Convention Book of the Day: Allen Drury's Dysfunctional Senate

Today is the first day of the Democratic National Convention. As we did last week with the Republicans, we’re celebrating with some classics of political lit. Today’s choice was a pathbreaker half a century ago:

Allen Drury, Advise and Consent (1959 Book of the Month Club edition, published alongside the trade edition by Doubleday in the same size and quality). It has a few rubs and nicks along the top of the dust jacket, but is otherwise in excellent condition. Hardcover with dust jacket; 616 pp. HBB price: $35.

Allen Drury (1918-1998) graduated Stanford in 1939 and went into journalism at a small town California paper. His editorials won sufficient notice that he won a Sigma Delta Chi Society award. The war interrupted his career; he served in the infantry, then, from 1943 to 1945, was United Press’ Senate correspondent. During the 50s he was a syndicated columnist and reporter for the Washington Evening Star.

Sitting in the galleries and schmoozing around the lobbies, Drury filed away impressions for what became his second book, Senate Journal, and provided the material for his first, Advise and Consent.

The 1959 doorstop novel- 616 pages- was the story of a presidential nomination for secretary of state. The nominee, an intellectual from the University of Chicago, was hiding the secret of having been a member of a Communist group in the 1930s, when such was fashionable in his circles.

The nomination drew headwinds. A South Carolina senator-for-life, recalling a snub by the nominee a decade earlier, started pulling out the stops in opposition. An idealistic young senator, armed with the nominee’s secret, tried to blackmail him into withdrawing. The president, in failing health, determined to break the impasse, blackmailed another young, principled, senator- who held the balance of power on the Foreign Relations Committee- with disclosure of a homosexual affair during World War II. The senator killed himself, the president died, and to tell the rest would be a spoiler...

Drury pulled the plot together out of strands of the Alger Hiss scandal and a less-remembered one in which Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt, blackmailed by Senator Joe McCarthy and two Republican colleagues when Hunt’s son was arrested for solicitation, committed suicide in his Senate office in 1954. With its detailed accounts of legislative wheeler-dealering and intrigue, and the parallel social world of Washington's permanent community of millionaires, lobbyists and socialites, Advise and Consent was a blockbuster best-seller. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1960, and was made into a successful play and an even more successful 1962 movie directed by Otto Preminger.

Reviewers generally praised the novel as a worthy companion of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s Gilded Age, and Henry Adams’ Democracy. With the income of a 93-week New York Times bestseller flooding in, Drury resigned his job as a Times reporter and took a less demanding position with The Reader's Digest Association. He spent the rest of his life cranking out progressively more shrill and tedious sequels to Advise and Consent- six in all- and a variety of other fiction and nonfiction works. He died on his 80th birthday, never-married, two weeks after finishing his last novel. Advise and Consent was then long out of print, and only returned to bookshelves in 2014.

Advise and Consent  reinvented the Washington political novel, a genre opportunity into which many have jumped since: Gore Vidal and Ward Just among the most successful. The best recent contender is Joe Klein’s 1996 roman a clef, Primary Colors. With social media and CCTV on every street corner, blackmail seems to have died a quiet death in the dust-covered back rooms of political dealmaking, where once William McKinley was reckoned a colossus, no one believed Warren Harding was having sex in his office closet, and President Kennedy was a saint.

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