Advise and Consent
by Allen Drury
Summary
The President sends the Senate the name of Robert A. Leffingwell for Secretary of State, and the novel is the two weeks that follow.
Drury builds it out of the machinery: the subcommittee, the hearing, the cloakroom count, the leak to a friendly columnist, the phone call from the White House. Senator Seab Cooley of South Carolina, old and vain and very good at this, is certain Leffingwell lied to him years ago and sets out to prove that he once belonged to a Communist cell. Brigham Anderson of Utah chairs the subcommittee, finds the evidence credible, and declines to be managed.
So the White House goes looking for something on Anderson and finds it: a wartime affair with another man in Honolulu. What the pressure does to him, and what he does in his Senate office one morning, is the pivot the whole book turns on.
It runs over six hundred pages and reads like a procedural rather than a thriller, in a close third person that moves among a dozen senators, their wives, the press gallery and the Soviet ambassador. Drury covered the Senate for a living, and the pleasure of the book is watching a vote get assembled and then taken apart.
The politics are the author's own and he does not hide them. The liberal nominee is the danger and any accommodation with Moscow is the sin, which some readers found bracing and others found the point at which they stopped.
Best for readers who want Washington written by someone who sat in the press gallery, and who can take a novel that argues with them.
Historical Context & Significance
Advise and Consent won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction over the fiction jury's own choice. The jury had recommended Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and the advisory board set that aside in favour of Drury.
Published in August 1959, it spent 102 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was the biggest selling novel of 1960. Allen Drury had covered the Senate for United Press and then the New York Times, and drew on the 1954 case of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming, who shot himself in his office after colleagues threatened to publicise his son's arrest.
Franklin Schaffner directed the Broadway version in 1960 with Richard Kiley. Otto Preminger filmed it in 1962 with Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton and Walter Pidgeon, and the picture carried what is generally cited as the first depiction of a gay bar in Hollywood.
Drury wrote five more novels about the same senators. The Washington political novel as a commercial genre effectively starts here.