Advise and Consent (Drury)

Advise and Consent
Allen Drury, 1959
Doubleday
616 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385054195


Summary
Winner, 1960 Pulitizer Prize

Advise and Consent is a study of political animals in their natural habitat and is universally recognized as THE Washington novel. It begins with Senate confirmation hearings for a liberal Secretary of State and concludes two weeks later, after debate and controversy have exploded this issue into a major crisis. (From the publisher.)

Over the course of the novel, we follow four of the primary players in the U.S. Senate: Bob Munson, the affable and skilled Senate Majority Leader; Seab Cooley, the hornery Senator from South Carolina who carries a personal grudge against the nominee; Brigham Anderson, the talented and idealistic young Senate from Utah who heads up the subcommittee hearings; and Orrin Knox, Senator from Michigan who burns with an intense rivalry toward the man who sits in the White House.

Each man, and others, must make a decision to follow their party dictate or their own moral compass. Fifty years after it was written Advise and Consent still speaks to us about the difficult trade-offs and compromise at the heart of governing.

Author Bio
• Birth—September 2, 1918
• Raised—Porterville, California
• Death—September 2, 1998
• Where—Tiburon, California
• Education—B.A., Stanford University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize


Allen Stuart Drury  was a U.S. novelist. He wrote the 1959 novel Advise and Consent, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960.

He was born to Alden Monteith Drury (1895-1975), a real estate broker and insurance agent, and Flora Allen (1894-1973), a legislative representative for the California Parent-Teacher Association. Drury's early American descendants were early immigrants to Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Allen Stuart Drury grew up in Porterville, California, and earned his B.A. at Stanford University in 1939. In the 1990s, he wrote three novels inspired by his experiences at Stanford: Toward What Bright Glory?, Into What Far Harbor?, and Public Men. After graduating from Stanford, Drury went to work for the Tulare Bee in Porterville, where he won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. Drury enlisted in the U.S. Army on July 25, 1942 in Los Angeles and trained as an infantry soldier.

A Senate Journal
In late 1943, he was a 25-year old army veteran looking for work. A position as the United States Senate correspondent for United Press soon provided Drury not only with gainful employment, but also with the opportunity "to be of some slight assistance in making my fellow countrymen better acquainted with their Congress and particularly their Senate."

In addition to fulfilling his duties as a reporter, Drury also kept a journal of his views of the Senate and individual senators. Drury freely offered his first impressions of many senators: "Alben Barkley, the Majority Leader, acts like a man who is working awfully hard and awfully earnestly at a job he doesn't particularly like."

He considered Minority Leader Robert Taft "one of the strongest and ablest men here," and felt that "Guy Gillette of Iowa and Hugh Butler of Nebraska vie for the title of Most Senatorial. Both are model solons, white-haired, dignified, every inch the glamorous statesmen."

Harry Truman was featured as his position changed from junior senator from Missouri to vice president to president in the course of Drury's narrative. Given the period it covered, it is natural that Drury's diary devoted considerable attention to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his contentious relations with the Senate. Drury wrote: "If he appears in a critical light, that is because this is how we saw him from the Hill."

In addition to the chamber's personalities, Drury's journal captured the events, large and small, of the 78th and 79th Congresses. He characterized this period as "the days of the War Senate on its way to becoming the Peace Senate."

At times the events Drury described had a national impact, such as FDR's death or the Senate's consideration of the United Nations Charter. In other cases, the effects were felt more clearly within the Senate community, such as the resignation of Majority Leader Barkley, the Senate's rejection of a congressional expense allowance, or the death of Secretary of the Senate Edwin Halsey.

Although written in the mid-1940s, Drury's diary was not published until 1963. A Senate Journal found an audience in part because of the great success of Advise and Consent, Drury's 1959 novel about the Senate's consideration of a controversial nominee for Secretary of State.

Later works
Drury's greatest success was Advise and Consent, which was made into a film in 1962. The book was partly inspired by the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt. It spent 102 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Drury followed Advise and Consent with several sequels. A Shade of Difference is set a year after Advise and Consent. Drury then turned his attention to the next presidential election after those events with Capable of Honor and Preserve and Protect. He then wrote two alternative sequels based on two different outcomes of an assassination attack in an earlier work: Come Nineveh, Come Tyre and The Promise of Joy.

In 1971, Drury published The Throne of Saturn, a science fiction novel about the first attempt at sending a manned mission to Mars. He dedicated the work "To the US Astronauts and those who help them fly." Political characters in the book are archetypal rather than comfortably human. The book carries a strong anti-leftist/anti-communist flavor. The book has a lot to say about interference in the space program by leftist Americans.

Having wrapped up his political series by 1975, Drury began a new one with the 1977 novel Anna Hastings, more a novel about journalism than politics. He returned to the timeline in 1979, with the political novel Mark Coffin U.S.S. (though the main relationship between the two books was that Hastings was a minor character in Mark Coffin U.S.S.'s sequels). It was succeeded, by the two-part The Hill of Summer and The Roads of Earth, which are true sequels to Mark Coffin U.S.S. He also wrote stand-alone novels, Decision (about the Supreme Court) and Pentagon, as well as several other fiction and non-fiction works.

Drury's political novels have been described as page-turners, set against the Cold War, with an aggressive and determined Soviet Union seeking to undermine the U.S.

Death
Drury lived in Tiburon, California, from 1964 until his 1998 death of cardiac arrest. Drury had completed his 20th novel, Public Men set at Stanford, just two weeks before his death. He died on 2 September 1998 at St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco, California on his eightieth birthday. Drury was never married.[ (From .)

Book Reviews
(Older books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

I can recall no other novel in which there is so well presented a president's dilemma when his awful responsibility for the nation's interest conflicts with a personal code of good morals.
New York Times

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to get a discussion started for Advise and Consent:

1. The book is divided into 4 sections, each devoted to one the main characters. Which character do you find most sympathetic? Do you have a favorite?

2. How does the press come off in Drury's book. He himself was a press corp member. Does he look favorably or not so favorably on his fictional cohorts?

3. For Bob Munson, "it took time, and much study of men's hearts and minds to be a good leader." Munson himself has been at it for decades, first in the House, now as the Senate Majority Leader. Is Munson correct, that good leadership takes years to develop? Or is the call for term limits a good idea, to refresh a sclerotic government with new blood?

4. Why is the president so firm in his desire to have Bob Leffingwell as his secretary of state? What do you think of Leffingwell? Why does he lie in the subcommittee?

5. What were the stakes during the cold war when it came to charting a course for foreign policy—either appeasement or toughness? Does the nation face a similar problem today?

6. How would you describe the relations among all members of the Senate and between both sides of the aisle in this novel? Did the Senate (at least as portrayed in this novel) behave differently in the mid- to late-fifties than it does today? Why or why not?

7. When politicians compromise their positions are they weak? How do you feel when it comes to the bargaining and  bartering that go on behind the scenes in this novel?

8. What do you think motivates the politicians in this book? Is it a higher concern for the welfare of the country or personal ambition?

9. Referring to constituents, Munson complains to a colleague that Senators are expected to

Decide high policy, legislate for the good of the country, run the government, and play nursemaid...too. How do they expect us to do any of it?

Is Munson right? Do we expect too much of our elected officials? Or should the men and women we send to Washington be responsive to our individual needs? Who gains access to Senators anyway?

10. Talk in particular about Brigham Anderson's decision. Could he have taken another path? What would you have advised him, given the era in which the events of the book take place.

11. Does evil occur in this book? If so, who is responsible for setting it in motion? If not, why not?

12. SPOILER ALERT: What kind of president do you think Harley Hudson will make? Will he live up to the job and be capable of making sound decisions?

13. After reading Advise and Consent, how do you view politicians—at least those portrayed in this book? Do you see them as attempting to walk a fine line between their ideals and their ambitions? Do you feel their personal ambition frequently overtakes their ideals? Do you feel that most try to legislate for the good of the nation? Or does staying in office, "careerism" take precedence over devising fair and workable national policy?

14. Are today's politicians different than the way Drury wrote about them in 1957-58?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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