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    Advise and Consent
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    Advise and Consent
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    Advise and Consent
    Ebook1,102 pages16 hours

    Advise and Consent

    By Allen Drury

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The #1 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner

    Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent is one of the high points of 20th Century literature, a seminal work of political fiction—as relevant today as when it was first published. A sweeping tale of corruption and ambition cuts across the landscape of Washington, DC, with the breadth and realism that only an astute observer and insider can convey.

    Allen Drury has penetrated the world’s stormiest political battleground—the smoke-filled committee rooms of the United States Senate—to reveal the bitter conflicts set in motion when the President calls upon the Senate to confirm his controversial choice for Secretary of State. This novel is a true epic showing in fascinating detail the minds and motives of the statesmen, the opportunists, the idealists.

    From a Senate old-timer’s wily maneuvers, a vicious demagogue’s blistering smear campaign, the ugly personal jealousies that turn a highly qualified candidate into a public spectacle, to the tragic martyrdom of a presidential aspirant who refuses to sacrifice his principles for his career—never has there been a more revealing picture of Washington’s intricate political, diplomatic, and social worlds. Advise and Consent is a timeless story with clear echoes of today’s headlines.

    Includes Allen Drury’s never-before-published original preface to Advise and Consent, his essay for the Hoover Institution on the writing of the book, as well as poignant personal memoirs from Drury’s heirs.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordFire Press
    Release dateFeb 24, 2014
    ISBN9781614750796
    Unavailable
    Advise and Consent

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    Reviews for Advise and Consent

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 Pulitzer winner, thoroughly covers the machinations of the Senate confirmation process as that august body deliberates the nomination of a controversial figure for the post of Secretary of State. Although long and sometimes exhausting, Drury’s landmark novel is a rewarding book for the patient reader. At over 600 dense pages, this is not a quick read. The first 100 pages seem especially slow as the characters are introduced and the stage set. This behind-the-scenes look at the Senate may have been more interesting before 50 years of televised politics in general and C-SPAN in particular leached any tantalizing mystery out of Senate subcommittee hearings. Once the story builds up steam, however, it powers right along. The candidate under consideration, peacenik Bob Leffingwell, has his avid supporters, including the somewhat Machiavellian President who nominated him. But he faces stiff opposition from those who think he will be unable to protect America on the brink of a nuclearized Cold War with an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union determined to send men to the moon to claim it as Soviet territory. While the details of the controversy seem anachronistic now, the underlying issue of diplomacy versus military might is as pertinent today as it was 50 years ago. What is most interesting is that Drury keeps party politics out of it. He does not name either party, and the battle over Leffingwell’s nomination is all within the President’s own liberal party that holds the majority in the Senate. The minority, presumably conservative, party is relegated to the sidelines. In the end, Leffingwell’s confirmation comes down to character issues as much as his political opinions. The heart of Drury’s story is that, when an unsavory part of Leffingwell’s past arises, instead of having the Senate’s decision turn on the underlying facts, the controversy centers on how Leffingwell and his supporters, including the President, deal with the facts, and what their conduct reveals about their essential worthiness as national leaders. Again, the details of the scandals involved seem quaint now, but the principal debate over what weight to give to politicians’ personal lives still rages. Stylistically, Drury follows formal conventions, with third-party narration, traditional dialog format, discretion in all things sexual, and one particularly distracting gimmick in that many characters share the same first names. For instance, the nominee and the Senate Majority leader are both names Robert and both go by Bob. Context usually makes clear which one is under discussion, but it seems odd that no one ever mentions that they have the same name. There are also two Hals, two Toms, and two Johns (but no Mikes, Marks, or Daves). Maybe it is more like real life to duplicate names, but some literary customs are there for a reason. The writing is a little stuffy, but the tone suits the subject matter and helps raise it above a run-of-the-mill political thriller. A sample passage demonstrates Drury’s intricate style as well as his purpose of thoroughly presenting the Congressional system: The system had its problems, and it wasn’t exactly perfect, and there was at times much to be desired, and yet – on balance, admitting all its bad points and assessing all the good, there was a vigor and a vitality and a strength that nothing, he suspected, could ever quite overcome, however evil and crafty it might be. There was in this system the enormous vitality of free men, running their own government in their own way. If they were weak at times, it was because they had the freedom to be weak; if they were strong, upon occasion, it was because they had the freedom to be strong; if they were indomitable, when the chips were down, it was because freedom made them so. Although it takes some endurance to get through such a thicket of prose, the effort is worthwhile, which is why Advise and Consent remains the most popular, perceptive study of Congressional American politics on the shelves. Also posted on Rose City Reader.
    • 5/5
      Each year since 1944 I have picked a book of the year--the book deemed by me at the end of the year as the best book I read that year. This book was the best book I read in 1960, a year in which I read 33 books--5 fiction and 28 non-fiction. This book was fiction, but I really ate it up because it was about political matters and politics has been a prime interest of mine since I was 8 years old.
    • 3/5
      The inside flap to Advise and Consent states it is "...a story so sweeping and complex in its conception that each segment alone would make an enthralling book." Right. I'm sure that's why the entire story is over 600 pages long. Drury has crafted five segments: Bob Munson's book, Seab Cooley's book, Brigham Anderson's book, Orrin Knox's book and Advise and Consent.Advise and Consent opens with the announcement of the President of the United State's controversial appointment of Bob Leffingwell as Secretary of State. Right away Drury's language is witty and mischievous as if there is a twinkle in the eye of the storyteller. If you have ever watched "House of Cards" then you know how deviously politics can be played out. Advise and Consent is no different.
    • 3/5
      I had a hard time getting into this. I'm just not that interested in politics. Some parts are dated. But I don't think politics has changed much.
    • 3/5
      Actually a pretty decent read. The tale of a controversial nominee for Secretary of State is quite timeless, as are the political infighting and behind the scenes machinations.
    • 5/5
      great introduction into politics and its struture and how it works and how, more often, it doesn't. I read this in my senior year of high school. If you like government suspense novels, this is a definite read.
    • 2/5
      Interesting subject, but the cast of characters is too large and it moves rather slowly.Recommended for Hill staffers and fans of the West Wing/House of Cards.
    • 4/5
      This is the 1960 Pulitzer award winning book and I read this while in Florida because it was available here in the library. This book is over 600 pages and it took be a long time to engage with the story but then I did and the last couple sections went by much faster. The fact that this book was published in 1959 during the cold war following WWII made the book even more significant to me. The story is about the process of approving a presidential recommendation for Secretary of State by the Senate. The president's candidate is smooth and avoids responding to any question with anything at all that can inform anyone of what he represents or how he will conduct himself. In the course, something is found, and what is found is significant in that it shows that the man has not been honest, that he has willfully lied during his hearings. The knowledge leads to a crisis for one man who is unable to survive the process and other senators who also played a part of in the destruction of their own colleague. The president is unhealthy and there is suspicions of his health, the vice president is painted as weak. The president is also culpable in the event that occurs because he put his desires before treating people decently and respectfully. The Russians are antagonistic and in this book, they are the first country to land on the moon. Interesting in that no one has yet landed on the moon when this book was written. The final chapters of the book had me nearly in tears, it was such a good, good ending. I come away from the book with a better understanding of political process and a renewed desire to know more in spite of the dirty, horrible political climate that is currently apart of normal operations. I do feel that the book was too long, that the author could have shortened it up a bit without losing any of the important parts of the story but I am so glad that I read it.
    • 1/5
      Without a doubt, the worst book that I read in 2010 was Allen Drury's Advise and Consent (1959); how this thing won a Pulitzer for Best Fiction is beyond me. Advise and Consent is a door-stopper of a "novel" (760 pages in the mass market paperback edition that I read) that is concerned with the U.S. Senate's role to advise the President on and give consent to his cabinet appointments; the main plot involves the tortuous process of confirming a highly divisive figure, Robert A. Leffingwell, as Secretary of State, while the main subplot involves shocking revelations of the past of the young senior senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson. While I mostly enjoyed the 1962 Otto Preminger movie (in which Henry Fonda played Leffingwell and Don Murray played Anderson; it also starred Walter Pidgeon, Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres and Gene Tierney), which was based on the play that was based on the book, despite some reservations that mostly arise from the time in which it was made, the book -- the book! -- is a windy, prolix, flat, dull, singularly unconvincing bloviation on the glories of the U.S.Senate that is occasionally enlivened by scenes of interest (chiefly some of the political skulduggery, but also how the President is so abrasive, manipulative and double-dealing that he manages to alienate a substantial number of the senators from his own party). No one's political party is ever identified, and the President is never named -- he remains simply "The President" throughout the entire book -- but one can make educated guesses as to the major characters' party affiliation. (Given the time in which it was written and set, the party in majority is doubtless the Republican Party, while the opposition party, led by a wily Southern cliché named Seab [pronounced "Seb"; it's short for "Seabright"] Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in the film, is the Democratic Party, still strong in the South.) Drury was a former journalist, and one can see how he must've felt as though he was on a busman's holiday, albeit free of the strict limitations to his word count, with Advise and Consent; for the novel to remain readable, however, an editor should've taken him firmly in hand and slashed his manuscript by at least a couple hundred pages. The character development is notable by its absence, the female characters are nearly non-existent and offensive to a modern reader when present, the ethnic stereotypes are so close to racist tropes that there's not a hair's difference between them, and Drury's abuse of the adverb nearly converted me to Graham Greene's abhorrence for same. That the conclusion is so obviously meant to be uplifting is farcical, utterly risible. In short, The West Wing it ain't. Wikipedia's entry for Advise and Consent reports: "The story is loosely based on the Hiss-Chambers and David Lilienthal controversies, and, according to comments by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Joseph T. Kelliher, on the Leland Olds nomination battle;" Drury also threw in a minor, though significant, character to stand in for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, although, in the best Red-baiting fashion (Drury was a rabid anti-Communist who favored military confrontation of the Soviet Union), he makes this character's weltanschauung the polar opposite of McCarthy's. (SPOILER ALERT: don't jump to Wikipedia's article if you want the story elements of Advise and Consent to remain a surprise, as it starts making with the spoilers in the very next paragraph.) Drury published five, count 'em, five sequels to Advise and Consent (two of which -- Come Nineveh, Come Tyre [1973] and The Promise of Joy [1975] -- are alternate endings: two different outcomes spun off from the ambiguous cliffhanger of 1968's Preserve and Protect); I'm happy to report that, contrary to my usual book hoarding practice, I own none of them, and I plan to read none of them. (I do, however, own a copy of Drury's novel about Akhenaten, A God Against the Gods (1976), which I bought before I bought Advise and Consent; it's gonna be a looooong while before I pick that one up, I'm afraid.)