The Age of the Shrug

Allen Drury’s quietly sensational excerpt of appeasement in Washington and of senatorial mores (Advise and Consent, Doubleday, $5.75) appeared in the week witnessing the American government’s most distressing capitulation to the Soviet Empire since Yalta. Mr. Drury’s naturalistic first novel, projecting the cumulative erosion of defeatism into the mid-1960s and powerfully arraigning the Liberal Establishment’s complicity in promoting surrender, is, therefore, shudderingly topical.

The unintended moral of Advise and Consent, given the Administration’s truckling to the intransigent Nikita S. Khrushchev’s demand for the honors of the White House, is that we need not wait a half-decade for Mr. Drury’s “Age of the Shrug.” The authoritative and gifted author (a Capitol Hill correspondent of the New York Times and hence an observer from within the Establishment) could not have foreseen, while pecking out his novel of anxious protest, that our government would so soon sink honor, tradition and considerations of international morality in deference to Khrushchev’s desire to witness our fears and gullibility at first hand.

FD

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Forrest Davis

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Whittaker Chambers

The New York Times

Allen Drury’s quietly sensational excerpt of appeasement in Washington and of senatorial mores (Advise and Consent, Doubleday, $5.75) appeared in the week witnessing the American government’s most distressing capitulation to the Soviet Empire since Yalta. Mr. Drury’s naturalistic first novel, projecting the cumulative erosion of defeatism into the mid-1960s and powerfully arraigning the Liberal Establishment’s complicity in promoting surrender, is, therefore, shudderingly topical.

The unintended moral of Advise and Consent, given the Administration’s truckling to the intransigent Nikita S. Khrushchev’s demand for the honors of the White House, is that we need not wait a half-decade for Mr. Drury’s “Age of the Shrug.” The authoritative and gifted author (a Capitol Hill correspondent of the New York Times and hence an observer from within the Establishment) could not have foreseen, while pecking out his novel of anxious protest, that our government would so soon sink honor, tradition and considerations of international morality in deference to Khrushchev’s desire to witness our fears and gullibility at first hand.