Hazard of History by Diary

A Senate Journal 1943-45, by Allen Drury. McGraw-Hill, $7.95 Allen Drury has followed two sunburst successes, Advise and Consent and A Shade of Difference, with a tediously pedestrian account of how it was with the U.S. Senate in the war years, 1943-45. The reader-through emerges with the uneasy conviction that he has learned about one House of the national legislature more of its day-by-day habits than he really cared to know. A Senate Journal is blighted by pious platitudes and mechanical trivia of the legislative processes. One early suspects that Drury is self-consciously writing for posterity or, so help me, even for the ages.

His Journal is his diary, surely uncut, set down during the indicated years as a member of the Senate staff of United Press. There are vast areas of disinterest in which the business of the day is a parliamentarian’s picnic of amendments to the amendments to the amendments of the amendment to strike all after the enacting clause. There is neither suspense nor interest—there being, twenty years after, not much consequence in how or whether the soldiers do or do not vote in the 1944 election and/or whether their votes would further or brake Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unholy project to seize a Fourth Term. The question of postwar reconversion long since became moot.

A Senate Journal 1943-45, by Allen Drury. McGraw-Hill, $7.95 Allen Drury has followed two sunburst successes, Advise and Consent and A Shade of Difference, with a tediously pedestrian account of how it was with the U.S. Senate in the war years, 1943-45. The reader-through emerges with the uneasy conviction that he has learned about one House of the national legislature more of its day-by-day habits than he really cared to know. A Senate Journal is blighted by pious platitudes and mechanical trivia of the legislative processes. One early suspects that Drury is self-consciously writing for posterity or, so help me, even for the ages.

His Journal is his diary, surely uncut, set down during the indicated years as a member of the Senate staff of United Press. There are vast areas of disinterest in which the business of the day is a parliamentarian’s picnic of amendments to the amendments to the amendments of the amendment to strike all after the enacting clause. There is neither suspense nor interest—there being, twenty years after, not much consequence in how or whether the soldiers do or do not vote in the 1944 election and/or whether their votes would further or brake Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unholy project to seize a Fourth Term. The question of postwar reconversion long since became moot.