Advisedly Political

A dvise and Consent, Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of Washington politics (NR, August 29, 1959), has been turned into a play by Loring Mandel and is settling down to what will probably be a long and profitable run at New York’s Cort Theater. As a playgoer I approve, for it is a good show and deserves to succeed. As a conservative I rejoice, for Advise and Consent, combining edification with entertainment, is (among other things) a slashing attack on Liberalism and its highly-placed practitioners in Washington.

The Drury book is now well into its second year at the top of the national best-seller lists, so its plot is scarcely a secret. A future President’s appointment of an oily appeaser as Secretary of State is blocked by Brigham Anderson, a veritable Jack Armstrong among U.S. senators, who objects to the nominee’s false denial of Communist Party membership fourteen years before. The President, and a villainous rival senator who frankly declares, “I would rather crawl on my knees to Moscow than die under an atom bomb,” try to blackmail the happily-married Anderson by threatening to expose a long-buried homosexual episode in his otherwise spotless past. Anderson’s consequent suicide galvanizes his fellow senators, and the nomination is rejected.

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About the Author

William A. Rusher

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A dvise and Consent, Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of Washington politics (NR, August 29, 1959), has been turned into a play by Loring Mandel and is settling down to what will probably be a long and profitable run at New York’s Cort Theater. As a playgoer I approve, for it is a good show and deserves to succeed. As a conservative I rejoice, for Advise and Consent, combining edification with entertainment, is (among other things) a slashing attack on Liberalism and its highly-placed practitioners in Washington.

The Drury book is now well into its second year at the top of the national best-seller lists, so its plot is scarcely a secret. A future President’s appointment of an oily appeaser as Secretary of State is blocked by Brigham Anderson, a veritable Jack Armstrong among U.S. senators, who objects to the nominee’s false denial of Communist Party membership fourteen years before. The President, and a villainous rival senator who frankly declares, “I would rather crawl on my knees to Moscow than die under an atom bomb,” try to blackmail the happily-married Anderson by threatening to expose a long-buried homosexual episode in his otherwise spotless past. Anderson’s consequent suicide galvanizes his fellow senators, and the nomination is rejected.