Cover image of "Advise and Consent," a novel set at a time when Congress worked

Most Americans today are likely to have a difficult time imagining how well Congress worked in the 1950s. Of course, it was far from perfect. On the nation’s dominant domestic issue, the legacy of slavery, segregationist Southern Democrats holding positions of power in both houses stymied any action. But on most other domestic issues, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower could usually expect to negotiate successfully with the Democrats who held sway on Capitol Hill. Both parties had liberal and conservative wings. Strictly partisan votes were unusual. And on foreign policy, Congress almost invariably voted in lockstep with the Administration. Close observers of Washington politics like Advise and Consent author Allen Drury would have had trouble envisioning a standoff between the White House and the Senate on a major foreign policy initiative by the President. Yet that is the central drama of Drury’s classic political novel, which was published in 1959—when Congress worked well.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

An accurate portrayal of Washington politics in 1959?

Advise and Consent is a simple story. The President has nominated a controversial Washington insider named Robert A. Leffingwell as Secretary of State. But will the Senate confirm him? Leffingwell’s nomination hangs in the balance as the Foreign Relations Committee swings into action, the diplomatic corps and the press weigh in in the nominee’s favor, and his bitterest enemy in the Senate maneuvers to deny him the job.

Meanwhile, the President’s health is in decline, and the Vice President seems sorely unequipped to step into his shoes. The popular Majority Leader of the Senate is having an affair with the city’s premier hostess. And the son and daughter of two Senators are planning a wedding. Drury weaves together these strands of the story into a suspenseful tale that readers are expected to take as an accurate portrayal of the political process on Capital Hill as the 1960s approach. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1959) 706 pages ★★★☆☆

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Photo of the US Senate in session, long after the time when Congress worked well
The United States Senate in session for a consequential vote that attracted full attendance like the vote on the Leffingwell nomination in the novel. Image: voanews.com

The principal actors in the drama

Drury prefaces his story with several pages of “Major Characters.” Among them are many members of the US Senate. And it is certainly true that in the space of seven hundred pages, every one of these figures arrives in the spotlight. The author profiles many of them at length. But the heart of the novel revolves around just six characters:

  • Robert D. Munson of Michigan, Majority Leader of the Senate. He is popular on both sides of the aisle, and, unlike many Senators, has no ambition to serve as President.
  • Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina, President Pro Tempore of the Senate. “Seab” is seventy-five years old, having acquired a passel of enemies as well as friends during his long years in Congress. Though at times he appears to be simply a stubborn old man, he is nothing of the sort. Seab Cooley is brilliant and a consummate political tactician.
  • Brigham H. Anderson, senior Senator from Utah. “Brig” is the scion of a prominent old Mormon family, a veteran of World War II, and viewed by his colleagues in both parties as a man of integrity.
  • Orrin Knox, senior Senator from Illinois. Twice a candidate for President, he despises the incumbent, whom he regards as having lied his way into the nomination that was rightly Orrin’s.
  • The President, a former Governor of California
  • Vice President Harley M. Hudson, former Governor of Michigan, who is viewed by all, including himself, as a man of little ability.

Every one of these characters emerges clearly in context as a Democrat.

Spoiler alert: what Drury got badly wrong

In four respects Drury’s picture of Congress fails to capture the world as it was.

Senator Anderson’s behavior

The plot in Advise and Consent hangs on a decision by Senator Brigham Anderson, chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Leffingwell Nomination. He opts to tell no one when he learns that the nominee has lied in his testimony about a matter that clearly goes to the heart of his character. Instead, Anderson simply announces to the press that he will reopen the subcommittee’s hearings. This, without informing the President, the Majority Leader, or the members of the subcommittee. And he keeps the secret for nearly forty-eight hours as pressure builds on him from all quarters. It is unthinkable that a United States Senator wouldn’t have the sense to speak with any one or all three of the leading parties to the issue. Nobody with any sense at all—and Senator Anderson is clearly brilliant—would fail to do so.

The nominee’s history

What Senator Anderson has learned is that Robert Leffingwell was a member of a Communist cell while teaching at the University of Chicago a dozen years ago. And he lied to the subcommittee in open session when a witness told the committee that he, too, had been a member of the tiny cell. In the overheated atmosphere of the 1950s, the merest hint that Leffingwell was a Communist—with or without proof—would have immediately signaled that the game was over for the nominee. No politician in Washington in that era could possibly afford to come across to the public as anything but a knee-jerk anti-Communist. And it is inconceivable that Senator Anderson wouldn’t understand this.

The character of the Senate

The United States Senate, like the House of Representatives as well, was dominated by Southern Democrats, many of them “arch-segregationists” (to use a term common at the time). Some, like the Majority Leader of the Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson, voted against civil rights bills only because they felt they had to. (Johnson, of course, later championed the pathbreaking civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s.) But most were vitriolic racists. And it is a deep flaw in Advise and Consent that the novel does not in any way so much as hint at the then fast-boiling debate over civil rights. It was far and away the dominant issue of the day in domestic affairs and could not fail to have intruded on hearings for any Administration nominee, including Secretary of State.

Fear of the Soviet Union

On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched the space age by successfully sending an artificial satellite called Sputnik into orbit above the Earth. The event struck fear among the American public. And despair deepened as one after another of the many rockets launched by the United States in a bid to match the Russians exploded upon launch or shortly thereafter.

This was the period of what presidential candidate John F. Kennedy loudly charged was a missile gap. Millions of Americans lived in fear of an imminent nuclear attack because they were convinced the USSR might launch a preemptive strike at any moment. And Drury depicts this same fear as infecting the members of the Senate, including those who should have known better. (Many officials in the Pentagon surely did, but they failed to speak out because the hysteria helped boost the military budget. In fact, the Soviets were far behind the US in nuclear capability.) However, the author ventures into fantasy by writing about a manned Russian mission to the moon—which immediately succeeds in building a permanent Soviet base there. As we know now, the first manned mission to the moon was in 1969—and the Russians weren’t responsible for it. And neither then nor since has any nation built a base on the surface.

About the author

Photo of Allen Drury, author of this novel about a time when Congress worked
Allen Drury. Image: Word Fire Press

The late Allen Drury (1918-98) was a reporter for United Press in the US Senate during World War II. What he learned in those years formed the basis of his blockbuster novel, Advise and Consent. But he wrote nineteen other novels, including five sequels to Advise and Consent. Drury grew up in a small town in California and gained a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. After graduation, he went to work for a series of newspapers, eventually joining the press syndicate United Press. He lived for a total of fifteen years in Washington, DC but moved back to California in 1964. He died there aged eighty in 1998.

I’ve also numerous other political novels, including five by Thomas Mallon, whom I’ll include here only once:

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