Pols at Work & Play

ADVISE AND CONSENT (616 pp.)--Allen Drury--Doubleday ($5.75).

Most novelists know so little about real-life politicians that they could not and should not dare take a crack at a political novel. No novelist, but a knowing man on the subject of politicians, Allen Drury, U.S. Senate correspondent for the New York Times, thus stepped into a near vacuum in U.S. letters. His Advise and Consent is the August Book-of-the-Month Club choice, and Author Drury thought he could afford to be adamant when the B.O.M. asked him to cut his great prose pudding. So it comes to the reader with all its fat intact, but no one really interested in the workings of Washington politics will complain too much.

The plot concerns a President of the U.S. (name and period not stated) who has just nominated Bob Leffingwell for Secretary of State. Bob is in trouble--a controversial liberal and accomplished public servant, he is a hero to the eggheads but unacceptable to conservatives. Old Senator Scab Cooley of South Carolina is frankly out to get him, and he finds his weapon when evidence links Leffingwell to a Communist cell in his past.

Headline Echoes. Will the opposition members take the scalp of an able man who committed an indiscretion 14 years before? Can the obstinate President be persuaded by men who love their country above party that the nomination should be withdrawn?. When Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah, whose subcommittee is holding the hearings, discovers that Leffingwell has indeed lied about his past, it would seem that Advise and Consent has already gone on too long with echoes from a decade of news headlines. But Author Drury now shows how vindictive his challenged President can be, and how vicious a Senator touched by envy, spite or just the power bug. Utah's Brigham Anderson is himself vulnerable, and when his enemies dig up a homosexual incident in his wartime past, they drive him to suicide.

Part of the book's fascination lies in a game of who's who that readers will be tempted to play. The parties are never actually labeled, but indications are that the President is a Democrat; with his infectious laugh, his habit of tossing his head and his cynical charm, he has more than a few traits of F.D.R. Leffingwell, Cooley and Anderson are blurred, composite pictures. But Senator Orrin Knox, who has been defeated twice for the presidential nomination because of his brusque honesty, owes a great deal of his fictional likeness to that of Bob Taft, while the Vice President who wakes up in the middle of the night worrying that the President might die recalls the early Harry Truman. In an ironic reversal, the book's leading Communist appeaser, Senator Van Ackerman, has all the demagogic characteristics of Joe McCarthy.

Behind Closed Doors. Some of the personality clues are teasers. Any Capitol reporter knows that North Dakota's Senator William Langer chews cigars in their cellophane wrappers, but who is meant by the honorable gentleman who has love affairs all over Washington? The Indian Ambassador, Khrishna Khaleel, is obviously a scathing caricature of India's Khrishna Menon, but who are the models for 1) the liberal Supreme Court judge who cannot stay out of politics; 2) the tireless adviser to everybody; 3) the meddlesome cardinal?

Apart from such guessing games, the book's merit is the authenticity with which it describes the Senate atmosphere --the cloakroom conversation, the weary quorum calls, the maneuvers to line up votes. Along the way it also manages to poke fun at the emotional liberalism of some Washington correspondents and makes a ringing case against Leffingwell's peace-at-any-price position. For all its literary heaviness, the book has the fascination that always comes with an attempt to reconstruct what happens in high places behind closed doors.

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