Good Lord! You couldn't put the thing down!'īaker was just the first. I took it home, ate, fixed a drink, sat down and with a heavy heart reached into the box for a fistful of manuscript. What lies I would be compelled to tell poor Allen…. 'I groaned silently,' Baker wrote in early September, just after Drury's death, 'the way you groan when a friend who has never written more than a postcard asks you to read this book he's been working on and tell him what you think. Stacked inside was a draft of Advise and Consent erratically typed on legal-sized paper. Includes Allen Drury’s never-before-published original preface to Advise and Consent, his essay for the Hoover Insitution on the writing of the book, as well as poignant personal memoirs from Drury’s heirs.'I've written a novel,' Allen Drury told his New York Times colleague Russell Baker one day in 1958, pushing a cardboard box into Baker's hands. Advise and Consent is a timeless story with clear echoes of today’s headlines This novel is a true epic showing in fascinating detail the minds and motives of the statesmen, the opportunists, the idealists.įrom a Senate old-timer’s wily maneuvers, a vicious demagogue’s blistering smear campaign, the ugly personal jealousies that turn a highly qualified candidate into a public spectacle, to the tragic martyrdom of a presidential aspirant who refuses to sacrifice his principles for his career-never has there been a more revealing picture of Washington’s intricate political, diplomatic, and social worlds. A sweeping tale of corruption and ambition cut across the landscape of Washington, DC with the breadth and realism that only an astute observer and insider can convey.Īllen Drury has penetrated the world’s stormiest political battleground-the smoke-filled committee rooms of the United States Senate-to reveal the bitter conflicts set in motion when the President calls upon the Senate fo confirm his controversial choice for Secretary of State. Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent is one of the high points of 20th Century literature, a seminal work of political fiction-as relevant today as when it was first published.

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