Rot From Within
By
Mark Falcoff
On the eve of America’s 1960 elections, a 600-page novel about Washington politics emerged from nowhere to catapult to the top of the best seller lists and remain there for an unprecedented 93 weeks. Everybody interested in U.S. governance rushed to read it, and so did many who were not. The list was led by the two Presidential candidates, Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John Kennedy. The book won its author the Pulitzer Prize and became both a Broadway play and a Hollywood film directed by Otto Preminger.
Its creator was a New York Times journalist who had been covering D.C. for some years in semi-obscurity. His name was Allen Drury, and his debut novel was called Advice and Consent, which chronicled the struggle of a U.S. President to achieve Senate confirmation for Robert Leffingwell, his choice for Secretary of State.
The cabinet nominee is a semi-intellectual with a left-liberal record on international issues—possibly modeled on Alger Hiss, the former State Department official revealed to be a Russian agent in a series of sensational congressional hearings in the late 1940s. Leffingwell is strongly opposed by conservative elements in the Senate, and in the course of the hearings, chaired by a squeaky-clean senator from Utah with matinee-idol looks by the name of Brigham Anderson, it becomes apparent that Leffingwell has been less than candid about his past relations with the Communist Party. In an effort to save the nomination, “progressive” forces led by Senator Fred Van Ackerman decide to trawl through the committee chairman’s past for something with which to blackmail him.
Though apparently happily married and a father, Senator Anderson does indeed have a very large skeleton in the closet: during his service in Hawaii in World War II he had an affair with another man. This is 1959-60, so the pro-confirmation forces cannot count on that kind of information being splashed over the airwaves and on the front pages of the daily press. They can, however, engage in a whispering campaign, complete with anonymous phone calls to the senator’s home.
As the pressure mounts, Anderson is at a loss over what to tell his wife about “what happened in Hawaii.” He is worn down by the sinister rumors being spread by unidentified parties, and verges toward a nervous breakdown. Late one night he goes into his office and commits suicide. In the end Leffingwell is not confirmed, but at the cost of the life of a promising young politician.
The point of the book is, evidently, that liberals are just as inclined to use slander and innuendo to achieve their purposes as any other political operators. (That view is somewhat blunted, though not entirely omitted, in the film version.) Coming a few short years after the censure of Joseph McCarthy, and at a time when many American liberals were still insisting that Alger Hiss was an innocent victim of a witch hunt, Drury’s argument ran very much against the prevailing intellectual currents in media and academic circles, which painted conservatives as unscrupulous inquisitors and liberals as their victims.
It may be, of course, that what interested readers in this book was less its political message than its finely filigreed depiction of life behind the scenes in senatorial Washington. Advice and Consent was written at a time when network television was still in its infancy, and discretion was still the rule in reporting about the private lives of American politicians. It thus had the appeal of a tell-all Washington Confidential in addition to being a brilliant reconstruction of how the Capitol conducts its business when nobody appears to be watching. The sub-theme of homosexuality in high places added a shocking jolt at a time when the subject was literally unspeakable.
Although Drury lived to a great age and wrote an additional 18 novels and five works of nonfiction, he never again achieved comparable success. But many of the characters he created in Advice and Consent—like the British politicians and aristocrats in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series—survived to populate future works. And as Drury worked his way from novel to novel, his political point of view—deeply conservative in some ways, traditionally liberal in others—became more marked. His increasingly emphatic views became particularly clear in one of the final books of the Advice and Consent cycle, Drury’s 1973 novel Come Nineveh, Come Tyre.
“Anti-war” Dreams Fulfilled
Come Nineveh, Come Tyre is less a political novel than a political thriller. It is a tale about the end of the United States as a free country. The nation’s demise is the result not of frontal attacks by an obvious enemy—although an enemy is clearly identified in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Rather, America perishes in Drury’s telling by rot from within, through the action of respectable political and intellectual forces which have ceased to believe in the country and the nobility of its destiny.
At the beginning of his book, Drury brings readers of Advice and Consent up to date. President Harley Hudson, recently nominated for a second term, has died in a mysterious airplane accident. After a furious contest, Secretary of State Orrin Knox has defeated California governor Ted Jason for the nomination to succeed the deceased President. In an effort to unite a deeply divided American society, Knox agrees to accept Jason as his Vice Presidential candidate. The problem is that while Knox favors a strong response to the challenge of Soviet imperialism, Jason, supported by the “peace movement,” advocates a more conciliatory approach to the Russians. Despite the fact that the ticket is split down the middle ideologically, it is successful at the ballot box.
The novel opens on inauguration day. Stunningly, both President-elect Knox and Mrs. Jason are assassinated by unidentified gunmen. The unexpected accession of Ted Jason to the White House has enormous political implications, since it means a 180-degree shift in American foreign policy. As part of their contrasting views on the Soviet menace, Knox and Jason differed sharply on how to meet Soviet-sponsored challenges in Africa (where U.S. troops have been sent to support a pro-Western prince in Gorotoland who is under siege by his Soviet-backed brother) and in Panama (where the canal is threatened by communist guerrillas, and therefore blockaded by U.S. naval forces).
These little wars are the source of acute political controversy in the United States, and several organizations have sprung to life to oppose them. There is NAWAC (the National Anti-War Activities Congress), a nebulous coalition operating on the fringe of political respectability, a group which, we eventually learn, is not averse to using terrorist tactics to defeat its opponents. And there is COMFORT (the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce), led by none other than Senator Fred Van Ackerman, the blackmailer of Brigham Anderson.
Once confirmed as President, Jason does not disappoint his backers. He announces withdrawal of American troops from Gorotoland and Panama, and cedes control of the Panama Canal to the United Nations. He also announces the end of U-2 and satellite surveillance of the Soviet Union, and the withdrawal for 60 days of all American naval, air, and land forces from the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as a reduction of U.S. military strength by more than a million men. He invites the Soviet Union to take parallel measures.
The liberal anti-war establishment is ecstatic with their new President, who has fulfilled their wildest dreams. Epigones in the media (led by syndicated columnist Walter Dobius and TV commentator Frankly Unctuous) fall all over themselves to congratulate the new President on his statesmanship. Unfortunately, the Soviets do not reciprocate in kind.
Far from it: Moscow takes advantage of the drawdown of U.S. forces to launch an assault on American positions worldwide. In Gorotoland 100 American soldiers are killed in a local communist offensive. The Russians are invited into Panama by the new insurgent government, and U.S. forces are taken prisoner. Key points in Alaska are occupied for two hours by Soviet paratroops who withdraw only after Red trawlers sink the bulk of the U.S. fishing fleet. Meanwhile, the Soviet Navy rushes to occupy positions the American fleet has relinquished in Asia, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic.
Though thoroughly shocked, President Jason’s first impulse is not to reverse course but to take his case to the United Nations. His ambassador calls for an international conference to resolve the crisis. Not only does the body refuse to accept the proposal, it instead passes a resolution gratuitously condemning the United States.
The scene at the U.N. Security Council represents a very brief moment in the book, but evokes episodes of painfully recent memory. The British ambassador manfully tries to carry some of Washington’s water, but his French counterpart simply shrugs his shoulders and recites the mantra, “Adapt or die.” The Indian ambassador manages to combine sanctimony with hypocrisy (“we will not adapt to anything that does not further world peace”). When the U.S. ambassador tells his Indian counterpart that he is frankly un-believable, the latter replies, “But I have much companyÉmuch, much company.” When the anti-U.S. resolution is passed, the African delegates dance in the aisles.
Making Peace with Lost Freedom
Defeated at the U.N., the President boldly decides to travel to Moscow to confront his Soviet opposite number, Premier Tashikov, face-to-face. In a dramatic private meeting the latter refuses to back down. Instead, he invites Jason to gracefully accept the new state of affairs. When the President suggests that his Soviet counterpart has placed him in an intolerable position—that presumably he must react to these aggressive moves—Tashikov simply asks him whether he wants to bear the responsibility for destroying world peace. With this he touches the liberal President’s Achilles’ heel. Jason returns to the United States and closets himself in the White House, refusing to meet with members of Congress or even his own cabinet or military leaders.
During this period of Presidential reticence the forces of polarization grow. Around the country, citizens who have always questioned Jason’s naive faith in the Soviets begin to organize. Even some members of the media publicly voice disquiet. These efforts are met with street demonstrations by COMFORT and NAWAC militants.
Even more disturbingly, there are acts of violence for which no one will take responsibility. Newspaper offices are bombed. Beth Knox, the widow of the late President-elect, is kidnapped and later murdered. When Walter Dobius expresses doubts about the course of action he had previously favored, terrorists burn his Virginia country house to the ground. In Congress, meanwhile, Senator Van Ackerman and his allies are pushing a bill that will create a Domestic Tranquility Board to suppress opposition to the course the President has chosen. When the Supreme Court must deliberate on the law’s Constitutionality, the justice who represents the swing vote is hounded to death before he can act. (It turns out he has been poisoned.)
President Jason eventually realizes he has fallen into a trap of his own making, but he is restrained from acting by a combination of vanity and fear. At the end of the novel, he finds himself welcoming Tashikov to Washington to sign a new “U.S.-Russian Agreement of Friendship and Cooperation”—in effect, an acceptance of Soviet world hegemony. On the steps of the Capitol the Russians savor their triumph; Tashikov winks at Senator Van Ackerman, who presumably imagines himself the successor of the hapless Jason. (“Like all the simple egomaniacs of history who have not been communists, but have thought they could use communism for their own ends, Fred was, temporarily, content.”) We have the sense that, in time, disillusionment is in store even for Van Ackerman, COMFORT, NAWAC, and others of the American peace party.
The Unctuous and the Dangerous
Like most books of this sort—and certainly all of Drury’s other Washington novels—Come Nineveh, Come Tyre portrays real people in a barely fictional disguise. One of the particular pleasures of this sort of literature is guessing who the characters were intended to represent in events of the day. Some of Drury’s personalities, however, closely resemble politicians who were not yet on the political scene when he wrote, but are prominent now—demonstrating that Drury “was clear-eyed and ahead of everyone else,” as Roger Kaplan has put it, “in sensing how the country’s political conventions were moving.”
Hence President Jason, scion of an aristocratic Spanish California (presumably Roman Catholic) dynasty, bears a superficial physical and stylistic resemblance to John F. Kennedy. But ideologically and above all temperamentally he more nearly approximates other contemporary figures: twice-defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson, and Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee at the time the novel was being written. The figure Jason most resembles, though, is Jimmy Carter, who had yet to make his national political debut. (As Jason’s efforts lead to the evaporation of American power he blurts out, “I wanted to be good, I really tried.”)
Likewise the “scowling” black activist LeGage Shelby, head of DEFY (Defenders of Equality for You), resembles no one so much as Jesse Jackson. Senator Bob Munson of Michigan and former President William Abbott both strongly evoke Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. The best portrayals are of the two media giants, the pompous Walter Dobius, a very thinly disguised representation of columnist Walter Lippman, and the self-infatuated Frankly Unctuous, who can be no one other than Walter Cronkite. The Washington press corps, much of it quoted anonymously, sounds surprisingly like the one we have today, even though at the time Drury was writing it was recruited from a very different social and cultural milieu.
To be sure, in many ways Come Nineveh, Come Tyre deals with issues no longer on the agenda. With the end of the Cold War, the Soviet-American rivalry has ended and communism as a political ideology is dead. But many of the emotions that went into Cold War domestic battles, especially anti-Americanism and American self-hatred, are very much alive and well. These make Drury’s book troublingly current.
Drury foresaw the slow displacement of political power in the United States from representative government and deliberative procedures to special-interest groups and activist organizations. Through the mass media, manipulation of non-governmental organizations, direct mail, and now the Internet, professional provocateurs have the capacity to produce crowds on order.
Admittedly, Drury exaggerates for effect. But even if nothing exactly like NAWAC currently exists in American politics, it is nonetheless true that the line between activism and violence is becoming increasingly blurred—witness anti-free trade hooligans, animal rights saboteurs, eco-terrorists, clinic bombers, race rioters, and Islamic assassins in Europe and elsewhere. Thugs and street agitators are increasingly being admitted into the political mainstream, even lionized by the media. Al Sharpton, the moving spirit behind racial protests that led to defamation, arson, and deaths, was accepted as a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Drury anticipates the sharp decline in civility in American politics, and in particular the sharp edges lately acquired by liberalism. He mourns the transformation of liberalism into a “rigid, ruthless, intolerant, and unyielding orthodoxy.”
Blaming America First and Last
Come Nineveh, Come Tyre is most prophetic in forecasting our current culture wars. As his story unfolds, the author makes no secret that he considers the real problem to be not so much the determination of the Soviets to dominate the world, or the naivete of President Jason in dealing with it, or even the President’s compromised relationship with fringe groups. The deepest problem, Drury suggests, is that American elites no longer have the will to win in harsh world struggles. They have drunk deeply at the well of historical revisionism. They have been educated to believe that, “the United States of America was no damned good.... Its achievements were empty.... Whatever good might have come from it here and there over the years—and that was precious little—had been entirely inadvertent and accidental. It was sinister, hypocritical, imperialistic, racist, ruthless and cruel. It was a mess, and if it happened to provide one with a substantial amount of material comfort and an amazing amount of personal freedom, that was entirely aside from its true nature and a dividend you shouldn’t question but should just make the most of while you did your best to tear the country down.”
At the time the novel was published, this was a huge distortion. Today it is far less so. To take just one example, since Come Nineveh, Come Tyre was published in 1973, more than a million copies of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States—whose argument is precisely the one cited above—have been sold, mostly to college students who are required to read it for their courses. Beyond the classroom, watered-down versions of the critique above can be detected in much of what is currently printed, broadcast, or preached in the public spaces throughout the United States.
Come Nineveh, Come Tyre is not a great work of literature in all ways. The story takes far too long to develop. Some of the prose is a bit overwrought. The major characters’ speeches are often excessively verbose. But Allen Drury had an uncanny sense of the direction in which American politics was moving. And, troubled patriot that he was, he sent his timely book into the world as a warning flare.
Mark Falcoff is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
