Where was that coming from? And not wanting to start a political debate here, but he was a member of the Democratic party - why would he out Brigg? I would think that would be something a Republican would be more inclined to do. Or was it just that he was a bare-knuckle political fighter, looking to get what he wanted?
I asked the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.
It seemed he was jealous of Brig getting the chair position despite his seniority over him. That combined with his burning desire to get Leffingwell confirmed (which is the one part of the movie I didn't understand as Lefingwell being SOS gave Van Ack no obvious benefit) led to the blackmail. Not sure why him being a Democrat would make him any more or less likely to blackmail someone as that is more of an individual ethcial choice and not a policy thing (don't think the Republicans are any more in favor of using blackmail to get their way than Democrats).
shareOh, I'm not saying being a Democrat makes him more or less likely to blackmail. I am applying 2010 thinking to a 1962 Democrat to say that a 1962 Democrat should be less willing to "out" someone for being gay than a Republican would be. Of course, I realize that that would probably be less true in 1962 than now, but that would certainly be more true of a Democrat than a Republican in either era. The Pubs distanced themselves mighty quickly from Sen. Larry Craig.
I asked the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.
I think it had nothing to do with partisan politics but was simply due to Van Ackerman's mania to have Leffingwell confirmed. The fact that they were members of the same party (clearly Democrats, but unstated) made no difference to him.
Allan Drury was a very good writer -- the book won the Pulitzer Prize -- but he was a political conservative, so it's natural he'd find his villain among the liberal set...although, as the majority party, that's where all the action would be anyway. But he was fairly even-handed in his treatment of senators in the book. He described Brig's Republican colleague from Utah as someone generally considered inept and incompetent as a legislator, even by his fellow Republicans.
I don't think anyone cared much about Larry Craig's sexual orientation (whatever it is!) but were more concerned with the fact that he was a hypocrite caught in a misdemeanor, but embarrassing, offense. He even lied about resigning.
Intra-party contests and feuds can get ugly. When Mario Cuomo ran against Ed Koch for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City, there were people going around saying "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo." Mario Cuomo denied any involvement in that but it had to have come from his supporters.
Sam Tomaino
Drury actually based the Brig Anderson subplot on a real-life tragedy in the Senate in the 1950s that did indeed involve blackmail, except in this case the blackmail was partisan.
In 1954 the son of Senator Lester Hunt, a Wyoming Democrat, was arrested in D.C. on a "morals" charge, soliciting sex from an undercover policeman. Normally back then such cases involving prominent people or their immediate families were dealt with quietly by the police. However, in this instance two Republican senators -- Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Herman Welker of Idaho -- went to Hunt and threatened to expose his son's arrest and force a public prosecution unless Hunt pulled out of his reelection race in Wyoming.
In those days Wyoming was a fairly competitive state politically and Hunt was considered a shoo-in for a second term. But Bridges and Welker (well known as unscrupulous and vicious men) gave Hunt just a few days to decide before they intended to go public. Hunt, who knew his son was gay and loved him very much, capitulated, and surprised everyone by announcing he would retire. Bridges and Welker then showed what kind of honorable men they were by reneging on their promise and using their press contacts to expose Hunt's son. In desperation, and in a vain effort to shut down this inquisition against his son, Hunt went into his office and committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle.
Though no one publicly linked Hunt's suicide with his son's case, it didn't stop the two senators from demanding that the D.C. courts prosecute the younger Hunt. He pleaded guilty, but even in 1954 the penalties weren't very severe, and the incident was soon forgotten. It was known to insiders among the Senate and press corps but in those days nothing was reported in the press. It was only decades later that the full story came out.
But what goes around comes around. In 1956 Welker lost his own bid for a second term and the following year died suddenly, after a brief but painful illness, at age 49. Bridges never lost his seat but also died quite suddenly in office in 1961, at 63. And while the Republicans did temporarily gain Hunt's Senate seat in 1954 when the Republican governor appointed an interim GOP senator, they promptly lost it in the fall elections when a former Democratic Senator, Joseph C. O'Mahoney, beat the state's lone House member, William Henry Harrison (grandson and great-great grandson of two presidents) for the Senate seat.
As a long time Washington reporter, Drury knew of the incident and incorporated a variation of it in his book, carried on into the film. It was not a coincidence that he made the two men involved in the blackmail senators from two Mountain states, just like Hunt and Welker, and that he used Hunt's home state, Wyoming, as the home of the fictional Senator Van Ackerman -- except making him the predator, not the prey, as was the tragic and honorable Lester C. Hunt.
If there is such a thing as eternal justice, it is to be hoped that senators Welker and Bridges are burning in hell for their blackmail, lies, dirty deeds and bloody hands, not to mention their McCarthyite careers in helping to destroy many innocent lives. Two of the biggest swine who ever disgraced the United States Senate.
I'd known some of thr history but thanks for the detail. I brought up the Cuomo-Koch race just to show that anyone, regardless of the political opinions they express in public, can engage in that kind of behavior. I surely agree with your hope for eternal justice.
Drury's insider knowledge is what really makes his politcal novels interesting reading. He would change things to protect himself. I have no doubt he knew about JFK's dalliances before he was married and based Lafe Smith on him. He just put him all the way out of Iowa to disguise it. The movie changed things around to make it more obvious. When I first read A&C back in 1968, I did not know about JFK's activities so I did not catch it then.
I have read some of Drury's novels outside the formal A&C 6. Throne of Saturn & Anne Hastings did use some characters from A&C but I could not tell when in the series it was supposed to be taking place. I look through a copy of his last novel (whose name I've forgotten) and read a nice scene with Dolly Harrison Munson, now a widow. I also read that Drury wanted to write two divergent novels to follow-up the vague end of Promise of Joy. I assume one would be of Knox had bombed Russia and the other if he had bombed China. I guess his publisher said "No way!" Hell, I would have read them.
The other novels I've read are his Akhenaten duology which was fascinating.
Sam Tomaino
"Lafe" is such a rustic, hayseed sort of name that when they made the movie and transferred the character from a Senator from Iowa to one from Rhode Island, I felt they should have changed his first name as well. Obviously, Peter Lawford's vague British accent would have made him an unconvincing Iowan, and that combined with his Kennedy connection made making him from RI sensible, particularly given the political similarities and geographical proximity of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
I certainly admire you for reading all Drury's works. I generally don't have much interest in a series of books on the same theme, as with his "A&C 6", as you so aptly called them. When I finally read "Advise & Consent", years after seeing the movie, I was most impressed by his command of the language. The book was also an interesting take on Washington (plus the futuristic asides he put in, principally the Soviet moon landing), and a curious mix of both a lack of faith in the American government and yet a reassuring faith in it at the same time. But I suppose I felt that nothing could quite equal a Pulitzer-prize-winning novel of such excellence, and given my predilection against anti-climax, I never had an interest in pursuing the sequels, which in my view could only become more outlandish and artificial (which from what I've been told seems to be at least in part true).
I live near NYC and well remember that Koch-Cuomo smear back in the 1977 New York mayoral campaign. At least that bit of mud didn't go any further than being a stupid homophobic rhyme. I doubt Cuomo endorsed it, and I do remember him denouncing it. Whether anybody in his campaign had a hand I never heard. Of course, Koch won that election, so the slander didn't work anyway. When the two men faced off for the Democratic gubernatorial election in 1982 no such insults arose, and I'd be pretty sure Cuomo made sure to keep a lid on such stuff. Of course, he won that race.
I live in New Jersey myself and (before cable) got my news from NYC.
If you would like to read something by Allen Drury that does not involve anything like contemporary politics, I recommend "A God Against the Gods" and "Return to Thebes", set in ancient Egypt, concerning the pharoah Akhenaten. with Tutankamon a major character. His history is a bit specualtive but could be accurate.
Sam Tomaino
Isn't Akhenaten the same pharaoh in the book and movie The Egyptian? If so I've had a lot of conversation about him on IMDb's TE site.
Actually, aside from your Drury recommendations above, I'm thinking now of reading more of his A&C sextet. I hadn't thought about them in years but this conversation has whetted my appetite a bit. They sound like fun, particularly for political junkies!
I think so, but I haven't seen or read movie or book.
Drury portrays Akhenaten as a pharoah who wanted to change Egyptian worship of Amon and other gods to Aten as a single god, a loving god similar to what would be the Christian one years later.
Sam Tomaino
Yes, that's the same story Waltari told in his book "The Egyptian", repeated in the film. I never read the book but found the film overlong and pretentious.
So...how did we go from confirming Robert A. Leffingwell to discussing a monotheistic pharaoh?!
There is a connection in that Akhenaten is portrayed as a sympathetic bisexual and one of his brothers is a sympathetic homosexual.
There are also sympathetic homosexuals in Drury's "Anne Hastings" and "Throne of Saturn."
Sam Tomaino
Saved!
I enjoyed the follow-up novels. When someone reads "Capable of Honor" today and learns it was written *before* the 1968 Democratic Convention, it reveals Drury to have had more insights about the era than he is given credit for. It has always seemed to me that his conservatism, unfairly, has been used as a way of downplaying his approach to satirically comment on the times, especially in regards to how the country lost its grip regarding the Cold War struggle.
Pat Buchanan's new memoir about the 1968 Nixon campaign, drawing from his files of notes taken at the time from when he went to work for him in 1966, notes how Nixon was an enthusiastic reader of Drury's novels.
Drury's final two novels "The Hill of Summer" and "The Roads of Earth" written in the early 80s also uncannily picked up on a theme of a young charismatic Soviet leader rising to power and changing the existing Cold War dynamic, only in Drury's case (written before the rise of Gorbachev) it was of a Soviet Hitler type trying to win the Cold War but things backfiring because the President digs his heels in and blunts the Soviet leader's advances in the world (all of this being done without the ultimate brinksmanship of a nuclear exchange being employed).
Acknowledging I have never read Drury's subsequent novels, from what I have read and been told about them, I don't think "Capable of Honor" -- published in 1966 -- sounds particularly insightful.
The fact that there are a few broad and vague parallels to the events at the 1968 Democratic convention -- and those mainly in the presence of violence among protesters -- hardly qualifies as "insight", let alone a prediction of anything. Little else is in any way prescient, and in fact much of it seems based loosely on ongoing political and social events, not something made up out of whole cloth...or even a respectable Republican cloth coat.
It's well known that Nixon was a fan of Drury's work. But I never heard anyone of any consequence disparage him simply because he was a conservative. Just another tidbit from the conservative persecution complex, albeit, perhaps, Knoxonian, rather than Nixonian.
I disagree completely that there's no prescience in "Capable Of Honor." Not only do you have a violent convention clash between a "war" candidate" and a "peace" candidate and violence in the streets, you also get what I feel are insightful observations about the power of the Washington elite media, which Drury serves up with the powerful political columnist "Walter Dobius" (based on Drew Pearson), and also the spectre of political assassination impacting American politics with Harley Hudson's murder in the opening pages of "Preserve and Protect", the next novel. He wrote that one before the events of 1968 as well though it came out the same year.
I have seen my share of negative reviews of Drury that specifically cited his politics, and this includes critics from so-called "mainstream" outlets (I remember finding them when looking up old reviews for a high school report on Drury that I did so that's how long his work has been ingrained in my memory even though its been years since I've gone through them again).
Well, I never read the follow-up books so can only judge by what I'm being told. What I meant about "Capable of Honor" not sounding very prescient is that it was published in 1966, when the antiwar movement was already underway. Granted there was no particular reason to anticipate the kind of riots that rocked the Dem convention in '68, even so, the basis for such actions did exist. And of course we had had a presidential assassination, though no one could see what 1968 would bring.
Still, upon soulful reconsideration, I'll give Drury greater props for portraying such behavior or incidents than I did before. But neither was all of it totally out of thin air.
I have little use for people who attack an author's or artist's work solely based on the artist's politics, although in cases where the works are expressly political it may be fair to comment on the politics behind them. I had no problem with the novel "Advise & Consent" in spite of Drury's obvious conservative bent (at the time I read it I had little idea of Drury's politics, but could discern them in the work). I think Drury made an effort to appear reasonably even-handed, at least from a partisan point of view -- as opposed to an ideological one. But let's face it, political books are always criticized for the "slant" of their authors' politics. Conservatives bitterly attacked Knebel and Bailey over "Seven Days in May" and Burdick and Wheeler over "Fail-Safe", to name two roughly contemporary novels.
It can be hard to separate judging a book or film or some other work of art (such as Picasso's "Guernica") on its artistic merits as opposed to its political content. What I find most objectionable are the people who insist something is "good" on no basis other than its politics -- that if they agree with a book's or play's or movie's political slant, there is no possibility it could be bad. (And of course its concomitant mirror-image slant, that there is no possibility that something with contrary politics can be good.) That kind of thing is the last refuge of unthinking dolts.
You mention "Fail-Safe." I did read that before seeing the movie.
IIRC, Khruschev is explicitly named as the Soviet Premier. The American Prsident is not named but he is so much like JFK there cam be no doubt as to
his identity.
There is one more political novel I read a long time ago. William Safire published a novel called "Full Disclosure" in 1978. In it, an accident leaves the President blind and they try to cover it up. This takes place in a near-future with different world political alliances. IIRC the US is allied to the USSR and China is allied to Japan. The cabinet has also been streamlined. I don't recall many other details bit remember enjoying it. It was one of the few political novels that was not the "thrillers" that have become so common today. Alas, I just checked my county library and they do not have a copy.
Sam Tomaino
Yes, I always thought it curious that they explicitly used Khrushchev as the Soviet Premier in the book "Fail-Safe". In the prologue they state that the events in the book are thought of as taking place in the year 1967 (five years after publication). Of course they didn't foresee K being overthrown in 1964. Good thing the movie didn't make that mistake!
I remember Safire's novel but never read it. The premise of a blind president sounds very interesting, but how you could cover up such a thing I'll never know. A Dave-like substitution, maybe?
I forget how they pulled it off but it was not with a double.
"Fail-Safe" is a pretty gripping movie and the end is really unsettling but it is a little hard to take seriously after "Dr. Strangelove" which is a lot better movie.
I also don't think a president could have got away with killing that many Americans even if one of them was his wife.
Sam Tomaino
I was being facetious about the use of a double. Frankly the premise sounds too ludicrous to pull off today. In the 1800s, perhaps, for a while, but something like that could never be kept secret. A more interesting question is whether a president's suddenly being blinded would constitute a disability that could lead to the VP taking over under the terms of the 25th Amendment.
There used to be special back-to-back showings in revival houses and the like of Fail-Safe and Strangelove. It's not only that they cover the same basic subject but that so many scenes parallel one another, in entirely different ways of course. I guess Strangelove is the "better" movie but comparisons are difficult because despite the similarities of topic one shows the events as an absurdly nightmarish piece of darkly humorous insanity while the other is simply a straightforward depiction of the horror that would befall millions in such an event. One might as easily say it's hard to laugh at the silliness of Strangelove after seeing the brutal reality of Fail-Safe.
Yes, I don't think any President could survive such a decision even if it saved the rest of the country, and the world. I always assumed the President in F-S wouldn't have run for reelection, not just out of political considerations but from sorrow and weariness, particularly since he'd in effect killed his own wife.
Of course, today, a Democrat bombing New York would be hated for the deed, especially by his fellows in the party, who'd have lost a lot of their supporters. A Republican President, on the other hand, would be privately cheered by his political compatriots for getting rid of the city, and they'd probably insist on renominating him out of gratitude.
Actually, a funnier "Dave" like scenario was written before that film ever was made by former Agnew speechwriter Vic Gold and Lynne Cheney no less in a hilarious satiric novel "The Body Politic" which features a Rockefeller-type VP dying just as he's about to get dumped (and like Rocky it was in the throes of carnal arrest with a mistress) but because the incumbent President (party unnamed BTW) wanted to not dump him until after a key primary, his staff decides (without telling the President) to keep the VP alive through use of official statements and a voice impressionist.
But then things spiral out of control when the President doesn't win the primary and the charade done by the staff must continue and this game of keeping the VP alive with blunt statements works too well when suddenly the public is now clamoring for the dead VP to be President instead!! There's a hilarious send-up of "The McLaughlin Group" at one point called "Houlihan's Free-For-All" and a snooping investigative reporter modeled on Robert Novak with a "Prince of Darkness" reputation that he revels in. It was priceless stuff praised by liberals and conservatives. (and a funny in joke refers at one point to former Secretary of State "Leffingwell").
The name of that book rings a very faint bell. From your description it does sound very funny, in a suitably zany way that's both ludicrous as well as weirdly credible. (Almost!)
Lynne Cheney "of all people" is right. A sense of humor isn't something I would normally associate with her. Anyway, it sounds like it would make a great movie. I especially like the references to both actual people (McLaughlin) and fictional predecessors (Leffingwell).
Of course, I realize that that would probably be less true in 1962 than now, but that would certainly be more true of a Democrat than a Republican in either era.
But van Ackerman was something of a loose cannon who did not even heed the advice of his own party leaders to let the process play itself out. In the series of book Drury wrote, van Ackerman was censured by his own party for his actions. The complicity of the President in the blackmail plot is suggested but not fully
spelled out. And, although the movie was more liberal leaning than the book, Leffingwell did not really come across as an ideal Secretary of State candidate.