Customer Reviews

Capable of Honor

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

. . .of an outstanding series.

In "Advise and Consent", Allen Drury brought us into the inner workings of the US Senate. In "A Shade of Difference" he brought us into the inner workings of the United Nations. He continued his excellent "Advise and Consent" series with a book that touched upon the overwhelming power of the media to form and force public opinion, and did so in a context (that of a violently divided Presidential nominating convention) which resonates true today.

When Mr. Drury was writing, his main fear was the communist threat. His books need to be read and understood in that context. However, don't think for a moment that his books are not timely today. Take a look at the political and journalistic situation surrounding the 2000 Presidential election, and one can easily see how insightful Mr. Drury was. (20 years in the newspaper business did him some good!)

I'm sorry that we have lost Mr. Drury -- I would have enjoyed his take on recent events in the US.

At first glance one might look at this tale of a bitterly divided political convention centered around America's Cold War commitment in a Third World country, and the ensuing violence as a conservative's reaction to the 1968 Democratic Convention. But what makes this novel so remarkable is that it was written nearly two years *before* the spectacle of Chicago in 1968. Drury's blatant political conservatism has often caused his works to be sadly overlooked for their prescience and insights into American society given the prevailing bias of critics, but "Capable Of Honor", like the rest of the "Advise And Consent" is a masterpiece of political novels.

It's nothing short of uncanny how this political novel written from December 1964 to December 1965 anticipates the violence and passions of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Here the scene is the Cow Palace in San Francisco (Daly City, actually), where the party in power is trying to renominate its current President, whom we already know from the two earlier books in the series. The first one, Advise and Consent, is one of the great political novels, perhaps the greatest one of all even, while the second, A Shade of Difference, is readable but tedious. This one, which shares most of the same characters of the first two books is nearly as good as Advise and Consent and is just as unput-downable.

One of the great strengths of Advice and Consent and, I think, the reason for the fascination that it holds on the reader, is that the author appeared to be deeply ambivalent about Robert Leffingwell, the man nominated to be Secretary of State. For 100 pages he shows the reader just why he *should* be accepted by the Senate. Then new information comes out and there are 100 pages of why of he *shouldn't* be confirmed. Then *more* information comes out and our viewpoint shifts yet again. In other words, Leffingwell was mostly an attractive character but with some very human character flaws. Right up to the very end the reader genuinely doesn't know whether he should be confirmed or not. The other main characters in the book were similarly depicted (except of, course, for the despicable Senator Fred Van Ackerman).

In A Shade of Difference Drury lost his compassionate and understanding viewpoint and drew his characters in much clearer black and white tones. There were good guys and bad guys and in spite of the book's title there really weren't many shades in their characters. They were all good or all bad.

Here in the third book Drury to some degree recaptures the skill and humanity he brought to Advise and Consent. Robert Leffingwell is back as a semi-major character and this time he seems to have moved out of Drury's disfavor into a far more positive role. And one of the other major characters of the book, the Governor of California, who first seeks his party's Vice-Presidential nomination, and then the Presidency itself, is also depicted in first quite favorable terms that then gradually shade off to gray. It is a believable portrait of a basically good and decent man who is, nevertheless, an overly ambitious politician.

The other main strength of the book is the narrative tension that Drury creates as he depicts the struggle for the nominations. There is genuine tension here, because it's a real struggle for real goals, just as it was in Advise and Consent. And just as it was *not* in the second book, in which the various votes and rollcalls at the United Nations were clearly contrived and struggled to capture the reader's interest.

The *real* problem with this book, and why it's only a 4-star book instead of a 5-star, is the totally unrealistic hatchetjob Drury does on the liberal media. I myself am fairly moderate in my politics, and in the days in which Drury wrote (and was depicting), I was a Kennedy Democrat-Rockefeller Republican. I *lived* through those years, and I can tell you that the liberal media absolutely did not run things the way Drury insists in this book that they do. Here he has invented a Walter Lippmann-type parody of a newspaperman-philosopher named Walter Dobius who is known as Walter Wonderful and who, because of his political column in 436 newspapers, is the quasi-dictator of the liberal movement, which, according to Drury, is nearly every newspaper, magazine, and television chain in America. Satire is fine, and in the hands of a capable satirist wonderfully illuminating. But in the hands of Allen Drury it is heavy, tedious, repetitive, and totally unrealistic.

One question that Drury skirts is the key one: If Dobius and his ubiquitous allies are *so* powerful, then why aren't the President and all the Congress precisely the ones they want? If they are so united in picking their candidates and shoving them down the throats of the ignorant American electorate, then why isn't the world being run to suit their tastes?

The answer, of course, is that Dobius et al are clearly exaggerated far past any pretense at realism. As the years passed, Drury evidently became more and more obsessively anti-Communist (nothing wrong there, I was then and am now anti-Communist also), to the point where anyone short of being a 1964 Barry Goldwater Bomb-'em-back-to-the-Stone-Ages type was pretty close to being a traitor to his country. And this is clearly exactly what all of the media types in this book are portrayed to be.

But if you can suspend your disbelief, or maybe just irritation, about Drury's heavy-handedness and just stick with the narrative, I think you'll find the book a real page-turner.

One other caveat that makes you wonder just what Drury was smoking while he wrote this book. One of the main characters and troublemakers of the second book, the Panamanian Ambassador to the United Nations, is also the brother-in-law of the California Governor who is running for President. In this book he suddenly vanishes to Panama and leads a revolution to throw the United States out of the Canal Zone. A physical, violent revolution, not just one of words. Drury doesn't tell us whether the rebels actually seize the Canal or not, but he tells us that American troops are killed and that our planes are shot down. He also tells us that the rebel leader leads this revolt from the veranda of his well-known, enormous planation, a sort of Panamanian version of Mount Vernon. And yet the United States, which has gone to actual *war* in Panama to put down this rebellion, is unable, or unwilling, to send a squadron of bombers, or even a plane full of Green Berets, to kill or capture this character?

And his brother-in-law, the Governor of California, with this war going on, is *still* able to run for the Presidenial nomination and come within a handful of votes of being chosen?

You tell me: Is Drury kidding?

Excellent read better than Allen Drury's "Advise and Consent". In our current political climate I doubt there is even one member of congress "Capable of Honor".

If you can't understand why conservatives still complain about the liberal media in this day of talk radio and cable news shows, read this. Published in 1966, this is a great characterization of the way the mainstream media--primarily the major tv networks and newspapers--attempted to set the parameters of acceptable political opinion in America at the time. And why many conservatives believe that, for those two news sources at least, not much has changed.