Advise and Consent

"This is all about the United States and it’s a novel based really, I think, on the Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers hearings, but it fictionalises them beautifully. If you read this book and then you watch, in future, a hearing on the confirmation of a secretary of state or a supreme court judge, you will understand far better as a result of it how these things happen than you otherwise would. It is dated, but in an instructive way. Allen Drury was a reporter for Associated Press on Capitol Hill before he wrote it. It was his one big success, filmed slightly unsatisfactorily with Charles Laughton, of all people, playing a particularly wonderful and devious senator, who is my favourite character in the book. I understood American politics much better after reading it. Interestingly, the centre of the plot is an attempt to blackmail a heroic and upstanding senator because of his past homosexuality. The attitudes towards this and the way in which it is used now seem tremendously outdated, but the fundamental view of the person, which is that he is to be judged as a person rather than because of what he might get up to in bed, seems to me to be wholly enlightened. Well, I think there’s a lot of conservative sentiment in it in terms of just being cautious about idealists and I think that if you know about the Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers hearing, and Drury was a witness to this, you see that he was pretty much on Whittaker Chambers’s side rather than Alger Hiss’s. The allegation was made by Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist, that Hiss and a number of other senior people in the state department and elsewhere were effectively Soviet agents. Hiss was tried for perjury and convicted but maintained his innocence to the end, though later transcripts showed that Chambers had been essentially right. This convulsed Washington, of course. What we now increasingly know is that, although Joe McCarthy was an idiot, a lot of what he said was actually true."