“When Bob Munson awoke in his apartment at the Sheraton-Park Hotel at seven thirty-one in the morning he had the feeling it would be bad a day” –opening lines
In Allen Drury’s debut Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Advise and Consent, we travel backward in time to a distant epoch; a time when vigorous debates were still held on the floor of the United States Senate, and war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed like a very real possibility. Advise and Consent is a meticulously crafted tale of politics and betrayal. Our setting is the height of the Cold War, perhaps during the 1950s (the exact date is never given in the novel). By this time, American politics has become utterly ensconced in fear and paranoia over the rise of Soviet communism. Suspicions are high, and espionage-fueled enemies lurk around every corner in the nation’s capital. In as much as Advise and Consent is a political thriller, it is also a love letter to a city –a rare “Washington novel” for a culture that seems resistant to producing literary works about its own capital city. Drury portrays Washington DC as an opulent town populated by transient newcomers, vast numbers of employees who run the federal government, who pretend to hate the city, while secretly loving it since they cannot ever seem to leave. Washington is said to be a “hopeful land in which evil men do good things and good men do evil in a way of life and government so complex and delicately balanced that only Americans can understand it and often they are baffled” (21).
The novel begins with a bang: the President (whose name and party are never officially given) suddenly surprises his allies in Congress by announcing the nomination of a controversial figure for Secretary of State –Robert “Bob” A. Leffingwell, a forty-seven-year-old Binghamton, New York native who has served in a variety of federal administrative roles, particularly on the Federal Power Commission (he is married with two children and his political affiliation is decidedly “non-partisan”). So why is Leffingwell’s nomination controversial? Despite being fawned over in the press, Leffingwell is privately despised by a few members of the Senate for his questionable moral character (he is perceived to be a smug liberal and a conniving careerist), but no senator detests Leffingwell more than the irascible Seabright “Seab” Cooley of South Carolina, whom Leffingwell once insulted when he accused the elder statesman of lying in open committee some thirteen years earlier.
“Steadily over the years, partly through the development of his native character, in greater part through a shrewd creation of his own legend, he built the picture of Seab Cooley that existed today: intelligent, industrious, persistent, tenacious, violent, passionate, vindictive, and tricky. Men did not take him lightly, and many a legislative battle he had won without a struggle simply because certain of his colleagues were actually afraid of him both politically and physically” (155). At seventy-five years old, with rumors of his waning power, and newfound tensions among the young guns of the senate, “Bob Leffingwell, to Seab’s mind, was one of the most dangerous men in America” (161). Others view Leffingwell as “Supercilious, arrogant, holier-than-thou, Righteous Rollo… one of the shrewdest politicians to ever hit Washington” (18).
Much of the opposition to Leffingwell in the Senate coalesces around his professed conciliatory attitude toward communism –he is publicly opposed to preventive war against the Soviet Union. With such circumstances in mind, Drury’s rather blatant hawkish and reactionary politics comes to the fore throughout the novel. As we read along, we sit through committee hearings, procedural fights, formal delays, dinners, banquets, smoky backroom deals, press banter, nefarious foreign ambassadors, phone calls with the likes of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the head of General Motors, all while rumors begin to swirl about the President’s questionable health. At one point, even the Chaplain’s prayer is accused of being surreptitiously biased. Indeed, the nomination of Leffingwell seems to cause widespread discontent and it divides the Senate right down the middle, causing a rift within the President’s own party which leads to a frustrating headache for Majority Leader Robert “Bob” Munson, a senator from Michigan, who finds himself caught between the insistence of his President, on the one hand, and recalcitrance from a group of senators on the other. The resistance pledges to sink the nomination at all cost –the opposition include the likes of Stanley Danta of Connecticut, Warren Strickland of Idaho, Walter Calloway of Utah, and of course, Seab Cooley of South Carolina (“Seab Cooley runs the country” becomes as a popular refrain around Washington).
“They were big men in the Senate then,” Drury later remarked. “And they didn’t have the phalanx of aides then they have now. They wrote their own speeches, staked out their own positions.” As such, Drury presents an age of lions in the Senate with the likes of Robert Taft and Robert Byrd –a flashback to a time when the printed word was king, and senators could actually be persuaded on important issues (i.e. an era so foreign from our own it is barely recognizable).
At any rate, the Vice President hails the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell as Secretary of State –“Will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination?”– (hence, the title of the novel) and the Senate goes to work. During a heated Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Leffingwell is repeatedly pressed on whether he is loyal to the United States, a line of inquiry which elicits audible gasps in the room. But the real dilemma comes when a young senator from Utah named Brigham “Brig” Anderson, an Air Force veteran and a devout Mormon, unearths news about a shadowy figure from Leffingwell’s past. Apparently while at the University of Chicago, Leffingwell was involved in radical politics with a student named Herbert Gelman and even introduced him to a four-person communist cell (the other two members of the group included a now-deceased person and a man named James Morton). At first, Leffingwell claims not to remember anybody named Gelman, but once Gelman himself arrives in Congress, Leffingwell is permitted the extraordinary opportunity to cross-examine him. In the course of the exchange, we learn that Leffingwell once fired Gelman from the Federal Power Commission and that Gelman’s mental health might be questionable. Letters from the University of Chicago are then proffered and Leffingwell manages to deflect enough scrutiny from himself for the time being –that is, until Anderson tracks down James Morton, the other mystery man from Leffingwell’s communist past. This sets in motion a dark turn in the novel as the President speaks privately with Brig. The President appears to finally relent, claiming he will select a new nominee if only Brig will send James Morton away (this occurs during an informal conversation after the White House Correspondent’s Dinner).
Brig agrees. However instead of fulfilling his promise, the President decides to quietly unleash a malicious effort to personally destroy Brig. With the help of a firebrand liberal senator, Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, incriminating information about Brig just happens to find its way to the surface. In a secret message to Brig’s wife, it is revealed that Brig once had an affair with a man years ago in Honolulu –it was during the war when he was likely about eighteen. Forced to come clean to his wife, Brig watches as his marriage seems to fall apart. He realizes that he has been outplayed in a very sinister game:
“This knowledge, which meant the end of his reputation, his career, his marriage, all the great world and all the fair things in it, all the things that made life worth living, the chance for public service, the chance to do good, the chance to achieve a little share of happiness for himself and his family, did not come to him as a shattering revelation, for he was past the point for that” (440-441).
As Brig’s one-time homosexual liaison begins to find the light of day, we witness the utterly gut-wrenching suicide of this promising young senator, a former war hero, as he bids one final farewell to his wife and daughter:
“I tried, he thought. I tried, my poor beloved who could never understand me. I wanted to make you happy, but God wouldn’t let me. He had other plans. Go home to Utah and forget I ever lived. I wasn’t worth it, after all. He took the gun, got in the car and drove, guided by blind instinct and seven years of habit, through the golden afternoon to Capitol Hill” (442).
“Then it all ended, but not before, in one last moment of rigid and unflinching honesty, he realized that it was not only of his family that he was thinking as he died. It was a beach in Honolulu on a long, hot, lazy afternoon. The waves crashed and he heard for the last time the exultant cries of the surf riders, far out” (447).
And the unnamed man whom Brig once had a sexual liaison with many years prior (a man who was apparently offered a hefty sum of money in exchange for incriminating information) also becomes wracked with guilt and he quietly kills himself, as well:
“Much later that night, after the news had babbled out over the airways and across the nation and around the globe, a tall young man with haunted eyes got drunk in a shabby café in a little town in Indiana and jumped off a bridge. There were no papers on his body and nobody knew who he was. No banner headlines heralded his demise, and far away in the beautiful city where ruthless men had used him ruthlessly for their purposes no one knew that he was gone” (448).
News of the President’s abhorrent dirty tricks slowly trickles throughout the Senate, and this quickly leads to the surprise resignation of Majority Leader Bob Munson. Here, Munson shows himself to be a man of true principle. And this is followed by a final tense vote on the nomination of Leffingwell, a vote which affects all ninety-nine men and the lone woman who compose the United States Senate. The swing vote in the nomination is now Orrin Knox, a man who has twice sought the presidency and who fully intends to run again. Can he be persuaded to support Leffingwell? He is publicly opposed to the “fuzzy thinking” of Leffingwell, but the President attempts to buy him off by promising to resign and endorse Knox for president in the coming election. Knox ponders this enticing prospect, but unlike Brig, Knox manages to secure the President’s promise in writing. In the end, following a nail-biting series of events, Orrin Knox ultimately stands his ground on principle. He refuses the President’s deal and publicly denounces Leffingwell as the nomination finally concludes during a warm, spring-drenched season in Washington DC.
Upon reading the vote tally —“’On this vote the Yeas are twenty-three, the Nays are seventy-three, and the Senate does not advise and consent to the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell’”– the Senate erupts into chaos, and even a brief fist fight ensues. Meanwhile, across the city, upon hearing the news of his failed nominee, the President collapses on the floor of the White House, grabbing his chest, dying of an apparent heart attack or stroke. This singular moment –a fraught political nomination battle—has entirely destroyed the lives and careers of many prominent leaders in America. It has ended the tenure of a Majority Leader, and killed a prominent Senator as well as the President himself. In the aftermath, Leffingwell is given a relatively milquetoast role in the government (leading a special commission to analyze the efficacy of the administrative state), as Vice President Harley Hudson steps in to lead the country. And in one final twist (as if there weren’t enough twists and turns already) the new President speaks before congress announcing his intent not to run for President in the upcoming election, and he nominates none other than Orrin Knox for Secretary of State while reinstating Bob Munson as Majority Leader. In this best-of-all-worlds scenario, the leaders who possess respect, civic virtue, self-sacrifice, and strong moral character are the ones proven victorious. In Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, moral character triumphs over cynicism.
Drury started writing Advise and Consent in 1957 (the month Sputnik was launched) and he published it a couple years later. Since this was still the dawn of the Space Age, in the novel the Soviets actually beat the United States to the moon (imagine that!), further exacerbating the belief that the United States is losing the Cold War. With this in mind, Drury’s caricature of American liberalism is fairly silly, as if Democrats were willingly abetting communism during the Cold War –he gives a palpable impression throughout the novel that the West could fall at any moment to the devious communists whose widespread espionage efforts run so deep they actually infiltrate the White House. But regardless of the veracity of the book, Advise and Consent is still a grand political thriller. However, while reading the novel, I found myself asking: Why is the President so adamant about appointing a controversial nominee as Secretary of State? Could he not simply select someone more palatable to his own party? Wouldn’t he want to inform his own Majority Leader in advance of an impending senatorial nomination fight? By the end of the book, the President admits that the nomination of Leffingwell “began as a genuine judgment that this man, an excellent and experienced public servant with a broad view of world problems” who is also an “an excellent public servant” and who is “far and away the most qualified man” (549-550). The President reveals that he wants someone young and dynamic who might be more competitive against the Soviets since they have now landed on the moon –hence why the President is openly forcing out his current Secretary of State (Howie Sheppard).
Heavily influenced by Allen Drury’s own experiences as a reporter on the hill, as well as his own private identity as a homosexual (which was later revealed in the Nixon tapes), Advise and Consent is a towering novel in my view –it masterfully exposes a web of interlocking senatorial interests and personal ambitions, resulting in a “political vortex” that exposes all the bitterness and sorrow deeply bound within the game of politics. While a bit tedious at points and also more than a little flimsy in its attempt to portray a secret, perhaps unwitting, alliance between American liberals and foreign communists, Advise and Consent is nevertheless an inspiring portrait of political life at the height of the Cold War (I was particularly struck by Drury’s vivid language of the history and architecture around Washington DC, cleverly introduced by guided tours of the capitol building). Drury also manages to convey a remarkably intimate portrait of each major senator in the story; the novel is divided into five chief sections: “Bob Munson’s Book,” “Seabright ‘Seab’ Cooley’s Book,” “Brigham Anderson’s Book,” “Orrin Knox’s Book,” and the final chapter is a brief coda entitled “Advise and Consent” in which the new President, his Secretary of State, and a cohort of leaders in the Senate, all hop aboard an airplane en route to Geneva as “old friends from the Senate carrying their country’s hopes.”
While Drury quite clearly did not intend to write a roman à clef with Advise and Consent, we might still find echoes of real events in the novel. For example, as far as I can tell, Drury drew upon a variety of historical events as inspiration –one being the infamous Alger Hiss case, in which a government official was convicted of perjury in 1950 for allegedly spying on behalf of the Soviet Union in the 1930s (Hiss maintained his innocence for the rest of his life until his death in 1996). Additionally, the suicide of Brigham “Brig” Anderson –the novel’s tragic climax—shares a certain kinship with the actual suicide of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming in 1954, a popular Democratic politician from Wyoming who championed New Deal causes like the expansion of Social Security and the end of racial segregation in the District of Columbia, but he was also a fierce opponent of Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist probes. When McCarthy threatened to expose Hunt’s son as a gay man (in a time when homosexual acts were very much illegal), Hunt admirably refused to bow before threats of prosecution against his son. As a member of the liberal bloc, Republicans attempted every dirty trick under the sun to eliminate Hunt, and in the ensuing months (after allegedly receiving unfavorable health news), Hunt wound up committing suicide inside his senate office. Ironically, the sympathetic portrait of a wronged gay man as featured in Advise and Consent, comes from the pen of a life-long Republican who maintained deeply held conservative convictions throughout the Cold War.
At any rate, with the release of his debut novel, Drury managed to triumphantly walk a fine line between creating award-winning literature and securing popular success –upon release, the book sat on the bestseller list for some 102 weeks (it debuted on The New York Times bestseller list in August 1959 and didn’t leave until July 1961). In the press, the book’s reception was met with both praise and condemnation, largely rising or falling along Cold War partisan lines. For example: “Rarely has a political tale been told with such vivid realism,” wrote Richard L. Neuberger in The New York Times Book Review in 1960. He further described it as “one of the finest and most gripping political novels of our era.” However, others like Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote in The New Statesman that the book was “politically repellant and artistically null with a steady hysterical undertone.”
The success of Advise and Consent was followed by no less than six sequels, and a Broadway play which featured a few minor revisions that Drury later dubbed “hysterical outcries of phony professional liberals.” A movie version of the book was then released in 1962 starring Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Henry Fonda, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney, and Betty White (it was to be Charles Laughton’s final film). Click here to read my review of the film.
Notable Quotations
“’Of course in a democratic government,’ he had remarked bitterly during the debate, ‘we deal with men as they are reputed to be, and not with men as they really are’” (19).
“Like a city in dreams, the great white capital stretches along the placid river from Georgetown on the west to Anacostia on the east. It is a city of temporaries, a city of just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on the shifting sands of politics, filled with people passing through. They may stay fifty years, they may love, marry, settle down, build homes, raise families, and die beside the Potomac, but they usually feel, and frequently they will tell you, that they are just here for a little while. Someday soon they will be going home. They do go home, but it is only for visits, or for a brief span of staying-away; and once the visits or the brief spans are over… they hurry back to their lodestone and their star, their self-hypnotized, self-mesmerized, self-enamored, self-propelling, wonderful city they cannot live away from or, once it has claimed them, live without. Washington takes them like a lover and they are lost” (21).
“Of course, that was the thing about Washington, really; you didn’t have to be born to anything, you could just buy your way in” (44).
“Having real friends is one of those reserved powers that aren’t granted to the President” (68).
“There were many times and many occasions in the Senate when a sharp exchange on the floor was followed by backslapping and wisecracking and amicable interchanges that wiped out animosities and soothed bruised feelings; but there were other times when matters went too deep for easy persiflage and the sting was longer dying. This was one of them…” (91-92).
“Night had come down on the District of Columbia, and with it clouds and a biting wind carrying promise of snow… In hundreds of giant apartment houses of thousands of government girls were about to descend in thousands of self-operated elevators to meet thousands of government boys for a night on the town… Night had fallen on the capstone of Western civilization, and sex and society were on the move” (99).
“For even Seab, feudist that he is, carries in his heart a concept of the United States of America that he does not want to see damaged; and over and above the shrewdly calculated flamboyance of his long-standing vendetta with Bob Leffingwell there exists a purpose more genuine and more worthy import” (148).
“The debate over Bob Leffingwell was no longer –if it ever had been—a discussion on the merits; it was now simply a matter of personal attack and personal smear, with no holds barred and no weapons unused where weapons could be found” (310).
“Yesterday had begun as a day of imagined shadows and had ended at midnight in the sunlight, figuratively speaking, of victory. Today had begun in sunlight and was ending with shadows” (405).
“’Because, by God,’ he said, ‘I’m going to beat you if it’s the last thing I do. You’re a liar and a cheat and a double-dealing son of a bitch, and you aren’t fit to sweep up the Capitol, let alone be Secretary of State. I know what you are and I’m going to tell the whole wide world. Now get the hell out of my office. I’m sick of the sight of you’” (423).
“’If all the people who talk about doing the right thing for the country only did the right thing for the country,’ Brig said with a weary dryness, ‘what a wonderful country it would be’” (440).
“Politics… was neither as good nor evil as people said” (497).
“Here within his reach lay all that he had dreamed of for thirty years, the chance to be President, the chance to run the country as he believed best, the chance to do the great things for America that he knew, he knew, he could do if he had the power” (572).
“And so it was that the Senate gathered, and the press gathered, and the government gathered, and out across the land the country gathered, and around the globe the world gathered, to a turning point in time that most of them knew, instinctively, had always been destined to come. If it had not come over this, it would have come over something else, for sooner or later it had to come. The game of leapfrog played for so long by the United States and the Soviet Union inevitably had to reach a point where one party or the other would grow impatient…” (579).
“So they rode on, old friends from the Senate together carrying their country’s hopes, while below America sped away, the kindly, pleasant, greening land about to learn whether history still had a place for a nation so strangely composed of great ideals and uneasy compromise as she” (616, closing lines).
On the 1960 Pulitzer Prize Decision
Apparently, the Fiction Jury in 1960 initially recommended that the award be given to Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (after considering James Michener’s Hawaii as a runner-up), but as occurred numerous times in Pulitzer history, the Pulitzer Board overruled the jury and awarded the prize to Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent instead (this was detailed in Pulitzer Prize Administrator John Hohenberg’s Pulitzer Diaries and it was later reported in The New York Times in 1984). Jury reversals reached an unexpected climax in 1960, when the Pulitzer board reversed jury recommendations in numerous categories, including fiction, drama, history, and biography as well as six out of eight awards that were bestowed for outstanding performance in newspaper journalism and wire services. Per John Hohenberg, “Only the juries’ choice in poetry, music, public service, and national reporting survived this outbreak of wholesale damnation.” In his diary at the time, he wrote, “it was a real rampage.” For the Fiction decision, Drury’s boss Turner Catledge (Executive Editor of The New York Times) was the only Board member who remained silent –he never did say whether or not he was merely being neutral or if he didn’t like the book.
For the Fiction category, the year 1960 once again saw only two members of the Fiction Jury:
- John K. Hutchens (1905-1995) was an author and book critic (at both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times Book Review), as well as a long-time judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club. He was born in Chicago and grew up in Montana –later penning a memoir of his youth– before becoming a leading editor of modern literary anthologies.
- Thomas B. Sherman was a music critic and book reviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (he was editor of a series called “Book Ends,” in the literary section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). He was elected president of the Music Critics Association in 1960. I am uncertain of Mr. Sherman’s presumed dates of birth and death.
The 1960 jury report also discussed William Faulkner’s The Mansion and Milton Lott’s Dance Back the Buffalo. In his diary, John Hohenberg documented the following scene during the board’s discussion in the World Room at Columbia University’s School of Journalism:
“Instead of ‘Henderson the Rain King’ by Saul Bellow, the Pulitzer board picked ‘Advise and Consent’ by Allen Drury for the fiction prize and brushed off President Kirk’s openly expressed dislike of what he called an unfair picture of Washington. The jury’s second choice, James Michener’s ‘Hawaii,’ wasn’t considered. That, however, was just the beginning of the onslaught against jury recommendations…”
Also in 1960, a special citation was given by the Pulitzer Board to Garrett Mattingly’s popular history about the Spanish Armada’s attempt to invade England entitled The Armada.
Who is Allen Drury?
Allen Drury (1918-1998) was born in Houston, Texas. His father worked as a citrus industry manager, real estate broker, and insurance agent; while his mother was a legislative representative for the California Parent-Teacher Association. Eventually the family moved to Whittier, CA and then later to Portier, CA. Drury was a direct descendant of several early immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Drury received his BA from Stanford University, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942 but was discharged due to “an old back injury.” He then relocated to Washington DC where he became a U.S. Senate reporter for various publications including The New York Times and kept a journal of his time there (later published as “A Senate Journal 1943–45”). During and after the war, he was granted the rare privilege of closely observing the Presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, and their successors. These experiences would later greatly influence his debut novel Advise and Consent, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. Still to this day, Advise and Consent is often praised as “the definitive Washington tale.” He dedicated the book to his parents and sister as well as “the distinguished and able gentlemen without whose existence, example and eccentricities this book could have been neither conceived nor written: The Senate of the United States.”
Drury went on to write nineteen novels, many of them depicting Washington politics –some critics have placed his importance among the ranks of Galsworthy, Dickens, Thackery, and Henry Adams, not to mention Gore Vidal, Ward Just, and C.P. Snow. Drury was also compared to fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Margaret Mitchell for his similarly stunning debut success, and Herman Wouk (another fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist) compared Drury to the great Victorian writer, Anthony Trollope.
Drury was an intensely private man who lived a quiet, retired life and never married –his one passion was reading. In the Nixon audiotapes, John Ehrlichman stated, “Allen Drury is a homosexual.” He lived in Tiburon, California, from 1964 until his death. He completed his 20th novel, Public Men, just two weeks before his death. He died of cardiac arrest on September 2, 1998, his 80th birthday, at St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco, California. His last series of novels, written shortly before he died, were inspired by his experiences at Stanford University.
Film Adaptation:
- Advise and Consent (1962)
- Director: Otto Preminger
- Starring: Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Don Murray, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney, Paul Ford, George Grizzard, Inga Swenson
Literary Context in 1959-1960:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1959): awarded to Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo “for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times.”
- National Book Award (1960): Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestselling novel in 1959 was Exodus by Leon Uris. Also on the list that year was Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Hawaii by James A. Michener, Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence (the English translation), and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
- Romanian poet, theologian, and Orthodox monk Sandu Tudor began a 40-year sentence in prison for “conspiracy against social order” and “intense activity against the working class,” per a Romanian communist tribunal. He later dies in prison, possibly from torture.
- After a 31-year obscenity ban, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is allowed to be published in the United States, the others being Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill.
- The Obscene Publications Act became law in the U.K.
- Aldous Huxley turned down a knighthood.
- Frank Herbert began researching Dune.
- Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King was published.
- Robert Bloch’s Psycho was published.
- William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch was published.
- Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate was published.
- Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger was published.
- Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was published.
- Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House was published.
- John Knowles’s A Separate Peace was published.
- Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz was published.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Admittedly, as an admirer of political thrillers, I thought Advise and Consent was a wonderful honoree among the Pulitzer Prize-winners, along the same lines as The Caine Mutiny (an earlier Pulitzer Prize-winner). Does it fall among the ranks of the greatest American novels ever written? Decidedly not in my view, though it might be debated among some critics. Still, Advise and Consent stands out as a guilty pleasure of mine among the Pulitzer Prize-winners thus far.
Drury, Allen. Advise and Consent. Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York (1959). First Edition.
Click here to read my review of the film Advise and Consent (1962).
Have not read the book but your review will lead me to read it. The movie is somewhat different but is great. How could it not be with that cast!
I might have to watch the film this weekend!
Sputnik was launched in October 1957.