Come Nineveh, Come Tyre: The Presidency of Edward M. Jason (Hardcover)

Only a best-selling author such as Drury, whose sales were apparently guaranteed, could have gotten away with ending the fourth book, Preserve and Protect, as he did. After 500 pages of anguished conflict and struggle between Orrin Knox and Ted Jason to secure the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominations of their party, *one* of them is then murdered in the last paragraph. But *which* one we are not told! On to the fifth book, Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, to find out....

It turns out to be Knox who was killed. Jason, the wishy-washy semi-liberal and Communist dupe from California, becomes President. In just two weeks of ill-fated decisions alternating with trance-like indecision he manages to lead the United States to total ruin. By the end of the book most of the good guys (and women) from the previous books lie dead or locked up in insane asylums. The idiotic liberal media that Drury so excoriates and that have done so much to place Jason in power too late recognize the folly of their ways and utter loud cries of penance for what they have done. But they too are carted off to the insane asylums as a Hitlerian dictatorship descends upon the nation. The Soviets walk in (they hardly need to march) and take over what is left.

And that's the end of the book. All 500 pages of it -- 500 pages with *small* print, a staggering number of words. It's hard to believe that anyone else has ever written so long a book of such unvarnished gloom.

Some of the book *is* exciting. The reader *does* want to know what will happen next, even though he knows after a while that whatever it is, it won't be good. Even so, it's hard to believe that, according to the dustjacket of my paperback edition, 200,000 people bought this book in hardback and that it was the number 1 bestseller....

Unless, of course, all those readers recognized that Drury had already prepared book number *six*, The Promise of Joy, and that in *that* book it's Orrin Knox who survives the assassinations on the Mall and who leads the American Republic in the triumphant direction that Drury knows it would go if only those awful liberals in the media would let it....

Strictly a three-star book, maybe even a two-star. If you're feeling really gloomy about the state of the world and want to be confirmed in your judgment, or if you're a completist about the Advise and Consent series, read it. If not, skip it and finish up the series with The Promise of Joy.

Believe it or not, I've been called a right-wing stooge in my time, and not without reason. But Drury's fable just didn't do it for me. His perspective on both the Soviets and their willing accomplices (the media and ambitious, amoral politicians) alternates between arch sarcasm and overt antipathy, without the slightest nuance. The evil of the politicians - embodied by the Fred Ackerman and JB Swarthmore - seems most pronounced, not because of its depth, but because their lack of depth: there's just no end they'd stoop to for political gain. The media, mostly named only according to their publications (a persistent Drury quirk) seems to have become unbalanced (mentally that is) by its power to make American's believe utter nonsense (the Russians are our friends - they're only hurting us because we're just a pack of evil imperialists who've long had it coming). The Russians themselves don't so much as speak as swagger in mindless triumph, careful to place the credit where it belongs (for their evil, the Soviets are little more than a force of natural evil; the real blame always lays firmly with domestic liberals). Having taken pains to demonize the Yankee-left, the Russians themselves appear neglected, and their dialog wouldn't be enough for the villains of a second-rate Bond parody.

Strangely, Drury's politics have nothing to do with the novels' problems because politics has nothing to did with the story. Drury's anti-Soviet plot make the case clear enough to elude debate, and only willfull blindness to Russian aggression allows it to survive. Otherwise, there is no depth to the essential conflict between dove and hawk, big government and anti-bureaucratic, isolationist and globalist, conservative and liberal or pro- and anti-soviet. The liberals exist solely for the purpose of communist collusion. Even the issue of the President's unconstitutional police powers is meant to underline his willingness to clamp down on opponents to his peace initiatives. "Nineveh" could just as easily swap the political poles, and we have a book of equal literary value. Drury takes as a given that leftists will uniquely rely on repressive measures to ensure that their agenda stays on top, while conservatives will always have a sincere grassroots to uphold their principles. The various paramilitary organizations who support Ted Jason could just as easily antagonize against Soviet cooperation, while the amoral politicians, who obviously care little for the Russians beyond what political mileage they can get, could just as easily capitalize on anti-Russian sentiment (they don't). There's so much hot-air prose here about liberals and conservatives that it's easy to forget that the book never really identifies either of the two. Rather, the story relies on already established sentiment as to libs and cons, and sees little need for understanding as to who's-who. Drury, after all those dialog packed pages, doesn't realize that for all his hyperbole, his plot, charachters, dialog and especially his politics are more interchangeable than he is.