Capable of Honor (Hardcover)

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?