Editing Advise and Consent (section)

==Background==
The novel's title comes from the [[United States Constitution]]'s Article II, Sec. 2, cl. 2, which provides that the President of the United States "shall nominate, and by and with the [[Advice and Consent of the Senate]], shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States . . . ."

Drury believed most Americans were naive about the dangers of the Soviet-led communist threat to undermine the government of the United States:<ref>{{cite book |first=Tom |last=Kemme |title=Political Fiction, the Spirit of the Age, and Allen Drury |publisher=[[Bowling Green State University]] Popular Press |year=1987 |isbn=0-87972-373-4 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/politicalfiction00kemm/page/165 165, 170] |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/politicalfiction00kemm/page/165 }}</ref>

{{blockquote|Drury believed that the Soviet Union led an international totalitarian communist movement whose ultimate goal was world domination and that communists were willing to achieve that goal by whatever moral, immoral, or amoral means worked, including propaganda, lies, subversion, intimidation, infiltration, betrayal, and violence. A Drury thesis was that American liberalism contributed to communism's incremental success in its war against American democratic capitalism.}}

''Advise and Consent'' is a fictional account of the nomination of a prominent liberal, Robert Leffingwell, to the cabinet position of [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]] during the height of the Cold War. It is said that the story is based on Drury's first-hand insight into the personalities and political practices of the late-1950s including the 1954 episode wherein Senators [[Styles Bridges]] and [[Herman Welker]] threatened to publicize a homosexual in Senator [[Lester C. Hunt|Lester Hunt]]'s family if Hunt did not resign from the Senate.<ref>{{Cite news |first=Thomas |last=Mallon |author-link=Thomas Mallon |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |title='Advise and Consent' at 50 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/books/review/Mallon2-t.html |date=June 25, 2009 |access-date=March 4, 2011}}</ref><ref name="Isikoff">{{Cite web|url = https://news.yahoo.com/uniquely-nasty-advise-consent-blockbuster-novel-haunted-gay-washington-203331641.html|title = ''Uniquely Nasty'': The blockbuster novel that haunted gay Washington|date = n.d.|access-date = January 15, 2015|website = [[Yahoo! News]]|publisher = [[Yahoo!]]|last = Isikoff|first = Michael|author-link = Michael Isikoff}}</ref>

In fact, the website of the U.S. Senate states: {{Blockquote |text= Based on Drury's observations, one may guess who the author based his fictional senators on: Alben Barkley may be the dashing majority leader; Robert Taft might be the minority leader; Kenneth McKellar may be the southern senator; the overzealous Senator Fred Van Ackerman might be a caricature of Joseph McCarthy; and the tragic Brigham Anderson, who kills himself in his Senate office, reminds us of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming, who took his life in the Russell Building in 1954. The president and vice president strongly resemble President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President Harry Truman. The entire incident could be loosely based on the Chambers-Hiss case.<br /><br /> However, the book is not meant to be a ''roman à clef'', and it does not purport to disguise a true story. Drury considered his fictional senators and others as composites, and wove them through successive books.  The author was not interested in profiling any one individual but in capturing the whole gallery of stock characters that Washington had seen and would be seeing again.<ref>{{cite web |title= Virtual Reference Desk: Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1959) |website= Senate.gov |publisher= [[United States Senate]] |url= https://www.senate.gov/reference/reference_item/advise_and_consent.htm |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20141208153748/https://www.senate.gov/reference/reference_item/advise_and_consent.htm |archive-date= 2014-12-08 |url-status= live }}</ref>}}

Several sources agree that character Robert Leffingwell, the novel's nominee for Secretary of State, represents [[Alger Hiss]].{{r|PR 1999}}<ref name="NYT Rich">{{cite news |first=Frank |last=Rich |author-link=Frank Rich |newspaper=The New York Times |title=Just How Gay Is the Right? |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/15rich.html |date=May 15, 2005 |access-date=January 19, 2015}}</ref><ref name="Ringle">{{cite news |first=Ken |last=Ringle |title=Allen Drury, Father Of the D.C. Drama |newspaper=[[The Washington Post]] |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/junkie/links/drury2.htm |date=September 4, 1998 |access-date=January 21, 2015}}</ref>

Addressing the suggestion that the book was a ''[[roman à clef]]'', Drury wrote a very sharply worded preface which was only published in the new edition:
{{Blockquote|You will have to take the writer's word for it, because it is true. There are people and events in this book as in any that are ''akin'' to people and events in reality, but they ''are not'' the people and events of reality. Such resemblances as they do bear are transmuted through the observations and perceptions and understandings of the author into something far beyond and basically far different from the originals in the cases were originals can be argued to exist.<ref>{{Cite book|title = Advise and Consent|last = Drury|first = Allen|publisher = WordFire Press|year = 2014|isbn = 978-1-61475-078-9|location = Monument, CO|chapter= Original Preface}}</ref>}}