The Weekly Screed (#845)

Plus ça change…
by David Benjamin

“In the noisy aftermath of babble and talk and jokes and laughter, the junior Senator from Wyoming exchanged a look of open hostility with the senior Senator from Utah; the senior Senator from South Carolina, looking as sleepy and somnolent as before, gave one small chuckle and slapped the Majority Leader on the knee; the senior Senator from Illinois shook his head pityingly at the senior Senator from Minnesota, who pursed his lips and looked sadly disapproving; and the Majority Leader bowed with a grateful grin to the Vice President, who smiled with satisfaction in return.”
                       — Allen Drury, Advise and Consent

MADISON, Wis. — One of the forces that hooked me for life on politics was Allen Drury’s now-classic novel of Washington intrigue, Advise and Consent, whose 1962 film version popped up the other night on TV.

Watching the movie, I was initially amazed by how little the U.S. Senate has changed in some 60 years. Today, as in the 1950s, the Senate is composed almost entirely of rich white males. In the film, only two girl senators — one played by a shockingly youthful Betty White — are in evidence. I also glimpsed a Hawaiian senator who was maybe half-Japanese. Otherwise, the U.S. Senate features no one darker than a venti skinny vanilla latte.

But as the story wore on, I detected deviations from the current code of Capitol Hill protocol. The line twixt the two political parties is fuzzier in Drury’s depiction than it is now. Although the differences are evident, the words “Democrat” and “Republican” never cross the characters’ lips.

Certainly, the sides were neither so far apart in 1959 — nor were they as tribally polarized — as today they are. Drury’s senators are collegial and cordial, kidding one another from desk to desk, sparring amiably over policy differences and gliding, after hours, into a D.C. social whirl in which they  wear matching tuxedos, attend the same parties and hold manly all-night bipartisan smokers, complete with poker, whiskey, cigars and a little elegant mediation provided by the casually breathtaking Gene Tierney.

There are, of course, antagonists, else there would be no plot. Foremost among them is Sen. Seabright Cooley, an atavist curmudgeon from the Jim Crow South who’s a sort of cross between Dixiecrat firebrand Strom Thurmond — who served for two generations at the Senate’s beacon of race hatred — and the more subdued and courtly Albert Gore. Charles Laughton portrays Cooley in a rumpled linen suit with a sly drawl that suggests he was having more fun than anyone else in the movie.

Cooley’s nemesis is a Wyoming liberal (oxymoron alert!) named Fred Van Ackerman, played with vulpine intensity by George Grizzard. Together, they serve to highlight the story’s two maguffins: Commies and homos.

The Commie is Robert Leffingwell, nominated by the president to be Secretary of State. In the face of red-baiting suspicion from Cooley and his cohorts, Henry Fonda plays the part with an air of cool forebearance. Fonda also gets the best line of the movie, an ironic jab at the timeless anti-intellectualism of the American right wing. To update the quote, just substitute the word “elitist” for “egghead.”

Responding to an inquisitor who suggests that Leffingwell is too brainy for his own good, Fonda agrees: “I’m not only an egghead, I’m a premeditated egghead. I set out to become an egghead and at this moment I’m in full flower of eggheadedness, and I hope to spread the spores of egghead everywhere I go.”

Leffingwell’s sense of humor doesn’t help. America in the ’50s was enthralled by a mirthless terror of Russia and its insidious Communist dogma. Leffingwell’s nomination is stalled when the committee learns that he hung out with a Red named Bukowski when he was in college at the notoriously pink University of Chicago.

That was then: The Republican Party was the vanguard of anti-Russianism. It sent forth, in full roar,  America’s most ferocious red-baiters, from Tailgunner Joe and Tricky Dick to Pat Buchanan and the Gipper.

And this is now: Instead of waving blacklists, pounding gavels and grilling anyone who ever ordered a Black Russian at the Bistro Bis, all the president’s men are kool with the Kremlin. The president himself has brown-nosed and thumb-wrestled with a Russkie named Putin who not only made his living as a Soviet spy but, before taking over as czar of all Russia, served as capo di tutti capi of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.

Every tragedy needs a Hamlet. In Advise and Consent, it’s Utah Sen. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), a buttoned-down Mormon with a frigid wife. Brig unearths the full Marxist dossier on Leffingwell. As he’s preparing — reluctantly — to spill, he fends off pressure to cover it all up from his liberal colleagues, and even from the president. But Brig crumbles when Van Ackerman threatens to expose what happened during the war, in Honolulu, where Brig was lonely and lovelorn and had this bunkmate…

The skeleton in Brig’s closet is so unspeakable that the film never utters its name. However, we get to follow a desperate Brig to a dim-lit cellar in Greenwich Village where stereotypes in tight mauve t-shirts sit close at tiny tables, holding hands, listening to Jimmy Scott, smoking French cigarettes and drinking pastel cocktails with ingredients like creme de menthe and Dubonnet. The anguished senator finds Ray, his GI buddy — blond and lovely with perfect hair — and realizes that the jig is up.

Brig, of course, is obliged by the mores of both society and Doubleday in the 1950s, to kill himself, which he accomplishes by jabbing his jugular in the toilet. This leads to a dramatic dénouement, which I won’t ruin for you. You should read the book. It’s a humdinger.

Again, what a difference. Today, Allen Drury would not feel obliged — lest he lose his Reader’s Digest condensation and the Book of the Month — to kill off poor, torn Brig. Who among current-day senators — or voters — would care? Nowadays, my own senator is “openly gay.” Same-sex marriage is rampant in the land and transgender folks are welcome — according to a broad national consensus — to use any john where they feel comfortable.

Except, well…

We have this president whose “base” is America’s last bastion of homophobic panic. Last year, Trump issued orders to purge transgender GIs from every barracks in the republic. Right around Christmas, he suddenly fired the entire membership of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, which monitors the health of 1.2 million people affected by HIV. Gay people, who've read the handwriting faster than the rest of us, are nervous.

If Allen Drury were with us today, he’d also be nervous, because Brig’s suicide might not seem credible to a hip 21st-century readership. He’d need to craft a slight revision toward the end — something like this:

Instead of the humble and cerebral Harley Hudson, the VP is a fanatic homophobe named Mike who has spent most of his career writing laws that protect Christian shopkeepers from having to wait on dykes, fags, trannies, hippies, infidels and atheists. Horrified by the imminent danger that Brig Anderson — a Mormon blasphemer besides being queer! — might impose his homosexual lifestyle upon every innocent child of every senator, Mike strikes a blow for purity. First thing, he disbands the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and sends all those diseased fags back to the bathhouse where they belong. Then, he follows Brig into the Senate Men’s Room. As Brig unwittingly unzips, Mike unsheaths a razor blade…