Decision

Foreword

Kevin D. Killiany

In 1982, Diane Rehm said of Allen Drury’s latest novel: “
Decision
takes us inside the Supreme Court, as the human beings on that Court struggle with their personal biases and their public duties. At the center are characters who are real, ambitious, murderous, caring: all the stuff of Washington and political life.” In a time when many political novels were rife with caricatures or dimensionless puppets meant to symbolize conflicting ideologies, Allen Drury always wrote, as he frequently said, about ordinary, decent, well-intentioned people who are called upon to face extraordinary circumstances.

Our Uncle Al disliked shorthand, both in storytelling and in life. He didn’t approve of applying simplistic labels to people because in his experience, people—particularly political people—were very complex creatures. He said that when he first came to Washington in the forties it was not at all uncommon for a senator to be conservative in the aggregate but liberal on specific issues, and vice versa. One had to know where a person stood on foreign policy and labor and socialized medicine and “a whole range of issues”—one could never assume that the party to which the senator belonged dictated his or her vote on every issue.

Depending on his mood, Al was either bemused or annoyed that he was popularly pigeonholed as a Conservative. This public perception was based on two facts: he made no secret of his deep distrust of the Soviet leadership and he was outspoken in his despair at what he saw happening to his beloved institution of journalism. As a reporter in the forties and fifties, he’d understood his duty to be report the facts and explain issues—and he was known for doing a good job at both. But in the sixties he saw the news media becoming, in his words, “arrogant and overbearing and not always very accurate.” He was particularly disturbed to see the major networks and news services moving away from disseminating information and insights toward choosing what was reported and actively seeking to influence public opinion.

But Al could not be defined by those two convictions, no matter how strongly he held them. He felt as strongly about civil rights. Our mother, seven and a half years his junior, told us stories of living with him in Washington while she attended art school. One of those stories was about going with him to a local meeting of the NAACP, which he supported. This involved a certain amount of risk in the 1940s, when our nation’s capital was a viciously segregated city. Though Al was never expansive about his relationship with NAACP, that he was comfortable enough to bring his little sister along says something about the level of respect on both sides of the equation. His journal from his first two years as a Senate correspondent shows obvious sympathy for the voting rights of Southern blacks. When demonstrators were being beaten and jailed during the marches of the 1960s, he maintained that the duty and purpose of the police force was to protect the nonviolent protestors from the violent mobs.

Another indication that his interest in the human element at the center of every issue developed early in his life: while at Stanford, Al developed a keen interest in the Confederacy—which would seem the antithesis of his stance on racial equality. What fascinated him was not their racism, but the secessionists’ perception of the world and their place in it; the reasoning behind the choices they made. Years after Stanford, his study of Southern politics in the nineteenth century would give him insights into Southern politicians of the twentieth as a journalist and equip him to create authentic, three-dimensional Southern characters as a novelist. He discovered an unexpected benefit in the late sixties when he was investigating South Africa’s civil unrest and the repression of apartheid. His knowledge of the Confederacy as a nation that saw itself unjustly besieged helped him understand the thinking and culture of the white minority. This evident understanding enabled him to earn the cooperation of the Afrikaners and gain an access to their society seldom granted foreign journalists.

Al believed the arts, active and unfettered, contributed to the quality of our culture. In the 1980s, as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, he wanted the Endowment to move away from funding big institutions, such as the New York Met, that would have no trouble surviving without a few hundred thousand of the Endowment’s dollars. Instead he advocated that many, smaller sums of money be given—no strings attached—to small, independent institutions and even individual writers, painters, musicians, and sculptors. He also believed that well-educated and knowledgeable citizens were essential to America’s strength. He supported providing children in poor urban and rural settings with top-quality schools and practical access to higher learning.

At the same time Al believed strongly in the liberty of the individual and that the Constitution strictly limited our government’s ability to infringe on personal rights and freedoms. He saw no legitimate grounds for government oversight of people’s private lives, religious convictions, or business practices. Those of us who knew him well know that by today’s standards, depending on the question at hand, Al’s political position would be described as ranging from Progressive to Libertarian. That may border on hyperbole, but at its core is a kernel of truth. Al understood that different circumstances require different approaches; that different problems require different solutions.

No matter what the issue, Al believed in the strength—and the process—of American democracy. He affirmed this in a speech delivered in 1987, at a celebration of our Constitution’s bicentennial. He said: “When the chaos, confusion, cupidity, and stupidity in Washington seem to be rising to one of their periodic highs, it is difficult for some to believe that this, too, will pass, as it always does.… The percentage of good men and women in government will still outweigh the bad. And the sound decisions they make will still, on balance, outweigh the silly.”

Allen Drury was friends with both Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. He saw no conflict—or anything particularly unusual—in that. Neither did they. Al was outspoken in calling for the resignations of both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Though very forthright in expressing his political opinions, Al guarded his privacy when it came to his voting, even from his family. From conversations and observations we’re reasonably sure he voted for LBJ in 1964 and almost certainly for Clinton in 1992, but he would never confirm nor deny speculation. All we are sure of is that even in the voting booth, he defied easy categories.

Which should not be surprising, because Al didn’t think in terms of categories. He saw that although the men and women who were elected to serve the American people disagreed on how best to get there, they shared the goal of making this country and society as good as it could be. Of course, a shared goal did not automatically produce unity; common ground was elusive. Inevitably, the men and women of the House and Senate had confrontations, but they also had compromises; they learned to leaven their principles with practicality and their visions with pragmatism. They balanced the determination to reach their ideals with the wisdom to recognize when the best they could do was good enough. Al knew, and showed in his stories, that working politicians—which is to say politicians who work at governance—are, to quote the oft-cited maxim, practitioners in the art of the possible.

And, as the ordinary, decent, men and women of whom Allen Drury wrote soon discovered, the art of the possible is not a gentle discipline. Ill-considered acts had far-reaching consequences. Small compromises and reasonable accommodations could compound into things never intended. Favors carried hidden price tags. And even when everyone involved negotiated in good faith, each person might have to choose between their convictions, their constituents, their country, and their character.

Allen Drury knew how the people we elected to represent us came together—sometimes amicably, often times not—to go about the business of governing our nation. He saw how the men and women who make up what we all too often think of as a homogenous, impersonal “federal government” fought their daily battles, individually for what each believed and collectively for all of us. Through his novels he gives us a glimpse of what he saw.

—Kevin D. Killiany

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