Come Nineveh, Come Tyre: The Presidency of Edward M. Jason [Hardcover]

"Come Nineveh, Come Tyre", is one of the last entries of a prolonged political saga that Alan Drury began with "Advise and Consent". (Luckily, Drury encapsulates the the action of the prior books in a preface to this one; he also includes a list of the main characters). By "one of the last" I mean that it is one of two alternate finales to the "Advise" saga. At the end of the last book (which I didn't catch), an assassin kills one of two front-runners for the oval office. The victim identity - and our nation's fate - is resolved in both this book and its companion "Promise of joy". In "Promise" the heroic Orrin Knox survives to save America (and the world) from wooden-headed liberals. In "Tyre" it's king liberal himself, Ted Jason, who survives and ruins the country on becoming the president. Jason's platform is that of "peace" (which means dismantling the nation's status as a global superpower and its policy of confrontation with the Soviets). No Stalinist booster, Jason is nevertheless an outright stooge of the hardcore Soviets - convinced that their wish for peace reciprocates his own. But those familiar with Alan Drury know that this path invites disaster. In every global arena, a backward step by Americans is matched by an aggressive Soviet leap forward. Yankees pulling out of Africa are routed by a Soviet army; US advisers are rounded up and sent to camps in the Ukraine; American ships are sunk by Russian warships disguised as trawlers; Alaska is briefly occupied. In every case, the Jason administration faithfully clings to its sincere belief that all Soviets are good people just surrounded by nasty advisers - and that its more important to deal with opposition at home than commit warfare everywhere else. In every instance, Jason's refusal to resort to war (as well as every episode of the Soviets' refusal to resort to anything else) is championed by the craven, unelected plutocracy that is the American media, and enforced by leather-jacketed thugs.

Believe it or not, I've been called a right-wing stooge in my time, and not without reason. But I just couldn't buy Drury's fable. 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 liberal politicians - embodied by the Fred Ackerman and JB Swarthmore - seems most pronounced because their lack of depth: they'll do anything for political gain. The media (mostly named only according to their publications - a persistent Drury quirk) seems to have been driven insane with a new-found power to make Americans believe utter nonsense (the Russians are our friends - 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 and the media). 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 do 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, the combatants themselves are interchangeable - nothing about them defines them as left or right, conservative or liberal, GOP or DNC. In 2001, it would take little re-writing to make "Come Nineveh" an indictment of the right - replace the Soviets with OPEC, the media with big business, America's dominance in military power with its economic power, and just swap left-for-right.

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 our bringing our own prejudices to the story - which Drury highlights in a foreword in which he warns readers that his prose won't sit well with those "who set the trends". The problem is that, when you put politics aside, "Come Nineveh" is worse than polemic - it's boring. The liberal media, and Yankee-bashing foreigners traverse the novel like a Greek chorus, courteously orating what's on everybody's mind. The "action" falls into a familiar pattern - Jason makes unwise overtures, the Soviets exploit them, the media reports dramatic American reversals at the hands of the Soviets, then somehow save Jason's leftist administration from the repercussions of his ruinous policies - for hundreds of pages. By the end of story, you're almost praying the Soviets will win, if only put the entire exercise to rest. The only shock Drury leaves is this: for all of its tortuous history and dialog, this is essentially a Seinfeld version of the political novel, the potboiler about nothing.

To truly understand this book you must first read The Promise of Joy. You will be glad you did. Both books are exceptional and with the conflict ongoing in the Balkins today and our current American leadership - they are must reads.

Beginning with the second book in the Advise and Consent series Alan Drury became an out-and-out ideologue. The stories in books two through five are still interesting, and many of the old, recognizable characters are there, but Drury's main interest seems to lie in flailing the liberal media, particularly the printed media, for leading the United States down the path to ruin in the face of Soviet aggression and conniving. He does this with such an unsparingly heavy hand that the characters, and situations he puts them in, become nothing more than comic-book creations to illustrate his hobby-horses.

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.