Advise and Consent (106 page)

The original name of the nominee was Robert Aaron Levinson—largely, I think, because I liked the idea of all those syllables that Seab Cooley could roll spitefully over his tongue. Soon after I began steady writing in 1957, I decided that to have a Jewish name would automatically call into being both Semitic and anti-Semitic attitudes from my readers, and I didn’t want the story to get cluttered up with that kind of thing. I liked the three syllables, however, and so turned ultimately to a family name of cousins, Leffingwell.

For the same reason—unnecessary cluttering by automatic prejudices—I decided that I would leave out the words Democratic and Republican and substitute the words Minority and Majority when I wanted to refer to party labels. Some academic critics have made much over this picture of politics that is so uniform that the parties can’t even be distinguished with real labels. If this comment is really genuine, more fools they for not seeing the reason for a deliberate decision that must be obvious to any perceptive child over the age of three.

It will also be observed that in the initial planning the separate sections, or Books, of the novel, did not revolve around individuals but around the successive stages of the nominating process. This led in 1957 to the two most fundamental and most freeing decisions I made about the book:

1. It would be based upon the major Senators most actively concerned, and each book would center around one of them; and,

2. Rather than write each book from the viewpoint of the Senator involved, which I first thought of doing only to find it enormously crippling in my thinking about it, I would make the Senator the principal moving agent in each book, but would use many different viewpoints of many different characters—what I referred to, in my own mind, as being able to get out around town. This decision above all others made the novel the panorama of Washington, government, politics and people that it is. It could not have had that quality otherwise.

The first chapter is also dated by obvious indications: the quote from the second page, Congressional Record, Mr. Ennis in the Chair, is fictitiously dated May 17, 195—. Bob Munson wakes up in the then Wardman Park Hotel, which by the time the novel was fully written had become the Sheraton Park Hotel; etc.

My original subtitle,
A Novel of the Western World
, was changed at the publisher’s insistence to
A Novel of Washington Politics
which struck me flat as a pancake and much too limiting. It
is
a novel of the Western world, in that only in the Western world could a parliamentary struggle such as this occur; the book has much to say of the ills of the Western world; and so on. This was one of the very few, minor, points on which I made concessions to the publishers. I regret it now, because I think my original subtitle expressed very well what I was driving at when I wrote the book.

Many, many things in the turns and twists of the plot seemed to come out of the typewriter as I went along, as I have described elsewhere. Originally Leffingwell was going to the be confirmed; and so on. But by sticking to the local progression of events as they occur in Washington on a major nomination, and by bearing in mind always the Senate that I knew after 17 years reporting, many things developed as I went along that were not there when I began. The material I submitted to Ken McCormick in the fall of 1957 included the first two chapters and an outline of not more that 100 words; that was the extent of my detailed planning as I sat down to write the book.

But, it came, as its successor seems to be, at present date.

I kept my promise to the Lord, and He was kind enough to see me through.

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