Allen Drury’s
Note to the Reader
(previously unpublished)
Some months after Advise and Consent’s publication, I received a letter from a doctor, I think in Brooklyn, who asked, “Mr. Drury, do you know that on page so-and-so you misspelled the word such-and-such? Now, why do authors like you put things like that in their books?”
By that time I had heard from some others of the type who joy in nit-picking minor details, most of them injected during the printing process and quite beyond the capability of author and copy-editor to catch. And I had had it.
Dear Dr. So-and-So,” I wrote back, “authors like me put things like that in their books so that readers like you can spend all your time looking for them instead of paying attention to what the story is all about.”
Writing now about the world’s most nit-picking profession, the law, I fully expect to receive communications of the same caliber. To them my answer must be the same. Aided by a goodly crew, several of them members of the Supreme Court itself, I have done my best to be true to the letter and the spirit of the law. If in some instance I have failed, it is not the fault of these; nor is it anything to which I intend to devote much apology. There will no doubt be critics who dance around such slippages, if any, and archly make much of them: let them dance. They have little better to do, and it is, of course, an excellent excuse for not telling you what the story is all about.
It is on the latter that an author has a right to be judged, and no doubt will be.
I am indebted to the aforementioned Justices for intimate details of their daily operation, as I am indebted to Mark W. Cannon, Administrative Assistant to the Chief Justice; Francis J. Lorson, Clerk of the Court; Garrett McGurn, public information officer; and many others around the Court, all invariably kind and helpful. Representative John L. Napier of the Sixth District of South Carolina and Dee Lide, chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where invaluable in helping me understand the laws and criminal procedures of their state. Without the assistance of my old friend from Senate reporting days, Robert A. Barr of U.S. News and World Report—who is such a great fact-digger that he very probably knows more than anybody else about almost everything on the Hill—many a detail might have escaped me. And to William Howard Eichstadt go thanks once again for his usual fine job of deciphering and typing the manuscript and, as first reader, for his constructive and helpful suggestions along the way.
None of these is responsible in the slightest degree for any conclusions I may have drawn from information so generously given, or the use I may have made of it. My friends at the Court, I suspect, will not be overly happy to find their institution being portrayed as being subject to the same human pressures as beset all of us. No more will my South Carolina friends be pleased by the occasional shadow of their state’s sometimes unhappy past. And no doubt there will be critics, some of whom have made quite a good thing out of peek-and-tattle about the Court, who will condemn me because I have not made it out to be the weak and worthless institution they in their profitable wisdom have concluded it to be.
To them all, I can only say: this is how I see it.
This is not an exposé of the Court in fictional form. No more is it a paean to the Court. It is, I hope, a story of people and the law and how humanly vulnerable, though often well-meaning, both can be. It is not the minor error on page so-and-so that matters. It is the human tale unfolded within the framework of the Court, against the background of the law.
And on that, petitioner rests.
—Allen Drury
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