Clueless in Washington

By Horace Judson

FACING THE LIONS by TOM WICKER 432 pages. Viking. $7.95.

When Benjamin Disraeli wrote Sybil and Henry Adams wrote Democracy, they invented the novel of politics with wit, coherent political philosophy and some insight into the great worlds of London or Washington in which they moved. In the century since, the novel of politics has come a long way--straight down. But the reader's fascination with power continues, and those Washington journalists who grope into fiction are as prolific as all get-out:

Allen Drury, Fletcher Knebel, and now Tom Wicker, worthy liberal columnist for the New York Times and formerly chief of its Washington bureau.

In his first attempt at a novel, Wicker tells about a liberal Senator from the South. The poor chap is driven into trying for the presidential nomination by his enigmatic wife ("eyes of the smoky lambent blue that drifts mistily on soft Southern mountains"). Inevitably, the events are recollected by a veteran Washington correspondent, one Richmond P. Morgan ("The Professional," in Wicker's chest-thumping epithet), who got his start covering the Senator's first campaign. Inevitably too, Morgan is now the lover of the Senator's smoky, lambent wife, as well as bureau chief for an unnamed but very important Northern newspaper not easily confused with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

What is most depressing about such Washington novels is not the cliches they share but the things they leave out.

Though written by men who really do understand that most self-consciously political of cities, the books nonetheless have no genuine politics in them. Facing the Lions, for instance, offers no visible lions, no identifiable martyrs. It does not once mention the Democratic or Republican parties, names no President since Lincoln, no state, and no other city besides Washington. It exists in a world without war, with no Indo china, no other foreign place except the Riviera, no trace of foreign policy, and no civil rights or any other domestic problem. Wicker's Senator Hunt Anderson is said to have made his crusading reputation on the issue of East Coast migrant farm labor, but no word appears about labor unions, strikes, boy cotts or worker leadership.

Wicker's recent columns, with Watergate to swing on, have been so much better than his novel that it is hard to believe both emerged from the same typewriter..

sbHorace Judson

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