[2][3] Young, idealistic Mark Coffin wins a surprise, upset election victory, turning the 30-year-old Stanford University professor into the junior senator from California.

However, his father-in-law is Jim Elrod, a powerful senior senator from North Carolina and chairman of the Armed Services committee, and Mark's father owns one of the largest newspapers in the state.

Mark goes to Washington amid the glare of the media spotlight, and reporters Bill Adams, Chuck Dangerfield and Lisette Greyson take an interest in his career from the start, praising him as one of the most idealistic and promising senators to hit town in decades.

Mark's hopes of sitting on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are damaged when he takes strong positions on two hot button issues: his father-in-law's bill to add ten billion dollars to the defense appropriation, to be used to try to catch up with the Soviets; and the Attorney General nomination of Charlie Macklin, the tough D.A.

These so-called "Young Turks" include Rick Duclos of Vermont, who has an eye for the ladies and a teenage son, and Bob Templeton of Colorado, who recently lost his family in a plane accident.

Later Drury books in the same timeline are The Hill of Summer (1981) and The Roads of Earth (1984), a two-part series dealing with a major crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union.