by Allen Drury
She had been about to leave for Washington’s National Cathedral to marry Orrin and Beth Knox’s son Hal, and inevitably in a political family, politics had come up even at that most fundamental of moments. Stanley had raised the thought that Hal might someday wish to follow in Orrin’s footsteps and seek public office in Illinois.
“It’s a rough life,” Stanley commented.
“But capable of honor,” Crystal replied.
“Yes,” he agreed softly. “Capable of honor.”
If it were not capable of honor for some, it would indeed be worthless for all. That it is capable of honor for some, saves it for all.
But to get from Here—with Patsy Labaiya just setting in motion another of her clever schemes—to There—with someone (her brother? Orrin? the President? Senator Warren Strickland, Senate Minority Leader and the minority party’s likeliest candidate?) safely and honorably established in the White House, is not so open and shut as all that.
Safety is relative and honor takes some nurturing even under the best of circumstances, which a presidential campaign quite often is not. Honor is a difficult thing and apt to get skittish if it is either ignored too much or courted too avidly.
To be capable of honor is not always to achieve it. The thing takes doing.
Particularly will it take doing in this year which the small but powerful group composed of Walter Dobius and his friends has already built up to a peak of importance greater than anything in this century—unless it might perhaps be the last presidential election or, possibly, the one before. Already it is being called the most important—the most crucial—the most vital to the future of the nation—the most somberly fateful for our own democracy and the world at large— the most this—the most that—the most the other. Already it has been hailed with suitable trumpets: FATEFUL YEAR, says Life; YEAR OF GREAT DECISION, says Look; GOLLY-GEE-WHIZ-GOOD-GOSH-ALMIGHTY YEAR OF YEARS, say all the rest. Upon it they are already concentrating their perceptive typewriters, their knowledgeable microphones and cameras, their profound and endless speculations which, designed in some cases to enlighten and in some to confuse, succeed not too well in either but only add up to a kind of pounding roar which swiftly deadens the minds and dulls the sense of the electorate, until its members become really not very sure of what they think about anything.
This year the cacophony is even greater than usual because of several facts endlessly discussed by Walter and his world. One is the growing national uneasiness concerning the United Nations and the entire American position in world affairs, an uneasiness always chronic but now even greater in the wake of Terrible Terry’s visit to the country six months ago and its grave consequences for the United States in the UN. Another is the increasing pressure of Communism which, never relenting underneath no matter what bland soporifics are displayed upon its surface to lull the Great Gullibles of the West, is now being pushed to ever greater pitch. And the third is the fact that someone is running for the nomination of whom Walter Wonderful and his world do not approve.
This last makes it a somber and fateful year indeed, and a note close to hysteria has entered some of the attacks being leveled against the Secretary of State as the time nears for him to make formal announcement of the candidacy which twice before has failed to take him to the White House.
This time, Walter Dobius confided recently to one of his closest cronies, the director of the Post, he is “going to get Orrin Knox if it’s the last thing I do.”
“I’m with you,” the director assured him solemnly, and already his paper’s editorials and cartoons have faithfully, and on most occasions savagely, reflected his cooperation.
The attack upon Orrin Knox, almost always under way in some sector of Walter Wonderful’s world ever since Orrin first set foot in Washington, has never been quite as virulent as it is now. It springs from many things, but two are most immediately the concern of Walter Dobius and all who follow him. The first is the Secretary’s conduct of foreign policy during the unfortunate episode created by the visit of Terrible Terry. The second and by all odds the more important is what Orrin, then senior Senator from Illinois, did a year ago to block the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State.
The episode of Terrible Terry, which brought in its train a new inflaming of America’s unhappy racial problems and the failure by only one vote of a move to expel the United States from the United Nations, did indeed mark, as Orrin has just remarked dryly to Beth, the first time in fifteen years that a Secretary of State said No to Walter Dobius.
It had not been publicized, it had been done so discreetly that it had escaped the notice of the press, but Walter had stopped by Foggy Bottom one afternoon—he had not quite had the nerve at that time to suggest that Orrin come out to Leesburg—and had proposed a course of action so out of keeping with the situation as it then was and as it later developed that Orrin had laughed in his face. Walter’s astonishment was comical.
“I guess you aren’t used to having Secretaries of State be so impolite to you, are you, Walter?” Orrin remarked cheerfully. His guest had flushed with anger and there had been little left of the smooth, urbane, all-knowing statesman in his reply.
“You do as you please, Orrin,” he said heavily. “You always have and you always will. But don’t think it will be forgotten. Don’t make that mistake.”
“Walter,” Orrin said, “the only mistake I make is in letting your reputation fool me sometimes. Sometimes I find myself almost believing you’re as profound and disinterested a sage as the public thinks you are. Then something like this comes along and I realize that no, it’s just Walter, as prejudiced a Washington operator as the best of them.”
“It won’t be forgotten,” Walter repeated with the same characteristically ponderous emphasis. “I won’t forget.”
“No,” Orrin agreed, “I expect not.”
And true to his promise a new sharpness had come into Walter’s commentaries upon the conduct of the office of Secretary of State: couched in the far-seeing, decades-long, history-embracing perspective he loves to use, but, in its own more graceful and more competent way, as crudely obvious as any attack by the Post or Newsweek or anyone else on that particular level of fairness and objectivity.
This, however, is merely the frosting on the cake of what Walter and his world have done, are doing, and always will do to Orrin Knox for his part in defeating Bob Leffingwell.
The Leffingwell nomination, Orrin knows now, was one of those Washington events which, like the exposure of a Harry Dexter White or the unmasking of a Hiss, bring down upon those responsible for it a grim vindictiveness, unyielding and never-resting, on the part of the guilty one’s supporters—a vindictiveness which can last for many years beyond the event—last, indeed, until it sometimes achieves its objective of driving from public life altogether the persons responsible. The kind of total commitment to a cause which certain influential circles in the country have given to Robert A. Leffingwell brings in its wake total vendetta when its desires are thwarted.
Vendetta follows Orrin now, everywhere he goes.
Yet of course he could have pursued no other course, once Bob Leffingwell’s lying under oath to the Senate about his early Communist associations had brought in its wake the events leading to the tragic death of Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah. Nor, probably, could anyone else involved in the Leffingwell nomination have followed a course any different than he had. It was only in their attitudes afterward that men had a choice and their true natures stood revealed.
Some, like Orrin and Senator Robert Munson of Michigan, the Senate Majority Leader, let the episode go when it was ended, accepted President Harley Hudson’s appointment of Bob Leffingwell to a different job in the government, assumed that bygones could be bygones and that other, newer tasks were more important than the constant rehashing of old spites.
Not so the world of Walter Wonderful. Its members, relatively few among the Washington press corps but influential out of all proportion t
o their numbers, have neither forgotten nor forgiven Orrin’s decisive intervention to defeat Bob Leffingwell. In a thousand ways, some direct and obvious, some so remote that many readers and viewers are fooled and only political Washington realizes where the hostility comes from, they attack the Secretary of State. And the Secretary of State, being as human as they are, and less afraid to admit it, fights back as vigorously as he knows how.
He always has. He has always been skeptical of Walter and his friends; he has always given them short shrift and small respect. They have always retaliated by describing him to the country as “impatient … tactless … too arrogant … too ambitious … wants too much to be President …” Filtering out through columns, editorials, and broadcasts, and from there into the common tongue, have gone certain carefully honed phrases that tag at his heels incessantly.
“I like him,” Walter and his world say thoughtfully. “But I just don’t think he can be elected.”
Or, “He’s a nice guy—in some ways he’s a hell of a competent guy—but don’t you think he’s inclined to be somewhat erratic and unpredictable?”
Or, most damaging and always said with an air of disturbed puzzlement, “I don’t know what it is about him, but I … just … don’t … trust him.”
Having created in the country a frame of mind in which such smoothly destructive comments spring automatically to the tongue, Walter and his world have then been able to pick them up out of general conversation and relay them back through their columns, editorials, and broadcasts in such a way as to create an unending chain of damning uncertainties about the Secretary of State.
“When you hear it said everywhere about a man that ‘you just can’t trust him,’” Walter had begun a recent column, “one must necessarily wonder whether you can. Such—for some reason unknown to this observer—seems to be the popular impression of an otherwise well-regarded man, the Secretary of State …”
Twice before, this type of coverage has had much to do with costing Orrin his chance at the White House. Now, heightened in virulence by his participation in the defeat of Bob Leffingwell, it has as its basic aim the translation of a carefully nurtured doubt into the Great Misgiving that will decide the votes of millions of Americans and, hopefully, retire him forever from the government.
Thus in this presidential year the issue is joined in its most savage and fundamental form.
Walter Dobius knows the world is waiting for his advice in the matter and he intends to give it.
There is no doubt whatsoever in his mind, as he pulls his electric typewriter toward him and starts its motor humming with a flick of his pudgy finger, that he will carry with him a majority of the national columnists, at least two radio-television networks, several major magazines, a large number of politicians, academicians, and reviewers, and a half to two-thirds of the daily newspapers in the country.
Once, when he had provoked an angry and incautious fury in another candidate to whose destruction he had devoted himself, the hard-pressed Senator had charged that “Walter Dobius is lining up the press against me!” The response had been immediate, scornful, and overwhelming.
“Is the American public being asked to assume,” Newsweek had demanded in a near-hysteric editorial that teetered between adolescence and apoplexy, “that the influence of one man is so great—or his views so expressive of those of all the most powerful sections of press, television, and radio—that simply by stating a position he can synthesize it and advance its objectives across this whole broad land? Surely the country is not being asked to give credence to such a farcical ideal!”
Nonetheless, that was exactly what the harried candidate was asking the country to give credence to. And although they very swiftly succeeded in laughing it down, that was exactly what Walter and his world also gave credence to, for it was entirely true and they knew it. That was exactly the kind of influence he did have, and it was exactly the kind that had been held by several of his predecessors in the long parade of Washington correspondents—most notably, in the middle years of the century, by the commentator to whom Bob Taft, in a scathing comparison Walter Dobius never forgave him, had once referred as “Big Walter.”
“I always read Big Walter,” the Senator had said, “and after that I don’t need to read Little Walter. He always says the same thing.”
It has been many a long year since anyone has referred to Walter Dobius as “Little Walter.” No one ever will again. No one would dare.
For, as Walter Dobius is calmly aware, while his fingers hit the nervous keys with a tread as determined as his pompous voice, and the first words of his speech begin to take form on the waiting paper, he is Big Walter now, and what he and his world think and do about this coming election is almost more important to its outcome than any other single factor. He and his world like to tell their countrymen that they, the countrymen, decide what America will do. Walter and his world know better. They know that they do, and they know exactly how the consensus is reached: in Walter’s columns and those of his major colleagues, in certain radio and television programs, at cocktail parties and candlelit dinners in Georgetown, at the National Press Club bar, in casual gossip in the press galleries of the Congress and the State Department, in certain foundation-supported study groups, seminars, and round tables, on certain major campuses, from certain well-publicized pulpits, in certain frightfully daring production offices in Hollywood, in certain solemnly self-important editorial offices in the periodicals, publishing houses, and networks of New York City.
These are the places where America’s mind is really made up for it, and Walter and his world know it very well, for they are the ones who do it.
Furthermore, these are the places, and this is the method, out of which comes the picture the entire world is given of America. Certain foreign publications and correspondents are fully as susceptible to the pronouncements of Walter and his world as the most timorous would-be-sophisticate editor in Smalltown, U.S.A. As faithfully as any of his native worshipers, certain distinguished if somewhat sheep-like foreign observers in Washington and New York send home the word.
Around the globe the word spreads out. Not only in Canarsie is a reputation created or an idea destroyed, but in London and Paris, Rome and Tokyo, Bonn and New Delhi as well. One intimate little dinner given by Walter for his world at “Salubria” in Leesburg can do more to set the national and international tone toward a given personality or problem than any number of facts shouted vainly into the wind of their bland and implacable intolerance.
It is not entirely surprising that the members of Walter’s world should have a rather high opinion of themselves, therefore, and that quite often in private they should recall with some satisfaction the way in which, over the years, they have steered their well-meaning but really rather stupid country past so many pitfalls—saved her from so many serious errors of policy and belief—and prevented her from turning in her folly and bemusement to so many wrong-thinking and unworthy men.
Not, of course, that Walter and his world ever admit publicly to this protective guidance they believe themselves to exercise over their fey and wayward land. It is one of their strongest tenets that no one must ever be allowed to think that they have any conscious knowledge of what they are doing, or that there is, in fact, a pattern of thinking and attitude and reportage which is followed faithfully by all of them as each new public figure or policy appears upon the horizon. Their countrymen must always be given to understand that no one is more independent than Walter and his friends, none more sternly objective, none less moved by the passions and prejudices that afflict ordinary men. About themselves they drape the mantle of a terrible and terrifying righteousness, even as they engage in the most savage personal attacks upon those who disagree with them, even as they deftly slant and suavely tear down everything and all who attempt to stand in their way.
And yet—while there are those who believe it and say so darkly—it would really be quite naïve to think that this is a deliberate plot on th
e part of Walter and his world. There is here no Great Conspiracy such as their more conservative countrymen profess to see.
There is, rather, the much simpler, quite naïve, and really quite pathetic conspiracy of just wanting to be popular with the right people in the right places; to take, as Patsy puts it, “the Right Position on things”; to live snug and secure in a nest of parroted certainties about all the frightful problems to which you do not, really, know the answers; and to have the comfortable assurance that nobody is going to be sarcastic about your ideas, nobody is going to tear down your reputation, nobody is going to treat you with ridicule.
Ridicule in particular is a key to why Walter’s world became the way it is. Its members simply cannot stand to be laughed at. They know what a weapon ridicule can be, for it is one of the most effective in their own arsenal, a scourge to those they don’t like, and a powerful means of bringing into line colleagues who threaten to express an independent viewpoint. Ridicule terrifies them. They do all they can to keep it away from their world and to make sure that it is never, never turned against them.
Once upon a time the members of Walter’s world were young, coming to Washington from all parts of the country fired with an idealistic vision, supported and held high by the determination to tell America the truth honestly and fearlessly regardless of whom it might help or hinder. Then came the swift attrition of the years, the frightening collaboration of time and ambition, the desperate running after the popularity of the inward group. Almost without their knowing it they soon began to write, not for the country, but for each other. They began to report and interpret events, not according to the rigid standards of honesty upon which the great majority of them had been reared in their pre-Washington days, but according to what might or might not be acceptable in the acidly easygoing wisecracks of the Press Club bar and the parties at which they entertained one another. In time it became more important for them to receive the congratulations of their fellows—and at all costs to avoid their sarcastic laughter—than it did to receive the congratulations of a clear conscience.
