Capable of Honor

by Allen Drury

  “Hang on,” the press secretary said in a tired tone. “I’ll try.”

  “Good evening, dear,” the President said a moment later in an amused tone. “I hear you’ve been giving Jack a hard time. Are you sure it’s all that important? Have you really heard something about Panama?”

  “Probably no more than you have,” she said, “but I thought you ought to know.”

  “Tell me,” he said; and after she had, “Yes, that’s interesting and a somewhat different angle from what we’ve already received here. Now what did you really call me about?”

  “Walter,” she said promptly. “I’m worried as hell about this tack he’s taking. I think he’s going through the male climacteric and it’s driven him crazy. I’ve never known him to be quite this unrestrained before. I have a feeling it’s going to get worse.”

  “Yes,” the President said soberly, “I suppose it is. I didn’t think, after I read his column this morning and his statement at the UN, that he had any invective left, but I imagine after the vetoes he’ll be inspired to new heights. Of course he’s not alone. He’s leading a righteous army.” His tone lightened but not too much. “I may be shot down at the East Gate of the White House tomorrow morning, you know, if I venture out.”

  “I’ll be there to defend you,” Helen-Anne promised. “I like the vetoes. I think you’ve done exactly the right thing. And don’t you fall for the theory that Walter runs the country. He doesn’t. Plenty of people disagree.”

  “I know,” the President said with a rueful little laugh. “But they aren’t the ones who have the newspapers and the networks and the magazines. Those are the ones who agree with Walter, and I’m afraid they’re making so much noise we can’t hear anyone else. In fact, I hate to say it about a noble profession, but on the basis of past performance I rather suspect they aren’t going to let us hear anyone else. What do you think?”

  “Oh, they will,” Helen-Anne said dryly. “On page 37, with the worst photographs they can find. Except for you and Orrin. You can always get page 1 and all the networks. And that, if I may advise, is what you’d better do, Mr. President. And fast.”

  “I expect to have a few things to say as the days go by,” the President assured her. “I’m only lying low tonight. Incidentally, I trust you’re not writing any of this down and that it’s all going to be forgotten the minute you hang up, right?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. It won’t be forgotten but it won’t be written. I am going to come out strong for what you’ve done. I may not be the female counterpart of America’s leading philosopher-statesman, but I have a few million circulation, myself.”

  “Have you talked to the Knoxes?” the President inquired. His tone became humorous again. “I haven’t dared call. I’m sure Walter and his friends have all the wires tapped.”

  “Oh, yes. I got through there, too. It took a little doing, but—”

  “Helen-Anne,” he said, “you’re the miracle woman of the Washington press. The President and the Secretary of State put an absolute lid on calls, and Our Girl comes through. Sensational!”

  “I just figured that along about now you’d both be getting curious about the outside world and so you’d be ready to talk to someone. And who better than Helen-Anne?”

  “You’re pretty shrewd,” the President said. She laughed.

  “Some of my friends use other adjectives. Anyway, the Knoxes are fine. Orrin wants to blast Walter from here to Timbuktu, but Beth and I managed to hold him down.…I am worried about Walter,” she said with a sudden reversion to more somber concern. “If he wants to destroy himself, let him do it, but he shouldn’t be writing such wild things about his own country at a time like this.”

  “I think we’ve shattered something, in Walter and his friends,” the President said thoughtfully. “I think that for thirty years and more they’ve lived by a certain rigid pattern of beliefs by which they’ve judged everything, and into which everything has been made to fit whether it really did or not. The basic premise of it was that the United States would never—really—do anything out of the pattern to protect its own interests. It was all right for us to make protests, and occasionally have a little friction somewhere with the other side, maybe even, now and then, engage in a little military action—but the key word was ‘little,’ and nobody in Walter’s world contemplated anything big because they all convinced themselves years ago that anything big would automatically mean the end of the world. And now suddenly under my Administration the United States has burst out of the pattern and violently disarranged all the beliefs they’ve clung to all these years. It’s no wonder they’re hysterical. I probably would be, too. Which doesn’t, of course, make it easier to take their hysteria, just because I understand it.…You’re calling around, this evening, reaching people other people can’t reach. Why don’t you call him? He’s at the Waldorf-Astoria.”

  “Have you tried to reach him, Mr. President?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought about it, but I doubt if it would do any good at the moment. Anyway, he’s made it virtually impossible for us to communicate, with what he’s written. It’ll be a while before we talk again, I imagine.”

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “You might give him a warning.”

  “Oh?” And instantly, though she was on his side, he could sense the instinctive reaction of the press to anything that smacked of coercion.

  “Relax, Helen-Anne. I’m not going to censor anybody. Walter’s very conscious of history, though—or at least, he’s always writing about it. You might tell him that just possibly, when this is long over and he and I and you and Orrin and Terry and Obifumatta and even Vasily Tashikov are rotting in our graves, history may say that he made the wrong judgment and wrote the wrong things in an hour when his country needed all the help she could get from her leading people. You might just tell him that history may say he was wrong.”

  She made a skeptical sound.

  “He’ll just come back and say that history may say that you’re wrong.”

  “I know,” the President said. “I’m prepared for that. But I don’t think Walter’s prepared that it might say he’s wrong. I think he ought to be. It might make him a better man.”

  “I don’t know that he’ll talk to me. I don’t know that I can stand to talk to him, right now. But I’ll try.”

  “Good girl. And thanks for calling me. He worries both of us. I’m not afraid of Walter, and certainly Orrin isn’t either, but he’s a problem. There’s no doubt of that.”

  “I still think you’d better grab page 1 in one hand and the networks in the other, and stay there.”

  “I don’t intend to be idle,” he said comfortably. “You needn’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried, exactly. Just scared as hell.”

  “Aren’t we all,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t stop life from pushing us forward. It just means we’ve got to hang on tighter.” “Well,” she said. “Good luck on the curves, Mr. President.”

  He laughed.

  “Thank you. I’ll need it.”

  She reached Walter half an hour later when he finished dictating his column. He was cold and adamant and unimpressed by the possible uncertainties of history. As the President had foreseen, he was unable to conceive that it could ever betray him. His words concerning the Chief Executive were unrestrained and filled with a violence she had never known him to use. Their talk was short, sharp, bitter. It ended when she told him he was a damned fool and slammed down the receiver.

  Freed of that annoyance, and after giving himself ten minutes to still the chaotic anger that she could always arouse in his mind and heart, he picked up the telephone again and called Sacramento. The Governor, too, was playing hard to get, and it was only after several minutes, with an obvious reluctance, that he came on the wire.

  “Yes, Walter,” he said crisply. “I’m a little busy—”

  “You aren’t too busy to talk to me,” Walter said calmly, his voice at
its heaviest and most pompous. “Why hasn’t the country heard from you?”

  “Because I haven’t desired to speak,” Ted Jason said coldly.

  “I think you should,” Walter said, unimpressed, because this was a man who needed his help to win the White House and they both knew it.

  Ted laughed without humor.

  “Many people think I should.”

  “Why haven’t you? Surely you aren’t afraid?”

  “You’re being very offensive tonight, Walter. What’s the matter?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Walter said calmly. “The country has a perfect right to know what you think.”

  “You won’t believe it, but I honestly am not sure right now what I think.”

  “Even with the vetoes?”

  “Even with the vetoes. The world hasn’t ended with the vetoes, though I gather you think so.”

  “It’s closer than it ever has been in my lifetime,” Walter said somberly.

  “I grant your sincerity in thinking so,” the Governor said, “but I don’t know. Maybe I would have vetoed, myself, under the circumstances.”

  “How long do you expect to take to make up your mind?”

  There was a silence in Sacramento.

  “What have you got to offer?” Ted Jason asked, biting off each word, “to convince me that I should?”

  “I’ll tell you what I have to offer,” Walter said, and did. There was another silence.

  “How do I know they’ll go along with you?” the Governor asked.

  “They usually do,” Walter Dobius said. “Certainly they won’t if I tell them we’ve got a weak-willed candidate who can’t make up his mind to take the only stand the conscience of mankind will permit.”

  “I cannot tell you yet,” the Governor said calmly, “when I shall make my statement. Nor can I tell you what it will be.”

  “You think we have nowhere else to go,” Walter said coldly, a statement, not a question.

  “I know you have nowhere else to go,” Ted Jason said with an equal coldness. “And so do you.”

  This time there was a silence in New York.

  “I must be able to tell them that you will speak out by Friday,” Walter said. There was a silence, somewhat shorter, in Sacramento.

  “Very well. That, perhaps, is fair enough.”

  “This is an unequivocal promise?”

  “It is an unequivocal promise.”

  “Then I think that we can proceed with confidence.”

  “I hope so,” Governor Jason said politely. “Good night, Walter.”

  “Good night,” Walter said, thinking. By Friday you won’t be able to go in any direction but the one we want you to, friend.

  In his office in mid-Manhattan the executive chairman of The (the capital T was very important) Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was thought with a tired sigh that while he was as concerned as anyone about Gorotoland and the nation’s future, he did rather wish that America’s greatest columnist had not chosen tonight to have a conference about it. He also wished that Walter had not appealed to him to allow it to be held in the G.P.’s executive dining room. In a sense this would put the G.P. in a somewhat partisan position, and a partisan position was what the G.P. never wished to admit it was in, except for those two weeks prior to every Presidential election when it had finally condescended to tell a waiting Republic how to vote and was doing its best to secure the Republic’s compliance. For the rest, the G.P. preferred to sit serene upon its particular Olympus, frequently pouring hot coals upon the heads of those below of whom it disapproved, but disguising these attacks as fair, objective news stories which permitted it to cling tenaciously to its non-partisan mantle.

  Also, if truth were known, the executive chairman rather resented Walter taking it upon himself to call a conference at all. The G.P. prided itself on setting the tone and calling the tune for the nation’s press (its top stories and columns syndicated across the land, its front-page makeup carefully studied by several hundred lesser editors anxious to learn what was Really Important so that they might humbly feature it in their own pages), and it was not about to admit that Walter Dobius had more influence than it did. Actually he had, since the G.P. was to be found following his lead on things far more often than he repaid the compliment. But it was one of the basic tenets of the G.P. that no one surpassed it in independence and vigor of thought (were not its anti-Terry, pro-Obifumatta dispatches from Gorotoland sufficient proof of this?) and it acknowledged the leadership of no one. Of course it hurried to hail Walter suitably on state occasions—each new prize elicited a long, flattering front-page story; a special five-page insert full of quotes and columns was being prepared for his twenty-fifth anniversary this Friday—but no one in authority liked to admit that he exercised the influence he did upon its editorial deliberations and ultimate product.

  There was also a more modest, more personal reason why the executive chairman resented Walter’s intrusion at this particular moment. Down below in the enormous city room, at the interminable typewriters, across the endless copy desks, in the ceaseless editorial conferences, the final editions of the G.P. were at this moment being put together by all its devoted workers great and small. From time to time the executive chairman liked to wander through this solemn process (rather akin, in its attention to detail and general reverence of approach, to the weaving of some great tapestry in a medieval cathedral) and show himself to those who labored to advance the work.

  He would chat for a while with some editor, sub-editor, or possibly sub-sub-editor; pass a word or two with some busy reporter, perhaps exchange amiable persiflage with the large group of idle ones that always seemed to be playing bridge or poker down the block at the other end of the city room; and generally make the contribution to morale that his kindly, generous personality always seemed able to give. For he was liked, he told himself with a frequent wistfulness, even if he didn’t always know exactly what was going on; even if, at times, he felt that the G.P. was taking stands too harshly intolerant, printing stories too obviously slanted, publishing headlines that clearly placed it on just one side of the great issues that gnawed the vitals of the world.

  Once in a while he would express himself in a gently concerned fashion about this, but always some bright young man was instantly at his elbow to soothe away his worries some politely deferential, glibly rational explanation. So The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was sailed on: far from objective, but—since it told the country and the world that it was, and was from long habit believed—an institution haloed and sainted in the land.

  And now here was Walter with a meeting, and the executive chairman couldn’t go down to the city room tonight. The first edition was already gone, with its thundering headlines on the vetoes and Gorotoland, and he had been advised that the later editions would carry much more on the rapidly growing crisis. There would be the EUROPEAN OPINION CONDEMNS U.S. stories, based on quotes from thirty-seven anti-American newspapers and five pro-; the LATIN AMERICA FEARFUL and ASIANS AND AFRICANS UNITED IN OPPOSING U.S. AGGRESSION stories, with their comments from every possible critical source who could be contacted in a hasty two hours of telephoning, interviewing, and cabling; the first pictures from Gorotoland—REBEL WOMAN MOURNS DEATH OF THREE CHILDREN IN SKIRMISH; TRAGIC LOSS BRINGS BITTER “WHY?”—WAR IS HELL FOR REBEL SOLDIER CAPTURED, BEATEN BY TERRY FORCES—and other similar items designed to give a factual and well-balanced picture of how the affairs of America stood tonight.

  The executive chairman would have liked to see this, to have uttered, perhaps, a wistful question or two—“Aren’t there more people friendly to America who might have been interviewed?” Or, “Wouldn’t it have been possible to get a little better balance in these quotes?” Or, “Aren’t there any non-rebel women who lose children in the fighting, too?” And, “Isn’t war hell for non-rebel soldiers, too, when they get captured by the rebels?”

  Not that it would have done any good, of course.

&
nbsp; Still, it would have made him feel better to ask.

  But, of course, no chance now. Here was Walter. And looking like a storm cloud, too.

  “Walter,” he said with a kindly smile, “Do sit down and stop worrying. The others will be here in a few minutes, I expect. Did you have any trouble reaching anyone?”

  “A couple were at banquets,” Walter said, “and the head of Newsweek was in Philadelphia. But he’s flying back.”

  “Good,” the executive chairman of the G.P. said comfortably. “Then it should be an interesting discussion. Before they come, and just between you and me, Walter—because I think this publication has a right to know, don’t you, considering who we are?—what, essentially, do you hope to accomplish tonight?”

  “A consensus on the Presidency,” Walter said promptly. “I think we already have a consensus on Gorotoland, do we not?”

  “I don’t know about Time and Life,” the executive chairman said thoughtfully, “or possibly the UPI and ABC. But I would say that Look—the AP—CBS, NBC—Newsweek—the Post—ourselves—are pretty well agreed. Perhaps you can convince the others, too. Your column this morning was certainly a powerful argument.”

  “The one I’ve just written is, too.”

  “You seem very convinced that the Administration has committed a nearly fatal act, I gather.”

  Walter stared at him.

  “Aren’t you people? Your editorial this morning wasn’t so friendly, was it?”

  “Nor is tomorrow’s,” the executive chairman agreed. “We have not gone quite as far as you in the language we’ve used, but I suppose that essentially we’re just as strongly opposed.”

  “Your headlines and the news play you’re giving it indicate as much,” Walter said. “You really don’t have to say much in your editorials. With your position in the country, you can do the bulk of it in the way you present and emphasize the news.”