Chapter 2
Now the whirling globe has whirled six months and on the face of the land and the surface of the seas the races of man are engaged in their customary kindly attempts to cripple, hurt, and thwart each other in the name of world peace and the cold reality of a ruthless self-interest. In the United Nations, in great cities and distinguished capitals as well as in some not so great and not so distinguished, the game of advantage goes on, and with it a steady advance in all the subtle and not-so-subtle decays and attritions of a sad and luckless century. In some places, most notably in the great white city sprawled along the Potomac, some idealism still struggles against the deep disillusion of the times, men still talk earnestly of planning for a better tomorrow, working for a lasting world peace, improving the lot of the restless human tide that laps ever higher against the citadels of law and orderly change that furnish the only hope of saving a civilization apparently bent upon its own destruction. Likewise in Moscow and London, Rome and Paris, Peking and Bonn and many another, men still pay the lip-tribute of a self-defined nobility to what they are about. But it is apparent now, as it has been for several decades, indeed ever since the Second World War ripped apart the fragile fabric so flimsily tacked together after the First, that many powerful forces are engaged in policies diametrically opposed to those which men of good will and good heart might reasonably be expected to follow if they genuinely wished to save their planet from its ultimate disaster.
Nonetheless the tasks of government and diplomacy go on, as do the tasks of daily survival for the individual. People, in the simplest but most powerful cliché men know, have to go on living. There is a power in this, a forward surge, a life-force if you like, which ignores the dreams or failures of presidents and prime ministers, kings and commissars. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker have to go on eating, sleeping, sheltering, and begetting. And on they go, regardless of what is created or ruined for them at the top.
At the top, men try to make some sense of what they do, but too often the secret eludes them. Yet they too go on, for there is nothing else for them to do. They ride the juggernaut, but despite their efforts they do not control it. The juggernaut also goes on, suffering for a little the attempts of some to guide it, and then shaking them off as it roars inexorably on toward whatever fate an obscure and mysterious Providence has in store for it.
In some places the decision as to who will have the chance to try to guide the juggernaut is made in more orderly fashion than in others. In some places it is done by election, in others by committee, in still others, less tidy, by ravening revolution and bitter death. Nowhere is it done with more exhaustive—and exhausting—care than in the United States of America, and upon no choice, in these dying years of the century, does the world concentrate with a more worried and fearsome attention than it does upon the choice of the man who will sit in the White House in Washington.
His country may be confused in its aims, uncertain of its future, baffled and distressed by humanity’s exasperating refusal to see things the way it does, but there is no denying the awesome power to build or destroy that lies at the hand of this single individual chosen by all the complex and subtle pressures of a complex and subtle land. It is a land the world simplifies, because in many respects the world cannot understand it, but it is by no means as simple as the world makes out. And particularly is it not simple when it comes to electing a President, for there the range of contributing factors is as wide as the gulf that separates Walter Dobius from the butcher and baker who read him in Canarsie, the people involved as diverse as the whole broad land from which they spring.
In this year in which Orrin Knox will attempt for the third and last time to win the White House, in which the Governor of California will meet him head-on in the same attempt, in which the world will again watch, always fascinated, frequently fearful, and sometimes appalled, while the great Republic teeters and trembles on the edge of what may appear to be disaster but always turns out to be just one more smooth and well-ordered transition of power, the people and factors are various indeed.
Some will be found in Africa, where the chaotic Gorotoland of His Royal Highness Terence Wolowo Ajkaje—“Terrible Terry,” the 137th M’Bulu of Mbuele—is at last beginning to explode from the internal pressures of his relatives and the external pressures of the Communists. Some will be found in Panama, where Patsy’s husband, Felix Labaiya-Sofra, is flying home for purposes that are perhaps less his own than he thinks. Some will be found at the United Nations and in the Congress of the United States, some at the national conventions of America’s political parties. Many will be found in the shrewd, didactic world of Walter Wonderful.
A mother and her little girl, sitting even now by a coldly rushing stream in Utah’s Uinta Mountains; a determined if increasingly wry, Lothario who represents the dignified state of Iowa in the United States Senate; several distinguished ambassadors; a Negro Congressman from California; Edward Jason and Orrin Knox and their respective families; a Justice of the Supreme Court; Senator Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, national spokesman for the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce (COMFORT); LeGage Shelby, chairman of Defenders of Equality for You (DEFY); Rufus Kleinfert, Knight Kommander of the Konference on Efforts to Encourage Patriotism (KEEP); the Speaker of the House; certain influential members of the National Committee—all these will be involved in the political battle that will swirl around the White House this year. To it each will contribute, and each extract, what the Lord sees fit to allow; not as much, in some cases, as he or she might desire; more, in some cases, than he or she intends, in these opening stages of a campaign implicit with the ultimate destinies of many things.
To some participants the final rewards will be bitter. But to others—just enough to provide some testimony to their countrymen that the system really does work despite its handicaps, that the good in it really does in the long run triumph over the bad, there will come the knowledge and the satisfaction expressed a year ago by Crystal Danta in a conversation with her father. Senator Stanley Danta of Connecticut, the Senate’s Majority Whip.
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 to 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 the 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.
For just as surely as Washington’s seductive glamor corrupts some politicians, so too does it corrupt the world of Walter Wonderful. The process is hardly conscious, seldom sinister. It is just that it is so much more pleasant to be popular with your friends than it is to write the harsh, objective truth. It is so much easier and more comfortable to adopt the automatic, well-polished attitudes of the group than it is to take the hard and lonely road of thinking for yourself. It is so much nicer—and so much more profitable—to be In than Out.
Not, of course—as Walter sometimes realizes, a little uneasily—that this applies to all who are in, or about, or involved with, his world. There are many who came to Washington determined to tell the straight, unslanted truth and have remained true to that high ideal during many long and faithful years of service in the press. There are columnists and reporters who were capable of honor when they came to the capital, and live by honor still. Helen-Anne Carrew, in her raucous, self-opinionated way, is one. There are a good many others, liberal or conservative as it suits them, but alike in their devotion to the truth and their determination to tell it regardless of whether it helps or hurts their favorites, frustrates or assists their enemies.
But their ranks are dwindling and their influence declines alongside the national and international power of Walter’s world.
The advantages held by those who believe in the Right Position are too great for the skeptically honest to overcome. Being popular with each other has become the surest road to fame and fortune, and year after year shrewd young applicants, trained in a new school, thinking Right Thoughts, come to Washington, seek their places with an eager ambition, and are fitted smoothly into the mold.
Once—just once—a certain satiric self-knowledge about all this was allowed to creep into a Gridiron Club show. Some irreverent soul managed to have accepted for performance (nobody knew how, when an indignant postmortem was held) a jovially acrid skit in which a row of members dressed as defeated presidential candidates tripped to the footlights. Wistfully they sang:
“Oh—
you—
can—
“Slant the news,
Twist our views,
Warp the facts.
Give us the ax—
“But—
if—
you—
“Stand tall in Georgetown,
Stand tall in Georgetown,
Stand tall in Georgetown,
“You’re—
all—
RIGHT!”
This had produced such a raucous cheer from the Gridiron’s roster of distinguished political and diplomatic guests that its like had never been permitted again. But from that time forward, “Stand tall in Georgetown!” became, as it remains, a favorite joke in the world of Walter Wonderful.
“Got to stand tall in Georgetown!” somebody will grin, skillfully boosting Bobby, vilifying Dick, sanctifying Adlai, blackguarding Barry. “Better watch out or you won’t stand tall in Georgetown!” someone else will chuckle to a friend who has inadvertently been fair to the other side.
Stand tall in Georgetown!
It is the surest way to fame and preferment in Walter’s world, and the goal inspires them all.
Or almost all, he thinks with an impatient annoyance as the phone rings loudly in the quiet room and he pauses, methodically turns off the electric typewriter, and lifts the receiver to hear an all-too-familiar voice. There are people in Washington who never will think Right Thoughts, adhere to the Right Position, give him the respect which is his due. Fortunately they aren’t very numerous. Most people, he thinks with a tiny smile of satisfaction about his lips as he recalls Patsy Labaiya’s greeting, think he’s God.
Not so, he remembers as the smile fades and a grim little line furrows his forehead, his ex-wife.
“I suppose I’m interrupting genius again, but, God, Walter, life is so exciting when you’re involved that I just couldn’t hold back.”
“Yes, I know,” he said dryly. “What’s on your mind?”
“I want to know if you’re going to fall for Patsy’s line and get suckered in on Ted Jason’s campaign. It seems a legitimate inquiry, between us two old friends.”
“Are you going to warn me against it?” he inquired politely. “How very thoughtful of you, dear.”
“I think it would be stupid. And I don’t conceive of you as stupid, Walter. Misled by ego sometimes, but not stupid.”
“Oh, I am, am I?” he demanded, his voice losing its customary careful gravity and flaring into the sudden anger only she knew how to provoke. Damnable woman, anyway. It was the reason their marriage had been impossible from the start: she was so disrespectful and she—she made him mad. A snort was her only response to his tone now: it was absolutely typical. “I am not!” he said angrily. “Ego doesn’t have anything to do with it!”
“Oh, of course it does,” she said impatiently. “You’d just love to be the gray eminence of the White House, dear heart. You didn’t make it with Lyndon but maybe you might with Ted. Plus the fact that you still get a thrill out of dragging the press and TV after you. You just love being Walter Wonderful, the swayer of mankind. Come on, now. ’Fess up.”
“I have always thought,” he said, breathing hard, “that you were particularly obnoxious when you tried to be kittenish. ’Fess up! It’s like an elephant with a teacup.”
“Come, come,” she said briskly, “stop trying to be nasty, Walter. You don’t really know how to do it in personal relationships. Dr. Dobius only insults through his column. Personally, I’ve never thought you really had the heart—not the willingness, but the honest-to-God heart inside you—to be honestly blind-mad at somebody. There always has to be a cold-blooded motivation you can express in some devious, involuted way. Anyway, we’re getting afield—the same old field. I repeat, I hope you’re not going to be a sucker for the Jasons. Ted isn’t worth it.”
“Governor Jason,” he said coldly, “is a most attractive candidate and one worthy of any trust the country may desire to place upon him.”
“Are you quoting? Is that the speech? Oh, it will be one of your smasheroos, Walter, I can see that. But I think you’d be a fool to do it.”
“Now, see here,” he said, striving hard to put the conversation back on the rational plane from which she always tried to shift it, “surely you aren’t suggesting that I should support Orrin Knox? After all he’s done?”
“What has he done?” she inquired with a deliberate blankness. “Except be an honest man acting on his honest convictions? I know that’s considered rather square in your crowd, Walter, but I’ve got news for you. A lot of your countrymen still go for it in spite of all the educational efforts you and your pals have expended on them in the past few decades.”
“Have you talked to Bob Leffingwell about it?” he demanded abruptly.
“I don’t see what bearing that has, but I have. At the Nigerian Embassy last night. At some length. Have you?”
“Not for about a month,” he said, relieved that she seemed to be diverted from her personal attacks.
“You should. You might be surprised. He isn’t so hot for Ted as all that.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.
This time she got mad.
“Walter Dobius, one thing I don’t do is lie, and you know it. Now, stop that. Get out of your dream world and get with it, for a change. You’ve lived in that ivory tower too long.”
“Nobody else on earth,” he said in a grating voice, “has the colossal nerve to talk to me like that. Now, you stop it.”
“Now, you stop it,” she mimicked. “You stop shaking poor old Walter’s faith in himself. He hasn’t got too much, you know.”
“Helen-Anne,” he said in the same harsh tone, “I’m going to hang up on you.”
“No you’re not,” she said calmly, “because I’m a smart woman and you know it and you’re always ready to pick my brains and so you won’t do any hanging up until I’ve had my say. Now, I’ve been around this town just about as long as you have, dearie, and I’ve been talking to some people myself. I think you’ll be making the mistake of a lifetime if you line up with Ted.”
“What do you care?” he asked bitterly. “All you’ve ever wanted was to see me brought down. You’ve always been jealous because I was more famous than you, you’ve always resented it that my column has 436 papers and yours only has 321—”
“Walter,” she said, “stop talking like a petulant child, and listen to me. There’s something phony about that candidacy and there always has been. I haven’t found out what it is, yet, but I will. Or maybe we all will, all at once. At which time Walter Wonderful, if he’s out front leading the parade, may suddenly find himself in a rather awkward position. Awkward positions, Walter, are something we must avoid, you know, at all costs. Isn’t that Rule One?”
“Are you through insulting me?” he asked in a weary tone. She snorted.
“Oh, my, the Dying Swan. I’m not insulting you, love. I’m just trying to get you to be very cautious on this one.”
“Anyway,” he said, changing to a patient tone such as one would use with a child, which was really all she was under the hardboiled-newspaperwoman exterior, “what is so phony about the Governor of California aspiring to the Presidency of the United States? Harley’s predecessor was Governor of California. It’s a big state. It’s been done before.”
“Sure, and people buying their way into the White House has been done before, too. But that isn’t the answer to everything. No, I think you’d better think it over. Something tells me this may get quite sticky before we’re through.”
“You always have been a conservative,” he said in a tone popular in his world, the tone that indicates that being conservative is the worst possible sin a body could commit. “You always have liked Orrin Knox.”
“I hate his guts,” she said. “And stop using your cant words on me, Walter. They’re ridiculous and they don’t scare me. You can terrify a lot of our friends in press and television by calling them conservative, but not me. I don’t give a damn. I’m interested in what a man is, not in the label you and your pals manage to hang on him. Now: I’m just telling you, and”—her tone became noticeably dry—“in my own small way, Walter, boy, I’m just as infallible as you are—that you’ll be making a mistake if you go too far out on a limb for Edward Jason. It’s a screwball family, in more ways than one, and having several hundred millions just means that it’s several hundred million times more screwball. I’d go slow, if I were you. That’s all.”
“I am so touched by your concern,” he said with an equal dryness.
“You should be. I don’t show it to everyone.”
“Yes, you do,” he said honestly. “To a lot of people. You do have a kind heart underneath it all. But why to me?”
“You’ll never know, Walter, darling. Maybe because I still love you passionately, in the secret silence of my lonely room.”
It was his turn to sound skeptical.
“No doubt.”
“Believe it. It’s good for the ego.”
“Of which you tell me I already have too much. Thank you for calling,” he said formally, his voice regaining its customary solemn authority, preparing to bid her farewell. “I appreciate your interest.”
“O.K. Back to the drawing board, now! Give ’em hell in that speech. We’ll all be there to listen. Just remember what I said.”
“I couldn’t care less what you say,” he told her with a last flare of annoyance. But she only gave her ribald laugh.
“Oh, yes, Walter, dear. Oh, yes. That’s the trouble. That was always the trouble.”
“Aaaaarrrkh!” he exclaimed, a sound inconsistent with his dignity but expressive of his feelings, and replaced the receiver with rather more vehemence than his vast public would have associated with the figure of gravely impersonal philosopher-statesman Walter Dobius.
After that for a while, of course, his concentration was shot and there was little point in trying to go on with his speech. Helen-Anne always had this effect upon him; it was one of the main reasons their marriage had broken up. He just couldn’t concentrate with her around the house being disrespectful and unimpressed and building up her syndication on the basis of her hunches about things which nine times out of ten, infuriatingly, turned out to be right. And now she had done it again, with her mysterious nagging about Ted Jason. Who on earth did she want in the White House anyway, Orrin Knox? He was beginning to think so, and if anything was calculated to drive him farther toward Ted, it was the thought that his ex-wife might be for Orrin.
Except, of course, that as Helen-Anne said, he wasn’t stupid, and he did value her judgment in spite of everything. What on earth had her worried about the Jasons? They had their foibles, but what Presidential or potentially Presidential family didn’t? In Washington the warts of the great were considerably more visible than they were out in the country, but everyone had them and there didn’t seem to him anything noticeably unusual about the Jasons’. Particularly when Governor Jason represented a political philosophy—“moderate” was the label Walter and his world had begun to apply to him with increasing frequency in these past several weeks—that offered a position infinitely more desirable than that of the Secretary of State, with his annoying tendency to act on the basis of principle instead of on the automatic catch-phrases that Walter and his friends had evolved to rationalize the catastrophic changes of a churning world.
Still, Helen-Anne had been quite positive. He made again his half-coherent sound of protest and got up impatiently from his desk. The darkness outside was complete, now, and over the sleepy snapping of the fire only an occasional slap of snow, carried on the vicious wind against the old home’s leaded windows, brought reminder of the bitter weather raging. Downstairs Arbella would be readying dinner, and by the downstairs fireplace Roosevelt would soon be mixing the customary Manhattan and placing it on the antique table by the big leather armchair. One cocktail and one glass of wine with dinner: the rule was virtually inviolate. But tonight, he thought with a sudden viciousness as savage as the wind, he might just have two cocktails and three or four glasses of wine, since Helen-Anne wanted his concentration ruined. He’d really ruin it!
But this, of course, was just a passing thought for Walter Dobius, who had never done anything impulsive or uncareful in his life. In an instant it was gone. Methodically he placed his papers in a neat pile, checked the fire screen to make sure it was snug against the hearth, pressed his forehead for a moment against the icy pane and attempted without success to see out into the dark woods, and then turned and started to snap off the desk light, so that no electricity would be wasted between now and the time after dinner when he would return to resume working on his speech.
As he did so, the phone rang again. He hesitated for a second, then took up the receiver with an impatient hand. The little tinkling tremolos of long distance came to his ear. His expression changed to one of interest and then, as his caller introduced himself, to one of pleased attention. Slowly he sat back down again.
“Walter,” the confident voice of Governor Jason said across three thousand miles, “Patsy tells me you’re having a hell of a snowstorm back there. I’ve been on the beach all day at La Jolla. Pity me!”
Walter Dobius chuckled.
“You pioneers really have to rough it, out there in the Far West. Am I seeing you for lunch on Thursday?”
“You are. I couldn’t be happier about it. I hope I can resolve then any doubts that you may have.”
“I haven’t many,” Walter said complacently (for at least the Governor of California knew who he was talking to, and showed the proper respect). “I’m sure what there are won’t be insurmountable.”
“I hope not,” Ted said frankly. “Your influence is so great that it would be an enormous help to me if I had your approval—and an enormous detriment if I didn’t.” He gave a flattering little laugh and added with a flattering candor, “Nothing is more important to me than satisfying Walter Dobius, I can tell you that.”
“Yes,” Walter said gravely. “I think I probably am in a position to have a decisive effect on your candidacy at this particular moment.”
“None more so,” Governor Jason said with an equal gravity. “I join Patsy in her delight that you have accepted our invitation to be the recipient of the Good and Faithful Servant Award this year. We look forward with lively anticipation to your speech.” He gave an engaging chuckle. “For obvious reasons. What are you seeing of my distinguished opponent these days?”
“Orrin?” The Governor could not see Walter’s sour little smile, but could sense it in his tone, amply enough. “Orrin and I haven’t had occasion to chat much, lately. Although,” he added thoughtfully, “I intend to talk to him prior to Friday night. I think in fairness I should,”
“Is it an elimination contest?” Governor Jason asked with a certain asperity he did not attempt to soften. “I didn’t understand your principles were up for bids, Walter.”
There was a stunned silence. Finally Walter said coldly:
“Only a man possessed of supreme confidence in himself would venture such a remark to me.”
Ted laughed.
“Possessed of supreme confidence in you, Walter. If I had the slightest doubt about your principles, I can assure you, you would not be selected for GAFSA if it cost me the White House to refuse you. The Jasons have some pride too, you know.”
“Too much, I sometimes think,” Walter could not resist. “As for Orrin, I think both you and Patsy take too much for granted about my feelings toward him. He is not an incompetent man, you know, or a poor public servant. In a great many ways there is much to admire in Orrin Knox.”
“Very true. He just has one handicap.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t like him.”
“I hope my opposition is not based on so frivolous a foundation,” Walter said stiffly. “Really, Ted, I have noted this flippant streak in you before. As I told Patsy, I have a great responsibility to the country. I cannot base my decisions on personal prejudice or passion. The country expects too much of me. It places too great a reliance on what I say. I am too important to it. I can’t afford to treat things so lightly.”
“That is true,” Ted Jason said in an abruptly serious, soothing tone. “I know I shouldn’t joke about it, but sometimes the pressures of holding office and seeking office are such that I have to relax a little by joshing old friends. Of course I know how important you are. And of course I respect it. Aren’t I calling you now? Aren’t I coming to Washington a day early just so I can have lunch with you on Thursday? Who else does the Governor of California put himself out for in that fashion, except possibly the President of the United States?”
“Will you be seeing him when you’re here?”
Ted responded with a rueful laugh.
“I would think so. I would think so. Enigmatic Harley the Sphinx of the Potomac has to be prayed to, you know, by all us dutiful supplicants. I imagine Orrin drops in every hour on the hour. The least I can do is swing by on my way through town. Have you talked to him yourself in the past few days?”
“He invited me over last Thursday night,” Walter said. “We talked for almost an hour and a half, entirely alone. He said he had been missing me and felt the need for my counsel.” He gave a dry little laugh. “That’s what they all say. He did most of the talking and I didn’t learn a damned thing. So much for my intimate chats with the President.”
“Yes,” Ted said thoughtfully. “He certainly is playing it coy this time. I wouldn’t really be surprised if he decided to run after all, when all’s said and done, and just leave me and Orrin out there on a limb of our own devising.”
“I have some hopes that after my speech Friday night he will find this difficult to do.”
“You’re probably right,” Governor Jason said. An admiring note came into his voice. “I know of no one else in the nation in a similar position, able, as you are, to force the hand of the President of the United States in such a vital matter.”
“I can’t force his hand, but I can make it difficult for him to move in certain directions. I do have that much influence with my colleagues and the country, I think.”
“It’s the colleagues who count, Walter,” Governor Jason said, and it was impossible to tell whether he was being respectful or wry, “not the country. Persuade your colleagues, and they’ll take care of the country.”
“They don’t need too much persuading when confronted by a choice between a supremely equipped man and one only half-equipped. My work is mostly done for me. All I have to do is synthesize the mood and start it into action, and the rest will take care of itself. I think I can say without excessive egotism that I can do so.”
“Good,” Ted said in a relieved voice. “Good. Then I shall not attempt to press you any further as to what your decision will be. As long as I know you are judging matters with the fairness and objectivity so long associated with the name of Walter Dobius, I shall rest content with the decision. I know I need have no fear about it. No one of integrity need fear Walter Dobius.”
“I hope not. It has always been my aim to foster integrity in this government and sanity in its policies. I hope that will stand as one of my major achievements when the final record is read.”
“It will,” Ted assured him solemnly. “It will, by anyone’s standards. Very well, then, I shall see you on Thurs—”
“By the way,” Walter said abruptly, “why did your brother-in-law fly home to Panama so suddenly?”
“I didn’t know he had,” Governor Jason said blankly. “Patsy didn’t mention it. Has he gone?”
“Yes, quite suddenly. And just on the eve of the Security Council debate on Gorotoland, too. It seems odd.”
“It does seem odd. I can call our company people in Panama City, if you like, and let you know what they say.”
“If you could, I’d appreciate it. I’m going up to the UN tomorrow to see Terrible Terry and cover the Gorotoland debate. I think it’s about time for a column, or maybe several, on the UN. Panama could certainly become the basis for one of them, if Felix is up to anything.”
“Felix usually is,” Ted Jason said, not bothering to conceal his distaste. “I’ll get back to you later tonight.”
“Please do. And I shall see you Thursday.”
“Looking forward with pleasure,” Governor Jason said.
And so much, Miss Helen-Anne, for you, Walter thought with a savage satisfaction as Ted’s voice faded. He told himself at once, of course, that the satisfaction was unworthy of him, but still he couldn’t help feeling a little of it. She was so damned disrespectful and knowing and unimpressed. He was Walter Dobius, Governors of California did telephone him cross-country just to stay on his good side. Presidents of the United States did call him in privately to get his counsel and advice, his colleagues in the world of Walter Wonderful really did follow his lead on policies and personalities. He was indeed as powerful and major a figure as the world believed. What right, then did a—a gossip columnist—have, to attempt to destroy his confidence in himself and try to persuade him that he could be in error on anything? It was laughable, simply laughable.
“Ha, ha!” he said aloud into the snug little study, warm and safe from the snows outside, and instantly felt better for it. “Ha, ha!”
“Mist’ Waaaallll-ta?” Arbella called from below in her characteristic long-drawn yelp. “Me and Roosevelt’s ’bout ready!”
“All right,” he called back. “I’ll be right down.”
This time he actually got out the door before the phone rang, and for a second he contemplated letting it go. But he had always prided himself on keeping a listed number, unlike many of his colleagues, and upon answering it himself whenever possible, so after a moment he returned to his desk and picked it up again. Again it was long distance and he felt even more like saying “Ha, ha!” to Helen-Anne. The Soviet Ambassador was on the line.
“Good evening, Mr. Dobius,” Vasily Tashikov said in the perfectly good English he always pretended he couldn’t use when his diplomatic colleagues were harrying him about something, “I was wondering if you were planning to come to the UN tomorrow, and if so, if you might have lunch with me?”
“I am planning to if the storm stops and the planes are flying. I should, I think, be quite delighted. But you must let me be host, inasmuch as I shall undoubtedly be picking your brains, as we say, for my column.”
“I know the phrase,” the Soviet Ambassador said. “It is I who may be doing the picking, I think. Therefore I shall be host. I wish your advice on how to proceed against the imperialist attempt to thwart the desires of the citizens of the People’s Free Republic of Gorotoland.”
“I see,” Walter Dobius said, a little less cordially. “You realize of course that my country is one of those you are attacking. I may not be able to help you very much.”
“I think you can,” Tashikov said. “You are a very famous man, Mr. Dobius. Very famous. You are a bridge between East and West, for your fame is universal. Possibly on that bridge we can cross to understanding. That is why I wish to have lunch.”
“I am always willing to help if I can,” Walter said, flattered in spite of reminding himself that you always had to be on guard, you couldn’t trust their apparent cordiality for a second, it always concealed some devious and dangerous purpose. “I should like to think I could contribute to understanding between the two worlds.”
(The Two Worlds by Walter Dobius, Harper & Row, 341 pp., $5.95, had been one of his most popular books, thirteen weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. From it the phrase “positive acceptance” had entered the language: “We must achieve, if you please, a positive acceptance, not a sourly negative attitude, toward those necessary expressions of Communist self-interest which, while they may embarrass us as a nation and alarm some of our more tradition-bound citizens, are nonetheless the logical expression of the Communist desire to share equally with us the burdens of organizing and running the world.” “Positive acceptance” had instantly leaped into a hundred State Department position papers, a thousand columns, editorials, and broadcasts, speech after speech by the country’s more enlightened thinkers. Orrin Knox had referred to it as “the art of positive sinking,” which was another reason Walter considered him unfit to be President.)
“You do contribute to understanding,” Tashikov assured him. “You always have, more so, my dear Mr. Dobius, than anyone else in your country. Your columns, books, and speeches have built a foundation of good will between us that nothing can change. From ‘Mr. K’—that warm, fatherly cognomen which did so much to change your countrymen’s attitude toward us!—right on down to ‘positive acceptance,’ you have always been in the vanguard of those who seek to persuade the United States to abandon her foolish opposition to the inevitable and be more compliant with our just desires. No one deserves our gratitude more. That is why,” he ended in a businesslike tone, “I wish to have lunch.”
“You give me too much credit,” Walter Dobius remarked, “inasmuch as I assure you my purpose has not been to persuade my country to abandon her opposition to things she honestly feels to be wrong, but only to those things in which certain reactionary native prejudices have blinded our people to your justified self-interest and the necessary adjustments we must make in the cause of genuine world peace.”
“We know you are absolutely sincere, Mr. Dobius, that is why we honor you. Shall we say 1 P.M. tomorrow in the Delegates’ Dining Room?”
“That would be agreeable to me. I am wondering—”
“Yes?”
“I am very anxious to have a talk with Prince Terry—His Highness the M’Bulu—”
“That lackey of the imperialist warmongers?” Vasily Tashikov cried. “That betrayer of the freedoms of Gorotoland? He will not attend my luncheon, Mr. Dobius, I can assure you of that! Never!”
“But I thought the Soviet Union was a great friend of his,” Walter said blandly. “I remember only six months ago in the General Assembly—”
“He is a betrayer!” Tashikov said angrily. “He runs the imperialist errands of Washington and London! He is an enemy of his own people and of all freedom-loving peoples everywhere!”
“I shall be happy to have lunch,” Walter said cordially. “I want you to tell me all about it. Then perhaps I can help America understand your shift in position.”
“Hurry,” Vasily Tashikov advised grimly. “Your M’Bulu will not be there long.”
“But I will be, Mr. Ambassador,” Walter assured him. “Don’t forget my bridge between East and West. It will be there, I think, whatever happens to Gorotoland. Or, for that matter,” he added calmly, “the Soviet Union. You can also tell me, incidentally, why Felix Labaiya had to fly home, and what you’re planning in Panama.”
“One P.M. tomorrow,” the Ambassador said in an expressionless voice.
“Surely,” said Walter Dobius.
This, he tells himself as he closes the door of the study at last and starts down the stairs to his waiting dinner, is really quite a typical period in the life of Walter Wonderful. The Governor of California, the Russian Ambassador, a few nights ago the President of the United States—these things happen to Walter Dobius all the time. How can Helen-Anne be so imperceptive as to fail to see it, so unthinking as to laugh?
Actually, of course, she isn’t. She knows exactly the land of life he leads, for she shared it for seven years, and on a smaller scale she leads much the same kind of life herself. There is nothing so extraordinary about being called by the Governor of California, invited by the Soviet Ambassador, consulted by the President of the United States—these things do happen, at a certain level of press and politics in Washington. It is just that in Walter’s case there is a unique emphasis about it, a special aura, a feeling on both sides that he who calls will receive assistance, he who consults will be given a sage and dispassionate wisdom suitable to the unraveling of great problems, the surmounting of great events. If a few observers sometimes feel that Walter with his enormous influence is more often the used than the user, then that simply shows a lack of perception monumental in its misunderstanding of his position in the story of his times. Walter knows what he is doing, and very few indeed are those who fail to take him at his own estimation.
This has not been happenstance, he can congratulate himself as he slowly sips his Manhattan and stares thoughtfully into the roaring downstairs fire while Roosevelt hovers about and Arbella clatters in the kitchen, nor has it been any fluke such as sometimes occurs when Washington’s erratic tides toss surprising jetsam to the top. Walter has worked hard for what he has, and Walter deserves it. He may seem a little precious now, there may be an air of dignity slightly greater (if that be possible) than the responsibility he actually carries, but it is not a small responsibility and he has not achieved it lightly.
Patsy may regard him with the spiteful attitude with which she regards most people, Helen-Anne from the vantage point of a special knowledge may feel and express a disenchantment more blunt and open than many dare, the Knoxes may be skeptical, Ted Jason, the President, and many another ambitious politician domestic and foreign may think that they play upon his ego to use him for their purposes, but no one can ever truthfully say that Walter Dobius is not exactly where he should be. He has earned his position honestly and he fills it with style.
What citizen of a land that has for so long been dependent upon his wisdom could, in all fairness, ask for more?
Certainly the list of honors and accomplishments indicates that few do. Pulitzer Prize three times, twice for national reporting, once for international; Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington Correspondence twice; the Heywood Broun Award; the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award; the University of Missouri Award for distinguished service in journalism; the Overseas Press Club Award, the John Peter Zenger Award, the George Polk Award, and now the Jason Foundation’s Good and Faithful Servant Award; writer of the nation’s most influential column for twenty-five years; steady contributor to national magazines; special lecturer at ten universities here and abroad in the past twelve years, favorite speaker at the annual conventions of everything from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to Rotary International; repeatedly rumored (though never quite selected) choice for the Nobel Peace Prize; adviser to the powerful in his own land, intimate and familiar of the powerful in many a foreign land as well; statesman, philosopher, counselor, and guide to his own worshipful profession; one of the four or five major figures in the political thought of the twentieth century—
If he has critics, they are minor. If he has enemies, they are mute.
When Walter speaks, the world literally listens.
But it was not always so.
Indeed, when he pauses sometimes to reflect upon his early years—and he does so, quite conscientiously, two or three times a week, because, as he once told Helen-Anne (not entirely, as she knew, in jest) “it keeps me humble”—he is struck with a certain wonderment that he should have reached the pinnacle he has. Not too much wonderment, for that would imply a lack of self-confidence of which no one has ever accused him, but enough to prove that he too, as he is fond of saying, is just as human as anyone else who has climbed the heights in Washington.
From what he is fond of referring to as “the bogs and moors of my childhood” to “Salubria” in Leesburg and all it connotes has been a journey whose ultimate triumph few save himself could have foreseen. When his father brought the family from Saxony’s Luneburger Heath to America, Walter was two (his memory of the bogs and moors not quite so vivid, perhaps, as in later years he has become fond of recounting from the public platform). The job his father found, that of a meat cutter in Philadelphia, did not give his family much promise of an affluent future. For most of Walter’s childhood and adolescence this remained true. The memory of always living in near-poverty, or on the edge of it has proved a great goad to the family’s second son. From the time he was able, he did menial labor and odd jobs of all lands to help out, and he did them well and without complaining. It made him a lonely, hard-working, and self-sufficient child who had few friends but much respect. He always preferred it so, and eventually he came to realize the value of it to the particular kind of career he finally found. He emerged from a grueling childhood with a grim inner determination that he was someday going to get out of all this and never turn back. Suddenly in high school he found the means. He discovered that he had been blessed with a certain ability to use words, and with it an air of authority that persuaded his teachers and contemporaries that he wrote with a perception and force unusually impressive in an adolescent. He was on his way.
With this gift—“The Lord was good to me, in my talent,” he had remarked in the same Columbia School of Journalism speech that had provoked such hosannas from his hearers and the press—“and I have tried to be faithful to Him, in my use of it”—went a native doggedness and diligence that made of young Walter Dobius one of the hardest working and most ambitious students ever to edit the school paper and graduate with top honors while doing so. Hard work marked him then and hard work marks him now, filled with honors and power as he is. To this day, Walter Dobius does not relax. He performed then, and he still does, the hard, patient, relentless digging that is the mark of the top reporter.
Whenever a big story broke on campus, in high school or later at Yale, where he edited the Daily, Walter was there, his sturdy figure trudging into the thick of it, pencil raised, voice insistent, asking his blunt, demanding questions until he got the answers, Whenever a big story breaks in Washington now, Walter is there, his sturdy figure trudging down the corridors of State Department or Senate, emerging from inside closed committee hearings and secret international conferences (“Now, how the hell did Walter get in there?” his exasperated colleagues demand of one another, but only a secret little smile around his lips betrays his knowledge at their consternation and his satisfaction at having caused it), getting exclusive interviews with visiting heads of state, standing at the President’s elbow as he delivers his latest pronouncement on the crises of a disintegrating world. Walter is there because he is Walter Dobius, friend of the mighty, just as he was there in school days because he was Walter Dobius, friend of the mighty. But he is also there, and always has been, because he is Walter Dobius, magnificent and indefatigable reporter.
It is the foundation of his fame and the true basis of his power; and it is the element which perhaps more than any other gives his words the weight they have.
“Walter is a pompous, patronizing, insufferable sh.…owoff,” one of his most famous colleagues remarked thoughtfully one night in the Press Club bar, “but he does go to the source.”
And the sources go to Walter and together—or so he tells himself with a secret pleasure he would be inhuman not to feel—they run the world.
(Nowadays the claim is not far from the truth. Two or three times a year in London, for instance, the phone will ring at No. 10 Downing Street and the familiarly casual, heavy voice will say, “Reggie?” (or “Harold?”) “I’m just in town for a day or two. I wonder if we could have lunch?” And Harold—or Reggie—will obediently drop everything and oblige, aware that behind the voice lie 436 newspapers, an international reputation, and—perhaps—the key to swaying the opinions of a baffling and erratic ally. Similarly from Moscow or Peking, Paris or New Delhi, there will come from time to time the impossible-to-get interview, the exclusive revelation, handed down by men who find in Walter the surest road to the world’s front pages, the most effective channel through which to disclose their purposes and threaten, or cajole, the hearts and minds of men.)
Out of the high school editorship, however, out of Yale after editing the Daily, something suddenly seemed to go wrong. There followed a dark period of several years during which the future sage somehow failed to find his place. It was the only time in his life when he came close to doubting himself.
He began with a good job on the Hartford Courant. At once he ran into trouble. Possibly, as he long ago became convinced, it was the difficult personalities of his fellow workers that started their immediate mistrust and misunderstanding. Possibly, as one of them indicated years later in a witty and quickly discredited article in National Review entitled, “I Remember Walter,” it was his own personality which was at fault.
In any event, a clash was immediate. Somehow his colleagues got the unjust and unwarranted idea that Walter was after their jobs—not anyone’s in particular, just that of whoever happened to be in his way. Actually, it was just that Walter, in his usual hard-working fashion, seemed to get there first on every good assignment. This went on for some eight months, until the day when the paper’s top political reporter, arriving ten minutes late for an interview with the governor, found Walter already deep in earnest conversation with him behind closed doors and got the unfortunate impression that Walter was after his job. An ultimatum to the editor followed, and with a mixture of reluctance, because he recognized Walter’s abilities, and compliance, because he recognized his all-consuming drive for power, the editor suggested that Walter might prefer a larger arena for his talents. The editor murmured vaguely of New York and Washington, confident that in those competitive jungles Walter would either go under or hit the top. Nowadays, long since retired in Darien, he is fond of recounting how certain he was that Walter would do the latter.
But Walter didn’t get that impression then, and it was only years later, when he was in the process of mellowing his image all along the line, that he had invited the editor to introduce him when he spoke to the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington. On a wave of sentimental applause from the audience, all of whom fondly fancied themselves to be in the same position of constantly helping to boost brilliant young talent up the ladder to success, the hostile aspects of Walter’s parting from his old boss had been blurred out and the event had been riveted finally into legend in the form in which both he and Walter now preferred it.
At the time, however, the event had been quite shattering, though then, as now, he did not show his feelings to the world. For several days he went through a considerable hell, wondering quite seriously whether there was any place in his chosen profession for conscientious talent and genuine ability. It had honestly never occurred to him— and it has not occurred to him since—that he might be treading on other people’s feelings. He quite genuinely did not realize that it is possible to be ruthless with a certain grace that can save it from being cruel. “The thing I love about Walter,” Helen-Anne remarked years later, “is his tact.” But even as she said it a curious pain came into her eyes that startled her listeners. “Poor devil,” she added, and abruptly changed the subject with some profane comment on the First Lady that diverted them into forgetting laughter.
To this day Walter honestly does not know that he has hurt people along the way, or that he is still hurting them, in his column and in his speeches and, sometimes, in his personal relationships (though these in recent years have been cut to a minimum to permit him more freedom to concentrate upon his work). He just knows that he has certain things to say and certain things to do, and if others get in the way he considers it unfortunate but their own fault for not understanding that their wishes must be subordinate to his. Toward Orrin Knox, for instance, he is sure he has only the kindliest personal feelings but he also knows that Orrin should not be President. In the defeat of that misguided and dangerous ambition any misrepresentation in the column is justified, any smear is reasonable, any cruelty excusable. For they do not seem so to Walter, any more than they do to others in his world. Walter, as he is fond of saying on the rare occasions when someone ventures to criticize him for a particularly savage column, wouldn’t hurt a fly. More than that, he is conscientiously generous to those about him. With a sort of horrible, heavy-handed graciousness he goes about his world encouraging other correspondents, figuratively patting younger colleagues on the head (providing they agree with him), giving fatherly advice to those whose own talents are sufficiently great that they can hardly bear to accept it with civility, and generally playing the part of the kindly senior squire. Helen-Anne calls him tactless, his older colleagues call him patronizing, but Walter is absolutely sincere about it. For all his brilliance, he has a childlike inability to sense or understand the personal feelings of others. It is perhaps no wonder Helen-Anne can still feel pain for Walter, who is so self-armored that he cannot feel it for himself.
But in Hartford at the age of twenty-two, this was probably a blessing, for it permitted him to gather himself together without too much difficulty and start off to the Washington upon which his heart had always been set. He had not planned to attack it quite so soon, but later this turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
Again, however, nothing came right at first, and again he went through several periods of doubt and despair. Working in turn for the Washington Times-Herald, and the Evening Star, he found himself frequently involved over four or five years in the same kind of difficulty he encountered in Hartford. Everyone respected his talent and disliked his personality. Frictions—always due to the failure of others to understand him—were constant. Attempts to undercut others—always innocent, just because he was so hard-working—were frequent. The Times-Herald suffered it for a while and then fired him just before he finally decided that the paper’s conservative atmosphere was stifling him and he must get out. Time seriously considered making him one of its stars and then decided it had enough trouble with talented egos without giving permanent home to another. (The decision suited them both. Briefly he had thought that a newsmagazine’s murderous anonymity might be a convenient shield behind which to attack the growing number of people and causes he considered dangerous to the country. But before they reached their decision not to hire him he had reached his not to accept. He decided that he was proud of his views and would stand by them. He was not afraid, ashamed, or jealous, so he did not need the nameless knifer’s cloak.) The Evening Star, in its easygoing, tolerant way, endured him for a couple of years until it, too, without ever quite saying so, indicated that he would probably be happier elsewhere. Frustrated and depressed, he came at last to the town’s most intolerant, most slanted, most ruthless and most powerful publication, and found that they were made for each other.
Swiftly he learned the knack of the prejudicial word, the smoothly hostile phrase, the sarcastic jape that substitutes for decency, the bland omission of friendly facts, the deliberate suppression of honors and achievements, the heavy dependence upon unidentified “informed sources” who believed, or stated, or predicted, or thought, unfavorable and unkind things about the chosen targets of editorial disapproval.
His writing, as it became more savage under this tutelage, also for a while showed a tendency to become more precious: he was among the first to litter his copy with such self-conscious Anglicisms as “straight away,” “in the crunch,” and “early on.” And, although research never entirely confirmed it, he was generally believed to have been the originator of the term “hawks” for those who favored a responsible firmness toward the Communists, “doves” for those who fled, wide-eyed and tippy-toe, from the slightest show of force about anything.)
Within a year he was an editor’s pet, given carte blanche to roam where he would and trample whom he needed. At the end of two more years, after a series of scoops on the State Department’s wavering position papers on Southeast Asia that made his by-line world-famous, after an exposé of an after-hours sex-ring on Capitol Hill that won him both the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award and his first Pulitzer, after a long series of analytical pieces on the two major political parties which gave his publication’s readers the point of view they felt they must have, he found himself at thirty with his own column and a contract for syndication that promised great things to come.
And great things came, though for a while they were not as great as he wanted them to be, and certainly not as great as they were now. Dutifully, and often with considerable stylistic force, he upheld the Right Position. With intelligence and skill he urged America to follow a course that to many of his countrymen seemed to place her in ever-increasing jeopardy. Smoothly he advised her to give up her idealistic dreams of a lasting peace and accept instead a condition of permanent negotiation and endless war. Logically and persuasively he encouraged her to retreat from responsibility, abandon courage, and acknowledge the inevitable nature of accommodations with the Communists that would steadily weaken her power.
All this he did in the name of a genuine personal conviction and a great determination to be In, not Out. Bitterly he attacked those who disagreed with him or deviated in the slightest from the rigid pattern of thinking beloved of his employers, his major colleagues, and himself. He spoke perfectly, in short, for that world in which he was coming to assume an increasingly prominent and commanding position. With an instinctive flair for the right words and phrases to synthesize its attitudes, he speedily became one of its best-known prophets in those days when it was just hitting its full stride in the campaign, always sincere and usually quite innocent, to cripple America and tie her hands in the face of an implacable enemy who used all means, including the eager if unconscious help of Walter and his world, to try to bring about her death.
And still he was not where he wanted to be. There were, after all, a good many others parroting the same line: Walter Dobius was not unique. For all that his column began to pick up clients with a fair rapidity, it did not, as yet, have anything particularly special to offer. He began to think that it would not have as long as Big Walter lived and he must work in his shadow, for as Bob Taft had so unnervingly noted, Little Walter more and more found himself thinking and writing along much the same lines and in much the same style. There was the same air of superior knowledge and infallible wisdom; the same appeal to a higher reality above the law—and above the ideas of those who dared challenge the Right Position; the same ridiculing of America’s naïve belief that firmness and decency together might save the world; even, on occasion, the same angry attacks upon candidates and leaders who dared to disagree with the policies that Big Walter— and Little—believed best for the country.
It was not, in fact, until Big Walter joined the Great Press Conference in the Sky that Little Walter finally came into his own; and then it was only because he had been shrewd enough to gather about him an aura of dispassionate disinterest that concealed his lively partisan emotions as successfully as his idol’s had. There had been a brief period when he had thought that excessive partisanship for a given candidate was the right road to fame and power, and for a year or two his columns were filled with undiluted praise for the Texan in the White House. But it turned out that Lyndon had other ideas, and aside from a good many intimate chats in which he was told how much he was loved and how much his advice was valued, he discovered that his vision of himself as another Colonel House, a second Harry Hopkins, a Brother Milton or Brother Bobby redivivus was not to be. He did not need the lesson twice. Although he continued to aid his favorites, he did so with an air of being far above the battle which only served to make his concealed partisanship more effective. And little by little he began to acquire the position of unassailable authority and automatic influence left vacant when his great idol succumbed. “Doesn’t he have an ideal life?” he had once asked a friend with naïve wistfulness when Big Walter was at his peak of fame and power, worshiped by all the Right Thinkers and Forward Lookers, hailed universally as a latter-day Socrates, a modern Plato, Paragon of the Nations and Monument of the Age. “He just sits there in that study and writes his thoughts on things and the whole country listens. Isn’t that a life to lead?” And now, at last, Walter Dobius could lead it. The years of glory began.
If in the process of reaching them Walter seems to have had little personal life, this is because, essentially, he hasn’t. Walter has been an ambitious machine for most of his days, and personal considerations have been peripheral. His parents are dead, he has two brothers and a sister whom he almost never sees; there are three or four old friends from high school and college who have been retained because they are suitably awed (he has no genuinely close friends in Washington, for all the thousands of famous and talented people he knows); and he did marry Helen-Anne Carrew, when he was young in Washington, because he was temporarily bemused by her brains and by the idea that a proper columnist ought also to be a well-wed one, since so much of the capital’s news-gathering occurs on the social circuit and the contacts one acquires there. Her motivations had been much the same, with the addition of some genuine affection and the feeling that anyone so arrogant as Walter must be vulnerable and in need of protection. But it didn’t work, for the reasons implicit in their conversation just now: brains equal to his in some respects, an intuition greater; an equal ambition; a refusal to grant the automatic acknowledgment of superiority which is necessary to Walter if he is to feel really secure and write at his best.
They had stuck it out for seven years, getting increasingly on each other’s nerves; had never had children to hold them together because Walter feared it would distract him from his work; had finally parted in a half-hateful, half-friendly way that still prompts Helen-Anne to call him sometimes, as she has tonight, to warn him against some misstep she fears he may take, or to urge modification of some pet thesis he is promoting in his column. Of course he is never able to concede the possibility of a misstep, for his record of success indicates that he makes none; and since he early discovered her conservative bent, her ideas on his public philosophy can be dismissed as typically reactionary, obstructive, and worthless.
This relieves Walter of feeling any ties to Helen-Anne—except, of course, the tie she still exerts by being unimpressed. And that, of course, ties him to her forever.
“Walter Wonderful,” Lyndon called him, in lieu of more concrete favors. The nickname, often used with a jealous mockery among his older colleagues in Washington but always echoed with a dutifully respectful friendliness in less knowledgeable circles across the country, has stuck to him ever since. For fifteen years, now, he has occupied his unique position, challenged by three or four, ousted by none, never seriously threatened in his role as (to quote from the preface of The Necessary Dobius, a compilation of his columns and speeches published five years ago) “America’s philosopher-statesman par excellence and nonpareil,” and (to quote from the welcoming address of the Yale trustees when he was elected to join their number) “this beacon-light of the intellect whose rays illumine the murkiest comers of American policy and bear testimony to the nations that all is not wasteland in the Great Republic of the West.”
One of his non-worshipping colleagues, scornfully snapping off a CBS special, “Tribute to A Mind,” on the occasion of his third Pulitzer and fiftieth birthday, had remarked, “It’s a pity Walter died so young.” It is true that many of the references to him do have an elegiac, he-has-moved-above-and-beyond-us ring. But it is also true that the overwhelming majority of the tributes he receives are so perfervidly genuine and sincere that only the most grossly irreverent and daring would ever dream of pointing out that Emperor Walter, like so many other Washington emperors, really does not, at times, have on too many clothes.
Thus he goes his way, his influence so pervasive and his ideas so dominant that it can almost be said that he is the principal architect of American thought on most of the major issues of the age. This could be a farcical idea—as Newsweek in its hysteria may have noted with the right emphasis but for the wrong reasons—but it is a factual one. He reflects with satisfaction now, as he finishes his Manhattan, gets up from the big armchair, and goes into the candlelit dining room where Arbella has graced his solitary meal with the Georgian silver service and the antique lace tablecloth that are always laid out be the number of diners one or twenty, that he and the powerful columnists, commentators, broadcasters, writers and reviewers who accord with his views do, in fact, come as close to controlling the country as anyone can.
He knows—and it is both pleasing and flattering—that since the Sixties they have made it virtually impossible for anyone who disagrees with them to receive an impartial hearing in America. They have successfully scoffed and attacked and withered almost every attempt to state the opposing view. They have established such a monopoly on the means of communication that those who venture to assert an independence from them are subjected instantly and automatically to a savage campaign to smear, suppress, or ridicule down. It is no mean accomplishment, and Walter and his world are justified when they reflect, with the smugness born of a secure intellectual hegemony, that their views, and their prejudices, are quite, quite safe.
If their countrymen sometimes show a certain restiveness at this, if on occasion there is some harsh indication—such as, say, a roar of cheers at a public meeting when someone attacks the press—Walter and his world are highly indignant and dismayed. Their consternation is, in fact, quite comical. It is not enough for them to exercise the virtual censorship of American thought that they do, in fact, exercise: it is necessary to their self-esteem that they be allowed to believe that they are getting away with it. One of the few humorous—if not actually pathetic—aspects of Walter and his world is their naïve belief that nobody sees through them. It is shattering to them to realize that while the peasants may be easygoing and too lazy to object very much, they are not fooled. This is upsetting.
But not, of course, upsetting enough for them to deviate in the slightest from the exercise of the dictatorship that they have managed to establish over the American mind. Right Thoughts flood the columns, dominate the airwaves, fill the editorials, news reports, movies, plays, and reviews. Right Thoughts are everywhere. Right Thoughts are gospel, and Walter, as Patsy truly says, is their God.
And the gospel he presides over and offers to his countrymen? It comes down essentially to the same basic arguments that first caught the approving eyes of his employers, the same arguments that he and his major colleagues have offered ever since the end of the Second World War, endlessly repeated through every means of communication:
America is declining in influence and therefore unable to meet her problems with firmness and integrity—
Communism is gaining in strength and therefore had best be accommodated, because its advances aren’t really very important anyway, and anyway, it might be dangerous to try to stop them—
And a blind fear of atomic war, offered as the final obliterating answer to all who dare suggest that if America will only stand unafraid for the great revolutionary principles upon which she was founded, she can come safely through her perils and achieve in reasonable time the establishment of an honorable and lasting peace.
In the minds of Walter and his world, this last is a naïve and childish idea, a hopeless obsession on the part of far too many of their foolish countrymen. Toward it their scorn is implacable and unyielding. He is readying some of it right now, as he carefully wipes his lips on his damask napkin, pushes back his richly carved chair from the massive old refectory table, and starts slowly and thoughtfully up the stairs to his study to resume work upon his speech.
For that idea and for all who hold it, up to and including Orrin Knox and the President himself, Walter Wonderful and his world have only savage answers. The thought of them brings once more the tight little smile of satisfied contempt to his lips as he snaps on the desk lamp, takes off his coat, sits in his writing chair, and again flicks on his electric typewriter with a pudgy, determined finger.
Others may doubt, on this cold, blustery night suspended between winter and spring, the course they will follow in the presidential campaign now getting under way. Others may be uncertain where the best solutions lie for the enormous problems domestic and foreign that swirl about their uneasy, beleaguered land. Others may be humble and afraid, seeing not only the night of snow but the night of ages threatening to close in on America.
Not so Walter Dobius. Walter and his world, now as always, have no doubts.
He flicks a key or two in a tentative, pondering way, and then, without humility or hesitation, begins to write steadily and forcefully into the night.
***