Capable of Honor (4 page)

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.