Capable of Honor (7 page)

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.