by Allen Drury
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 philos
opher-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.