Capable of Honor by Allen Drury Page A

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