Capable of Honor by Allen Drury Page B

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