Capable of Honor Read Free

that she was afraid to run in her native California just because Cullee Hamilton, its most famous Negro Congressman, might try for the Senate this year. Jasons didn’t scare that easily. Jasons, in fact, didn’t scare at all. A couple of hundred millions and four generations of command running back to the Spanish occupation of California saw to that. Jasons went after what they wanted without any qualms. And got it.
    And they will this year, too, she promised the columnist. You wait and see!
    As for what the columnist—whose name was Helen-Anne Carrew, and who had herself seen them come and go in Washington’s restless tides almost as long as Walter Wonderful—thought about that distinguished gentleman. Patsy had to confess that, while disliking the tone, she could not entirely disagree with the diagnosis. There was something quite precious about Walter Dobius, as though he were handing down tablets from a golden sarcophagus in the Smithsonian. But there was also something quite powerful about him. More powerful, in fact, than about any other single commentator on the American scene.
    Regularly his solemnly portentous, more than a little pompous countenance stared out upon his countrymen from the head of his column, as if to say, “Who are you, and what makes you think you know what’s going on? Much better you should listen to me, peasants. I really know What It’s All About.”
    And such is the obliging nature of peasants that they had long ago accepted this implied self-anointment—which was much more than implied in the title of his column (“The Way It Is”) and the general tone of his writings—and concluded agreeably that indeed he did know, and that of all those writing out of Washington, the Bakers, the Drummonds, the Krocks, the Lippmanns, the Pearsons, the Restons, and the rest, Walter Wonderful was indeed the greatest of them all.
    “Did you read Walter Dobius today?” someone would chortle in Canarsie, someone would rage in Dubuque. “I do think Walter Dobius is so astute ” they would tell one another in Kennebunkport, nodding sagely in L.A.
    As broad as the oceans, as high as the sky, ran the writ of Walter Dobius to tell humanity what it should do. With a heavy and often slashing turn of phrase (broken at conscientious intervals by determinedly jocular attempts at humor) and a diligent attention to his news sources, that is exactly what he did.
    Even more fundamental than his hold upon his countrymen, of course—and the thing that really made him so interesting to Jasons and Kennedys, Knoxes, and Rockefellers, and everyone else who had aspirations to power in the powerful city—was his influence with the government and his hold upon the press. The press did not quite, in Helen-Anne’s acrid phrase, go “baa-ing at his heels”—it wasn’t as obvious as that—nor did certain influential people in the State Department and elsewhere—at least openly—ask him what they should do.
    Yet there had been more than one secret meeting at “Salubria” in Leesburg in time of crisis, more than one Chief Executive and Secretary of State who had arrived by furtive helicopter in the lush Virginia countryside to stay a while, receive the Word, and then be whisked away again to the city of their torment and their power. And in news offices throughout the land his columns, a little turgid but filled with the calm certainty that he was absolutely right—for did not things very often move as he said they would, and was not his advice very often followed in the councils of the mighty?—laid down a line that was frequently echoed by editors not quite sure of themselves, local columnists casting about for a subject to fill up today’s six hundred words, national commentators needing inspiration with which to face the evening cameras, book and drama critics anxious to maintain their standing at Manhattan cocktail parties, reporters who found themselves awed and impressed by his fabulous reputation and so