Capable of Honor Read Free Page A

inclined, often quite unconsciously, to see the news and transmit it with a selection and emphasis that subtly but powerfully reflected his ideas.
    Thus Walter Wonderful was a prize indeed, and Patsy intended to see to it that the prize went to her brother in his growing campaign against Secretary of State Orrin Knox for the Presidential nomination that would presumably be left open when President Harley Hudson made good on his promise to step down at the end of the present term.
    As Walter jumped, so would many of the news media, much of the academic world, most of that complex of power and superior certainty that had its habitat in plush offices in New York and Washington and other major centers throughout the land. All of these people swore by Walter Dobius, all of them obediently thought as his columns told them they should. There was a network of attitude, non-conspiratorial but quite binding, which controlled the thinking and the reactions of this particular powerful group of interests in America. Walter Dobius nine times out of ten was the man who, in the last analysis, created that attitude if it did not exist, or strengthened it if it existed but showed signs of wavering.
    This Patsy knew, and Ted, and Orrin Knox and Harley Hudson and a number of other astute and powerful people, some not so basically friendly to the country as these. Sophisticates in politics, instinctive or self-made students of their well-meaning but sometimes rather erratic countrymen, they were all aware that if you praised the right people, backed the right causes, parroted the right phrases, indulged in the right type of automatic thinking, you could be absolutely sure of flattering news stories, favorable editorials, cordial television broadcasts, helpful reviews, friendly and encouraging references in any one of the thousand and one channels through which a public issue or personality is presented to the American people, and through them to the world.
    Thus if Walter Dobius endorsed the shrewd gray-haired gentleman known as Governor Edward Jason of California, his friends, colleagues, and true believers by the millions would also endorse Ted. And if by some remote chance he decided to endorse the shrewd gray-haired gentleman known as Secretary of State Orrin Knox, the friends, colleagues, and true believers, though gulping and groaning and protesting a bit, would finally, obediently, fall into line behind Orrin.
    So it was that Patsy, having launched her well-laid plans in what only appeared to be an impulsive moment, again picked up the receiver, drew toward her over her enormous redwood desk a carefully prepared list of names, and began telephoning around the country. At almost the same moment, three miles across town in Southeast Washington, Helen-Anne Carrew yanked the item about the award banquet out of her typewriter and sent it along to be set in type for tomorrow’s paper, knowing as she did so that she was helping to start in motion what was, for all practical purposes, the opening gambit in Ted Jason’s formal campaign for the Presidency.
    The ways of the Jasons, the columnist told herself as she gave her mouth a hasty smear of lipstick, grabbed her purse and mink coat and hurried out of the Star ’s busy newsroom, were among the damnedest curiosities in American politics. But, knowing full well the weight of Walter Wonderful, she was ready to bet a sizable amount that they would, in this instance, be more than a little effective.

    And now, the Secretary of State thought with an annoyed grimace an hour later, he supposed he would have to go ahead and announce right away instead of waiting, as he had planned, for some definite sign from the President.
    “Damn that woman, anyway,” he remarked rather absently into the telephone. At the other end of the line, in Dolly Munson’s green and gold dressing room at snow-hugged “Vagaries” standing white and secret and warm amid the softly falling drifts in Rock Creek Park, his wife