Free Capable of Honor by Allen Drury Page A

Good and Faithful Servant Award; writer of the nation’s most influential column for twenty-five years; steady contributor to national magazines; special lecturer at ten universities here and abroad in the past twelve years, favorite speaker at the annual conventions of everything from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to Rotary International; repeatedly rumored (though never quite selected) choice for the Nobel Peace Prize; adviser to the powerful in his own land, intimate and familiar of the powerful in many a foreign land as well; statesman, philosopher, counselor, and guide to his own worshipful profession; one of the four or five major figures in the political thought of the twentieth century—
    If he has critics, they are minor. If he has enemies, they are mute.
    When Walter speaks, the world literally listens.
    But it was not always so.
    Indeed, when he pauses sometimes to reflect upon his early years—and he does so, quite conscientiously, two or three times a week, because, as he once told Helen-Anne (not entirely, as she knew, in jest) “it keeps me humble”—he is struck with a certain wonderment that he should have reached the pinnacle he has. Not too much wonderment, for that would imply a lack of self-confidence of which no one has ever accused him, but enough to prove that he too, as he is fond of saying, is just as human as anyone else who has climbed the heights in Washington.
    From what he is fond of referring to as “the bogs and moors of my childhood” to “Salubria” in Leesburg and all it connotes has been a journey whose ultimate triumph few save himself could have foreseen. When his father brought the family from Saxony’s Luneburger Heath to America, Walter was two (his memory of the bogs and moors not quite so vivid, perhaps, as in later years he has become fond of recounting from the public platform). The job his father found, that of a meat cutter in Philadelphia, did not give his family much promise of an affluent future. For most of Walter’s childhood and adolescence this remained true. The memory of always living in near-poverty, or on the edge of it has proved a great goad to the family’s second son. From the time he was able, he did menial labor and odd jobs of all lands to help out, and he did them well and without complaining. It made him a lonely, hard-working, and self-sufficient child who had few friends but much respect. He always preferred it so, and eventually he came to realize the value of it to the particular kind of career he finally found. He emerged from a grueling childhood with a grim inner determination that he was someday going to get out of all this and never turn back. Suddenly in high school he found the means. He discovered that he had been blessed with a certain ability to use words, and with it an air of authority that persuaded his teachers and contemporaries that he wrote with a perception and force unusually impressive in an adolescent. He was on his way.
    With this gift—“The Lord was good to me, in my talent,” he had remarked in the same Columbia School of Journalism speech that had provoked such hosannas from his hearers and the press—“and I have tried to be faithful to Him, in my use of it”—went a native doggedness and diligence that made of young Walter Dobius one of the hardest working and most ambitious students ever to edit the school paper and graduate with top honors while doing so. Hard work marked him then and hard work marks him now, filled with honors and power as he is. To this day, Walter Dobius does not relax. He performed then, and he still does, the hard, patient, relentless digging that is the mark of the top reporter.
    Whenever a big story broke on campus, in high school or later at Yale, where he edited the Daily , Walter was there, his sturdy figure trudging into the thick of it, pencil raised, voice insistent, asking his blunt, demanding questions until he got the answers, Whenever a big story breaks in