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someone (her brother? Orrin? the President? Senator Warren Strickland, Senate Minority Leader and the minority party’s likeliest candidate?) safely and honorably established in the White House, is not so open and shut as all that.
    Safety is relative and honor takes some nurturing even under the best of circumstances, which a presidential campaign quite often is not. Honor is a difficult thing and apt to get skittish if it is either ignored too much or courted too avidly.
    To be capable of honor is not always to achieve it. The thing takes doing.
    Particularly will it take doing in this year which the small but powerful group composed of Walter Dobius and his friends has already built up to a peak of importance greater than anything in this century—unless it might perhaps be the last presidential election or, possibly, the one before. Already it is being called the most important—the most crucial—the most vital to the future of the nation—the most somberly fateful for our own democracy and the world at large— the most this—the most that—the most the other. Already it has been hailed with suitable trumpets: FATEFUL YEAR, says Life ; YEAR OF GREAT DECISION, says Look ; GOLLY-GEE-WHIZ-GOOD-GOSH-ALMIGHTY YEAR OF YEARS, say all the rest. Upon it they are already concentrating their perceptive typewriters, their knowledgeable microphones and cameras, their profound and endless speculations which, designed in some cases to enlighten and in some to confuse, succeed not too well in either but only add up to a kind of pounding roar which swiftly deadens the minds and dulls the sense of the electorate, until its members become really not very sure of what they think about anything.
    This year the cacophony is even greater than usual because of several facts endlessly discussed by Walter and his world. One is the growing national uneasiness concerning the United Nations and the entire American position in world affairs, an uneasiness always chronic but now even greater in the wake of Terrible Terry’s visit to the country six months ago and its grave consequences for the United States in the UN. Another is the increasing pressure of Communism which, never relenting underneath no matter what bland soporifics are displayed upon its surface to lull the Great Gullibles of the West, is now being pushed to ever greater pitch. And the third is the fact that someone is running for the nomination of whom Walter Wonderful and his world do not approve.
    This last makes it a somber and fateful year indeed, and a note close to hysteria has entered some of the attacks being leveled against the Secretary of State as the time nears for him to make formal announcement of the candidacy which twice before has failed to take him to the White House.
    This time, Walter Dobius confided recently to one of his closest cronies, the director of the Post , he is “going to get Orrin Knox if it’s the last thing I do.”
    “I’m with you,” the director assured him solemnly, and already his paper’s editorials and cartoons have faithfully, and on most occasions savagely, reflected his cooperation.
    The attack upon Orrin Knox, almost always under way in some sector of Walter Wonderful’s world ever since Orrin first set foot in Washington, has never been quite as virulent as it is now. It springs from many things, but two are most immediately the concern of Walter Dobius and all who follow him. The first is the Secretary’s conduct of foreign policy during the unfortunate episode created by the visit of Terrible Terry. The second and by all odds the more important is what Orrin, then senior Senator from Illinois, did a year ago to block the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State.
    The episode of Terrible Terry, which brought in its train a new inflaming of America’s unhappy racial problems and the failure by only one vote of a move to expel the United States from the United Nations, did indeed mark, as Orrin has just