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remarked dryly to Beth, the first time in fifteen years that a Secretary of State said No to Walter Dobius.
    It had not been publicized, it had been done so discreetly that it had escaped the notice of the press, but Walter had stopped by Foggy Bottom one afternoon—he had not quite had the nerve at that time to suggest that Orrin come out to Leesburg—and had proposed a course of action so out of keeping with the situation as it then was and as it later developed that Orrin had laughed in his face. Walter’s astonishment was comical.
    “I guess you aren’t used to having Secretaries of State be so impolite to you, are you, Walter?” Orrin remarked cheerfully. His guest had flushed with anger and there had been little left of the smooth, urbane, all-knowing statesman in his reply.
    “You do as you please, Orrin,” he said heavily. “You always have and you always will. But don’t think it will be forgotten. Don’t make that mistake.”
    “Walter,” Orrin said, “the only mistake I make is in letting your reputation fool me sometimes. Sometimes I find myself almost believing you’re as profound and disinterested a sage as the public thinks you are. Then something like this comes along and I realize that no, it’s just Walter, as prejudiced a Washington operator as the best of them.”
    “It won’t be forgotten,” Walter repeated with the same characteristically ponderous emphasis. “ I won’t forget.”
    “No,” Orrin agreed, “I expect not.”
    And true to his promise a new sharpness had come into Walter’s commentaries upon the conduct of the office of Secretary of State: couched in the far-seeing, decades-long, history-embracing perspective he loves to use, but, in its own more graceful and more competent way, as crudely obvious as any attack by the Post or Newsweek or anyone else on that particular level of fairness and objectivity.
    This, however, is merely the frosting on the cake of what Walter and his world have done, are doing, and always will do to Orrin Knox for his part in defeating Bob Leffingwell.
    The Leffingwell nomination, Orrin knows now, was one of those Washington events which, like the exposure of a Harry Dexter White or the unmasking of a Hiss, bring down upon those responsible for it a grim vindictiveness, unyielding and never-resting, on the part of the guilty one’s supporters—a vindictiveness which can last for many years beyond the event—last, indeed, until it sometimes achieves its objective of driving from public life altogether the persons responsible. The kind of total commitment to a cause which certain influential circles in the country have given to Robert A. Leffingwell brings in its wake total vendetta when its desires are thwarted.
    Vendetta follows Orrin now, everywhere he goes.
    Yet of course he could have pursued no other course, once Bob Leffingwell’s lying under oath to the Senate about his early Communist associations had brought in its wake the events leading to the tragic death of Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah. Nor, probably, could anyone else involved in the Leffingwell nomination have followed a course any different than he had. It was only in their attitudes afterward that men had a choice and their true natures stood revealed.
    Some, like Orrin and Senator Robert Munson of Michigan, the Senate Majority Leader, let the episode go when it was ended, accepted President Harley Hudson’s appointment of Bob Leffingwell to a different job in the government, assumed that bygones could be bygones and that other, newer tasks were more important than the constant rehashing of old spites.
    Not so the world of Walter Wonderful. Its members, relatively few among the Washington press corps but influential out of all proportion to their numbers, have neither forgotten nor forgiven Orrin’s decisive intervention to defeat Bob Leffingwell. In a thousand ways, some direct and obvious, some so remote that many readers and viewers are fooled and only political