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Washington realizes where the hostility comes from, they attack the Secretary of State. And the Secretary of State, being as human as they are, and less afraid to admit it, fights back as vigorously as he knows how.
    He always has. He has always been skeptical of Walter and his friends; he has always given them short shrift and small respect. They have always retaliated by describing him to the country as “impatient … tactless … too arrogant … too ambitious … wants too much to be President …” Filtering out through columns, editorials, and broadcasts, and from there into the common tongue, have gone certain carefully honed phrases that tag at his heels incessantly.
    “I like him,” Walter and his world say thoughtfully. “But I just don’t think he can be elected.”
    Or, “He’s a nice guy—in some ways he’s a hell of a competent guy—but don’t you think he’s inclined to be somewhat erratic and unpredictable?”
    Or, most damaging and always said with an air of disturbed puzzlement, “I don’t know what it is about him, but I … just … don’t … trust him.”
    Having created in the country a frame of mind in which such smoothly destructive comments spring automatically to the tongue, Walter and his world have then been able to pick them up out of general conversation and relay them back through their columns, editorials, and broadcasts in such a way as to create an unending chain of damning uncertainties about the Secretary of State.
    “When you hear it said everywhere about a man that ‘you just can’t trust him,’” Walter had begun a recent column, “one must necessarily wonder whether you can. Such—for some reason unknown to this observer—seems to be the popular impression of an otherwise well-regarded man, the Secretary of State …”
    Twice before, this type of coverage has had much to do with costing Orrin his chance at the White House. Now, heightened in virulence by his participation in the defeat of Bob Leffingwell, it has as its basic aim the translation of a carefully nurtured doubt into the Great Misgiving that will decide the votes of millions of Americans and, hopefully, retire him forever from the government.
    Thus in this presidential year the issue is joined in its most savage and fundamental form.
    Walter Dobius knows the world is waiting for his advice in the matter and he intends to give it.
    There is no doubt whatsoever in his mind, as he pulls his electric typewriter toward him and starts its motor humming with a flick of his pudgy finger, that he will carry with him a majority of the national columnists, at least two radio-television networks, several major magazines, a large number of politicians, academicians, and reviewers, and a half to two-thirds of the daily newspapers in the country.
    Once, when he had provoked an angry and incautious fury in another candidate to whose destruction he had devoted himself, the hard-pressed Senator had charged that “Walter Dobius is lining up the press against me!” The response had been immediate, scornful, and overwhelming.
    “Is the American public being asked to assume,” Newsweek had demanded in a near-hysteric editorial that teetered between adolescence and apoplexy, “that the influence of one man is so great—or his views so expressive of those of all the most powerful sections of press, television, and radio—that simply by stating a position he can synthesize it and advance its objectives across this whole broad land? Surely the country is not being asked to give credence to such a farcical ideal!”
    Nonetheless, that was exactly what the harried candidate was asking the country to give credence to. And although they very swiftly succeeded in laughing it down, that was exactly what Walter and his world also gave credence to, for it was entirely true and they knew it. That was exactly the kind of influence he did have, and it was exactly the kind that had been held by several of his