OBITUARY - Vernon Walters, R.I.P.(Brief Article)(Obituary)

The Quiet Man departed this world at Good Samaritan Medical Center, the cause of death, as he'd have wished, unstated. On hearing of his unobtrusive death in Palm Beach, friends and admirers took it for granted that the Good Samaritan hospital took the very best care of the good Samaritan dying in its hands. If Vernon Walters was conscious, he'd have received the last rites of the Catholic Church, whose God he thought himself as having committed his life work to, although what he did was work for the United States, an ungodly nation much of the time Walters was active, but reasonably adjudged the best-intentioned country of the 20th century.

Walters was at once the invisible man, and the man, asked to speak out, utterly plainspoken, wittily dogmatic, searchingly thoughtful. He was a consummate craftsman: You had to be out of sight when you were interpreting for Eisenhower and de Gaulle, Kissinger and Pompidou, note-taking for Truman when he fired Douglas MacArthur, sneaking Kissinger into Paris to meet secretly with the Vietnamese, serving as deputy chief, then acting director, of the CIA. But when his views were asked, on questions he thought himself entitled to speak out about, the words, thoughts, reflections, history, and witticisms poured forth, ingenuous questions corrected, sarcasm and cynicism handled, the questioner left barely alive to tell the tale.

It happens that I saw him often, because he spent many days on passenger liners participating in seminars we both engaged in. He was getting creaky, at 85, and needed his nephew to get him about, but he omitted nothing that was going on, in part a preternatural disposition to do his duty, in part an appetite to see and hear everything. The intelligence officer off-duty is sometimes governed by the habits of an intelligence officer on-duty. In his company one found oneself supposing, on hearing Walters handle German and Spanish, French and Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian, that his mind traveled from any one language to any other seriatim, because his mind worked that way, taking it all in.

Although his business in later years was diplomacy, his craft was intelligence, and the two blended in his hands. His mien was grouchy, the corners ...