Gold by Darrell Delamaide Page B

international finance in the wake of the oil shock. His chief distinction was his longevity; a Lebanese Christian, he had proved more resilient than most in keeping up with the shifting fortunes of his Middle East clients.
    He had not said please in making his request, but Drew would certainly go. He owed Sangrat too much over the years, and the Lebanese kept very accurate accounts. The older a journalist got, it seemed, the more obligations he accumulated.
    Drew had always thought that journalism was a profession for young people. Cynicism was well known to be an occupational hazard, but it was not so well known that the first object of that cynicism was the profession itself. Drew had seen too many tired, bitter reporters to wish himself a lifelong career in journalism.
    The responsibility and authority of his job as managing editor might have changed his attitude, but he was finding instead that it just brought a new dimension to his cynicism. Sun Belt Communications was a darling of the stock market. Tom Madison’s tight control of costs and his decentralized management had resulted in an almost uninterrupted chain of quarterly earnings increases. But an accountant like Madison was too calculating. He maintained the quality of his newspapers and agencies just high enough to keep market share, but there was no commitment to traditional journalistic values. SBC awarded generous bonuses to top managers for good performance, but performance was measured in terms of pennies saved. The goal was not a top-quality product but a higher number on the bottom line. Don’t look for the best reporters, look for the cheapest who can get the job done.
    Drew was lucky. At thirty-eight, he had made the transition into editorial management. As a reporter he would have been facing a rapidly diminishing range of options as younger, cheaper people flooded the market.
    Perhaps it was just as well, reflected Drew, as his thoughts came back in a circle. No one could work for an entire career scavenging for truth and keep his integrity. Drew recalled the French journalist who had told him with a Gallic wink that reporters spent the first half of their careers finding out what they didn’t know and the second half hiding what they knew only too well.
    Truth was important to Drew, though. In some ways, it was his religion.
    He had been very pious as a child, even zealous. His mother, despite her English and German extraction, was Roman Catholic and steadfastly adhered to her faith. She had insisted that Henry Dumesnil convert to the church before she consented to marry him. The young accountant was in love and cared little for the arid religion of his Huguenot forebears, so he readily agreed.
    Drew, and later his brother, attended the Catholic school, dutifully conforming to the strictures of a paranoid church implanting bastions of Roman faith in a Protestant and secular America.
    Drew took readily to the religious tutelage. Intelligent and impressionable, he shared his mother’s devotion and his father’s driving sense of rectitude. He accepted the special status of American Catholics in a hostile world and their mission to bring heretics and nonbelievers to the one, true church.
    For that’s what they were taught, and it was easy to believe inside the sheltered environment of school, church, and home. Catholics in the middle America of that era occupied an intellectual ghetto as isolating as any walls.
    Drew became an altar boy. The solemnity and the ritual of the Mass appealed to his imagination. His responsibility to carry the heavy Latin missal from one side of the altar to the other, to bring the cruets of wine and water to the priest, to ring the bell as the priest elevated the host and chalice that had become the body and blood of Christ the Savior—all this charged him with a sacred fervor.
    He followed the ceremony carefully, reading the English version in his missal as the priest intoned the Latin text. Jesus was the Way, the