When Loring Mandel graduated from college, he had one dream: to be a composer of serious music. Alas, his father had other ideas.

"My father wanted me to be a doctor," Mandel says. "He was one of those old-fashioned doctors who made house calls every day. He did not have a college education, but he was always interested in medicine. And when he was an orderly, some doctors paid his way through medical school. He wanted me to follow."

Mandel refused, and his father refused to support him. Without the money to continue his education, he took a job arranging music for the ABC orchestra in Chicago and found himself immersed in the world of radio and television. Within no time, he was asked to write material for an NBC show, and soon he was a staffer on "The Norman Ross Show."

It is more than half a century since that debut. And in the time since, Mandel has carved a reputation as one of the most thoughtful and gifted writers to work in television, with credits ranging from "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (1967) to "The Little Drummer Girl" (1984) to the recent TV drama "Conspiracy" (2001).

It is because of such work that he is now being honored with the Writers Guild of America's highest prize, the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for lifetime achievement in television.

If Mandel had a lucky start, he was less lucky when his career was interrupted by the Korean War. What he saw as a U.S. soldier in Korea affected much of his thinking -- though not in the way one might think.

"Did it have an impact on me? The Army did," he says. "I met kinds of people in the Army that I would never ordinarily have come in contact with and found to my surprise that there was a much wider world than I had experienced up to that time. One of my closest friends turned out to be a member of the mafia. Another friend, I saw his whole life destroyed by an accident. ... You are just seeing life on a much more basic level in the Army."

It was this "basic level" that drew him to his writing when he returned to the United States and followed his friends from Chicago to New York, where he caught the end of the Golden Age of tele-vision.

"It was a new industry, and nobody quite knew what to do with it," Mandel recalls. "The people who should have been doing television were the motion picture people, but it was not until 1957 or '58 that the contracted players were even allowed to be on TV. So television drama went to the radio people, and radio drama depended almost entirely on the imagination of the audience."

At a time in his life when many other writers would be easing into retirement, Mandel wrote one of the most acclaimed of all recent TV movies: "Conspiracy," about the Wannsee Conference where the "final solution" was devised by the Nazis.

"I have to say it was a very wonderful writing experience," he says. "The hardest part was explaining to people that it didn't tear me apart to write it. They said, 'The material is so awful! Everything they are talking about is so emotional!' Here am I, a Jewish writer writing it -- how could I not be disturbed? But I wasn't. I was excited because it was a fantastic challenge to take that static situation and develop it emotionally and intellectually so that it worked. It wasn't until I was in that room with those actors in their uniforms, and it started playing out -- then the Jewishness kicked in."