The Boys on the Bus (15 page)
Read The Boys on the Bus Online
Authors: Timothy Crouse
But, Broder said with a sigh, there were not enough resources to handle that kind of story, even on the superfat
Post
—not
enough money, manpower, time, or space. He himself had drawn up the blueprint for the
Post
’s election coverage, late in the summer of ’71, stretching five full-time men from the national staff and a few younger reporters from the state and city staffs so that they would cover all twelve Democratic candidates, plus the two Republican challengers. There was no one to spare for the Democratic party saga.
It was four o’clock. Broder looked again at his watch, announced with finality that he had to get back to work, and led us out of the bar. As we walked the block back to the
Post
, we talked about Martha Mitchell, who had been telephoning reporters to announce that she was a “political prisoner.”
Broder shook his head and said something about being disappointed that the papers were running that kind of “shoddy story.” I was brought up short. It seemed to me that Martha was getting what she deserved and that the papers were serving their proper function by giving her enough rope. But I had to admire Broder for being so righteous. He had lived in the world’s biggest den of thieves for sixteen years, yet he had managed to hang on to an almost Victorian sense of decency. Sometimes when I climbed onto the press bus and saw Broder, I half expected him to be wearing a clerical dog collar. While the other reporters talked tough, he spoke gently. While they hoarded stories, he generously shared the goods. In New Hampshire, he had quietly told Curt Wilkie of the Wilmington
News-Journal
: “You better go out and knock on some doors. It’s not there for Muskie.” Which, for a journalist, was tantamount to an act of sainthood.
“He’s a very conventional journalist,” said a colleague, “but by sheer perseverance he really has taken conventional journalism to a new peak; he tells you as much as a well-informed non-genius can tell you. A Broder column tells you exactly where the political situation is on that given day. It might take a Mailer to tell you what it all
means
, but Broder is almost always on the money about what has happened.”
*
Other names frequently mentioned were Al Otten of
The Wall Street Journal
, Peter Lisagor of the
Chicago Daily News
, Walter Mears of the AP, Jim Perry of the
National Observer
, and Jack Germond of Gannett.
†
Apple had played this game at least twice before. When Robert Kennedy was about to enter the Senate race in New York in 1964, said a colleague of Apple’s, “the Kennedy people played him like a yo-yo. His needs and their needs absolutely coincided. They wanted to be in the paper every day and he wanted to be in the paper every day. They just leaked him stuff and he put it right in. And of course, the
Times
wanted a story on Bobby Kennedy every day. Same thing when Rockefeller was trying to decide whether or not to go in before the 1968 Convention. Again, the Rockefeller people played him like a yo-yo.”
‡
The Kingdom and the Power
by Gay Talese (New York, World, 1969).
§
The South Carolina credentials challenge was not overly complicated in itself; the question was whether more women should be put on the South Carolina delegation in order to comply with the equality guidelines that McGovern’s own party reform commission had handed down. What made this challenge a crucial battle was the fact that if the vote fell in the “Twilight Zone” between 1,496 and 1,509 votes, the Stop McGovern forces (led by Humphrey) would have been able to raise certain procedural questions that might have caused McGovern to lose 151 California delegates in a later credentials challenge. If that happened, McGovern might have lost the nomination. So the McGovern forces had either to win decisively or lose decisively, but they could not afford to get caught in the “Twilight Zone.” Seeing that they could not win big, the McGovern command ordered their delegates to throw votes to Humphrey’s side and deliberately lose the challenge. This move effectively blocked the Humphrey forces’ last chance at sinking McGovern.
‖
Jim Naughton was later substituted for Witcover. In Miami, Germond “won” the race “by default,” using the expedient of posting announcements all over the Fontainebleau Hotel to the effect that he was sorry to hear that Naughton had a “personal problem” and could not race. Although Naughton was in perfect health and willing to race, he gave in to Germond’s ruse, and thus Broder was spared having to pay off the bet.
More Heavies
These four men also deserve special attention:
Times
“Jules is like a leashed tiger,” said a reporter one afternoon late in McGovern’s campaign. “He’s going crazy. He can’t get his stuff in the paper.” We were standing in the middle of a huge pressroom in the Pittsburgh Hilton, sipping beers. Jules Witcover was over in the corner, talking intensely into a phone. He was a tall but unprepossessing man of forty-five, with a weak chin, blank eyes, and thinning hair. He had the pale, hounded look of a small liquor store owner whose shop
has just been held up for the seventh time in a year.
“Chances are,” the reporter said, nodding toward Witcover, “chances are, he’s having a go-round with some editor out there who’s just shit-canned one of his articles.”
Witcover wasn’t doing his best work in 1972. The reason was that the Los Angeles
Times
was cramping his style. All his friends knew it. It seemed to be the story of Jules’ life; he had always been better than the paper he worked for.
Witcover was a very straight, conventional journalist, but throughout the year he had tried to inject some analysis into his stories, to interpret the campaign for his readers. Some of his analysis stories got into print. Others were killed by the editors. And sometimes a story would get set in type and then just sit there for one or two weeks. “Well,” said a friend of Witcover’s, “it’s human nature that if you’ve got one story in type that hasn’t appeared yet, you’re not going to bust your ass on another. And that happened a lot.” On still other occasions, Witcover had the edge on a story, had it a little earlier than everyone else; he would phone the story in, and it would mysteriously turn up in the paper one or two days late, after everyone else had already printed it.
All of this was more or less standard operating procedure for the majority of American newspapers, but it was slow torture to Witcover. He was a gifted, ambitious, hard-working journalist, and he took enormous pride in his work. He had worked like a dog to become a national political reporter. He had gone through almost twenty years of writing for obscure papers, taking long-term assignments he didn’t like, and turning out magazine pieces on the side to get recognition. For many years, the Washington press establishment had tended to slight Witcover, because he came from a lower-middle-class background and said “duh” instead of “the.” Now he was among the most respected reporters in town.
Having served such a long indentureship, Witcover was deadly serious about his craft. He had given a great deal of thought to his own role as a political journalist, and he was
extraordinarily sensitive to the role that the whole press corps played, to its problems and failings.
At the same time, Witcover was definitely one of the gang. On every press bus, there was always an inner circle of veterans, and whenever Witcover was aboard he was part of the circle. He gossiped in the nether reaches of the bus, drank late, and generally participated in the rituals of the bus. He was a compulsive, driven worker; besides his newspaper and magazine work, he wrote books. When he was going full throttle, he worked early in the mornings, over weekends and during vacations. Like all compulsives, he sometimes let himself go with a spectacular release of energy, such as the night in a St. Louis restaurant when he and Walter Mears stood up on the banquette shouting: “Escargots! We must have escargots!” When the order finally arrived, Mears was in a phone booth filing a story. Witcover threw one of the snails at him, landing it squarely in his ear.
But Witcover sometimes stepped back and examined the press with the fascination of an anthropologist who has just discovered a pristine tribe. Like the songs. The reporters enjoyed writing satirical songs about the candidates. Late at night in some hotel bar, or shivering in the cold, waiting for the candidate to come out of some closed meeting, Witcover and his friends would write these awful lyrics to popular tunes. The lyrics did not read well in print, but Witcover liked to put them in his books—as if they were artifacts, clues to what the press was really thinking. “It’s a funny thing,” he said one day during the California primary, “I was remarking to some of my colleagues just the other day that we privately had Muskie’s weaknesses pretty well identified back in January, but we didn’t write them hard enough. We kind of gave him the benefit of the doubt. But we wrote songs—satires, parodies—just for our own amusement, and most of the ingredients of those songs were the difficulties that Muskie was having about his temper and his inability to make decisions quickly.”
Witcover was not a professional press critic, an A. J. Liebling;
he was simply an “activist” reporter. He showed concern for the press’s problems in many ways. It was Witcover who had helped Jack Germond to found Political Writers for a Democratic Society. In 1970, he and another reporter had put together the “Washington Hotel Meeting,” which was the press’s first and last organized attempt to deal with the insularity of the White House. He was the only political reporter in town who contributed regularly to the
Columbia Journalism Review
—a rather conservative publication, but nevertheless the country’s major organ of serious press criticism. In his three books (on Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Spiro Agnew)
*
he discussed at length the ways in which the press had affected the careers of the three politicians. In his book on Nixon, Witcover blasted reporters, including himself, for not having written more about Nixon’s use of media and his relentless evasion of hard questions from the press during the 1968 campaign.
Even in some of his articles for the Los Angeles
Times
, Witcover broke the old convention that the press was not supposed to be seen or heard in campaign coverage. He treated the press as an active force in the campaign, and was quick to sound the alarm when George McGovern tried briefly to shut out reporters. The piece, headlined “McGovern’s Campaign Tactics Resemble Nixon’s in 1968,” ran in early September. It read in part:
On landing in Portland, as local newsmen attempted to question McGovern about reports of disorganization in his campaign, Press Secretary Richard Dougherty broke in and ended the questions.
He led McGovern back to the steps of the plane where the candidate waited for the cameras and then read his prepared statement on the Olympics tragedy. When McGovern finished, Dougherty interposed: “No questions, no questions please” and McGovern was hustled off. A motorcade then
went straight to a senior citizens’ center in suburban Gresham. En route, reporters in the press bus were given strict instructions by a local McGovern aide to go directly into the center’s cafeteria, where most of the elderly were waiting, and to “stand in one place” against the walls.
He informed the reporters that the average age of the residents was 74 and thus there was “the possibility of a heart attack” if the newsmen created too much stir.
In these first days, McGovern granted some interviews, but only to local radio and TV reporters, with a few representatives of the travelling press permitted to sit in and act as pool reporters for the rest. In this first week’s schedule, through next Saturday, there is no provision for any press conference.
All this is reminiscent of the 1968 Nixon campaign, in which nearly all public events were geared for television, where the writing press was given extremely limited access to the candidate.…
In this shakedown swing, McGovern is being watched by his travelling observers of the press as much to examine his tactics and style as to record and assess his words. If a pattern of isolation and insulation is established at the outset, it doubtless will create still another public relations problem for the underdog candidate at a time when he can ill-afford any new ones.
Some of the other reporters on the plane felt that this piece was unfair to McGovern. After all, McGovern had led an incredibly open campaign all year long, and Nixon hadn’t even begun to campaign yet. They thought Witcover had overreacted to McGovern’s few days of inaccessibility. But the article served its purpose. It made the McGovern people very upset, and a few days later, McGovern once again became available for questions.
Witcover was reserved with people he did not know well, and he did not talk easily about himself, at least not to me. Then one night in October, he loosened up. After a long day on the road, almost half of the McGovern press corps had adjourned
to a new restaurant called Jimmy’s in New York. Witcover and I were sitting on tall stools at the circular bar. Shirley MacLaine was sitting there too. Not one to let an opportunity for propagandizing slip by, she kept saying things like, “Jules, I
know
you just want to smash Nixon and have George win,” to which Witcover would gently demur.
A white-haried New York Republican party boss was buying drinks for everyone. “Mr. So-and-so will be hurt if you don’t have another,” the bartender kept saying every time he refilled our glasses. After a while Witcover began to tell me the story of his life. The verb that he used most often was “scramble.”
His father had owned a gas station in Union City. Witcover scrambled to make it out of Union City, via the Navy, Columbia College (on the GI Bill), and Columbia Journalism School (supporting himself with odd jobs). He wanted to be a sportswriter, and he became one on the Providence
Journal
But his main ambition was to work for a big paper in New York City. The nearest he could get to New York was the Newark
Star Ledger
, a member of the Newhouse chain. Seeing after a year that he wasn’t going to make it across the river to the city, he took up an offer to work in the Newhouse Washington Bureau. He spent his career at Newhouse struggling to get national political assignments and trying to get a job on a major newspaper. It took him seventeen years.