The Boys on the Bus (24 page)

“The thing with television,” Roger Mudd said later, “is that everybody’s a high-priced communicator and nobody can really communicate. You know, it’s a hung-up, inarticulate bunch of people. Even when we put things in memos we can’t seem to get through to each other.”

As much as any Convention in the electronic age, the 1972 Democratic Convention went its own way, in defiance of the dictates of television. The McGovern people’s South Carolina victory depended on a lack of coverage rather than on any manipulation of the medium. And the McGovern people allowed the long, inane Vice Presidential nominations to push McGovern’s acceptance speech out of the prime-time hours. The Democrats had a real, spontaneous Convention, with real rifts, boredom, chaos, and chicanery. The network reporters had to struggle to keep up with the happenings. They missed a lot, but they gave a fairly accurate picture of the drama and tedium of the Convention.

At least, the Democrats gave them a show. The Republicans gave them a perfectly scripted TV Convention, and it was as dull as a three-day-long treasurer’s report.

“You were lucky to get on the air twice a night,” Roger Mudd summed it up, “and even then you felt ashamed to go on with such junk. You know, everybody has their vanity, and you want to get on the air, and you want to show people that you’re still working. I was not proud of my work at the Republican Convention, but I’ve told myself that there really wasn’t that much for a reporter to do down there if he was a television man and trapped on the floor. It was
arranged
so there wasn’t much to do. You were a prisoner on that floor and every time you got going on something they’d kill the house lights and roll the film so you couldn’t broadcast anyhow.”

The most interesting story of the Republican Convention took place well off camera. On the second afternoon, a messenger from the Republican National Committee’s press office dropped off a sheaf of press releases in the “in” box of the BBC. The BBC was working out of a tiny pasteboard cubicle which was crammed with tables and equipment and was decorated with several gas masks hung on the wall in anticipation of Zippie demonstrations.

The office was being run by the BBC’s chief U.S. correspondent, a wiry, forty-nine-year-old jockey-sized man named Charles Wheeler. When Wheeler looked through the papers in the box that afternoon, he came across one unbelievable treasure, a minute-by-minute script of the Convention. The script simply confirmed what everybody already knew, that the Convention was a totally stage-managed coronation of Richard Nixon. But it confirmed it with incredibly damning detail.

The script instructed the speakers when to pause, nod, and accept “spontaneous” cheers. It stipulated that at a certain point, a demonstration would interrupt the convention secretary in midsentence. And at 10:33, according to the script, the President would be nominated and there would be a “ten-minute spontaneous demonstration with balloons.”

Wheeler was still examining this document when three new
messengers showed up to demand that he give it back. Wheeler told them that he could hardly consider doing such a thing. The messengers stalked off to fetch the sergeant-at-arms, but they came back instead with a lady from the Republican National Committee press center named Kit Wisdom. She was thin as a blade, had a very sharp nose and spiky dyed hair. She did not argue for long with Wheeler. She simply grabbed the script. Wheeler grabbed it back. Kit Wisdom pulled it out of his hand. Wheeler pried it away from her and pitched it across a couple of tables to a young radio correspondent named Christopher Drake, who might have played the Albert Finney part in an English movie. Kit Wisdom ran around the tables and reached for the script, but Drake poled her off with a straight right arm. “Naughty, naughty, naughty,” he said. Finally, she walked away, close to tears.

Wheeler went on the air and told the British people about the script and the scuffle. He was the first reporter to discover the script and the only one to have to fight for it. The Republicans later realized that other copies had been sent out by mistake but despaired of trying to hunt them down. Copies soon fell into the hands of network correspondents, and all of the networks reported on it. ABC gave it good play on its evening news. CBS and NBC did very brief reports on it from the floor of the Convention Hall. None of the networks bothered to mention that the Republicans had tried frantically to retrieve the first missing copy, nor did they mention Charles Wheeler’s valiant defense.

That night, I went to the NBC central control booth to watch the NBC executives directing the coverage of the nomination of Richard Nixon. Since the Democratic Convention, phone calls had been made, differences had been smoothed over, and Bud Rukeyser was now willing to cooperate with
Rolling Stone
, or at least with me. So I was led into the NBC complex, which consisted of a dozen or so Winnebagos connected by carpeted bridges. In the center of these was the small wood-paneled control room. At the back of the room were two booths with
sliding glass panels—one for Julian Goodman, the president of NBC, who had the power to interrupt the proceedings at any moment via a red phone and overrule a decision; and the other, occupied by several executives from Gulf, which was sponsoring the NBC Convention coverage.

In the middle of the room, Reuven Frank, the president of NBC News, and George Murray, the executive producer, were seated side by side at a long slim desk that was covered with telephones—blue phones to Chancellor and Brinkley, the red phone to Goodman, beige phones to everywhere else. In the greylit darkness, they were peering at a wall that contained fourteen TV screens—screens for ABC, CBS, and PBS; a screen for the pool camera that covered the podium for all the networks; screens that showed what some of the NBC cameras were doing both inside and outside the hall; and in the middle, two big screens, one showing the actual broadcast and the other, marked Preset, showing whoever was on deck.

Reuven Frank, an intense man with prematurely white hair and a scholarly face, was making comments in a low voice. Murray, with a truckdriver’s physique and a fringe of black hair around a balding pate, did all the shouting. Murray was barking commands toward a door on his right that led to the trailer containing all the hookups to the cameras inside the Convention Hall. Somewhere in there, a director named Tony was looking at another set of screens and telling all the cameramen in the hall what to do.

It was about eleven o’clock (the Republican script was running late); the roll call was about to end. Gerald Ford was about to announce that Nixon had been nominated. The delegates were about to go wild in a ten-minute spontaneous demonstration and 20,000 red, white, and blue balloons were about to drop from nets in the flies of the Convention Hall.

“Watch the balloons up there,” Murray yelled at Tony. The balloons showed up on the Preset screen. The control room was growing tense. From inside the adjacent trailer, Tony could be heard shouting into a microphone, directing his engineers and
cameramen. He referred to the cameramen by number.

“Five, hold five! Hold three. Hold four!”

Suddenly the balloon drop commenced.

“Here they come! Here they come!” shouted Murray. His eyes were glued to the main screen, and he was very excited.

“Go! Start the zooms, Tony!” Murray yelled, getting even louder. “In and out, in and out! Yo-yo! Yo-yo!”

Yo-yo was part of the technical jargon. It meant to zoom in and out very fast. Balloons were dancing all over the screen. It looked like New Year’s Eve in Valhalla.

“Switch, switch,” Murray screamed. “Go, Tony! Now! Four, five, seven, three!”

The screen jumped with sudden cuts from one delegation to another. There was a giddy collage of laughing faces, banners, standards, balloons, more faces, people dancing in the aisle. Tony was cutting so fast from one camera to another that the screen seemed to whirl.

“That’s it, Tony!” Murray lashed him on. “Beautiful! Cut like a maniac! Come on! Faster, faster! No more yo-yo, just cut. One, two, one, two—get the beat, Tony! That’s it.”

The pandemonium went on for several minutes. Finally, it was over and Murray slumped back in his leather swivel chair, exhausted. Congratulations were exchanged. Murray looked happily done-in, like a virtuoso who has just left the stage after playing a tricky concerto.

Over in the CBS newsroom, they were furious. Everyone there was bitching that NBC had been “editorializing” by making the demonstration look more exciting than it actually was. It was a niggling thing to say, but CBS was right. The demonstration had been a stage-managed bore. The whole Convention was a bore. So George Murray had hoked it up. But he didn’t look like a man bent on distorting reality. He had obviously played around with the cameras on the balloon extravaganza to have a little fun. And he had had the time of his life. He had got off on all the shouting and the flashing images. He and the other producers out there in the control room were
grown men playing with one of the most amusing electric trains ever built.

Across town, comfortably settled in a large white stucco house in a posh section of Miami Beach, was a very different operation called Top Value Television. TVTV, as they liked to be known, was a collective of twenty-eight young cable-TV reporters who had got press passes to the Conventions, and who had rented the house from a French landlady who did not object to their long hair. Using inexpensive videotape equipment, they made an hour-long documentary about each of the Conventions at a total cost of $25,000—or roughly the cost of a couple of minutes air time on one of the networks. The money had come partly from cable TV stations and partly from private philanthropists. The two documentaries were shown on cable stations across the country, getting an excellent review from the television columnist of
The New York Times
. They were extraordinarily intimate portraits of the Convention and, surprisingly, they reflected no particular ideology. The first tape, on the Democratic Convention, showed Willie Brown, the slick black McGovern staffer from California, telling his delegation how to vote on the South Carolina challenge and explaining the whole strategy; it showed the making of the challenge that unseated Mayor Daley; it had Cassie Mackin talking about the job of being a floor person and declaring ecstatically, “There’s nothing to it, there’s nothing to this a woman couldn’t have done a long time ago.” The tape of the Republican Convention included pep talks from Ronald Reagan, an interview with an embarrassed Eddie Cox, scenes with Vietnam vets, with Paul McCloskey, and with the Nixon Youth preparing for one of their “spontaneous” rallies.

At times, the tapes were blurry, jiggly, and patently nonprofessional. But they gave a robust whiff of the Conventions, and had a caught-by-surprise, off-camera feeling that the networks could not and probably would not want to approach. The
most striking thing about the tapes was the absence of narration. Except for a few handwritten titles, the pictures and sounds of the Conventions spoke entirely for themselves; watching a narratorless news broadcast was a strangely exhausting and disturbing experience. There was no easy gloss to take the sting out of what was happening on the screen.

The leader of the TVTV collective was a twenty-nine-year-old dropout from
Time
magazine named Michael Shamberg. When I arrived at the stucco house one afternoon during the Republican Convention, Shamberg was reclining on a sofa, while random activity went on around him. Upstairs, people were viewing and editing new tape. A barefoot girl came in and cried that she had inadvertently erased the best part of the Walter Cronkite footage. Outside by the swimming pool, where azaleas bloomed, a young man was filling balloons from a blue tank of laughing gas and passing them around for his friends to inhale. Inside, the living room was cluttered with cameras, Sony Porta-paks, tape, wires, cables, newspapers and large hand-lettered signs and assignment sheets. One of the signs said:

Dressed in a loose green T-shirt and gold corduroys, Shamberg looked like a model kibbutznik. He was handsome, lithe, had long black hair and spoke in a sleepy suburban drawl. Shamberg had written a book called
Guerrilla TV
and he believed that cable was the wave of the future. The networks, with their economic dependence on mass audiences and mass advertising, would eventually go the way of the mass magazines like
Life
, he thought. And cable TV—local, decentralized, appealing to small audiences and specialized tastes—would gradually take over. This might not happen until Shamberg was as old as Walter Cronkite, but he was in no hurry. He was simply happy that TVTV’s first major project was turning out so well. He liked the network people. They had been very open and cooperative with the TVTV people. It was just that Shamberg believed in a different style of television.

“Look at the economy of production in broadcast TV, with that expensive equipment and unions and shit,” he said. “They
have
to produce that stuff. But around here, we’re talking about little Sonys that cost only 1,400 dollars and tape that costs ten dollars for thirty minutes and that you can reuse.

“The networks have never understood that the expensive equipment they have dictates a style, which is what’s pissing people off. They have to force behavior. When they’re on live, or even when they’re filming, they have to have something happening when the camera’s on. Everything they do costs so much that they can’t afford to be patient. That’s why they have correspondents who are always talking to give you the illusion that something’s happening. They can’t wait and really pick up on what’s happening.

“We never do that. We just like to hang out. It’s more of a print notion. Like, when you do a story, you probably don’t do formal interviews as much as you hang out. We’re trying to do the same thing.