The Boys on the Bus (3 page)

But things had also begun to change since Fleming’s campaign stories in 1968. The men on the bus had more authority and independence than ever before, and many of them were searching for new ways to report on the freakish, insular existence of the press bus, and for ways to break away from the pack. Very few of them filed any confidential memos to their superiors, or phoned in any inside information, except to suggest that such information might be worked up into a story.

Take, for example, the case of Curtis Wilkie, a young reporter for the Wilmington, Delaware
News-Journal
whom I met for the first time on the morning of June 1. I walked out of the lobby of the Wilshire Hyatt House, past all the black Nauga-hide furniture, and stepped into the first of the two silver buses that were waiting at the curb. It was the kind of bus to which most bus-fanciers would give three stars—the windows were tinted and there was a toilet in the rear, but the seats did not recline. The time was 7:30
A
.
M
. and two-thirds of the seats were already filled with silent and bleary-eyed reporters who looked as
cheerful as a Georgia chain gang on its way to a new roadbed. Most of them were sending out powerful “No Trespassing” vibes. My company was in no great demand, word having gotten around that I was researching an article on the press. Reporters snapped their notebooks shut when I drew near. The night before, Harry Kelly, a tall, hard-eyed Irishman from the Hearst papers, had looked at me over his shoulder and muttered, “Goddam gossip columnist.”

I finally sat down next to a thirtyish dark-haired reporter wearing a Palm Beach suit and a drooping moustache, who looked too hungover to object to my presence. After a long silence, he spoke up in a twangy Southern accent and introduced himself as Curtis Wilkie. He was from Mississippi and had been a senior at Ole Miss in 1964 when General Walker led his famous charge on the administration building. After graduating, Wilkie had put in seven years as a reporter on the Clarksdale, Mississippi
Register
(circ. 7,000), and, as I later found out, had won a slew of journalism prizes. In 1968, he had gone to the Chicago Convention as a member of the “loyalist” Mississippi delegation and had cast his vote for Eugene McCarthy. Soon after that, he won a Congressional fellowship and worked for Walter Mondale in the Senate and John Brademas in the House. In 1971, the Wilmington paper hired him as its main political writer; they got their money’s worth, for he wrote two separate 750-word articles every day, a “hard” news story for the morning
News
and a “soft” feature story for the afternoon
Journal

“Last night, I filed a story unconditionally predicting that the Hump’s gonna get rubbed out in the primary,” he said. Now he was worried that his editors might object to so firm a stand, or that Humphrey, through some terrible accident, might win. As if to reassure himself, Wilkie kept telling funny, mordant stories about the last-ditch hysterics of the Humphrey campaign.

Wilkie had experienced a few bad moments over a Humphrey story once before. During the Pennsylvania primary, Humphrey unwisely decided to hold a student rally at the University of Pennsylvania. The students booed and heckled, calling
Humphrey “Americas Number 2 War Criminal,” until Humphrey, close to tears, was forced to retreat from the stage. Wilkie filed a long story describing the incident and concluding that Humphrey was so unpopular with students that he could no longer speak on a college campus.

There were no TV cameramen at the rally, and of the fifteen reporters who covered the speech, only one besides Wilkie filed a detailed account of the heckling. The next day, when Wilkie went into the office, the managing editor was laughing about the story. “We’ve kind of started wondering,” he teased Wilkie. “Several people have called and said that they didn’t see anything about Humphrey on Channel Six, and they seem to think you made it up. And we’re beginning to wonder ourselves, because none of the wire services mentioned it.” Wilkie began to sweat; he nearly convinced himself that he had grossly exaggerated the incident. Late that afternoon, he came across a piece by Phil Potter, a veteran reporter for the Baltimore
Sun
. Potter’s version of the incident agreed with Wilkie’s. With great relief, Curt clipped the article and showed it to the managing editor.

For months afterward, Wilkie felt slightly qualmish whenever he thought about the Humphrey story. “They sort of put me on notice that somebody was carefully reading my stuff, that time,” he said after the election. “It may have inhibited me, I don’t know.” But it didn’t drive him back to the safety of the pack. He continued to trust his own judgment and write about whatever he himself thought was important. In October, when he was one of the few reporters to file a full account of an ugly Nixon rally where the President smiled at the sight of demonstrators being beaten up, the paper printed his articles without questioning them. “After a while,” he said, “the guys on my desk began to have enough faith in me that they would accept anything I gave them regardless of what their wire services were telling them. They may have wondered a couple of times, but that didn’t prevent them from running it.”

What made this all the more remarkable was that the
News-Journal
was owned by the arch-conservative DuPont family,
^§
and had long been famous for resisting news stories that gave any comfort to liberals. Ben Bagdikian, in his book
The Effete Conspiracy
, had used the
News-Journal
as a case study in biased journalism. According to Bagdikian, one of the owners had once even “complained bitterly to the editors that the paper’s reporter had written a conventional news account of a Democratic rally when he should have turned it into a pro-Republican essay.”
‖
In the late sixties, however, stronger editors had taken over, and in the fall of 1972 they decided not to endorse either Nixon or McGovern, much to the displeasure of the DuPonts. The DuPonts’ dissenting editorial, which exhorted readers to vote for every Republican on the ballot, was relegated to the letters column under the coy heading “A View from the Top.” Wilkie was assigned to write a story about the rift. Interviewing the DuPonts, he asked whether a proposed merger pending before the SEC had anything to do with their endorsement of Nixon. Only a few years before, such impertinence would have been unthinkable.
^a

But one should not make too much of Curt Wilkie and the
News-Journal
. There were still lazy men on the bus, and men
with large families to feed or powerful ambitions to nurture, who feared losing their jobs and thus played it safe by sticking with the pack. And there were still editors whose suspicions of any unusual story made pack journalism look cozy and inviting to their reporters. Campaign journalism is, by definition, pack journalism; to follow a candidate, you must join a pack of other reporters; even the most independent journalist cannot completely escape the pressures of the pack.

Around 8:15
A.M.
on June 1 the buses rolled past the stucco housefronts of lower-middle-class Los Angeles and pulled up in front of a plain brick building that looked like a school. The press trooped down a little alley and into the back of the Grand Ballroom of the Roger Young Center. The scene resembled Bingo Night in a South Dakota parish hall—hundreds of middle-aged people sitting at long rectangular tables. They were watching George McGovern, who was speaking from the stage. The press, at the back of the room, started filling up on free Danish pastry, orange juice and coffee. Automatically, they pulled out their notebooks and wrote something down, even though McGovern was saying nothing new. They leaned sloppily against the wall or slumped in folding chairs.

McGovern ended his speech and the Secret Service men began to wedge him through the crush of ministers and old ladies who wanted to shake his hand. By the time he had made it to the little alley which was the only route of escape from the building, three cameras had set up an ambush. This was the only “photo opportunity,” as it is called, that the TV people would have all morning. Except in dire emergencies, all TV film has to be taken before noon, so that it can be processed and transmitted to New York. Consequently, the TV people are the only reporters who are not asleep on their feet in the morning. Few TV correspondents ever join the wee-hour poker games or drinking. Connie Chung, the pretty Chinese CBS correspondent, occupied the room next to mine at the Hyatt House and she
was always back by midnight, reciting a final sixty-second radio spot into her Sony or absorbing one last press release before getting a good night’s sleep. So here she was this morning, bright and alert, sticking a mike into McGovern’s face and asking him something about black ministers. The print reporters stood around and watched, just in case McGovern should say something interesting. Finally McGovern excused himself and everybody ran for the bus.

The reporters began to wake up as they walked into the chilly Studio 22 at CBS. There was a bank of telephones, hastily hooked up on a large worktable in the middle of the studio, and six or seven reporters made credit card calls to bureau chiefs and home offices. Dick Stout of
Newsweek
found out he had to file a long story and couldn’t go to San Francisco later in the day. Steve Gerstel phoned in his day’s schedule to UPI. Connie Chung dictated a few salient quotes from McGovern’s breakfast speech to CBS Radio.

A loudspeaker announced that the interview was about to begin, so the reporters sat down on the folding chairs that were clustered around a monitor. They didn’t like having to get their news secondhand from TV, but they did enjoy being able to talk back to McGovern without his hearing them. As the program
started, several reporters turned on cassette recorders. A local newscaster led off by accusing McGovern of using a slick media campaign.

“Well, I think the documentary on my life is very well done,” McGovern answered ingenuously. The press roared with laughter. Suddenly the screen of the monitor went blank—the video tape had broken. The press started to grumble.

“Are they gonna change that first question and make it a toughie?” asked Martin Nolan, the Boston
Globe
’s national political reporter. “If not, I’m gonna wait on the bus.” Nolan, a witty man in his middle thirties, had the unshaven, slack-jawed, nuts-to-you-too look of a bartender in a sailors’ café. He grew up in Dorchester, a poor section of Boston, and he asked his first tough political question at the age of twelve. “Sister, how do you
know
Dean Acheson’s a Communist?” he had challenged a reactionary nun in his parochial school, and the reprimand he received hadn’t daunted him from asking wiseacre questions ever since.

The video tape was repaired and the program began again. The interviewer asked McGovern the same first question, but Nolan stayed anyway. Like the others, Nolan had sat through hundreds of press conferences holding in an irrepressible desire to heckle. Now was the big chance and everyone took it.

“Who are your heroes?” the newscaster asked McGovern.

“General Patton!” shouted Jim Naughton of the
Times
.

“Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln,” said McGovern.

“What do you think of the death penalty?” asked the newscaster.

“I’m against the death penalty.” There was a long pause. “That is my judgment,” McGovern said, and lapsed into a heavy, terminal silence. The press laughed at McGovern’s discomfiture.

By the time the interview was over, the press was in a good mood. As they filed back onto the buses, the normal configurations began to form: wire service reporters and TV cameramen in the front, where they could get out fast; small-town daily and
big-city daily reporters in the middle seats, hard at work; McGovern staffers in the rear seats, going over plans and chatting. Dick Stout and Jim Naughton held their tape recorders to their ears, like transistor junkies, and culled the best quotes from the TV interview to write in their notebooks. Lou Dombrowski of the Chicago
Tribune
, who looked like a hulking Maf padrone, typed his Sunday story on the portable Olympia in his lap. The reporters working for morning newspapers would have to begin to write soon, and they were looking over the handouts and their notes for something to write about.

So it went. They went on to another interview in another chilly studio, at NBC. This time the reporters sat in the same studio as McGovern and the interviewer, so there was no laughter, only silent note-taking. After the interview there were phones and typewriters in another room, courtesy of the network. Only a few men used them. Then to Bixby Park for a dull speech to old people and a McGovern-provided box lunch of tiny, rubbery chicken parts. Another filing facility, this one in a dank little dressing room in back of the Bixby Park band shell. While McGovern droned on about senior citizens, about fifteen reporters used the bank of twelve phones that the McGovern press people had ordered Pacific Telephone to install.

At every stop there was a phone bank, but the reporters never rushed for the phones and fought over them as they do in the movies. Most of them worked for morning papers and didn’t have to worry about dictating their stories over the phone until around 6
P
.
M
. (Eastern Standard Time).
^b
Earlier in
the day they just called their editors to map out a story, or called a source to check a fact, or sometimes they called in part of a story, with the first paragraph (the “lead”) to follow at the last moment. There was only one type of reporter who dashed for the phones at almost every stop and called in bulletins about almost everything that happened on the schedule. That was the wire service reporter.