The Boys on the Bus (38 page)

Just a few weeks before, Ziegler had assured the press that at least 700,000 people had come out to see Nixon in Atlanta. Maybe more. Many reporters printed the figure, or something approaching it. Only Jim Perry of the
National Observer
bothered to check it out. He phoned the Atlanta Public Works Department and found out that each city block was about 400 feet long. He generously estimated that 400 people a block, 5 rows deep, both sides of the street, for 15 blocks, had seen Richard Nixon. That made 60,000 people. Then he threw in another 15,000 people to cover the side streets between the blocks. “So,” he wrote, “in an act of charity I’m willing to say that 75,000 people turned out to welcome Richard Nixon to Atlanta.”

Yet the other reporters on the bus, especially the wire-service men, still took the White House estimates seriously. The word going around the buses that afternoon was that you could trust Captain Keefe; he was an honest estimator. The pack was yapping at full cry.

The motorcade ended in Tarrytown, where the press had dinner at the Hilton Inn. George Embrey was glowing with enthusiasm. “What impressed me,” Embrey told a crony from a Buffalo paper over the roast beef, “was that he got his best reception in that
working-class
section of New Rochelle. I’ll tell you one thing,” he went on, looking straight into his friend’s eyes. “There was no busing-in today. Absolutely nobody was bused in.”

After supper, the press flew in Air Force helicopters to Union-dale, Long Island. The choppers were dark and noisy and it was impossible to work inside them, so the reporters simply sat there, with their backs to the walls, and tried to turn around to look out the portholes. They disembarked in a vast parking lot outside a gigantic white whale of an auditorium called the Nassau Coliseum. Thus far, it had been a normal Nixon trip—meaningless, boring, predictable, slightly grotesque, and hardly worth the $87.50 transportation charge. Suddenly, inside the Coliseum, it turned ugly.

No sooner had the President arrived on the platform in the middle of the Coliseum floor and started to speak, than a small group in the third balcony began to jeer. The rally had been tightly screened; admission was by ticket only and the local GOP organizations had handed out the tickets. Somehow, a few dozen hecklers had got tickets, and now they were way up in the gallery behind Nixon, small figures in the blue fluorescent haze, shouting: “Stop the war!”

They had only been chanting for about a minute when a coalition of cops, men in trench coats, and ordinary spectators began beating them up. They clobbered the hecklers with a merciless series of roundhouse rights, then stomped and kicked the ones who fell down, and finally dragged them off. At the sight of the protesters getting their bones broken, the crowd of 16,000 gave off a sustained, sickening Nuremberg roar.

Nixon turned around, looked up, and turned back with a broad grin on his face. Maybe, as some reporters speculated
later, it was a grin of nervousness, but it was Nixon’s only immediate comment on the brutality. Later in his speech, Nixon had only praise for the cops in the auditorium. “I have seen tonight the blue uniforms of the police,” he said. “Give them the backing and respect they deserve.” He also declared that his Administration had ended “the age of permissiveness.”

Other hecklers continued to jeer at Nixon from the floor. Some were ejected by guards, to great cheers from the crowd. Others were shoved and punched by Nixon sympathizers directly in front of the podium where Nixon was speaking.

The brutality at the rally was the only strikingly newsworthy story of the day. It was a natural lead. Yet many of the reporters shrugged it off. It was as if the barrage of propaganda to which they had been subjected all day had numbed their ability to register horror. Only a couple of reporters, so far as I know, led with the incidents at the Nassau rally. Many newspapers failed even to mention it the next day.

If you were up at 7:05 in the morning the next day, you saw it on the CBS morning news; and you saw it on NBC if you happened to be watching at 8:15. It didn’t make the evening news on any of the networks. If you read the city edition or the late city edition of
The New York Times
, you saw no mention of it. It finally appeared deep in the story in the very last edition, which few people see. Bob Semple said he had phoned in an insert to Frank Lynn’s story about the day. He had dictated it to a tape recorder at the
Times
, but nobody checked the tape until much later that night.

If you read the Washington
Post
, you saw no reference to the incident. Carroll Kilpatrick, the
Post
’s veteran White House man,
^†
didn’t want to talk about it when I first asked him. Later
he relented. “I phoned in an insert from the Coliseum,” he said, “but it must have gotten lost on the way downstairs to the printer. Things like that happen every day. Listen, I hate to think how often things like that happen.”

A young reporter for a large metropolitan daily was so appalled by what he had witnessed that he phoned in a passionately indignant story suggesting similarities between the Administration and the Third Reich. His paper killed it. The story was too one-sided, said the editor. It made Nixon sound too much like Hitler. The Jewish readers would get upset.

The only reporter who managed to lead with the incident and also managed to get it in his paper intact was Curtis Wilkie. His
P.M
. story in the Wilmington
Evening Journal
began:

Having spent most of his life in the Mississippi Delta, Wilkie knew a Wallace rally when he saw one.

Just after the rally ended, Don Fulsom of UPI radio sat down at the press table in the cinder-block lobby of the Coliseum and batted out his lead. “Though admission was by ticket only,” it read in part, “a number of anti-Nixon demonstrators had infiltrated the audience, touching off several disruptions and even a few fist fights.”

Suddenly Fulsom heard a familiar voice over his right shoulder. “You’ve got an obsession with this ‘admission-by-ticket-only’ business don’t you?” said Ron Ziegler. Then Ziegler read the rest of the copy, patted Fulsom on the back, and walked away.

A lot of people were aware that Big Brother was watching that night. Nobody wanted to get that ominous pat on the back.

If the Nixon people’s willingness to have me along on Presidential trips remained a mystery, it came as no surprise when the Agnew people banned me from the Vice President’s plane. They went about this in a typically spiteful way: they lied to me for five weeks before declaring me anathema. A secretary from Random House, a courteous lady with a redoubtable telephone voice, phoned the Vice President’s office twice a week. Each time she was told that the plane was full. Mr. Crouse was fourteenth on the waiting list and there might be some room next week. Keep trying. Once she even got through to Agnew’s press secretary, Victor Gold; he gave her the same excuse.

After this charade had gone on for five weeks, I asked
Bob Semple to intercede. Semple contacted Jim Wooten, who was covering Agnew for the
Times
. Wooten examined the plane’s records and discovered that the plane had never been filled to capacity. Then Wooten confronted Victor Gold and asked him why I was being kept off the plane.

“I don’t want the press to be inhibited,” Gold shouted, for he always spoke as if he were giving orders in a hurricane. “I want the press to cover the campaign! I don’t want the press to worry about being covered while they cover the campaign!”

Here was the number one running dog of the World Champion Press Baiter, claiming that he wished to protect the press. Whether or not Vic Gold was blind to this glaring irony, the incredible fact remained that he was probably totally sincere in his solicitude for the reporters. No one doubted that he would throw himself on a live hand-grenade to protect his boss. Many suspected that he might sacrifice one or two fingers for the sake of his charges, the press.

If Victor Gold had been a character in a Broadway play, he would have been played by Martin Gabel. He was a short man on a short fuse, with a high forehead, a drill instructor’s bearing, and eyes sufficiently full of fire to suggest that smoke would momentarily shoot out his nostrils. He was the most unshakable kind of fanatic—a convert. In his University of Alabama law school days, he had roomed with the man who went on to head the Washington office of the ACLU. He had been a liberal Democrat in the Deep South, but the racism of the Folsoms and Wallaces gradually drove him away from the Democratic party into the arms of the Republicans. By 1964, he was working as assistant press secretary to Barry Goldwater.

At the end of the 1972 campaign, the reporters on the Agnew press plane gave Gold a strait jacket as a going-away present. That was because Gold tended to fly into quasi-psychotic rages at the slightest provocation. Every reporter who traveled with Agnew had at least a dozen Vic Gold stories. Vic screaming horrible threats at cars in the path of the press bus. Vic terrorizing press-bus drivers who fell behind the motorcade. Vic
becoming so deranged he distractedly pounded the assistant press secretary over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Vic in Provo, Utah, sitting in the pool car, furious at the bus drivers behind him:

“Those goddam motherfucking cocksuckers! Those shitheads! Christ, why can’t those fuckers learn to stay in line!” said Gold. Then he glanced at the apple-cheeked Republican volunteer who was sitting at the wheel of the car.

“Say, are you a Mormon?” Gold asked him.

“Yes, I am,” the young man said softly.

Gold looked guilt-stricken. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s the way we Christians talk.”

Gold also liked to wallow in paranoia. On the last day of the campaign, the McGovern and Agnew planes landed simultaneously in the same corner of the Philadelphia airport. While McGovern sped off to a street rally, Agnew went into town to address the Fraternal Order of Police. After the speech, Wooten rode back out to the airport in a convertible with Gold. A suave, good-looking man in his middle thirties and a bit of a bon vivant, Wooten thoroughly enjoyed the ride; it was a beautiful fall day, warm enough to drive with the top down. But Gold, as usual, looked as if he had just drunk hemlock.

“What’s the matter, Vic?” asked Wooten.

“It’s those McGovern people,” said Gold. “You never can tell about those people. There must be some reason why they came in at the same time we did. They’re gonna start something at the airport. They’re gonna make some kind of trouble, I just know it.”

“Oh, come on, Vic,” said Wooten. “They’re no more anxious to start anything than you are. That’s just ridiculous.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” said Gold. “You’re not the press secretary. But I am, and I’m a good one and that’s why I worry about these things.”

Wooten just laughed at Gold, as countless other reporters laughed at him whenever he ranted, cursed, shook his fist, or worked himself up into a right-wing heaven of paranoia. But
they also respected Gold for being a stickler for perfection. He made sure that everyone had a room, that everyone knew where the phones were, that the baggage never got lost, and that the Western Union man was never more than a few feet away.

“Vic is a guy who’s got all the moves about protecting his candidate Ziegler has, except he’s got a little shame, which comes from having some respect for the guy he works for and from wanting to get some respect from the press guys,” said Jules Witcover. “And I think that makes him better than Ziegler, who has a basic contempt for us. Vic cares about what people think of him, so he’ll go that extra mile.”

Gold was the architect of the major innovation in Agnew’s 1972 campaigning—the “all-media conference.” When Agnew began stumping in the middle of September, his primary mission was to explode the notion that the Administration was inaccessible and isolated. So for the first week of campaigning, Agnew gave the press tons of access. “You want access?” the Agnew people seemed to be saying. “We’ll give you so much access you’ll wish you never asked.” They held three or four press conferences in the first two days on the road. Except they weren’t press conferences. The reporters looked at their schedules on the first day and found something called an “all-media conference.” They went to Gold and asked him to define the difference between a press conference and an all-media conference. After a long go-round, the difference finally emerged. At a press conference, the Vice President stood. At an all-media conference,
the Vice President sat down
. That was a big joke on the plane for the first week. But the all-media conference was actually a clever device, invented by a connoisseur of TV logistics.