The Boys on the Bus Read online

  Praise for The Boys on the Bus

  “All the secrets … the definitive story.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Crouse takes a big bite out of the hand that feeds news to America—a mean, funny, absolutely honest book!”

  —Hunter S. Thompson

  “Superbly accurate … a titillating insider’s exposé … a most significant contemporary work about our information machines.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “More than any other book I know of, The Boys on the Bus shows in cumulative anecdote and detail, how the campaign press does actually work.… An extremely insightful and provocative book.”

  —New York magazine

  “If you are puzzled about the prism through which you view events, if you have wondered what reporters are like in person, what are their strengths and their limitations, then this is your book.”

  —David Halberstam

  “[The Boys on the Bus] does more to reveal the rivalry, competition, different styles used in the press than anything I have seen.… Fascinating brief biographies of the chief political reporters.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “If, as I do, you love reporters one day and despair of them the next, you will love this book. But everyone who reads it will learn much that is valuable and fascinating about politics, psychology, and the press.”

  —George McGovern

  “Provokes, perplexes, illuminates and amuses. If there is a press baiter on your Christmas list, please buy him this book.”

  —Newsweek

  “Wit, a bouncy style, meticulous observation… The Boys on the Bus has a brace of virtues.”

  —The New Republic

  “Extraordinary … [Crouse] is a remarkably shrewd observer.”

  —Commonweal

  2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1972, 1973 by Timothy Crouse

  Foreword copyright © 2003 by Hunter S. Thompson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is based upon an article that originally appeared in Rolling Stone, issue #119, October 12, 1972.

  This book was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc. in 1973.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  ROWLAND EVANS, JR., AND ROBERT NOVAK: Excerpts from five newsletters, copyright © 1973 by the Evans-Novak Political Report Company; excerpt from one column, copyright © Publishers-Hall Syndicate. Reprinted by permission of Rowland Evans, Jr., and Robert Novak.

  INTERNATIONAL FAMOUS AGENCY: Excerpt from “Will Ambition Spoil St. George?,” by Richard Reeves, from New York, May 8, 1972. Reprinted by permission of International Famous Agency.

  The New York Times: Excerpts from “The McGovern Image,” by James M. Naughton, July 31, 1972, and “Palm Springs Idyll: Agnew and His Pals,” by James Wooten, October 10, 1972. Copyright © 1972 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission of The New York Times.

  Newsweek: Excerpt from “McGovern’s Politics of Righteousness,” by Peter Goldman and Richard Stout (Newsweek, November 6, 1972), copyright © 1972 by Newsweek, Inc.; excerpt from “My Turn: Richard Dougherty ‘The Sneaky Bumbler’ ” (Newsweek, January 8, 1973), copyright © 1973 by Newsweek, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Newsweek.

  HENRY REGNERY COMPANY AND STERLING LORD AGENCY: Excerpt from pages 132–133 of Running: A Nixon-McGovern Campaign Journal, by Bob Greene, published by Henry Regnery Company (Chicago), copyright © 1973 by Bob Greene. Rights outside of North America are controlled by the Sterling Lord Agency. Reprinted by permission of the Regnery Company and the Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.

  THE STERLING LORD AGENCY, INC.: Excerpt from “Nixon,” by Nicholas von Hoffman (New American Review #11), copyright © 1971 by Nicholas von Hoffman. Reprinted by permission of the Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.

  The Washington Post: Excerpts from “The President’s Shield,” by David S. Broder, October 1, 1972; “McGovern’s Emotions Are Showing,” by William Greider, September 10, 1972; “The McGovern Course,” by William Greider, August 1, 1972. All articles copyright © 1972 by the Washington Post.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data is available.

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-4983-9

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  FOREWORD

  Hunter S. Thompson

  This book holds a very special place in my heart for at least three excellent reasons, personal, professional and otherwise. I guess you could say I have a crush on it, a primitive sort of love that feels almost like parenthood and borders, perhaps, on lust.… Which is true, for good or ill, because I watched The Boys on the Bus develop from start to finish, from a brilliant idea to the elegant and legendary political classic that it is today, particularly among smart journalists and professional politics junkies who do little else in their lives except cover Presidential campaigns and major political stories out of Washington. They are big-time people in big-time jobs who like getting Presidents elected (OR DEFEATED) and massively influence public opinion.

  Tim Crouse and I are close friends now, but it was not always that way. He was a total stranger when I first laid eyes on him at that fateful Rolling Stone editorial conference in the summer of 1971, which seemed like a routine laid-back stag picnic on a secluded mountainside in Big Sur, California, for no particular reason except getting to know each other and pondering the editorial content of the magazine for the coming year. It looked like a free lunch. Ho ho ho.

  I was on my way to Saigon at the time, eager to see and feel and know the ugly war that had been such a gigantic part of my life for so many years and for so many violent confrontations with police in what seemed like every city in the nation between Miami Beach and Boston to the streets of L.A. and the lunatic outdoor Rock Festivals in the hills around Portland and Seattle. It was a wild time and those of us who grew up in it were developing into a wild and confrontational breed.

  It was a tough crowd to break into. We had already toppled one President of the United States, and we would soon be toppling another. Indeed. We had been to the Mountain more than once, and if we hadn’t entirely prevailed, we were nowhere near defeated. We were warriors, and we were not afraid of the White House or anything they could do to us. We were champions, and the President was not.

  This was the heady world that young Tim Crouse wandered into when he arrived in Big Sur that weekend. The way I recall it, he was still a student at Harvard, and his only experience in professional journalism had been as a low-paid low-ranking stringer writing occasional music stories out of Harvard and Cambridge and the Boston Naval Yard, where rock & roll was just taking root … a punk kid who knew absolutely nothing about Politics, though he did have a knack for the music scene, and a sense of humor.… All right, all right, if you want to be a stickler for accuracy—and Crouse always was, the bastard—he was actually almost three years out of Harvard, and had gone to Morocco with the Peace Corps and then made his bones on a couple of Boston newspapers and joined the staff of Rolling Stone. All of which may be true, but he still looked pretty damn green to me—a grizzled veteran of two wartime Presidential campaigns.

  In any case, we live in different times, by different standards, and we have different hopes for our children. They will learn to be afraid
of Everything, which is pitiful. Life in the Fourth Reich will not be easy, for most of them. They will ride fast motorcycles and have a lot of sex, and that will be just about it.

  The Boys on the Bus is about what it was like to scramble in the bowels of a U.S.A. Presidential Campaign, and what kind of people you were working with—or against—or were afraid of, or despised, or sometimes just stuck with, overnight, by accident, against your will, and often with ugly results.

  I knew these people, and they are not what we think they are. They are vicious. I knew them, and I know them now. We are family, in the closer sense of that word, and I am proud to be a part of it (pause, then massive cheering).

  We were not ghoulish people, but they called us ghouls anyway. We were good people, but they gave us a nasty job.

  I ran the National Affairs desk in those years mainly because nobody else on the RS national staff—except Crouse, as it turned out—wanted to do politics. They were Music journalists, they said. They were hippies, in the main—heavy stoners, acid freaks, naked people—and they wanted nothing to do with Politics. It had nothing to do with their lives. They were Flower Children, and they would soon take over the world. It was inevitable.

  Exactly how they were going to take over the world without knowing, or wanting to know, anything about politics sounded like a pipe dream to me, but I didn’t mind dreaming it from time to time, and I also lived right in the middle of it for four years, and I definitely liked the neighborhood. These were my people—along with the Hell’s Angels, Ken Kesey, Bill Graham and the Fillmore Auditorium, the Golden Gate Bridge, Big Sur and all those who have ever lived there.

  The list is long, and I love it. San Francisco was clearly the best place in the world to be living in those years—1960–70, to be specific—and my memories of life in that purest of all tornadoes still cause me to babble and jabber and dance.

  But that is another story, I think, and the only reason I mention it is that I have always kind of wondered about what it must have been like for Tim Crouse when he was thrust so mercilessly from Harvard Yard, as it were, straight into what was literally and historically the hot rolling center of the 1972 Presidential campaign.

  On second thought, the pages that you are about to read give the precocious, witty and, as time has proved, durable answer to that question.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Woody Creek, Colorado

  May 2003

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE Covering the Primaries and Conventions

  I On the Bus

  II Coming to Power

  III The Muskie Three and Other Campaign Reporters

  IV The Heavies

  V More Heavies

  VI The Newsweeklies

  VII Television

  PART TWO Covering Nixon’s Campaign

  VIII Nixon Before the White House

  IX The Old Squeeze Play

  X Divided They Fall

  XI Nixon’s Campaign

  XII Agnew’s Campaign

  XIII Watergate

  PART THREE Covering McGovern’s Campaign

  XIV Chafing at the Rules

  XV The Black Hills

  XVI Calling It from 30,000 Feet

  XVII The Last Days

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  COVERING

  THE PRIMARIES

  AND

  CONVENTIONS

  CHAPTER I

  On the Bus

  June 1—five days before the California primary. A grey dawn was fighting its way through the orange curtains in the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel in Los Angeles, where George McGovern was encamped with his wife, his staff, and the press assigned to cover his snowballing campaign.

  While reporters still snored like Hessians in a hundred beds throughout the hotel, the McGovern munchkins were at work, plying the halls, slipping the long legal-sized handouts through the cracks under the door of each room. According to one of these handouts, the Baptist Ministers’ Union of Oakland had decided after “prayerful and careful deliberation” to endorse Senator McGovern. And there was a detailed profile of Alameda County (“… agricultural products include sweet corn, cucumbers, and lettuce”), across which the press would be dragged today—or was it tomorrow? Finally, there was the mimeographed schedule, the orders of the day.

  At 6:45 the phone on the bed table rang, and a sweet, chipper voice announced: “Good Morning, Mr. Crouse. It’s six forty-five. The press bus leaves in forty-five minutes from the front of the hotel.” She was up there in Room 819, the Press Suite, calling up the dozens of names on the press manifest, awaking the agents of every great newspaper, wire service and network not only of America but of the world. In response to her calls, she was getting a shocking series of startled grunts, snarls and obscenities.

  The media heavies were rolling over, stumbling to the bathroom, and tripping over the handouts. Stooping to pick up the schedule, they read: “8:00–8:15, Arrive Roger Young Center, Breakfast with Ministers.” Suddenly, desperately, they thought: “Maybe I can pick McGovern up in Burbank at nine fifty-five and sleep for another hour.” Then, probably at almost the same instant, several score minds flashed the same guilty thought: “But maybe he will get shot at the ministers’ breakfast,” and then each mind branched off into its own private nightmare recollections of the correspondent who was taking a piss at Laurel when they shot Wallace, of the ABC cameraman who couldn’t get his Bolex to start as Bremer emptied his revolver. A hundred hands groped for the toothbrush.

  It was lonely on these early mornings and often excruciatingly painful to tear oneself away from a brief, sodden spell of sleep. More painful for some than others. The press was consuming two hundred dollars a night worth of free cheap booze up there in the Press Suite, and some were consuming the lion’s share. Last night it had taken six reporters to subdue a prominent radio correspondent who kept upsetting the portable bar, knocking bottles and ice on the floor. The radioman had the resiliency of a battered Timex—each time he was put to bed, he would reappear to cause yet more bedlam.

  And yet, at 7:15 Mr. Timex was there for the baggage call, milling in the hall outside the Press Suite with fifty-odd reporters. The first glance at all these fellow sufferers was deeply reassuring—they all felt the same pressures you felt, their problems were your problems. Together, they seemed to have the cohesiveness of an ant colony, but when you examined the scene more closely, each reporter appeared to be jitterbugging around in quest of the answer that would quell some private anxiety.

  They were three deep at the main table in the Press Suite, badgering the McGovern people for a variety of assurances. “Will I have a room in San Francisco tonight?” “Are you sure I’m booked on the whistle-stop train?” “Have you seen my partner?”

  The feverish atmosphere was halfway between a high school bus trip to Washington and a gambler’s jet junket to Las Vegas, where small-time Mafiosi were lured into betting away their restaurants. There was giddy camaraderie mixed with fear and low-grade hysteria. To file a story late, or to make one glaring factual error, was to chance losing everything—one’s job, one’s expense account, one’s drinking buddies, one’s mad-dash existence, and the methedrine buzz that comes from knowing stories that the public would not know for hours and secrets that the public would never know. Therefore reporters channeled their gambling instincts into late-night poker games and private bets on the outcome of the elections. When it came to writing a story, they were as cautious as diamond-cutters.

  It being Thursday, many reporters were knotting their stomachs over their Sunday pieces, which had to be filed that afternoon at the latest. They were inhaling their cigarettes with more of a vengeance, and patting themselves more distractedly to make sure they had their pens and notebooks. In the hall, a Secret Service agent was dispensing press tags for the bagg
age, along with string and scissors to attach them. From time to time, in the best Baden-Powell tradition, he courteously stepped forward to assist a drink-palsied journalist in the process of threading a tag.

  The reporters often consulted their watches or asked for the time of departure. Among this crew, there was one great phobia—the fear of getting left behind. Fresh troops had arrived today from the Humphrey Bus, which was the Russian Front of the California primary, and they had come bearing tales of horror. The Humphrey Bus had left half the press corps at the Biltmore Hotel on Tuesday night; in Santa Barbara, the bus had deserted Richard Bergholz of the Los Angeles Times, and it had twice stranded George Shelton, the UPI man.

  “Jesus, am I glad I’m off the Humphrey Bus,” said one reporter, as he siphoned some coffee out of the McGovern samovar and helped himself to a McGovern sweet roll. “Shelton asked Humphrey’s press officer, Hackel, if there was time to file. Hackel said, ‘Sure, the candidate’s gonna mingle and shake some hands.’ Well, old Hubie couldn’t find but six hands to shake, so they got in the bus and took off and left the poor bastard in a phone booth right in the middle of Watts.”

  To the men whom duty had called to slog along at the side of the Hump, the switch to the McGovern Bus brought miraculous relief. “You gotta go see the Hump’s pressroom, just to see what disaster looks like,” a reporter urged me. The Humphrey pressroom, a bunker-like affair in the bowels of the Beverly Hilton, contained three tables covered with white tablecloths, no typewriters, no chairs, no bar, no food, one phone (with outside lines available only to registered guests), and no reporters. The McGovern press suite, on the other hand, contained twelve typewriters, eight phones, a Xerox Telecopier, a free bar, free cigarettes, free munchies, and a skeleton crew of three staffers. It was not only Rumor Central, but also a miniature road version of Thomas Cook and Son. As the new arrivals to the McGovern Bus quickly found out, the McGovern staff ran the kind of guided tour that people pay great sums of money to get carted around on. They booked reservations on planes, trains and hotels; gave and received messages; and handled Secret Service accreditation with a fierce, Teutonic efficiency. And handed out reams of free information. On any given day, the table in the middle of the Press Suite was laden with at least a dozen fat piles of handouts, and the door was papered with pool reports.*