The Boys on the Bus Page 11

  “I will now be an old fart for one minute,” Broder said cheerfully, “and tell you that the most distressing thing about covering politics is that the guy who was absolutely right, whose wisdom was almost breathtaking one election year—you go back to that same man for wisdom some other year and he’ll be as dumb as dogshit. That’s why it’s not a science. You can say, ‘In 1968, I learned the following key lessons, which I’m going to write down in the front of my notebook and look at them twice a day all through 1972’—and you’ll get absolutely deceived by doing that.”

  Which was true; anyone who tried to apply old lessons to 1972 would have looked hopelessly bad. Broder had tried to avoid the trap of fighting the last war, but he had gone astray nonetheless in 1971 and early ’72. He had devoted a lot of space to Muskie (always with the caveat that it was nonsense to consider the contest locked up), he had spent no less than ten days researching and writing an exhaustive article on the Birch Bayh machine, and he had generally slighted the candidacy of George McGovern. We kept asking Broder where he had gone wrong, and whether it had been possible for even the wisest of men to foresee the situation this year.

  “The one thing I’ll say in my defense,” said Broder, “is that I repeatedly wrote, ‘Front runner is a meaningless term.’ There’s a lawyer named Milt Gwirtzman who works for McGovern, and I keep cribbing his laws of politics, and his first law of Presidential politics is that nothing that happens before the first Presidential primary really has any relevance at all. So those three years are a very artificial environment.

  “They’re campaigning for us and putting on parades for us in the press, they’re putting on shows for other politicians; it has very little to do with the voters. A good case could be made that we shouldn’t say anything about them at all, except that’s an impossible rule to follow in this town because the appetite for politics is continuous. Also you want some sense of the evolution of these guys as personalities. But no matter how you play it, you’re going to end up with a rather low yield of significant information in an odd-numbered year.

  “I was very proud of that piece I did on how Birch Bayh, who seemed to have no following at all in the country, had nonetheless assembled this marvelous machine. Turns out I should have been looking at McGovern—bad judgment on my part. But I’m damned if I can tell you even in retrospect how I should have known at that point.”

  We nodded and asked Broder how any of us was supposed to know a year ahead that, for instance, a twenty-six-year-old kid named Gene Pokorny was already nailing down Wisconsin for McGovern. Did the press miss the McGovern story, or was it even there to get?

  “Oh, yeah,” said Broder, “I knew that Pokorny was there and I knew he was making lists, but he was one of twelve guys in twelve different Presidential camps who was busy, busy, busy making lists. As it turned out, his lists were made up of people who honest-to-god when the time came were ready to go to work, and the others weren’t.

  “That’s why this all may be unknowable in advance. I went back over my notes from New Hampshire, and I had all this stuff about the Muskie organization in the fall of 1971. They had this very clear organization: they would have two thousand volunteers signed up by December 15, and they would do a sample run-through on this date and so on, and all of it was beautiful on paper. It was not until you came to the first of February and it was evident by even the most simple kind of check that no canvassing had been done for Muskie, that you began to be able to say, ‘This is a facade.’ ”

  Which was pretty nearly what Broder had said in a piece in late February. Broder and several other Post reporters had gone from door to door in several New Hampshire precincts, conducting a private canvass. They found far fewer Muskie voters than they had expected. The resulting article was the first to question Muskie’s strength, and it had an enormous impact on the other reporters in New Hampshire, who immediately began to doubt the myth of the Muskie juggernaut. The article also infuriated the Muskie people, who were not yet admitting to themselves that their organization was a paper tiger. On the morning the piece hit the stands, Broder received three irate phone calls from Muskie people in Washington before he even got out of bed.

  “I think,” said Broder, “that it would have been useful for me to get out of Washington more. The Pokorny thing for instance. I ran into Pokorny at a picnic with a bunch of liberal friends of mine in Austin, Texas—I was there with Harold Hughes on one of his exploratory swings. And there was this strange Gene Pokorny in May of 1971, and he had flown in that day, and he and some of these crazy Travis County liberals were busy plotting about precinct caucuses a year from then. But what never crossed my mind was that their people really had a commitment to do some work and that George McGovern had a potential of developing a constituency beyond those five or ten thousand people who were obviously involved.”

  Misjudging McGovern was one mistake that Broder continued to make, which was why he was willing to put big money on Humphrey in California. He still hadn’t adjusted to the new political situation. He figured that Humphrey would have his first big Jewish vote in California, his first big black vote there, plus a big last-ditch effort by labor. And he was right about all that (with the possible exception of labor). “Now, where I was wrong,” he said ruefully, as he continued to nurse his Coke, “and where I have been consistently wrong all year, was in sort of underestimating the ability of the McGovern people to maximize McGovern’s assets.”

  His wrong-headedness on this point often smacked of righteousness. He repeatedly indicated in his writing that he was afraid the McGovern delegates wouldn’t be housebroken. It was the “Breaking of the President” piece all over again. In his column of June 20, he cited several examples of McGovern delegates misbehaving at state caucuses. (Except for pushing through a resolution sanctioning homosexual marriage, the delegates didn’t do anything Richard Daley hadn’t been doing for forty years.) Broder wrote:

  “As word of these and similar incidents in recent weeks has filtered back to Washington, a shudder of apprehension has gone through Democratic ranks. For the first time, there is beginning to be widespread concern that the Miami Beach convention hall may prove to be the disaster for the Democrats that the San Francisco Cow Palace was for the GOP in 1964.” Of course, it turned out to be the best-behaved Convention in history.

  Broder was looking at his watch more and more frequently in the dim barroom light. Thompson was trying to catch the waitress’s eye to order two more beers for himself. Our clothes were beginning to stick to the vinyl upholstery in the heat. So, while Thompson finally tore out of his seat to head off the waitress, I finished up the interview by asking Broder what changes he would like to see made in political journalism.

  First, he said, the press was still using very primitive means to “gauge and describe the dynamics of public opinion.” He liked the fact that the Times and the Post had both hired pollsters to help them out in 1972. Later in that year, he and Haynes Johnson, another Post reporter, would travel across America interviewing voters to see how they felt about the candidates and the major issues.

  At the same time, Broder was not going out into the field simply to “make a special effort to understand Middle America,” as Joe Kraft had advised the press to do in a famous article in 1968. “I disagreed strongly with that piece of Kraft’s and do so now,” he said. “I think what he did in that piece was to manage to suggest that somehow the limits of what we did as reporters ought to be defined by what was acceptable to the society in which we were operating, and that we ought to be very careful about our role. Well, if you begin to play that game, then you’re in serious trouble. I think you define your role as a reporter in terms of what you understand the role of a reporter to be. And if that incurs a degree of popular wrath, then that’s just a consequence of it.

  “But I think that in 1968, we did begin to do what we should have been doing for years, which is to talk about what we think the role of the press is. And that’s something that we still have bar
ely begun to do. The basic point that we have never gotten across is that the Presidential campaign is not the property of the two candidates. It ought to belong, in some real sense, to the public. It’s the only change every four years when they ought to be able to get their questions answered, and get the kind of commitments that they’re interested in from these candidates.

  “The second thing that interests me,” Broder went on, “is the suggestion that you’re getting now from some social scientists and psychohistorians that the press ought to look much more seriously at its role as the chronicler of critical incidents that shape the personality of these men who are running for President, instead of just sort of doing canned feature stories about these guys. But I don’t want to go too far in that, because I’m mortally afraid of unleashing a bunch of newspapermen who would fancy themselves as amateur psychiatrists.” (Later, in the summer of 1972, the Post would assign a reporter named Bill Greider to cover George McGovern, and he would provide the most sensitive running portrait of McGovern’s personality of any journalist on the plane.)

  Broder was down to the dregs of his Coke.

  “The third area in which I think we still do kind of a poor job is institutional reporting,” he said. “The story always tends to be this-guy-versus-that-guy, instead of the development and change of an institution. That the story may not be personal combat but the development and change of an institution is a notion that’s very hard to get into the heads of newspaper people. Because they want to know ‘What’s the lead?’ But you could look at the Democratic party, the majority party in the country, and what has happened to it—and not just Fred-Harris-out, Larry-O’Brien-in, or McGovern-versus-Muskie. And maybe McGovern wouldn’t have surprised us if we’d done that.”

  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.

  CHAPTER V

  More Heavies

  These four men also deserve special attention:

  Jules Witcover of the Los Angeles 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.