The Boys on the Bus Read online

  But Witcover sometimes stepped back and examined the press with the fascination of an anthropologist who has just discovered a pristine tribe. Like the songs. The reporters enjoyed writing satirical songs about the candidates. Late at night in some hotel bar, or shivering in the cold, waiting for the candidate to come out of some closed meeting, Witcover and his friends would write these awful lyrics to popular tunes. The lyrics did not read well in print, but Witcover liked to put them in his books—as if they were artifacts, clues to what the press was really thinking. “It’s a funny thing,” he said one day during the California primary, “I was remarking to some of my colleagues just the other day that we privately had Muskie’s weaknesses pretty well identified back in January, but we didn’t write them hard enough. We kind of gave him the benefit of the doubt. But we wrote songs—satires, parodies—just for our own amusement, and most of the ingredients of those songs were the difficulties that Muskie was having about his temper and his inability to make decisions quickly.”

  Witcover was not a professional press critic, an A. J. Liebling; he was simply an “activist” reporter. He showed concern for the press’s problems in many ways. It was Witcover who had helped Jack Germond to found Political Writers for a Democratic Society. In 1970, he and another reporter had put together the “Washington Hotel Meeting,” which was the press’s first and last organized attempt to deal with the insularity of the White House. He was the only political reporter in town who contributed regularly to the Columbia Journalism Review—a rather conservative publication, but nevertheless the country’s major organ of serious press criticism. In his three books (on Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Spiro Agnew)* he discussed at length the ways in which the press had affected the careers of the three politicians. In his book on Nixon, Witcover blasted reporters, including himself, for not having written more about Nixon’s use of media and his relentless evasion of hard questions from the press during the 1968 campaign.

  Even in some of his articles for the Los Angeles Times, Witcover broke the old convention that the press was not supposed to be seen or heard in campaign coverage. He treated the press as an active force in the campaign, and was quick to sound the alarm when George McGovern tried briefly to shut out reporters. The piece, headlined “McGovern’s Campaign Tactics Resemble Nixon’s in 1968,” ran in early September. It read in part:

  On landing in Portland, as local newsmen attempted to question McGovern about reports of disorganization in his campaign, Press Secretary Richard Dougherty broke in and ended the questions.

  He led McGovern back to the steps of the plane where the candidate waited for the cameras and then read his prepared statement on the Olympics tragedy. When McGovern finished, Dougherty interposed: “No questions, no questions please” and McGovern was hustled off. A motorcade then went straight to a senior citizens’ center in suburban Gresham. En route, reporters in the press bus were given strict instructions by a local McGovern aide to go directly into the center’s cafeteria, where most of the elderly were waiting, and to “stand in one place” against the walls.

  He informed the reporters that the average age of the residents was 74 and thus there was “the possibility of a heart attack” if the newsmen created too much stir.

  In these first days, McGovern granted some interviews, but only to local radio and TV reporters, with a few representatives of the travelling press permitted to sit in and act as pool reporters for the rest. In this first week’s schedule, through next Saturday, there is no provision for any press conference.

  All this is reminiscent of the 1968 Nixon campaign, in which nearly all public events were geared for television, where the writing press was given extremely limited access to the candidate.…

  In this shakedown swing, McGovern is being watched by his travelling observers of the press as much to examine his tactics and style as to record and assess his words. If a pattern of isolation and insulation is established at the outset, it doubtless will create still another public relations problem for the underdog candidate at a time when he can ill-afford any new ones.

  Some of the other reporters on the plane felt that this piece was unfair to McGovern. After all, McGovern had led an incredibly open campaign all year long, and Nixon hadn’t even begun to campaign yet. They thought Witcover had overreacted to McGovern’s few days of inaccessibility. But the article served its purpose. It made the McGovern people very upset, and a few days later, McGovern once again became available for questions.

  Witcover was reserved with people he did not know well, and he did not talk easily about himself, at least not to me. Then one night in October, he loosened up. After a long day on the road, almost half of the McGovern press corps had adjourned to a new restaurant called Jimmy’s in New York. Witcover and I were sitting on tall stools at the circular bar. Shirley MacLaine was sitting there too. Not one to let an opportunity for propagandizing slip by, she kept saying things like, “Jules, I know you just want to smash Nixon and have George win,” to which Witcover would gently demur.

  A white-haried New York Republican party boss was buying drinks for everyone. “Mr. So-and-so will be hurt if you don’t have another,” the bartender kept saying every time he refilled our glasses. After a while Witcover began to tell me the story of his life. The verb that he used most often was “scramble.”

  His father had owned a gas station in Union City. Witcover scrambled to make it out of Union City, via the Navy, Columbia College (on the GI Bill), and Columbia Journalism School (supporting himself with odd jobs). He wanted to be a sportswriter, and he became one on the Providence Journal But his main ambition was to work for a big paper in New York City. The nearest he could get to New York was the Newark Star Ledger, a member of the Newhouse chain. Seeing after a year that he wasn’t going to make it across the river to the city, he took up an offer to work in the Newhouse Washington Bureau. He spent his career at Newhouse struggling to get national political assignments and trying to get a job on a major newspaper. It took him seventeen years.

  While he worked a lot of beats he didn’t like—such as writing about the New York delegation in Congress for a couple of Newhouse papers in Syracuse, or covering the Pentagon—he kept scrambling for political assignments. In the summer of 1966, he hustled himself an assignment to travel with Nixon. It proved to be Witcover’s big break. One afternoon in Roanoke, Nixon gave him a long interview, which he turned into a piece for the Saturday Evening Post. It was the first article to treat Nixon as a serious contender for the 1968 Republican nomination, and it later made Witcover look very good.

  After 1966 he began writing daily political pieces for Newhouse. He also wrote more magazine articles, to gain visibility, and he finished his first book, a finely detailed account of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. The book made his reputation. A year later, the Los Angeles Times hired him as an assistant news editor. The paper had no national political correspondent. Within a year, he talked the bureau chief into creating the position for him. Witcover was delighted; he finally had the job he wanted on a major paper.

  The Los Angeles Times was supposed to be among the best papers in America. It was often ranked third, after The New York Times and the Washington Post. It paid excellent salaries. But it was also a greedy paper which devoted far more space to advertising than to news. As a result the Los Angeles Times was rich; in 1972 it made about 42 million dollars after taxes. But the reporters and editors and bureau chiefs had to fight to get their stories into the tiny news-hole.

  Witcover arrived while a complicated internal political battle was going on at the paper. One faction wanted to use the limited news space for more local coverage, and wanted the newspaper to be run tightly by the Los Angeles office. This faction was led by Frank Haven, the managing editor.

  The other faction wanted the paper to emphasize national news and wanted less interference by the Los Angeles office. This faction included David Kraslow, the Washington Bureau chief, who had hired Witcover.

  Ha
ven’s faction slowly won out. Haven was a Pasadena WASP, very West Coast, who knew little about national politics. Haven kept asking the Washington Bureau for frivolous stories, or demanding major articles to be written in impossibly short amounts of time, or killing Washington articles to make room for Los Angeles news. Kraslow constantly fought these unrealistic moves. In April 1972, Kraslow was replaced by a Haven protégé, a bland company man named John Lawrence, who had no experience covering politics or government. It was a staggering blow to the people in the Washington Bureau. They feared that Haven, with his narrow, conservative Southern California mentality, would continue to push serious political news out of the paper. According to his friends, Witcover was deeply shaken by the Kraslow firing, but not so shaken that he seriously considered leaving the paper. That decision was brought on by other indignities.

  Several weeks after the Kraslow incident, Witcover arrived in California to cover the primary and was shocked to learn that he had been locked out. He was abruptly informed that two political reporters from the metropolitan staff—Richard Bergholz and Carl Greenberg—would cover the candidates. Haven wanted it this way. So Witcover knocked around for two weeks, chasing after a couple of secondary stories and writing two long analysis pieces that never got into the paper. The rest of the press corps were amazed at the stupidity of the Los Angeles Times. It was true that such jurisdictional disputes between metro and national staffs were common, even on The New York Times; these disputes were not unlike the feuding between state troopers and the FBI over a big case. But this was something special. For once, the whole press corps was camped out in California and had almost no choice but to read the Los Angeles Times (which was nearly impossible to find back in Washington). But, instead of exploiting this great opportunity to show off its star national political man, the Times gagged Witcover and gave the job to two reporters whom the press corps considered competent but hardly extraordinary. The whole fiasco made the paper look idiotic and drove Witcover further up the wall.

  Witcover became increasingly frustrated as the campaign went on. The paper seemed less and less willing to make space for national news. But what pained Witcover the most was that the paper refused to allow him to analyze and interpret the news. He couldn’t understand this. It wasn’t as if he were some kind of wild-eyed advocacy journalist. In fact, he deplored the rise of advocacy journalism. He thought that too many of the young journalists who worked for the underground press were undisciplined, lazy, and irresponsible; they went into a story with a fixed point of view which prevented them from digging and looking at all the facts: why find out anything that would contradict their prejudgment of the story? Witcover felt very strongly that the establishment papers had to combat this trend, and that the only way to compete with advocacy journalism was to provide interesting, compelling, responsible analysis based on a thorough review of the facts. If the establishment papers went back to the cut-and-dried formula stories of the forties, Witcover thought, they would bore everybody to death.

  So Witcover kept writing meticulously fair analysis stories, and the Times kept balking. The biggest showdown came at the end of September over a story on Nixon’s non-campaign. As the weeks went by and Nixon kept refusing to face the public, Witcover knew that he would have to write a story about it, pointing out the injustice of a one-candidate campaign. After all, he had slapped McGovern for trying to avoid newsmen. But he kept putting the article off, waiting for a news “hook” that would allow him to write that story in a way that wouldn’t offend the Times. Finally, at the end of September, McGovern solved the problem for him. Addressing a conference of UPI editors, McGovern accused the press of failing to meet its responsibilities by not forcing Nixon to answer questions on the issues and by not pointing out that Nixon was refusing to face reporters, while he, McGovern, was running an open campaign. It was up to the press, said McGovern, to restore some balance to the campaign.

  So Witcover began his story by quoting McGovern’s accusations. While McGovern’s argument was self-serving, wrote Witcover, it did point up a serious problem: how could the press provide balanced coverage when only one candidate was campaigning? Of course, Witcover went on, the President did have some legitimate reasons for not campaigning—for instance, the risk of assassination, the fact that Congress was still in session.

  But then Witcover pointed out the dangers of a lopsided campaign. The public needed a chance to see both candidates questioned on the issues. When only one man campaigned, the whole system was undermined.

  Finally, Witcover concluded that although the President might have real reasons for not going out on the stump, he could still hold a press conference in the safety of the White House and answer political questions, something the President had refused to do at the few news conferences he had held earlier in the year.

  Witcover, who was by now paranoid about the Times’ attitude toward analysis stories, showed the Nixon story to several of his friends on the bus and asked them if he was going “too far.” All of them found the story very mild. Walter Mears said that with a few minor changes in form, he could have put the story on the AP wire with no difficulty. Bill Greider of the Washington Post could not imagine why Witcover was so worried.

  The editors in Los Angeles killed the story. They told Witcover that it didn’t “come off” and that it was an “opinion” story. Witcover couldn’t believe it. He felt that the story was a classic example of the difference between analysis and opinion. He had marshaled all the facts, and drawn his conclusion solely from them. But the editors couldn’t see it. Witcover, who was covering McGovern in New York, had long arguments with them over Long Distance. The solution was simple, they told him. All he had to do was get other people to make the same points and draw the same conclusions and then write the article in their words. Yes, said Witcover, but that was reporting, not analysis. It wouldn’t have the same impact as an analysis article. The editors asked him again to do it over. He refused. Didn’t they see? The piece might be no good in two or three days. The piece was important now.

  The very next day, Nixon held a press conference at which he answered political questions. One of the main reasons for Nixon’s decision to hold a press conference was an analysis piece by David Broder—similar to Witcover’s but much tougher—which had appeared four days before. Witcover was now even more miserable, because he knew that both he and the Times would have looked very good if his piece had run on the eve of the press conference.

  After the fight over the Nixon story, Witcover knew that he would have to leave the Los Angeles Times. “I can’t stand this much longer,” he told his friends. “I’m going crazy.” During the Republican Convention, Witcover had been approached with a job offer from the Washington Post. He told them that he felt he had a commitment to stay at the Times through the end of the campaign; he had helped to plan the campaign coverage, after all, and there were still a few stories he hoped to do. But when the Post made him an offer shortly after the election, he accepted.

  On January 1, 1973, he joined the Post’s national staff. His friends knew exactly why he had made the move. “There wasn’t a rat’s ass of difference in the money,” one of them said, “but the Post is a reporters’ paper. They give you freedom there, they give you leeway, and Jules would have been a fool not to move.”

  But the editors of the Los Angeles Times never quite understood why they had lost Jules Witcover.

  Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, of the Publishers Hall Syndicate and the Chicago Sun-Times

  From their office a block from the White House, Rowland Evans, Jr., and Robert D. Novak wrote what was probably the best-read column in America—five times a week it ran in nearly three hundred newspapers here and abroad. Unlike most columnists, they didn’t write “think pieces.” They wrote “dope pieces,” inside information on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Of course, it was close to impossible to dig up sufficient inside dope to make five significant pieces a week. So they were part-time hoke artists. The
y would take a small incident (which they and they alone had discovered by prodigious digging) and they would blow it up into a campaign crisis. Or they would inflate a small remark into a trend. They claimed to be straight reporters with no ax to grind. Which was ridiculous. Their columns were consistently distorted by their conservative bias.

  Evans and Novak made an odd couple. “Rowley” Evans was the gregarious, flesh-pressing member of the team—a smooth, well-connected aristocrat from Philadelphia’s Main Line who still talked with a slight case of prep school drawl. A Yale classmate of Mayor John Lindsay’s, he was small and lean and still looked like an Ivy Leaguer in his crisp, pin-striped shirts and conservative suits. “For the last fifteen years, Rowley has looked forty-two and just blond enough,” said a veteran Washington reporter. “And he’s still a Dewey Republican.”

  He fought with the Marines in World War II, started in journalism as a fifteen-dollar-a-week copy boy on the Philadelphia Bulletin, and got to know the Washington scene by covering labor and the Senate for the AP. In 1956, he moved to the Herald-Tribune’s Washington Bureau. His career took off four years later when Jack Kennedy became President. Evans, Charles Bartlett, and a few other preppy reporters were old buddies of Kennedy’s, neighbors of his in Georgetown when he was in the Senate, and suddenly they were in the center of things. Their people were running the government. They knew everyone at the White House on a first-name basis. Suddenly Charlie Bartlett of the Chattanooga Times had a syndicated column, and Jock Whitney, the Tribune’s publisher, was offering Evans a column too. Evans realized that he couldn’t handle a five-day-a-week column by himself, so he invited Novak to be his partner.