The Boys on the Bus Page 14

  Novak wouldn’t name any of his sources and didn’t seem to want to talk about them. “Evans and I are switch-hitters,” he said. “We write different columns and have different news sources. I use about fifty to a hundred sources regularly, I suppose. I don’t really know how many. God bless ’em, though.”

  Beside Novak, on the front seat, there lay a manila folder, filled with Xeroxes of his columns. On top of that was a small yellow sheet, with his day’s schedule typed on it. It said: “3:30, Pierre Salinger, Doral Hotel.” No matter what Evans wrote about McGovern, the fact still remained that McGovern needed them more than they needed him. So Salinger was very much at home to Novak, and, the next night, Frank Mankiewicz smiled and smiled and was only too glad to show Evans around the McGovern command trailer.

  Later, during the fall campaign, things would change. In September, Novak showed up to follow the campaign for a couple days, and Mankiewicz insisted on banishing him from the Senator’s plane, on which all the reporters from the big papers rode, and putting him on the Zoo Plane, with the foreign reporters and TV technicians. Novak did not take this well. At the first stop, he went up to Mankiewicz and protested vociferously. Mankiewicz was implacable. It was the Zoo Plane or nothing.

  “OK,” said Novak, in his one endearing comment of the campaign, “No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

  Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post

  In 1972, Haynes Johnson seemed to be a man whose time had come, for the genre of which he had long been the acknowledged master—the “mood-of-the-country” piece—had suddenly come into vogue. This sudden increase in articles which analyzed the disposition of the American voter actually sprang from events which had taken place four years before, and its origin had much to do with the turbulent state of American journalism in the late sixties.

  The whole press corps had been jolted by the New Politics in 1968. The McCarthy surge in New Hampshire took them by surprise, and then the madness for Bobby Kennedy. Then they had received another jolt from the opposite direction—for the event that shook them up the most in 1968, that left the final, bitter taste in their mouths, was the Chicago Democratic Convention. The single most influential piece of journalism that year, among the press corps at any rate, was the column written by Joe Kraft a week after Chicago.

  Kraft, a former speech-writer for John Kennedy, was a legendarily aggressive social climber, a member of the set of Georgetown journalists who did much of their legwork on tennis courts and at supper parties. His ambition, combined with a good analytical mind, had won him that most prestigious of showcases, a regular column in the Washington Post; his opinions carried weight in the Capital.

  On September 3, 1968, Joe Kraft wrote a column in which he asked, rhetorically and repentantly, whether the press did not suffer from certain prejudices.

  “The answer, I think, is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans—in Middle America. And the result shows up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the kind of presidential candidates who appeal to them.”

  Kraft went on to argue that Presidential candidates like McCarthy, Kennedy and even Nelson Rockefeller, who campaigned among college kids and blacks, got all the coverage, while Richard Nixon, who made his pitch to ordinary Americans, “was almost entirely out of the news in the weeks before he walked off with the Republican nomination.” Kraft thought that this was because the press was dominated by an “upper-class outlook” which could afford to be indulgent to rebellious Negroes and kids. The press was out of touch with the public.

  “In these circumstances,” Kraft concluded, “it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America.”

  Joe Kraft had put his prestige behind a fear that many journalists felt but had not wanted to express. Right away, a number of press people joined in the mea culpa. Walter Cronkite helped set the tone by giving Dick Daley a nice, respectful interview.

  Within the year, both Time and Newsweek had done cover stories on Middle America. All of this happened before Spiro Agnew had said a single excoriating word against the press.

  The Kraft line of thinking had deep and long-lasting effects on campaign coverage. In early 1968, the press had been flying high—reporting the sensational, irresistible story of McCarthy’s overnight rise; thrilling to Kennedy’s charisma; helping to topple an incumbent President. The press felt its oats when Johnson fell. The bulk of reporters felt that they were powerful as never before, in tune with the country, expressing the feelings of a huge constituency that hated the war. Then, suddenly, Chicago blew up in their faces. Beaten by cops and jeered by delegates, reporters found themselves openly detested as a biased, leftist elite. The violence in Chicago radicalized a few journalists; in Tom Wicker, for instance, it precipitated what can only be described as an identity crisis, and he increasingly became the champion of the young and oppressed. But most of the newsmen were simply shocked and hurt to find out that a majority of Americans thought that the press sucked. They brooded over the wound for three years, along with the editors and network executives. And when they sat down in 1971, around tables in board rooms and city rooms all over New York and Washington, to plan the election coverage, they decided to make “a special effort to understand Middle America.”

  That was the great leap forward in 1972. Almost every sizeable news organization in America made an attempt, however sketchy or erratic, to canvass precincts, interview families, check out local issues, and find out what the voters were thinking. Everyone talked about getting away from the old system of covering elections by sending out a man to ride around isolated on a bus and report that candidate’s speeches. Of course, some reporters had been canvassing for years, but it had not been the official, universal policy of the nation’s press.

  Now The New York Times set up a “grid system,” with men in every primary state to explore local political factors and describe the effect that the candidates were having on the electorate; later the paper commissioned a fifty-state survey of voter preferences, which was written up by Johnny Apple. Most large newspapers and chains sent their national political reporters to canvass a few key precincts for a week at the opening of the fall campaign and a week toward the end; usually the purpose of the canvassing was to answer one or two crucial questions, such as whether traditional blue-collar Democrats were going to abandon the party in November. Newsweek announced a mood-of-the-country series, but soon lost interest and let it peter out; Times attempt was likewise half-hearted. CBS and NBC made occasional forays into key precints. ABC confined its efforts to Columbus, Ohio, which it called the “ABC City”; a special correspondent periodically invaded the privacy of a dozen families there to inquire how they felt about the candidates and the issues.

  Of all the news organizations, only the Washington Post had a grand design. It consisted mainly of a series of articles based on interviews with 443 registered voters in fifty precincts (chosen by precinct-expert Richard Scammon) in the ten largest states. The Post could have serialized a good portion of War and Peace in the space it devoted to this series. Indeed, the series had the Tolstoyan aim of giving a complete picture of the mood of an entire society. The main architect of this project was Haynes Johnson.

  Haynes Johnson was not yet forty, but he was already an institution. In the business, a certain kind of feature that attempted to sum up the national attitude toward specific issues or trends by using interviews with “typical” voters from certain blocs was known as a “Haynes Johnson piece.” Haynes Johnson had written his first Haynes Johnson piece in 1960. Having gone to the University of Missouri School of Journalism and received a master’s degree in American History from the University of Wisconsin, he became a night city editor for the Washington Evening Star at the age of twenty-five, and later a copy editor. But he
wanted to write, so he went to the Star’s editor and sold him on the idea of a series about Black America.

  Johnson spent six months doing door-to-door interviews with blacks all over the country, and he turned out an authoriative series which pleased the editor. So Johnson began to do “Mood of America” pieces for the Star, wandering around the country on his own, refining his technique, finding typical labor districts, typical Jewish neighborhoods, typical conservative small towns, and interviewing people in their homes. It wasn’t a totally new kind of piece. Ernie Pyle had done much the same thing for Scripps-Howard before World War II, except that Pyle had driven around the country in a battered Ford coupe and approached the whole thing much less scientifically.

  During the sixties, Johnson wrote a best seller on the Bay of Pigs invasion and a biography of William Fulbright. He helped cover the ’60, ’64, and ’68 elections, but he did not consider himself a political reporter. He wanted to keep developing his specialty, so in 1969 he moved to the Washington Post, where Ben Bradlee let him fly around the country writing more mood-of-the-country pieces. But more important, he and David Broder began to lay out plans for covering the 1972 campaign. The idea was that the campaign coverage of the future would not center on traveling with the candidates, but on gauging the attitudes of the public. So they set up an elaborate system, with questionnaires, computers, key precincts, and a flying squad of reporters. There would be three surveys—one in 1970, one in 1971 and one in 1972 just before the election.

  “We wanted to chart the mood of the country over a period of years,” said Johnson, “so that when we got into the campaign we would really have something to base conclusions on. We would really have a sense of the major issues and what was moving people.” He was sitting in the Post cubicle at the Republican Convention, a large, athletically built man with a square jaw and black-framed glasses. “Obviously,” he went on, “a problem with the press corps is that there is too much of a tendency to stay in the group, to talk of official sources, to rely on the past, and not to recognize that there are changes that aren’t measured in the polls, that aren’t measured by getting endorsements. We have the most mature, sophisticated electorate in our history, and it’s going to be even more so. And if you don’t understand how people’s attitudes are changing, how complex they are, it seems to me you miss the whole potential in the country. And that’s what the press missed.”

  The most interesting Johnson/Broder series was the second one, a huge eight-part spread which appeared in December 1971. It examined public attitudes toward the two-party system, and the professionals’ feeling about their own parties. It showed that the parties were breaking into fragments, that bosses no longer controlled votes, that patronage was no longer effective, that few people felt party loyalty, that the public felt a deep distrust of politicians and no affection for any of the Democratic contenders, that powerful grass-roots organizations had grown up around issues like ecology and the war, and that the political situation was volatile and the way was open to new leaders. In other words, Johnson and Broder described the situations that would make it possible for McGovern to win the nomination.

  The two reporters used their usual system. They began together, interviewing voters and party pros on tape and filling out questionnaires together. Then they split up for several weeks and worked separately, interviewing from morning until late at night seven nights a week; at the end they finished up together, and then collated the materials back in Washington. The tape recorder was an important tool, because Johnson insisted on reproducing large chunks of transcript in “boxes” alongside the body of the text. “The suspicion of the printed word today is so immense,” said Johnson. “If you do a lengthy series on some controversial topic, you find an enormous outpouring from people who don’t agree with what you’re saying and therefore simply don’t believe that you’ve been there. So we use these transcripts to give the reader a sense of ‘By God, whether or not I like it, that’s what the man said.’ ” Thus they had a ward heeler from New Hampshire tell in his own words why nobody came to the party’s bean dinner any more. And there was a photograph of the ward heeler drinking coffee in a diner, just to nail down the credibility. There was, over the course of eight days, an impressive array of witnesses—reformers, consultants, bosses, local chairmen, all describing the shaky status of the two-party system.

  After finishing the two-party system survey with Broder, Johnson worked with a Post reporter named Nick Kotz on another long series about the American Labor Movement. He did not catch up with the primaries until late in the spring, and when he did, the prevailing mood he found was one of total apathy. “Despite all this collective political sound and fury, or perhaps because of it, this campaign is characterized by public indifference,” he wrote during the California primary. “You cannot travel across California today without being struck by the lack of emotion being generated by the politicians.”

  On the few occasions when he appeared on the press bus, Johnson was not exactly everybody’s favorite reporter. No doubt this was partly because he gave the lie to the fuss that the rest of the press was making over the primaries; he was telling them that the public didn’t care. But many reporters who had known Johnson for years quite sincerely regarded him as a pompous, conceited stuffed shirt. Resentment of Johnson reached a peak on the night of George McGovern’s nomination, when Johnson somehow became the only daily reporter allowed to stay in McGovern’s suite throughout the evening. There was some bitter talk of Johnson’s being an “ass-kisser.”

  While most reporters were impressed with the series Johnson had written with Broder in December 1971, they did not think so highly of the series that came out in October 1972.

  Broder helped to research the October series, but it was written almost entirely by Johnson, and most of the men in the press corps found it interminable and dull. There were long articles on the Labor Vote, the Catholic Vote, the Old Vote, the Youth Vote, and on and on. Many reporters felt that the series simply belabored the obvious—Nixon was not beloved but held a commanding lead nevertheless; America’s young people were not going to vote as a radical monolith; the nation was unhappy and distrustful of politicians. “He tells me what’s happening, but he can’t explain it,” said one national political reporter of the Johnson series. “I don’t know whether the whole series is worth it. It’s a tremendous commitment of money, it’s very expensive to do. It took most of the important guys on their national staff a couple of weeks to do the interviews, and what did they get out of it? A series of blockbusters that nobody’s reading. I can’t get through it. My friends can’t get through it. We all care about that stuff, but I don’t know anybody on the bus who’s reading it all the way through. So if the press isn’t reading it, who the hell is reading it? When that first survey came out in 1970, I thought it was just pseudo-sociology. Then I thought that the survey in 1971 made a real contribution. Now I’ve begun to wonder again.”

  Many reporters felt that Johnson had begun to parody himself and that his pieces were becoming fatuous. On the night George McGovern lost the election, a bunch of half-drunk campaign reporters at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn ripped Haynes Johnson’s election night wrap-up off the wire machine. One of them read it out loud while the others laughed. It seemed to crown the dismal inevitability of the whole thing. “Once every four years,” the piece went, “the American past and present come together. Last night, as always on these occasions, the voters gave their quick, clear and overwhelming verdict on the direction of the American future. It is to be, after all, four more years.”

  “Jesus,” said one of the reporters. “The same Haynes Johnson piece I’ve been reading for three years. I could have written it myself, word for word.”

  There was some jealousy in this, but also some truth. Much of Johnson’s writing in the fall had been long and dull. But it was also true that the country, in the fall of 1972, was in a dull, passive, contrary and confused mood, and to turn such a mood into interesting re
ading was close to impossible. Had the election been a cliff-hanger, Johnson’s pieces might well have been fascinating. At any rate, it was his specialty and he was not about to give it up. It was more expensive and less fun than following a candidate around with the rest of the pack, but it was the only way to draw any useful conclusions from the chaos of an election year. No doubt the Post would remain in the vanguard of “Mood of America” coverage until an exciting election came along to make the technique look appealing. Then the rest of the press would follow.

  * Eighty-five days, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, and White Knight, respectively.

  CHAPTER VI

  The Newsweeklies

  In 1972, Time magazine had 4,250,000 paying readers. Newsweek had 2,625,091.

  Time and Newsweek might have looked alike, read alike, and had the same people on the cover week after week. But there was one crucial difference: 1,624,909 readers. Given that monstrous gap to close, Newsweek ran a relatively lean, we-try-harder, underdog operation. And Time, home free in the circulation race, fairly reeked of extravagance.

  Item: Time threw big parties at both Conventions, with sumptuous buffets and special perks for VIP’s and advertisers. On the first night of the Democratic Convention, Time collected the floor passes from all its correspondents and gave them to big advertisers so that the advertisers could walk around the Convention floor and gawk for a couple of hours.

  Item: Time hired a fleet of fifteen Cadillac limousines that stood ready to whisk Time correspondents and messengers to any point in Miami, including Flamingo Park. (“The Zippies all wanted a ride,” said a correspondent.)

  Item: Time ran its Convention operations out of a sultan’s tent in the Fontainebleau’s Exhibition Hall that made every other newsprint operation look like a hovel. On three sides, the Time office was fenced in by blue muslin curtains, with a grey-uniformed security guard at the entrance flap. (No other publication had thought of that touch, the security guard.) The fourth side of the office was the back wall of the Exhibition Hall, a riot of red whorehouse flock, adorned with an orchestra of plaster cherubs.