The Boys on the Bus Read online

  At any given moment, a dozen correspondents sat in a row, staring right into blue curtains and banging out reams of copy, while a crew of shirt-sleeved editors huddled around a complex of steel desks, making tactical decisions. The lines to the Front (at the Convention Hall) were kept open by a telephone operator in a flowered dress who ran a full-sized switchboard and set off beepers in the pockets of stray editors and correspondents; and by a dozen couriers who sat on a row of chairs behind the switchboard—half of them Time editors’ sons who had reportedly been flown in at company expense. (The New York Times, which ran many more words about the Convention than Time, managed to get along with no switchboard and no couriers.)

  All in all, Time brought 130 people to the Democratic Convention, including 23 photographers who exposed 400 rolls of film in the first three days. Several senior editors were there, but were not often seen outside of the tennis courts and parties. The senior editors wore hotel haircuts, pin-striped suits and horn-rimmed glasses. “You could switch the senior editors with the Board of Directors of the Chase Manhattan Bank,” said a Time staffer, “and nothing would change at either the magazine or the bank.”

  All of the bureau chiefs came to Miami for the week, except for the chief of the Houston Bureau. There just wasn’t enough room for him, so as a consolation prize he was flown to Hyannis to babysit with Ted Kennedy. There was room, however, for most of the twenty-three members of the Washington Bureau, which, as Time’s largest outpost, filled eighty percent of the “Nation” section every week.

  Many of Times best correspondents worked in the Washington Bureau, reporters like Champ Clark, Hays Gorey, Simmons Fentress, and Dean Fischer, all of whom, it was said, could probably have held down front-line positions on The New York Times. Some of them were legends within the Time organization, but to the public at large they were about as well known as engineers at Cape Kennedy. Everybody in the Time office, for instance, knew that Champ Clark was writing an epic-length narrative of the Convention and that every line was uproariously funny. But Clark never saw his narrative, much less his by-line, in print.

  Most correspondents had to live with this frustrating condition, which was sweetened by the fact that they made around $30,000 a year. The correspondents filed about 750,000 words every week, and then the editors took over. The editors worked in the New York office, and their job was to throw away about 700,000 of those words. Then they rewrote about 85 percent of the remaining copy.

  The Washington Bureau put out a little sheet of its own, called “Washington Memo,” which contained some of the gossip and rumors that the correspondents thought unfit to go in the magazine. “Washington Memo” was sent to Time’s New York office and most of the bureaus, but each copy was numbered and copies were not allowed out of the office. The “Washington Memo” was supposed to keep Time editors abreast of backroom happenings in the Capital, but most correspondents refused to give their best stories to the “Memo.” “Some editor will just phone you and try to get you to do a story about some rumor that you put in,” said one correspondent, “and you know it’s true, but you feel bad because you know you can’t ask your source to back you up on it.”

  There were other gripes that the Washington correspondents sometimes voiced, very privately, about the editors of the Nation section.

  “This whole bit about the Eastern Press Establishment has some basis in fact,” said one correspondent. “These six or seven guys who determine the final editorial content of the Nation section all sit around New York most of the time. Occasionally, they try to shake them out of their ivory tower. They bring ’em out. They brought the Nation section, lock, stock and barrel—the editors and the researchers—down to Washington last year.

  “Now they bring ’em down to Miami, the whole crew, and they assign each one of them to a correspondent, kind of like on the buddy system. The correspondents had a conference the other morning before the Nation section got here and one correspondent said, ‘The question I want to ask is about what I would have to call the Helplessness Factor. Are we responsible for picking these people up, taking them around and taking them to the bathroom?’

  “A lot of correspondents just sort of ignored their Nation person, and a lot of the Nation people went off and played tennis. A few of the Nation people did make an honest effort to tag along, find out what was going on, and meet the people they were writing about. But for the most part, it was a kingsize waste of money.”

  The Nation people, in fact, didn’t have much contact with politicians and they didn’t seem to have heard of the first rule of Old-Fashioned Menckenesque Political Journalism—that all political types ought to be regarded as guilty until proven innocent.

  The Nation section’s two-week junket to Washington was a case in point. Each morning, the whole section met to be addressed over breakfast by some Washington notable. On the first morning, said a correspondent who was there, the notable was Chief Justice Warren Burger. When Burger was done with his spiel, the whole table, except for the correspondent, gave Burger a standing ovation. Thinking about it later, the correspondent felt that maybe they had applauded out of respect for the office of Chief Justice. The next morning, however, Ron Ziegler, the former Disneyland ad executive who became Nixon’s press secretary, spoke to the Time editors. They gave Ziegler a standing ovation too.

  On yet another morning, Wilbur Mills was the honored guest. The same correspondent took the opportunity to ask him whether he had lobbied to become Speaker of the House when John McCormack had stepped down. According to an observer, Neil MacNeil, Time’s Congressional correspondent, “went bananas.”

  “How could you ask the chairman that?” MacNeil demanded of the correspondent. “He was very insulted.”

  It was not just the Nation editors from New York who seemed so completely wedded to the establishment. It was also some of the men who had been in the Washington Bureau for a long time like MacNeil or the bureau chief, Hugh Sidey. Sidey was known around the bureau as Hugh Sidestep. He was famous for the weekly pieces he wrote about the Presidency for Life. The pieces were loaded with “mood” and “color,” but they did not have a great deal to say about what was really happening inside the Administration. Some of the reporters in the bureau felt that while Sidey might have had a flair for the form of politics, he never bothered really to study the substance—the content of bills, economic programs, or major statements on issues. One morning in the late spring, for instance, Sidey had come into the bureau upset and grumbling about McGovern’s “confiscatory tax program.” Several correspondents had to explain to him what McGovern’s tax program really was and assure him that the Senator did not intend to confiscate wealth.

  “The meetings they have in the Washington Bureau sound like cabinet meetings,” said a correspondent who had recently departed Time. “The older men are the cabinet members and Sidey is like the President. They sit around and refer to the Administration as ‘we.’ Like once I was in a meeting—it was around the time of the May Day demonstrations—and Sidey asked me, ‘Do you think we can handle them? Do you think we can keep them from disrupting things?’

  “I said, ‘No, I think they’ll succeed.’ And Sidey looked at me as if I were from the Vietcong.”

  Newsweek’s temporary bureau in Miami was just a few feet up the hall from Time’s. Enclosed on all four sides with blue muslin, it was smaller, humbler and quieter than Time’s office. No guard and no switchboard. Just a couple of reporters chatting around the coffee urn, a secretary on the phone, and three or four other reporters pecking at typewriters. Most of the editors were back in New York. But if there was less boondoggling around Newsweek, and less conspicuous waste, its bureaucracy was still very much like Time’s. The correspondents whipped out tons of copy, and the New York editors dumped, trimmed, or rewrote almost all of it.

  “My copy usually ends up looking like a goddam chicken that’s been hit by a fucking truck,”* said John J. Lindsay, a Newsweek Washington correspondent, who was known by his fr
iends as “Real John” to distinguish him from the mayor of New York.

  “You’ve got to be happy if they get your facts right,” said Lindsay. “Since January I don’t think I’ve recognized a damn thing I’ve filed. I just pour everything out of the goddam boot. Otherwise, you get a phone call at three in the morning asking you why you left out that the candidate had his teeth drilled that morning.”

  John Lindsay was a fixture of political journalism, a sensitive and observant man who was deeply dissatisfied with the world and had cultivated a cynical manner to deal with all the hypocrisy that he saw. He was in his late forties, with a thin face and sharp features, and he spoke with the accents of an old Boston ward heeler, for he was one-half Massachusetts Irish. He grew up in a small Massachusetts town and entered politics for a few weeks in his youth, managing a losing campaign for a man who wanted to be state representative from Milford, Mass. “I had a job digging graves at the time, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to vote anybody from the cemetery,” he said. “It was a clear indication that I wasn’t cut out for politics.” So he confined himself to writing about politics. He had been on various papers and he worked for ten years on the Washington Post, but daily journalism frustrated him because he rarely had time to “take that last step and lock in a story.” For this reason, he moved to Newsweek.

  It was the morning after the last night of the Convention. We were in the Fontaine Room of the Fontainebleau Hotel, a blue ballroom decorated with painted statues of busty Marie Antoinette shepherdesses in low-cut bodices. In front of us, the three hundred-odd members of the Democratic National Committee were sitting in gold chairs, waiting for George McGovern, the newly nominated candidate, to come and address them from the stage. Some network crews were hanging around the stage. A couple of dozen newspaper reporters were standing around the back of the room, looking worn out. They had stayed up all through the night, either drinking or writing. Lindsay had filed copy all night but, being an ex-alcoholic, he did not drink. He and I were leaning against a disused bar at the back of the room, hoping McGovern would show up soon. Despite his lack of sleep, Lindsay looked quite sporting in his blue blazer and beige espadrilles, with his horn-rims and greying hair.

  “I can’t write worth anything,” he said with a sad smile, “but I’m a good reporter, I can cut through the bullshit. And there’s a lot of bullshit in this business. You’d almost have to get in on a phone line, or something like that, to get the real story—’cause what goes on up there on the platform isn’t really what’s happening.”

  Without the aid of any phone taps, Lindsay had a pretty good idea of what was happening, and in the next few minutes I got a sample of some of the political perceptions that are presumably cut from his copy. I have never seen anything like them in Newsweek.

  Just then, Lindsay was sighted by one of the ubiquitous political fixers who were plying their trade in Miami.

  “Hi,” said Lindsay. “Who you working for now?”

  “Matty Troy.”

  “Oh, Matty Troy, the liberal Gauleiter!” said Lindsay. A perfect description! Matty Troy was a crazy egomaniac who supported McGovern, drank with Jimmy Breslin, and ran the Democratic Party of Queens with an iron fist—a liberal version of one of the Nazi “Gauleiters” who ran German districts in the thirties.

  Lindsay and the Troy aide began to discuss the McGovern forces, whom they mistrusted. “Give me an old pol like ‘Onions’ Burke,”† said Lindsay. “If he was gonna double-cross you, he would wink while he was shaking your hand. But these guys don’t even give you a tip-off.”

  McGovern suddenly appeared at the entrance of the ballroom, surrounded by aides. As TV cameramen crowded him, he edged his way to the gold-curtained stage, where Lawrence O’Brien, the Democratic Party Chairman, was sitting. O’Brien was being kicked out of his job to make way for Jean Westwood, McGovern’s choice. McGovern reached the podium and acknowledged the applause of the Democratic National Committee. Then he began to sing O’Brien’s praises, saying what a great chairman O’Brien had been.

  “Keep looking for the cloud,” said Lindsay. “They’re gonna take McGovern up on a cloud.”

  “I would like to thank Mr. O’Brien for his wonderful service to the party,” McGovern intoned.

  “Not to mention for saving the nomination for me last week,” Lindsay said out of the corner of his mouth.

  McGovern finally got around to nominating Jean Westwood as the new party chairman. The committee dutifully elected her and she accepted.

  Then McGovern nominated Pierre Salinger, his choice for vice chairman of the party. Salinger was standing underneath one of the sexy shepherdesses. The TV crews trained their lights on him and the cameras whirred. He was obviously thinking over his acceptance speech one last time; everyone expected the committee to vote him in without a peep of protest.

  But suddenly Charles Evers, the black Committeeman from Mississippi, was on his feet nominating another candidate, Basil Patterson, a black from New York.

  “Black power strikes again,” was Lindsay’s comment.

  McGovern looked agitated. He couldn’t oppose a black without looking bad. He leaned toward the microphone and said, “I would like to make a suggestion.”

  “Take a dive, Pierre, take a dive!” said Lindsay, reading McGovern’s mind.

  “I think that either Pierre Salinger or Basil Patterson would be perfectly acceptable to this committee,” said McGovern.

  “I think Pierre just got the signal from George to jump out the window,” said Lindsay.

  Salinger put up his hand and announced that he wanted to address the committee. He walked quickly to the stage and stood beside McGovern at the podium. Looking deflated, he said brusquely that he sensed it was the will of the committee that Basil Patterson be the next vice chairman.

  “He not only sensed it,” piped Lindsay. “He saw how many weren’t standing up!”

  Then McGovern took the microphone to praise Salinger for withdrawing. “I would like to thank Pierre …” McGovern began.

  “For taking that beautiful parachute dive!” Lindsay said, trying not to laugh out loud. He peered over at the side of the ballroom, trying to catch a glimpse of Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart.

  “Boy, did the McGovern boys ever bail out on that one,” he said. “But tomorrow we’ll find out it was a beautiful scheme that Mankiewicz had in his pocket the whole time.”

  McGovern was still droning on, and Lindsay was getting restless. “I’ve had enough of this shit,” he said finally, and went off to file a story on the meeting.

  I looked very carefully in the next week’s Newsweek, but I couldn’t find a word about the Democratic National Committee proceedings.

  * Lindsay later told me that these words referred to his own imperfections as a journalist and were not intended to refer to Newsweek.

  † William “Onions” Burke was once a power in the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

  CHAPTER VII

  Television

  The years since 1968 had been rough ones for TV newsmen. Spiro Agnew had been making it hot for them, ranting about how the newtworks slanted the news and hinting darkly about what the FCC might do to incorrigible news-twisters. The phrase “media event” had entered the language, and become a dirty phrase. At some time or other in 1972, nearly everybody—right-wing editorialists, left academics, Nixon aides, McGovern staffers, and newspaper reporters—accused the networks of distorting reality. Many newspapermen complained that they would soon be relegated to the role of drama critics; they would merely write reviews of the spectacles staged for the benefit of TV crews.

  The TV people were extremely sensitive to all of this hostility, and even they were growing slightly resentful of media events. So in 1972, whenever the setup was too blatantly artificial—like Mayor John Lindsay milking a cow in Wisconsin or putting on a wet-suit to probe the muck of Biscayne Bay for ecological disasters—the networks often shied away or tried to be the first to brand it a “media event
.” In California, when McGovern’s people began handing out free video tapes of McGovern’s speeches to any station that would take them, NBC devoted three and a half conspicuous minutes to a report on McGovern’s use of the media. The NBC people even spent a day filming themselves filming McGovern.

  During one brief period, in the early fall, when McGovern began staging media events, Cassie Mackin, the NBC correspondent, felt downright insulted. McGovern would spend a whole morning hauling the press corps to some farm in the Midwest just so that he could appear against a background of grain silos when he made a statement about the wheat scandal. “This is a Presidential campaign and we don’t need pretty pictures to get on the air,” said Mackin. “Why can’t they just run their campaign and let us take the responsibility of finding something interesting to say about it? It would be fine with me if they did nothing for the media.”

  At the same time, TV people were increasingly prone to admit the limitations of their medium. While NBC still had the gall to take newspaper ads claiming that its news program provided “All You Need to Know,” many TV journalists were more humble. “I don’t think people ought to believe only one news medium,” Walter Cronkite told an interviewer during the Republican Convention. “They ought to read and they ought to go to opinion journals and all the rest of it. I think it’s terribly important that this be taught in the public schools, because otherwise, we’re gonna get to a situation because of economic pressures and other things where television’s all you’ve got left. And that would be disastrous. We can’t cover the news in a half-hour every evening. That’s ridiculous.”

  Others went even further. “A lot of TV reporters are not really reporters at all,” said a CBS correspondent who wished to remain anonymous. “They’ve come up from local radio and TV stations, and they really don’t know much about politics. But all they have to do is run around and dredge up a minute and a half of thought. It makes no difference if they’re ignoramuses because there’s no space on the program anyway.”