The Boys on the Bus Read online

  As I headed toward the Press Gate of the Convention Hall to begin the tedious business of scrounging for a floor pass, I spotted a friend of mine, a professional political fixer whom I will call Paddy O’Hustle. Paddy had come to the Convention to troubleshoot for three separate clients: John Tunney, Gov. John Gilligan of Ohio, and George McGovern.

  “Hey, Paddy,” I said. “Can you get me a floor pass?”

  “Maybe I can,” he said solemnly. “Do you know anyone at NBC?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know Cassie Mackin.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll give you a delegate’s pass if you can do me a favor.”

  “Sure,” I said, desperate for a pass.

  “You go out there and tell her that Ted Kennedy’s supposed to make a statement at eleven, but she can find out about Kennedy sooner if she talks to John Tunney. ’Cause Tunney’s Ted’s best friend, see, and he knows exactly what Ted’s gonna say. And this way, I get Tunney some air time. But for chrissake, don’t tell her that.”

  “OK,” I said, grabbing the pass.

  “You think she’ll do it?” he shouted after me.

  “Yeah,” I shouted over my shoulder. “I think so.”

  I had no idea whether Cassie would do it. She was a smart, pretty, thirtyish ex-Hearst reporter who, having been at NBC for only a year and a half, had landed a job that many male correspondents had coveted for fifteen years. She was a “floor person” at the Convention, an assignment that can put rockets on a career. She had developed an iron self-confidence and a touchy professional pride; she bridled at any suggestion that NBC had made her a floor correspondent as a sop to Women’s Lib. “Five years ago, they’d have said I was sleeping with the right people,” she would snap.

  I had seen her the night before, crisscrossing the floor in search of interviewees, and later she had stood alone at the foot of the rostrum, sagging with exhaustion. “I’m so sick of it at this point,” she said. “There’s no one out there left to talk to.” She had developed a waitresslike memory which juggled profiles like orders. She knew the names and salient features of about three hundred county chairmen, delegates, and campaign staffers, and she knew the first questions to ask each of them if an interview should materialize. That night, she had interviewed Kenneth Gibson, the black mayor of Newark; Ted Van Dyk, the McGovern staffer; Joe Duffey, the would-be-Senator from Connecticut; and Dick Gregory, the war protestor, among dozens of others. In most cases, she herself decided whom to buttonhole and what to ask. Sometimes a voice from the control booth would come through her grey plastic headset to instruct her to ask a certain question. “Reuven Frank, the president of NBC News, came on the headset while I was talking to a kid from Virginia,” she said. “He said, ‘It’s the Harris Proposal he’s talking about,’ so I asked the kid about that. In fairness to me, that’s the only time it happened.”

  But I couldn’t sight Cassie tonight. Armed with my delegate’s pass, I elbowed my way through the noisy, hypertense crush of delegates. The only way to make speedy progress through the mob was to yell “Hot coffee!” but so many people were used to the trick that it no longer worked. Celebrities were standing in little pools of charisma. I shoved through delegates who were fighting to snap pictures of Art Buchwald and John Lindsay smoking fat cigars, of Warren Beatty, Germaine Greer …

  Over by the Texas delegation, Garrick Utley stood out like the Eiffel Tower. His face was lifted toward the rafters, as if in prayer, and his lips were moving. “Jesus,” I thought. “The pressure really gets to some of these guys.” Then I realized that Utley was talking to one of the NBC telephoto cameras that was perched in the gridwork. One of the reasons that every small-town mayor, fashion model, Jaycee and publicity hound in America will kill to get onto the floor is that, once you have arrived, there is no way to avoid getting on TV. The eyes of the networks are constantly scanning the floor, like the cameras that scrutinize shoplifters at Macy’s. If you stand around for a few minutes you will inevitably become part of the background for an interview, or part of an interview.

  Finally, I caught a glimpse of Cassie’s blond head and pushed my way to the back of the floor where she was standing with her “floor manager” getting ready to question some delegate. A floor manager is a portable bouncer; when the interview starts, his job is to put out his arms like a tightrope walker and keep passers-by from blocking the camera’s view.

  “Listen, Cassie,” I said, jingling the thirty pieces of silver in my pocket. “I got a hot tip. Ted’s supposed to go on at eleven, but John Tunney can tell you what he’s gonna say. You could probably get a scoop.”

  “Oh, that sounds good,” she said enthusiastically. “I have to do this thing, and then I’ll look for him.”

  “Great,” I said. “He’s right over there in the California delegation. He’s tall, you can’t miss him.”

  “Thanks a lot for telling me,” said Cassie.

  “Glad to help,” I said.

  About an hour later, Paddy O’Hustle came barreling toward me, grinning wildly.

  “Did Cassie ever get to Tunney?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “but don’t worry. I went up to Doug Kiker [also of NBC] and I said, ‘Doug, was it you or Cassie Mackin that was interested in seeing Senator Tunney about Kennedy’s decision?’ Kiker said, ‘It was me!’ and ran off to find Tunney. Then I went up to Roger Mudd [of CBS] and I said, ‘Roger, was it you or John Hart that was asking to see Tunney …’ and Roger said, ‘Must have been me!’ Roger got Tunney, too. So in the last hour, I’ve had Tunney on all three networks and I’ve got him in The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe for tomorrow. I’d call that a good night’s work.”

  Ted Kennedy never had any intention of appearing on television that night, since he had nothing to tell the press. According to [More] magazine, a group of bored reporters had asked Dick Drayne, Kennedy’s press secretary, if he would join them at a Hyannisport “fish house” at 11 P.M. “When he accepted,” [More] reported, “an overzealous UPI reporter bashed out a bulletin saying Drayne had called a press conference.”

  The floor reporters were fueled by a mixture of adrenalin and dogged competitiveness. They had to get to the big stories before the other networks did. One had to compete with the other floor people from one’s own network for the jangled attention of the executive producer in the control booth. Yet the floor people stayed remarkably cool and civilized. There was nothing to match the scene in 1964 when Frank Reynolds of ABC had tried to grab Bull Connor away from a CBS producer who was setting up an interview. The CBS producer had punched out Reynolds.

  There were a few problems at CBS. One CBS correspondent complained that they had “Walter to Walter coverage.” The difficulty, said the correspondent, was that nobody dared tell Walter to shut up. It wasn’t really Cronkite’s fault. In the midst of the turmoil of the 1968 Convention, some CBS executive had sent Cronkite a note advising him that he was using the word “erosion” too much. Cronkite sent back a note which read, “I QUIT.” Now everybody was afraid of offending him.

  “When Walter keeps talking and you can’t get your story on the air, it’s terrible,” said the correspondent. “It’s not like on a newspaper. If you’re a newspaper reporter and some editor kills your story, you get pissed off, sure. But if you’re a TV reporter, it’s different. Your face is attached to the story. They’re not just rejecting some disembodied piece of copy, they’re rejecting you. So you get horribly angry. Roger Mudd sounded like he was going to quit a couple of times. At the Republican Convention, Mike Wallace quit because they didn’t put him on the air when he had cornered Maurice Stans. But that was nothing new. He had quit three times the day before and three times just that afternoon. We all quit all the time.”

  And in spite of the enormous staffs and elaborate preparations—or perhaps because of them—things still went wrong at the networks. On the first night of the Democratic Convention, CBS fell on its face by announcing that McGovern had suffered a defeat on
the South Carolina challenge—which was, of course, a major tactical victory for the McGovern forces. CBS later undertook an investigation to find out the reasons for the failure. The results of the investigation remained top secret, but the main reason was simply that CBS had had a bad night.

  Roger Mudd, a knowledgeable political reporter by any standards, was in the South Carolina section but did not know what was happening. Later, he ruefully admitted that he simply had not done his homework. Mike Wallace, who kept asking the wrong questions of Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart, did not know either. Neither did Cronkite. All of the floor reporters were supposed to have been briefed by Marty Plissner, CBS’s full-time political editor. But Plissner had been too busy preparing delegate counts. David Schoumacher, who was covering McGovern Headquarters at the Doral Hotel, walked into the pressroom there and saw a bunch of newspaper reporters laughing at Cronkite. He managed to get on the air and say that the McGovern people seemed happy with the way the vote had gone. Hearing Schoumacher’s report in his earphone, Roger Mudd finally caught on. Offcamera, he got Gov. Pat Lucey, a McGovern man, to confirm his suspicion that the McGovern people had thrown the South Carolina vote on purpose. He called this information into the CBS control booth, but it got lost in the gigantic, electronic maw, and Cronkite did not straighten out the story for another couple of hours.

  “The thing with television,” Roger Mudd said later, “is that everybody’s a high-priced communicator and nobody can really communicate. You know, it’s a hung-up, inarticulate bunch of people. Even when we put things in memos we can’t seem to get through to each other.”

  As much as any Convention in the electronic age, the 1972 Democratic Convention went its own way, in defiance of the dictates of television. The McGovern people’s South Carolina victory depended on a lack of coverage rather than on any manipulation of the medium. And the McGovern people allowed the long, inane Vice Presidential nominations to push McGovern’s acceptance speech out of the prime-time hours. The Democrats had a real, spontaneous Convention, with real rifts, boredom, chaos, and chicanery. The network reporters had to struggle to keep up with the happenings. They missed a lot, but they gave a fairly accurate picture of the drama and tedium of the Convention.

  At least, the Democrats gave them a show. The Republicans gave them a perfectly scripted TV Convention, and it was as dull as a three-day-long treasurer’s report.

  “You were lucky to get on the air twice a night,” Roger Mudd summed it up, “and even then you felt ashamed to go on with such junk. You know, everybody has their vanity, and you want to get on the air, and you want to show people that you’re still working. I was not proud of my work at the Republican Convention, but I’ve told myself that there really wasn’t that much for a reporter to do down there if he was a television man and trapped on the floor. It was arranged so there wasn’t much to do. You were a prisoner on that floor and every time you got going on something they’d kill the house lights and roll the film so you couldn’t broadcast anyhow.”

  The most interesting story of the Republican Convention took place well off camera. On the second afternoon, a messenger from the Republican National Committee’s press office dropped off a sheaf of press releases in the “in” box of the BBC. The BBC was working out of a tiny pasteboard cubicle which was crammed with tables and equipment and was decorated with several gas masks hung on the wall in anticipation of Zippie demonstrations.

  The office was being run by the BBC’s chief U.S. correspondent, a wiry, forty-nine-year-old jockey-sized man named Charles Wheeler. When Wheeler looked through the papers in the box that afternoon, he came across one unbelievable treasure, a minute-by-minute script of the Convention. The script simply confirmed what everybody already knew, that the Convention was a totally stage-managed coronation of Richard Nixon. But it confirmed it with incredibly damning detail.

  The script instructed the speakers when to pause, nod, and accept “spontaneous” cheers. It stipulated that at a certain point, a demonstration would interrupt the convention secretary in midsentence. And at 10:33, according to the script, the President would be nominated and there would be a “ten-minute spontaneous demonstration with balloons.”

  Wheeler was still examining this document when three new messengers showed up to demand that he give it back. Wheeler told them that he could hardly consider doing such a thing. The messengers stalked off to fetch the sergeant-at-arms, but they came back instead with a lady from the Republican National Committee press center named Kit Wisdom. She was thin as a blade, had a very sharp nose and spiky dyed hair. She did not argue for long with Wheeler. She simply grabbed the script. Wheeler grabbed it back. Kit Wisdom pulled it out of his hand. Wheeler pried it away from her and pitched it across a couple of tables to a young radio correspondent named Christopher Drake, who might have played the Albert Finney part in an English movie. Kit Wisdom ran around the tables and reached for the script, but Drake poled her off with a straight right arm. “Naughty, naughty, naughty,” he said. Finally, she walked away, close to tears.

  Wheeler went on the air and told the British people about the script and the scuffle. He was the first reporter to discover the script and the only one to have to fight for it. The Republicans later realized that other copies had been sent out by mistake but despaired of trying to hunt them down. Copies soon fell into the hands of network correspondents, and all of the networks reported on it. ABC gave it good play on its evening news. CBS and NBC did very brief reports on it from the floor of the Convention Hall. None of the networks bothered to mention that the Republicans had tried frantically to retrieve the first missing copy, nor did they mention Charles Wheeler’s valiant defense.

  That night, I went to the NBC central control booth to watch the NBC executives directing the coverage of the nomination of Richard Nixon. Since the Democratic Convention, phone calls had been made, differences had been smoothed over, and Bud Rukeyser was now willing to cooperate with Rolling Stone, or at least with me. So I was led into the NBC complex, which consisted of a dozen or so Winnebagos connected by carpeted bridges. In the center of these was the small wood-paneled control room. At the back of the room were two booths with sliding glass panels—one for Julian Goodman, the president of NBC, who had the power to interrupt the proceedings at any moment via a red phone and overrule a decision; and the other, occupied by several executives from Gulf, which was sponsoring the NBC Convention coverage.

  In the middle of the room, Reuven Frank, the president of NBC News, and George Murray, the executive producer, were seated side by side at a long slim desk that was covered with telephones—blue phones to Chancellor and Brinkley, the red phone to Goodman, beige phones to everywhere else. In the greylit darkness, they were peering at a wall that contained fourteen TV screens—screens for ABC, CBS, and PBS; a screen for the pool camera that covered the podium for all the networks; screens that showed what some of the NBC cameras were doing both inside and outside the hall; and in the middle, two big screens, one showing the actual broadcast and the other, marked Preset, showing whoever was on deck.

  Reuven Frank, an intense man with prematurely white hair and a scholarly face, was making comments in a low voice. Murray, with a truckdriver’s physique and a fringe of black hair around a balding pate, did all the shouting. Murray was barking commands toward a door on his right that led to the trailer containing all the hookups to the cameras inside the Convention Hall. Somewhere in there, a director named Tony was looking at another set of screens and telling all the cameramen in the hall what to do.

  It was about eleven o’clock (the Republican script was running late); the roll call was about to end. Gerald Ford was about to announce that Nixon had been nominated. The delegates were about to go wild in a ten-minute spontaneous demonstration and 20,000 red, white, and blue balloons were about to drop from nets in the flies of the Convention Hall.

  “Watch the balloons up there,” Murray yelled at Tony. The balloons showed up on the Preset screen. The control room wa
s growing tense. From inside the adjacent trailer, Tony could be heard shouting into a microphone, directing his engineers and cameramen. He referred to the cameramen by number.

  “Five, hold five! Hold three. Hold four!”

  Suddenly the balloon drop commenced.

  “Here they come! Here they come!” shouted Murray. His eyes were glued to the main screen, and he was very excited.

  “Go! Start the zooms, Tony!” Murray yelled, getting even louder. “In and out, in and out! Yo-yo! Yo-yo!”

  Yo-yo was part of the technical jargon. It meant to zoom in and out very fast. Balloons were dancing all over the screen. It looked like New Year’s Eve in Valhalla.

  “Switch, switch,” Murray screamed. “Go, Tony! Now! Four, five, seven, three!”

  The screen jumped with sudden cuts from one delegation to another. There was a giddy collage of laughing faces, banners, standards, balloons, more faces, people dancing in the aisle. Tony was cutting so fast from one camera to another that the screen seemed to whirl.

  “That’s it, Tony!” Murray lashed him on. “Beautiful! Cut like a maniac! Come on! Faster, faster! No more yo-yo, just cut. One, two, one, two—get the beat, Tony! That’s it.”

  The pandemonium went on for several minutes. Finally, it was over and Murray slumped back in his leather swivel chair, exhausted. Congratulations were exchanged. Murray looked happily done-in, like a virtuoso who has just left the stage after playing a tricky concerto.

  Over in the CBS newsroom, they were furious. Everyone there was bitching that NBC had been “editorializing” by making the demonstration look more exciting than it actually was. It was a niggling thing to say, but CBS was right. The demonstration had been a stage-managed bore. The whole Convention was a bore. So George Murray had hoked it up. But he didn’t look like a man bent on distorting reality. He had obviously played around with the cameras on the balloon extravaganza to have a little fun. And he had had the time of his life. He had got off on all the shouting and the flashing images. He and the other producers out there in the control room were grown men playing with one of the most amusing electric trains ever built.