The Boys on the Bus Read online

  Across town, comfortably settled in a large white stucco house in a posh section of Miami Beach, was a very different operation called Top Value Television. TVTV, as they liked to be known, was a collective of twenty-eight young cable-TV reporters who had got press passes to the Conventions, and who had rented the house from a French landlady who did not object to their long hair. Using inexpensive videotape equipment, they made an hour-long documentary about each of the Conventions at a total cost of $25,000—or roughly the cost of a couple of minutes air time on one of the networks. The money had come partly from cable TV stations and partly from private philanthropists. The two documentaries were shown on cable stations across the country, getting an excellent review from the television columnist of The New York Times. They were extraordinarily intimate portraits of the Convention and, surprisingly, they reflected no particular ideology. The first tape, on the Democratic Convention, showed Willie Brown, the slick black McGovern staffer from California, telling his delegation how to vote on the South Carolina challenge and explaining the whole strategy; it showed the making of the challenge that unseated Mayor Daley; it had Cassie Mackin talking about the job of being a floor person and declaring ecstatically, “There’s nothing to it, there’s nothing to this a woman couldn’t have done a long time ago.” The tape of the Republican Convention included pep talks from Ronald Reagan, an interview with an embarrassed Eddie Cox, scenes with Vietnam vets, with Paul McCloskey, and with the Nixon Youth preparing for one of their “spontaneous” rallies.

  At times, the tapes were blurry, jiggly, and patently nonprofessional. But they gave a robust whiff of the Conventions, and had a caught-by-surprise, off-camera feeling that the networks could not and probably would not want to approach. The most striking thing about the tapes was the absence of narration. Except for a few handwritten titles, the pictures and sounds of the Conventions spoke entirely for themselves; watching a narratorless news broadcast was a strangely exhausting and disturbing experience. There was no easy gloss to take the sting out of what was happening on the screen.

  The leader of the TVTV collective was a twenty-nine-year-old dropout from Time magazine named Michael Shamberg. When I arrived at the stucco house one afternoon during the Republican Convention, Shamberg was reclining on a sofa, while random activity went on around him. Upstairs, people were viewing and editing new tape. A barefoot girl came in and cried that she had inadvertently erased the best part of the Walter Cronkite footage. Outside by the swimming pool, where azaleas bloomed, a young man was filling balloons from a blue tank of laughing gas and passing them around for his friends to inhale. Inside, the living room was cluttered with cameras, Sony Porta-paks, tape, wires, cables, newspapers and large hand-lettered signs and assignment sheets. One of the signs said:

  The big stories

  1. The Underbelly of Broadcast TV

  2. The Vietnam vets

  3. Those zany Republicans, young and old

  4. The White House family/celebrities

  Are you on a big story? Does your big story connect with the others? Is your Little story part of the big picture?

  The Management

  Dressed in a loose green T-shirt and gold corduroys, Shamberg looked like a model kibbutznik. He was handsome, lithe, had long black hair and spoke in a sleepy suburban drawl. Shamberg had written a book called Guerrilla TV and he believed that cable was the wave of the future. The networks, with their economic dependence on mass audiences and mass advertising, would eventually go the way of the mass magazines like Life, he thought. And cable TV—local, decentralized, appealing to small audiences and specialized tastes—would gradually take over. This might not happen until Shamberg was as old as Walter Cronkite, but he was in no hurry. He was simply happy that TVTV’s first major project was turning out so well. He liked the network people. They had been very open and cooperative with the TVTV people. It was just that Shamberg believed in a different style of television.

  “Look at the economy of production in broadcast TV, with that expensive equipment and unions and shit,” he said. “They have to produce that stuff. But around here, we’re talking about little Sonys that cost only 1,400 dollars and tape that costs ten dollars for thirty minutes and that you can reuse.

  “The networks have never understood that the expensive equipment they have dictates a style, which is what’s pissing people off. They have to force behavior. When they’re on live, or even when they’re filming, they have to have something happening when the camera’s on. Everything they do costs so much that they can’t afford to be patient. That’s why they have correspondents who are always talking to give you the illusion that something’s happening. They can’t wait and really pick up on what’s happening.

  “We never do that. We just like to hang out. It’s more of a print notion. Like, when you do a story, you probably don’t do formal interviews as much as you hang out. We’re trying to do the same thing.

  “The network people are essentially giving people a radio with a screen. If you turn the picture off, you don’t miss a thing. They never let you hear environmental sounds. They always make people express themselves in a format determined by the announcer. They never say, ‘How do you want to explain the problem? Do you want to take me around and show me or what?’

  “Another thing is, they shoot film and take it back to the studio and process and edit it, and the subject of the film never gets any say in it. But we can play a tape back for people immediately. If they don’t like it, we’ll erase it. People rarely ask you to do that. But you can establish a rapport with people that way if you’re working in an alien situation.

  “That’s how we got our stuff on the Nixon Youth. They were very uptight about us shooting, so we let them see themselves and get a feeling for how they came across, and it relaxed them.”

  The barefoot girl suddenly returned. She was ready to show the marred Cronkite tape. Shamberg and several other TVTV people gathered on a long curved couch in the living room and watched as Cronkite flickered onto the little Sony set. He was in his shirt-sleeves, leaning back and good-naturedly giving his ideas on Convention coverage. The Cronkite segment was one of the last pieces they had shot for their tape of the GOP Convention, and the team that had shot it kept talking about how nice Cronkite had been and how much they liked him.

  Shamberg was relaxed and happy. Like everybody else, he and his friends had seen the Conventions as a chance for national exposure, and the TVTV people had got that. Now they would move on to other subjects, leaving political journalism behind.

  But Cronkite and Co. would be at it every night, and they were slowly beginning to accept some of the same technical innovations that the TVTV people were using. The networks were gradually trying to develop less obtrusive equipment so that their news teams would not change the nature of the events they were covering. NBC and CBS were experimenting with small, lightweight eight-millimeter cameras. They were trying out faster film that needed no bright lights. They were exploring the possibilities of portable tape units like the ones that had given the TVTV people such mobility and allowed them to film people so unobtrusively.

  There were young producers at the networks who wanted to make innovations. At CBS, for instance, there was a long-haired, piratical-looking, defiantly hip producer named Stanhope Gould, an enormously energetic man in his thirties, who had been given the two most important assignments of the election year, the Wheat Deal story and the Watergate story. Gould deplored the network tendency toward “Top 40” news, and favored longer, more complex stories. He was looking for new ways to “punch through” to people, and he was willing to use graphics, charts, diagrams, actors playing out skits, anything that would work.

  Early in September, George McGovern charged that giant grain exporters and speculators with inside information bought up wheat at low prices before news of the magnitude of the Soviet grain sale drove prices up, and that they did so with the silent consent of the Administration. Cronkite immediately smelled another Te
apot Dome scandal and decided that CBS should investigate the wheat deal. Gould worked on the story for two weeks. He assembled a staff of six, including an agricultural expert who knew his way around the Department of Agriculture. He sent crews to Kansas and Texas to film interviews with wheat farmers who were angered by the deal. He filmed experts and government officials in Washington and New York. He and his research team discovered new evidence damning Clarence Palmby.†

  There was nothing new about this intensive fact-finding. CBS had a superb research department, including an Elections Unit that sent out a weekly newsletter to correspondents, and the network often assembled stories from stringers and correspondents all over the country. What was unusual about the wheat story was the form that it took. It was in two segments, the first one eleven minutes in length, the second one five minutes long. In the first report, on September 27, Cronkite began by announcing the intention of the report—to find out “who benefìted from the grain deal”—and then laid out the whole history of the deal, getting up from his desk to go to a blackboard and use stick figures to show which officials had moved from the Department of Agriculture to private companies. It was almost unprecedented for a network news show to devote such a large amount of time to unraveling a complicated story. It was an admission on CBS’s part that the old formats had not been getting through to people, that you could not report a complicated story like the wheat deal in isolated, two-minute fragments and expect viewers to make sense of it. Instead, you had to pull all the facts together in a sort of illustrated lecture.

  By the end of the second report, many Americans understood the wheat deal for the first time. There was an immediate response from fellow reporters. New York Timesmen phoned to say that CBS had told the story better than the Times, and no form of praise meant more to network people than recognition from the Times. Cronkite was elated; he was reliving his youth as a crusading reporter. He ordered another “Special Report,” this time on the Watergate Case.

  Gould got the assignment again, and he went about it in the same way, checking out dozens of sources, filming all over the country, and helping to prepare a script that used diagrams and stick figures to make the situations crystal clear. In the end, Gould relied mainly on Washington Post articles for his information, but again the report pulled together all the stray facts and made a coherent story out of them. The first segment of the Special Report ran on October 27. It began:

  Cronkite (standing in front of dark screen showing buildings identified with tags as Watergate, offices of CRP—Committee for the Re-election of the President—the White House): Watergate has escalated into charges of a high-level campaign of political sabotage and espionage apparently unparalleled in American history …

  It was a tought report, which included excellent filmed segments from Dan Rather and Daniel Schorr. It ran an astounding fourteen minutes. Cronkite was careful to mention the Administration’s denials of all the evidence, but the graphics told a clear story of political sabotage with a line that led straight to the White House. And there was to be a second report, also lasting fourteen minutes.

  There were many complimentary phone calls on the first report, but there was at least one very unfavorable call. It came from Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, and it went to Bill Paley, the chairman of CBS. No one was sure what Colson said to Paley, but Colson managed to change Paley’s mind about the second segment. A meeting was held on the subject and CBS executives told Gould that the second segment was too long and had to be cut in half. The executives never mentioned the phone call from the White House. They simply said that the piece was too long. Gould argued against the decision but was ordered to cut the piece.

  The abbreviated version of the piece contained all the vital information, but it lacked the impact of the first Watergate report. Gould’s method was to lay out the facts slowly and carefully so that they made sense. The second Watergate report, which was to have traced the laundering of the money in the secret fund, cried out for this approach. But in shrinking from fifteen to six minutes, the report became a rushed, run-of-the-mill takeout, difficult for the average viewer to follow.

  In the wake of the cutting of the Watergate report, many of the younger people at CBS worried that the news department was abandoning its new approach, that the Wheat and Watergate Special Reports had been two aberrations from the norm instead of the beginning of a hopeful trend. Even more, they worried about the increasing power of the White House.

  * The enormous publicity given to the polls may indeed have skewed the results of the California primary election. But it is also possible that the polls were wrong, that McGovern never really had such a huge lead. Almost every publication and network in America chose to accept the polls as gospel and to report McGovern’s eventual six-point victory as a “setback.” One of the few publications to challenge the accuracy of the polls was The New Yorker, which wrote in June 1972: “… McGovern’s victory by six percent was called a ‘setback’ for him by most of the press; just as Muskie’s victory in New Hampshire was called a ‘setback’ for him because he hadn’t won by the margin that the press had decided he should win by In both cases, failures on the part of observers were made to seem failures on the part of candidates.” At any rate, the press’s theory that McGovern had suffered a reversal gave Humphrey and Muskie the courage to continue fighting him after California; their persistence caused a deep rift within the Democratic party.

  † Palmby was the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture who moved to a job at the Continental Grain Company after having negotiated the wheat deal with the Russians, but before the deal was made public. Continental then proceeded to close the biggest deal of any grain company, 150 million bushels, three days before the government announced that it was possible to sell grain to the Russians.

  PART TWO

  COVERING

  NIXON’S

  CAMPAIGN

  CHAPTER VIII

  Nixon Before

  the White House

  Every president, when he first enters the White House promises an “open Administration.” He swears he likes reporters, will cooperate with them, will treat them as first-class citizens. The charade goes on for a few weeks or months, or even a couple of years. All the while, the President is struggling to suppress an overwhelming conviction that the press is trying to undermine his Administration, if not the Republic. He is fighting a maddening urge to control, bully, vilify, prosecute, or litigate against every free-thinking reporter and editor in sight. Then, sooner or later, he blows. Teddy Roosevelt sued newspapers. Franklin Roosevelt expressed his displeasure over a certain article by presenting its author with an Iron Cross. Lyndon Johnson … but there is no sense singling out a few. Every President from Washington on came to recognize the press as a natural enemy, and eventually tried to manipulate it and muzzle it.

  But no President ever had any prolonged success at muzzling the press, and most of them came ruefully to accept the press’s adversary role as healthy and challenging. In mid-Presidency, Harry Truman served notice that he was “saving up four or five good, hard punches on the nose, and when I’m out of this job, I’m going to run around and deliver them personally.” But at his last press conference he said, and sincerely: “This kind of news conference where reporters can ask any question they can dream up—directly of the President of the United States—illustrates how strong and how vital our democracy is.”

  Richard Nixon, however, was different. Nixon felt a deep, abiding, and vindictive hatred for the press that no President, with the possible exception of Lyndon Johnson, had ever shared. Nixon had always taken personally everything that the press wrote about him. The press, he believed, never forgave him for pulling the mask off its darling, Alger Hiss; so the press tortured him, lied about him, hated him. Over the years, Nixon conceived and nursed one of the monumental grudges of the century, a loathing so raw, ugly, and obvious that it only served to make him vulnerable. To borrow a phrase from Iago, Nixon wore h
is heart on his sleeve for daws to peck at. The daws had a field day. Painfully, Nixon learned his lesson. He learned to control and disguise his hatred, to use it in subtle ways to defeat his enemies in the press. It was precisely for this reason, because Nixon hated for so long and studied his foes so well, that he had become the nemesis of the press. No other President had ever worked so lovingly or painstakingly to emasculate reporters.

  In 1960, eighty percent of the nation’s newspapers and all of the mass circulation magazines endorsed Nixon for President. Which was no surprise, because publishers always tell their editors whom to endorse, and the majority of publishers are staunch Republicans. But publishers do not exercise such neat control over their reporters, and Nixon regarded the press that followed him as a malicious band of thugs and Democrats who had sworn to do him in. Accordingly, he decided to cut them dead.

  “Stuff the bastards,” a Nixon aide told Theodore White in June 1960. “They’re all against Dick anyway. Make them work—we aren’t going to hand out prepared remarks; let them get their pencils out and listen and take notes.”* During that year the Nixon people punished the press for their supposed hostility by withholding transcripts of speeches; late in the campaign, the Nixon people finally realized that this was a self-defeating tactic and began providing handouts. They also inaugurated singalongs. Herb Klein, Nixon’s short, smiling press officer, passed out sheet music on the press bus and tried to lead a disgusted chorus of reporters in old favorites. Meanwhile, Nixon stayed aloof, holding few press conferences, making no effort to get his ideas across to the reporters. By the time Nixon lost in November, most of the reporters who had been trapped with him were glad to see him go.