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  The sergeant, who was not a bad sort, smiled at the regulars from behind the plate-glass window and pressed the button which springs the catch in the wrought-iron gate and, with a push, they were inside the fortress. From there, they trudged up the driveway toward the west lobby; if they had held a straight course, they would have walked smack into the full-dress Marine who stood at attention on the porch of Henry Kissinger’s chandeliered office, but instead they veered to the left, up the path a few yards and through the French doors of the pressroom.

  Pressroom? It looked more like an antechamber of a fat Wall Street law firm. Just the kind of venue that made the Nixon staffers feel at home, even if it was not quite what the press was used to. Before the Nixon regime, the reporters had camped out in the West Lobby, piling their coats, hats and cameras on a huge circular Philippine mahogany table, fighting for lounging privileges on the one beat-up sofa, and wandering in and out of the press secretary’s office. The reporters also had a small pressroom just off the lobby, which was crammed with desks and contained forty telephones. For purposes of identification, each of the phones rang on a different note. Often, all of the phones rang at once, producing a jangled symphony that the old hands grew to like.

  The White House reporters found the lobby very cozy, but in 1970, Ronald Ziegler announced that he was going to move the press to “more comfortable quarters” in the Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. A number of reporters complained loudly, accusing Ziegler of trying to banish the press and cut off their access to White House staffers. Ziegler indignantly denied this, but he did come up with another plan—fill in the West Wing’s swimming pool and turn it into a press room. Lyndon Johnson had liked to strip down and plunge in with publishers and network executives, but skinny dipping was not Richard Nixon’s style and he did not object to giving up the pool.

  Even then, some of the reporters worried that the new setup would deny them access to Ziegler’s office. “You will always have access to my office,” Ziegler solemnly promised them. Somehow the promise got lost in the move. Ziegler’s office was now well off the main pressroom, and the reporters had to run a gauntlet of remorselessly efficient secretaries to get to Ziegler.

  The White House decorators boarded up the old pool and redid the place in various businesslike shades of brown: beige walls, beige drapes, beige sofas along the walls, big chestnut-colored chairs, tan carpet. The ashtrays were cleverly disguised as Roman urns, the table lamps were made out of China vases, and the walls were hung with Currier and Ives snowscapes. At the front end of this long rectangular room was a darkwood lectern, with a light blue curtain on the wall in back of it. An elegant waiting room, in short, steeped in just that flavorless, impersonal gloom that one associates with all rooms where people are made to cool their heels.

  On this Tuesday morning, there were already a dozen reporters here, talking about nothing, or reading the Times, or simply looking bored. At the rear of the main room, a short corridor led to another room. On the right wall of this corridor, there were coathooks and a row of glass “bins” that contain the day’s handouts—a radio statement by the President, a fact sheet on a bill that he had signed, the schedules for Edward Finch Cox, Tricia Nixon Cox, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and Mrs. Richard Nixon.

  The next room contained rows of padded cubicles, each equipped with a typewriter and two phones for all of the major newspaper and news-chain correspondents. At the rear, there were three larger booths, one for each of the networks. The left wall was lined with phones for foreign correspondents, most of whom did not rate cubicles; these were direct lines to the Washington Bureaus of British newspapers, European newspapers, and Iron Curtain news agencies. On the left of the room, another corridor led to a smaller, dark green room which contained candy and soft-drink machines, a coffee maker, three wire tickers, and a round table where the TV technicians had already begun the daily game of gin rummy. There was a story that Eddie Folliard, having emerged from retirement to be given a tour of the plush new premises, shook his head in disbelief and said, “I’ll have a drink, but I won’t go upstairs.”

  Back by the handout bins, a flight of stairs led down to another collection of booths and cubicles—booths for each of the radio correspondents and cubicles for the lesser papers. Also, another row of wall phones—the Avenue of the Rising Sun, it was called, because the phones belonged to the Japanese correspondents. Three or four Japanese showed up for every briefing, took copious notes, and then mysteriously drifted away; nobody knew what they thought or what they wrote, largely because nobody within memory had bothered to inquire. The Avenue of the Rising Sun was a quiet place, except when a major textile agreement was announced. On those occasions, the Japanese stampeded for the phones and screamed the details across bad connections to their home offices. Fay Wells, the dowdy correspondent for the Storer Broadcasting Company, once produced a legendary thirty second spot by saying, “This is how Japan got the message when the White House lifted the United States trade ban with the People’s Republic of China,” and then opening the door to hold out the microphone and record twenty seconds of shrill, hysterical Japanese.

  It was an odd congregation, the White House press—a strange mixture of professional witnesses, decree-promulgators, cheerleaders, hard-diggers, goldbricks, and gadflies. There were shadowy figures like Trudy, a small birdlike woman who worked for a Jewish newspaper in St. Louis and who seemed to do nothing but receive dozens of mysterious phone calls on a downstairs pay phone; or Alan Lidow, the correspondent for Gene Autrey’s Golden West Broadcasting Company, who had never been known to ask a question at a briefing, and who seemed to be present mainly so that the FCC would not forget the existence of Golden West.

  Roughly 1,500 reporters paid dues to the White House Correspondents Association, an organization whose sole function was to sponsor an annual dinner held in the banquet room of one of the large Washington hotels. But only sixty or seventy of these reporters regularly attended the daily White House briefings.

  The regular White House correspondents could be divided into two basic types. There were the old-timers, who had come into the job as a sinecure, a reward for long years of faithful service; to them, the pressroom was one more quiet men’s club. And there were the young, ambitious types, the future Tom Wickers and Max Frankels, who saw the job as a showcase for their talents. If they did well, they would move up to become bureau chiefs and editors. No ambitious young man wanted to stay in the White House forever, because the job was a slow death.

  “It is a strange, airless kind of work,” said Russell Baker, who had covered the White House in the fifties and early sixties. The White House was like a Stuart court, Baker thought, and all the correspondents lingered like courtiers in the antechambers. The Preisdent’s aides were like sycophants who protected the monarch, fed the courtiers information that would make the Great Man look good, and nursed the ego of “this monstrosity, this Queen Bee” who was at the center of court life. Whenever he left the White House to cover a story on the Hill, Baker felt as if he were climbing out of a closed sewer and going up onto a mountain, into the fresh air. “There were 435 people up there on the Hill,” said Baker, “and they all loved to talk.”

  Nevertheless, some reporters thrived in this suffocating palace atmosphere. They began to think of themselves as part of the White House, and they proudly identified themselves as being “from the White House press” instead of mentioning the paper they worked for. They forgot that they were handout artists and convinced themselves that they were somehow associates of a man who was shaping epochal events. The walls of the White House press complex were covered with mementos of the past, framed and yellowing photographs: a line of somber men in straw boaters and high collars with Woodrow Wilson in the center, like a Sixth Form and its Master; a larger and merrier group with Franklin Roosevelt; a loose circle of men in Hawaiian shirts and Bermudas, laughing with Harry Truman in Key West; several rows of men in flannel suits posing formally wi
th Ike on the White House lawn.

  The faces of these men were infused with a funny expression, a pathetic aura of pride, a sense that they were taking part in the colossal moments of history. Now most of these moments were forgotten, and no one remembered a word that any of these men had written. The strikingly sad thing about all these pictures was the anonymity. Except for the Presidents, not a single face was familiar. They were journalistic Prufrocks and they measured out their lives in handouts. Deferential, glad to be of use, they enjoyed some prestige in their day, but none of them had passed into legend as a great reporter—with the exception of Merriman Smith.

  Merriman Smith came to the White House in 1941, a young United Press reporter of twenty-seven with slick black hair, a pockmarked face, and a moustache he had grown to make himself look older. He remained on the beat until his death in 1970. A straight, old-fashioned reporter who thought that his job gave him “a front seat at the making of history,” he reported what the President said, whom he saw, and where he went. No interpretation or analysis. But he stood out from the pack because he had the aggressiveness, resourcefulness, and sometimes the ruthlessness of a great police reporter. He was prolific: he once filed 30,000 words of copy in a twelve-hour period on a Presidential train trip. He was fast: he could write a story in his head in the thirty seconds it took him to run from the Oval Office up to the UP’s phone booth in the pressroom. His sprints to the phone booth were legendary. He trampled anything or anyone in his way; he once slipped and dislocated a shoulder on the way to the phone but dictated for an hour before passing out from the pain.

  He went to incredible lengths to score small scoops. It was rumored, for instance, that he always was the first reporter to know that Nixon was going to go to the Western White House, because he had cultivated a clerk at a San Clemente motel who called him whenever the whores came up from Vegas in anticipation of the arrival of the Secret Service.

  For years, he doggedly hung on to his seniority privilege of sitting in the middle of the front seat of the pool car on Presidential trips. He was in this cherished spot on November 22, 1963, in the Dallas motorcade. When he heard the sound of gunfire, he grabbed the radiophone (which was on the transmission hump, directly in front of him) and started to dictate. Jack Bell, Smith’s rival from the AP, was in the back seat. After Smith had dictated four pages of copy, Bell demanded the phone. Smith stalled, saying that he wanted the Dallas operator to read back the copy—the overhead wires might have interfered with transmission. Everyone in the car knew that Smith had a perfect connection—they could hear the operator’s voice coming over the phone. Bell started screaming and trying to wrestle with Smith for the receiver. Smith stuck it between his knees and hunched up into a ball, with Bell beating him wildly about the head and shoulders. UPI beat the AP by several crucial minutes on the story, and Smith won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Kennedy assassination.

  In later years, Smith watched with alarm as the White House turned into a massive public relations operation, exercising more and more control over the distribution of the news. But by that time, his personal problems had begun to outweigh his professional ones. “Hell,” Lyndon Johnson told Smith in 1966, “I don’t have anything like the troubles you have—you lost your boy in Vietnam while you were going through a divorce from your first wife, behind in your taxes, poor-mouthing me on the Merv Griffin show to make money for big tuition bills—I’ve got it a lot better than you have.”* Smith also had a bad drinking problem which increased as the White House job wore him down physically. In 1970, he learned that he had incurable cancer and shot himself with a pistol.

  Unlike most reporters, Smith left behind a legacy of books. In these books, he chronicled an era of White House reporting that now seems heartbreakingly simple and innocent. In the forties, the reporters gathered once a week in the Oval Office to throw questions at the President for as long as they pleased; and the President, only a few feet away on the other side of a huge desk, responded with wit and candor. Presidential advisers still roamed freely and talked to the press. Reporters were still allowed to badger every visitor who left the President’s office. The reporters felt a patriotic affection for the President, and did not mind engaging in what Merriman Smith called “a friendly conspiracy” to keep the public from finding out that Roosevelt was confined to a wheelchair.

  The pressroom, in those days, was as raunchy and intimate as a police shack, and the reporters knew each other well, drank together in the long afternoons, and played pranks on each other.

  Now, in 1972, the White House press complex was as flavorless as a large insurance office, so impersonal that the people downstairs scarcely knew the people upstairs. It had lost the sour camaraderie of the police shack—except for an obscure little group of six men who were permanently hunkered down in a corner of the downstairs room. At almost any hour of the working day, you could find them reading the papers and grumbling articulately, slumped in a circular arrangement of armchairs and sofas, with their feet up on the central piece of furniture from which they took their name, the Knights of the Green Ottoman. The six Knights were united by a bond of vague discontent—with the White House operation, with their jobs, or simply with themselves.

  There was Don Fulsom, the UPI audio man. Fulsom was an open, friendly thirty-four-year-old with a long face who was considered a troublemaker by the White House staff. A question of his attitude. He had been fired from his first radio job, at a station in Buffalo, N.Y., when he began the news on Easter morning by saying: “Today, millions of Christians around the world are celebrating the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ.” In private conversation, he never called Nixon anything but “the Trick.”

  In the next armchair sat Jim McManus, Westinghouse’s correspondent, a neatly dressed man with a lean, almost Jesuitical face and a quiet manner of speaking. He was one of the few men ever to walk out of a White House briefing in protest.

  On the sofa was Howard Norton, sixty-one, grey-haired, wearing a white shirt and a White House tie-clasp. In 1947, his investigations of racketeering had won a Pulitzer Prize for the Baltimore Sun. Now he filled the minimal needs of U.S. News, which, being almost a house organ for the Administration, did not demand much investigative reporting. Norton did not say a great deal, but when he talked he was very frank. “This job,” he said, “has ruined more good reporters than any job I know.”

  Then there were Al Sullivan, a USIA reporter in his thirties who had some surprisingly unofficial-sounding opinions about the White House; Gil Butler, about the same age, the reporter for TV station WTOP, who was chuckling over a volume of Mencken; and finally, Gary Axelson, a plump young man who was sorry that his employers at Metromedia had promoted him from the State Department beat, where he used to be able to dig up good stories. At the White House he found only frustration.

  It was quarter after eleven on this Tuesday morning, and the Knights were getting restless. They were making the ritual joke about tranquilizing gas. The gas, they said, came out of the vents above the sofa before every briefing and subdued nettlesome reporters. “Well, I guess they got us just about comatose enough,” said Fulsom, squirming in his chair. “They can bring out Ziegler now.”

  McManus looked at his watch. “Looks like the old squeeze play,” he muttered.

  “Yeah,” said Sullivan, “the old squeezeroo.”

  “What is the squeeze play?” I asked.

  “Well,” said McManus, like a teacher going back to a familiar lesson, “the press briefing is scheduled to begin at eleven. You will notice that it is now eleven seventeen. Inexplicably, the briefing starts late more often than not. Now, if anybody is going to get a telephone and make any sense out of the information they have and still get it moving on the wire or over a broadcast facility, the briefing simply cannot be allowed to run beyond fifteen minutes until twelve. At the absolute outside, say ten minutes until twelve. And if it was the Second Coming, you could probably make it two minutes to twelve, but you’d bust into every
thing, just absolutely break into all the wire circuits. I mean, it would have to be the Second Coming.

  “Noon is a crucial hour for newspapers across the country. You see, most of the papers that these wire services do business with are one-edition dailies. The services have got to get that copy out to them or it’s simply not going to get set in type. And they’ve also got their eye cocked on their broadcast clients when it comes up to major newscast hours, like noon.

  “The point is that if you are a press secretary, you use all these little tricks. You start the briefing late, you compress the time, you increase the anxiety in the room. Then, you throw out something that the wires are going to want to run with, but that not everyone else necessarily wishes to run with, so that the wire reporters are at odds with the other reporters.”

  It almost boiled down to a formula: the more troublesome the briefing promised to be, the later it started. A week before, on October 10, the Washington Post had reported that the Watergate bugging incident was merely one facet of a massive spying and sabotage campaign set up by the Republicans, and the Post identified a young lawyer named Donald Segretti as one of the operatives in the campaign. Two days before, the Post had charged that Nixon’s appointment secretary, Dwight Chapin, was Segretti’s contact in the Administration.

  Because of these articles, Ziegler had had a great deal of trouble with the press. Smelling blood, the reporters had momentarily come to life, stinging him with question after question about the Watergate, Segretti, and Dwight Chapin. Ziegler had piled up record numbers of “no comments” which the wire services dutifully counted. He was beginning to look ridiculous, like a gangster who takes the Fifth when the DA asks him his address. So the briefings got later and later.