The Boys on the Bus Page 4

  * Every day, a “pool” of one or two reporters was delegated to stay close to the candidate at those times (i.e., during motorcades, small dinners, fund-raising parties) when the entire press corps could not follow him. The regular reporters on the bus took turns filling the pool assignments. After each event, the pool wrote a report which was posted in the pressroom, and was usually also Xeroxed by the candidate’s press staff and distributed on the bus. According to the rules, the pool reporters were not supposed to include in their own articles any information which they had not put in the pool report. The reports usually dealt in trivia—what the candidate ate, what he said, whose hands he had shaken. Pool reports varied in length. Jim Naughton of the Times, the most meticulous pooler on the bus, once turned in a report that went on for eight double-spaced pages. Dick Stout of Newsweek wrote the year’s shortest report: “Oct. 30, 1972. 5 P.M. to bed. Nothing happened untoward. Details on request.”

  † LA folded several months later.

  ‡ It applied best to the White House reporters in the Johnson years, many of whom knew all about Johnson’s growing isolation and loosening grip on reality, but wrote nothing about it. In 1967, David Halberstam met a China expert in Hong Kong who recounted several fascinating anecdotes about Johnson’s increasing lack of control. When Halberstam asked about the source of the stories, the China expert said that he had heard the anecdotes from three top White House correspondents who had recently been in Hong Kong during one of Johnson’s trips to Asia. “The White House guys were talking about these things and they were concerned, but they weren’t writing about them,” says Halberstam. “Because that’s a hell of a story to have to write, saying the President of the United States is isolated from reality. They’d have a goddam crazy, angry President the next day.”

  They were, however, passing on these anecdotes to the executives on their papers.

  § Most American newspapers—at least 85 percent—are owned by conservative Republicans and regularly endorse Republican candidates. The greatest cross that these owners have to bear is that most reporters are Democrats.

  ‖ The Effete Conspiracy by Ben H. Bagdikian (New York, Harper & Row, 1972) p. 75.

  a On the other hand, take the case of Hamilton Davis, the political reporter and Washington Bureau chief of the Providence Journal, who was also on the McGovern bus that day. In January 1972, Davis was given a weekly column. As the year went on the column got increasingly ballsy. Davis took well-aimed shots at both the national candidates and the Rhode Island candidates. He was equally critical of both of Rhode Island’s Senatorial candidates, Sen. Claiborne Pell and the Republican challenger, John H. Chafee. Only one problem. The Chafee family owned a hunk of the paper. Davis was abruptly informed that the paper’s policy was that no reporter should write a column. Davis thought it very strange that the owners had taken eleven months to remember this policy.

  b The reporters who worked for afternoon papers, such as the Washington Star, the Philadelphia Bulletin, or the Boston Evening Globe, had a much rougher schedule. Their deadline was between six and eight in the morning, and they usually wrote their stories late at night, when everyone else was having supper or drinking. Having gone to bed late, they then had to be up to inspect the first handouts and to cover the first event, just in case there was something important to file in the last few minutes before their papers went to bed. If a reporter from a morning paper missed an early morning event, he had the rest of the day to catch up on it.

  CHAPTER II

  Coming

  to Power

  For the men following the primary campaigns in 1972, and later the general election campaigns, such as they were, campaigning was no longer the easy ride it had once been. Campaign coverage began to settle into a neat and comfortable science around the time of Theodore Roosevelt, the first big-time American politician to rationalize the handing out of news. Stepping into the White House over McKinley’s dead body, Roosevelt had given the Washington correspondents a White House pressroom for the first time; installed phones for them; held occasional news conferences in the Oval Office while his barber gave him a late afternoon shave; frequently leaked items to his favorite reporters; and had given out what were the first primitive campaign press schedules.

  “He made our work tons lighter,” wrote a beholden reporter aboard Teddy’s campaign train in 1904. “Whenever he returned to the car after a speech he would round us up and say, ‘Now, the next stop will be Blankville. You don’t have to bother about that; I’m going to get off the usual thing.’ Or, ‘At Dashtown, where we stop next, you’d better be on the job. I’ll have some new stuff there.’ Sometimes he would even tell us in the rough what the new stuff was to be … In this way he not only saved us useless physical and mental work, but economized our time and systematized our schedules. It also aided the editors at home to plan out their work without uncertainty …”

  From Teddy Roosevelt’s time until 1956, when Stevenson began taking large jumps around the country by airplane, candidates campaigned by train. For fifty years, the routine hardly changed. In the post-Depression era, the thirty or forty reporters would pile out at each whistle stop, wearing fedoras, carrying notebooks and pencils, and when the high school band had blared its last sour note, and the candidate had stepped out onto the rear platform, they would stand on the tracks making notes and counting the crowd. When the speech was done, the train’s whistle would blow, and the reporters would clamber back into their fetid press car—the aroma was a compound of cigar smoke, whiskey and the stench of men who had not bathed for five or six days. The smell sometimes became so rank that porters burned incense in the Pullmans.

  The press car was a Pullman car whose seats had been ripped out and replaced with two boards which ran the length of the car on either side. The men sat at these long tables, looking out at the passing countryside, and wrote their stories on bulky typewriters. The stories contained three simple elements: what the candidate had said, the size of the crowd, and the weather. (In their Sunday stories, the men would usually try to assess the candidate’s chances, or report what hastily interviewed local politicians thought of the candidate’s chances.) Then they would give the stories to the Western Union man. He would tie the stories up in a bundle and toss them off at the next small station, whence the telegrapher would transmit them to the reporters’ home offices. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Merriman Smith of the UPI, anxious to file a story before coming to the next station, tied pillows around his number-two man and tossed him off a moving train.

  After filing, they would repair to the dining car for lunch or dinner—Rocky Ford melon and fresh mountain trout if they had just passed through Denver, and Dungeness crab if they had made a stop in San Francisco. Traveling on Presidential trains, they ate with the Secret Service men, and since these Secret Service men were husky fellows and had a food allowance of only six dollars a day, the reporters would often treat them to sirloin steak.

  As for the candidate, he was usually accessible for news conferences or informal chats throughout the trip. Truman even played poker with the boys; one of them, Joe Short of the Baltimore Sun, lost four hundred dollars to the President in one afternoon and had to make it up by padding his expense account for the next few months. “We liked Harry Truman very much,” an old timer, Edward T. Folliard, recalled, twenty-four years later. “Of course we felt sorry for him. Poor son of a bitch. We knew he was going to lose.”

  “It was all very friendly and romantic,” said Folliard. Once the Washington Post’s chief campaign reporter, he was now seventy-four and lived in retirement in suburban Washington. A tall, skinny man with black hair and the face of a Norman Rockwell farmer, he covered his first campaign when he was twenty-eight—the Herbert Hoover–Al Smith contest of 1928.

  Folliard remembered his colleagues as hard-working men who wrote objective, unbiased stories. “I think 95 percent of the men wrote what they heard and saw and damn little what they thought,” he said. “They left
that to the editorial writers.” Folliard was proud of that objectivity. Yet other observers had a different view of that era of campaign reporting. They saw the reporters of the thirties, forties and fifties as poorly educated men, drawn from the ranks of police reporters and sportswriters, who had neither the intellectual curiosity nor equipment to dig below the shimmering surface of the campaign.

  In 1937, Leo C. Rosten did a scholarly survey of the 127 main Washington correspondents and found that only half of them had finished college. Eight did not have a high school diploma and two had no high school education at all. Rosten concluded that “men without a ‘frame of reference’ and with an uncontrolled impressionistic (rather than analytic) approach to issues are driven to a surface interpretation of events.”

  They are oriented [Rosten continued] with reference to normative words of ambiguous content: “liberty,” “Americanism,” “justice,” “democracy,” “socialism,” “communism,” … Newspaper men evidence a marked insecurity in the presence of social theories or political conceptualization. In this light the caustic reportorial reaction to “New Deal professors,” “crackpot theories,” “the Brain Trust,” “Frankfurter’s bright young men” soon suggests the projection of doubts of personal adequacy upon men who have unwittingly increased personal and professional insecurities.*

  But most of these men were not overly worried by the fact that they lacked a diploma. Some simply sent home the kind of news which they knew would please their publishers. The rest were secure in the knowledge that they were not paid to think, analyze, or judge. With few exceptions, these reporters were interchangeable drones who wrote the same simple formula stories day after day.

  When these men began to retire, in the fifties, they were replaced by a new generation of young reporters who had gone to college and were asking different kinds of questions. In those days the younger men wrote the same formulaic stories, but at the same time, they were more comfortable with theories and concepts, and more anxious to analyze the political process and report on how it worked.

  Their dominance of the profession was sealed with the rise and election of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy played on the values he shared with these young reporters in order to engage their loyalty. He knew many of them socially, and he was careful to treat them with respect and affection. His Harvard-trained advisers spoke in an academic, sophisticated idiom that excluded many of the older reporters but appealed to the new generation. Because they were so obviously in tune with the youthful, “intellectual” atmosphere of the New Frontier, the young reporters who had covered Kennedy’s campaign in 1960, and now covered him in office, found their stock soaring. It was no coincidence that many of them—reporters like David Broder, Ben Bradlee, Bob Novak, Rowland Evans, Mary McGrory, and Russell Baker—would become leading journalists in the sixties and seventies, and would help to change the techniques of campaign reporting.

  But in 1960, campaign coverage had changed very little from what it had been in the 1920’s. Planes replaced trains, and the networks made their first all-out attempt to cover an election, but most of the reporting remained superficial, formulaic, and dull. Newspapers approached campaign coverage as a civic duty, like reporting sermons and testimonials to retiring fire chiefs.

  The most devastating comment on the political coverage of the time was the reception that greeted Theodore White’s book, The Making of the President 1960. The book struck most readers as a total revelation—it was as if they had never before read anything, anywhere, that told them what a political campaign was about. They had some idea that a campaign consisted of a series of arcane deals and dull speeches, and suddenly White came along with a book that laid out the campaign as a wide-screen thriller with full-blooded heroes and white-knuckle suspense on every page. The book hit the number-one spot on the best-seller lists six weeks after publication and stayed there for exactly a year.

  White had started covering American politics in 1953 for The Reporter, after fifteen years in Europe and Asia as a Time correspondent. Two years later, he signed on with Collier’s as the magazine’s national political correspondent and began covering his first Presidential campaign. The press entourage in the first primary consisted of White and an AP man riding around New Hampshire with Estes Kefauver. There were occasional interloping visits from a Timesman or a CBS crew out on a day trip, but in 1956 primaries were considered minor, local events, too inconsequential to rate extensive national coverage. All spring, White had the candidates almost entirely to himself, and he took advantage of the opportunity to build up good relationships with Kefauver, Harriman, and Stevenson as they passed through the primaries and the convention.

  He was flying high on the greatest assignment of his life. The only trouble was that Collier’s was going down for the third time. In September, just as the campaign was gearing up, the management called him back with instructions to supervise a total reorganization of the editorial department in a last-ditch move to save the magazine. Four months later, in spite of White’s best efforts, Collier’s was dead.

  What upset White as much as anything was that he had not had the chance to finish the campaign. “It was a classic case of coitus interruptus,” said White as he sat in the living room of his Manhattan town house, taking a break from writing the fourth Making of the President volume. “There I was, stiff cock, ready to go for the massive summary of the 1956 campaign, and here I am out of a job and no place to write it.” Instead, he dined out for the next couple of years on campaign anecdotes, stories about what had really happened as opposed to the newspaper accounts, and he found that these stories intrigued a lot of people. He also wrote two novels, the second of which he sold to Hollywood for $85,000. With his financial future secure for at least two years, he decided to indulge himself in his great love, political reporting, and write a book about the 1960 Presidential campaign. He had to go to several publishers before he found one who was enthusiastic about the project, and he assumed that the book would make very little money.

  If it was hard to imagine in 1972 that only thirteen years before, a proven novelist had a difficult time selling the idea of a popular book about Presidential politics, it was just as hard to imagine the absolute virginity of much of the territory White set out to explore. “It was like walking through a field playing a brass tuba the day it rained gold,” said White. “Everything was sitting around waiting to be reported.”

  The Republicans were not overly helpful; being somehow convinced that White was writing a work of fiction, they kept assigning him to the Zoo plane with the television technicians and foreign reporters, listing him on the manifest as “Theodore White, novelist.” Fortunately, they lost. White had all of his best contacts among the Democrats anyway, and the Kennedy people were especially cooperative, perhaps sensing that they could use White to help them promote the New Frontier. White got to know all the staffers well, and had little trouble seeing Kennedy himself. Flying back from the Montana convention early in 1960, for instance, White had only one CBS correspondent, Blair Clark, for competition. “Blair and I sat around with John F. Kennedy all the way from Montana back to the East Coast, just shooting the breeze,” he remembered. “You can’t do that any more. Because now there are 27 million correspondents squeezing in.”

  The reason that 27 million reporters now show up for every kaffee klatsch in New Hampshire has a lot to do with Whites first book. “When that book came out,” said White, “it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. Goddam thing was an unbelievable success.” White is not the world’s humblest journalist, but he is not far off the mark about the book’s success—the number of imitations and spinoffs testify to that. The first rival, published by The New York Times, came out in 1964. By 1968, White was competing against seventeen other campaign books. The London Sunday Express and Sunday Times both sent teams of writers; White began to see himself as a small independent businessman fighting off giant corporations which had swooped down to cash in on
his success. Most of the books adopted White’s magic formula: present politics in novelistic terms, as the struggle of great personalities, with generous helpings of colorful detail to sugar the political analysis.

  The book competition was bad enough, but White also had to contend with the newspapers jumping his claim. In 1972, the AP told its men: “When Teddy White’s book comes out, there shouldn’t be one single story in that book that we haven’t reported ourselves.” Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor of The New York Times, told his reporters and editors: “We aren’t going to wait until a year after the election to read in Teddy White’s book what we should have reported ourselves.” It took from eight to twelve years for the newspapers to accept White as an institution, but by 1972 most editors were sending off their men with rabid pep talks about the importance of sniffing out inside dope, getting background into the story, finding out what makes the campaign tick, and generally going beyond the old style of campaign reporting.

  Of course, reporters had been doing many of these things as early as the 1968 campaign, causing George Romney to howl that he had been a victim of “the Teddy White syndrome.” By that, Romney meant that flocks of reporters had started looking into the embryonic stages of Presidential campaigns, scrutinizing aspirants even before the primaries, killing candidacies with untimely exposure.

  If this premature mass coverage upset politicians, it nearly drove Teddy White to distraction. After the succès fou of the 1960 book, he had looked to make a living from the Making of the President series for the next twenty years. Now, with the market glutted, he was no longer sure that he could. “People have read so much of what I have to say in Newsweek, in Time, in The New York Times and the Washington Post,” he lamented that afternoon in New York, as he started on his third or fourth pack of cigarettes.

  But his uneasiness stemmed from more than a fear that the 1972 book might not sell as well as the earlier ones. He sometimes felt that the methods he had pioneered had gotten out of control, had turned into a Frankenstein’s monster. Thinking back to the early spring of 1960, he remembered watching a relaxed John Kennedy receiving the Wisconsin primary returns in a Milwaukee hotel room. White had been the only journalist present, except for a young film maker working on a documentary, and he had blended in with the Kennedy Mafia as unobtrusively as a distant in-law.