The Boys on the Bus Page 5

  Then he recalled the July night, only a few months before, when George McGovern had won the Democratic nomination in Miami. White had been in McGovern’s suite at the Doral Hotel:

  “It’s appalling what we’ve done to these guys. McGovern was like a fish in a goldfish bowl. There were three different network crews at different times. The still photographers kept coming in in groups of five. And there were at least six writers sitting in the corner—I don’t even know their names. We’re all sitting there watching him work on his acceptance speech, poor bastard. He tries to go into the bedroom with Fred Dutton to go over the list of Vice Presidents, which would later turn out to be the fuck-up of the century of course, and all of us are observing him, taking notes like mad, getting all the little details. Which I think I invented as a method of reporting and which I now sincerely regret. If you write about this, say that I sincerely regret it. Who gives a fuck if the guy had milk and Total for breakfast?”

  “There’s a conflict here—the absolute need of the public to know versus the candidate’s need for privacy, which is an equivalent and absolute need. I don’t know how you resolve it. McGovern was so sweet, so kind to everybody, but he must have been crying out for privacy. And I felt, finally, that our being there was a total imposition.”

  The reporters who followed the Presidential hopefuls in 1972 would probably have been surprised to hear White say these things. They were arriving in Washington, or were first beginning to make their reputations, around the time that the first Making of the President books hit the stores. Now they took White and his techniques for granted; it made sense to them to treat a political campaign as a growing, organic drama and to examine the psychological and sociological causes of political decisions. Many of the new generation of campaign reporters looked down on White as a pathetic, written-out hack. They saw him as a political groupie who wrote flattering, mawkish descriptions of major politicians in order to keep them primed as sources for future books. His 1968 volume, with its penitently overkind description of Richard Nixon, had taken a beating from reviewers. A lot of reporters laughed out loud when they read sentences like: “In 1968, Nixon conspicuously, conscientiously, calculatedly denied himself all racist votes, yielding them to Wallace.” It was left for three of White’s British competitors, in a book called An American Melodrama, to give a decent account of Nixon’s wholly opportunistic Southern Strategy.

  By 1972, the traveling press openly resented White. They felt that he was a snob, that he placed himself above the rank and file of the press. White would suddenly appear in some pressroom, embracing old friends on the campaign staff, and would immediately be ushered off to the candidate’s suite or the forward compartment of the plane for an exclusive interview. And the reporters would grumble about Teddy White getting the royal treatment.

  These same reporters forgot that Teddy White’s first books had radically altered the function of the campaign press. Because of him, the press now began to cover political campaigns two years before the election.† Unlike White, the reporters were not collecting tidbits for use at some remote future date, in case one of the primary candidates went on to win the Big One. They were using the information immediately, exposing flaws and inconsistencies in the candidate that could ruin his chances before he even reached the primaries. As recently as 1960, or even 1964, a coalition of party heavies, state conventions, and big-city bosses had chosen the candidate in relatively unviolated privacy, and then presented him to the press to report on.

  Now the press screened the candidates, usurping the party’s old function. By reporting a man’s political strengths, they made him a front runner; by mentioning his weaknesses and liabilities, they cut him down. Teddy White, even in his wildest flights of megalomania, had never allowed himself this kind of power. The press was no longer simply guessing who might run and who might win; the press was in some way determining these things. The classic example was George Romney. Romney had opened his campaign almost a year before the first primary, expecting a press contingent of two or three reporters. Instead, twenty or thirty showed up for Romney’s first exploratory trips around the country, and they all reported Romney’s embarrassing inability to give coherent answers to their questions about Vietnam, thus dooming his candidacy. But Romney was the perfect, textbook example. The process was usually more subtle, and more difficult to describe.

  The journalists involved in this selection process were a very small group, consisting mostly of the national political correspondents, and they formed what David Broder called “the screening committee.” Of the two-hundred-odd men and women who followed the candidates in 1972, less than thirty were full-time national political correspondents. Most of the campaign reporters came from other beats around Washington—the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the Hill, or the White House. After the campaign, they would go back to these beats, and if they did well, they would rise to a management position at their newspaper, magazine or network. But the national political correspondents had covered the whole political scene for five, ten or fifteen years and were likely to continue doing so until they died in harness; and if the actuarial tables were correct, their jobs would kill them at a relatively early age. Many of the members of this group belonged to an organization called Political Writers for a Democratic Society, an organization whose evolution requires some explaining.

  In 1966, a stolid, slightly pompous Christian Science Monitor reporter named Godfrey Sperling started organizing breakfasts where he and some of his friends could meet with leading politicians and government officials. He would have the Monitor’s secretaries call up Warren Weaver of the Times, David Broder of the Post, Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun, Bob Donovan of the Los Angeles Times, Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News and nine or ten other political writers, to invite them to breakfast at the National Press Club, where for five dollars a head they would get scrambled eggs and hash-browns and a chance to further their acquaintance with some politician. The breakfasts were also “background” sessions—any news that came out of them was not for attribution but had to be treated as coming from “a highly placed Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.” A great deal of useful information was served up with the orange juice at these sessions. Romney first stumbled over Vietnam at one of Sperling’s breakfasts, and Agnew made his debut as a buffoon by declaring that Humphrey was “soft on communism.” At another breakfast, shortly before the 1968 Republican Convention, the reporters kept suggesting to Nelson Rockefeller that his chances were nil. “Gee,” Rockefeller finally said, “if I thought I was as bad off as you guys say I am, I’d drop out.” The most memorable breakfast took place in January 1968, when Robert Kennedy anguished out loud for an hour as to whether or not he should run. The reporters there recalled the scene in the stories they wrote when Kennedy finally decided to enter the race.

  By 1970, Sperling’s breakfast club began to go to hell; almost anybody who wanted to could come, and the guests often spoke on the record, which meant that they said nothing of importance. But in the early days, Sperling restricted the breakfasts to his friends, which caused great bitterness among the writers who were not invited. Jack Germond, the chief political writer for the Gannett chain, was furious. He had eighteen papers in New York State and he was tired of getting scooped by The New York Times whenever John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller or Robert Kennedy appeared at Sperling’s breakfasts. So in 1969 he and Jules Witcover, who was working for the Newhouse chain and was also shut out, organized a rival group. Witcover christened it, with tongue in cheek, Political Writers for a Democratic Society.

  The main purpose of PWDS was to get to know politicians in easy, informal surroundings. The meetings were usually held at Germond’s three-story row house in southwest Washington. The fourteen members would assemble once a month, have a couple of drinks with the guest, eat a catered supper downstairs in a big family room, and then go back upstairs to the long, rectangular living room. The guest sat in a large armchair in the middle of the
room, taking questions from the reporters, who sat around him on sofas and other easy chairs. More drinks were served. Finally, after the guest had left, the men would pull out their notebooks and reconstruct the main points of the evening, trying to decide what the guest may or may not have meant in certain statements and generally sizing him up.

  The most interesting thing about PWDS was its composition, which had been determined largely by Germond and Witcover. I cornered Germond one August night in the McGovern pressroom at the Biltmore Hotel in New York to ask him about the group. He was sitting all alone at one of the long typewriter tables, waiting in vain for a poker game to materialize and slowly getting drunk. He was a little cannonball of a man, forty-four years old, with a fresh, leprechaunish face, a fringe of white hair around his bald head, and a pugnacious, hands-on-hip manner of talking. He was not simply drawn to journalism as a profession; like Hildy Johnson in Front Page, he was addicted to it as a way of life.

  Although he himself sometimes described his chain as a “bunch of shitkicker papers,” he was proud of his position as a national political writer and the dues he had paid to win it.‡ Nothing made him angrier than small-town newspapermen—“homers”—who came up to him during campaigns and told him that he was ignoring “local factors.” “God,” he said, “I remember this one homer in Columbus. I’ve worked in these jobs, you know, as a homer. I’ve been a city-side reporter, a statehouse reporter, I’ve done the whole bit—and I’ve worked for a bunch of obscure newspapers. Christ Almighty, they were obscure. And for some guy from Ohio who works for this goddam shitty newspaper to come up and tell me that I don’t understand the whole thing—I’ve been covering this campaign for about sixteen months—and this asshole comes up and tells me this after two weeks’ exposure—ooh, I was outraged. Got pretty testy in the saloon, I must say. Told him what I’d do with his fucking newspaper.”

  So PWDS was not for homers or tyros. It was for the professionals’ professionals. More specifically, said Germond, sipping a Scotch and soda, the standard was this: Who are the men who cover an obscure Western governors’ conference in an off political year? “Everyone covers the national governors’ conferences,” said Germond, “that’s easy. You go out there and they just drop stories in your goddam lap. But you go out there and cover the Western governors, or the Southern governors in a year like ’67 or ’69, and if you can make a story out of that—if you can even convince your office they ought to pay your fare home—you’re a goddam genius.” Germond and Witcover had found fourteen men who passed this test. Not counting themselves, there were:

  David Broder of the Washington Post

  Paul Hope of the Washington Star

  Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun Times Syndicate

  Warren Weaver of The New York Times

  Ted Knapp of Scripps-Howard

  Bruce Biossat of the Newspaper Enterprise Association

  Jim Dickenson of the National Observer

  Loye Miller of Knight Newspapers

  Tom Ottenad of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  Marty Nolan of the Boston Globe (who replaced James Doyle in the group when Doyle moved from the Globe to the Washington Star)

  Pat Furgurson of the Baltimore Sun

  Jim Large of The Wall Street Journal

  These people, said Germond, rated membership because of what they did, not because of the organizations they represented. The rule was that no member could send a substitute to a dinner. It was an elite group of men who, by their own consensus, were the flame-keepers of political journalism—the heavies. “We took a couple of guys who we thought were pretty dumb,” said Germond, “but we brought ’em in because they were entitled by what they did.” No doubt there were some serious omissions—reporters like Johnny Apple of The New York Times, Alan Otten of The Wall Street Journal, Peter Lisagor, Jim Doyle, Harry Kelly of Hearst, and Jim Perry of the National Observer—who either were not congenial to the group or worked for papers already represented. But by and large this group was the elite’s idea of the elite. They did not consider the network correspondents to be serious political reporters, nor did they hold a high opinion of the wire-service men (except for Walter Mears) or of newsmagazine reporters (except for John Lindsay of Newsweek). But Lindsay could not be admitted because he would have got more out of the dinners than the rest—little pieces of color that the daily journalists couldn’t use. And Mears had to be excluded because, on the rare occasions when a not-for-attribution story emerged from one of the dinners, he would have put it on the wire and beaten everybody else. “Most of the wire-service reports generally reflect nothing about what is going on,” said Germond, “but Walter’s good enough so that he would whip our ass off. Walter and I are good friends and he was pissed and kept asking me why he couldn’t get in the group. And I said, ‘Jeez, Walter, I brought it up and you had eight co-sponsors, but the vote was 13 to 1 against you.’ ”

  The members of PWDS did not constitute a pack. They were too confident, competitive, proud, and self-sufficient for that. They also differed ideologically. Germond for instance was a political agnostic, leaning toward liberalism;§ Novak was increasingly embracing the ideological tenets of the Sun King; and Nolan stood, on many matters, to the left of George McGovern.

  But they did form a sort of club, with a certain code and certain rituals. If you shared a cab with members of PWDS, for instance, they would invariably dive for the back seat, leaving you to ride with the driver. At the end of the ride, one of them would say, “I think we’d better invoke the Germond rule.”

  “What’s that?” you would say.

  “The Germond rule states that the person who rides up front has to pay.”

  It was an established rule, widely accepted throughout the world of political journalism, and most people paid.

  But PWDS was primarily a dinner group, and their main goal was to set themselves up for the 1972 campaign. They did the drudge work of political journalism, therefore they were entitled to an advantage, a closer relationship with the candidates. They saw the dinners as a new tool of the trade. The alternative was to go around, individually, and formally interview each new cabinet member or potential candidate—which would teach them next to nothing about the man’s personality. “What we were trying to do,” said Germond, “was to sit down with the guy without having to file any shit about his program or something. Have a couple of pops and dinner, talk, and decide ‘What kind of a guy is this, has he got any class?’ You don’t hand down arbitrary, ex cathedra judgments—get to know the man. And this was true of cabinet members, Presidential candidates—you learn—the people are nice, a lot of them anyway. Or sometimes you don’t learn anything. Our great non-learning session was George McGovern. Jeez, we were the dumbest bastards in the world about George McGovern.”

  McGovern actually came twice, and the second time, in 1971, he carefully spelled out his entire strategy for winning the nomination. “To show you how strange it was,” says Warren Weaver, “I do not even remember it. I just didn’t believe the man. I thought it was a pipe dream.” That was the consensus of the whole group that night. “We thought he was a nice guy, even a savvy guy,” says Germond. “But we didn’t believe him. We figured he was a total loss.” So George McGovern slipped right through the screening process. The incredulity of the press failed to stop him.

  In fact, the dinners yielded very few tangible results. Mel Laird, Bob Finch, Teddy Kennedy provided nothing more than a few minor stories. From dining with George Wallace, the group was surprised to discover that he was consistently witty and genuinely puritanical, but they found out little else. The dinners provided only one solid insight—that Ed Muskie had a bad temper. At his first guest shot, in 1970, the members gave him the old George Romney treatment, boring in with question after question about Vietnam. Muskie kept giving equivocal answers and finally he blew up, attacking the group for trying to trap him. They were trying to trap him, but Presidential candidates were supposed to stay cool in the face of such q
uestioning. Some of the members knew about Muskie’s temper from covering his vice-presidential campaign in 1968, but most of them were stunned.

  Muskie appeared again in December 1971, accompanied by his press secretary, a former Boston Globe editor named Dick Stewart. Every time Muskie began to lose control, Stewart would say, “Now, Ed, don’t get testy!” They began to wonder a little about Muskie’s stability, but most of them decided that it was just a minor flaw and wouldn’t make any difference.

  Nevertheless, when the national political correspondents—PWDS members and a few others—checked their scratch sheets at the end of 1971, Muskie looked like the only man who really had a chance. Johnny Apple had written a series of exclusive articles in the Times about various big Democratic politicians endorsing Muskie, and these articles helped to build up an impression that Muskie had it made. If he took New Hampshire he would be hard to stop, but because he looked like the one and only contender, he could not afford to do poorly in that first primary.

  On January 9, 1972, David Broder, the most influential political writer in Washington, wrote from Manchester, New Hampshire: “As the acknowledged front runner and a resident of the neighboring state, Muskie will have to win the support of at least half the New Hampshire Democrats in order to claim a victory.” At the beginning of the campaign, that was the wisdom of the screening committee of national political journalists. And when Muskie’s big Scenicruiser bus rolled out of Manchester in January, most of them were on it—writing down every fact that might prove useful six months later when they did the big piece about how Muskie had won the nomination. Thanks to the screening committee, no other candidate in sight had half the press entourage that Muskie had.