The Boys on the Bus Read online

  The screening committee had never held a meeting to appoint Muskie the front runner. They had never even discussed it at great length. If there was a consensus, it was simply because all the national political reporters lived in Washington, saw the same people, used the same sources, belonged to the same background groups, and swore by the same omens. They arrived at their answers just as independently as a class of honest seventh graders using the same geometry text—they did not have to cheat off each other to come up with the same answer. All signs pointed to Ed Muskie as the easy winner, and as the wisdom of the national political men began to filter down through the campaign reporters and the networks to the people, victory began to seem assured for the Senator from Maine.

  Of course, Muskie made no such predictions for himself. All he wanted to do was win, he said, and with all the time he had to spend shuttling back and forth between Florida and New Hampshire, he’d consider himself lucky to get fifty percent. Nobody listened to him. And when the returns came in on the night of March 7, leaving Muskie with only 46 percent of the vote, the press started muttering about a Muskie setback.

  The next morning Muskie held a press conference in the dingy ballroom of the Sheraton Carpenter Hotel in Manchester, and several members of the screening committee turned out for it. David Broder and Tom Ottenad kept asking him about the percentage of his victory. Why hadn’t he done as well as predicted? What had happened? Suddenly Muskie’s temper exploded and he launched into a tirade, lashing out at Broder and Ottenad, who were two of the gentlest and most soft-spoken men in the business. The percentage, said Muskie, had nothing to do with anything. The press was misinterpreting it because the press was out to get him.

  Nothing daunted, Broder asked him how, specifically, the New Hampshire results would affect his chances in Florida and in the other primaries. “I can’t tell you that,” Muskie snapped. “You’ll tell me and you’ll tell the rest of the country because you interpret this victory. This press conference today is my only chance to interpret it, but you’ll probably even misinterpret that.”

  Broder just shrugged, but Marty Nolan, who was sitting directly behind him, raised his hand and said sternly, “Senator, will you answer the question?” Muskie simply looked at him and went on to some other subject. Nolan asked him again, and got the same response.

  After the press conference, Nolan stalked over to Dick Stewart and some Muskie aides who were talking in a corner.

  “Calm down, Marty, calm down,” said Stewart.

  “Look,” said Nolan. “I’ve taken three and a half years of this kind of shit from Nixon and those people, and I’m not gonna take it from you pricks.”

  Muskie, who had known Nolan for many years, came over and put his hand on Nolan’s shoulder. “What’s the problem, Marty?” he asked in his gravest tones.

  Nolan turned around and looked at him. “The bullshit you’ve been handing out—that’s the problem, Senator.”

  Nolan then repeated to Muskie that he was tired of taking bullshit from Nixon and Agnew. “I expect much more of you and I intend to hold you to it,” he said sharply.

  “Well, Marty,” said the Senator. “I guess you’re right.” For the next five minutes, he apologized for his outburst.

  If the press had ever been more powerful than in 1972, nobody could remember when.

  * Leo C. Rosten, Journalism Quarterly, June 1937.

  † White’s emphasis on the vital importance of John F. Kennedy’s early start was the main reason for all this early coverage. There was also another factor. In 1961, a political amateur named Clifton White started assembling the political machine which eventually won the 1964 Republican nomination for Barry Goldwater. The press did not find out about Clifton White’s activities until early 1963. Many reporters later felt chagrin that they had taken so long to catch on to the Goldwater movement, and resolved not to let it happen again.

  ‡ He was also the Washington Bureau chief for Gannett, which meant that he was as powerful within the organization and as well-paid as many of the publishers of the chain’s newspapers.

  § Germond often talked like a hardhat and made a point of being equally cynical about all the candidates. However, when Washington liberals decided to help rehabilitate the poor black southwest section of town by buying homes there, Germond had been one of the first people to move in. He was one of the last to leave the area after it became clear that the project was a failure.

  CHAPTER III

  The Muskie Three

  and Other Campaign

  Reporters

  The journalists on any campaign plane or bus were divided into two distinct types: the national political reporters, who were aboard for only a few days at a time and were free to go off and cover another candidate whenever they wished; and the campaign reporters, who were on board for the duration. The campaign reporters had been assigned to live with a single candidate for as long as he was in the race, or until further notice. They followed the candidate everywhere, heard his standard speech so many dozens of times they could recite it with him, watched his moods go up and down, speculated constantly on his chances, wrote songs about him, told jokes at his expense, traded gossip about him, and were lucky if they did not dream about him into the bargain. They ate and drank with his staff and, in some cases, slept with his lady staffers. At their best, they were his short-order biographers, experts on his positions, habits and character. At their worst—and the deadly fatigue of the campaign trail guaranteed that all but the hardiest of them were occasionally at their worst—they were like the foreign service officer who is sent abroad and goes native; they identified with the candidate and became his apologists.

  In 1971, long before the primaries began, Jim Naughton of The New York Times and Dick Stout of Newsweek were assigned to cover Edmund Muskie. Later they were joined by Bruce Morton of CBS,* and together these three men made up the nucleus of the campaign reporters on the Muskie bus; they had been around the longest and had the best knowledge of the workings of the campaign. It was a great compliment to their abilities that they had been put on the front runner’s campaign, but with the decline of Muskie, which was accelerated when he placed fourth in the Florida primary in March, they found themselves further and further from the center of the action. By the time the Wisconsin primary rolled around, in April, they had begun to look like characters in a Solzhenitsyn novel—forgotten men, and for no reason but fate’s perverse amusement.

  The member of the trio who had spent the longest time with Muskie was Stout. Stout had covered the Man from Maine in the ’68 and ’70 elections, had traveled to Moscow and Israel with him, and had come to know him more intimately than any other writer. Stout looked like an overgrown schoolboy—tall, hulking, overweight, his suit always rumpled, and his blond forelock constantly falling down over his perspiring forehead and his glasses. A native of Indianapolis, he had gone to De Pauw University and worked for papers in Dayton and Chicago. In the early sixties, he contracted “Potomac Fever” by reading Advise and Consent, and landed a job in Newsweek’s Washington Bureau as a general assignment reporter. He was capable of writing well, witness his book on Eugene McCarthy (People) or the campaign piece he did for the Atlantic Monthly in March 1972; but little of his prose survived the blades of the Newsweek blender.

  Stout was a man of startling moods. When he was depressed, his gloom could drown the good mood of a room. But when he was feeling happy, he often displayed a terrifying sense of humor that hovered somewhere between Jack Benny Deadpan and Jonathan Winters Bizarre. He had an alarmingly strong sense of the absurd.

  In August 1971, for instance, Stout was sent to Zanesville, Ohio, to interview a sample of twenty-five people for a segment in an ongoing mood-of-the-country series, which Newsweek had announced with much fanfare several months earlier. Stout did his twenty-five interviews, and he was on his way out of Zanesville when he came upon an encampment of Jesus freaks. Joining their prayer circle, he fell to his knees, threw up his arms and cried, “O
h, Jesus, I am a sinner! Dear Jesus, come and help this poor sinner!” The Jesus freaks were thoroughly convinced by Stout’s performance. Later that evening, they insisted that he come to a formal church service, where they proudly pointed him out as their prize convert.

  The day after Stout filed his Zanesville article, President Nixon announced his wage-price controls. Stout’s editors decided that the announcement made the article dated and irrelevant, so it was killed. A week later, Stout was put back on the Muskie watch and the whole mood-of-the-country series was forgotten.

  One of Stout’s first moves was to refresh his acquaintanceship with the Muskie family. In the late summer of 1971, he had supper with them at their home in Maine. After dinner, he rushed back to his room in the Naragansett Hotel in Kennebunkport and scribbled in his notebook for an hour. The dinner had been full of just the kind of material that most appealed to Stout, and he could not resist writing it up as an FYI memo for his editors—one of the few such memos he filed all year. In the memo, Stout detailed Muskie’s swearing at table in front of his kids, his pride in property, his observations on his golf game, and his arguments with his wife, Jane. At one point, Muskie had realized that he needed his tuxedo the next night, and that it was too late to send it to the cleaners. Muskie and his wife had locked horns in an argument over who was going to iron the tux. “You iron it,” she said finally. “You’re the tailor’s son.” Muskie had exploded in a rage.

  Half a year later, during the Wisconsin primary, Dick Stout played a star role on the night when Muskie and the press had what was probably their most intimate get-together. After a long day, the Muskie Bus had finally pulled in at the Northland Hotel in Green Bay, one of those huge, ancient salesman’s hotels that are forever burning down on the front pages of tabloids. The press gave off an aura of cheerfulness as they came out of the wretched snowy night into the relative snugness of the seedy hotel lobby, and then hunkered down for the first drinking of the evening. There was a party in the offing, a celebration of Ed Muskie’s fifty-eighth birthday.

  Around 9:30, reporters began to filter down a long corridor on the second floor, past a gauntlet of mean-looking Secret Service men, and into a small meeting room where a makeshift bar had been set up in the far corner. Just behind the bar sat an old-fashioned red Coca-Cola tub filled with ice.

  Most of the fifty reporters gathered in the room had trudged after Muskie through the long, depressing days of his decline in Florida, Illinois and Wisconsin. They were ravenous for a good time. The entire stock of liquor at the bar was gone within fifteen minutes. The Senator himself was there, slowly sipping a bourbon and stiffly joking with reporters.

  Soon after the liquor ran out, Dick Stout went to the Coke tub, placed on it a stand-up ashtray to use as a lectern, and took out his notebook, in which he had made some hasty notes that afternoon. The room fell silent as Stout began a laborious and sometimes deadly accurate parody of a Muskie speech. The main point of the speech was that, like any Muskie oration, it went on forever. But the reporters roared at anything that faintly resembled a punch line; they laughed until they cried. Stout was making wooden, Muskie-like gestures and laughing at his own jokes; he seemed to be having a wonderful time.

  Muskie and Jane sat behind the table, a few feet away from Stout. Whenever he had to, Muskie gave a harrowing grin, as if he had just received a shock through alligator clips attached to his genitals. Jane smiled indiscriminately at everything, just to be on the safe side.

  When Stout finished the speech, he and Naughton and Morton presented Muskie with gifts they had purchased the day before. The Senator winced as they handed him a Polish Power sweatshirt and other joke-shop fare. A large rectangular birthday cake was brought in, and Muskie rose to cut it. The cake was decorated to look like the White House. As he summoned each reporter by name to claim a piece of the cake, the party suddenly turned somber and formal. It looked like the Last Supper, with fifty Judases present. Several reporters gathered around Stout to compliment him on his wit, but Stout seemed distracted and uneasy. He was skating on thin social ice with the Muskies. In December, Newsweek had cribbed a Women’s Wear Daily account of Jane’s mild swearing; William Loeb, the curmudgeon publisher of the reactionary Manchester Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only statewide paper, used the Newsweek item in a vicious anti-Muskie editorial. Muskie had been defending his wife’s honor outside of the Union Leader office when he broke down and started to cry. So it was safe to bet that somewhere in the back of Muskie’s mind, Newsweek was mixed up with the fatal “crying incident” and Stout was mixed up with them both.

  Now Stout had treated the Senator to a good roasting, which had been designed to burst the tension that had built up between Muskie, ever secretive and suspicious, and his journalistic adversaries. But the speech had left a curious malaise in the room. The party was meant to let off steam, but Muskie’s safety valve was jammed.

  As the Senator continued to cut the cake, he was approached by Jack English, his campaign coordinator. Jack English’s hair was dyed jet black, and he had one of the last crew cuts to be given in New York State. He looked like a washed-up pug and was normally aloof, but tonight he was gregarious and almost pixyish. Prancing over to the Senator, he whispered something in his ear. Muskie peered over at Stout, grinned his first heartfelt grin of the evening, and said, “No, Jack, I don’t think a Presidential candidate should stoop to slapstick comedy.”

  “What?” asked Jane Muskie, looking confused. “What are you talking about?”

  Muskie ignored her and went back to dissecting the cake. But Jane puzzled out the exchange and suddenly a light bulb went on; she smiled a victorious smile. Picking up a piece of cake—marble cake with thick white icing—she marched over to Stout, who was standing alone, lost in meditation.

  “Dick?” she cooed.

  “Yes,” said Dick, and turned around.

  “Here,” said Jane, and pushed the cake into his face. She smeared the cake around, as if it were a mudpack. The icing got into Stout’s nostrils, all over his cheek and into his left ear. He had the surprised expression of a poleaxed sheep.

  “One good turn deserves another,” said Jane, doubling up with laughter. Muskie looked as if he wanted to crawl out of the room. He chuckled good-naturedly for lack of anything to say. Some reporters laughed and others looked horrified. Stout looked humiliated and ineffably sad as he pulled out his blower and began to wipe off the goo. The party was over.

  It is doubtful whether the press ever came closer to making contact with the Man from Maine than at that bizarre and manic party. At the start of the primary races, the press had by and large been disposed to like the Senator, but it took Muskie only a few short weeks to poison that good will. He whipsawed between begging the press and bullying them. On a flight from Los Angeles to Washington in August ’71, he interrupted the reporters’ cribbage game to tell them that his fate was in their hands. “You can make me or break me,” he said. At other times he would turn on reporters, as he did at his post-election press conference in New Hampshire, and treat them to a stream of arrogance and abuse, blaming them for his setbacks.

  Ironically, Muskie’s campaign was a reporter’s dream, for if the Senator treated the press badly, he treated his staff worse. He intimidated them, made scapegoats of them, and often ignored their advice. There was nearly always some wounded staffer who didn’t mind telling you what was going on up in the Candidate’s Suite. Surprisingly, very few reporters availed themselves of these willing sources, and several interesting developments in the Muskie campaign went largely unchronicled.

  There was, for instance, the incident on election night in Florida when Muskie went into a rage over the poor returns and tried to resign. “All his major advisers were up there in his hotel room,” recalled an eyewitness, “and Muskie just had a fit. He screamed and ranted like something out of Marat/Sade. He kept shouting, ‘You guys made me commit political suicide! You made me come out against the Space Shuttle!’ ”

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sp; When Muskie had calmed down, he and his advisers left the room and crowded into an elevator to go down to the doomed election night party where he was to deliver his concession statement.

  The dialogue in the elevator, according to the same eyewitness, went like this:

  “What are you going to say, Senator?” asked Berl Bernhard, Muskie’s campaign manager.

  Muskie stared at him. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” he growled.

  “Yes, Senator, we certainly would,” Bernhard said nervously.

  Muskie just stood and glared. Jane put her head on his shoulder. “Oh, Ed,” she said. “If you go back to Maine we can have another baby.”

  And Muskie, said the eyewitness, suddenly seemed to change his mind. One thought of another kid in Kennebunkport, and he walked right out to the microphones and told the crowd he was still in the race. “I swear to God,” said the eyewitness. “That’s what did it.”

  Now, if the protagonist of this incident had been George McGovern, and the incident had taken place in the fall, it would have got into print without a doubt—though perhaps in sketchy, abbreviated form. The rumors of Muskie’s attempt to withdraw were in the air within a few days after the Florida election. A little guileful prodding should have unearthed the whole story. But not even a hint of the story showed up in the press, except in a Rolling Stone column written by Hunter Thompson several weeks later.

  A month and a half later, in a front page New York Times story that appeared the day after Muskie withdrew from the primaries, Jim Naughton finally revealed that the Senator had wanted to pull out after the Florida election. But why didn’t the reporters trace down the full story at the time it happened? All of the ones I asked said that they had not heard the rumors. I believed them, but I thought another factor might have been operating. I thought that they didn’t want to hear the rumors—not because they necessarily supported Muskie’s candidacy, but because they wanted to be on the Winner’s Bus.