The Boys on the Bus Read online

  “We were captivated by a goddam hula hoop,” Lindsay said in August of the press’s attitude toward McGovern. By we, Lindsay really meant they—the editors who doled out space and the reporters who covered McGovern. He felt that the McGovern reporters had failed to look hard at the fact that McGovern would have done poorly in several primaries if not for the votes of Republicans and of Wallace voters who did not have Wallace on the ballot. Lindsay also thought that the McGovern press corps had failed to quiz the Senator rigorously on his defense budget and income redistribution plan.

  “At least,” said Lindsay, “Humphrey managed to turn a very dull primary season into something fairly interesting, and in the end became the only thing that stood between George McGovern and a free ride.

  “Humphrey cut McGovern up a little bit in California, which the process is supposed to do. Cut him up on the issues. It disclosed to me for the first time that McGovern had gotten where he was by some alchemist’s formula, but he sure as hell didn’t get there on the basis of what he really stood for. He didn’t know what the hell he really stood for. He didn’t know what the hell his stands really implied. So Humphrey served a good purpose. And the opportunity was given to him on a silver platter by the press, because the press had never done it.

  “From Wisconsin on, we should have been all over McGovern’s ass, backing him up against the wall on the issues. The fact of the matter is that we’re doing a helluva lot more damage to George McGovern right now, in August, by simply reporting what’s happening to his campaign that if we’d done it last spring when it really didn’t matter.”

  Lindsay was quite correct. In fact, only one reporter really probed George McGovern’s stands in the spring of 1972—Richard Reeves, the political reporter for New York magazine. Reeves was a seasoned journalist in his late thirties who had recently cut the umbilical cord to what he called the “Mother Times” to do free-lance magazine work. Free at last to write with a sweeping authoritativeness that the Times had never allowed, Reeves was out on a shooting spree, turning his personal, sometimes opinionated style on every politician in sight. “If there’s anything good about the guy, fuck it, his press officer will get it out,” Reeves once told me. “So why should I waste my time, for McGovern or anybody else. I don’t tend to think in terms of their problems.”

  Reeves regarded George McGovern as a garden variety pol with an unwarranted reputation for saintliness. “George would rather be President than be right,” he wrote in a New York piece which came out in early May. In the same article, Reeves pointed out that McGovern was fudging on busing (saying one thing in Florida, another in Massachusetts); that McGovern’s accusation that forty percent of American corporations were paying no income tax was “ridiculous”; that McGovern gave little indication of caring much about the plight of the poverty-stricken Indians in his own South Dakota backyard; and that McGovern’s ADA rating had plummeted from 94 to 43 in 1968, the year he ran for reelection to the Senate.

  “Politicians are different from you and me,” Reeves went on, apropos of McGovern. “The business of reaching for power does something to a man—it closes him off from other men until, day by day, he reaches the point where he instinctively calculates each new situation and each other man with the simplest question: what can this do for me?” Reeves saw that McGovern was a politician, and he predicted the compromises that McGovern would make with party regulars later in the year.

  The article had little impact, and few of the reporters on the McGovern Bus seemed to share Reeves’ perception of the Senator. Which was not to say that they wrote glowing, laudatory stories about the candidate. During the California primary campaign, in late May and early June, they gave thorough coverage to McGovern’s inability to put a price tag on his welfare plan and to his growing defensiveness in the face of Humphrey’s shrill attacks. At the same time, however, the phenomenon of the Muskie Bus seemed to be recurring; the McGovern reporters did not seem anxious to probe for McGovern’s flaws, to examine the ruthless, pragmatic side of his personality. True, a few of the national political reporters, notably Jules Witcover and Marty Nolan, wrote a satirical song poking fun at McGovern for his political alliance with Meade Esposito, the old-guard Democratic Party boss of Brooklyn, New York. But many of the reporters seemed content to take McGovern at face value, accepting him as the anti-politician he claimed to be. In California, there was sometimes a feeling of general giddiness on the McGovern Bus. McGovern was so close to victory, and if he won the nomination it would be perhaps the most sensational political story since Lyndon Johnson took himself out of the running in 1968. No one wanted to spoil a story that good.

  It would have been far better for McGovern if the reporters had regarded him as a common politician from the outset. For when, in the course of the Eagleton mess, they finally discovered that he could resort to expediency as quickly as the next pol, many of them acted as though they had been deceived and betrayed. Jim Naughton, for instance, sounded shocked and outraged in the “New Analysis” which he wrote on July 31. Naughton described the less-than-straightforward way in which McGovern had disposed of Eagleton and argued that it might have shattered McGovern’s idealistic image. “The biggest political casualty in the Eagleton affair may prove to be not Senator Thomas F. Eagleton but the man who chose him to seek the vice-presidency,” he wrote. “Mr. McGovern appeared, even to disillusioned members of his campaign staff, to be saying one thing and doing another—which was the charge he had been preparing to make against President Nixon. It all seemed to illustrate, as have other events since Mr. McGovern won the Democratic nomination, that he is, after all, a politician.”

  Naughton did not sound like the same man who had written about Ed Muskie. His on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand equivocations had been replaced by a tough, certain tone. But then Naughton’s circumstances had changed. He was no longer covering a shaky primary candidate, wondering what the future held in store. He had made it through the eliminations and was one of the two anointed Times correspondents who had been assigned to cover the one and only Democratic candidate. As a result, he had a new confidence in himself, a self-assurance which allowed him to operate by the principle he had learned years before in Cleveland: “You should never place your trust in a politician.”

  * Morton’s first assignment of the campaign year, starting in December 1971, had been to cover the seemingly quixotic campaign of George McGovern. While Morton did not appear overly disappointed with this job, his camera crew referred to the McGovern Bus as the “Morgue Patrol” and were convinced that they had been assigned to McGovern as a belated punishment for having botched CBS’s coverage of the Tet Offensive. Six weeks later, however, Morton was rotated to the Muskie Bus. The networks tended to favor such rotations, on the theory that a change of pace prevented the reporters from getting stale or from growing too attached to a single candidate.

  Apparently, however, CBS had not informed its correspondents of the rotation scheme, for David Schoumacher was shocked and angered when he learned, in mid-January, that Morton was to replace him on the Muskie Bus. Several weeks earlier than most of his colleagues, Schoumacher had realized that Muskie could be beaten; he thought that Muskie’s demise would make a great story and wanted badly to stay with the Senator from Maine. He was so unhappy at being transferred to the Humphrey campaign that he began quietly negotiating with ABC, which was a land of opportunity for reporters who felt that their careers were being blocked at CBS or NBC. In recent years, Herb Kaplow (NBC), Bill Matney (NBC), and Harry Reasoner (CBS), had moved to ABC. Late in 1972, Schoumacher also made the move.

  † While it was extraordinary for a reporter so new to the Times to rise so quickly on the paper, it was not unusual for a young reporter, inexperienced in Presidential politics, to be assigned to a candidate. Many of the 1972 crop of campaign reporters, perhaps a majority, were covering a Presidential campaign for the first time. Dick Stout, who had covered his first Presidential contest in 1964, said he supposed he was “as ol
d a pro as there was” among the campaign reporters. “It scares me when I think about it,” he said. “I have more experience at this thing than most of them, and I don’t know anything about it.” Stout later said that he thought campaign coverage was “pretty bad,” but he couldn’t think how to improve it. “I don’t think very many publications or TV stations go at it with any sense of a pattern,” he added. “They don’t profit by experience, mainly because the turnover of editors and reporters is so rapid.”

  ‡ Clark, who covered McGovern through Wisconsin and later covered Humphrey, proved herself to be an excellent correspondent. On December 8, 1972, she was killed in a plane crash at Chicago’s Midway Airport.

  § As it turned out, Lydon did such a good job covering Humphrey and carrying out other assignments that he was chosen to succeed Johnny Apple as the Times’ national political correspondent when Apple moved to the White House beat in early 1973.

  ‖ Lindsay had covered Humphrey off and on since 1971 and followed him full-time from March through the Democratic Convention. Both he and Hayes Gorey, the Humphrey reporter for Time, had to live with the fact that their magazines gave less space to Humphrey than to McGovern. They also had to live with Humphrey’s exhausting eighteen-hour days and his incompetent press secretary, who never learned that reporters needed time to file.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Heavies

  One afternoon after the election, I asked Dick Stout what he thought of a certain campaign reporter. Stout was in one of his darker moods. “He’s as good as any,” he grumbled.

  I waited for Stout to elaborate.

  “Hell, political reporters,” Stout said disgustedly. “Shit, they’re like sportswriters. The job’s a lot the same. It’s fun to do. And the quality isn’t very high. Anybody can be a political reporter or a sportswriter. Even though publications and networks put some of their best people on the candidates in an election year, they really don’t have to. Because anybody really can do it. But you have to be exceptional to do it well. It really takes something to be a good one.”

  There were only a handful of reporters who everyone in the business agreed were exceptional. In any discussion or straw poll, the names that always came up were Johnny Apple, David Broder, Jules Witcover, Bob Novak, and Haynes Johnson.* Nobody could quite define what made these reporters exceptional. It was not just their wide knowledge of politics. Nor the fact that they worked for big papers. Nor that they were right all the time, because they weren’t. When you asked around, the consensus was that they were a lot like other reporters except that they somehow had more energy, they were more monomaniacal about their work.

  Here then are portraits of some of the Heavies:

  Johnny Apple of The New York Times

  “Take a look at Johnny Apple over there,” said a celebrity-watching politico on the closing night of the Democratic Convention. “He practically goes around with a T-shirt saying, ‘I work for the Times: I’m Number One!’ ”

  R. W. “Johnny” Apple, Jr., The New York Times’ national political correspondent, was standing in a shadowy area at the south end of the blue wooden stands of the Press Gallery. A chubby mid-thirtyish man with a pug nose and narrow eyes, he was wearing a polo shirt and slacks and looked like a country-club golfer. All of a sudden Ted Kennedy, who had just finished his speech nominating George McGovern for President, came around a corner a few feet away from Apple, walking briskly and followed by his entourage.

  “Hey, Ted,” shouted Apple, and waved him over. They chatted for about a minute.

  “You know,” said the politico as Ted left Apple, “Johnny thinks he’s better than the pols he writes about. He thinks they need him. He seems to forget it’s The New York Times they need, not him. If Johnny worked for the Denver Post and he said, ‘Hey, Ted,’ Teddy would have kept on walking.”

  Johnny Apple never hesitated to let you know that he was important. He once described to me the elaborate twenty-man “grid system” that the Times had developed to cover the primaries. “And then, floating above all that,” he concluded, “is me. Nobody has as much authority as I do. I can do virtually any story I want to, and I can help shape what other people do.”

  In the eyes of many of his colleagues, Apple was a compulsive bullshit artist, the kind of man who could not resist adding $5,000-a-year when he told you his salary. Returning to New York from the Times’ Saigon bureau, Apple announced that he had killed several Vietcong, which prompted one Timesman to mutter: “Women and children, I presume.” At least a few journalists saw Apple as a ruthlessly ambitious hustler who had stabbed and flattered his way up through the ranks of the Times. Not many people had ever accused Apple of dishonest reporting; it was Apple’s personality that turned them off—his braggadocio, his grandstanding, his mammoth ego. In a business populated largely by shy egomaniacs, he stuck out like a drunk at a funeral.

  I first met Apple around noon on the Sunday before the California primary. Along with a dozen other very heavy media people, he had passed up the tacky Wilshire Hyatt House in favor of the posh Beverly Wilshire, in Beverly Hills. Most of his fellow journalists were lounging by the pool, but Apple had been pounding on his Olivetti since eight, finishing up his story for Monday’s paper. He was phoning the last paragraphs to New York as I arrived. In a room as elegant as a Design Research store window, with bronze foil wallpaper and mod furniture, he was sitting in white BVD’s taking a last hurried look through the mess of yellow legal paper on the desk.

  “Hi,” he thrust out his hand, “John Apple.” As he slathered soap on his face to shave, he enthusiastically outlined the Times’ campaign coverage. Talking nonstop, he pulled on some sports clothes, led me through the lobby and commandeered a good table on the shaded patio of the hotel restaurant. Having ordered a bull-shot and a pack of Salems, he started attacking the basket of sweet rolls on the table. We were talking about the piece he had written for that morning’s paper, in which he flatly predicted that a pack of Southern governors trying to stop McGovern would get nowhere.

  “Believe it or not, they gave me an unlimited travel budget at the Times,” he said, buttering a roll. “So when I get into a situation like that piece this morning, I know fifteen people in Georgia who I can get on the phone and will level with me, and I know another ten in Kentucky, because I’ve been all these places three and four times. That piece took about sixty-five phone calls—two whole days and part of a third. I’m a great string-saver—while I’m doing one story like that I’ll duck into a phone booth and make half a dozen phone calls for another story.

  “My all-time record”—he reached for a second roll and urged one on me—“my all-time record is a hundred calls in one day. That was on a story I did about five state conventions and a couple of territorial conventions or something. But I sat down at my desk at nine o’clock in the morning and got up at ten after seven. And I made about twenty-five of those calls trying to find out what happened in the Canal Zone. ’Cause I was determined I wasn’t gonna have to write: ‘A convention was also held in the Canal Zone, but we don’t know what happened.’ That’s just a little matter of pride.”

  The waiter brought the poached eggs and caviar we had ordered. “The important thing is the amount of money a publisher is willing to contribute to travel,” Apple went on. “Because travel is the soul of this business. You’ve gotta be there, you can’t do it all on the telephone.

  “Tell you a little story. When Tunney [Sen. John Tunney, D.-Cal.] and Moretti [Robert Moretti, Speaker of the California Assembly] made their announcement for Muskie, which I had a couple of days early, a rather bitter California reporter said to Moretti, ‘How come we have to read what you’re going to do in national politics in The New York Times, when we cover California?’ And Moretti looked at the guy and said, ‘If you’d been in my office four times in the last year drinking Scotch the way Johnny Apple was, maybe you wouldn’t have to read about it in The New York Times.’ ”

  Which implies that Apple got the story
from his well-primed source, Moretti. That is not exactly what happened, according to a Tunney aide. The Tunney aide claims to have fed the story to Apple via a couple of intermediaries and for his own purposes. In other words, Apple was being used.

  The Tunney endorsement was a big story, the first of a string of front-page scoops that Apple got on major political figures endorsing Muskie. Tunney was a bosom pal, law school roommate and fellow Senator of Ted Kennedy; if Tunney came out for Muskie, it was probably with Ted’s consent and meant that Ted wasn’t going to run.

  Late in November ’71, Muskie approached Tunney to ask for an endorsement. Tunney checked it out with Kennedy and got the green light. So Tunney’s aide went ahead to make a deal: Tunney would endorse the Man from Maine if Muskie would promise to make him chairman of the California delegation at the Convention. Muskie agreed, and Tunney scheduled the press conference for a week later—Wednesday, December 7.

  Meanwhile, Alan Cranston, the other Senator from California, got wind of Tunney’s plans. Cranston decided he’d better endorse Muskie, too. So he called up Muskie and offered his endorsement in return for a promise that he would be chairman of the California delegation at the Convention. Muskie said yes. When Tunney’s people found out that Muskie had promised the chairmanship to both Tunney and Cranston, they were furious. They called Muskie and raised hell. As usual, Muskie couldn’t make up his mind what to do.

  So, late on Monday, December 5, two days before the scheduled announcement, Tunney’s aide decided to pull the rug out from under Cranston by leaking the Tunney endorsement to The New York Times. He found out that Johnny Apple was in Columbus, Ohio, seeing an old friend, John Gilligan, the governor of Ohio. The aide phoned Mark Shields, a Gilligan aide; Shields relayed the information to Gilligan; and Gilligan leaked the story to Apple. A three-cushion shot with Apple as the eight ball—it was hard for anyone to trace the story back to Tunney’s aide and accuse him of screwing Cranston. On December 7, Johnny Apple’s story—“Tunney Endorsement of Muskie in 1972 Race Is Reported Near”—appeared on the front page of the Times. It was almost an exclusive, but not quite. Just for insurance, Tunney’s aide had also leaked the story to Sam Roberts of the New York Daily News.