The Boys on the Bus Page 9

  In the next month, Mark Shields, the Gilligan aide, became a national coordinator of the Muskie campaign and proceeded to leak several Muskie endorsement stories exclusively to Apple, including the news that Leonard Woodcock of the UAW was going to come out for Muskie. Several high-level members of Muskie’s staff were outraged that Shields was favoring one reporter and felt that Shields ought to be punished. But Shields, one of the shrewdest men on Muskie’s staff, was sure he had done the right thing. By giving the stories exclusively to The New York Times, he had guaranteed: a) that The Times would give them front-page play and b) that every other paper in America would give them prominent coverage. Once a story hits page one of the Times, it is certified news and can’t be ignored.†

  “You build up confidence in people,” Apple was saying as he sipped his bull-shot. “They tell you things.” No small part of Apple’s success was that he had been, for as long as anyone could remember, a red-hot, gung-ho overachiever. He was editor-in-chief of the yearbook at his Ohio prep school, Western Reserve Academy. At Princeton, he ran the newspaper, got elected vice chairman of the student council, and was thrown out for bad grades. He worked for The Wall Street Journal, did a hitch in the Army (moonlighting for a newspaper in Virginia), and finally graduated magna cum laude from Columbia in 1961. He was editor of the newspaper there, too. After a couple of years as a writer for Huntley-Brinkley at NBC, he joined the Times and became a protégé of Abe Rosenthal, who was then the metropolitan editor.

  “… he never stopped running…,” Gay Talese wrote of Apple in his book on the Times. “The result was that he got more good stories into the paper than anyone on Rosenthal’s staff. This is not what bothered his older colleagues so much, for they soon recognized his ability to get a story and write it; what really bothered them was Apple’s incredible enthusiasm for everything he had been assigned to cover—a Board of Estimate hearing, a talk by the tax commissioner, a repetition of political speeches—and Apple’s insistence, once he had returned, on telling everybody in the newsroom what he had seen and heard.”‡

  Apple practically ran up the ladder of good reportorial jobs—Bobby Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign, the Albany Statehouse, Vietnam, Nelson Rockefeller’s ’68 Presidential campaign, Africa, and then the whole national political scene. He was a golden boy. Someone once asked Abe Rosenthal what was the best decision he had ever made. “Hiring Johnny Apple,” Rosenthal shot back immediately.

  The lowlier employees of the Times were not so enamored of Apple. Among his fellow reporters, Apple had the reputation of an ass-kisser. He not only flattered Rosenthal, it was said, but also took pains to ingratiate himself with the Sulzberger family, who owned and published the Times. He had, for instance, gone out and written an enthusiastic feature about a radio show that was run by Ellen Sulzberger Straus (cousin of Punch Sulzberger, the publisher). It was around this time, in 1964, that David Halberstam returned to the Times’ New York office after having reported on Vietnam for several years, for which coverage he had won a Pulitzer Prize. One afternoon, as he sat at his desk, Halberstam spotted a round-faced young man walking around the city room as if he owned it. Halberstam realized that this must be Abe Rosenthal’s current pet, Johnny Apple. Apple sauntered over to Halberstam’s desk and announced with studied nonchalance: “Say, I was over at Peter and Ellen Straus’s—you know, Punch’s favorite cousin—last night, and Harding Bancroft [vice president of the Times] was there, and your name came up and I thought you’d be pleased—it was very favorably commented upon.”

  Halberstam said his first words to Johnny Apple: “Fuck off, kid!”

  What constantly amazed people, as the years passed, was that Apple remained the same eager, egregiously ambitious kid he had been when he first arrived at the Times. He still had a restless, stir-crazy desire to get every story first—a commendable trait in a reporter. But some of his colleagues thought that he was less interested in covering the election than in seeking out small pieces of information that some of his more eminent rivals, like David Broder, did not have in their stories. He did not seem to develop the depth, reflectiveness, and moral courage necessary to become a great journalist. He never stopped running for long enough to form any ideas; one could not imagine him writing a thoughtful magazine piece or a book review. “Johnny has not grown up in one way,” said a reporter who had known him for years. “And that is that he literally believes that newspapermen are judged on how many by-lines they get, not what they say. We all used to think that way when we were kids —‘Gee, I got six by-lines this week’—but Johnny still talks that way. He travels all over and spreads himself thin. He should write one or two pieces a week and give people some insight into what the fuck’s going on, but instead he tells people how many delegates McGovern had on Thursday as opposed to Tuesday. Scoreboard journalism, and the Times has a hundred good reporters who can do that.

  “In April,” the reporter continued, “Apple wrote one of the best stories of the campaign—that interview with John Gilligan where Gilligan talked about all the things that were going wrong with Muskie’s campaign. Apple has worked Gilligan as a source for a long time and he got Gilligan to say things that politicians never say. It was funny, it was sad, it was insightful. And he blew it. He could have taken a week and made that interview the centerpiece for a long front-page article on what it’s like to run a campaign and how Muskie’s failed. But as it was he got that interview in two hours and got on a plane and the fucking thing ran way inside the paper with a one-column head and only professionals saw it. He just never bothered to develop it.”

  Some reporters, when they have passed thirty and have achieved some success, begin to nurture healthy doubts about their work, about the use of the power they have attained, about the difference between the reality they witness and what they report as news. Apple never seemed to feel a twinge of doubt. As long as he was getting exclusives, writing big stories, breaking news earlier than other reporters, he was happy. He was not anxious to analyze, to explore the meaning of events. He liked to write prediction stories, to be the first reporter to say that a certain candidate was going to win. I once asked Edward Folliard, the Washington Post’s emeritus political reporter, why so many reporters want to write prediction stories. “They do it because it’s fun,” said Folliard. A few reporters were gradually coming to realize that it did the public little good to know who was going to win or which way a certain state was going to vote—they would find that out on election day anyway. But it was a game with reporters to predict these things, and Apple liked to win the game.

  Apple had a mania for being “one jump ahead.” Over lunch at the Beverly Wilshire, he mentioned the story he had written three days before the New Hampshire primary, saying that Muskie was in trouble in three of the first four primary states. “We had men traveling with the candidates and men assessing the situation in New Hampshire, and that enabled me to stay one jump ahead,” he said. “So in New Hampshire, I had talked to a lot of candidates, managers and local people I knew and I got this idea Muskie was slipping. I thought, ‘Shit, if this is happening here, it must be happening elsewhere.’ So I went to Florida and Wisconsin in the three weeks before the election, and it was as obvious as the nose on your face.”

  Apple always stayed ahead of the pack on day-to-day events, but he was seldom ahead of public opinion on major social issues. In 1966, when he first arrived in Saigon, he had aspired to be “Combat Johnny,” wearing a German brush cut, talking tough, and bragging about the number of VC he had killed. By 1967, however, he perceived a general feeling that the war was not admirable; suddenly he began to write that the war was a stalemate—even though it had already been stalemated for at least a year.

  “He is classically the reporter that the Times would have invented,” says a fellow reporter. “He asks just the questions that they want asked and not one more; he doesn’t probe too deeply; and if he ever started to doubt what he was doing, he would tell them about those doubts. He’s not like t
hat deliberately to please the Times. It’s just the way he is.”

  For all Apple’s energy, ambition, and haste to get to the top, he was not an overreacher. Although he thrived on leaks and plants, he never pretended to get information from a high authority when he had got it from a lowly source, and he was careful not to lie in print. The closest he ever came was in a dispatch from Saigon, in which he claimed that a bullet had split the seat of his pants while he was under enemy fire. When skeptical colleagues asked to inspect the evidence, Apple said that he had thrown the trousers away. “Threw them away!” one of the skeptics later exclaimed. “He’s so full of it. I mean, you better believe that if a bullet did go through your pants you’d save the goddam things and frame them!”

  The tale of the pants is among the most famous stories about Apple, but there are hundreds of others. Apple is probably the leading character in contemporary American journalistic folklore. Other reporters are fascinated by him and love to tell stories about him. Even back in the early sixties, when Apple was covering the Statehouse in Albany, his fellow reporters constantly traded anecdotes about his boastfulness and incredible aggressiveness. Apple stories so completely dominated the conversation of a group of Statehouse reporters who dined every night in the same restaurant that anyone who mentioned Apple had to pay a fine of fifty cents. One night one of the reporters angrily stalked into the restaurant and threw a ten-dollar bill onto the table. “That fucking Apple …,” he began, and went on to complain about ten dollars’ worth of outrages.

  There was a reason why reporters told stories about Apple: they recognized many of their own traits in him, grotesquely magnified. The shock of recognition frightened them. Apple was like them, only more blatant. He openly displayed the faults they tried to hide: the insecurity, the ambitiousness, the name-dropping, the ass-kissing, and the weakness for powerful men. So, like prep school boys tormenting the class goat, they shifted the spotlight off themselves by making fun of Johnny Apple. When they talked about him, they were really saying: “I hope it doesn’t show so much in me. I hope I’m not that bad. I’m really much better than that.”

  At the same time, the reporters admired Apple. (The class goat happens to be a genius at Math and becomes popular at exam time). He knew more about the fine, mundane details of national party politics than almost anyone in the business. “During the primaries,” said Jim Doyle, “Johnny did it best. Johnny became a source for many, many guys who weren’t getting around as much as he was. He became a source for me.”

  Not only did other reporters read Apple’s articles for unique information, they also looked to him for guidance whenever they had to cover a story where there were no handouts, no speeches, and no easy answers. Such a situation arose in late January, when the Democratic precincts of Iowa held caucuses to vote for delegates to the Convention. The Iowa precinct caucuses were the first test of Muskie’s strength, and thirty or forty reporters—national political reporters, campaign reporters, and men from small papers—descended on Des Moines to report and interpret the results. When they crowded into the tiny, steamy Democratic headquarters on the night of January 24 to hear a local Democratic official announce the hour-by-hour returns, none of them could make much sense of the figures. Except for Apple.

  A McGovern worker who was present recalled the scene. It was the first time he had ever seen the national press in operation. “It really amazed me,” he said, “because what happened was that Johnny Apple of The New York Times sat in a corner and everyone peered over his shoulder to find out what he was writing. The AP guy was looking over one shoulder, the UPI guy over the other and CBS, NBC, ABC and the Baltimore Sun were all crowding in behind. See, it wasn’t like a primary. No one knew how to interpret these figures, nobody knew what was good and what was bad, so they were all taking it off Apple. He would sit down and write a lead, and they would go write leads. Then he’d change his lead when more results came in, and they’d all change theirs accordingly. When he wanted quiet to hear the guy announce the latest returns, he’d shout for quiet and they’d all shut up. Finally, at midnight, the guy announced that Muskie had 32 percent and McGovern had 26 percent, and Apple sat down to write his final story. He called it something like ‘a surprisingly strong showing for George McGovern.’ Everyone peered over his shoulder again and picked it up. It was on the front page of every major newspaper the next day.”

  Because of Apple’s enormous power, politicians were sensitive to anything he wrote and often had gripes with him. During the early primaries, Lindsay and McGovern people complained that Apple was favoring Muskie. Although Apple claimed that he had tried to insure from the beginning that the Times would give serious coverage to McGovern’s campaign, the fact remains that he relied heavily on party regulars as sources. This constantly irritated the more liberal, reform-minded Democrats.

  On the last night of the Democratic Convention, I was waiting for a floor pass with a young lady journalist, who had taken time off in the spring to serve as Sissy Farenthold’s press officer during Farenthold’s bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Texas. Suddenly Apple came charging out of the Press Gallery, beaming and heading straight for us.

  “Wasn’t I right?” he demanded as he reached us. “Didn’t I tell you back in California that McGoo was going to get the nomination!”

  “Yeah, you sure did,” I said. Apple always referred to McGovern as “McGoo.” Apple was a Timesman to the core, so to speak, but he often seemed anxious to prove that he was not a running dog of the establishment, especially when he was around young people. So he did naughty little things to assert his independence—like calling the candidate “McGoo,” or wearing his hair long, or refusing to wear a jacket and tie—things that made him stand out from the stuffy grey image of the Times. He was one of the few men on the Times with aspirations to hipness.

  I had a vague recollection of Apple telling me in June that McGoo had the nomination sewed up. “You were right about that,” I shouted at Apple over the blare of the band and the clamor of the delegates.

  He smiled again and launched into another sentence, but the young lady cut him off. “Boy,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you. You completely misrepresented Sissy Farenthold. You were inaccurate.”

  “No I wasn’t,” said Apple. His smile crumpled and he began to hedge away like a criminal who has just spotted the one witness he thought was dead.

  “You said Sissy’s issues were gun control, abortion, and the Texas Rangers, but they weren’t …” the young lady fired away, but Apple had given a little wave, backed off fast, and disappeared into the crowd.

  “My God,” said the young lady. “Sissy’s main issue was tax reform, and he never said anything about that. David Broder of the Post rode around with us, but we never saw Apple on the campaign plane. Instead, he got most of his information from some of Ben Barnes’ people—the powerful oil-interest Democrats who were running against Sissy. I guess he saw a few of our staffers in Dallas. But Dallas is the home of Texas radical chic. He never saw the Chicanos and blacks and poor whites who were working for Sissy in Houston. He missed the whole point of the campaign. I always believed that the Times was accurate, but I’ll never trust it again after reading that story.”

  Johnny Apple’s confidence wasn’t shaken like that very often. One of his virtues as a journalist was that he took confident stands in many of his stories. He didn’t hedge a lot of bets. “Part of that is because I have the strong backing of a strong newspaper,” he said at the Wilshire. “I’m never questioned on what I write. Never! Occasionally there will be a small hassle about phraseology—but as to my overall judgment of what a situation is, they don’t argue.”

  So it shook him like an earthquake when the Times killed his major Democratic Convention story—his on-the-money analysis of the South Carolina vote. On Monday night, when the McGovern forces purposely “lost” the South Carolina challenge rather than risk a narrow “Twilight Zone” victory that would have brought u
p sticky parliamentary questions, Walter Cronkite announced that it was a serious setback for the McGovern people, and NBC acted momentarily confused. But Apple filed five-hundred words explaining the whole Byzantine mess, and showing that it was really a victory for McGovern’s crack troops.§

  Apple knew it was coming. The week before, he had written about the parliamentary skirmishing that was likely to break out at the Convention. That morning, in Monday’s Times, he had a piece outlining the parliamentary game plans that the McGovern generals might put into effect. At one o’clock that afternoon, he got a memo from Jim Naughton predicting the McGovern tactic. And when the vote actually came up, he was sitting on a folding chair at the Times counter in the press bleachers, keeping a tally for Max Frankel, the Washington Bureau chief.

  “When the two states switched—I knew people in the delegations—I turned to Max and said, Throw something in the story about how they’re switching votes to put off the main showdown until the California vote,” Apple recalled later. “Then I wrote a new top for my ‘Convention Notes’ column, explaining the whole thing. We sent it off and heard not a single word. We presumed it was in the paper, everybody was happy, and we went off to bed.”

  Around noon the next day, Apple sauntered into the Times office to look at his story in the late edition, which was flown to Miami every morning. The Times had the biggest office of any newspaper at the Convention; it occupied half of the vast East Riviera Room of the Fontainbleau Hotel. The far wall of the office contained plate-glass windows that looked out on the pea-green Atlantic. The near wall was a tall aluminum partition that had been erected to make the Times office a little fortress within the gilded and thickly carpeted ballroom.