by Joan Didion
Those June days in 1988 during which Michael Dukakis did or did not cross a curious American threshold had in fact been instructive. The day that ended in the schoolyard in San Jose had at first seemed, given that it was the day before the California primary, underscheduled, pointless, three essentially meaningless events separated by plane flights. At Taft High School in Woodland Hills that morning there had been little girls waving red and gold pom-poms in front of the cameras; “Hold that tiger,” the band had played. “Dream . . . maker,” the choir had crooned. “Governor Dukakis . . . this is . . . Taft High,” the student council president had said. “I understand that this is the first time a presidential candidate has come to Taft High,” Governor Dukakis had said. “Is there any doubt . . . under those circumstances . . . who you should support?”
“Jackson,” a group of Chicano boys on the back sidewalk shouted in unison.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Governor Dukakis had said, and “health care”, and “good teachers and good teaching”.
This event had been abandoned, and another materialized: a lunchtime “rally”, in a downtown San Diego office plaza through which many people were passing on their way to lunch, a borrowed crowd but a less than attentive one. The cameras focused on the balloons. The sound techs picked up “La Bamba”. “We’re going to take child-support enforcement seriously in this country,” Governor Dukakis had said, and “tough drug enforcement here and abroad”. “Tough choices,” he had said, and “we’re going to make teaching a valued profession in this country”.
Nothing said in any venue that day had seemed to have much connection with anybody listening (“I want to work with you and with working people all over this country,” the candidate had said in the San Diego office plaza, but people who work in offices in San Diego do not think of themselves as “working people”), and late that afternoon, on the bus to the San Jose airport, I had asked a reporter who had traveled through the spring with the various campaigns (among those who moved from plane to plane it was agreed, by June, that the Bush plane had the worst access to the candidate and the best food, that the Dukakis plane had average access and average food, and that the Jackson plane had full access and no time to eat) if the candidate’s appearances that day did not seem a little off the point.
“Not really,” the reporter said. “He covered three major markets.”
Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these “events” they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (“They hope he won’t make any big mistakes,” the NBC correspondent covering George Bush kept saying the evening of the September 25, 1988, debate at Wake Forest College, and, an hour and a half later, “He didn’t make any big mistakes”), events designed only to provide settings for those unpaid television spots which in this case were appearing, even as we spoke, on the local news in California’s three major media markets. “On the fishing trip, there was no way for the television crews to get videotapes out,” the Los Angeles Times noted a few weeks later in a piece about how “poorly designed and executed events” had interfered with coverage of a Bush campaign “environmental” swing through the Pacific Northwest. “At the lumber mill, Bush’s advance team arranged camera angles so poorly that in one setup only his legs could get on camera.” A Bush adviser had been quoted: “There is no reason for camera angles not being provided for. We’re going to sit down and talk about these things at length.”
Any traveling campaign, then, was a set, moved at considerable expense from location to location. The employer of each reporter on the Dukakis plane the day before the California primary was billed, for a total flying time of under three hours, $1,129.51; the billing to each reporter who happened, on the morning during the Democratic convention in Atlanta when Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen met with Jesse Jackson, to ride along on the Dukakis bus from the Hyatt Regency to the World Congress Center, a distance of perhaps ten blocks, was $217.18. There was the hierarchy of the set: there were actors, there were directors, there were script supervisors, there were grips.
There was the isolation of the set, and the arrogance, the contempt for outsiders. I recall pink-cheeked young aides on the Dukakis campaign referring to themselves, innocent of irony and therefore of history, as “the best and the brightest”. On the morning after the Wake Forest debate, Michael Oreskes of the New York Times gave us this memorable account of Bush aides crossing the Wake Forest campus:
The Bush campaign measured exactly how long it would take its spokesmen to walk briskly from the room in which they were watching the debate to the center where reporters were filing their articles. The answer was three and a half minutes—too long for Mr. Bush’s strategists, Lee Atwater, Robert Teeter, and Mr. Darman. They ran the course instead as young aides cleared students and other onlookers from their path.
There was also the tedium of the set: the time spent waiting for the shots to be set up, the time spent waiting for the bus to join the motorcade, the time spent waiting for telephones on which to file, the time spent waiting for the Secret Service (“the agents”, they were called on the traveling campaigns, never the Secret Service, just “the agents”, or “this detail”, or “this rotation”) to sweep the plane.
It was a routine that encouraged a certain passivity. There was the plane, or the bus, and one got on it. There was the schedule, and one followed it. There was time to file, or there was not. “We should have had a page-one story,” a Boston Globe reporter complained to the Los Angeles Times after the Bush campaign had failed to provide the advance text of a Seattle “environment” speech scheduled to end only twenty minutes before the departure of the plane for California. “There are times when you sit up and moan, ‘Where is Michael Deaver when you need him?’ “ an ABC producer said to the Times on this point.
A final victory, for the staff and the press on a traveling campaign, would mean not a new production but only a new location: the particular setups and shots of the campaign day (the walk on the beach, the meet-and-greet at the housing project) would dissolve imperceptibly, isolation and arrogance and tedium intact, into the South Lawns, the Oval Office signings, the arrivals and departures of the administration day. There would still be the “young aides”. There would still be “onlookers” to be cleared from the path. Another location, another stand-up: “We already shot a tarmac departure,” they say on the campaign planes. “This schedule has two Rose Gardens,” they say in the White House pressroom. Ronald Reagan, when asked by David Frost how his life in the Oval Office had differed from his expectations of it, said this: “—I was surprised at how familiar the whole routine was—the fact that the night before I would get a schedule telling me what I’m going to do all day the next day and so forth.”
American reporters “like” covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington), which is one reason why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported. They are willing, in exchange for “access”, to transmit the images their sources wish transmitted. They are even willing, in exchange for certain colorful details around which a “reconstruction” can be built (the “kitchen table” at which the Dukakis campaign conferred on the night Lloyd Bentsen was added to the 1988 Democratic ticket, the “slips of paper” on which key members of the 1988 Bush campaign, aboard Air Force Two on their way to New Orleans, wrote down their own guesses for vice president), to present these images not as a story the campaign wants told but as fact. This was Time, reporting from New Orleans on George Bush’s reaction when Dan Quayle
came under attack:
Bush never wavered in support of the man he had lifted so high. “How’s Danny doing?” he asked several times. But the Vice President never felt the compulsion to question Quayle face-to-face. The awkward investigation was left to Baker. Around noon, Quayle grew restive about answering further questions. “Let’s go,” he urged, but Baker pressed to know more. By early afternoon, the mood began to brighten in the Bush bunker. There were no new revelations: the media hurricane had for the moment blown out to sea.
This was Sandy Grady, reporting from Atlanta:
Ten minutes before he was to face the biggest audience of his life, Michael Dukakis got a hug from his 84-year-old mother, Euterpe, who chided him, “You’d better be good, Michael.” Dukakis grinned and said, “I’ll do my best, Ma.”
“Appeal to the media by exposing the [Bush campaign’s] heavy-handed spin-doctoring,” William Safire advised the Dukakis campaign on September 8, 1988. “We hate to be seen being manipulated.”
“Periodically,” the New York Times reported in March 1988, “Martin Plissner, the political editor of CBS News, and Susan Morrison, a television producer and former political aide, organize gatherings of the politically connected at their home in Washington. At such parties, they organize secret ballots asking the assembled experts who will win. ... By November 1, 1987, the results of Mr. Dole’s organizing efforts were apparent in a new Plissner-Morrison poll . . .”
The symbiosis here was complete, and the only outsider was the increasingly hypothetical voter, who was seen as responsive not to actual issues but to their adroit presentation: “At the moment the Republican message is simpler and more clear than ours,” the Democratic chairman for California, Peter Kelly, said to the Los Angeles Times on August 31, 1988, complaining, on the matter of what was called the Pledge of Allegiance issue, not that it was a false issue but that Bush had seized the initiative, or “the symbolism”.
“Bush Gaining in Battle of TV Images,” the Washington Post headlined a page-one story on September 10, 1988, and quoted Jeff Greenfield, the ABC News political reporter: “George Bush is almost always outdoors, coatless, sometimes with his sleeves rolled up, and looks ebullient and Happy Warrior-ish. Mike Dukakis is almost always indoors, with his jacket on, and almost always behind a lectern.” The Bush campaign, according to that week’s issue of Newsweek, was, because it had the superior gift for getting film shot in “dramatic settings—like Boston Harbor”, winning “the all-important battle of the backdrops”. A CBS producer covering the Dukakis campaign was quoted complaining about an occasion when Governor Dukakis, speaking to students on a California beach, had faced the students instead of the camera. “The only reason Dukakis was on the beach was to get his picture taken,” the producer had said. “So you might as well see his face.” Pictures, Newsweek had concluded, “often speak louder than words.”
This “battle of the backdrops” story appeared on page twenty-four of the Newsweek dated September 12, 1988. On page twenty-three of the same issue there appeared, as illustrations for the lead National Affairs story (“Getting Down and Dirty: As the mud-slinging campaign moves into full gear, Bush stays on the offensive—and Dukakis calls back his main street-fighting man”), two half-page color photographs, one of each candidate, which seemed to address the very concerns expressed on page twenty-four and in the Post. The photograph of George Bush showed him indoors, with his jacket on, and behind a lectern. That of Michael Dukakis showed him outdoors, coatless, with his sleeves rolled up, looking ebullient, about to throw a baseball on an airport tarmac: something had been learned from Jeff Greenfield, or something had been told to Jeff Greenfield. “We talk to the press, and things take on a life of their own,” Mark Siegel, a Democratic political consultant, said to Elizabeth Drew.
About this baseball on the tarmac. On the day that Michael Dukakis appeared at the high school in Woodland Hills and at the rally in San Diego and in the schoolyard in San Jose, there was, although it did not appear on the schedule, a fourth event, what was referred to among the television crews as a “tarmac arrival with ball tossing”. This event had taken place in late morning, on the tarmac at the San Diego airport, just after the chartered 737 had rolled to a stop and the candidate had emerged. There had been a moment of hesitation. Then baseball mitts had been produced, and Jack Weeks, the traveling press secretary, had tossed a ball to the candidate. The candidate had tossed the ball back. The rest of us had stood in the sun and given this our full attention, undeflected even by the arrival of an Alaska Airlines 767: some forty adults standing on a tarmac watching a diminutive figure in shirtsleeves and a red tie toss a ball to his press secretary.
“Just a regular guy,” one of the cameramen had said, his inflection that of the “union official” who confided, in an early Dukakis commercial aimed at blue-collar voters, that he had known “Mike” a long time, and backed him despite his not being “your shot-and-beer kind of guy”.
“I’d say he was a regular guy,” another cameraman had said. “Definitely.”
“I’d sit around with him,” the first cameraman said.
Kara Dukakis, one of the candidate’s daughters, had at that moment emerged from the 737.
“You’d have a beer with him?”
Jack Weeks had tossed the ball to Kara Dukakis.
“I’d have a beer with him.”
Kara Dukakis had tossed the ball to her father. Her father had caught the ball and tossed it back to her.
“OK,” one of the cameramen had said. “We got the daughter. Nice. That’s enough. Nice.”
The CNN producer then on the Dukakis campaign told me, later in the day, that the first recorded ball tossing on the Dukakis campaign had been outside a bowling alley somewhere in Ohio. CNN had shot it.
When the campaign realized that only one camera had it, they had restaged it.
“We have a lot of things like the ball tossing,” the producer said. “We have the Greek dancing for example.”
I asked if she still bothered to shoot it.
“I get it,” she said, “but I don’t call in anymore and say, ‘Hey, hold it, I’ve got him dancing.’ “
This sounded about right (the candidate might, after all, bean a citizen during the ball tossing, and CNN would need film), and not until I read Joe Klein’s version of these days in California did it occur to me that this eerily contrived moment on the tarmac at San Diego could become, at least provisionally, history. “The Duke seemed downright jaunty,” Joe Klein reported. “He tossed a baseball with aides. He was flagrantly multilingual. He danced Greek dances . . .” In the July 25, 1988, issue of U.S. News & World Report, Michael Kramer opened his cover story, “Is Dukakis Tough Enough?”, with a more developed version of the ball tossing:
The thermometer read 101 degrees, but the locals guessed 115 on the broiling airport tarmac in Phoenix. After all, it was under a noonday sun in the desert that Michael Dukakis was indulging his truly favorite campaign ritual—a game of catch with his aide Jack Weeks. “These days,” he has said, “throwing the ball around when we land somewhere is about the only exercise I get.” For 16 minutes, Dukakis shagged flies and
threw strikes. Halfway through, he rolled up his sleeves, but he never loosened his tie. Finally, mercifully, it was over and time to pitch the obvious tongue-in-cheek question: “Governor, what does throwing a ball around in this heat say about your mental stability?” Without missing a beat, and without a trace of a smile, Dukakis echoed a sentiment he has articulated repeatedly in recent months: “What it means is that I’m tough.”
Nor was this the last word. On July 31,1988, in the Washington Post, David S. Broder, who had also been with the Dukakis campaign in Phoenix, gave us a third, and, by virtue of his seniority in the process, perhaps the official version of the ball tossing:
Dukakis called out to Jack Weeks, the handsome, curly-hair
ed Welshman who good-naturedly shepherds us wayward pressmen through the daily vagaries of the campaign schedule. Weeks dutifully produced two gloves and a baseball, and there on the tarmac, with its surface temperature just below the boiling point, the governor loosened up his arm and got the kinks out of his back by tossing a couple hundred 90-foot pegs to Weeks.
What we had in the tarmac arrival with ball tossing, then, was an understanding: a repeated moment witnessed by many people, all of whom believed it to be a setup and yet most of whom believed that only an outsider, only someone too “naive” to know the rules of the game, would so describe it.
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The narrative is made up of many such understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line. It was understood, for example, that the first night of the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans should be for Ronald Reagan “the last hurrah”. “Reagan Electrifies GOP” was the headline the next morning on page one of New York Newsday; in fact the Reagan appearance, which was rhetorically pitched not to a live audience but to the more intimate demands of the camera, was, inside the Superdome, barely registered. It was understood, similarly, that Michael Dukakis’s acceptance speech on the last night of the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta should be the occasion on which his “passion”, or “leadership”, emerged. “Could the no-nonsense nominee reach within himself to discover the language of leadership?” Time had asked. “Could he go beyond the pedestrian promise of ‘good jobs at good wages’ to give voice to a new Democratic vision?”