As the delay grew longer, the Knights continued to beef about the White House system. It was all they had talked about the previous week, and it was all they would talk about in weeks to come. They complained about Ziegler’s penchant for setting up ground rules—bringing out someone like John Ehrlichman, and then telling the press that they could only question him about one limited subject. “If any governor tried that, he would be laughed out of office,” said Al Sullivan, who used to cover the governor of New Jersey. “But a lot of these guys are caught up in respect for the White House, so they respect the stupid ground rules.”
McManus, who at one time covered the governor of Indiana, nodded in agreement. “This Watergate thing has been going on for weeks now, and all we get is no comment. And what has happened? Do you see the publishers breaking down the gates of the White House, or the editors jamming the switchboard with protests, or the reporters screaming with rage? Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“What can you do about it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Sullivan, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
“We should hold Ziegler there for four or five hours and make him run out of the room,” said McManus.
At 11:23, a voice came on the PA system. “There will be a briefing in the briefing room,” it said. It was a sweet female voice and Don Fulsom knew it well because it belonged to a secretary with whom he once had a run-in. About a year ago, when Ziegler had quietly dropped the regular afternoon briefings, Fulsom was one of the few reporters who bothered to protest. The secretary, who heard him protesting, called him a creep. So Fulsom mentioned in his radio report that a “White House staffer called a reporter a creep.” The secretary had refused to talk to him ever since.
By now everyone was rushing into the briefing room, the stenographer was seated and ready to take transcript, the Signal Corpsman was at the sound console, adjusting the controls of the PA system, a deputy press secretary and three female secretaries were standing by in case Ron Ziegler needed any additional information, and Ron Ziegler was standing at the podium, smoking nervously and looking wary.
In fact, with his pudgy, baby face, he looked like nothing so much as a high school teacher who is a little too young to command total respect. He began the briefing, but some of the reporters in the back went on talking, so a certain sternness came into his voice, as if to show them that he didn’t care. And like a high school assembly, the briefing started out with a long series of tedious announcements: the President met with labor leaders from twenty-four countries; his remarks would be posted. There was a photo opportunity with the President and the members of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse Prevention; a press release on the meeting would be handed out later.
The announcements went on for several minutes, with everyone fidgeting and coughing and making few notes. Then Ziegler announced plans for trips to Philadelphia and New York State later in the week, and everyone perked up a little and wrote down the itineraries. From there, Ziegler moved on to announcements about seventy-one bills that Congress had sent the President, and about legislation still pending, like the spending ceiling. “Now the eyes of many people in this country are on the Senate to see if they will meet their portion of the responsibility to keep taxes down and inflation under control by acting affirmatively on the spending ceiling legislation.” Blatant propaganda, and everyone was going to sleep, but someone asked Ziegler if his remarks were meant as a form of pressure on the Senate and Ziegler said yes, and handed out some more propaganda. There were some intelligent and well-informed questions about other bills, but Ziegler told the reporters to save their questions until he had finished making his announcements.
Then he dropped the big sop of news he had been saving: “I’d also like to tell you now at this time that the President has asked Dr. Kissinger to go on from Paris to visit Saigon to review with President Thieu the status of the Paris negotiations.” The questions began, dozens of little questions of detail—when was Kissinger last in Saigon? who will be going with him? had he wrapped up the Paris talks for good? “See,” said McManus, “if there’s a danger they’ll ask about the Watergate, all he has to do is pitch them something about Kissinger, and the wires can hardly wait to get it on.”
For a few minutes, everyone focused on Henry Kissinger’s trip. They asked some probing questions and some stupid ones, but the striking thing was the high school atmosphere that pervaded the briefing. It was as if they were all chafing under the teacher’s authority, and they wanted to humiliate him without getting caught. So whenever anyone asked a question that carried the slightest hint of naughty disrespect, they all giggled. When Ziegler’s microphone suddenly started to vibrate wildly, causing him to back off in alarm, someone shouted “Sabotage!” and there was a great laugh from the whole class.
The microphone, after all, was one of Ziegler’s most effective weapons. It made him sound booming and authoritative, and it made the questioners, who spoke in unamplified tones, sound comparatively timid and mousy. I was standing next to the ancient representative of a formerly great Midwestern daily, who arrived every morning befuddled with drink and proceeded to pore over the Times sports section during the briefing. As he turned the pages, which he did absent-mindedly, they made a noise like a four-year-old jumping in a pile of leaves. Consequently, the reporters standing around him could not hear many of the questions asked at the front of the room. But they could hear Ziegler’s replies coming out of the four hidden speakers in the room.
The questions continued. Someone asked whether Kissinger used an interpreter. “I can’t provide you that information, but Dr. Kissinger does not speak North Vietnamese,” said Ziegler. A wave of mocking laughter and comment moved back through the room. The question was asked twice more. “Ron, why can’t you tell us whether he uses an interpreter?”
“I’m not prepared to discuss the talks in any way whatsoever,” Ziegler said curtly.†
After a while, the wire people began to get edgy. Fran Lewine, the No. 2 AP correspondent, tried to end the briefing. “Thank you,” she called out in a bored singsong from the back of the room. The rest of the group roared with disapproval. “Wait a moment, wait a moment,” they all grumbled. So the briefing moved on to other questions, important questions. Fulsom asked whether the President had found out yet if those were American bombs that had been dropped on the French Consulate in Hanoi. (He had not.) McManus followed up and asked if the President did not have an interest in finding this information out. (He would receive and had received information along this line, but the Defense Department was the place to ask that question.)
Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun asked Ziegler about the President’s trip to Atlanta two weeks before. Potter was an unreconstructed hawk of retirement age who frequently got into noisy arguments about the war at the Press Club bar, but he asked good, tough questions. Potter said that during the Atlanta motorcade, he twice saw somebody, “apparently a security agent,” grab or tear down a McGovern sign being held by a demonstrator. He wanted to know if that was approved. In his blandest tones, Ziegler answered that “our policy is the total opposite of that kind of activity … we are opposed to any violence at all.” (Two weeks later, at a rally in California, Curtis Wilkie of the Wilmington News-Journal would see Dwight Chapin instruct a pimply faced young Nixon supporter to go and bat down the signs of the McGovern supporters.)
Someone else followed up, saying that the incident had been widely witnessed and asking if Ziegler was sure that it had not been condoned. Ziegler showed his first flash of anger and spoke sternly: “That was a public motorcade on a public street and I don’t have a comment or any basis on which to judge that situation or comment on it. I’ve given a response to you in terms of what our policy is on this over and over again. I’ve stated it and I think it’s clear.”
It was clear that they wouldn’t get anything out of Ziegler on that subject, so they moved on. John Osborne of the New Republic asked a question about Clark McGregor.
Fulsom came back to the French Consulate question. “Is the President concerned that it’s taken so long to get a report to him on whether these were American bombs?”
“Uh,” said Ziegler, beginning to seethe. “The uh … a very complete investigation of that is being conducted.”
More intricate questions about Kissinger’s travels. And then finally, for the first time in almost twenty-five minutes, someone got around to asking about the scandals.
“Ron, is there anything new on the Dwight Chapin affair?” called out Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News.
“Nossir,” said Ron tersely.
“Thank you, Ron,” shouted a harried wire service man.
The room erupted in protest. Ziegler started to walk away from the lectern. “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Ron! Ron!”
McManus got the floor. “Ron,” he said, “there’s a great straining in the back of the room to go tell the world about Henry Kissinger. Now, if we’re going to end this briefiing, let’s have a briefing at three o’clock.”
Ziegler was furious. His voice was cold and hoarse. “The normal procedures that we will follow and we are going to follow is that the wire services will cut this briefing off,” he said, his anger eating away at his grammar. There were shouts for attention.
“There will be a posting at three o’clock,” Ron concluded, and began to leave again.
“Now, wait a minute, Ron,” shouted Robert Pierpoint of CBS. Pierpoint was probably the hardest and most persistent interrogator of any of the network men. (The briefings drove him crazy, but he blamed “the system,” not Ziegler: “It’s kind of fruitless to make life difficult for Ziegler. But I do it. The reason I do it is that I want the people who read the briefings, including, hopefully, once in a while the President, to know that I am dissatisfied with the situation.”)
“The wire services have no more right than any of the rest of us,” Pierpoint said angrily. “You’ve just given them that right. Now, we have other questions that we would like to ask.”
“I did not just give them that right,” said Ziegler, and curiously he sounded just like an angry Richard Nixon.
“It has not been a right that they had before,” said Pierpoint.
“It has been standard procedure,” said Ziegler in cavernous Nixon tones.
“Since you took over, it’s been standard procedure,” said Pierpoint. “Now, several of us have questions we’ve never been allowed to ask and we’d like to go into it if you’re not going to see us at three o’clock.” And before Ziegler could stop him, Pierpoint was sliding into another question about the peace talks.
Ziegler was icy. “Uh, I’m not prepared to, uh, be responsive to that question, Bob,” he said.
“Yeah, but …” Pierpoint began to ask another question, but Jim Dickenson of the National Observer had already begun to talk, asking another question about the Atlanta incident, and Ziegler had recognized him to spite Pierpoint.
“Well, wait a minute,” said Pierpoint, in a high plaintive voice. He sounded as if he were about to cry with frustration. “Jim!… aw, Christ!”
Dickenson wanted to know whether the White House had tried to determine whether the sign-destroyer in Atlanta was a government security agent.
No, said Ziegler, because the White House had only been informed of the incident by Phil Potter after it took place. Pierpoint raised his voice again and got in two more questions about the Paris talks. Ziegler answered them curtly.
“Ron, I have a question I’ve been anxious to get in, and I don’t believe it’s been asked,” said John Osborne.
He spoke in a gentle Southern accent from his seat in the middle of the room, and his voice carried a quiet authority. The others listened carefully, because Osborne had the reputation of a man who knew what he was doing. Born in Corinth, Mississippi, sixty-six years ago, Osborne had grey hair, a prominent nose that gave his face a mole-like appearance, and a shy manner that hid an iron will. Having worked for newspapers in the South and for the AP, he became a National Affairs writer at Time in 1938 and quickly rose to become Foreign News editor. He was a controversial figure around the Luce offices, a man of strong and often dogmatic convictions. Militantly pro-Soviet during World War II, he later did a complete about-face and became a terrifyingly hard-line cold warrior. In 1951, he wrote in an editorial: “Life sees no choice but to acknowledge the existence of war with Red China and to set about its defeat, in full awareness that this course will probably involve war with the Soviet Union as well.”
Over the years, he had mellowed. “He is,” said a former Time associate, “one of the few men I know who keeps improving with age.” In 1961 he left Time-Life to free-lance and by 1968, through a process he claims is too complicated to discuss, his views had changed sufficiently to allow him to sign on as one of the two full-time writers on the liberal New Republic. Since then, he had devoted all his energies to observing the White House, writing a weekly column called “The Nixon Watch.”
Osborne had been the only journalist in America to give a consistent, clear, comprehensible picture of Nixon’s machinations, aspirations, successes, and failures. He was a meticulous craftsman, and he pieced this picture together like a restorer filling in the missing portions of a Greek vase. He searched for clues in statements, speeches, or simply in the air around the White House, and every Wednesday morning he sat down to write a 1,000-word column that was witty, discursive, personal, and full of educated conjecture. It was this speculative tone which made “The Nixon Watch” so much more useful than anything that appeared in a newspaper, for conjecture was a necessary tool in cracking the secretiveness of the Nixon Adminstration. And Osborne was scrupulously fair. His even-handedness, discretion, and unobtrusive manner appealed to many of the Nixon staffers, who were constantly surprised to receive praise from the New Republic when praise was due. So they sometimes cooperated with him to the extent of letting him come into their offices and ask a question or two. It was said that Ziegler’s boss, Bob Haldeman, actually liked John Osborne. Which might have been the reason why Ziegler treated him with respect.
On this Tuesday, Osborne asked the best question of the day. The Post that morning had implied that Herbert W. Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, and a fund collector for the Committee to Re-elect the President, had access to the Watergate “secret fund.” Incredibly, no one had mentioned the subject yet.
“Two related questions,” said Osborne. “First, this Mr. Kalmbach of Newport Beach. Is it a fact that he is Mr. Nixon’s personal attorney? And two, has Mr. Nixon been in touch with him in the last two days?”
Ziegler gave him a detailed and courteous answer, saying that Nixon had not been in touch with Kalmbach in months.
Someone else asked whether the White House had tried to contact Kalmbach to determine whether there was any truth in the Post story.
“To my knowledge, there has been no contact with Mr. Kalmbach,” snapped Ziegler.
Then Sarah McClendon spoke up. Ziegler saw no need to be courteous with her. Sarah McClendon was a frumpish woman in a purple pants suit and star-in-circle earrings, with tousled platinum hair, and a sweet, toothy smile. At the outbreak of World War II, she had sold her clothes for twenty-one dollars traveling money, left her hometown of Tyler, Texas, and joined the WACs. Her only pair of shoes had high heels, and she drilled in them for two weeks. She was sent to Washington to work in the WAC PR operation. After the war, she married, was deserted by her husband, and went to work as a legwoman for a Washington correspondent, nine days after having given birth to her daughter. She did not tell the correspondent about the baby for fear of being fired.
After years of struggling, she became a correspondent herself, doing piecemeal work for several radio stations in the South, writing for a handful of Texas newspapers and the North American Newspaper Alliance, and turning out a weekly newsletter. She also became the comic relief at Presidential press conferences. Whenever they were in a tight spot, Kennedy, Johnson, and now Nixon would poin
t to her with an indulgent smile and wait for her to ask some stupid, irrelevant question, which, it was true, she sometimes did. But no matter what she asked, all the male reporters laughed.
Sarah McClendon was vulnerable because she was a woman in a male chauvinist profession and she did not work for a large paper. Lyndon Johnson thought nothing of getting her fired from several of her Texas papers so that she could be replaced by Les Carpenter, a Johnson shill.
In the spring of 1972, she had investigated some questionable government contract dealings by Strom Thurmond and Harry Dent. She wrote up her findings for the NANA syndicate, but when Dent found out about the article he made such loud and horrible threats that NANA not only killed the story in question but stopped running her articles on other matters as well. A thousand such bullyings and petty cruelties had not daunted her. She had a revenge of sorts; she was now as tough as any reporter in Washington, and she was not afraid to ask a question for fear of sounding silly. It was no coincidence that some of the toughest pieces on the 1972 Nixon campaign came from Sarah McClendon, Helen Thomas of UPI, Cassie Mackin of NBC, Marilyn Berger of the Washington Post, and Mary McGrory. They had always been the outsiders. Having never been allowed to join in the cozy, clubby world of the men, they had developed an uncompromising detachment and a bold independence of thought which often put the men to shame.
But the men still tittered whenever Sarah McClendon asked a question, and Ziegler still treated her as if she were a wino who had wandered in off the street (although he was always very sweet to her after the briefing, which only disgusted her more).
“Ron, was Mr. Kalmbach the man who took Mrs. Martha Mitchell to the hospital to have her fingers sewed up after she was pushed against the glass?” asked McClendon.
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