The Boys on the Bus

by Timothy Crouse

  Marty Schram was the White House correspondent for the Long Island daily, Newsday. He was a serious-minded, rabbinical looking young man who wore black-rimmed glasses and a Groucho Marx moustache. In the summer of 1971, Schram helped Newsday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team of investigative reporters to carry out an exhaustive investigation of Richard Nixon’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo.

  The investigation resulted in a six-part series, carefully documented with maps and charts, which laid out the shady business dealings of Rebozo and his friend Sen. George A. Smathers (D.-Fla.). “The deals made by Bebe Rebozo and the Smathers gang have tarnished the Presidency,” Newsday declared in an accompanying editorial.

  When the series came out in October 1971, Ziegler was asked to comment on it.

  “We have absolutely no concern about the integrity of Mr. Rebozo, and I’ll have no further comment on those stories,” said Ziegler. Then he put the freeze on Schram.

  Without ever mentioning the Rebozo series, Ziegler suddenly began to act as if Schram did not exist. He refused to talk to him, except to give curt and rude answers when Schram asked a question at a briefing. If Schram tried to broach a question after a briefing, Ziegler would cut him off with a brusque, “I don’t have time now,” and walk away. When Schram made an appointment to see Ziegler about the problem, Ziegler kept him waiting for an entire afternoon and then left via a back door.

  Ziegler steadfastly refused to admit that this treatment had anything to do with the Rebozo series. In February 1972, reporters who were not on the list to go to China were summoned to Ziegler’s office, one by one, to receive the bad news. Schram was among those called. Ziegler made a number of excuses as to why there was no room on the plane for Newsday. Schram pointed out that Newsday met all the criteria that had been set up, while many of the papers on the list did not. Ziegler made more excuses.

  “Come on, Ron,” said Schram. “It’s the Rebozo series.”

  Ziegler denied it.

  “Well, then, what is it, Ron, what’s the reason?” Schram kept asking. Ziegler kept answering that certain, uh, decisions just had to be made.

  Even after the China trip, Ziegler continued to exclude Schram from pool assignments. This banishment did not cripple Schram, but it did hurt him because he liked to embellish his features and takeouts with the kind of atmosphere and fine detail that could only be gathered by observing Nixon at close range. He still collected information from several friendly sources he had cultivated on the White House staff, but it pained him whenever he saw the pool trooping into some state dinner, the pool members being mostly “hard news guys who didn’t give a shit about the background stuff.”

  Almost a year after the Rebozo series appeared, Nixon went to campaign in Nassau County, where Newsday was delivered to seven out of ten homes. As usual, Schram didn’t make the pool. “But what am I supposed to do,” he shrugged, “act wounded? They shouldn’t choose the pool, anyway. The press should choose it.”

  SHEER BALLS

  Every so often, when bullying and intimidation failed, Ziegler and his superiors would resort to a tactic that can only be described as sheer balls. They would tell a lie so Stalinesque in its grandeur or would make a demand so preposterous that the reporter in question was struck dumb and did not know where to begin his counterattack.

  One of the most spectacular examples of White House balls-manship was the attempt to convert Nicholas von Hoffman at the time of student uprisings over the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. Nick von Hoffman was a prematurely grey-haired forty-two-year-old columnist for the Washington Post who voted for Nixon in 1960 and 1968 for reasons which he has never been able to explain satisfactorily. People who discovered von Hoffman’s voting record were invariably surprised by it, because von Hoffman had been slamming Nixon all over the Post’s “Style” section ever since the inauguration of the column (and of Nixon) in 1969. One of von Hoffman’s charms was his maverick inconsistency, but his stands were invariably radical and he himself described the content of his column as “bolshie drivel.”

  After the invasion of Cambodia, he wrote a column saying that the situation was so appalling that “the Washington monument went limp.” So it came as something of a shock to von Hoffman when the Nixon White House attempted the old Lyndon Johnson hustle of soliciting his advice to try to bring him on as a member of the team. Even Johnson, who used to spend whole afternoons cajoling reporters, would never have taken on a hard-core radical like von Hoffman. Von Hoffman wrote an account of the incident for the New American Review, and he swears it’s all true. (He didn’t write it for the Post because the Post refused to print the exact language he had used.) The article deserves to be quoted at length:

  The crew-cut press aide who stands at parade rest while Ziegler does his monologue begins inviting people backstage. I am approached and led into Ziegler’s office. Outside the window is Nixon, hands behind his back, talking to Kissinger, strolling on the lawn, maybe still grooving on his crisis euphoria or maybe he’s already crashed. The four at Kent State have already been killed; two more will die at Jackson shortly.

  John Erlichmann [sic] comes into the room …

  “I’m sure John would like to hear your ideas,” Ziegler says.

  “Suppose you’re right about Vietnam,” I begin, and they make as if I’m about to give them the unique word, instead of being one among who knows how many reporters they’ve run through their office. Most of us believe against certain knowledge that if only we could get in there and tell them, they’d listen. So I am in the White House and the President’s man has said he wants to hear. You don’t have to be a politician to be infatuated with your own possibilities.

  “Suppose you’re right about Cambodia,” I continue, “suppose you’re right about the military situation, suppose you’re right about everything, don’t you see you still can’t fight this fucking war?” I fancy that the word hasn’t been spoken in the building since Lyndon Johnson. I also imagine that bad language may make them pay attention. “In a democracy, see, fifty-one percent is good enough to build a road or exempt the oil companies from taxation, but not to fight a war. You gotta have ninety percent for that, and you boys didn’t pull that in the election. That cocksucker was elected to end the war, not spread it.”

  Ziegler is a two-expression man, blank and smiling. No frowns, no pensive looks, no screwing up in distaste, it’s the blank or the smile. The blank is for when you’re speaking; the smile is for when you’re finished and he’s about to talk. Having a conversation with him is like playing tic-tac-toe with a computer.

  “People’ll feel differently when it works out. Opinion’ll change when it’s a success,” Ziegler says. An efficient organization silences all opposition by declaring high quarterly dividends.

  “Millions of people don’t give a shit if it’s a success. Christ almighty, they don’t even know where Cambodia is much less want to conquer it.”

  The President has gone from the lawn.

  “We know that. We’re pulling out. We’re withdrawing. Vietnamization is working.”

  “Oy!”

  “As people see that the President’s policy is a success, they’ll support him.”

  “If you keep pushing this way, these kids are going to burn down the country. Get off people’s necks.”

  Erlichmann says something to indicate that things are nastier than he’d like to see them. There is more talk about the stock market, the businessmen, the different kind of people who’ve had it. Erlichmann agrees it is serious, remarking it has probably cost Governor Rhodes of Ohio the primary. I repeat the prediction of bloody trouble. Erlichmann replies, “We’re counting on leaders like yourself to keep things calm.”

  Leaders like who?

  We’re doomed.

  TAX SCARE

  In 1969, Jules Witcover wrote a book about Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign called The Resurrection of Richard Nixon. The White House, getting wind of the project, called up all of Witcover’s s
ources and instructed them not to talk to him any more. Fortunately, Witcover had already completed most of his research.

  In 1970, when the book came out, Witcover went on The Dick Cavett Show to publicize it. Cavett asked him whether the Nixon people had been cooperative, and Witcover recounted how the Nixon people had tried to stop him by cutting off his information. A week later, Witcover’s wife received a phone call from an Internal Revenue Service agent who announced that Witcover was going to be audited.

  Witcover had to take time off and assemble all his tax materials. An IRS agent looked through every check Witcover had written in the last year, and found nothing amiss. For weeks, Witcover tried to make the IRS tell him why he was being audited, what in specific they were looking for. The IRS never came up with an answer, except to say that they were testing a new system and that his name had been chosen at random. Witcover, however, was convinced that he was the victim of a political audit.

  Witcover was not the only journalist to receive a visit from the taxman. At the time of Newsday’s Rebozo series, Robert Greene, the head of the paper’s investigative team, had his tax returns audited by the IRS. So did William Attwood, the publisher of Newsday, and David Laventhol, the editor. The IRS also examined the newspaper’s financial records.

  Day after day, Ziegler and his superiors frustrated and harassed the White House press corps in petty ways. Yet the correspondents refused to stand up and defend each other. No one, for instance, ever lodged a protest in behalf of Marty Schram or investigated the IRS audit of Jules Witcover.

  Meanwhile, the White House kept building up a powerful public relations machine whose function was to compete with the press, to go over the heads of the press and straight to the people. The White House sent off tons of mailings to newspapers and individuals. The White House frequently demanded and received free network television time so that the President could present his arguments to the public and even so that the Vice President could attack the press.

  The Nixon aides were advertising people, Dan Rather said as he sat around the pressroom one afternoon; they knew ten times as much about the media as the Johnson people had. They had known that if they squawked enough about post-speech analyses by network correspondents, they could make the networks back down. And they knew dozens of little tricks which allowed them to use television to their own advantage, said Rather. For instance, in October 1972, Nixon hardened his stand on amnesty in a speech which he made over the radio. CBS had a clip from an old TV interview in which the President had put forth a much softer position, and Rather would have liked to have shown the two statements side by side to demonstrate that Nixon was toughening up his position for political reasons in an election year. But to do this, Rather needed a picture of the second statement. The White House people had realized this, and that was the reason Nixon had made the statement on the radio.

  So the voice of the White House grew stronger while the voice of the press became weaker.

  One morning in September, as we were flying out to California on the White House press plane, I tried to find out from Peter Lisagor why the press corps was so docile. Lisagor was a fixture of Washington journalism; as the veteran “special” correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, he could write more or less what he wanted. While his White House articles usually opened with a “news peg” from the daily briefing, rather than the kind of “trend” lead that John Osborne favored, Lisagor was nevertheless very good at standing back and putting official statements into perspective. When Ziegler announced the end of the draft, for instance, Lisagor carefully pointed out in his lead the political implications of the move—its appeal to young voters. At the same time, Lisagor was a living monument in the Washington press establishment, a former president of the White House Correspondents Association, and a man who did not like to rock the boat too hard.

  “Why not a mutiny?” I asked.

  Lisagor stopped typing on the lightweight portable he had set up on the tray in front of him.

  “Well, you see,” he said, in his polite way, “because the White House people managed successfully to put the press in the ambivalent position of being an entity separate from the public interest or the public, the press has not much to stand on.”

  “When did you first see that tactic used?”

  “Well, it was first articulated by the Nixon Administration. The others had accepted the notion that the press was a legitimate vehicle for disseminating information to the public. But the Nixon Administration gave the press an identity of its own, separate from the public interest, and then began to characterize the press either as friendly or hostile or what have you.”

  As Lisagor continued to talk, it became clear that he felt the Nixon people had maneuvered the press into a kind of Dien Bien Phu, isolated and abandoned without any hope of rescue. If Nixon wanted to make himself inaccessible, there was nothing the press could do. “It can’t sue him,” said Lisagor. The press had no legal rights, except for the First Amendment, which was a thin reed. It wasn’t an institution set up by the Constitution. It could kick and scream, but that didn’t produce any results because “the public doesn’t give a damn about our problems.” The only thing the press could do, Lisagor concluded, was to work more vigorously to ferret out information from the government, “recognizing that no Administration owns the public’s business—that it is the public’s business, and that the public is the proprietor of it.”

  But not many White House reporters got around to ferreting out information. One problem was that the White House swamped them with press releases. Perhaps a greater problem was the beat system.

  The ideal way to find out what was going on inside the White House was to approach it from the outside—drive over to State or HEW, for instance, and look up some Young Turk who had just had a pet program sold out by Haldeman or Ehrlichman in order to placate some right-wing governor; the Young Turk would be angry and would gladly tell the whole story. But usually a White House reporter didn’t have time to cultivate sources outside the White House. The White House was his beat and he had to stay there to protect himself in case a story broke, and also to fill in his colleagues on other beats when they needed information from the White House.

  Bob Semple, for instance, used up large portions of every working day getting the White House reaction to various developments for fellow Timesmen on the Hill or at the State Department. If he could not get a comment from Ziegler, he would have to sit down and write a summary of past White House statements on a certain bill (if he was helping out the man on the Hill) or a certain international situation (for the man at State). Which meant that Semple was tied down to his desk at the White House. Although some newspaper editors and bureau chiefs had begun to talk about freeing up their White House men to do more investigative work, this was not being done during the first Nixon Administration.

  Since few of the White House correspondents had opportunities to ferret out information, since they were largely sequestered from staffers and outside sources, they needed decent briefings and press conferences if they were going to do a creditable job. Above all, they needed a revival of Presidential press conferences. In the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the weekly sessions in the Oval Office were considered indispensable by the White House correspondents. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in The Coming of the New Deal: “By according the press the privilege of regular interrogation, Roosevelt established the Presidential press conference in a quasi-constitutional status as the American equivalent of the parliamentary question period—a status which future Presidents could downgrade to their peril.”‡

  For years, political scientists, political reporters and historians like Schlesinger considered the Presidential press conference an unshakable institution. Nixon changed all that.

  “What we assumed, and it seems sort of dumb in retrospect,” said David Broder, “was that just because the press conference had grown up from Wilson on and seven or eight Presidents had adhered to it, it had somehow become insti
tutionalized. It’s not institutionalized at all. In fact, you could effectively say that Richard Nixon has abolished the Presidential press conference as an institution. He may grant two or three a year, but when they’re that infrequent they don’t really mean anything.”

  There was a school of thought, led by John Osborne, that held that press conferences did no good anyway. Osborne thought that Nixon was “altogether too good for the common good at using press conferences to present himself and his policies in a favorable light.” Other reporters echoed him, saying that reporters never were able to follow through on a line of questioning and pin Nixon down, that too much time was wasted on trivial questions. But many of these reporters had forgotten, or had never known, what a real press conference was like.

  “You have to go back to the Kennedy period or even the Eisenhower period to see what a Presidential press conference system really looks like,” said Broder. “The key thing is the frequency. If you have them weekly—as was the custom under Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—it doesn’t make any difference if you blow ten minutes on some trivial thing or if you don’t get to follow up on a question, because the President is going to be back there the next week and you’ll have another chance. You can look at those old press conferences and get a very actute sense of what was agitating public opinion at the time, of what questions were up for political discussion. Now obviously, if you’re down to three or four a year, the press conference doesn’t serve that function at all. You just get scatterings of bits of information. But on a weekly basis, it serves an extremely important function. It requires the President to think about what other people may have on their minds.”