For the correspondents to do a proper job of covering the White House, they needed regular Presidential press conferences and they required briefings from a press secretary who was not in love with the art of obfuscation. The only way to extract these necessities from the Administration was joint action—a petition or a boycott, supported by the whole White House press corps, that would put pressure on the Administration to change its smug ways.
But whenever I suggested joint action to reporters around the White House, they looked at me as if I had suggested cutting off their typing fingers. They invariably launched into speeches about how reporters were fierce individualists who defied any attempt to regiment them. Everyone made basically the same speech, but Dan Rather made one of the best. “You know,” he said when I broached the subject of joint action, “journalists by their nature are not an organized lot. The average journalist, including myself, is a whiskey-breathed, nicotine-stained, stubble-bearded guy, and journalism is not a business that attracts very organized people.” Rather was wearing a beautifully tailored blue suit and he gave off the healthy glow of a man who has just emerged from a hotel barber shop. I had never seen him smoke and I doubt whether, on a typical day, his strongest exhalation could budge the needle on a Breathalyzer.
But the curious thing about political journalists is that they often work as a herd when they should act as individuals, and they claim their right to perform as individuals when they should close ranks and act as a group. The most sheeplike herd in Washington—the Pentagon press corps—boasted the loudest of its individuality; the reporters at the Pentagon bragged that they were so independent that they had never formed even a ceremonial organization like the White House Correspondents Association.
But it was not just the worst reporters who shied away from joint action. Some of the best and the toughest also had qualms. “We’re all reluctant to gang up,” said Jack Germond. “Ganging up is a bad business. I mean, there aren’t many guys I want to gang up with. I don’t agree with their methods. I have a different judgment on what I think is news. I have a different judgment on what I think is a fair way to go at something. I have a different judgment about my ability to beat them on my own, so why should I join up with them?
“There are occasions when some kind of ganging up is necessary, I suppose,” Germond conceded. “And Nixon’s campaign in 1968 was probably one of them.”
“Let the editors fight those battles,” said Jules Witcover. “We’re in the trenches every day and we’re just trying to get access. It’s like professional football. You start going straight in and it doesn’t work, so you loop and you stunt and you just see how the game goes. This business of getting together and forming a committee or boycotting or something else—that doesn’t deal with the ongoing changes. It’s just constant and you’ve just got to keep making your moves and being aware that they’re doing those things, and try to cope with them on your own.”
“But Jules,” I said, “that doesn’t seem to work. The White House keeps getting away with murder.”
“There’s nothing wrong with looping and stunting if everybody does it, but there are not enough guys who do it,” Witcover admitted. “There are not enough guys who see this happening. I think there are still too many guys who just cover a campaign like its an evolving set of speeches.”
Most of the reporters seemed to perceive, however dimly, that they were the people’s representatives in the executive mansion and that the President had no right to keep them in the dark and to use the media solely for his own ends. But at that point they balked. They would not admit that this extraordinary situation called for extraordinary action by the press; they refused to consider a strike, a boycott or any kind of dramatic gesture that would point up the gravity of the crisis. “There’s just an awareness that this would be a politically unwise thing to do because you’d leave yourself open to attack,” said Jules Witcover. Nixon had the reporters so thoroughly on the defensive that they forgot that they, as a body, had considerable power and that they had certain rights.
It was not as if pressure had never succeeded in the past. In 1967, during the Johnson Administration, Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, decided to fight the system of backgrounders.§ Bradlee instructed his reporters to “fight like hell” to get everything on the record, and he got The New York Times to go along with him. A few days later, when the White House tried to hold a backgrounder on the Common Market, the Post’s Carrol Kilpatrick and the Times’ Max Frankel protested and insisted that they had to know why the briefing was for background only. The briefing was put on the record. Having won a small victory, however, the Times and the Post did not keep up the fight, and backgrounders continued to flourish.
During Nixon’s first term, there was only one group effort to deal with the White House, the “Washington Hotel meeting,” and all the reporters involved went out of their way to explain that they weren’t trying to gang up on the President. The Washington Hotel meeting took place in December 1971, when Nixon had avoided holding a press conference for nineteen consecutive weeks. When Nixon finally announced that he would hold a press conference on December 10, Jules Witcover and Stuart Loory, who were both then working for the Los Angeles Times, decided that it would be a good idea if some White House reporters got together and discussed how to make Presidential press conferences more productive.
Witcover and Loory realized that if they weren’t careful, the White House would try to brand the meeting a “press conspiracy,” so they did everything they could to make the meeting open and innocent. They got John Osborne, whom the White House regarded as if he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, to chair the meeting. Then they phoned about forty reporters and invited them to come. Some simply refused to consider the invitation, fearing the “conspiracy” charge. Others consulted with their editors and agonized for days over the decision. Bob Semple consented to attend, but only as an observer. Witcover and Loory considered setting up a miniature press section for him—a separate table, with a typewriter and free drinks.
Finally, twenty-eight reporters met one December morning for a coffee-and-cruller session in a room on the mezzanine of the Washington Hotel, a second-class place just up the street from the National Press Building. The meeting was as innocuous as a student council session. The first subject they discussed was whether it was cricket for them to meet. They agreed that it was. Then they talked for over an hour, arriving at a consensus on two points: it would be nice if somebody would ask the President at the upcoming press conference whether he intended to see the press more frequently; it would also be nice if reporters were more diligent in following up each other’s questions, so that the President could not slip by with an evasive reply. Some of the reporters had misgivings about asking the President about the press conference situation—the viewing public might be offended to see the press taking up time with an “inside baseball” type of question. But eventually everyone at the meeting agreed that it was a good thing to ask because it was in the public interest to have more press conferences.
It was a very informal meeting, with everyone gulping coffee and smoking. At the end, John Osborne was asked to go over to the White House and tell Ziegler about the subjects that had been discussed and the conclusions that the reporters had reached. When Osborne appeared in Ziegler’s office that afternoon, the press secretary smiled and said that he already knew about the meeting. Osborne gave him a short summary of the discussion and Ziegler said “Fine,” thanked him, and led him out of the office.
Of course, Osborne’s mission did no good. Soon after the meeting, Herb Klein (the White House director of communications) wrote an article for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, hinting darkly that the reporters had been up to no good: “… some of the reporters who were there took pains to say they were not part of a cabal or conspiracy and that in no way did they discuss either the order or the subject matter of the questions that would be asked at the forthcoming conference. Whether or n
ot they did, the timing of the meeting did nothing to enhance press credibility.”
Later, Allen Drury, The New York Times-reporter-turned-conservative-novelist, painted an even darker picture in Courage and Hesitation, his semiofficial book on Nixon: “A group of major correspondents, fantastically, has actually held a secret meeting, their ostensible purpose to arrange the sequence of questions, their real aim to get Dick Nixon.”
It was true that the press conference on December 10 was probably the roughest one Nixon ever had to face. “But that meeting didn’t make it rough,” said John Osborne. What made it rough was the fact that Nixon had piled up a lot of things to answer for, like calling Charles Manson “guilty” before the trial, firing Walter Hickel, and letting unemployment rise. Two or three reporters asked nasty questions, but there were very few follow-up questions, and Nixon dodged the tough ones with his customary skill.
Nixon always had the advantage at these conferences. The reporters were disorganized and many of them suffered from stage fright in front of the live television cameras. Nixon, on the other hand, spent several days preparing himself, polishing answers to possible questions; he even memorized the seating chart so that he knew exactly where to point whenever he felt the need for a soft question from a friendly or notoriously incompetent reporter.
Toward the end of the half-hour press conference on December 10, Herb Kaplow (then of NBC) asked whether the President would hold press conferences more frequently in the future. Kaplow phrased the question very tactfully, and Nixon gave his standard reply, right out of one of the loose-leaf briefing books he’d been studying for three days. Of course, he had an obligation to inform the American people, but there were several ways—press conferences, formal reports to the nation, television chats with one or two correspondents. He thought that the American people had a right to hear his views directly, not just through the press. “And I think any member of the press would agree on that,” he said. He would like suggestions on how to keep the nation informed without dominating television too much, as some had charged. Maybe the answer was “more conferences in the office.”
“But,” said Nixon, “you make the vote.”
A few weeks later, Peter Lisagor, acting as head of the White House Correspondents Association, sent a list of suggestions to Nixon via Ziegler. Ziegler announced that the President was “pleased.” The list was promptly forgotten. None of the suggestions, including a plea for weekly press conferences, was adopted.
Thus, in the long run, the Washington Hotel meeting was a flop.‖ It was like a resolution by the General Assembly of the U.N.—there was no clout behind it, so it was ignored. If there was a conspiracy in Washington, it was a White House plot to cripple the press, not a press conspiracy to get the President. The White House conspiracy, if anything, demanded a counter-conspiracy from the reporters to regain their rights. But the White House reporters refused to assert themselves, except to write a few sniping, ineffective articles about the lack of press conferences. Later, during the 1972 campaign, Nixon naturally felt free to seclude himself.
And even the best of the White House correspondents despaired of making the President account for the actions of his Administration. John Osborne, for instance, wrote a column about a press conference which Nixon held on August 29, 1972. A couple of reporters asked Nixon about the Watergate, and Nixon skated around the issue for a while, finally concluding with a statement that “no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.”
Osborne noted that nobody bothered to ask Nixon about John Mitchell, Hugh Sloan and other assistants who were alleged to be involved with the Watergate affair but were no longer “presently employed” at the White House. “He was not asked, either,” Osborne went on, “whether with all of these investigations on he now knew who had ordered the bugging and why it was ordered. I stood within 10 feet of him and didn’t even try to ask that simple and obvious question.” Later in the article, Osborne summed up by saying that the thing he would always remember about “Mr. Nixon’s first ‘political press conference’ of 1972 was his handling of the funds and bugging matter and our failure to handle him as a vulnerable candidate should have been handled. It was a lesson in the mesmerizing power of the presidency.”
But mesmerizing power had nothing to do with the case of Clark Mollenhoff. Mollenhoff was a fifty-one-year-old bull of a man, with greying closely cropped hair and glasses, who had been drafted by the New York Giants in 1943, but gave up a pro football career to enter journalism. An Iowan who still spoke with a Midwestern nasality, he joined the Des Moines Register and gradully earned a reputation as the toughest investigative reporter in Washington.
He prided himself on having “no ideological hangup.” He fought injustices in the State Department and the Agriculture Department and in 1953 he began to expose labor rackets and convinced Robert Kennedy to enlist the Senate Government Operations Committee in the battle against labor racketeering. As Jimmy Hoffa was led off to jail in 1967, he spat on Clark Mollenhoff. Nobody could intimidate Mollenhoff, not even Presidents. Eisenhower once told him to sit down at a press conference. He stayed on his feet. In time, he won every prize in the business, from the American Legion’s Fourth Estate Award to the Pulitzer.
For all his success, Mollenhoff was unpopular among some of his colleagues. In 1964, when he was heir apparent to the presidency of the National Press Club, a group of members mounted a successful stop-Mollenhoff movement. Many people found Mollenhoff dogmatic and egotistical. Moreover, for an investigative reporter, he had a curious weakness for participating in government. Under Kennedy he served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information Policy while still writing about the Administration. While covering the Goldwater campaign in 1964, he wrote a memo bringing one of his pet injustices to the candidate’s attention; Goldwater based a speech on the memo. Finally, in 1969, he became an ombudsman for the Nixon Administration, a $33,500-a-year bureaucrat who was supposed to warn the President against corruption within the ranks of the Administration, investigate complaints, and ferret out wrongdoings in past Administrations. Mollenhoff resigned after a year. His detractors said that he was eased out after making a fool of himself by clumsily and stubbornly defending the nomination of Clement Haynsworth to the Supreme Court. He claimed to have left because the Nixon staffers engaged in “footdragging” over things he “was suggesting for their own good.”
Two years after Mollenhoff had quit the White House and returned to his desk in the Motel Modern surroundings of the Des Moines Register’s Washington Bureau, the Watergate affair broke. Mollenhoff was appalled at the implications of the break-in and once again started suggesting moves that the White House ought to make for its own good. But this time he was suggesting them in the public prints. In a long series of tough columns, Mollenhoff called on Nixon to set up a bipartisan panel which could investigate the affair and clear the Presidency of all taint of wrongdoing. He also charged that the Justice Department could, if it wanted to, force at least one of the indicted men to tell who had financed the operation—by granting immunity from prosecution.
On October 5, Mollenhoff was typing in his plaque-studded office when the news came over the bureau’s wire machine that Nixon was holding an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office. Mollenhoff dashed the four blocks to the White House and arrived while the press conference was still in progress. But he was not allowed to go in. Standing around the empty White House pressroom, Mollenhoff began to smolder. He was convinced that the White House had purposely avoided notifying him for fear that he would badger Nixon with questions about the Watergate affair.
Later that afternoon, Mollenhoff stormed into Ziegler’s office to give the press secretary “a piece of my mind.” Mollenhoff accused Ziegler of trying to block the “tough, informed questions” which he had been raising in his column for weeks. Then he began to question Ziegler about the financing of the Watergate burglary. He asked if
Ziegler seriously believed that Gordon Liddy and James McCord, two of the arrested men, had used their own money on the project.
“No,” said Ziegler.
“Then where did it come from?” asked Mollenhoff.
“Why, I didn’t think there was any question but that the money came from the Committee,” said Ziegler.
Mollenhoff was startled. He couldn’t believe that the White House press secretary would admit that the Watergate break-in had been financed by the Committee to Re-elect the President. So he asked again.
“There is no question but that the money came from the Committee,” Ziegler repeated.
The next morning—October 6—Mollenhoff had a story on the front page of the Register based on the Ziegler quote. Reporters immediately began to phone Ziegler about the quote, and Ziegler read all callers a prepared statement which said that the quote was a “misinterpretation” of what he had told Mollenhoff.
“I said I have no personal knowledge of any aspect of this matter other than what I have read in the press,” Ziegler’s statement continued. “Therefore I am not in a position to draw any conclusion or to make any authoritative statements whatsoever, and the reporter for the Des Moines Register was so informed.”
That evening, Ziegler called Mollenhoff and read him the statement, too.
“Well, are you denying that?” Mollenhoff asked him.
“Well, no,” said Ziegler, and repeated that he had not been authorized to say anything, and that he didn’t know anything about the Watergate.
“Well, if it stays within that context and it’s clear it’s not a denial, that’s fine,” said Mollenhoff.
But many papers treated Ziegler’s statement as a denial, which angered Mollenhoff. A week after the story appeared, he went to the morning White House briefing to battle openly with Ziegler and to defend his own reputation as a journalist.
The Boys on the Bus Page 25