The Boys on the Bus

by Timothy Crouse

  The briefing began with some pleasantries from Ziegler and an announcement that the President would make a radio speech on crime the coming Sunday. There was a long string of questions on the Paris peace talks. Then Mollenhoff, standing at the front of the room about ten feet from the lectern, initiated his exchange with Ziegler.

  Mollenhoff: Ron, there has been some dispute about our conversation as of last Thursday, and I wanted to go over that with you here to make sure there is no misunderstanding about what you are denying. You are not denying the quote itself, that there is no question but that the money came from the Committee, is that right?

  Ziegler: I have issued a statement on that, Clark. I will stand by it.

  Mollenhoff: My story has been questioned on this. That is important to me. It is an important point relative to the Watergate investigations. I want to go over this. I want a confrontation out here where we have witnesses, where the question of accuracy is settled.

  Ziegler: I have issued a statement and I stand by it.

  Mollenhoff: I don’t want you to get away that way. I want to go over the context in which this was said. You said this on defending the Administration on the general thoroughness of the investigation. You said that the question had been answered and that there is no question but that the money came from the Committee. We had just gone over the $1,600 that Liddy had in his possession. We had just gone over the $3,500 that was spent for the electronic devices by McCord in connection with the Watergate bugging.

  At that point, you said—I raised the question about the sources of this money, and we had agreed that it was absurd that they would spend their own money for this—and at that point you said, “There is no question but that the money came from the Committee” and there was not any question about what money it was or what committee it was. Do you challenge that?

  Ziegler: I have issued a statement and stand by it.

  Mollenhoff: That is the kind of crap we have been getting out of this White House all along. You may not know anything about this, but you have been denying implication of the White House and the Committee people on top for the last two months. I was not aware that you were unauthorized to speak on the subject, because certainly the press conferences up to now have indicated that you were.

  Ziegler (looking around the room): Any other questions?

  Somebody immediately popped up to ask a question on the bombing, leaving Mollenhoff stranded and shaking with anger. Ziegler was pale and his pudgy face was drawn, but the bombing question and some subsequent queries about campaign plans gave him a chance to calm down. Mollenhoff kept raising his trembling hand and coming in with more questions, but Ziegler kept putting him off. Nobody helped him. In the back of the room, a reporter shook his head as Mollenhoff came in for his third attack. “There,” said the reporter, “is the male Sarah McClendon.” Everyone in the room knew all the details of the Mollenhoff affair, which had been reported in the Washington Post. Most of them probably believed that Mollenhoff was in the right.

  But Mollenhoff was a comic figure to his colleagues. He had thought that he was too good for journalism, but he had failed as a mandarin in Nixon’s White House. He was like a cocky kid who had left his small town for good, proceeded to fail dismally in the Big City, and was now forced to come back to the small town covered in shame but putting up a good front. So no one was anxious to defend him. They watched him for a while as he flailed against Ziegler, and then, instead of demanding that Ziegler answer Mollenhoff’s questions, they stepped in with questions of their own. “Ron,” someone said, sounding faintly bored, “may I change the subject?” Nobody seemed to care whether Ziegler denied the quote or not. That was Mollenhoff’s problem, not theirs.

  Mollenhoff was no proponent of joint action. “If they don’t have the guts to do it individually,” he said later, “there’s no point getting together to rig a conspiracy to get them off their asses.” But he did expect some help from his fellow newspapermen. He kept looking around in a beseeching way, until someone in the back of the room finally asked Ziegler: “Did Clark Mollenhoff quote you accurately in that story?” Ziegler said he had already given a response on that point. The subject was dropped.

  Mollenhoff managed to get off one parting shot. “The speech Sunday on crime—will that include the Watergate?” he asked Ziegler.

  At the end of the briefing, a group of reporters gathered around Mollenhoff to slap him on the back and shake his hand. “That a way, Clark!” they said. “That was certainly some performance! it sure is good to see someone take on Ziegler like that!”

  The White House press corps always admired a show of fierce individualism.

  * The Resurrection of Richard Nixon by Jules Witcover (New York, Putnam, 1970), p. 376.

  † After doing a critical piece on the Administration, CBS’s Schorr had been investigated by the FBI on the phony pretext that he was being considered for a “high government post.”

  ‡ The Coming of the New Deal by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York, Houghton Miffln, 1959), p. 562.

  § Backgrounders are small press conferences where government officials give out information on the condition that it will not be attributed to any source. Using backgrounders, officials can float trial balloons or simply lie without assuming any responsibility.

  ‖ There were also a few smaller, less formal attempts at organized resistance, all of which failed. For instance, on the eve of the China trip, Charles Wheeler of the BBC tried to organize a boycott of a cocktail party the White House was giving for correspondents who weren’t going to Peking. “My God,” Wheeler said later, “they had made space for parish newsletters with circulations of seven hundred and fifty, but they weren’t allowing any foreign correspondents to go. And then they tried to buy us off with a cocktail party. So I phoned around and said I didn’t think we ought to go to the party. But several people went anyway, just for fear that they would miss something.”

  CHAPTER XI

  Nixon’s

  Campaign

  Every so often in the course of the fall campaign, Jules Witcover appeared at a White House briefing in his black, funereal raincoat, looking like a cut-rate version of the bad fairy. He would wait until the questioning started to hum and then, with his eyes all blank and innocent, he would catch Ziegler’s attention and ask, “Ron, what did the President do today as a candidate for reelection? Did he do anything?”

  Ziegler would bristle and fight the impulse to snap, and then he would give a very composed answer detailing all the Presidential duties that Nixon would discharge that day, and he would completely ignore Witcover’s question. Witcover would come back a minute later with something like, “Ron, as a candidate, did the President read the Times’ story on Segretti?” Witcover never could get over the fact that all the White House staffers took offense the moment you said or even implied that Nixon was a candidate for President. Around the White House, it bordered on treason to call Nixon a candidate; the big plan was to run him as the President and try to bury the fact that he was a politician. Ziegler tore up the English language looking for euphemisms for the word “campaign.” Someone would ask him about one of Nixon’s upcoming campaign trips and Ziegler would answer, “Yes, on Monday the President will go to New York to, uh, follow the schedule we’ve announced.”

  Whenever he could, Witcover liked to remind the White House that Nixon was running for office. Dan Rather, for his part, began signing off his reports with the tag line: “This is Dan Rather with the Nixon campaign at the White House.” Some of the better political writers around Washington, like Peter Lisagor and Jack Germond, tried in their articles to point out the political motivation behind each of Nixon’s Presidential acts. Nevertheless, it was difficult to keep writing political copy about a stubborn non-candidate, a man who made only eight token campaign outings during the entire fall.

  Nixon had already taken a couple of these trips when the White House press office, which had been ignoring my pleas for accreditation, did
a sudden, mysterious about-face. On September 26, a stern, no-nonsense White House secretary phoned to say that I had passed the requisite security check and could ride the press plane on the Presidential Trip to New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The trip had already begun, she said, but I could catch the Presidential party if I got out to Liberty Island in New York Harbor on the double.

  I got there just in time to see the press coming into the island in three Chinook helicopters, the kind that were used to carry troops in Vietnam. The choppers circled the island three times so that the cameramen on board could get aerial shots of the Statue; you could feel the blades pounding the air.

  Meanwhile, the 36th Army Band played Sousa marches. I was Standing in back of the crowd—which consisted almost entirely of plaid-uniformed girls from Catholic schools and little boys in yarmulkes from Hebrew schools, all of whom were broiling and screaming for Cokes in this shadeless park right beneath the Statue’s backside—when the White House press corps started charging single file through a hole in a nearby hedge. The wire-service men and the regulars headed straight for a row of phones that had been set up on a table at the rear of the park. They had just found out that Henry Kissinger and Xuan Thuy had decided to extend the peace talks for one more day. Robert Pierpoint’s sound man hastily removed the mouthpiece of one of the telephones and wired a tape recorder to the inner workings of the receiver so that Pierpoint could phone the story into CBS radio. Pierpoint shouted into his microphone above the crowd noise, but the sound man kept looking at the dials on the tape recorder gesturing that something was wrong. “Come on, New York, the sound level’s too high,” the sound man yelled into another phone. “I told you the sound level was too high!”

  “Christ,” Pierpoint said to no one in particular. “When you try to work with these guys, they do not understand that we are under tremendous pressure.”

  Ziegler came bustling through the throng of reporters. “Lisagor!” he shouted. “Lisagor! This is the first time the talks have ever been extended. All the others have been one-day sessions. But, just off the record—don’t push it too much.” Ziegler accompanied this advice with a vague but ominous cranking gesture.

  Lisagor, who was chatting with Carroll Kilpatrick, the tall, grey-haired Washington Post correspondent, did not seem greatly excited over the information that Ziegler had checked for him. “I don’t see many Negroes in the crowd, do you, Carroll?” he said.

  “Hey,” he continued, “have you heard Claudel’s title? He’s head of Frogs for Nixon.”

  Claudel was Henri Claudel, the French Consul General, who had come to present some citation to the American Museum of Immigration, which Nixon was officially opening this afternoon. Nixon was using the occasion to show how much he admired America’s Heritage Groups—such as Italians, Ukranians, Poles, and especially Jews. Nearly half an hour after the press arrived, Nixon himself finally appeared to the cheers of the schoolchildren and proceeded to give a speech about how immigrants made America great. The speech contained all the old “melting pot” clichés. Most of the reporters crammed themselves onto a wooden platform in the middle of the park and craned their necks for a look at Nixon.

  Suddenly a small group of antiwar veterans, who had apparently crashed the rigid security of this by-invitation-only affair, began to shout “Stop the bombing, stop the war!”*

  Nixon stared into the cameras on the wooden platform. “I have a message for the television screens,” he said. “Let’s show, besides the six over here”—he pointed to the war protesters—“the thousands over here.” He gestured to all the schoolchildren, who were dutifully screaming “Four More Years!” Then the protesters were dragged away by the police.

  Jack Germond was pacing the pavement at the back of the park, studying a tip sheet. “Jesus,” he said, “this is the ultimate media event. Nixon at the Statue of Liberty! It’s a piece of fiction. I just hope we get into the OTB parlor before five o’clock. I got a good horse in the eighth.”

  Frank Lynn, The New York Times’ specialist on New York City politics, was covering the New York leg of Nixon’s trip in accordance with the paper’s tradition that a reporter from the New York office takes over whenever the President is in the metropolitan area. Bob Semple, the Times’ White House man, immediately recognized that the day’s story was Nixon’s blatant grab for the ethnic vote. He tactfully suggested this to Lynn, and he also warned Lynn that the speech which Nixon was scheduled to deliver that evening would harp on a hackneyed theme which Nixon had put forth dozens of times in the past—that America must maintain a strong defense. The next morning, Lynn led his story with the sentence: “Calling for the maintenance of a strong defense establishment President Nixon urged Americans last night ‘never to send the President of the United States to the conference table with anybody as head of the second strongest nation in the world.’ ”

  (Several weeks later, seeing Lynn at another Nixon function in Westchester, Semple felt a curiosity welling up inside himself. He wanted to know why that lead had ended up on Lynn’s story. Semple sensed that he shouldn’t question Lynn about the matter, but he could not resist. He had a second or third martini and then went over to Lynn and asked, “Say, Frank, did the desk rewrite that story of yours …?” The moment the words were out of Semple’s mouth, he saw a look of shame in Lynn’s eyes and knew that he shouldn’t have asked.)

  Later that afternoon, after the speech was over and the President had taken off in his helicopter to go to a meeting with “Jewish leaders,” the press was taken back to Manhattan on a Circle Line ferryboat and then bused to the Commodore Hotel. Dan Rather went back to Manhattan on a specially chartered tugboat. For some reason, there was a chimpanzee on the deck of the tug, and he was persuaded to clap his hands at the press assembled on the deck of the ferry. Which called for repartee from the press. “Hey, Dan,” they yelled, “is that your producer?”

  The monkey provided the best moment of the afternoon. The bus ride through the city was depressingly quiet. There was a pall of defeat and futility over the White House press corps. Inside the White House, their broken, sheeplike behavior seemed somehow natural. But here, in the world outside, it was painful to watch. Three thousand miles away another bunch of reporters were careening about the West Coast with the McGovern campaign. They were suffering from a blinding fatigue, but at least there were signs of life on the McGovern bus; there was noisy speculation about the prospects of a candidate who made mistakes and acted in unpredictable ways. But here in New York, the White House correspondents knew that nothing unpredictable would happen. The word that appeared most frequently in their pool reports was “uneventful.” They were too resigned to the tedium to fight it. During the fall, the only major acts of protest and defiance came from the shock troops—reporters from outside the White House press corps who were only covering Nixon for a little while.

  That evening, the buses picked up the reporters at the Commodore Hotel and took them across town to the Americana Hotel, where Nixon was going to address a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner. At the top of a wide stairway, uniformed guards directed the guests to a huge ballroom on the right and the press to a smaller meeting room on the left. Total Quarantine for the press.

  Lyndon Johnson, in the halcyon days when he was still wooing reporters, used to invite three or four of them, and their wives, to almost every state dinner. It gave the reporters a big thrill to see their names on the official invitation list, and on the Washington Post’s society page the next morning. Johnson knew that this was a simple enough thing to do—letting the press in with the white folks every so often—and it earned him an enormous amount of good will. But Richard Nixon was hardly ever willing to spoil his parties by inviting the press. He didn’t mind having four hundred Youths for Nixon crash the party that night. (They kept yelling “Four More Years!” on cue.) But he wanted the press out of sight.

  The eighty reporters in the pressroom lined up for paper-dry turkey sandwiches and a shot at four bottles of
whiskey (which were cleaned out by the first fifteen men in line). The myth dies hard that the Nixon operation was first-class all the way. But it died for me that night. The food was stale and scarce. Although the President was staying at the Waldorf, the press was billeted for the night in the Commodore, a grimy, seedy railroad hotel whose main distinction lay in having pioneered the technique of piping sexually explicit films into hotel rooms. Some of the men had been to their rooms and caught the porno classic Vixen, which the Commodore was featuring that week. Vixen was already a topic of conversation.

  “Did you see the scene with the trout?”

  “Isn’t that something?”

  “Naw, that’s famous. Haven’t you ever heard of the trout scene?”

  “Four more years in the Commodore, that’s what we need!”

  The pressroom was arranged like a classroom, with three rows of baize-covered tables facing a podium and three Sony televisions at the front. Most of the reporters went about setting up their Olivettis on the tables, sipping drinks from a cash bar, and talking shop. One of the local reporters appeared at the well-guarded door with a guest from the dinner across the way—a suburban Marie Antoinette, dressed in a smart neo-Moroccan pant suit. The lady sniffed delicately at the scene, taking in the dozens of slouching, puttering figures. “They don’t seem to be doing anything,” she said. “Why don’t they report something?”

  As if to satisfy the lady, the Sony monitors began to buzz and lit up finally with the image of a tuxedoed Robert Dole, the Chairman of the Republican Party. As Dole spoke, a wave of comment gradually rippled through the room. The absurdity of the insult was sinking in. Dole was speaking from a dais not two hundred feet away, just across a marbled hall, yet the press was not allowed to see him live—except for a four-man pool. It was no big deal to see Robert Dole once again in the flesh, or even Nixon, but the restriction was so petty that it began to loom large as a taunt.