“I looked forward to a Convention full of surprises and excitement,” Chairman Dole was saying, “and those of you who were there know just how exciting it was. Tonight we are fortunate to have a video tape of the most exciting moments of the Convention, and we are going to show it to you on these big screens.” There were different reactions to this statement in the pressroom. There were a few reporters who probably agreed; one or two others may have concluded that Republicans simply had unusual criteria for excitement; but most of the reporters were stunned by the enormity of the lie. The room began to reverberate with jokes about the “exciting moments” being shown on the monitors—Sammy Davis hugging Nixon, Pat taking a bow, Nixon’s banal acceptance speech. Ralph Harris of Reuters, a small, rumpled, grey-headed Englishman who had been stationed at the White House for many years, stared at the monitor and shouted: “Throw Nixon out of work!” John Farmer, a political writer for the Philadelphia Bulletin, looked at his typewriter and kept repeating, “You can’t cover this guy. They won’t let you.” Peter Lisagor shook his head and walked off to join the other pool reporters in the ballroom. “I’ve got to smell this crowd,” he announced. “I’ve got a feeling you really got to smell this crowd to know it.”
These comments were mostly muted because Ron Ziegler was on the prowl, pacing up and down the aisles between the rows of tables. Not that there was any crack in Ziegler’s bland smile to show he was picking up hostile vibes. No, Ziegler was like an expert floorwalker who would spot a shoplifter, walk calmly to the nearest phone, ring Security, and adjust his pocket hanky as the security thugs dragged the shoplifter away.
Ziegler was now hovering around the front of the room, where Jim Doyle was sitting. Doyle had locked horns with Ziegler at a briefing earlier in the evening. Doyle kept asking whether “the candidate” was going to have a press conference during the trip. Ziegler became furious and finally snapped: “Don’t worry, we’ll tell you if there’s going to be any news conference, Doyle!”
“Hey, Ron!” Doyle now shouted at Ziegler. “Do you get to go inside?”
“Yes,” said Ziegler, staunchly oblivious to the sarcasm. “I’m going in with the Youth for Nixon. I’m going in right now.” And in he went.
Meanwhile, the Exciting Moments movie had ended and the action had shifted to the simultaneous fund-raiser in Chicago, linked by closed circuit, where Anne Armstrong, the Party’s Vice Chairman, was introducing Spiro Agnew. “All day long,” she said, “I’ve been trying to think of one word to describe Vice President Agnew.”
“I’ll bet it’s shithead,” said Doyle, in a loud voice. “It’ll bring down the house.”
Anne Armstrong listed a number of virtues she associated with the Vice President. “And he can transmit these qualities to others,” she said.
“Like a leper!” said Doyle.
Just then, Gerald Warren, the deputy press secretary, appeared at the door. He was in a floorwalker’s suit like Ziegler’s.
“What’s it like inside, Gerry?” Doyle asked him. “You been inside?”
Warren slumped his shoulders and let his tongue hang out. “Hot!” he said.
“Nice to know there is an inside,” said Doyle.
At 10:30, Nixon entered. The reporters watched him on TV as he made his progress through the lobby, came up the stairs, stepped onto the dais, acknowledged applause, and started to speak. There was a low steady clatter in the room now. The reporters were intently taking transcript on their portables. All in a day’s work. Listen for the lead and file the story. Here and there, people were quietly boiling with indignation—mostly people who were not regulars at the White House. Cassie Mackin sitting in the front row taking notes, looked grim. “Isn’t this incredible?” I said to her.
“The Republicans certainly have things organized, don’t they?” was all she said.
“Why do they just sit here and take it?” I asked.
“They’ve been worn down,” she said, very low. “We need some new ones.”
Nixon was making his standard speech, embellished with little winks, gestures, and turns of phrase (“Now, in very personal terms, may I tell you …”) that implied that he understood that a very special bond existed between him and the fat-cat audience. Nixon’s behavior with these people bordered on crassness and cried out to be described; it was a story in itself. But, as far as I could tell, such a story did not suggest itself to the reporters who watched him, and certainly none ever got into print.
About halfway through his speech, Nixon got to the part where he announced how happy he was that young people could vote. It was significant, Nixon congratulated himself, that “right here in this room, at this great dinner where it costs, I understand, a great deal to sit down and eat, that the young people were able to come in and at least enjoy the speeches.”
That was too much for Doyle. The needle in his bullshit detector hit the red zone. He was up on his feet shouting at the tube. “How about the press!” he screamed. “How about the press!”
“You’re not young, Jim,” somebody said. “You gotta be young to get in.” But Doyle went on yelling at the monitor, half joking and half off the handle.
“This is terrible! This is awful shit. I just want to take a look at him! Is he alive? How do I know he’s alive?” People stopped typing for a moment, turned around in their chairs to look at Doyle, assured themselves that he wasn’t really dangerous, and then went back to their jobs. Doyle sat down and looked around him, half expecting to see everyone else up and raging. All he saw was the White House press corps, hunched over the baize like blackjack addicts, taking down every word Nixon uttered. At the end of the trip, Doyle wrote a piece about the “surrealistic atmosphere” of Nixon’s isolation, but the article failed to match the fire of his outburst.
After the dinner ended, Cassie Mackin went out into the hall to do her “standup” in front of the NBC camera crew. She got as far as the second sentence, and then she doubled over in a fit of laughter and had to stop. The guests were being allowed to leave through only one of the doors, but were trying to get out through all of them. The beautifully dressed people still in the ballroom were actually pounding on the doors, and the security guards and police were leaning against these doors from the other side.
“They’re banging on the doors to get out!” Mackin kept saying between paroxysms. “I’d love to see them break the doors down!” Then she would compose herself, signal the cameraman, try to do her introduction and collapse in laughter again. It was not healthy to flaunt that kind of an attitude around the Nixon people, and one didn’t have to be prescient to predict that within forty-eight hours Mackin would run afoul of the Thought Police.
The next morning, the reporters were bused to LaGuardia. They walked past Nixon’s blue and silver plane, which the White House people insisted on calling “The Spirit of ’76,” and boarded an oversized Eastern 727, which was at once tackier and less comfortable than either of the McGovern press planes. As I came to the top of the ramp, I met Cassie Mackin again. “Welcome to the Spirit of 1984,” she said.
There were four or five assistant press secretaries aboard—Tricia Nixon replicas in neat skirts and blouses. They sat in the first-class section with typewriters and a mimeograph machine, and about halfway to Oakland they began passing out the prepared text for the speech that Nixon would make at a thousand-dollar-a-plate lunch in San Francisco. They also handed out the text of the speech the President would give that night in Los Angeles. Since both speeches ran about ten legal-sized pages in length, the White House press people had helpfully prepared a page of salient excerpts from each.
I was kneeling on a seat in front of Lisagor and Bob Semple, turned around so that I could talk to them. Semple was typing away on his portable Olympia and sipping wine when the handout arrived; he immediately scanned the excerpt sheets and looked alarmed. He underlined a sentence from the Los Angeles speech that went: “Those who call for a redistribution of income and a confiscation of wealth are not speaking fo
r the interests of people …” Nixon was obviously referring to George McGovern, but at no point in either speech did he actually mention McGovern’s name.
“There is some pretty sleazy operating going on in this thing,” said Semple. “I don’t understand it. The guy obviously isn’t reading us.” He laughed. “I mean, I don’t think McGovern is calling for confiscation of wealth, do you?”
Semple began to read the San Francisco text. He underlined a sentence which referred to certain “proposals that would put the United States in the position of having the second strongest” Navy, Air Force and Army in the world. “It would be a move toward war,” the speech said. The author of these nefarious “proposals” was not identified.
“All right,” said Semple, “let’s say we use a lead saying President Nixon declared today that Senator George McGovern’s defense policies represented—you know, this is simple, wire-service stuff—a move toward war. Now how long do you think it would take for McGovern …?” Semple laughed, apparently at the idea of McGovern launching an indignant counterattack. “I mean, that’s tough business.”
“Well,” said Lisagor, “that’s how it’s gonna be handled.”
“It’s an interesting question,” Semple went on enthusiastically. He had curly brown hair, a long, smooth, boyish face, and blue eyes that widened and lit up whenever he grew excited about something. “I think just to put that in your lead is not necessarily serving Nixon’s purpose—not when you’re using outrageous statements like that.”
“Even outrageous remarks seem to help Nixon this year,” I pointed out.
“And to be recorded flatly, it helps him more,” said Semple, completely contradicting his first position.
“Yes, but I don’t know why that is,” I said.
“I can tell you why,” said Lisagor. “It’s because Nixon is one of the best students of journalistic formats of any politician we’ve had in a number of years. He understands the one-dimensional format of the wire service, where you can’t qualify anything and where you’ve got to go with a hard punchy lead, and that’s what this speech is designed to do.”
“Well, I’m trying to work out a way around it,” said Semple firmly.
“Share it with me,” Lisagor said drily.
“Well,” said Semple, looking at the handout again, “I may just say that he came to California and played on very familiar themes in terms that seem to admit to no debate, that show no consideration for the complexity of the issues.”
Semple thought that over for a moment and then added, “Yeah, but then the desk will go like this.” He made a ripping sound and tore up an imaginary piece of copy.
“Yeah, right,” said Lisagor.
“Yeah,” said Semple, to me. “But not because the editors are pro-Nixon. It’s just the rules—and they’re good rules. But I’ll tell you about that later.” And he went back to his wine and his typewriter, leaving me to talk to Lisagor.
“The rules of objectivity are such,” said Lisagor, “that a man can make political capital out of them by being clever in the way he presents a particular issue.” Joe McCarthy, said Lisagor, was the prime example of a man who had taken advantage of the rules. McCarthy made outrageous accusations, knowing full well that the wires would print his statements deadpan, with no qualifications and no counterstatements from the people he accused. McCarthy had understood what made a headline, what made a good lead. Nixon knew these things, too. He knew that the “move toward war” statement would make a good, crisp lead for the wires.
(Nixon also knew that his attack on McGovern would get good play, while McGovern’s defense, coming a day or two later, would not have as much impact. Nixon himself stated this law of journalism back in the fifties, when he saw himself as a victim of attacks from the left. “A charge is usually put on the front page; the defense is buried among the deodorant ads,” he said.)
“All politicians make these simplistic charges,” said Lisagor. “It becomes a problem for the press to put these charges in proper perspective. But a lot of reporters feel that they’ve discharged their obligation if they just report what the man said.”
In the next three days, Bob Semple wrote three stories about the trip—one for the Times of September 28, another on September 29, and a final piece for the Sunday “Week in Review” section on October 1. In his first piece he wrote:
The President discussed neither his programs nor his opponent’s in detail. Instead, he employed broad strokes to paint the South Dakotan as a willing captive of the left who had isolated himself from Mr. Nixon’s vision of the American temperament.
But not once did Semple write that Nixon had wrongly accused McGovern of wanting to confiscate wealth and weaken the country militarily. In effect, his stories said that Nixon had begun to use strong rhetoric and had thrown some tough accusations at McGovern, but then McGovern was doing the same thing to Nixon. We talked about the stories while he was writing them, and at one point Semple said: “You can say that Nixon’s attack on McGovern was couched in severe language and general terms, but you can’t then write—‘and bore no resemblance to what McGovern has been saying.’ ”
Semple was not intimidated by the White House; it was just that he was a model Timesman, and therefore painfully conscious of the rules of objective journalism. He came from a large, close-knit, cultured Midwestern family. (His father, who ran the Wyandotte Chemical Company, not only served as president of the Detroit Symphony, but also sat in as second clarinetist several times a season.) Early in his teens, he was sent to Andover, where he ran the school paper. Later, he went to Yale, became chairman of the Daily News, and acquired an accent somewhat similar to that of William Buckley, who had held the same position in an earlier era. After graduating he studied history at Berkeley for a year and flirted with the idea of going to law school. But he could not face the prospect of more schooling; he rejected the professions one by one until he finally settled upon journalism faute de mieux.
In 1961, he went to work for the fledgling National Observer; two years later he wrote to James Reston, asking for a job on the New York Times. He was hired and served a two-year apprenticeship as a deskman in the Washington Bureau. By 1965, he was lobbying heavily for a job as reporter, and Tom Wicker, who was then bureau chief, finally made him the No. 2 man at the White House. From then on, he rose quickly, for he wrote gracefully, worked fiendishly hard, and charmed everyone with his open, good-natured manner. In late 1967, Wicker assigned him to cover the long-shot candidacy of Richard Nixon.
Semple would later think that he had been a good choice for the assignment, for he was able to convince the Nixon people, who hated the Times, that he was looking at the candidate with “a fresh eye.” In one of his first pieces, Semple wrote that the old, Red-baiting Nixon had vanished. “In his place,” wrote Semple, “stands a walking monument to reason, civility, frankness.” (Even in June 1973, after the Watergate scandal had broken, Semple claimed that he was not embarrassed by this early assessment. “I guess I’m victimized by the same thing as Scotty Reston,” he said. “I’m perfectly prepared to believe in redemption.”)
Later, after Nixon had won the nomination and launched his Presidential campaign in earnest, Semple became less enchanted with him, but found it hard to express his doubts within the narrow, hard-news form of reporting preferred by the Times. In the fall of 1968, a mildly worded piece he wrote pointing out Nixon’s trick of declaring “moratoriums” on issues he did not wish to discuss was greeted with skepticism by the editors; they balked at running it. The Times was loathe to break away from the traditional, simplistic forms of election coverage, and Semple had to fight for over a week to make them accept a piece which contained so much analysis. Though he continued to write such pieces over the course of the next four years, he did so with extreme caution, for he shared the Times fear of mixing conjecture with straight news. Although he admitted in 1973 that the press needed some new form of journalism to deal with the obscurantism and dissimulation of the Whit
e House, he was always leary of pioneering such forms himself. “I just didn’t know how good I was at it,” he said.
When Semple followed Nixon into the White House, his belief in redemption continued to spring eternal. Though he realized, and wrote, that Nixon’s staff was concerned mainly with re-electing the President, he still searched for higher motivations. In April 1970, for instance, he wrote a magazine piece about John Ehrlichman in which he depicted the Nixon aide as a “compassionate and easy-going” middle American who was seeking to push Nixon away from the right and toward the middle of the road on issues such as welfare and civil rights. Not all of Semple’s colleagues agreed with this appraisal.
“Why are you so nice to Ehrlichman?” Marty Nolan asked him. “He’s just a sleazy arrogant thug like the rest of them around here.”
“I think there’s such a thing as being too cynical,” Semple replied.
Even in 1973 Semple did not feel compelled to apologize for the gentle treatment he had given Ehrlichman. He had been writing about the “substance of ideas, pieces of legislation” rather than about Ehrlichman’s character, he said. He had avoided denigrating Ehrlichman’s character in order not to affront him. “I had to keep lines open to Ehrlichman to find out what the hell Nixon was doing.”
Semple prided himself on keeping the lines open. It was for this reason, he said, that he remained at the White House no matter how discouraging the assignment became. “There were many months when nobody would see me. But I felt that it would be even more difficult for somebody else to give it a try. They were more likely to return my phone calls, simply because they knew what I looked like.”
Semple drove himself hard in the White House job, often growing so absorbed in his duties that he became woefully absent-minded. (On a later Presidential trip to California, for instance, he woke up one morning in his hotel room, packed his suitcase, placed it outside the door, and heard the baggage handler pick it up; it was only as he was about to go out for breakfast that he realized he had packed his shoes. He had to spend the day padding around in his stocking feet.) He was one of the three or four men in the White House press corps who went beyond the briefings and press conferences to cultivate sources on the staff, study the White House hierarchy, and dig out original “inside” stories. But by the time of the 1972 campaign, he was growing increasingly bored and frustrated. With the election at stake, his best sources were drying up. “When you’re reduced to the status, as we were toward the end, of listening to Nixon’s speeches and listening to Ronald L. Ziegler once a day, then you’re reduced to guesswork,” he said later. “And that is not work for a grown man.”
The Boys on the Bus Page 27