Of course, John Osborne’s work sometimes consisted largely of guesswork, and it was consistently the most informative writing on the White House. But Semple was playing by the rules of The New York Times, and they did not allow for guesswork. Nor did he push Ziegler especially hard for more information. That wasn’t Semple’s style. Semple did not want to demean the dignity of the Times by getting into any open fights with the Administration. Ziegler usually treated him cordially, and Semple did not seem to know, or want to know, about the ways in which Ziegler abused reporters from lesser papers. Semple resigned himself to writing pieces which did little more than report what Nixon said, and much of his reporting in the fall of 1972 lacked guts. At the end of the year, he left the White House and became a deputy national editor in New York. Many of his colleagues guessed that he was being groomed to be chief of the Washington Bureau in four or five years time.
Yet people who knew Semple sometimes felt that for all of his complaisance and willingness to play by the rules, he anguished over his failure to confront the Nixon people in the White House. Among his closest friends were some of the toughest Washington journalists—Tom Wicker, Peter Lisagor, and John Osborne—and he often talked to them about the problems of covering the Administration. Semple went out of his way to do things which seemed almost to be acts of contrition. For instance, he pulled the few strings he had in the White House to try to get credentials for Hunter Thompson of Rolling Stone. Semple knew Thompson slightly from the days when they both worked on the National Observer, and he liked Thompson’s wildly satirical writing. He seemed to enjoy using his influence to put Thompson on the same plane with Ron Ziegler.
When the press plane landed in Oakland, the weather was gloomy and overcast. The White House operatives and the Secret Service immediately herded the whole pack of journalists into a tiny area which had been formed by stretching yellow plastic ropes around red, white and blue oil drums. The band was playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and the crowd, drummed up by the Nixon advance team, was pressing against the airport fence. I looked around and suddenly spotted Hunter Thompson heading for the press enclosure in his springy lope, looking only moderately bizarre in his blue pants, white jacket, red-and-white shirt, and light blue aviator’s sunglasses. I introduced him to a Secret Service man, who got him his credentials. Meanwhile, Air Force One had landed and taxied to within fifty yards of the press. The door swung open and Nixon stepped out on the ramp, grimacing and waving. “Go get ’em Dick,” Thompson yelled. “Throw the Bomb!” The whine of the plane’s engines drowned him out, but he got a few funny looks from immediate neighbors. “Fifty years more!” he yelled. “Thousand-year Reich!”
Then Nixon headed for his panzer-limousine and the press headed for the buses, with the women in curlers screaming “Dan, Dan!” at Dan Rather, who acknowledged the screams with a curt nod and little shooting motion of the index finger, reminiscent of Elvis Presley. They carted all the reporters to a newly finished terminus of San Francisco’s BART system, where Nixon was sighted for a moment, on the other side of a glass partition, shaking hands with six subway functionaries. Then to a San Francisco Hotel to eat a buffet lunch in the pressroom and hear Nixon’s speech piped in over loudspeakers. Most of the men filed, it being early afternoon, typing furiously and then holding up a page and shouting “Western!” for the plane’s resident Western Union man to pick it up.
Next the reporters flew to Los Angeles, where they saw the President emerge from the plane again. The press was bused to the Century Plaza Hotel, where the Nixon people had set up a press headquarters in a little pseudo-Spanish meeting room that had a tiled fountain in its center. Standing outside the pressroom in the late afternoon, Hunter Thompson told Bob Semple how appalling it was to observe the White House press, even for a few hours. “They’re like slugs on a snail farm,” he said, taking a nervous puff on his cigarette holder. “Jesus, Ziegler treats them like garbagemen and they just take it.”
Semple was beginning to reply when Ziegler himself rounded a corner and Thompson went over to ask him a question. McGovern had stupidly charged that Nixon was soon going to introduce a right-to-work law and put an end to collective bargaining—which even McGovern must have known was ridiculous. Thompson asked Ziegler, talking very fast, “Uh, will there be any comment from you people on McGovern’s charge that Nixon is backing a right-to-work law?”
Ziegler didn’t even stop to look at him. “No!” he said, but it was more of a popgun explosion than a word. Thompson was stunned by this display of rudeness.
“Does he ever talk like that to you?” he asked Semple.
“Yes,” said Semple, and mumbled something about how the job was making him crazy. “Excuse me,” he said, “I have to get a martini.”
That night, there was a large antiwar demonstration outside the Century Plaza. Many of the reporters watched the milling, chanting throng from the hotel balconies, which gave the demonstration a gladiatorial air. A few reporters, Jim Doyle among them, went out to have a closer look at the demonstration. As he stood outside the hotel, watching the protesters wave signs and beat wooden sticks against an iron railing, he said, “I used to think this was power. But these people have no power.”
By 9:30, most of the reporters had returned to the press headquarters in the Granada Room to watch another thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner on the same Sony monitors which had been set up in New York the night before. The dinner was taking place just upstairs. This time the featured guest was Bob Hope, in his pathetic court-jester-to-the-GOP incarnation.
“McGovern’s running out of money,” piped Hope. “Yesterday, he mugged an Avon lady!” You could divide the pressroom into two types—those who laughed and those who didn’t. Cassie Mackin sat there stonefaced, taking notes and furiously chain-smoking small cigars. David Broder looked somber and angry. Germond slumped in his chair, half-asleep, his head in one hand. Bob Pierpoint patted a dour John Osborne on the shoulder, rolled his eyes, and said, “You inspired?”
“McGovern had a hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner the other night,” said Hope, “and they stole the plates.” Over in another corner of the Granada Room a bunch of reporters were jiggling with laughter over Hope’s routine. Bill Theis, a white-haired mesomorph from the Hearst papers found it very funny, as did some other men from Midwestern papers. But no one found it as killingly funny as George Embrey of the Columbus Dispatch.
George Embrey loved the President. Nixon had a habit, whenever he got into his helicopter at the airport, of going to the window for a moment and waving at the crowd. George Embrey was the only member of the press who would always wave back. “Goodbye,” he would cry softly as the helicopter started to take Nixon away, “Goodbye!” Embrey was a blank-faced, clean-cut man who wore white shirts, striped ties, neat suits, well-shined shoes; he spent a great deal of time at the National Press Club bar, soliciting votes to become the club’s secretary. He liked pool assignments, and once blew up at Ziegler for not letting him follow Nixon out the kitchen exit of a hotel. “My job is to stay with him at all times!” said Embrey. What he really wanted, many of his colleagues thought, was to become a Secret Service man.
He liked to hang out with other ultraconservative reporters, like the man from the Dallas Morning News. Sitting together on the bus, they chatted happily about how much they loathed George McGovern. On one trip Embrey expressed shock that McGovern had used the phrase “Kiss my ass.” Embrey said that he had washed his son’s mouth out with soap for using that kind of language—someone ought to do the same for George McGovern.
Embrey adored Nixon, but he was not considered the foremost shill in the White House. That distinction was generally conceded to Frank van der Linden of the Nashville Banner. Van der Linden was a short, redheaded man with the thin lips and rimless glasses of a mean little principal of a very backward high school. The Administration fed Van der Linden an “exclusive interview” whenever it sensed that the right wing was about to blow. In December 1971, when some of the White
House aides were beginning to worry that John Ashbrook’s insurgent candidacy might steal the right from Nixon, a White House aide named Harry Dent summoned Van der Linden. Harry Dent, a former factotum to Strom Thurmond, did little chores for President Nixon like rescuing Southern textile firms which were about to lose defense contracts just because they refused to hire Negroes. Frank van der Linden had written a book based on the premise that Nixon was a great leader because he was a super-hawk. “In private, he is tougher than Spiro Agnew,” Van der Linden said approvingly in his book. One of Harry Dent’s jobs was to keep Van der Linden happy by reinforcing the impression that Nixon would nuke anybody in the world for the sake of peace. So on December 24, 1971, Van der Linden wrote this in the Banner:
Washington—President Nixon is moving to quell a revolt in the right wing of the Republican party by urging the mutineers to have faith in his devotion to his aim of “keeping America No. 1.”
“That’s what I hear him say more than anything else—‘I’m not going to let the United States ever be less than No. 1,’ ” said Harry Dent, his chief political technician in the White House.
And so on. Frank van der Linden also liked the Vice President, even though Agnew wasn’t as tough as Nixon. When Agnew went on his trip to Greece, Van der Linden led the pack of shills and conservative columnists who accompanied him. In one of his first dispatches, Van der Linden described Agnew as a “consummate diplomat,” which set the general tone of the reporting. Walter Mears was also along on the trip, and he felt the odd man out. One day on the plane, Agnew announced that the U.S. would keep sending aid to Greece, no matter what Congress wanted to do. After the party landed, Mears went to his hotel room and filed the story. Later he found out that Van der Linden and the rest of the reporters had agreed to “embargo” the story until the Agnew people put out a full text of Agnew’s remarks. They always insisted on handouts, because they didn’t like to have to take notes; the Agnew people always obliged.
When Mears came down to breakfast at the little hotel in Crete the following morning, he found he had unwittingly broken an embargo. “Van der Linden starts leaping all over me and screaming, waving his arms and raising hell,” Mears later recalled. Van der Linden and his cronies got so ugly that Mears finally called New York and told the AP to hold the story for a day. But even then, Van der Linden wouldn’t lay off him. He kept bitching and whining at regular intervals throughout the day about how Mears had tried to betray the group. Finally, at Knossos, standing right in front of the Labyrinth, Van der Linden started in again. Mears decided to shove him into the Labyrinth. But just as Mears was about to deliver the blow, Spiro Agnew appeared around a corner, surrounded by Secret Service men, waving, smiling, and yelling hello. Thus was Frank van der Linden saved from meeting the Minotaur.
The next morning in Los Angeles, Nixon made a final speech to a group of cancer scientists amidst the tacky splendors of the Biltmore Hotel. Then most of the reporters flew home to Washington with Nixon, but Cassie Mackin stayed behind. She was completing her two-week tour of duty with the Nixon campaign and was therefore expected to do an overview piece. She had been thinking about it for several days, and she knew precisely what she wanted to say. She shot her “standups” at the Biltmore immediately after Nixon’s speech and went to the local NBC affiliate station to edit the piece and feed it to New York. At the time the piece went on the air, she was boarding a plane to fly back to Washington, so she did not find out until late the next morning that she had just filed the most controversial piece of the year. Cassie Mackin was the first, if not the only, member of the press to point out that the emperor had no clothes.
She opened her report by observing that “the Nixon campaign is, for the most part, a series of speeches before closed audiences, invited guests only.” Then she moved into the heart of the matter. She said: “On defense spending and welfare reform, the two most controversial issues in this campaign … the two issues that are almost haunting George McGovern, there is a serious question of whether President Nixon is setting up straw men by leaving the very strong impression that McGovern is making certain proposals which in fact he is not.”
She showed a film clip of Nixon saying: “There are some who believe that we should make cuts in our defense budget … that it doesn’t really make any difference whether the United States has the second strongest Navy, the second strongest Army, the second strongest Air Force in the world.”
Then Mackin said: “The President obviously meant McGovern’s proposed defense budget, but his criticism never specified how the McGovern plan would weaken the country. On welfare, the President accuses McGovern of wanting to give those on welfare more than those who work, which is not true. On tax reform, the President says McGovern is calling for ‘confiscation of wealth,’ which is not true.”
Mackin concluded: “When all is said and done, it’s like Mr. Nixon says, he is the President and it is the power of the Presidency that makes it possible to stay above the campaign and answer only the questions of his choice.”
Before the Nightly News was off the air, Herb Klein was on the phone to NBC, demanding corrections. The next morning, Reuven Frank, the president of NBC News, looked at Mackin’s script and could not find anything to correct. Nevertheless, as Mackin was about to leave her home for the White House, which was her assignment for the day, she got a phone call from NBC telling her to come to the office instead. That was the first she heard about the White House protests, and she had to spend the day compiling background material from Nixon and McGovern speeches to substantiate her report. She sent the material to New York and heard nothing more about the matter. Rumors circulated in Washington all week to the effect that NBC was getting ready to fire her, but the rumors were apparently generated by alarmists in the McGovern office.
The extraordinary thing about her piece was that it was virtually unique. Nobody else who reported on the trip said in simple declarative sentences that Nixon had made demonstrably false accusations about three of McGovern’s programs. Bob Semple said that you couldn’t do it—it was against the rules. But Mackin did it, without even thinking about the consequences. Even months later, she did not like to talk about the piece, because she felt that it put her in the position of defending an action that was natural and obvious, an action that required no defense.
The reason that the piece packed such a wallop was that it was so simple and direct. There were no lengthy film clips to prove that McGovern didn’t believe in confiscation of wealth. There were no complicated references to “observers” or “experts” who would vouch for McGovern. Mackin was confident of her own honesty and intelligence, and she simply expected people to believe her when she said that Nixon was wrong. This was a revolutionary belief; hers was one of the few reports on the White House during the fall that did not automatically assume a need for dozens of built-in defenses against an anticipated assault from the Administration. Perhaps it was no coincidence that it was a woman who went for Nixon’s jugular. Mackin was an outsider. She had neither the opportunity nor the desire to travel with the all-male pack; therefore, she was not infected with the pack’s chronic defensiveness and defeatism. Like Helen Thomas and Sarah McClendon, she could still call a spade a spade.
Other people on the trip wrote tough pieces about the absurd isolation of the President and the lack of access to even his most junior advisers. David Broder wrote the toughest. In fact, it was clear that Broder had seen things in San Francisco and Los Angeles that touched off his obsession with the fragility of institutions. Broder took one look around and sensed that Nixon was trying to kill off that most sacred of institutions, the Presidential election. He wrote:
In every way possible, the Nixon entourage seems to be systematically stifling the kind of dialogue that has in the past been thought to be the heart of the Presidential campaign. That is the source of McGovern’s unhappiness, but it’s a problem the press must address—directly, even at the risk of being thought partisan.
An electi
on is supposed to be the time a politician—even a President—submits himself to the jury of the American voters. As a lawyer, Richard Nixon knows that if he were as highhanded with a jury as he’s being in this campaign, he’d risk being cited for contempt of court.
The press of the country ought to be calling Mr. Nixon on this—not for George McGovern’s sake, but for the sake of its own tattered reputation and for the public which it presumes to serve.
The editors of the country and the television news chiefs ought to tell Mr. Nixon in plain terms, that before they spend another nickel to send their reporters and camera crews around the country with him, they want a system set up in which journalists can be journalists again, and a President campaigns as a candidate, not a touring emperor.
With that, Broder retired from the campaign trail for the rest of the year. “You shouldn’t write that kind of a piece and then come back as an ‘objective reporter’ immediately thereafter,” he said. So he left the day-to-day work to his chastened White House colleagues, who actually seemed to like the piece—since they were always momentarily braced by any show of balls—and he went off with Haynes Johnson to take the pulse of the electorate.
The Boys on the Bus Page 28