The Boys on the Bus

by Timothy Crouse

  I went on only one more “Trip of the President” (as it said on the hexagonal press tag that hung around my neck). This was in late October, an excursion to Westchester and Nassau counties, fat suburbs to the north and east, respectively, of New York City. Nixon was going to motorcade through Westchester County and then fly to Nassau for a big rally. Since it was only a day trip, it afforded small papers a chance to see the campaign on the cheap. Enough reporters came to fill seven press buses. In honor of the motorcade, the Nixon people revived the custom of piping in a running pool report over the PA system of the buses—a technique which they had pioneered during the 1968 campaign.

  “It was a big leap forward in press bus technology,” recalled Stuart Loory. “You no longer had to rely on the pool-after-the-fact. You had the pooler up there broadcasting, so you could sit back there in the press bus and know what was happening a mile ahead. This guy became known as the Z-pooler, Z for Ziegler, because he rode in Ziegler’s car.”

  In more innocent times, they used to let anybody be Z-pooler. Loory once had the job when Nixon went to Manila. “Having seen a lot of manufactured demonstrations, by what we used to call Rent-a-Crowd in Moscow,” said Loory, “I noticed that the Manila demonstration had all the signs of being manufactured, as if John Ehrlichman had been there with the balloons beforehand. And I reported it that way over the microphone. My colleagues loved it.” Ziegler had been sitting next to Loory in the car, connected by earphone to almost every other aide on the White House staff. “Ziegler was on a different channel, and he was getting feedbacks on what I was saying, or else he was getting heat from Haldeman, I don’t know. They were embarrassed. They wanted to cut me off but they couldn’t. So they started pointing out positive things for me to report. I would attribute that stuff to Ziegler. I was having fun. I was really enjoying it. That was the last time they let me have that job.”

  After the Loory fiasco, the White House began to refine the technique of Z-pooling, and by October 1972, they had found the ideal Z-pooler—Forrest Boyd of Mutual Broadcasting. Boyd was such a congenial type that you could hardly tell he was a reporter. In fact, Boyd was one of the very few journalists whom Nixon sometimes invited to a state dinner. Boyd was up there with Ziegler on this cold, gusty October afternoon. First came a limousine containing Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, then came the 500,000-dollar tank carrying Pat and Dick Nixon, then a Secret Service car, then a pool car, then five open pickup trucks containing rheumy-eyed, shivering, mutinous network camera crews, then the seven press buses full of reporters guzzling soda and beer and listening to the squawk of the PA system. Though Forrest Boyd identified himself quite shamelessly at the outset of the running commentary, almost everyone on the buses assumed that he was a White House flack. Even Bruce Biossat, a syndicated columnist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association who later wrote an amusing column about the commentary, labored under this false impression.

  At the outset, Boyd established himself as a master of euphemism. “The President is waving to people along the street …” he said. “A few are holding signs giving a message.”

  A “sign giving a message” meant a pro-McGovern sign. There were an astounding number of them that day, considering that Westchester was supposed to be solid Nixon country. The messages included: “Re-elect the Dike Bomber,” and “Robots for Nixon, People for McGovern.” In fact, the anti-Nixon turnout was so striking that Rowley Evans, sitting in one of the buses, became visibly alarmed. The hundreds of McGovern signs did not quite jibe with the Nixon landslide that he and Novak were confidently predicting.

  “Rowley was really sweating,” one reporter later said to another. “I mean, he just shat.”

  “That’s funny,” said the other reporter, “Rowley usually goes back to his room to get nervous.”

  “Yeah,” said the first reporter, “it’s hard to get him nervous in public.”

  Forrest Boyd managed to ignore all the anti-Nixon signs and plowed on in his Kurt Gowdy voice.

  “There’s a lot of noise here,” he said in Mamaroneck. “Some favorable, some unfavorable, but of course the favorable are outshouting the others by a considerable margin … The President has signed a football apparently belonging to the Mamaroneck Midgets. The President is going back to the limousine, I’m going to see if I can get back there too!… This crowd is really terrific! It’s almost impossible to get through here!

  “We’re an hour and fifteen minutes behind schedule. The most we’ve ever been behind before was forty-five minutes, so this may be an historic first. We’re trying to make up time, but it’s impossible. The crowds have just been too big, bigger than expected. Ron Ziegler is very apologetic.”

  The reporters on the bus found this all very funny, but they listened carefully for the crowd count.

  “We have an estimate here from Captain Keefe of the New York State Police, who will be keeping us posted. Up to the last town the estimate is that 312,000 people have seen the President today. Hold it. We just got a new figure on Larchmont. The chief there says it was 80,000 not 50,000. Make the cumulative total 342,000.”

  Len Garment and Bill Safire, two White House aides who were on one of the buses, kept promoting Captain Keefe every time the estimate went up. “Captain Keefe!” Safire would say. “I’d say that makes him Lieutenant Governor Keefe!” Later that day Ziegler told Semple, “Listen, that’s an honest estimate. This Captain Keefe makes an honest estimate.” There was a pause while the implication sank in. “Of course,” Ziegler added, “all our estimates are honest.”

  Just a few weeks before, Ziegler had assured the press that at least 700,000 people had come out to see Nixon in Atlanta. Maybe more. Many reporters printed the figure, or something approaching it. Only Jim Perry of the National Observer bothered to check it out. He phoned the Atlanta Public Works Department and found out that each city block was about 400 feet long. He generously estimated that 400 people a block, 5 rows deep, both sides of the street, for 15 blocks, had seen Richard Nixon. That made 60,000 people. Then he threw in another 15,000 people to cover the side streets between the blocks. “So,” he wrote, “in an act of charity I’m willing to say that 75,000 people turned out to welcome Richard Nixon to Atlanta.”

  Yet the other reporters on the bus, especially the wire-service men, still took the White House estimates seriously. The word going around the buses that afternoon was that you could trust Captain Keefe; he was an honest estimator. The pack was yapping at full cry.

  The motorcade ended in Tarrytown, where the press had dinner at the Hilton Inn. George Embrey was glowing with enthusiasm. “What impressed me,” Embrey told a crony from a Buffalo paper over the roast beef, “was that he got his best reception in that working-class section of New Rochelle. I’ll tell you one thing,” he went on, looking straight into his friend’s eyes. “There was no busing-in today. Absolutely nobody was bused in.”

  After supper, the press flew in Air Force helicopters to Union-dale, Long Island. The choppers were dark and noisy and it was impossible to work inside them, so the reporters simply sat there, with their backs to the walls, and tried to turn around to look out the portholes. They disembarked in a vast parking lot outside a gigantic white whale of an auditorium called the Nassau Coliseum. Thus far, it had been a normal Nixon trip—meaningless, boring, predictable, slightly grotesque, and hardly worth the $87.50 transportation charge. Suddenly, inside the Coliseum, it turned ugly.

  No sooner had the President arrived on the platform in the middle of the Coliseum floor and started to speak, than a small group in the third balcony began to jeer. The rally had been tightly screened; admission was by ticket only and the local GOP organizations had handed out the tickets. Somehow, a few dozen hecklers had got tickets, and now they were way up in the gallery behind Nixon, small figures in the blue fluorescent haze, shouting: “Stop the war!”

  They had only been chanting for about a minute when a coalition of cops, men in trench coats, and ordinary spectators began beating them up. They
clobbered the hecklers with a merciless series of roundhouse rights, then stomped and kicked the ones who fell down, and finally dragged them off. At the sight of the protesters getting their bones broken, the crowd of 16,000 gave off a sustained, sickening Nuremberg roar.

  Nixon turned around, looked up, and turned back with a broad grin on his face. Maybe, as some reporters speculated later, it was a grin of nervousness, but it was Nixon’s only immediate comment on the brutality. Later in his speech, Nixon had only praise for the cops in the auditorium. “I have seen tonight the blue uniforms of the police,” he said. “Give them the backing and respect they deserve.” He also declared that his Administration had ended “the age of permissiveness.”

  Other hecklers continued to jeer at Nixon from the floor. Some were ejected by guards, to great cheers from the crowd. Others were shoved and punched by Nixon sympathizers directly in front of the podium where Nixon was speaking.

  The brutality at the rally was the only strikingly newsworthy story of the day. It was a natural lead. Yet many of the reporters shrugged it off. It was as if the barrage of propaganda to which they had been subjected all day had numbed their ability to register horror. Only a couple of reporters, so far as I know, led with the incidents at the Nassau rally. Many newspapers failed even to mention it the next day.

  If you were up at 7:05 in the morning the next day, you saw it on the CBS morning news; and you saw it on NBC if you happened to be watching at 8:15. It didn’t make the evening news on any of the networks. If you read the city edition or the late city edition of The New York Times, you saw no mention of it. It finally appeared deep in the story in the very last edition, which few people see. Bob Semple said he had phoned in an insert to Frank Lynn’s story about the day. He had dictated it to a tape recorder at the Times, but nobody checked the tape until much later that night.

  If you read the Washington Post, you saw no reference to the incident. Carroll Kilpatrick, the Post’s veteran White House man,† didn’t want to talk about it when I first asked him. Later he relented. “I phoned in an insert from the Coliseum,” he said, “but it must have gotten lost on the way downstairs to the printer. Things like that happen every day. Listen, I hate to think how often things like that happen.”

  A young reporter for a large metropolitan daily was so appalled by what he had witnessed that he phoned in a passionately indignant story suggesting similarities between the Administration and the Third Reich. His paper killed it. The story was too one-sided, said the editor. It made Nixon sound too much like Hitler. The Jewish readers would get upset.

  The only reporter who managed to lead with the incident and also managed to get it in his paper intact was Curtis Wilkie. His P.M. story in the Wilmington Evening Journal began:

  A handful of hecklers who managed to infiltrate a Republican rally, coupled with strongarm tactics by police and GOP vigilantes, turned President Nixon’s personal appearance in suburban New York from a gala event into a battleground last night.

  Despite carefully laid plans by the White House, the Long Island campaign swing by the President was climaxed by an evening reminiscent of disruptions that once followed Gov. George Wallace.

  Having spent most of his life in the Mississippi Delta, Wilkie knew a Wallace rally when he saw one.

  Just after the rally ended, Don Fulsom of UPI radio sat down at the press table in the cinder-block lobby of the Coliseum and batted out his lead. “Though admission was by ticket only,” it read in part, “a number of anti-Nixon demonstrators had infiltrated the audience, touching off several disruptions and even a few fist fights.”

  Suddenly Fulsom heard a familiar voice over his right shoulder. “You’ve got an obsession with this ‘admission-by-ticket-only’ business don’t you?” said Ron Ziegler. Then Ziegler read the rest of the copy, patted Fulsom on the back, and walked away.

  A lot of people were aware that Big Brother was watching that night. Nobody wanted to get that ominous pat on the back.

  * Months later, some of these veterans told The New York Times that the New York office of their organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, had mysteriously received invitations in the mail a few days prior to the ceremony.

  † At the beginning of Nixon’s first term, the Post assigned three reporters to the White House. Two of them, Don Oberdorfer and Ken Clawson, were “inside men.” They were assigned to get to know the White House staff and write investigative stories about the Administration. Kilpatrick, meanwhile, was the “outside man,” the reporter who covered the briefings and served as the Post’s ambassador to the White House. He was, in effect, a tougher version of Jack Horner. When Clawson defected to the Administration and Oberdorfer went to the Tokyo Bureau in early 1972, Kilpatrick was left to cover the beat alone. As a result, the Post’s coverage was accurate and voluminous, but at the same time superficial.

  CHAPTER XII

  Agnew’s

  Campaign

  If the Nixon people’s willingness to have me along on Presidential trips remained a mystery, it came as no surprise when the Agnew people banned me from the Vice President’s plane. They went about this in a typically spiteful way: they lied to me for five weeks before declaring me anathema. A secretary from Random House, a courteous lady with a redoubtable telephone voice, phoned the Vice President’s office twice a week. Each time she was told that the plane was full. Mr. Crouse was fourteenth on the waiting list and there might be some room next week. Keep trying. Once she even got through to Agnew’s press secretary, Victor Gold; he gave her the same excuse.

  After this charade had gone on for five weeks, I asked Bob Semple to intercede. Semple contacted Jim Wooten, who was covering Agnew for the Times. Wooten examined the plane’s records and discovered that the plane had never been filled to capacity. Then Wooten confronted Victor Gold and asked him why I was being kept off the plane.

  “I don’t want the press to be inhibited,” Gold shouted, for he always spoke as if he were giving orders in a hurricane. “I want the press to cover the campaign! I don’t want the press to worry about being covered while they cover the campaign!”

  Here was the number one running dog of the World Champion Press Baiter, claiming that he wished to protect the press. Whether or not Vic Gold was blind to this glaring irony, the incredible fact remained that he was probably totally sincere in his solicitude for the reporters. No one doubted that he would throw himself on a live hand-grenade to protect his boss. Many suspected that he might sacrifice one or two fingers for the sake of his charges, the press.

  If Victor Gold had been a character in a Broadway play, he would have been played by Martin Gabel. He was a short man on a short fuse, with a high forehead, a drill instructor’s bearing, and eyes sufficiently full of fire to suggest that smoke would momentarily shoot out his nostrils. He was the most unshakable kind of fanatic—a convert. In his University of Alabama law school days, he had roomed with the man who went on to head the Washington office of the ACLU. He had been a liberal Democrat in the Deep South, but the racism of the Folsoms and Wallaces gradually drove him away from the Democratic party into the arms of the Republicans. By 1964, he was working as assistant press secretary to Barry Goldwater.

  At the end of the 1972 campaign, the reporters on the Agnew press plane gave Gold a strait jacket as a going-away present. That was because Gold tended to fly into quasi-psychotic rages at the slightest provocation. Every reporter who traveled with Agnew had at least a dozen Vic Gold stories. Vic screaming horrible threats at cars in the path of the press bus. Vic terrorizing press-bus drivers who fell behind the motorcade. Vic becoming so deranged he distractedly pounded the assistant press secretary over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Vic in Provo, Utah, sitting in the pool car, furious at the bus drivers behind him:

  “Those goddam motherfucking cocksuckers! Those shitheads! Christ, why can’t those fuckers learn to stay in line!” said Gold. Then he glanced at the apple-cheeked Republican volunteer who was sitting at the wheel of the c
ar.

  “Say, are you a Mormon?” Gold asked him.

  “Yes, I am,” the young man said softly.

  Gold looked guilt-stricken. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s the way we Christians talk.”

  Gold also liked to wallow in paranoia. On the last day of the campaign, the McGovern and Agnew planes landed simultaneously in the same corner of the Philadelphia airport. While McGovern sped off to a street rally, Agnew went into town to address the Fraternal Order of Police. After the speech, Wooten rode back out to the airport in a convertible with Gold. A suave, good-looking man in his middle thirties and a bit of a bon vivant, Wooten thoroughly enjoyed the ride; it was a beautiful fall day, warm enough to drive with the top down. But Gold, as usual, looked as if he had just drunk hemlock.

  “What’s the matter, Vic?” asked Wooten.

  “It’s those McGovern people,” said Gold. “You never can tell about those people. There must be some reason why they came in at the same time we did. They’re gonna start something at the airport. They’re gonna make some kind of trouble, I just know it.”

  “Oh, come on, Vic,” said Wooten. “They’re no more anxious to start anything than you are. That’s just ridiculous.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” said Gold. “You’re not the press secretary. But I am, and I’m a good one and that’s why I worry about these things.”

  Wooten just laughed at Gold, as countless other reporters laughed at him whenever he ranted, cursed, shook his fist, or worked himself up into a right-wing heaven of paranoia. But they also respected Gold for being a stickler for perfection. He made sure that everyone had a room, that everyone knew where the phones were, that the baggage never got lost, and that the Western Union man was never more than a few feet away.