The Boys on the Bus

by Timothy Crouse

  As the fall campaign progressed, however, it began to dawn on many of the McGovern reporters that the rules of objectivity were no longer doing the job. The trouble was the staggering inequality between the coverage of the two campaigns. Given their new mandate to explore “inside” stories, the McGovern reporters were having a field day with the wide-open McGovern campaign. Meanwhile, the White House reporters were failing to get across the obstacle course that the White House had set up; indeed, they were not even trying.*

  There was nothing in the rules of objectivity to rectify such a situation. Only the national political reporters had the leeway to write about both campaigns; among them, only Broder expressed real outrage over Nixon’s invisibility, and he declared himself hors de combat immediately thereafter. As for the McGovern campaign reporters, they were trapped on the plane and they could do little but file their stories and anguish over the imbalance in the coverage.

  * Which is not to say that the McGovern reporters were more courageous than the White House crew. It is perfectly possible that if the men covering McGovern had had the White House assignment instead, they would have failed just as miserably. In fact, a number of the McGovern reporters, including Adam Clymer of the Baltimore Sun and Dean Fischer of Time, moved to the White House beat after the election. Their presence did not noticeably change the quality of White House reporting.

  CHAPTER XV

  The Black Hills

  Since Richard Nixon was declining nearly all invitations to share the pleasure of his company with the electorate, the only real Presidential campaign belonged to George McGovern. McGovern’s campaign did not officially begin until the second week in August, but soon after the Democratic Convention adjourned, in mid-July, McGovern retreated to his home state of South Dakota for two weeks of rest and strategy-planning. Good Senator that he was, he had been persuaded to take his working vacation in the picturesque Black Hills in hopes that the tag-along press might boost South Dakota’s flagging tourist industry.

  McGovern installed himself and a skeleton staff in comfortable cabins hard by Sylvan Lake, in a wooded area at the top of a hill. The press was parked eight miles down the hill in metropolitan Custer, S.D., a tourist paradise that contained antique shops and Indian souvenir stores—everything but the requisite snake ranch. The reporters were billeted in the Hi Ho Motel, a modern, Holiday Inn-type establishment which was nevertheless overwhelmed by the arrival of thirty-odd national reporters. It was the kind of a place where the desk clerk kept asking for autographs and the chambermaid walked on air for two weeks because she had made Harry Reasoner’s bed. There were no phones in the rooms, a fact which disturbed some of the reporters. But the McGovern staff pulled a bed out of one of the suites, hooked up twenty phones and a defective Telex machine, which received but could not transmit messages, put a big table in the center, and called it a pressroom.

  Once a day, McGovern’s press secretary, Dick Dougherty, pulled into the parking lot outside the pressroom and stood in the hot sunshine, dressed in a denim jacket, telling the press what McGovern had eaten for lunch and how many sets he had played with the tennis pro he had imported from Washington. The relaxed routine was perfect for a group of people who were still recovering from the sleepless madness of the Convention. The reporters played tennis, canoed, took long drives to inspect the scenery, or simply sat around the Hi Ho’s swimming pool ogling the Secret Service lady in her bikini. There was a birthday party for McGovern, reminiscent of Muskie’s birthday night but tamer. The staff somehow conjured up a White House-shaped birthday cake, and Jim Naughton talked Dick Stout into coming out of retirement to do another stand-up routine. “The Senator went to Mt. Rushmore for a measurement,” said Stout. “The sculptor will be instructed to comb the rocks forward on the head.” McGovern smiled wanly.

  During the first week in Custer, a new nucleus of “regulars” emerged, and they remained the central figures in the McGovern press corps for the rest of the campaign. Besides Naughton and Stout, there were Doug Kneeland, Adam Clymer, and Bill Greider.

  Doug Kneeland was a New York Timesman who had given up a good desk job in New York for a chance to move to the San Francisco Bureau, where he could produce the kind of human interest stories he most enjoyed writing. He was an energetic man who spoke in a sharp, pinched Maine accent; he had long, shaggy black-and-grey peppered hair, which he was constantly pushing out of his pouchy face. In July, he and Naughton were assigned to cover the McGovern campaign as a team; Kneeland would write one day, Naughton the next. At first, many of the other reporters scoffed at this system. It was a typical example of the Times’ extravagance, they said, to assign two full-time reporters to the campaign when every other paper got along with one. But toward the end of the campaign, when everyone began to crumble from exhaustion, the reporters admitted that there was some wisdom in having two men on the plane.

  Adam Clymer, a priggish, pear-shaped reporter for the Baltimore Sun, joined the McGovern party in the late spring. A shy man, he communicated most easily by griping. He bitched incessantly about everything—the food, the accommodations, the staff, the press operation, and the campaign in general—but he obviously reveled in all of the rituals of the campaign. A president of the Harvard Crimson during the fifties, he had since distinguished himself on the Sun with his reporting on India, Moscow, and the Department of Justice. Despite his proven journalistic competence, he remained moody and insecure; more than anyone else in the press corps, he seemed to derive his whole identity from being a campaign reporter. He seemed to love the dozens of ways in which the campaign made the press feel important; they had special phones set up for them at every stop, they had entrée to backstage areas, they were men apart. This was his first Presidential campaign, and he clearly longed to be a member of the Inner Circle, to receive the approval of his peers. To this end, he took great pains in writing satirical pool reports for his fellow reporters. After a while, he was accepted as a “character” and a wit.

  The most extraordinary reporter on the McGovern campaign was Bill Greider of the Washington Post. Greider grew up in a little town outside Cincinnati, went to Princeton in the same class as Johnny Apple, tried to make it as a playwright in New York City, and ended up writing for a small paper in Wheaton, Illinois. “In a town that small,” he said, “you really learn in a hurry that if you’re gonna kick somebody, you’d better kick him fairly. Because if you don’t, he’s gonna be leaning over your desk the next day, hollering at you and canceling all his advertising.” From Wheaton, he went to Louisville and then to the Post, where he gained attention for his superb coverage of the Calley trial. The editors at the Post talked him into covering McGovern almost against his will, for he liked neither the high pressure nor the pack quality of campaign reporting. “My real vision, which I sometimes lay on the editors to their horror,” he said, “is to find some backwater college and teach journalism there and get a farm and fuck the whole business.” After doing a few campaign pieces in the spring, Greider joined McGovern full-time in the Black Hills.

  Greider was a tall man with a long, sad, big-eared Lincolnesque face and the rumpled appearance of a man in a Matthew Brady photograph; he always looked as if he lived in the age before dry cleaning. His black Corfam shoes were permanently scuffed, his herringbone suit had lost its shape long ago, his collar was always open, his tie undone, his receding brown hair falling down around his ears; once he walked around for an entire day with a splotch of catsup on his shirt front.

  Unlike his fellow reporters, Greider did not constantly, nervously check his watch. He didn’t have a watch. Every night during the fall campaign he would leave a wake-up call with the hotel operator and every morning he would awaken with the first light, groggily thinking: Those bastards, they forgot to phone me. It’s ten o’clock and the buses are gone and they fucked me. Then he would lie in bed stewing about it, wondering whether he should phone the hotel operator and find out what time it was. This phenomenon helped explain the fact that he alw
ays looked tired. But he never bought a watch.

  Greider was restless with conventional journalistic formulas. His model reporters were the correspondents of the Civil War. “Have you ever read any of the reporting from the Civil War?” he asked one day. “It would blow your mind! Great stuff. Very partisan, most of it, as you might expect in that situation, but they had none of the mechanical crutches that we’re given. The editors would just put some guy on a train and say go on down and find out where the army is and tell us about it. And these guys were essentially writing letters back which might be two or three weeks old by the time they got in print.”

  Many of Greider’s articles read like letters. They described the temper of the campaign, reflected the shifts in mood, articulated the doubt and ambiguity that the press and staff often felt in judging the day-to-day events. “Who knows what the public at large is deriving from all this?” Greider wrote at one point in the fall. “Does the candidate seem more human, more tuned to their bread-and-butter hopes and fears? Or does he seem more frantic and weak?” With the possible exception of Wooten, no reporter on either side of the campaign was as comfortable with ambiguity as Greider.

  He was the master of the “soft” lead, backing into his stories with a vignette or a piece of “color” rather than pegging them on the latest press release or most recent speech by McGovern. In September, for instance, he began an article:

  In the cool nights that end summer, visual bedlam follows the man through the noise of the crowds, a wild careening of glaring lights and darkness, pushing past a web of shadowy faces.

  Then, suddenly, all of the light is on McGovern, standing at a rostrum alone, beneficiary of the spotlight and prisoner, too.

  The Post encouraged this approach, although the editors sometimes kidded Greider about it. Greider would phone the national desk from some distant pressroom to say that he was about to file his piece via Western Union, and the man on the desk would say, “Okay, Bill, just so you don’t have any substance in your lead.” Of course, his stories were full of substance, but they also contained a deep compassion for McGovern; Greider saw McGovern as a complex, interesting man, not as a dull-witted fumbler, and this view helped to enliven his pieces.

  He took great care with his writing. When he had to write a conventional spot story, he never worried; he could come in late and “blow it out.” But he sweated out the longer meaning-of-the-campaign stories. While working on a longer story he would stop drinking and grow tense. When he finally finished it, he would float around in a kind of mystic high for a day.

  When Greider, Stout, Kneeland, Clymer, Bruce Morton, David Schoumacher, John Dancy and all the other reporters arrived in the Black Hills, they expected no deep insights into George McGovern or into the workings of his campaign. They had no idea that within a few days, the Thomas Eagleton affair would bring out one of McGovern’s greatest problems: he did not understand how he would look in print, just as a neophyte actor is not prepared for the effect that his performance will have when projected on a screen. “He never got a focus on how his actions as a candidate translated to the people out there,” Greider said later, and that turned out to be as good an epitaph as any. The classic example was the way in which McGovern handled the press during the Eagleton mess.

  The Eagleton story took the reporters by surprise, and they were so deeply settled into the tempo of boondoggle that it took them nearly a day to get revved up. On Tuesday, July 25, Eagleton, McGovern’s running mate, was scheduled to drop into Custer on his way to the West Coast and hold a ceremonial press conference with McGovern. They would pose together for photographers and express mutual admiration. The prospect of such a press conference did not excite the reporters, but late Tuesday morning they dutifully drove up the hill in their rented cars and assembled in the little pine-paneled recreation cabin adjacent to the Sylvan Lake Lodge. They stood around chatting idly and waiting for the candidates. A few of them declared their intention of leaving the next day; nothing was happening and the tedium was getting on their nerves. Noon came, and still no sign of Eagleton. The TV men grew slightly annoyed; they had helicopters waiting in a nearby field to take the film to Rapid City, and it was getting precariously late.

  Then Tom Eagleton arrived, was introduced by McGovern, and announced that he had been hospitalized three times for “nervous exhaustion and fatigue.” The reporters asked him embarrassed questions. Eagleton admitted that he had twice received electroshock therapy. Then McGovern said he would discourage any talk of dumping Eagleton.

  Given the surroundings, these disclosures did not seem terribly momentous. Some tourists who had snuck in were milling around the back of the room. A sultry breeze was blowing through the screen door. A dog tied to a tree outside was barking. When the press conference was over, Harry Reasoner bet someone that Eagleton would be off the ticket within the week. Not many people agreed with him. Eagleton had seen a shrink, so what? It would blow over. The only drama of the day consisted of watching John Dancy and David Schoumacher dash out of the room to do their hasty stand-ups and throw the film at the chopper pilots.

  That night, however, the Western Union Telex in the Hi Ho pressroom began to erupt. Since the pressroom Telex was the only such machine for miles around, it received all telegrams addressed to Senator George McGovern. So the reporters were able to take an instant reading of the public reaction simply by sitting around the clattering Telex and reading each wire as it appeared. The telegrams overwhelmingly damned Eagleton. “Listen to this one,” a reporter would say. “DO YOU WANT NUT FOR VICE PRESIDENT. DROP EAGLETON.” McGovern’s two young press aides, Carol Friedenberg and Polly Hackett, would look at their nails and pretend not to hear.

  Earlier that day, just after the press conference, Carl Leubsdorf had seen Tom Ottenad of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch going into McGovern’s cabin for a chat with the Senator. Ottenad was about to join Eagleton in California, and since he represented the biggest paper in Eagleton’s home state, McGovern had granted him an interview. When Ottenad and McGovern came out of the cabin and drove off, Leubsdorf followed them to their destination, which turned out to be the tennis courts. Leubsdorf walked over to McGovern and asked whether he could ride back from the courts with him. McGovern said yes. That was his first mistake. But it was typical of McGovern. “You know how he was,” Leubsdorf later told me. “If he saw a reporter he knew, and the reporter asked him a question, he’d go right ahead and answer it.”

  While McGovern played tennis, Leubsdorf sped down the hill to get his tape recorder at the Hi Ho. He found that it was in use. Gregg Herrington, the young AP backup man, was playing a cassette of the press conference for a group of reporters in the pressroom. Leubsdorf couldn’t announce that he was about to grab McGovern for an exclusive interview, so he made up a little story in the best Front Page tradition. He said that he needed the tape recorder back so that the McGovern people at Sylvan Lake could make a transcript of the press conference. Then he drove back up the hill to meet McGovern.

  During the ride from the tennis courts to McGovern’s cabin, which took place in a violent hailstorm, Leubsdorf asked the Senator what he thought the public reaction to the Eagleton disclosures was going to be. “We’ll have to wait and see,” said McGovern. So Leubsdorf wrote a “roundup” piece for the next day’s afternoon papers, saying that McGovern was keeping Eagleton and was going to “wait and see” about the public reaction.

  The next morning, when word of Leubsdorf’s story hit Custer, two groups of people immediately freaked out. First, the press blew up at Dougherty. As usual, Adam Clymer screamed the loudest. “This place is becoming a jungle,” he said. The others chorused him. They wanted no more exclusives. Either everybody saw McGovern or nobody saw him.

  Meanwhile, some people on McGovern’s staff—it has never been determined which people—became very upset over Leubsdorf’s story. They thought it implied that McGovern was wavering in his support of Tom Eagleton. Leubsdorf claimed that the story did not imply this
at all, that it merely reported McGovern’s flat statement that he was going to “wait and see” the public’s reaction. Nevertheless, late on Wednesday morning, Dougherty telephoned Carol Friedenberg in the pressroom and dictated a statement from McGovern. She typed it and taped it to the door of the pressroom. It summarized the Leubsdorf story, called it “utterly untrue,” and then said that George McGovern was “1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton.” No one has ever determined whether the statement was written by McGovern or whether some staffer wrote it and McGovern merely approved it. McGovern never said the words in person in front of a press conference, and it later seemed odd that he should have made such a statement at a time when newspaper editorials and party opinion were damning Eagleton and when McGovern clearly was wavering in his support of his running mate. Perhaps somebody on the staff panicked in the face of a press mutiny and decided to placate the angry reporters with a perfect nugget of a quote.

  Soon after the “1,000 percent” statement appeared on the door of the pressroom, Carl Leubsdorf underlined certain sentences and wrote in the margin, “Not correct. AP story did not say that.” By that time, however, the debate over whether the AP story had really portrayed McGovern as backing away from Eagleton was entirely academic. What mattered was that McGovern had furnished the reporters with a perfect spot story—before evening every reporter in the Hi Ho had seen the statement and filed on it. And in trying to deny a relatively harmless wire story, McGovern had branded himself with one of those little catch-phrases that voters never forget. Richard Nixon, with his hard-won knowledge of the media, would doubtless have known better than to stand 1,000 percent behind anything in the middle of a hot public controversy. But McGovern apparently did not.

  What made McGovern’s statement doubly incredible was that two days later, on Friday, he decided to dump Eagleton. And he chose to use the press to send Eagleton the bad news. McGovern’s first step was to try to plant a not-for-attribution story with Jules Witcover to the effect that Eagleton was going to get the ax; McGovern evidently hoped that Eagleton would read the story in the Los Angeles Times, take the hint, and resign from the ticket.