The Boys on the Bus

by Timothy Crouse

  On Friday afternoon, Dick Stout of Newsweek and Dean Fischer of Time were sitting in the pressroom when one of the telephones rang. Carol Friedenberg, a young red-headed press aide answered the phone, said “Yes, Senator, I’ll see if I can find him,” and ran out of the room. A minute later, Jules Witcover dashed into the room, out of breath, and picked up the phone.

  “Yeah, Senator … I’m fine,” said Witcover. “Sure … When?… six? Sure, Senator … goodbye.”

  When Witcover hung up, Stout went over to him and asked, “What are you going to do, Jules? Why are you going up to see the Senator? And six o’clock on what day?”

  “Oh, uh, today,” Witcover said nonchalantly.

  “Well, why?” asked Stout.

  “I don’t know really,” said Witcover. “He just wants to talk. Has something to do with the last chapter in my Agnew book. We’ve talked about it before.”

  “Well, what’s the last chapter? I don’t remember it,” said Stout, who hadn’t read the book.

  “Well,” Witcover hesitated. “It’s about the importance of the whole process of selecting the Vice President.”

  Stout and Fischer immediately set up an appointment to see Witcover after the interview. It was deadline night for both of them; neither wanted the other to get a newsbeat. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight,” Fischer said to Stout, a little apologetically. That evening they ate together at the Sylvan Lake Lodge. It was the beginning of a strange, symbiotic friendship. The two had close to nothing in common. Fischer, a tall blond, who with his horn-rimmed glasses bore a slight resemblance to the actor Michael Caine, was a silent man who occasionally flashed the tight, cryptic smile of a hatchet murderer; he seemed the complete opposite of the voluble Stout. But their jobs were sufficiently similar to make them professional twins. Without saying anything, each knew all about the other’s work life. They often ate together and rode together on the bus, and every Saturday, when no more copy could be filed, they compared notes.

  They were not alone at the lodge that night. Dougherty had tipped Doug Kneeland and some of the other reporters that the Senator might come out of his two-day seclusion to have a buffalo steak in the Lakota Room. Bill Greider was there, too. Having just finished an article based on the fact that McGovern had stopped seeing the press, Greider had a premonition that McGovern would show up and ruin the piece. Adam Clymer was back at the Hi Ho waiting to cook a trout dinner for Kneeland and Greider, who had forgotten all about the date.

  McGovern did dine in the Lakota Room that night. He sat at one table with his family, while the press sat at various other tables around the room. An organist played big hits of the forties. Everybody devoured buffalo steaks under a mural depicting “The Legend of the White Buffalo.”

  When McGovern finished his meal, he walked over and sat down with Greider, Bill Eaton of the Chicago Daily News, and a UPI man. Greider thought: “Well, gee, this is decent enough, the guy is just trying to do a little farewell number and make a little social chatter, and to let bygones be bygones.” The reporters at the table were itching to broach the Eagleton matter, but no one wanted to spoil McGovern’s evening. Then McGovern suddenly brought up the subject himself. He started talking about how a decision would have to be made, and it would be up to Eagleton to withdraw if public opinion ran against him. And McGovern’s tone of voice implied that Eagleton was dead. “It slowly dawned on us,” Greider remembers, “that we were the ones who were being used.”

  McGovern excused himself. “The reporters,” Greider wrote later, “discussed briefly among themselves the question of whether it was proper to quote a casual dinner conversation. Very briefly. Then they took out notepads and began trying to reconstruct what McGovern had said. Ever so casually, they slipped off to the lobby telephones, no point arousing all those other reporters.”

  Meanwhile, McGovern went over to Stout and Fischer. They were joined by Doug Kneeland and Bob Boyd of Knight. McGovern repeated his observations on Eagleton, and Stout surreptitiously recorded it all on a tape recorder he was holding in his lap. When McGovern left, the Stout-Fischer group gathered around the tape recorder to try to pick out a few words from the overwhelming organ music. Then they looked around and realized that they weren’t the only ones with the story. Kneeland headed for a phone. The only two in the lobby were being used, so he raced down the hill to the Hi Ho. On the way down he passed Clymer, who was steaming up to the lodge to find out what he had missed.

  Later that night, Fischer and Stout cornered Witcover in the pressroom. He showed them the unattributed story he had just finished. “It was learned,” the story said, that McGovern was going to dump Eagleton. Stout and Fischer knew exactly where Witcover had learned it, and they phoned the news to their home offices.

  Not that it really mattered what they phoned in—their files made up only a small part of their magazines’ coverage of the Eagleton affair. Newsweek’s Washington Bureau chief, Mel Elfin, an old friend of Eagleton’s, flew to California and interviewed him. Eagleton gave Elfin a lengthy, totally self-serving autobiographical monologue, to which Newsweek devoted most of its space. Since Newsweek had obtained an interview from Eagleton, Time had to get one too. It was equally self-serving. Both magazines appeared on the day Eagleton resigned, July 31, but they helped to pump the public flow of sympathy for him.* The newsmagazines served as Eagleton’s best forum for self-beatification, but not his sole forum. The newspapers gave Eagleton loads of straight coverage, thus allowing him to play the victim and to establish mental health as a red herring issue. The real issue, as The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times pointed out in editorials, was the difficulty Eagleton had experienced in telling the truth. Eagleton’s great victory over both McGovern and the press consisted in the agility with which he appropriated the hard news columns for his own designs—namely, to portray himself as a martyr for the cause of psychotherapy, a totally cured man who was wrongly suspected of being dangerously sick.

  Long after Eagleton was dropped from the ticket, several reporters kept trying to clear up the mysteries of the Eagleton affair. They tried unsuccessfully to reconstruct the phone conversation, held during the Democratic Convention, in which Mankiewicz had asked Eagleton about his possible disabilities. They tried in vain to pry loose Eagleton’s medical records, which were locked in a safe in St. Louis. Bill Greider attempted to follow up a rumor that had Eagleton’s doctors telling McGovern on the phone: Eagleton is a very sick man but he doesn’t know it, so you can’t tell him. But Greider never was able to substantiate this rumor. No reporter effectively counteracted Eagleton’s stunning week of self-promotion by writing a clean, fact-studded profile of the opportunistic, overambitious hack that Tom Eagleton was.

  In any case, McGovern did himself no good that night at Sylvan Lake. He succeeded only in making himself look like a sneak, a man who was trying to get the press to do his dirty work for him. He was hopelessly naïve to believe that Witcover’s story would remain unattributed for more than a couple of hours among such a confined, rivalrous group or that the press would not write about his awkward efforts to slip a big story into an after-dinner chat. Richard Nixon would not have made these mistakes; the least that could be said for Nixon was that he had painfully learned how the press worked. He would have known that while you might hope to plant a story with one reporter at a time, you could not play such a cozy, informal under-the-table game with an entire pack of reporters.

  The evening also revealed a new, disturbing side of McGovern, a side which some of the reporters had sensed but none had witnessed. Greider’s “news analysis” in the Post of July 31 described it well:

  “The South Dakota senator has always insisted that he is, above all, a pragmatic politican and his handling of the Eagleton crisis confirms this description. Beneath the exterior of the earnest and open man, there is a cautious tactician, more calculating than either his hard-boiled critics or his starry-eyed admirers have admitted.” Greider went on to descri
be McGovern’s table hopping in the Lakota Room and then wrote: “What McGovern did was either very slick or very clumsy. The people who watched still are not sure which.”

  Jim Naughton, who had spent the week back in Washington, was more severe. “In the Democratic primaries,” wrote Naughton, “Senator McGovern managed to convey the impression that he was somehow not a politican in the customary sense—that he was more open, more accessible, more attuned to the issues and more idealistic than other candidates. But his reaction to Mr. Eagleton’s disclosure may have seriously impaired that image.”

  * This sympathy had actually begun four days before, when Jack Anderson claimed to have “located photostats of half a dozen arrests for drunken and reckless driving.” When Anderson failed to produce the photostats, Eagleton promptly became a victim of slander in the public eye and his stock soared.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Calling It

  From 30,000 Feet

  It is an unwritten law of current political journalism that conservative Republican Presidential candidates usually receive gentler treatment from the press than do liberal Democrats. Since most reporters are moderate or liberal Democrats themselves, they try to offset their natural biases by going out of their way to be fair to conservatives. No candidate ever had a more considerate press corps than Barry Goldwater in 1964, and four years later the campaign press gave every possible break to Richard Nixon. Reporters sense a social barrier between themselves and most conservative candidates; their relations are formal and meticulously polite. But reporters tend to loosen up around liberal candidates and campaign staffs; since they share the same ideology, they can joke with the staffers, even needle them, without being branded the “enemy.” If a reporter has been trained in the traditional, “objective” school of journalism, this ideological and social closeness to the candidate and staff makes him feel guilty; he begins to compensate; the more he likes and agrees with the candidate personally, the harder he judges him professionally. Like a coach sizing up his own son in spring tryouts, the reporter becomes doubly strict.

  Most of the reporters who covered George McGovern in the fall campaign preferred him to Richard Nixon and ended up voting for him (if they voted at all). For just this reason, they were careful to be tough on him as reporters. The best example is Jim Naughton. In early October, Naughton went home for a couple of days. One of the things he did was go to the Registrar’s Office in Fairfax, Virginia, and apply for an absentee ballot. To his surprise, he was allowed to fill out the ballot on the spot; after a minute or two of meditation, he voted for George McGovern and Sargent Shriver.

  Naughton returned to the McGovern campaign almost immediately. Two days later, at a press conference in Chicago, McGovern accused the local Republicans of bribing Spanish-American voters to stay away from the polls in November. The reporters pressed McGovern for details, but he failed to provide any evidence to back his charges. Just as the press conference was about to end, Naughton raised his hand and asked a final question.

  “Senator,” said Naughton, “you’ve made a fairly serious charge about Republican involvement in this nefarious activity, but you haven’t given us any details and you haven’t told us where details can be obtained. As a student of history, how do you distinguish what you are doing from what Joseph McCarthy used to do?”

  There were groans and startled glances from Naughton’s fellow reporters while McGovern fumbled for an answer. To Naughton, the question seemed perfectly fair. But later, he had qualms about the tone of the question. “In looking back on it,” he said, “I wonder whether I would have been as cutting, as direct, and as vicious in my question if I had not voted for McGovern a couple of days before. I think I may have been tougher on McGovern after that.”

  When the press conference ended, Dick Dougherty was furious at Naughton. “That’s the last time I ever get you recognized after the time has expired,” the press secretary said. Naughton believed that Dougherty “never forgave” him for having asked the Joe McCarthy question. But by that time, Dougherty was already fed up with the press in general.

  Dougherty had been a fine journalist himself (New York Bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times), a vice-commissioner in the New York Police Department (public relations division), and the author of four good novels. He looked like a dapper Irish detective, with steely grey hair curling back from his forehead and a cigarette constantly hanging from his lips. He spoke in a growl, which grew more pronounced when he referred to the press. On one occasion he threatened to punch several reporters in the nose. Another time, he warned a group of reporters that they were writing their own obituaries by “sucking up to the moral runts in the White House.” He was convinced that the campaign reporters were portraying George McGovern as a “sneaky bumbler” when they knew all the while that McGovern was really a sincere, honest, capable man.

  “I would guess that 90 percent of the news people who covered McGovern voted for him,”* Dougherty wrote in Newsweek after the election. He continued:

  Why, if that was their ultimate judgement of him, could they not pass that judgement on to the public? Hard news wouldn’t let them. It wouldn’t have been objective reporting. You can write about a candidate who is being sneaky and bumbling: that’s objective reporting. But you can’t write about a candidate who is being kind and forgiving: that’s editorializing. Curiously limited objectivity, isn’t it?

  Dougherty went on to endorse advocacy reporting: only if the reporters let their feelings show could they give a true picture of a candidate. The reporters who read Dougherty’s piece when it came out two months after the election enjoyed the prose style but did not take the content seriously.

  During the campaign, Dougherty had not been highly regarded as a press secretary, for he was seldom around when the reporters needed him. Unlike Ronald Ziegler, he was not interested in running a perfect public relations operation; he had been too good a journalist to stomach easily the prospect of becoming a great flack. During the summer, he gradually promoted himself to the position of personal adviser to the candidate. Whenever the reporters saw a shot of McGovern on the evening news, Dougherty would be right at his side, and a great chorus of jeers would go up from the reporters.

  One night in early September, on a long, hot bus ride from New York City to Waterbury, Connecticut, Jules Witcover began talking about Dougherty. Witcover was sitting in the back of the bus with Tom Oliphant, a skinny, bespectacled twenty-six-year-old reporter from the Boston Globe who was known affectionately as “The Kid.”

  “Dougherty said with a straight face that this was less bother for us than riding out to La Guardia and flying up to Connecticut,” said Witcover.

  “Yeah,” said Norm Kempster, a UPI man sitting across the aisle, “but Dougherty’s making a big sacrifice and flying up with McGovern in a chartered plane!”

  “Have you ever seen Dougherty on a press bus?” asked Oliphant.

  “Not lately,” said Witcover. “You know what we ought to do? We oughta give Dougherty a tour of the bus.” Witcover enthusiastically sketched out a scenario. First, they would muster all the reporters outside some hotel one morning. Then they would introduce Dougherty as if he were a total stranger—“You’ve seen him on TV, here he is in person!” Finally, they would give Dougherty a floor plan of the bus, show him where each person sat and how the reporters worked. Witcover and Oliphant decided to leave the execution of this plan to Jim Naughton, who was building a quiet but solid reputation as the most efficient prankster on the bus. Naughton never carried out the scheme, but he did author a memorandum to Dougherty, which was signed by all the regulars on the bus. The memo suggested, among other things, “that the presence of the press secretary on press buses and at access points would be of more benefit to us than the knowledge that he is supervising crowd control.” The reporters didn’t want a great writer for a press secretary; they wanted a Vic Gold, a fussbudget who always knew where to find the phones and the pool cars.

  Later on the bus ride
to Waterbury, Gordon Weil came aboard and tried to hold a briefing. Weil, the Senator’s personal aide and the alleged author of the thousand-dollar-a-head welfare proposal, was an officious man with curly black hair, goggle-type glasses, and close to no sense of humor. Earlier in the fall, Weil had thrown a well-publicized tantrum because he had been confined to the Washington headquarters when he wanted to be traveling with the Senator. After Weil calmed down, they let him come on the plane. The night Weil joined the campaign, Naughton organized a demonstration in his honor. When Weil got off the elevator in the Minneapolis hotel, he saw the whole press corps lined up in the corridor, waving hand-made posters with slogans like “Gordon Bugs Everybody” and “Where’s My $1,000, Gordon?” They were also singing a song (lyrics by James Naughton) that went in part: “You were number one/When this all begun/And now … you’re … shit.”

  Now, on this sultry September evening, Weil decided to brief the press on an economic statement of McGovern’s which had been handed out earlier in the day. In New York City, he boarded the first of the two press buses which were going to Waterbury and started to speak over the PA system. Stout, Greider and some other reporters were playing bridge on an upended garbage can in the aisle, and they found Weil’s spiel pointless and annoying. So they stopped the bus and made Weil get off. The second bus picked him up. He stood in the dimly lit front section and asked: “Do you want a briefing?” One AP man put up his hand.

  “What?” said Witcover.

  “An economic briefing,” Oliphant explained. “Shit, of course we want it, with all the fudge in that release.”