The Boys on the Bus

by Timothy Crouse

  “How does McGovern’s plan differ from Nixon’s Phase II, Gordon?” asked Norm Kempster of the UPI. “In a practical way, I mean.”

  “Real action,” said Weil. “There would be real action.”

  Kempster gave a skeptical nod, Oliphant laughed, and Witcover said, “Right!”

  Weil kept talking about the statement and said, “Food prices are not a dominant factor in inflation.”

  “Grind that up in your hamburger, Gordon,” somebody yelled.

  “Boy,” said Oliphant, “I’ve heard bullshit before but this takes the cake. I can’t believe Gordon checked this out with anybody in the campaign before giving this briefing. We deserve to have a press conference on this.”

  “I don’t understand what he’s proposing,” said Kempster, “but it sounds the same as Nixon’s plan to me.”

  And so the briefing broke down in confusion. This was not entirely typical of the briefings in the McGovern campaign; Dougherty and Mankiewicz often briefed the press with humor and smooth professionalism. But the point was that such a scene would never have taken place on a White House press bus. No one would have dared throw Ron Ziegler off a press bus or treat him with such patent contempt. The White House press operation was manipulative, frustrating, and sometimes downright evil; but it was always professional. From Nixon on down, the people in the White House knew the art of feeding news to the press at a proper digestible rate, doling out just the right amount at the right time. The McGovern people never mastered this technique. McGovern’s press secretary was never around. There never seemed to be enough filing time. Reporters who had to write in the afternoon kept getting assigned to afternoon pools.

  Frank Mankiewicz constantly complained that the reporters never wrote about the issues. They wrote about staff problems and Democratic county chairmen who refused to support McGovern, he said, but never about McGovern’s ideas on health care and pollution. Mankiewicz claimed to have answered 10,000 questions in the course of the campaign, only seven of them about a real issue. This was a valid point, but the reporters had a valid problem: they were swamped with prepared texts, but McGovern did not deliver many of these speeches. On a typical day, the press would receive a statement on anti-trust policy and another on veterans, both of them provocative treatises by McGovern’s most eloquent speech writers. But then McGovern would scrap both statements in favor of a new blast at the Administration over the Watergate affair, and the reporters would have to devote all of their space to the Watergate speech. This frustrated the good reporters, but there was nothing they could do about it. The Nixon people would have carefully scheduled the statements so that each one received maximum coverage.

  Dick Dougherty claimed that McGovern “conducted the most open campaign for President in history.” Here a distinction must be made. It is one thing for a candidate to see the press frequently and answer their questions honestly, which McGovern tried to do, thereby providing an admirable contrast to the reclusive Nixon. However, it is another thing for a campaign staff to talk openly about its problems, feuds, and discontents. That is the political equivalent of indecent exposure, and the McGovern staffers indulged in it with a relish that bordered on wantonness. While the Nixon people, by keeping their mouths tightly shut, managed to keep the lid on the largest political scandal in American history, the McGovern people, by blabbing, succeeded in making their campaign look hopelessly disorganized and irresponsible.

  One could not blame the reporters for writing that Lawrence O’Brien and Gordon Weil were threatening to quit—that was just the sort of Teddy White stuff that their editors were demanding. Nor could one blame them for finding George McGovern highly unprofessional; he could not even make his own advisers stop preening their wounded egos in public. And so a certain disrespect grew up among the press corps. They disdained McGovern not only because he seemed a likely loser—although that had something to do with their attitude—but also because he displayed a lack of professionalism. “From the beginning of the fall campaign, when we flew off from Washington on September 3,” said Dick Stout, “nobody ever dealt with McGovern with much respect, as though he might be the next President. It wasn’t that loose with Goldwater in the fall of 1964; he was a loser too, but they showed him more respect.”

  And yet, for all their irreverence, the campaign reporters on McGovern’s plane remained curiously reluctant to write him off as a loser. Perhaps this attitude stemmed from a desire to be fair, to offset the pollsters and national editors who seemed so certain of McGovern’s defeat, who seemed almost to be setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Late in September, Greider returned to the Post for a day and told his editors he thought McGovern might have a chance. “They looked at me as if I had been smoking something,” he said.) Then too, the reporters were as isolated as a bunch of submariners, trapped in the world of the press plane, seeing the enthusiastic crowds at the rallies and living with the intermittently manic McGovern staffers. This isolation nourished their atavistic urge to be with the winner, to write the upset story of the century. They kept talking of the election of 1948, of how the campaign reporters with Truman had been blind to the meaning of all those cheering crowds …

  The first journalist to suggest in print that McGovern had a chance was Mary McGrory, the Washington Star’s liberal political columnist. Like several other reporters on the plane, Mary McGrory was a renegade from the conservatism of Boston’s parochial schools. She had a plain Irish face, a regal manner, a mighty ego, and a taste for oversized earrings in the shape of coral clusters and alpha-helixes. She was fifty-five, but looked ten years younger. She had risen to prominence covering the ascension of John Kennedy, and had become his close friend in the process; indeed some of the amateur psychologists in the press corps claimed that she had fallen in love with Kennedy, and had transferred these feelings to every new hero of the Left since his death. Certainly she had written passionately about Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and now she was a deep believer in George McGovern. In California, just before one of the Humphrey-McGovern debates, I mentioned to her my feeling that McGovern might lose the primary. She gave me a scorching look. “Oh ye of little faith,” she said.

  At times, she could be more imperious than Joseph Alsop. On one of the last nights of the campaign, as everyone trooped off the planes onto the tarmac of the Little Rock airport, only Mary McGrory noticed the small crowd at the fence. “Frank, Frank,” she shouted, running after Mankiewicz. “Make him go over there! Christ, it’s one-to-one and it won’t take a moment.” So McGovern went to the fence and drank in the adoration of the blacks and college kids who had been waiting for hours to see him. She watched them reaching for his hands and glowed with happiness.

  Besides being a believer, she was a first-rate reporter. Her columns were full of facts and incidents that appeared nowhere else, the fruits of her hard digging. She slaved over her prose, which was invariably bright and witty. The men on the plane, who were not necessarily friends of the feminist movement, automatically treated her as an equal. The last man to treat her as an inferior had been James Reston, who offered to give her a job in the Washington Bureau of the Times on the condition that she work part-time on the switchboard—her reply was probably still burning in his ears.

  On October 22, McGrory wrote a column which began: “Detroit—Here in Michigan, they have failed to get the word about the Nixon landslide. They’re talking victory—not big, not easy—but victory for George McGovern.” She had been impressed both by the United Auto Workers’ drive for McGovern and by the high-powered McGovern canvassing operation. She knew the state coordinator, Carl Wagner, from the primaries, and Wagner had showed her the canvassing results for the Polish working-class town of Hamtramck:

  McGovern—263

  Nixon—68

  Leaning to McGovern—85

  Undecided—107

  McGrory concluded that “something was happening in Michigan” and that if the same thing were happening in other industrial states “the mandate could b
e something less than the size of Mt. Rushmore in November.” Privately, she went beyond this prediction; she was convinced that McGovern was going to win the election.

  The day after the column appeared, Nixon made his short trip to Westchester, and I saw Mary McGrory on the White House bus to Andrews Air Force Base. No sooner had she found a seat than she got into a long argument with Rebecca Bell of NBC, who was skeptical about the Michigan piece. “Carl Wagner is twenty-seven,” I heard McGrory say. “He’s too young to lie. They’ve never lied to me before. Maybe they’re starting now but I don’t think so.”

  During the Westchester motorcade, McGrory sat in the back of the bus looking out the window and counting the pro-McGovern posters with mounting glee. When the bus passed five people holding up a long “Nixon in ’72” sign in front of a car sales lot, she said, “Used car place, it figures.” Seeing Nixon aide Bill Safire, she confidently asked him, “You don’t get any bad vibes? Those registration figures don’t worry you? We hear a lot of new voters have been signed up in Westchester County. We don’t know whether they’re ours or yours.”

  But in the next two weeks, McGrory began to worry about her Michigan column. “I’ve taken more grief for that article than for almost anything I’ve ever written,” she said. Traveling briefly with Agnew in Michigan she met Senate Republican whip Bob Griffin who told her, “You’re all wrong.” She began to talk about it obsessively with her friends on the McGovern plane. During the last week, she phoned the Star from an airport pressroom in Corpus Christi, making monster faces throughout the conversation. “At the Star,” she said when she hung up, “they called a Hamtramck source who told them I was completely wrong. And they told me so, they made it very clear how they felt. If McGovern loses, I’m moving to Ottawa. I mean, I really went out on a limb and it could be very bad.”

  The same week Mary McGrory visited Detroit, Adam Clymer went to Freemont, Ohio, for a couple of days to sample popular opinion. He returned to the campaign plane with good news for McGovern. Knocking on doors, Clymer found sixteen people for Nixon and only two for McGovern. But polling on the street, where people were anonymous, he found sixteen for Nixon and twelve for McGovern. Clymer concluded that people were scared to tell pollsters that they intended to vote for an unpopular candidate, especially when they were at home, where they could be easily identified. This was the same theory that McGovern’s own pollster, Pat Caddell, was pushing at the time, and not everybody bought it. “Hell,” Dick Stout said later, “the Goldwater people tried that kind of reasoning in ’64. But there was Clymer passing this off as great evidence that McGovern was really surging. He just wanted McGovern to win.”

  During the last week of October, Jim Naughton also began to feel optimistic for McGovern. Returning from a rally outside Detroit one night, he leaned across the aisle of the press bus and in confidential tones told Stout, “He’s gonna win.”

  “Who’s gonna win?” said Stout.

  “McGovern.”

  “You got facts to back this up, you got any evidence?” demanded Stout. “Or are you just saying this from the elbows?”

  “Oh, it’s just from the elbows,” Naughton said quickly.

  “Well, you want to bet on it?” asked Stout.

  “Well,” said Naughton, “if you put it that way, no.”

  Naughton kept going hot and cold about McGovern. During the first week of October, he thought McGovern might win; during the second week, no; during the third week, it was barely possible. There were so many entrails to read—the crowd response, McGovern’s mood, the polls, the testimony of the staff, and the reaction of Naughton’s wife. Naughton considered his wife an accurate barometer of the mood of the Republic. At first, she had been ready to vote for Nixon, so angry was she at the dumping of Eagleton; then she was going to vote for no one; finally she had decided to vote for McGovern because of the Watergate scandal. So Naughton thought that the Watergate affair might be sinking in at last, and he also thought the fact that McGovern had received nearly a million dollars in contributions in one day signaled a turnabout in the campaign. He had, in fact, bet someone in the Times’ Washington Bureau that McGovern would come within five points of Nixon. And Doug Kneeland placed a bet putting McGovern within two points of the President.

  During the last weeks of the campaign, Naughton wanted to write a piece about the signs pointing to a possible McGovern victory, but he was loath to make any solid predictions. If McGovern lost, Naughton would look like a fool. His problem was finally solved when the Times’ Anthony Lewis appeared on the campaign plane with the page proofs of a book by Arthur Tobier called How McGovern Won the Presidency and Why the Polls Were Wrong. That gave Naughton the hook he needed. He struggled over the piece for nearly six hours one night, searching for the right tone. In the end he settled on whimsy. “Walt Disney built an empire out of fantasy and in it, at a campaign rally in the Disneyland Hotel here yesterday, Senator George McGovern predicted that he would win the Presidency on Nov. 7,” Naughton wrote in the Times of October 29. He went on to treat the book and other pieces of evidence in McGovern’s behalf as freak exhibits which were nevertheless worthy of interest.

  Adam Clymer never committed himself in print, either, and Mary McGrory survived the election without dire consequences to her career. But the fact that these people thought that McGovern had a chance to win showed the folly of trying to call an election from 30,000 feet in the air. “Those guys thought that at the very least it was going to be close,” a seasoned national political reporter said later. “So they misread the whole fucking thing from beginning to end. The interesting thing is that Dick Cooper, at least, was hurt by it.” Dick Cooper, one of the regulars on the McGovern plane, was a blond, taciturn, pipe-smoking reporter from the Los Angeles Times’ Chicago Bureau.

  “They put Cooper on the plane at the very beginning and left him there until the very end,” the national political man continued. “And apparently Cooper said in staff conferences, ‘This guy’s doing all right, he’s got a shot.’ So after the election, Jules Witcover quits and they’re looking for a national political reporter. So what do they do? They hire the Supreme Court reporter from Newsweek and claim that he’s got a national reputation as a political reporter. Which is absurd. I mean, the guy is smart but he doesn’t have any reputation for covering politics. And they bring Cooper to Washington, but they don’t give him the national political job. They put out the word that Cooper showed some very bad judgment during the campaign. Well, I know what they’re talking about. They’re talking about Cooper saying that McGovern had a shot. What the fuck! They put him in a steel capsule for three months and then bring him out and say, ‘Whaddya think?’ Of course he thinks McGovern has a shot. It’s just a lousy system, that’s all.”

  * Naughton later estimated that 95 percent of the reporters on the plane voted for McGovern. “But I suspect that many of them felt as I did—that they weren’t exactly eager to do it,” he said. “Most of us have not been terribly fond of Nixon. At the same time, McGovern did not seem to demonstrate in his campaign an overwhelming capacity for administrative ability, and the Presidency is an administrative job, after all.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  The Last Days

  The reporters attached to George McGovern had a very limited usefulness as political observers, by and large, for what they knew best was not the American electorate but the tiny community of the press plane, a totally abnormal world that combined the incestuousness of a New England hamlet with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigors of the Long March.

  There were two press planes, actually—the Dakota Queen II (named for the B-24 McGovern had piloted during World War II) and the Zoo Plane (etymology uncertain.)* Both were United Airlines 727’s with all the “tourist” seats replaced by “first class” armchairs. The Dakota Queen II carried the Senator (who usually remained in his curtained-off working space at the front of the plane), the major staffers (who had an office complete with telephones, type
writers and mimeograph machines in the rear of the plane) and the journalistic heavies—the network correspondents, the man on duty for each of the wires, the reporters from the big dailies, newsmagazines and chains, and both of the New York Timesmen. Many days, they spent five or six hours in the air.

  The atmosphere aboard the Dakota Queen II was informal but businesslike. The reporters with deadlines looming banged away at their portables; the others milled in the aisles, talking shop with each other and the staff, drinking, and sifting through the latest barrel of rumors. Every so often, McGovern wandered back to the press section, and the reporters piled up around him like ants on a crumb; small talk was made, pleasantries exchanged, nothing momentous emerged. After McGovern left, the reporters who had been at the fringes of the group hopped from seat to seat, trying to piece together the conversation. Sometimes, on long, mellow night flights, some of the reporters sang hymns or danced to a tape recorder in the rear compartment, but usually the Dakota Queen II remained staid.

  The Zoo Plane carried the lesser staffers, the backup men from the networks and wires, the reporters from small papers, the cameramen and technicians, the bulk of the Secret Service and the occasional persona non grata like Bob Novak or Joe Alsop.

  (“Put him on the Zoo,” Mankiewicz snapped one night upon learning of Alsop’s imminent arrival. “I don’t want to see him on the Senator’s plane, I don’t want him anywhere near there.”

  “Why not?” asked Polly Hackett, the press aide.

  “Because I’m liable to punch him in the nose, that’s why,” said Mankiewicz.)

  A whole status system grew up around the two planes. The heavies—the men at the top of the pecking order—had permanent seats on the Dakota Queen II; therefore, these seats became symbols of journalistic glory. To sit with The New York Times and the Washington Post meant that you had arrived. To be banished to the Zoo Plane meant social disgrace. Reporters begged Polly Hackett not to send them to the Zoo Plane. A man like Adam Clymer would rather have traveled by dogsled. But more and more heavies showed up as the campaign progressed, so a number of reporters were bumped from the Dakota Queen II. Some took it badly and worried so incessantly about missing something on the No. 1 plane that they were unable to concentrate on their work. What made this all the more absurd was the fact that the Zoo Plane was ten times as much fun as the Dakota Queen II; the difference between the Senator’s plane and the Zoo was the difference between Lent and Mardi Gras.