Although the piece came out on Halloween, nobody mentioned it until November 2. Then, just after the Dakota Queen II took off from Cincinnati for Battle Creek, Michigan, George McGovern walked back to where Stout was sitting, leaned over, and inquired good-humoredly whether Stout had been responsible for the piece or whether Newsweek’s editors had written most of it. Stout replied that most of the ideas had been his and that he had agreed with and okayed the final version. The smile vanished from McGovern’s face. He nodded and began to walk away.
“Why did you ask, Senator?” said Stout.
“Well,” said McGovern in his monotone, “I thought it was just a bunch of shit.”
A few minutes later, Mankiewicz came down the aisle and said, “Dick, you’ll be getting an awful lot of flack from the staff over that story in Newsweek.”
“Why?” said Stout, affecting innocence.
Mankiewicz said that it was the worst piece of political journalism he had ever seen, that it was intended to hurt rather than inform.
“Would you please be specific,” said Stout, getting angry. “What was intended to hurt?”
“The whole thing!” said Mankiewicz. He went on to say that Newsweek had knocked McGovern from the beginning. “Up in New Hampshire,” he said, “they thought so little of us that they sent us that après-ski reporter, that second-string art critic, Liz Peer.” Soon after Mankiewicz finished his attack, Dick Dougherty came by and added that the piece was “small-minded, mean-spirited and vindictive.” Stout later observed, with some bitterness, that Dougherty, the self-appointed champion of personal, advocacy journalism, did not admire the technique when it was turned against McGovern.
When the plane landed George McGovern got off and told a heckler at the airport fence to kiss his ass. On the long bus ride from the airport to the TV taping at Jackson, Michigan, Stout sat next to Fred Dutton and told him about McGovern’s bunch-of-shit remark. Dutton, once a key aide, had long since grown disenchanted with the campaign and was now on the plane only so the reporters could not write that he had abandoned ship.
“Oh, my God,” groaned Dutton. “The man doesn’t know what he’s doing. You don’t go tell a guy he’s written shit. All you do is say, ‘That’s the way it goes,’ and then you quietly freeze the fucker out.”
That was the clean, professional, Zieglerian way to do it, and it was doubtless the most efficient method from the candidate’s point of view. But there was something close and personal about the McGovern people’s relationship with the press that didn’t admit that kind of tactic. Mankiewicz and Dougherty were both former journalists, and they kept expecting their brothers to give McGovern the benefit of the doubt, even to help him. Like Richard Nixon, they assumed that the press had a liberal bias. They could never understand why a reporter would report McGovern’s flaws, and thus give comfort to Nixon; after all, Nixon was the press’s natural enemy. So Mankiewicz and Dougherty felt baffled and betrayed whenever a reporter slammed George McGovern, and they reacted from the gut. But their angry outbursts were never as effective as the icy, calculated disdain of the Nixon men. The reporters simply resented the McGovern staffers for blowing up, laughed at them behind their backs, and dismissed them as “unprofessional.”
That night, at a hotel bar in Grand Rapids, Stout stayed up late drinking with Mankiewicz, Bill Greider, Hunter Thompson, the Times duo, and a couple of other reporters. That was standard procedure in the McGovern campaign. The staff and the press got along well most of the time; they ate and drank together. Hunter Thompson, who had arrived late that night, suddenly brought up the Newsweek article. He said he found it shallow and malicious. Which set off Mankiewicz again. Stout protested that he thought the article had been fair. The other reporters at the table studiously ignored the argument. They liked Stout, but they didn’t agree with his article. Finally Stout excused himself, looking hurt and dismayed. He did not appear on the plane the next day. When he returned, he explained that he had remained in Grand Rapids to finish an article. But he acted shy around the plane for the last few days of the campaign.
On Sunday, November 5, Johnny Apple predicted on the front page of the Times that George McGovern was going to lose forty-eight states, with the outcome “in serious doubt” only in Massachusetts and Wisconsin. The next morning, in a pressroom on the top floor of the Bellvue Stratford in Philadelphia, Jim Naughton passed around a floridly worded challenge; for five dollars a shot, the reporters were invited to bet Apple that McGovern would take more than two states. Everybody signed up. Stout later claimed that he had signed under duress. “Word would have gotten back to the staff if I hadn’t signed, and all my entrée would have been shut off,” he said. “When they passed me the sheet to sign, I had to ask somebody what state McGovern was supposed to win besides Massachusetts.” Naughton telexed the wager to Apple, who replied that so many separate bets would complicate his bookkeeping. So Clymer and Naughton threw in fifty apiece and bet Apple an even hundred.
By that time, Naughton and Clymer had no hopes of a McGovern victory; they merely thought that McGovern might pick up more than two states. There was one among the press, however, who did not so easily give up hope. He represented a mass-circulation Fleet Street daily, for whose quality he made no great claims. “It is considered a serious paper,” he said, “by its readers. I choose my words carefully.” A gregarious chap with a crazy, brown-toothed grin, he was known to take a drink; in fact, his full account of the campaign, had he written it, would have closely resembled The Lost Weekend. Somehow he never missed a bus or plane. At the last second some good Samaritan would always pull him away from the hotel bar, waving madly at some new-found American friend and shouting farewells: “Listen, it’s been really great … Yes … yes … I’ve got your address … We must send Christmas cards.”
As Naughton and Clymer were passing around their wager in Philadelphia, this refugee from Fleet Street was buttonholing reporters and telling them the good news. “Listen, we’re all going to be writing the story of the century tomorrow night. Just remember there was one Englishman who said so. And buy me a drink when he wins.” It might have amused the forlorn McGovern staff to know that on election eve, some 1,500,000 faithful readers of this great Fleet Street organ went to bed all across the British Isles thinking that George McGovern was about to pull the upset of all time.
From Philadelphia, the planes flew to Wichita, Kansas, for a brief and pathetically small airport rally that was broken off by a sudden, violent prairie squall. Then a long flight to Long Beach, California, for a larger, floodlit airport rally. At Long Beach, Candice Bergen, who was working for McGovern, walked into the makeshift pressroom where everybody was phoning in stories. She looked around and announced: “You all suck.”
Finally the planes took off into the California night for the last flight of the campaign, the return to Sioux Falls. The mood aboard the Dakota Queen II was quiet and somber. The day had ravaged everyone’s emotions. At a street corner rally in Philadelphia that morning, George McGovern had hoarsely spoken his favorite words from Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” A number of reporters had bitten their lips to keep from crying. For George McGovern grew stronger and calmer as his staffers grew more desolate, and the reporters could not help being awed by his incredible serenity.
In the last forty-eight hours of the campaign, many of the reporters worked on strange ghostly pieces describing McGovern’s victory, to be set in type in advance so that the newspapers would not be completely unprepared if McGovern should do the impossible. Some of the reporters discovered their true feelings about McGovern in writing these pieces. Jim Doyle found that he had only dire predictions for a McGovern Presidency; the stock market, he wrote, would go down, the transition period would be the ugliest in American history, and McGovern would immediately face a pile of crises for which he was hopelessly unprepared. However, Doug Kn
eeland’s “Man in the News” analysis was an admiring portrait which began:
Sioux Falls, S.D. Nov. 7—As it turned out, George Stanley McGovern, the preacher’s son from Avon and Mitchell, really was “right from the start.”
He kept saying he would win, serenely, earnestly, convincingly. And as the days in his plodding 22-month old campaign for the Presidency dwindled down to the final few, when his closest advisers showed by their eyes, if not by their words, that they thought all was lost, almost everyone on the McGovern trail believed that he believed.
Kneeland knew that this fairy tale would never run in the paper, so he allowed it to be passed around on the flight to Sioux Falls. It set off a massive flow of tears. The press aides cried, the baggage handlers sobbed, and the speech writers got lumps in their throats. From then on, the plane was like a flying cortege.
When the plane finally landed in Sioux Falls, at 1:30 in the morning, there was a high school band playing and a crowd that had waited since 9:30 to see McGovern. He spoke briefly. More staffers broke down as they listened to him thank his fellow South Dakotans for their “love and devotion.” It was 37 degrees. Geider stood shivering at the front of the crowd with a flimsy United Airlines blanket pulled around his shoulders for warmth. Other reporters came up to him, raised their hands, and said “How!” When the speech was over, Greider walked slowly to the bus and sat down in the front. Earlier in the evening, at Long Beach, he had been in a sarcastic mood. “McGovern said that voting was a sacrament,” he had said. “You know what comes after the sacrament? The cross and nails, boy!” He had tried to write an article on the plane, but was too tired to finish it. Now he sat in the cold bus, grey with fatigue, his eyes watering.
“Anything exciting happen on the Zoo?” he asked after a long silence. “You get laid?”
“Nothing happened.”
Greider was silent. He started fiddling with the buttons of his Sony, trying to find a certain passage on the tape. Finally he located it and pushed the play button. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” came squawking out of the speaker as we had just heard it played by the Sioux Falls High School Band. Greider closed his eyes and soaked it in. When it was over, he flicked off the Sony and sat in silence for the rest of the ride, looking as if he had just lost his best friend.
The next morning, half of the press slept while the other half rose at 8:30 to take the hour-long bus ride to Mitchell, McGovern’s hometown, and watch the Senator vote. After handing his ballot to a grey-haired lady in the basement of a parish hall, McGovern went to shake the hands of the citizens who had gathered along Mitchell’s main street. Adam Clymer and several other reporters bought cowboy hats. Dean Fischer spotted Gordon Weil and asked him, “What did McGovern have for breakfast?”
“Danish, milk,” said Weil.
“Juice?”
“No, I didn’t see any juice.”
Not for nothing was Fischer a golden boy at Time.
At lunch, Bill Greider, Doug Kneeland, and several other regulars agreed that McGovern could not lose by much more than ten points. By seven o’clock, they knew that they were wrong. The reporters got the news from the three televisions set up at the front of the pressroom in the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn. It was like every other pressroom of the campaign—long rectangular tables loaded down with office typewriters and telephones. The reporters walked around with hands in pockets, fetching beers from a large cooler, and helping themselves to coldcuts. Nobody could feel any emotion. Mary McGrory sat at a typewriter, calm, smiling, but still obsessed with her Hamtramck story; she kept asking whether anyone had heard the returns from Michigan.
The Englishman who had expected to write the story of the century stared into his beer bottle. “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
Everyone commented on the general numbness. “It’s like a bad homecoming, where nothing happens,” said Tom Oliphant. “You drink about eighty drinks and you can’t get drunk and all you get is bad breath.”
“It’s like jumping into a cold pool of water so that your balls shrivel up,” said Stout, who was wandering around in rumpled blue pants and a blue shirt. Later in the evening, he put it another way. “For two years,” he said, “I circled the country looking for it. I looked for it in Hackensack, New Jersey, but did not find it there. I did not find it in Hogan, West Virginia, nor even in Kennebunkport, Maine. But I finally found it in a little Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”
“Found what?”
Stout cupped his hands and looked at them as if he were holding the object of his search.
“The perfect pile of shit,” he said.
Greider was pacing the room, looking ineffably sad. He had stayed up all night finishing the piece he started in Long Beach. He had slept for most of the day. The rest had done him little good. He was neat on the surface, having shaved and combed his hair, but the dark rings remained under his eyes. He was talking, almost reminiscing, about how much he liked John Holum, one of McGovern’s aides. “Holum was going to the Pentagon, you know, as a Deputy Secretary of Defense,” he said. “Just think about it. The generals would come to the White House to see George, and George would say, ‘That’s all right, gentlemen, I’d like you to see Mr. Holum at the Pentagon.’ And Holum would listen to the generals and nod in that quiet way of his and say, ‘No.’ And then he would write down a number on a piece of paper and say, ‘That’s what you get.’
“Now it’s just sodden,” said Greider. “Now nothing will happen in this country for another four years. And that’s very bad.”
Some of the reporters had started to file, but without much enthusiasm. There was little demand for news out of Sioux Falls. Greider and I put on our coats and started to walk the four blocks to a dingy auditorium called the Coliseum to watch McGovern concede. As we walked past pizza parlors and third-class hotels, Greider mused about what would happen when he phoned the Post.
“I’ll call the desk and say, ‘Do you want anything on the speech?’ and they’ll say, ‘No, we got it from the networks.’
“Then I’ll say, ‘Do you want to know how it feels?’ And they’ll say, ‘Naw, that’s all right.’
“And I’ll say, ‘Well, how about a piece on the disillusioned McGovern kids?’ And they’ll say, ‘Naw, we don’t need it.’ ”
I lost Greider at the Coliseum but ran into him later back at the pressroom. He was shouting at the TV sets. Richard Nixon was on all three networks, addressing the nation from the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House. “Peace with honor!” Greider yelled. “Right on, Abe! You tell ’em.” There were whistles and catcalls from the other reporters.
Turning to me, Greider shook his head and said, “You remember what I said they’d say on the desk? Exactly what happened. Almost word for word. They said, ‘Well, how are things going out there?’ but you knew it was one of those questions where they didn’t really mean it.”
Adam Clymer was still showing off the cowboy hat he had bought that morning. “Big-time Washington correspondents need hats for their press cards!” he said for the fifteenth time.
Meanwhile, Jim Naughton was walking back from the Coliseum with Carol Friedenberg, the press aide. They spotted a despondent bunch of kids coming down the street, stopping every twenty feet or so to chant: “Awwwwwwwwww, shit!” Naughton and Friedenberg took up the chant themselves. They found it made them feel better.
Nobody wanted to stay in Sioux Falls any longer than necessary. The planes were ready to take off from the town’s tiny airport by midmorning of November 8. The Dakota Queen II was full of men who were trying to figure out what had happened; they were going to have to write articles explaining how George McGovern had got buried by a landslide. All the reporters were trying to trace the roots of the disaster, testing theories on each other. It was the Eagleton thing. No, the trouble started back in California when Humphrey cut him up. Well, actually it was more that the press had started to examine him seriously just as he started to make
terrible mistakes. They were all searching for a key incident that symbolized the whole campaign. One reporter would try out an incident on a colleague and then say, “That sums it up, doesn’t it.” The phrase spread through the plane like an epidemic of hiccups.
George McGovern and his wife came aboard at the last moment, entering through the tail section. The reporters stood up and gave him a warm ovation. McGovern slowly began to move up the aisle. He gave each reporter a smile and a good, firm handshake.
“Hello, Bill. Hello, Doug.”
“Congratulations, Senator,” said Kneeland. “You made a great speech last night.”
Some of the reporters exchanged glances. They could not believe McGovern’s composure, and they were deeply moved by his personal farewells. He let his distraction show only once, when he asked David Murray, “You flying with us all the way back to Washington?” Murray’s only alternative would have been to bail out.
After takeoff, Frank Mankiewicz came back with the telegram that Richard Nixon had sent McGovern. The Nixongram was very short. “You and Mrs. McGovern have our very best wishes for a well deserved rest after what I know must have been a very strenuous and tiring campaign,” it read.
Mankiewicz smiled and dragged on a Kool. “It’s worded with the felicity that has characterized the Administration,” he told a bunch of reporters who had gathered around him. “It’s a perfect example of gracelessness without pressure. Nixon does better for a losing manager in a playoff.”
The reporters and staffers had begun to mill around in the aisles. I was sitting next to Stout when a staffer wandered by and began to make a long, lachrymose farewell speech.
“Don’t do the funeral bit, Bill,” Stout said gently. The staffer nodded, shook hands, and moved on to do the funeral bit elsewhere.
Then Doug Kneeland came by, and I immediately braced for an argument. For the last week and a half, Kneeland had been needling me about an article I had written about the campaign press for Rolling Stone. The article was full of cheap shots, he said; it was a snide hatchet job which imputed all kinds of low motives to men who were actually decent, honest and hard working. I tried to argue with him, but he always brought up the same old litany of accusations, and one evening the debate had exploded into a shouting match in the middle of the press bus. After that, I carefully avoided Kneeland, which was not easy to do in a crowded campaign plane. Now here he was again, but mellowed, like everyone else on the plane, and seeking to instruct rather than provoke. Wearing a wilted turtleneck, his face sagging with fatigue, he looked as if he had spent a very bad night.
The Boys on the Bus Page 38