“You think these guys don’t care,” Kneeland started in. “You think they’re here because of ambition or personal selfishness or something like that. What you don’t see is that they want to change things. They’re idealists, romantics.”
“I’m not sure that’s why I do this,” said Stout, staring into the Bloody Mary he was nursing. “I just wanted to see life. This was the best way I could do it with my limitations.”
Kneeland acknowledged Stout’s dissenting voice and then began to fill in his portrait of the reporter as romantic. Reporters were the kind of guys who cried at movies, he said. He himself had shed tears over animal books as a child and had even wept at Love Story. The reporters might not give a damn about the Democratic Party, but they cared about the people on the campaign who had devoted themselves to McGovern, like Polly Hackett and Carol Friedenberg.
“I cried on Monday,” Stout admitted. “Sitting in that goddam bus in Philadelphia, watching those girls go through their little duties even though they knew the thing was a disaster, knew it was falling apart. Well, I didn’t exactly cry, but I did feel my eyes brimming.”
“A lot of guys were torn up last night,” said Kneeland. “Naughton was torn up. They’d all worked so goddam hard trying to be fair, doing a lot of things they didn’t want to do. I had to write that ‘Man in the News’ piece in case McGovern won. You think I wanted to do that?
“Every two-bit columnist from every two-bit paper that was on this plane for two days took a cheap shot at McGovern,” Kneeland continued. “They’d come on and write a funny story about how the campaign was fucked up. Well, I could have written funny stories, too. I got goddam sick of doing those little daily pieces. It’s a helluva lot more fun to be amusing, but I didn’t let myself do it and neither did most of the other guys.
“You see, we’re idealists,” Kneeland went on in his vinegar New England accent. “McGovern invited us to be harsh on McGovern so we were. He invited us to hold him up to his own standards, and we’ve held him up to them and then some.”
What irked Kneeland more than anything was that no one had held Richard Nixon up to the same standards. Taking comfort from the belief that they were merely following the “rules of objectivity,” the White House correspondents had failed to make Nixon account for the actions of his Administration. Meanwhile, the McGovern reporters had adhered to the same rules of objectivity out of a genuine conviction that they must remain “fair”; they had refused to use advocacy journalism in McGovern’s behalf. “We played the game by street-fighting rules,” said Kneeland. “You don’t kick a guy in the nuts or stick your finger in his eye, even if it means you lose. And the White House people know you won’t. They knew that we played by the rules and they took advantage of that. But what can we do? We can’t help playing fair, that’s just the way we are.”
Kneeland would have gone on, but just then George McGovern’s voice came on the PA system. McGovern said that he wanted to express his “very great affection and appreciation.”
“There are moments we’re never going to forget,” McGovern continued, “and I promise never to say to anyone on this plane what I said to that friend along the fence in Battle Creek, Michigan. In fact, what we extend to all of you is the kiss of brotherhood, and goodbye until we meet again.”
“Class,” said Kneeland. “That is one of the classiest men I have ever known.”
A few minutes later, the two planes taxied up to a huge, empty Coast Guard hangar in a disused corner of National Airport. The reporters spilled out of the planes and stood on the tarmac, their hair blown about by violent gusts of wind. Suddenly everybody realized that it was all over, and their emotions flooded out. They wept, embraced, exchanged manful handshakes, cried on each other’s shoulders, or simply stood in a daze. It was like an orphanage being shut down. Then George McGovern appeared at the top of the ramp and drew them together for the last time. “I don’t think I lost anything yesterday except some votes we would have liked to have had,” McGovern said into the forest of Sonys and notebooks. “The cause is just as bright …”
Then the group broke up for the last time. The reporters stood in little groups around their luggage, looking shipwrecked, waiting to be picked up by their wives. The cause was not just as bright for them. The man who had brought them together, made them the most unlikely of friends, given them common gripes and jokes, given them, in fact, everything that they held in common, had just driven off into political oblivion in a black Cadillac. It would be a good while before any of them would again discover the same irresistible combination of camaraderie, hardship, and luxury. They now had to go back to paying the dues which would earn them another campaign in 1976.
* Since Presidential campaigns first took flight, the second (or third) plane has always been known as the Zoo Plane. Apparently this name derives from the large numbers of TV technicians who ride the second plane and who are considered slightly less than human by the print journalists.
† Which gave rise to the West-of-the-Potomac-Rule: “Nothing that happens West of the Potomac is ever talked about East of the Potomac.” The penalty for violating this rule, I was repeatedly warned, is lynching.
‡ Stout also had a growing aversion to losers. “I can’t stand losers any more!” he said after the election. “I’ve never covered a winner! Not one! I covered Percy when he ran for Governor and lost. I covered Goldwater, McCarthy, Muskie and then McGovern. I think there’s absolutely nothing noble about losing! You find a good loser—he’s still a loser.”
In January, Stout volunteered to cover Agnew full time for Newsweek. “At the same time, I said, ‘I don’t want to cover any more losers.’ And the editors said, ‘Well, we’re putting you on Agnew because we want him to lose.’ ”
To My Mother
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my debt to Hunter Thompson, who talked Jann Wenner into letting me write the Rolling Stone article from which this book grew, and who encouraged me from beginning to end. I would also like to thank Donald Klopfer for his encouragement and David Halberstam for his critical advice. For their help and support I also owe thanks to Suzanne Beves, Cordelia Jason, Claire Nivola, Francie Barnard, Drea Rhodin, Michael Wieloszynski, Mike Thompson, and, of course, to the members of the press corps who were generous enough to share their feelings, thoughts and experiences with me.
I would especially like to acknowledge a debt to Donald Kaul of the Des Moines Register for his article on Evans and Novak, “The Real Winners”; and to Stuart Loory for his article in the Los Angeles Times on Clark Mollenhof.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Timothy Crouse has been a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, and the Washington columnist for Esquire, writing numerous articles for these and other publications, including The New Yorker. He translated, with Luc Brébion, Roger Martin du Gard’s Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. The new version of Anything Goes that he co-authored with John Weidman was recently staged at the Royal National Theatre in London. He is writing a book of short stories.
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