Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (30 page)

Leonard and another CBS executive, Gordon Manning, went to Washington to discuss the proposal over dinner with Haldeman. “My conclusion,” said Leonard, “was that there was a possibility it might be an interview of considerable lasting public value. I never did think he would say something on the air in terms of a holy confessional. He made that clear. But he ran the White House, and I thought if you could find out how he ran it …” Leonard paused. “Maybe I was a little naïve about that.” The three men discussed where the interview was to be done, and who was to do it. (Leonard claims he thought of Mike Wallace from the first, which was logical: Wallace is a first-rate television interviewer, and he has always had good connections with the Nixon White House, which considered offering him Ron Ziegler’s job in 1968.) All that remained to be worked out was the money. Haldeman’s lawyer suggested a figure of either $150,000 or $200,000—Leonard, possibly from spending too much time around Haldeman, has suffered a memory loss about the exact figure. CBS said that was far too high. But they never attempted to call Haldeman’s bluff by offering to put him on the air for nothing; they were, after all, doing him a favor. Instead, they settled on a price that was an incredible tactical error: CBS would pay Haldeman $25,000
for each hour
of
interview that was used. This was done, Salant says, to provide an incentive for Haldeman to be forthcoming, to be worth the money he was being paid. It did nothing of the kind. Haldeman managed to screw a television network in a way that eluded him in all his years of White House plotting against the media. (Haldeman also sold CBS twenty-five hours of home movies, of which the network used four minutes. Industry insiders suggest that Haldeman may have been paid additionally for the film.)

CBS never considered following Haldeman around for a couple of weeks with hand-held cameras in the hope that he might eventually reveal himself. They did not consider using Dan Rather, or any of the print journalists who knew enough about Watergate to interview Haldeman properly. They did not cut into the show some of the other television footage of Haldeman that was available, obtained at no cost, like the moment when he bared his teeth at the Ervin subcommittee; they did not contrast Haldeman’s fuzzy, sugar-coated recollections with his remarks on the White House tapes. Instead, they sent in Wallace. Wallace does his homework. Wallace studies. Wallace was stuffed, like a Strasbourg goose, with papers and facts and questions and quotes. He spent fifty-five hours in preliminary talks with Haldeman—a period of time so long as to make me suspect he left the fight in the locker room—and when he sat down to tape, for over six hours, he found out firsthand why H. R. Haldeman used to be called the Berlin Wall. Haldeman gave a brilliant performance: he played the part of a vibrant football player who had been taken out of the game by a fluke, a minor muscle spasm no one could cure. I said only a paragraph ago that Wallace is a first-rate television interviewer; that is what
he is, and that is all he is. He too gave a performance. He gave us a bit of obsequiousness, and he gave us a lot of exasperated sighs. And two hours of sweet talk and exasperation did not make up for the fact that Wallace just did not know enough to follow through. Time after time, Haldeman made remarks that were not supported by the facts, and time after time, Wallace blew it.

When Haldeman insisted that many of the excesses of the campaign were the fault of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, not the White House, Wallace failed to point out that there was no real difference between the two, that Haldeman in fact controlled the CREEP secret fund. When Haldeman claimed that Woodward and Bernstein had admitted in their book they were wrong about him, Wallace did not correct him; what Woodward and Bernstein actually wrote was that they were wrong in saying that Hugh Sloan had named Haldeman before the grand jury as one of the men who controlled the fund. When Haldeman made what was the only potential news of the interview, by admitting that he occasionally chose not to carry out Nixon’s orders, Wallace did not press him for an example not already publicly known; more important, he neglected to ask Haldeman how, in view of this, he could base his defense at the cover-up trial on the claim that he was just following orders. Haldeman’s outline had made the CBS people believe that he would be anecdotal and gossipy about the so-called inner circle. But all Wallace got from him were the headlines of his book. Secret Nixon Plan To Make Connally VP. Martha Really Was the Reason Mitchell Quit. Kissinger’s Salzburg Tantrum Was Just Latest in a Series. Wallace prodded Haldeman for embellishment, but to no avail.

Back in the days when it was still defending its
decision, CBS claimed that it was paying not for hard news but for memoirs. Solzhenitsyn, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Walter Lippmann were also paid under this guideline. The other networks were swift—and hypocritical—in denouncing CBS. NBC, which paid Marina Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, the Fischer quints, and recently negotiated a roundabout deal with John Dean, said through News President Richard C. Wald that they would never have done it. ABC, having paid Lieutenant William Calley indirectly for an interview, said through its News President William Sheehan: “A news maker should not be paid for an interview.” CBS continued to insist for a time that it paid only for memoirs; in fact, the network paid Dispatch News Service and Seymour Hersh ten thousand dollars for an interview with Private Paul Meadlo on the My Lai massacre.

A few days after the second Haldeman interview appeared on the air, New York’s WNET did a
Behind the Lines
show on the whole business, and on it, CBS’s Bill Leonard asked a question. “If we could forget just a moment whether he was paid or not,” Leonard asked, “was it in the nature of a public service? Was it important or not important? Was it useful or not useful …?” It is an interesting question—largely because it is totally invalid. There is no way to forget that Haldeman was paid. He was paid. The smell of money perfumed both hours. The shows were dominated by the fee, and Haldeman’s responses were dictated by how far he thought he had to go to earn it. And all in all, the entire episode has made me change my point of view on checkbook journalism. I used to think it was a mistake to pay anyone for a story. I used to think it made it impossible for serious journalists to cover events. I used to think it would mean
that news stories would begin to go to the highest bidder. Now I think the networks should pay everyone. Hard news sources, soft news sources, everyone. It will serve to remind us that, at this point at least, there is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.

July, 1975

He was alone, as always.

A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it, and Theodore H. White was alone. It was a hot, muggy day in New York when he finished, or perhaps it was a cold, windy night; there is no way to be certain, although it is certain that Theodore H. White was certain of what the weather was like that day, or that night, because when Theodore H. White writes about things, he notices the weather, and he usually manages to get it into the first paragraph or first few pages of whatever he writes. “Hyannis Port sparkled in the sun that day, as did all New England” (
The Making of the President 1960
). “It was hot; the sun was blinding; there would be a moment of cool shade ahead under the overpass they were approaching” (
The Making of the President 1964
). “Thursday had been a cold day of drizzling rain in Manhattan, where Richard Nixon lived” (
The Making of the President 1968
). “I could see the fan of yellow water below shortly before the plane dipped into the overcast” (
The Making of the President 1972
). And now Theodore H. White looked at the opening line of his new book,
Breach of Faith
: “Wednesday dawned
with an overcast in Washington—hot, sticky, threatening to rain—July 24th, 1974.” It had worked before and it would work again.

White flicked a cigarette ash from his forty-sixth Marlboro of the day and took the last sheet of one hundred percent rag Strathmore parchment typing paper from his twenty-two-year-old IBM Executive typewriter. It was the 19,246,753rd piece of typing paper he had typed in his sixty years. He was tired. He was old and tired. He was also short. But mainly he was tired. He was tired of writing the same book over and over again. He was tired of being taken in, taken in by John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, General Westmoreland, Richard Nixon, tired of being taken in by every major politician in the last sixteen years. He was tired of being hornswoggled by winners. He was tired of being made to look like an ass, tired of having to apologize in each successive book for the mistakes he had made in the one before. He was tired of being imitated by other journalists, and he was tired of rewriting their work, which had surpassed his own. He was tired of things going wrong, tired of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; the night of the Saturday Night Massacre, for example, he found himself not in the Oval Office but on vacation in the South of France, where he was reduced to hearing the news from his hotel maid. He was tired of describing the people he was writing about as tired.

We must understand how Theodore H. White got to be that way, how he got to be so old and so tired. We must understand how this man grew to have a respect and awe for the institutions of American government that was so overweening as to blind him to the weaknesses
of the men who ran them. We must understand how he came to believe that all men in power—even base men—were essentially noble, and when they failed to be noble, it had merely to do with flaws, flaws that grew out of a massive confluence of forces, forces like PR, the burgeoning bureaucracy, television, manipulation and California. We must understand his associates, good men, tired men but good men, men he lunched with every week, men who worked at newsmagazines which had long since stopped printing run-on sentences with subordinate clauses attached to the end. And to understand what has happened to Theodore H. White, which is the story of this column, one would have to go back to earlier years, to the place where it all started.

Time
magazine.

That was where it all started. At
Time
magazine. Not everything started at
Time
magazine—Theodore H. White developed his infuriating style of repeating phrases over and over again later in his life, after he had left
Time
magazine—but that is where most of it started. It was at
Time
magazine that White picked up the two overriding devices of newsmagazine writing. The first was a passion for tidbits, for small details, for color. President Kennedy liked to eat tomato soup with sour cream in it for lunch. Adlai Stevenson sunned himself in blue sneakers and blue shorts. Hubert Humphrey ate cheese sandwiches whenever he was in the midst of a crisis.

The second was omniscience, the omniscience that results when a writer has had a week, or a month, or a year to let events sift out, the kind of omniscience, in short, that owes so much to hindsight.

Until 1959, when Theodore H. White began work
on the four-hundred-one-page, blue-bound
Making of the President 1960
, no reporter had written a book on a political campaign using these two devices. White did, and his book changed the way political campaigns were covered. He wrote the 1960 campaign as a national pageant, a novelistic struggle for power between two men. He wrote about what they wore and what they ate and what they said behind the scenes. He went to meetings other reporters did not even ask to attend; the participants at the meetings paid scant attention to him. And then, of course, the book was published, became a best seller, and everything began to change.

Change.

Change begins slowly, as it always does, and when it began, White was slow to notice it. He covered the 1964 campaign as he had covered the one before; he did not see that all the detail and color and tidbits and dialogue made no difference in that election; the political process was not working in the neat way it had worked four years before, with hard-fought primaries and nationally televised debates and a cliff-hanger vote; the 1964 election was over before it even began. Then he came to 1968, and the change, mounting like an invisible landslide, intensified, owing to a massive confluence of factors. The first was the national press, which began to out-report him. The second was White himself. He no longer went to meetings where he was ignored; he was, after all, Theodore H. White, historian to American Presidential elections. Had he been a student of physics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, instead of a student of history and all the Cicero he could cram into his books, he might have understood what was happening. But he did not. The change, the invisible landslide of
change, eluded him. He wrote a book about a new Nixon, an easier, more relaxed, more affable Nixon. He missed the point. He missed the point about Vietnam; he missed the point about the demonstrations. Larry O’Brien used to be important; now it was these kids; who the hell were these kids to come along and take politics away from Theodore H. White? He missed the point about the Nixon campaign too. And so, in 1969, came the first great humiliation. A young man named Joe McGinniss, a young man who had gone to low- and mid-level meetings of the Nixon campaign, where the participants had paid him scant attention, produced the campaign book of the year,
The Selling of the President
, and even knocked off Theodore H. White’s title in the process. Then, before he knew it, it was 1972, another campaign, another election, and White went through it, like so many other reporters, ignoring Watergate; months later, as he was finishing the 1972 book, he was forced to deal with the escalating scandal; he stuck it in, a paragraph here, a paragraph there, a chapter to wrap it all up, all this sticking out like sore thumbs throughout the manuscript. That year, the best book on the campaign was written not by White but by Timothy Crouse, who had stayed at the fringes, reporting on the press. To make matters worse, Crouse’s book,
The Boys on the Bus
, included a long, not entirely flattering section on Theodore H. White, a section in which White complained, almost bitterly, about the turn things had taken. He spoke of the night McGovern won the nomination in Miami: