Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (43 page)

After Mrs. Wortman’s death, Elbert decided to carry on the puzzles—something even his wife had thought he was not equipped to do. He began lurking in the offices of the
Saturday Review
with sample puzzles. He claimed he had done all his wife’s work. He threatened to sue. “It was somewhat sticky,” says Norman Cousins. A few fans had submitted tryout puzzles; in addition, Cousins contacted his sister’s husband and asked him to take a crack at it. Laura Hobson judged the entries, voted for Middleton, and that was that.

Mrs. Hobson thinks Tom Middleton does a bang-up job, and so does Margaret Farrar. I think he prints too many definitions that require looking up, too many arcane musical comedy references and too many quotes that are not as felicitous as he thinks. There is a glorious point in the working of a Double-Crostic when the puzzle falls together, you see what the quote is going to be about and you realize who the author is—and that moment is not so glorious when the quote is from
Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual
.

I see that I am on the verge of blaming Thomas Middleton for my ineptitude at his puzzles, and I suppose that really isn’t fair. I still like Double-Crostics. I sit with my dictionary and my atlas and eventually I solve them. In pencil. Erasing a lot. Still, I long for a
giraffe’s eye or two, and I remember the time Mrs. Wortman’s definition said: “This really ought to be next to a church,” and the answer was “laundry.” That was nice. I miss it.

May, 1977

No one in Washington quite knows how Godfrey Sperling’s breakfast group got to be quite the thing it has become. Godfrey Sperling himself, who started holding his breakfasts eleven years ago, claims to have no idea whatsoever. “I didn’t set up a group,” he said recently. “I just had a breakfast. And it wasn’t even a breakfast. It was a lunch. Chuck Percy was coming to Washington, and he didn’t know anyone, so I called up Bob Novak and Alan Otten and Peter Lisagor and three or four other reporters, and before I knew it I had twelve people. And they came. It made a lot of ripples, so I had another. And another. The second year I did it people started saying, You’ve got something this city needs. I said, I can’t imagine it. But I kept having them. Each time I’d say, This will be the last one. After a while, people started saying it was an institution. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.”

There have now been nearly eight hundred Sperling breakfasts, and thirty-seven members of the print press are invited to attend; over the years, they have met with almost every major American political figure. The Sperling Breakfast is indeed an institution. Some of its members
think it’s a good institution, useful and convenient, and that it would have to be invented if it did not exist. Others think it’s a bad institution, dangerous and silly, and that it ought to be taken out like an old horse and shot. I’d like to tell you who said the line about the horse, but he asked not to be quoted. He doesn’t want to hurt Godfrey Sperling’s feelings. Also, he doesn’t want Godfrey Sperling to throw him out of the breakfast group.

I recently spent a week in Washington attending five Sperling breakfasts. I had a wonderful time, except for the eggs. On Monday, Governor Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia was the guest. On Tuesday, Governor James “Big Jim” Thompson of Illinois. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal. On Thursday, White House counsel Robert Lipshutz. On Friday, Budget Director Bert Lance. I also interviewed many of the members of the breakfast group. I had a wonderful time doing that too. Everyone I spoke to was helpful. Many of them said it was only a breakfast. Sometimes it produces stories, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s not why it’s valuable, they said. It’s valuable because it provides an opportunity for the press to see how politicians perform. And why is it dangerous? I asked. It’s dangerous, they said, because it’s pack journalism and it can become a substitute for real reporting. This interested me, because it seemed to me they had it backward. The Sperling Breakfast is
valuable
because it’s pack journalism and it does substitute for real reporting. And it’s
dangerous
because it provides an opportunity for the press to see how politicians perform. How a politician performs does not prove anything about him except for his ability to hornswoggle journalists and pay his respects to their egos. But I’m getting carried away.

• • •

The Sperling Breakfast is supposed to be an informal way for politicians to meet with journalists, but it is actually a formal, ritualized, on-the-record press conference that happens to take place over breakfast. Columnists Joseph Kraft, Carl Rowan, David Broder and Robert Novak attend regularly. So do most of the bureau chiefs of the major news organizations—Mel Elfin of
Newsweek
, Hugh Sidey of
Time
, Jack Nelson of the
Los Angeles Times
, Jim Wieghart of the New York
Daily News
, Hedrick Smith of the
New York Times
, among others—and when they don’t feel like coming they send their staff members. (Women are allowed as substitutes, but there are only two female regulars; representatives of the wire services and of television are banned.) Breakfast costs six dollars per member.

The group meets with a guest two or three mornings a week at a long oval table in a banquet room of the Sheraton Carlton Hotel. Godfrey Sperling, bureau chief of the
Christian Science Monitor
, presides. At 8 a.m., he asks the first question. He also asks the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth questions. Then he calls on other members of the group. They ask questions. Sperling asks more questions. The guest answers the questions. At three minutes to nine, Sperling calls for “one last question.” Then he calls for “the final question.” Then he calls for “the final final question.” Just after 9 a.m., the breakfast ends. If something has happened at it, the reporters from the afternoon papers run for the phones. The rest walk back to their offices, comparing notes on what the story was, and complaining about the eggs.

Occasionally, major stories break at a Sperling Breakfast.
You’ve seen them: the second sentence of the article says, “So-and-so made these remarks at a breakfast with reporters.” Bobby Kennedy agonized over whether to run for President at a breakfast with reporters; Spiro Agnew called Hubert Humphrey “soft on Communism”; Earl Butz told a dirty joke about the Pope; John Rhodes suggested that Nixon might be impeached. The breakfast is also an ideal launching pad for trial balloons. In the last days of the Nixon administration, White House aide Patrick Buchanan used a breakfast to test the strategy of conceding the House of Representatives to pro-impeachment forces; by day’s end, the story was in the papers, along with negative responses from congressional leaders; Buchanan realized the approach wouldn’t work and junked it.

Most of the time, however, nothing happens at a Sperling Breakfast. This does not necessarily mean that no stories are written. For example, here is what happened the day Big Jim Thompson appeared:

Governor Thompson was asked what he thought of President Carter’s performance thus far. He said it was too soon to tell. He was asked about the future of the Republican party. He said that what the Republican party really needed was candidates who could win in 1978 and 1980. He was asked if he had the Presidential bug. “Sure,” he said, “there’s nothing new in that.” Toward the end of breakfast, Warren Weaver of the
New York Times
turned to Andrew Glass of the Cox newspapers. “This guy is very impressive,” he said.

Later in the day, I went to see Richard Dudman, bureau chief of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. “I got a story today,” he said. “I wrote that Governor Thompson met with the national press today and despite his disclaimers left no doubt that he’s already running for President.”

“What disclaimers?” I asked. “He admitted it. He has always admitted it.”

“I know it,” said Dudman. “I even called Springfield and they told me there’s nothing new in it. But it’s a story when he says it to us.”

“You have to understand something,” Jack Nelson of the
L.A. Times
said. “The first time Jimmy Carter was ever taken seriously in Washington was at a Sperling Breakfast.”

I think I understand: You cannot be taken seriously in Washington
until
you have done the Sperling Breakfast. The Sperling Breakfast is a screening committee. But I’m getting carried away.

On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Blumenthal came to the breakfast. He spoke of inflation, budget underruns and the New York financial mess. After breakfast, everyone agreed that he had performed well, and the reporters for afternoon papers ran for the phones. There would be front-page stories that afternoon and next morning. I walked over to the Treasury Building with Blumenthal’s press aide, Treasury Assistant Secretary Joseph Laitin. “The session served a useful purpose for Blumenthal,” Laitin said. “He wanted to talk to a cross section of the press to get a few things out. I didn’t feel we should have a press conference because television always dominates it. You also get everybody in town, and if you don’t produce eight-column headlines it’s a letdown. We had a standing invitation from the Sperling people, so I called up and said we’d like to accept. Now about what Blumenthal said—there wasn’t anything really new, yet it was important for these guys to hear it. All the financial reporters knew
about the underruns and they’ve written about them, but none of them has dramatized it. They will now. Why haven’t they before? Too unimaginative. Too lazy. Don’t have the time. It’s been out, but until now it hasn’t been packaged. That’s the word I want. Packaging.”

Bob Strauss loves doing the Sperling Breakfast. He did nine of them as Democratic national chairman, and he invited the entire group to his home for dinner the day the five hundredth breakfast was held. Then along came the six hundredth Sperling Breakfast, and Gerald Ford invited everyone to the White House. That seemed like only yesterday, and suddenly the seven hundredth breakfast rolled around, and the eight hundredth is coming up. The members are getting grouchy; the anniversaries are getting closer and closer together; there are more and more breakfasts. No one minds getting up for somebody interesting, but the other day the group was actually asked to turn up for Senator Alan Cranston. Alan Cranston, for God’s sake. The group has gotten too big; the group is too elite; the questions are too general; the questions are too specific. (The eggs are the only subject on which there is total agreement.) Even when Godfrey Sperling leaves town, the Sperling Breakfast goes on. Roscoe Drummond plays host, or Richard Strout. “It started out,” says one of the original members, “and practically every guest was somebody you really wanted to see. But somewhere along the line it all became a Godfrey Sperling Production. He felt an obligation to serve up two guests a week, three guests a week, four guests a week. You turn out a lot of crap that way. He was producing guys you could walk up to the Hill and call off the floor at any time.”

But I was talking about Bob Strauss, who loves doing the Sperling Breakfast. “I’ve grown very attached to it,” he says. “I’ll tell you why. I go in there with something to say and I say it. I bring in my medicine and I give it out. Some of them think it’s red medicine, and some of them think it’s blue medicine. But it tastes just fine.”

Whenever there is a Sperling Breakfast, an announcement appears on the Sheraton Carlton bulletin board.
BREAKFAST WITH GODFREY
, 8
A.M.
, it reads. This is extremely embarrassing to Godfrey Sperling—not the announcement, you must understand, but the reference to his first name. Godfrey Sperling is not known as Godfrey. He is known as Budge. “I have two older sisters,” he explained, “and they didn’t care for the name Godfrey, and they called me Brother. Don’t ask me how, but it became Budgie. I shortened it to Budge in college. The nice thing about the name Budge is it’s informal. I never have been Godfrey. The name’s been in my family and I use it as a by-line. But in my mind I’m always Budge Sperling.”

Sperling, sixty-one, is a pleasant, fussy man who looks like Elmer Fudd and indeed occasionally gives the impression of being thoroughly befuddled. Here, for example, is a question he asked Budget Director Lance at Friday’s breakfast: “Isn’t what you really mean is that you’re going to spend this defense money more slowly? Isn’t that what you mean? More slowly? Or is it less fastly? More slowly? You get me so doggone confused with all this. I’m just so doggone confused.” Budge Sperling really enjoys his breakfasts. “It’s a great help to me,” he says. “The self-interest just oozes in every direction.
But I’ve been engulfed by the thing. I can’t tell if I’m running it or it’s running me. This week I didn’t want five, but I must admit I can’t say no, I can’t say no. This is a sideline that occupies me, interests me, irritates me. Sometimes it takes me over. If anyone had said to me, the thing you’ll be remembered for is your breakfast group, I would have gone into another career. A breakfast group?”

I asked Sperling if he thought he was at all powerful. “Powerful?” he said. “I don’t know. That’s not Budge Sperling. It might be Godfrey Sperling, but not Budge. I have always felt that the Godfrey is too formal. It’s not me.”

In the course of a week, I heard a lot of things about the Sperling Breakfast. I was told that the whole purpose of the group was to promote peer approval and a feeling of joint accomplishment. I was told that the only reason anyone goes is for protection on those infrequent occasions when something interesting happens. I was even told that Godfrey Sperling had become so powerful he was dangerous. Well, I don’t buy it. I think no one gives the Sperling Breakfast the credit it deserves. It provides a way for our politicians to get out of bed and come to show their dependence on the press; the press responds graciously by passing on exactly what the politicians come in to say. It provides a way for our politicians to pay tribute to the role of the press in the electoral process; the press reciprocates by certifying the politicians as heavyweights and contenders. It provides a way for the out-of-power party to survive those long stretches between elections; right now, while the rest of us lie around playing Scrabble, the Sperling Breakfast
is doing its damnedest to find Republican candidates for 1980. It even seems possible to say that the Sperling Breakfast is single-handedly saving the two-party system in America. But I’m getting carried away.