The Boys on the Bus (13 page)

At least, that’s what he said he screamed. Some witnesses claimed that he quit on the spot, but Apple denied it. “I had a cow, to say the least,” he chuckled over Long Distance when I called to ask about the incident. “But I didn’t resign. I only said I was going to resign. The whole incident was over within an hour because I had to get the hell to work on the next day’s story. Gene Roberts, the national editor, got on the phone to New York. He was extremely angry and felt that we had been ahead on the parliamentary story; we had far more on the maneuvering than anyone else, and then, when the denouement arrived, they cut us off. They had no reason for doing it, no matter what the reason was.”

It was rumored that the New York editors had killed Apple’s story when they saw Walter Cronkite saying that the South Carolina vote marked a defeat for McGovern, that they had chosen to believe Cronkite over Apple. Everyone at the
Times
denied this, including Apple. “No,” he said, “somehow one of the editors decided we didn’t need any additional information to that in Max’s story. Or that it didn’t fit with what I had written before. He took one or two paragraphs out of mine and slapped them way down in Max’s story.”

In the end, the editors retooled Apple’s story and ran it a day late, but it is difficult to measure the long-range effect of the whole explosion. Apple had reached the higher echelons of the
Times
, where politics is practiced almost as much as journalism, and the South Carolina incident occurred just as he was jockeying for the position of Washington Bureau chief. Max Frankel was getting a promotion, and the job was up for grabs. During June and July, Apple’s hair was short and neat. He had got a haircut, it was said, to show the Powers in New York that he was just as clean-cut as Anthony Lewis (London Bureau chief and columnist), Robert Semple (White House correspondent), and Hedrick Smith (Moscow Bureau chief), who were also supposed to be contenders for the prize.

But when Apple showed up in August for the Republican Convention, his prematurely grey hair again flopped over his ears and crawled down the back of his neck. The night before the Convention, he was hopping around the Poodle Room in the Fontainbleau, a dark and noisy bar where middle-aged hookers hustled overweight Babbitts from Midwestern delegations.

“You’re going hip,” I said. “You’ve turned into a goddam longhair.”

“Come on,” he said, genuinely insulted. “You know my hair’s always been long.”

A young
Times
man wandered up and began to make in-jokes about internal politics on the paper. All
Times-
like propriety had dissolved many drinks ago.

“Hey,” the young
Times
man needled Apple, “too bad about the Washington Bureau. What are you gonna do now?”

Everybody thought at this time that the fix was in for Anthony Lewis to be the new chief. The job actually went to Clifton Daniel in a surprise move several weeks later.

“Same thing I’ve been doing all along—I’m just a reporter,” Apple said with his best country-boy smile.

“Come on.”

“Naw,” said Apple, “I never expected them to consider me seriously for the job.”

“You know you wanted it.”

Apple shrugged the way Rocky used to shrug when pressed about his Presidential aspirations. “Do I
look
like a Washington Bureau chief of
The New York Times?
” he asked rhetorically. And he flashed a big What-Me-Worry? smile. He had not watched a hundred concession speeches without learning a few tricks of the trade.

The high priest of political journalism, the most powerful and respected man in the trade, was David Broder. He was Johnny Apple’s counterpart—national political correspondent—on the Washington
Post
, a paper which vies with the
Times
to give the best political coverage in the country. Since the
Post
is located in a city which has an almost insatiable hunger for political news, it devotes an enormous amount of space to politics, and its coverage is often more thorough and colorful than that of the
Times
. The
Post
’s only competition in the Capital is the Washington
Star-News
—a decidedly parochial paper that often ends up losing its best political writers to the
Post
. The
Post
is a great national newspaper, and a permanent berth on its national staff is enough to give clout to any reporter. But Broder’s reputation transcends even the prestige of the
Post
. If he were to quit tomorrow and begin publishing a mimeographed tip sheet in his basement, Broder would still probably wield the kind of influence that can change campaigns in their course and other reporters in their opinions. “Broder’s the mark,” said another reporter. “You have to measure your own stuff against what he writes. He’s also the target, and you always find things in his
articles to tear apart. But at the end of a year, when you look at his total output, he’s always given the best picture of what happened.”

Many of the reporters on the press bus believed that in 1968 Broder divined, through some dark kind of journalistic voodoo, that Nixon would choose Spiro T. Agnew as his running mate. As a result they saw Broder, and sometimes venerated him, as a certified oracle. The Agnew story hardly ever failed to come up when Broder was introduced, and it had probably done more than anything else to enhance his reputation. Broder enjoyed exploding the myth.

“That story of mine was a plant,” he said with a laugh when I asked him about it.

“A plant?” I said incredulously. “From whom?”

“From Nixon!” said Broder, as if he still couldn’t believe it himself. “We were on a plane flying from Pendleton to Portland, Oregon, and Nixon sent somebody back to the press section to get me to come up and talk to him, and in about two minutes’ time he had gone from the fact that he was confident of Oregon, to the fact that Oregon would cinch him the nomination, to the fact that he was now thinking seriously about what kind of person should be his Vice Presidential running mate. He threw out a couple of obvious names that you would have to think about, and then he said, ‘What would be the reaction to Ted Agnew, what kind of a reputation does he have among the reporters?’

“And so we talked about Agnew, and Nixon said, ‘You know, he’s quite an urban expert, he was a county executive, he’s a lawyer,’ and I said, ‘OK. I’m beginning to get the message.’ ”

High up in his subsequent story, Broder mentioned the Agnew possibility, wrapping it in many qualifications. “I wrote it in May, and promptly forgot about it. It never crossed my mind again that it was a serious prospect, and I was as astonished as everyone in that Convention when it came to pass. But out of that, I’ve become ‘a great confidant of Richard Nixon’s’ and ‘the only reporter who knew he was going to pick Agnew.’ ”

With his short, greying hair, his horn-rims, and his unhurried, straight-necked, dignified walk, Broder has the look of the youngest full professor on the faculty of M.I.T. Indeed, the columns which he frequently writes for the
Post
’s Op-Ed page often have a slightly professorial tone, as if he were giving a civics lecture. Unlike most political journalists, Broder has a philosophy, even a passion; he believes that the two-party system will save America. He admits that the two parties have shattered and rotted, but he wants to see them repaired. He believes in the system as it is outlined in the civics books and he wants to see it work. The alternative, he fears, is “the rule of the streets” and “confrontation politics, with its constant threat of violence and repression.”

The son of a dentist, Broder grew up in Chicago Heights, Illinois, in a family that supported Roosevelt and constantly talked politics at the dinner table. He broke into journalism at the age of ten, when a friend got a hectograph machine for Christmas, and they began publishing a weekly sheet and peddling it around the neighborhood. After that, Broder never wanted to be anything but a journalist.

Broder acquired most of his political theory from a couple of left-leaning professors at the University of Chicago, who impressed on him the role of the state in creating the good life for individuals. But his first practical lessons in politics came from running the campus newspaper. Broder had entered college a couple of years after World War II, at a time when the Communist party was trying to take over student organizations. He was a leader of the liberal faction of student journalists that eventually beat out the Communist faction in a bloodless political battle for control of the paper. “Both sides used the classic tactics,” he said. “Come early, stay late, vote often, pack the staff with your people, and always find an acceptable stooge to front for you. We had some incredible goddam fights. You even had to worry about the political affiliation of the guy who was taking the paper down to the print shop on any given night, because if he was on the other side he damn well might rewrite
a lead or a headline to get the party line into the paper.” Broder carried away from college both a fascination for the nuts and bolts of political organization and a strong distaste for political groups which tried to subvert the system.

After serving in the Army, he made a rapid rise as a political reporter, working first for the Bloomington (Ill.)
Pantograph
, then moving to Washington in 1955 to write for the
Congressional Quarterly
, then going to the Washington
Star
. In 1965, when Johnny Apple was still a Statehouse reporter,
The New York Times
hired Broder as its national political reporter; he resigned a year and a half later, having run into irreconcilable differences with the national desk. The
Post
immediately grabbed him as its national political man.

As he rose from job to job, Broder kept adding to his list of contacts; by the early sixties, he seemed to know every politician, county chairman, and legislative aide in America. His fascination with the machinery of politics continued to grow as he came to know it more intimately. For instance, no story intrigued him more than the way in which Richard Nixon set out to rebuild the fractured Republican party, and his own political career, in 1966. Broder’s coverage reflected his awe for Nixon’s impeccable professionalism.

In 1967, Broder flatly stated that Eugene McCarthy could not topple an incumbent President. As the antiwar movement grew, Broder first underrated its strength and then attacked it as a threat to the system. In the fall of 1969, while he was a Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Broder filed his now-famous “Breaking of the President” column. Broder accused the Vietnam Moratorium Committee of trying to destroy Nixon just to prove that it could. “There is no great trick in using the Vietnam issue to break another President,” he wrote. “But when you have broken the President, you have broken the one man who can negotiate the peace.” There was an immediate uproar. While the Republicans happily distributed copies of the article, protests poured in from antiwar leaders, and the graduate students in Broder’s seminar insisted
on hotly discussing the article for the whole first half of the semester.

At these discussions, Broder realized that he still really believed that “our party system was an exquisitely tuned mechanism, designed to deal with the regional, economic and political differences in a continent-sized democracy.” He didn’t wish to see that system damaged. He admitted that his was “essentially a very status quo view.” And he began to see, for the first time, that there was a widespread disaffection with conventional politics throughout the country. But when he finished his year at Harvard, Broder wrote a book,
The Party’s Over
, in which he argued that the cure for this massive disaffection was to reform and revive the two parties so that the system would work well again.

Most of Broder’s colleagues felt that his hope for a revival of two well-disciplined parties, each with leaders committed to clearly delineated programs, was a pipe dream. Some felt that Broder’s understanding of politics was narrow and mechanical, and that his fear of change, conflict and disorder continued to blind him to the broad political upheavals that were taking place outside of Washington. Saul Friedman, a political writer for Knight Newspapers who had covered the civil rights and antiwar movements through much of the sixties, had even written a rebuttal to Broder’s “Breaking of the President” piece back in 1969. “Like many who are close to the people and processes of the American political system,” wrote Friedman, “Broder knows and loves it best when it operates with undisturbed beauty. He is really concerned, I think, not only that the process is now being disturbed but that the disturbance comes from outsiders who do not practice politics for its own sake.” Friedman felt that this still held true in 1972.

Of course, in his tendency to focus on old-fashioned party politics instead of new movements, Broder was no different from 95 percent of the political reporters in Washington. The difference was that he had more contacts than the rest and often had a quicker sense of what was happening in the arena.
He was also one of the few reporters in town with a clearly defined philosophy, which, if it limited his view, also gave his columns a coherency and helped him to put the crazy happenings of an election year into clear perspective.

Above all, Broder was a man who knew what he wanted. He wanted freedom to write about what he felt were the important stories and to supply the background and analysis necessary for understanding these stories. Broder had left the
Times
in 1966 partly because the editors in New York restricted his turf, not allowing him to cover stories in the New York area. But, as Gay Talese wrote in
The Kingdom and the Power
, Broder also “chafed repeatedly at the … general tendency in New York to overplay news stories with big names and to underplay trend stories or stories of a more analytical character.” In a memo Broder sent to the managing editor after resigning, he complained that the editors favored political stories about extremists, about political action by Southern Negroes, and about the Kennedys. “These may be the grist of political talk at New York cocktail parties,” he added, “but, as you know, they do not begin to embrace the variety of concerns that really animates national politics.” Time and again, Broder’s beloved analysis stories had been tampered with, killed, or held until they were stale, usually because of bureaucratic snafus. At the
Post
, Broder was largely free of these frustrations, free to travel where he wanted, write as he pleased, and to suggest and carry out innovations in the paper’s political coverage.