The Boys on the Bus (14 page)

Broder did not like anyone telling him what to write, including politicians. He was fully aware of the “mutual manipulation process that goes on constantly” between reporters and politicians, but while he accepted this as a fact of life, he himself was extremely wary of being used.

A professional political hustler, a man whose livelihood often depended on his success at “planting” stories, said: “You can’t feed a story to Broder. If you call him up with a tout, he’s insulted, he usually won’t use it. He likes to find things out for himself. And he doesn’t like to just
break
a story, he likes to look
at the story and see what it means.” Even when Nixon handed him the Agnew plant, Broder treated it as if it were a package that ticked and refused to make much out of it.

Of course, Broder was far from infallible. In fact, it was Broder’s fallibility that led Hunter Thompson, the iconoclastic
Rolling Stone
reporter, and myself to visit him at the
Post
on one tropical afternoon in June 1972. Thompson wanted to collect on a couple of bets. In Wisconsin, Broder had bet him a hundred dollars that McGovern would do better than 30 percent in the primary and another hundred that Wallace would get under 10 percent. He lost on both counts. McGovern did exactly 30 percent, not a hair better; and Wallace came in at 22 percent. Thompson immediately announced in his column that he meant to “hunt the bastard down and rip his teeth out if he tries to welsh,” which may have accounted for the long silence from Broder.

Then Broder suddenly came out of his cave and offered to go for double or nothing. Humphrey, he said, would win in California. That scared the hell out of Thompson, but he took the bet. Thompson kept the bet a secret, though. He was afraid that if the rest of the press found out that Super-Wizard David Broder had money on Humphrey, they might start predicting a Humphrey victory and thereby give his failing campaign a last-minute lift.

After June 6, Thompson started looking for Broder and his four hundred dollars. Two weeks later, Thompson finally ran into Broder at a McGovern Victory Party in New York, at which time Broder hastily offered to make out on IOU on a napkin. But Thompson had a head full of mescaline and was in no condition to conduct serious business, so he put it off. By the time we showed up at the
Post
, Thompson was beginning to be troubled by guilt feelings about taking Broder’s money.

Broder was standing in his shirt-sleeves by his grey metal desk in the
Post
’s brand new, flourescent-lit, morgue-like city room.
“Here come the
Rolling Stone
boys,” he said with a big grin. He immediately proposed a new, astounding, double-or-nothing offer: Jules Witcover would run a foot-race with Jack Germond in the sand of Miami Beach. Broder was backing Germond.

Since Witcover’s legs were twice as long as Germond’s, Thompson agreed to the bet—on the condition that he could run a urinalysis on Germond. Broder accepted.
^‖
They shook hands on it. Then, like a couple of sports in a Canadian Club ad, we asked Broder out for drinks. He looked skeptical. It was three in the afternoon. But he straightened his tie, got his suit jacket, and we set off for the dining room of the Pick Lee Hotel, a few doors up from the
Post
The dining room was closed, so we headed up the street to the next bar in sight, the New York Lounge. It was greatly to Broder’s credit that he didn’t flinch as we entered the place, which I later found out had been taken over by the
Post
’s linotypists. The reporters had their five o’clock beers a couple of doors up, at the more respectable Post Bar. The New York Lounge was a grimy one-room affair, dark enough to suggest that no light bulbs had been changed since the fifties. There was a jukebox at the back, playing Smokey Robinson tunes, and a woman bartender named Lou behind the bar. We sat down in a rear booth, avoiding the part of the seat where the spring was coming through. Thompson put in a complicated order of Margaritas and beer, I ordered Scotch, and Broder asked for a Coke. An extremely disciplined man, he never smoked and hardly ever took a hard drink; his only vice was chewing his fingernails. I switched on the Sony, and Thompson and I began to probe the sensitive subject of fallibility in political journalism.

“I will now be an old fart for one minute,” Broder said cheerfully, “and tell you that the most distressing thing about covering politics is that the guy who was absolutely right, whose wisdom was almost breathtaking one election year—you go back to that same man for wisdom some other year and he’ll be as dumb as dogshit. That’s why it’s not a science. You can say, ‘In 1968, I learned the following key lessons, which I’m going to write down in the front of my notebook and look at them twice a day all through 1972’—and you’ll get absolutely deceived by doing that.”

Which was true; anyone who tried to apply old lessons to 1972 would have looked hopelessly bad. Broder had tried to avoid the trap of fighting the last war, but he had gone astray nonetheless in 1971 and early ’72. He had devoted a lot of space to Muskie (always with the caveat that it was nonsense to consider the contest locked up), he had spent no less than ten days researching and writing an exhaustive article on the Birch Bayh machine, and he had generally slighted the candidacy of George McGovern. We kept asking Broder where he had gone wrong, and whether it had been possible for even the wisest of men to foresee the situation this year.

“The one thing I’ll say in my defense,” said Broder, “is that I repeatedly wrote, ‘Front runner is a meaningless term.’ There’s a lawyer named Milt Gwirtzman who works for McGovern, and I keep cribbing his laws of politics, and his first law of Presidential politics is that nothing that happens before the first Presidential primary really has any relevance at all. So those three years are a very artificial environment.

“They’re campaigning for us and putting on parades for us in the press, they’re putting on shows for other politicians; it has very little to do with the voters. A good case could be made that we shouldn’t say anything about them at all, except that’s an impossible rule to follow in this town because the appetite for politics is continuous. Also you want some sense of the evolution of these guys as personalities. But no matter how you play it, you’re going to end up with a rather low yield of significant information in an odd-numbered year.

“I was very proud of that piece I did on how Birch Bayh, who seemed to have no following at all in the country, had nonetheless assembled this marvelous machine. Turns out I should have been looking at McGovern—bad judgment on my part. But I’m damned if I can tell you even in retrospect how I should have known at that point.”

We nodded and asked Broder how any of us was supposed to know a year ahead that, for instance, a twenty-six-year-old kid named Gene Pokorny was already nailing down Wisconsin for McGovern. Did the press miss the McGovern story, or was it even there to get?

“Oh, yeah,” said Broder, “I knew that Pokorny was there and I knew he was making lists, but he was one of twelve guys in twelve different Presidential camps who was busy, busy, busy making lists. As it turned out,
his
lists were made up of people who honest-to-god when the time came were ready to go to work, and the others weren’t.

“That’s why this all may be unknowable in advance. I went back over my notes from New Hampshire, and I had all this stuff about the Muskie organization in the fall of 1971. They had this very clear organization: they would have two thousand volunteers signed up by December 15, and they would do a sample run-through on this date and so on, and all of it was beautiful on paper. It was not until you came to the first of February and it was evident by even the most simple kind of check that
no
canvassing had been done for Muskie, that you began to be able to say, ‘This is a facade.’ ”

Which was pretty nearly what Broder had said in a piece in late February. Broder and several other
Post
reporters had gone from door to door in several New Hampshire precincts, conducting a private canvass. They found far fewer Muskie voters than they had expected. The resulting article was the first to question Muskie’s strength, and it had an enormous impact on the other reporters in New Hampshire, who immediately began to doubt the myth of the Muskie juggernaut. The article also infuriated the Muskie people, who were not yet
admitting to themselves that their organization was a paper tiger. On the morning the piece hit the stands, Broder received three irate phone calls from Muskie people in Washington before he even got out of bed.

“I think,” said Broder, “that it would have been useful for me to get out of Washington more. The Pokorny thing for instance. I ran into Pokorny at a picnic with a bunch of liberal friends of mine in Austin, Texas—I was there with Harold Hughes on one of his exploratory swings. And there was this strange Gene Pokorny in May of 1971, and he had flown in that day, and he and some of these crazy Travis County liberals were busy plotting about precinct caucuses a year from then. But what never crossed my mind was that their people really had a commitment to do some work and that George McGovern had a potential of developing a constituency beyond those five or ten thousand people who were obviously involved.”

Misjudging McGovern was one mistake that Broder continued to make, which was why he was willing to put big money on Humphrey in California. He still hadn’t adjusted to the new political situation. He figured that Humphrey would have his first big Jewish vote in California, his first big black vote there, plus a big last-ditch effort by labor. And he was right about all that (with the possible exception of labor). “Now, where I was wrong,” he said ruefully, as he continued to nurse his Coke, “and where I have been consistently wrong all year, was in sort of underestimating the ability of the McGovern people to maximize McGovern’s assets.”

His wrong-headedness on this point often smacked of righteousness. He repeatedly indicated in his writing that he was afraid the McGovern delegates wouldn’t be housebroken. It was the “Breaking of the President” piece all over again. In his column of June 20, he cited several examples of McGovern delegates misbehaving at state caucuses. (Except for pushing through a resolution sanctioning homosexual marriage, the delegates didn’t do anything Richard Daley hadn’t been doing for forty years.) Broder wrote:

“As word of these and similar incidents in recent weeks has filtered back to Washington, a shudder of apprehension has gone through Democratic ranks. For the first time, there is beginning to be widespread concern that the Miami Beach convention hall may prove to be the disaster for the Democrats that the San Francisco Cow Palace was for the GOP in 1964.” Of course, it turned out to be the best-behaved Convention in history.

Broder was looking at his watch more and more frequently in the dim barroom light. Thompson was trying to catch the waitress’s eye to order two more beers for himself. Our clothes were beginning to stick to the vinyl upholstery in the heat. So, while Thompson finally tore out of his seat to head off the waitress, I finished up the interview by asking Broder what changes he would like to see made in political journalism.

First, he said, the press was still using very primitive means to “gauge and describe the dynamics of public opinion.” He liked the fact that the
Times
and the
Post
had both hired pollsters to help them out in 1972. Later in that year, he and Haynes Johnson, another
Post
reporter, would travel across America interviewing voters to see how they felt about the candidates and the major issues.

At the same time, Broder was not going out into the field simply to “make a special effort to understand Middle America,” as Joe Kraft had advised the press to do in a famous article in 1968. “I disagreed strongly with that piece of Kraft’s and do so now,” he said. “I think what he did in that piece was to manage to suggest that somehow the limits of what we did as reporters ought to be defined by what was acceptable to the society in which we were operating, and that we ought to be very careful about our role. Well, if you begin to play that game, then you’re in serious trouble. I think you define your role as a reporter in terms of what you understand the role of a reporter to be. And if that incurs a degree of popular wrath, then that’s just a consequence of it.

“But I think that in 1968, we did begin to do what we should
have been doing for years, which is to talk about what we think the role of the press is. And that’s something that we still have barely begun to do. The basic point that we have never gotten across is that the Presidential campaign is not the property of the two candidates. It ought to belong, in some real sense, to the public. It’s the only change every four years when they ought to be able to get
their
questions answered, and get the kind of commitments that
they’re
interested in from these candidates.

“The second thing that interests me,” Broder went on, “is the suggestion that you’re getting now from some social scientists and psychohistorians that the press ought to look much more seriously at its role as the chronicler of critical incidents that shape the personality of these men who are running for President, instead of just sort of doing canned feature stories about these guys. But I don’t want to go too far in that, because I’m mortally afraid of unleashing a bunch of newspapermen who would fancy themselves as amateur psychiatrists.” (Later, in the summer of 1972, the
Post
would assign a reporter named Bill Greider to cover George McGovern, and he would provide the most sensitive running portrait of McGovern’s personality of any journalist on the plane.)

Broder was down to the dregs of his Coke.

“The third area in which I think we still do kind of a poor job is
institutional
reporting,” he said. “The story always tends to be this-guy-versus-that-guy, instead of the development and change of an institution. That the story may not be personal combat but the development and change of an institution is a notion that’s very hard to get into the heads of newspaper people. Because they want to know ‘What’s the lead?’ But you could look at the Democratic party, the majority party in the country, and what has happened to it—and not just Fred-Harris-out, Larry-O’Brien-in, or McGovern-versus-Muskie. And maybe McGovern wouldn’t have surprised us if we’d done that.”