The Boys on the Bus (16 page)

While he worked a lot of beats he didn’t like—such as writing about the New York delegation in Congress for a couple of Newhouse papers in Syracuse, or covering the Pentagon—he kept scrambling for political assignments. In the summer of 1966, he hustled himself an assignment to travel with Nixon. It proved to be Witcover’s big break. One afternoon in Roanoke, Nixon gave him a long interview, which he turned into a piece for the
Saturday Evening Post
. It was the first article to treat Nixon as a serious contender for the 1968 Republican nomination, and it later made Witcover look very good.

After 1966 he began writing daily political pieces for Newhouse. He also wrote more magazine articles, to gain visibility,
and he finished his first book, a finely detailed account of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. The book made his reputation. A year later, the Los Angeles
Times
hired him as an assistant news editor. The paper had no national political correspondent. Within a year, he talked the bureau chief into creating the position for him. Witcover was delighted; he finally had the job he wanted on a major paper.

The Los Angeles
Times
was supposed to be among the best papers in America. It was often ranked third, after
The New York Times
and the Washington
Post
. It paid excellent salaries. But it was also a greedy paper which devoted far more space to advertising than to news. As a result the Los Angeles
Times
was rich; in 1972 it made about 42 million dollars after taxes. But the reporters and editors and bureau chiefs had to fight to get their stories into the tiny news-hole.

Witcover arrived while a complicated internal political battle was going on at the paper. One faction wanted to use the limited news space for more local coverage, and wanted the newspaper to be run tightly by the Los Angeles office. This faction was led by Frank Haven, the managing editor.

The other faction wanted the paper to emphasize national news and wanted less interference by the Los Angeles office. This faction included David Kraslow, the Washington Bureau chief, who had hired Witcover.

Haven’s faction slowly won out. Haven was a Pasadena WASP, very West Coast, who knew little about national politics. Haven kept asking the Washington Bureau for frivolous stories, or demanding major articles to be written in impossibly short amounts of time, or killing Washington articles to make room for Los Angeles news. Kraslow constantly fought these unrealistic moves. In April 1972, Kraslow was replaced by a Haven protégé, a bland company man named John Lawrence, who had no experience covering politics or government. It was a staggering blow to the people in the Washington Bureau. They feared that Haven, with his narrow, conservative Southern California mentality, would continue to push serious political
news out of the paper. According to his friends, Witcover was deeply shaken by the Kraslow firing, but not so shaken that he seriously considered leaving the paper. That decision was brought on by other indignities.

Several weeks after the Kraslow incident, Witcover arrived in California to cover the primary and was shocked to learn that he had been locked out. He was abruptly informed that two political reporters from the metropolitan staff—Richard Bergholz and Carl Greenberg—would cover the candidates. Haven wanted it this way. So Witcover knocked around for two weeks, chasing after a couple of secondary stories and writing two long analysis pieces that never got into the paper. The rest of the press corps were amazed at the stupidity of the Los Angeles
Times
. It was true that such jurisdictional disputes between metro and national staffs were common, even on
The New York Times
; these disputes were not unlike the feuding between state troopers and the FBI over a big case. But this was something special. For once, the whole press corps was camped out in California and had almost no choice but to read the Los Angeles
Times
(which was nearly impossible to find back in Washington). But, instead of exploiting this great opportunity to show off its star national political man, the
Times
gagged Witcover and gave the job to two reporters whom the press corps considered competent but hardly extraordinary. The whole fiasco made the paper look idiotic and drove Witcover further up the wall.

Witcover became increasingly frustrated as the campaign went on. The paper seemed less and less willing to make space for national news. But what pained Witcover the most was that the paper refused to allow him to analyze and interpret the news. He couldn’t understand this. It wasn’t as if he were some kind of wild-eyed advocacy journalist. In fact, he deplored the rise of advocacy journalism. He thought that too many of the young journalists who worked for the underground press were undisciplined, lazy, and irresponsible; they went into a story with a fixed point of view which prevented them from digging
and looking at all the facts: why find out anything that would contradict their prejudgment of the story? Witcover felt very strongly that the establishment papers had to combat this trend, and that the only way to compete with advocacy journalism was to provide interesting, compelling, responsible analysis based on a thorough review of the facts. If the establishment papers went back to the cut-and-dried formula stories of the forties, Witcover thought, they would bore everybody to death.

So Witcover kept writing meticulously fair analysis stories, and the
Times
kept balking. The biggest showdown came at the end of September over a story on Nixon’s non-campaign. As the weeks went by and Nixon kept refusing to face the public, Witcover knew that he would have to write a story about it, pointing out the injustice of a one-candidate campaign. After all, he had slapped McGovern for trying to avoid newsmen. But he kept putting the article off, waiting for a news “hook” that would allow him to write that story in a way that wouldn’t offend the
Times
. Finally, at the end of September, McGovern solved the problem for him. Addressing a conference of UPI editors, McGovern accused the press of failing to meet its responsibilities by not forcing Nixon to answer questions on the issues and by not pointing out that Nixon was refusing to face reporters, while he, McGovern, was running an open campaign. It was up to the press, said McGovern, to restore some balance to the campaign.

So Witcover began his story by quoting McGovern’s accusations. While McGovern’s argument was self-serving, wrote Witcover, it did point up a serious problem: how could the press provide balanced coverage when only one candidate was campaigning? Of course, Witcover went on, the President did have some legitimate reasons for not campaigning—for instance, the risk of assassination, the fact that Congress was still in session.

But then Witcover pointed out the dangers of a lopsided campaign. The public needed a chance to see both candidates questioned on the issues. When only one man campaigned, the whole system was undermined.

Finally, Witcover concluded that although the President might have real reasons for not going out on the stump, he could still hold a press conference in the safety of the White House and answer political questions, something the President had refused to do at the few news conferences he had held earlier in the year.

Witcover, who was by now paranoid about the
Times’
attitude toward analysis stories, showed the Nixon story to several of his friends on the bus and asked them if he was going “too far.” All of them found the story very mild. Walter Mears said that with a few minor changes in form, he could have put the story on the AP wire with no difficulty. Bill Greider of the Washington
Post
could not imagine why Witcover was so worried.

The editors in Los Angeles killed the story. They told Witcover that it didn’t “come off” and that it was an “opinion” story. Witcover couldn’t believe it. He felt that the story was a classic example of the difference between analysis and opinion. He had marshaled all the facts, and drawn his conclusion solely from them. But the editors couldn’t see it. Witcover, who was covering McGovern in New York, had long arguments with them over Long Distance. The solution was simple, they told him. All he had to do was get other people to make the same points and draw the same conclusions and then write the article
in their words
. Yes, said Witcover, but that was
reporting
, not
analysis
. It wouldn’t have the same impact as an analysis article. The editors asked him again to do it over. He refused. Didn’t they see? The piece might be no good in two or three days. The piece was important
now
.

The very next day, Nixon held a press conference at which he answered political questions. One of the main reasons for Nixon’s decision to hold a press conference was an analysis piece by David Broder—similar to Witcover’s but much tougher—which had appeared four days before. Witcover was now even more miserable, because he knew that both he and the
Times
would have looked very good if his piece had run on the eve of the press conference.

After the fight over the Nixon story, Witcover knew that he would have to leave the Los Angeles
Times
. “I can’t stand this much longer,” he told his friends. “I’m going crazy.” During the Republican Convention, Witcover had been approached with a job offer from the Washington
Post
. He told them that he felt he had a commitment to stay at the
Times
through the end of the campaign; he had helped to plan the campaign coverage, after all, and there were still a few stories he hoped to do. But when the
Post
made him an offer shortly after the election, he accepted.

On January 1, 1973, he joined the
Post
’s national staff. His friends knew exactly why he had made the move. “There wasn’t a rat’s ass of difference in the money,” one of them said, “but the
Post
is a reporters’ paper. They give you freedom there, they give you leeway, and Jules would have been a fool not to move.”

But the editors of the Los Angeles
Times
never quite understood why they had lost Jules Witcover.

From their office a block from the White House, Rowland Evans, Jr., and Robert D. Novak wrote what was probably the best-read column in America—five times a week it ran in nearly three hundred newspapers here and abroad. Unlike most columnists, they didn’t write “think pieces.” They wrote “dope pieces,” inside information on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Of course, it was close to impossible to dig up sufficient inside dope to make five significant pieces a week. So they were part-time hoke artists. They would take a small incident (which they and they alone had discovered by prodigious digging) and they would blow it up into a campaign crisis. Or they would inflate a small remark into a trend. They claimed to be straight reporters with no ax to grind. Which was ridiculous. Their columns
were consistently distorted by their conservative bias.

Evans and Novak made an odd couple. “Rowley” Evans was the gregarious, flesh-pressing member of the team—a smooth, well-connected aristocrat from Philadelphia’s Main Line who still talked with a slight case of prep school drawl. A Yale classmate of Mayor John Lindsay’s, he was small and lean and still looked like an Ivy Leaguer in his crisp, pin-striped shirts and conservative suits. “For the last fifteen years, Rowley has looked forty-two and just blond enough,” said a veteran Washington reporter. “And he’s still a Dewey Republican.”

He fought with the Marines in World War II, started in journalism as a fifteen-dollar-a-week copy boy on the Philadelphia
Bulletin
, and got to know the Washington scene by covering labor and the Senate for the AP. In 1956, he moved to the
Herald-Tribune
’s Washington Bureau. His career took off four years later when Jack Kennedy became President. Evans, Charles Bartlett, and a few other preppy reporters were old buddies of Kennedy’s, neighbors of his in Georgetown when he was in the Senate, and suddenly they were in the center of things. Their people were running the government. They knew everyone at the White House on a first-name basis. Suddenly Charlie Bartlett of the Chattanooga
Times
had a syndicated column, and Jock Whitney, the
Tribune
’s publisher, was offering Evans a column too. Evans realized that he couldn’t handle a five-day-a-week column by himself, so he invited Novak to be his partner.

Novak had come up via the AP route, working in Nebraska and Indiana before moving to Washington. As a young reporter at
The Wall Street Journals
Washington Bureau, he had quickly earned a reputation for being one of the great political reporters. The two began their column in May 1963. “We had never been social or personal friends,” said Novak, “but Evans respected me as a reporter.”

The general consensus of the press corps was that Evans was the lightweight of the team. Reporters saw him as the one who kept up the Georgetown contacts and peddled the column to
newspaper publishers around the country: He was not exactly stupid, but, well, he was just not that sharp. Which was probably unfair to Evans. It was just that Novak was so highly regarded. Novak might have been a little short on warmth and general humanity, but he was considered a great notebook and shoe-leather journalist, an incredibly hard-working man, almost a machine, who always seemed to know which lobbyist was with which Senator in which hotel room. During his days on
The Wall Street Journal
, he had become almost a legend, and his knowledge of politics was still widely respected.

I saw Novak for the first time on the night of the second California debate. The debate was taking place live on NBC’s
Meet the Press
, and Novak was one of the four reporters who had been chosen to fire questions at Humphrey and McGovern. About a hundred reporters had gathered on the cavernous, klieg-lit sound stage in NBC’s Burbank studio to witness the event, and they were making a party of it—waving, backslap-ping, telling stories, laughing. But Novak was standing off by himself. He was short and squat, with swarthy skin, dark grey hair, a slightly rumpled suit, and an apparently permanent scowl. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor. Some of the other reporters pointed him out and whispered about him almost as if he were a cop come to shush up a good party.