The Boys on the Bus (17 page)

“Novak looks evil,” said a gentle, middle-aged
Times
man. “He can’t help it, poor fellow.”

“Do you think Novak’s going to land his ABM on McGovern in the first round, or wait?” one wire-service man asked another.

“There’s a real tight coil of bitterness in the guy,” said a magazine writer. “So much of what he writes and talks about in private tends to reinforce one impression: he’s against anything good-looking, anything fashionable, anything slick—and liberalism is fashionable in the circles he travels in. I think that’s why he’s down on it.”

The debate got under way and Novak hit both Humphrey
and McGovern with tough questions. As soon as the program ended, I found him and asked for an interview.
Rolling Stone
, I explained, was doing an article on the campaign press.

“No,” Novak frowned. “Your readers have never heard of me.”

“Well, that’s just the point,” I said. “We want to inform our readers.”

“No,” he said, already walking away. “
Rolling Stone
—that’s another world.”

Another world indeed. Novak had come back from serving in Korea and gone to the University of Illinois in Urbana on the GI Bill, and he considered a college education to be a sacred privilege. He could never accept the idea of students challenging a college administration. He could not stand student revolutionaries or even student activists. In one of their early columns, he and Evans had gone after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the radical civil rights group. “SNCC will never be the same after our columns,” Novak had proudly told a friend. So he certainly had no love for a magazine devoted to the counter culture.

Later in the year, at the Democratic Convention, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both of them stoned, walked up to Novak and threw their arms around him while a photographer friend of theirs took pictures.

“Leave me alone,” Novak barked. “Get away from me!”

Rubin planted a kiss on Novak’s cheek. “Unless you pose with us,” said Rubin, “we’ll endorse
your
candidate. We’ll endorse Richard Nixon!” Novak’s opinion of the counter culture sank to a new low.

In the early years, however, the column had not been altogether conservative. What had made it such a sensational success was its tantalizing unpredictability. It would contain inside stuff on everybody, no matter who was helped or hurt. Novak prided himself on being a maverick, a loner. He had, for instance, been a great friend of Lyndon Johnson’s. One night, several years before Johnson became President, Novak had taken Johnson home after a party. Johnson was blind drunk, and
as Novak steered him up to the door, Johnson drawled, “Bob, you know the trouble with you? I like
you
but you don’t like
me
.” Novak did like Johnson, but in later years he went out of his way to be tough on him. He knew that he was losing Johnson as a friend, that Johnson was beginning to say things like “I never have to be told when Bob Novak’s around, I can
smell
him.” But he didn’t let up. He was very hard on Johnson and very fair. Eventually he and Evans wrote
Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power
, probably the best book in print on the subject.

But Novak’s insistence on being apart from the crowd, said a friend, also drove him steadily to the right. During the Kennedy and Johnson years, it became smart and fashionable in Washington to be liberal. Attention was focused on the young. And the press community, especially, became actively interested in liberal causes. So Novak, the maverick, deliberately went off in the other direction. The leftist surges of 1968, and especially the campus movements, made him more and more reactionary. In his coverage of the battle for the Democratic nomination, he championed the old-guard party regulars, the more conservative the better. In breathless accounts of closed meetings and campaign infighting, he and Evans repeatedly depicted Muskie as a man in danger of being seduced by foolish liberal advisers. They applauded in November 1971, when “tough-minded” George Mitchell gained full political control of the Muskie campaign. “What makes this so important,” they wrote, “is that Mitchell, unlike other key Muskie advisers, regards the Senator as a centrist who must also reach out to the right.”

They were convinced that Muskie would win. Much more than Johnny Apple’s news accounts, their columns sensationalized and popularized the notion of the Muskie Bandwagon. They continually relied on old party regulars for their information, and this information repeatedly proved to be wrong. Here are some excerpts from their columns and their biweekly newsletter:

And so on. Their reliance on conservative sources among the party regulars and on their own prejudices queered their predictions again and again. Yet they continued to hand out subtle kudos to the conservative advisers in the Humphrey and Muskie camps and demerits to the liberal advisers; the conservatives
got complimentary adjectives like “splendid” and “tough-minded;” while the liberals were branded with pejorative modifiers.

They saved most of their venom for George McGovern, however. They called McGovern “the doyen of the Democratic Party’s left fringe.” They consistently played down his victories and scoffed at his candidacy. They delighted in quoting any party regular who portrayed McGovern as a hopelessly irresponsible radical. After McGovern’s Wisconsin victory, for instance, they wrote him off again and quoted a “powerful lieutenant” of Mayor Daley’s Chicago machine: “This McGovern’s going to have all those woolly heads around him. He might as well forget about the support of our kind of people.”

In July a divinity student named Peter McGrath wrote an article entitled “Why McGovern Can’t Win: Because Evans and Novak Won’t Let Him” for the
Chicago Journalism Review
. McGrath cited Evans’ and Novak’s record of downgrading, ridiculing and attacking McGovern and concluded that the two columnists did not “trust people who think that politics has a moral component.” But he didn’t mention the lowest blow of all, the Evans/Novak column that doomed McGovern in Omaha.

The column, which appeared on April 27, about two weeks before the Nebraska primary, was called “Behind Humphrey’s Surge.” Evans and Novak argued that Humphrey’s stock was soaring because “regular Democratic politicians” were desperate to stop McGovern and agreed that only Humphrey could do it. “They fear McGovern as the Democratic party’s Barry Goldwater,” the column said.

“The reason is given by one liberal senator, whose voting record differs little from McGovern’s,” they went on. “He feels McGovern’s surging popularity depends on public ignorance of his acknowledged public positions. ‘The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot,’ he told us. ‘Once middle America—Catholic middle America in particular—finds this out, he’s dead.’ ”

Now, this was simply wrong. These were not McGovern’s
“acknowledged public positions.” Evans and Novak must have known, if they read the newspapers, that although McGovern favored the granting of amnesty, he was against the legalization of marijuana and his stand on abortion was that it was not a question for the federal government to decide. Whoever the liberal Senator was, he had “long ago endorsed Muskie” and conceded that he would probably “end up backing Humphrey.”

In Ohio, Henry Jackson had thrown these hysteria issues at McGovern, and in Nebraska Humphrey began to use them, too. So the Evans/Novak column was a godsend for Humphrey. It was reprinted as part of an advertisement in a popular local Catholic weekly called
The True Voice
, reportedly at the expense of a Humphrey supporter. Omaha is a Catholic city and a lot of people there read
The True Voice
. The ad helped to kill McGovern in Omaha, and the only thing that saved the election for him was the vote of the farmers in outlying counties.

The McGovern people, naturally, weren’t happy about the column. “It was a cheap shot,” Dick Dougherty, a high-level staffer, said later. “Well, those guys have to write five columns every week, so I guess sometimes they sort of soup things up to get a good story.” In Omaha, Dougherty’s language had been stronger.

All through the primary campaigns, Evans and Novak kept insisting that blue-collar workers voted for McGovern in the primaries because of “faulty perceptions,” because they did not know that he was “radical” on issues like pot, abortion, and amnesty. Once they found out that he was a “radical,” said Evans and Novak, the blue-collar workers would repudiate him. McGovern’s disastrous defeat in November appeared to prove them right, but most evidence showed that the blue-collar people did not reject McGovern because they thought he was a “radical”; they voted against him because he looked like a chronic bumbler, which is quite another thing. Even if Evans and Novak were correct in claiming that the blue-collar workers had voted for McGovern in primaries because of “faulty
perceptions,” they never examined the crucial question: assuming that the blue-collar people did not know that McGovern was a “radical,” what
did
they think he was?

All the same, Evans and Novak were experienced political observers. Early in the year, they caught some of the serious flaws in McGovern’s candidacy—his faulty economic proposals, for instance, and his lack of rapport with the Democratic regulars. But instead of really examining these flaws, they used them vindictively, to prove that McGovern could not win the nomination.

In spite of their steady assault on McGovern, they kept insisting that they were straight reporters and had no conservative bias.

I made several appointments to see Rowland Evans at the Democratic Convention, but had to cancel all of them. Finally, it was arranged that I would phone him at 7:45 in the morning in his suite in the Eden Roc Hotel. “Jesus!” said the sleepy voice. “I’m completely fucked! I have to do two columns and a newsletter today.” The interview was short and none too snappy. I wanted to get his reaction to the
Chicago Journalism Review
article.

“I haven’t seen it,” he said, “but I absolutely disagree with any charge of bias in anything we’ve written about McGovern. I mean, I’ve been flabbergasted about the McGovern operation. I thought it was a joke. But we weren’t out to get him.”

Then what were they doing? Weren’t they conservatives?

“
Time
once called us ‘zealots of the Center,’ ” he said. “I don’t think that’s a bad description. No, I don’t think we’re conservative. I just think politics moved to the left in the last five years, since Vietnam began to warm up, and we stayed in the center.”

The next time I saw Robert Novak was also at the Democratic Convention. He was coming through the front door of the Fontainebleau Hotel to collect his rented car on the huge porte-cochere outside. “No. 5!” yelled the car jockey. Novak was
wearing wrinkled checkered pants, scuffed black buckle shoes and a seersucker jacket that was buttoned too tight over his pygmy belly. As he waited, he acknowledged hellos from passers-by. “Hi, Governor,” he said, nodding at an obscure Southern pol.

I went up and asked for an interview and this time he agreed to talk to me if I would drive with him to the Carillon, Humphrey’s headquarters. We slid into his green compact Olds and started inching up Collins Avenue, with the air conditioning going full blast. I asked him what he had thought of the
Chicago Journalism Review
piece.

“Well,” he said, “I thought obviously it was hostile. But take away the rhetoric and there was a kernel of truth. As he said, I
do
feel that the function of a political party is to win elections. If it can’t, it has ceased to serve its function. The Democratic party is in danger of becoming defunct in 1972. I feel most comfortable when there is very little difference between the parties. I don’t think the system works very well when there is a great difference, as in 1964. There were a lot of inaccuracies in that Chicago article. He claimed we said McGovern was an ideologue. We never said that. We said he was influenced by ideologues and in some instances bound by them.

“The article did make one point I will fully agree with: Just because we’ve criticized McGovern doesn’t mean we’re conservative. Eight years ago, no one would have called us conservative. The
National Review
denounced us because we were critical of Goldwater. I don’t think we’ve changed.