The Boys on the Bus (19 page)

After finishing the two-party system survey with Broder, Johnson worked with a
Post
reporter named Nick Kotz on another long series about the American Labor Movement. He did not catch up with the primaries until late in the spring, and when he did, the prevailing mood he found was one of total apathy. “Despite all this collective political sound and fury, or perhaps because of it, this campaign is characterized by public indifference,” he wrote during the California primary. “You cannot travel across California today without being struck by the lack of emotion being generated by the politicians.”

On the few occasions when he appeared on the press bus, Johnson was not exactly everybody’s favorite reporter. No doubt this was partly because he gave the lie to the fuss that the rest of the press was making over the primaries; he was telling them that the public didn’t care. But many reporters who had known Johnson for years quite sincerely regarded him as a pompous, conceited stuffed shirt. Resentment of Johnson reached a peak on the night of George McGovern’s nomination, when Johnson somehow became the only daily reporter allowed to stay in McGovern’s suite throughout the evening. There was some bitter talk of Johnson’s being an “ass-kisser.”

While most reporters were impressed with the series Johnson had written with Broder in December 1971, they did not think so highly of the series that came out in October 1972.

Broder helped to research the October series, but it was written almost entirely by Johnson, and most of the men in the press corps found it interminable and dull. There were long articles on the Labor Vote, the Catholic Vote, the Old Vote, the Youth Vote, and on and on. Many reporters felt that the series simply belabored the obvious—Nixon was not beloved but held a commanding lead nevertheless; America’s young people were not going to vote as a radical monolith; the nation was unhappy and
distrustful of politicians. “He tells me what’s happening, but he can’t explain it,” said one national political reporter of the Johnson series. “I don’t know whether the whole series is worth it. It’s a tremendous commitment of money, it’s very expensive to do. It took most of the important guys on their national staff a couple of weeks to do the interviews, and what did they get out of it? A series of blockbusters that nobody’s reading. I can’t get through it. My friends can’t get through it. We all care about that stuff, but I don’t know anybody on the bus who’s reading it all the way through. So if the press isn’t reading it, who the hell
is
reading it? When that first survey came out in 1970, I thought it was just pseudo-sociology. Then I thought that the survey in 1971 made a real contribution. Now I’ve begun to wonder again.”

Many reporters felt that Johnson had begun to parody himself and that his pieces were becoming fatuous. On the night George McGovern lost the election, a bunch of half-drunk campaign reporters at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn ripped Haynes Johnson’s election night wrap-up off the wire machine. One of them read it out loud while the others laughed. It seemed to crown the dismal inevitability of the whole thing. “Once every four years,” the piece went, “the American past and present come together. Last night, as always on these occasions, the voters gave their quick, clear and overwhelming verdict on the direction of the American future. It is to be, after all, four more years.”

“Jesus,” said one of the reporters. “The same Haynes Johnson piece I’ve been reading for three years. I could have written it myself, word for word.”

There was some jealousy in this, but also some truth. Much of Johnson’s writing in the fall had been long and dull. But it was also true that the country, in the fall of 1972, was in a dull, passive, contrary and confused mood, and to turn such a mood into interesting reading was close to impossible. Had the election been a cliff-hanger, Johnson’s pieces might well have been fascinating. At any rate, it was his specialty and he was not about
to give it up. It was more expensive and less fun than following a candidate around with the rest of the pack, but it was the only way to draw any useful conclusions from the chaos of an election year. No doubt the
Post
would remain in the vanguard of “Mood of America” coverage until an exciting election came along to make the technique look appealing. Then the rest of the press would follow.

In 1972,
Time
magazine had 4,250,000 paying readers.
Newsweek
had 2,625,091.

Time
and
Newsweek
might have looked alike, read alike, and had the same people on the cover week after week. But there was one crucial difference: 1,624,909 readers. Given that monstrous gap to close,
Newsweek
ran a relatively lean, we-try-harder, underdog operation. And
Time
, home free in the circulation race, fairly reeked of extravagance.

Item:
Time
threw big parties at both Conventions, with sumptuous buffets and special perks for VIP’s and advertisers. On the first night of the Democratic Convention,
Time
collected the floor passes from all its correspondents and gave them to big advertisers so that
the advertisers could walk around the Convention floor and gawk for a couple of hours.

Item:
Time
hired a fleet of fifteen Cadillac limousines that stood ready to whisk
Time
correspondents and messengers to any point in Miami, including Flamingo Park. (“The Zippies all wanted a ride,” said a correspondent.)

Item:
Time
ran its Convention operations out of a sultan’s tent in the Fontainebleau’s Exhibition Hall that made every other newsprint operation look like a hovel. On three sides, the
Time
office was fenced in by blue muslin curtains, with a grey-uniformed security guard at the entrance flap. (No other publication had thought of that touch, the security guard.) The fourth side of the office was the back wall of the Exhibition Hall, a riot of red whorehouse flock, adorned with an orchestra of plaster cherubs.

At any given moment, a dozen correspondents sat in a row, staring right into blue curtains and banging out reams of copy, while a crew of shirt-sleeved editors huddled around a complex of steel desks, making tactical decisions. The lines to the Front (at the Convention Hall) were kept open by a telephone operator in a flowered dress who ran a full-sized switchboard and set off beepers in the pockets of stray editors and correspondents; and by a dozen couriers who sat on a row of chairs behind the switchboard—half of them
Time
editors’ sons who had reportedly been flown in at company expense. (
The New York Times
, which ran many more words about the Convention than
Time
, managed to get along with no switchboard and no couriers.)

All in all,
Time
brought 130 people to the Democratic Convention, including 23 photographers who exposed 400 rolls of film in the first three days. Several senior editors were there, but were not often seen outside of the tennis courts and parties. The senior editors wore hotel haircuts, pin-striped suits and horn-rimmed glasses. “You could switch the senior editors with the Board of Directors of the Chase Manhattan Bank,” said a
Time
staffer, “and nothing would change at either the magazine or the bank.”

All of the bureau chiefs came to Miami for the week, except for the chief of the Houston Bureau. There just wasn’t enough room for him, so as a consolation prize he was flown to Hyannis to babysit with Ted Kennedy. There was room, however, for most of the twenty-three members of the Washington Bureau, which, as
Time
’s largest outpost, filled eighty percent of the “Nation” section every week.

Many of
Times
best correspondents worked in the Washington Bureau, reporters like Champ Clark, Hays Gorey, Simmons Fentress, and Dean Fischer, all of whom, it was said, could probably have held down front-line positions on
The New York Times
. Some of them were legends within the
Time
organization, but to the public at large they were about as well known as engineers at Cape Kennedy. Everybody in the
Time
office, for instance, knew that Champ Clark was writing an epic-length narrative of the Convention and that every line was uproariously funny. But Clark never saw his narrative, much less his by-line, in print.

Most correspondents had to live with this frustrating condition, which was sweetened by the fact that they made around $30,000 a year. The correspondents filed about 750,000 words every week, and then the editors took over. The editors worked in the New York office, and their job was to throw away about 700,000 of those words. Then they rewrote about 85 percent of the remaining copy.

The Washington Bureau put out a little sheet of its own, called “Washington Memo,” which contained some of the gossip and rumors that the correspondents thought unfit to go in the magazine. “Washington Memo” was sent to
Time
’s New York office and most of the bureaus, but each copy was numbered and copies were not allowed out of the office. The “Washington Memo” was supposed to keep
Time
editors abreast of backroom happenings in the Capital, but most correspondents refused to give their best stories to the “Memo.” “Some editor will just phone you and try to get you to do a story about some rumor that you put in,” said one correspondent, “and you know
it’s true, but you feel bad because you know you can’t ask your source to back you up on it.”

There were other gripes that the Washington correspondents sometimes voiced, very privately, about the editors of the Nation section.

“This whole bit about the Eastern Press Establishment has some basis in fact,” said one correspondent. “These six or seven guys who determine the final editorial content of the Nation section all sit around New York most of the time. Occasionally, they try to shake them out of their ivory tower. They bring ’em out. They brought the Nation section, lock, stock and barrel—the editors and the researchers—down to Washington last year.

“Now they bring ’em down to Miami, the whole crew, and they assign each one of them to a correspondent, kind of like on the buddy system. The correspondents had a conference the other morning before the Nation section got here and one correspondent said, ‘The question I want to ask is about what I would have to call the Helplessness Factor. Are we responsible for picking these people up, taking them around and taking them to the bathroom?’

“A lot of correspondents just sort of ignored their Nation person, and a lot of the Nation people went off and played tennis. A few of the Nation people did make an honest effort to tag along, find out what was going on, and meet the people they were writing about. But for the most part, it was a kingsize waste of money.”

The Nation people, in fact, didn’t have much contact with politicians and they didn’t seem to have heard of the first rule of Old-Fashioned Menckenesque Political Journalism—that all political types ought to be regarded as guilty until proven innocent.

The Nation section’s two-week junket to Washington was a case in point. Each morning, the whole section met to be addressed over breakfast by some Washington notable. On the first morning, said a correspondent who was there, the notable was Chief Justice Warren Burger. When Burger was done with
his spiel, the whole table, except for the correspondent, gave Burger a standing ovation. Thinking about it later, the correspondent felt that maybe they had applauded out of respect for the office of Chief Justice. The next morning, however, Ron Ziegler, the former Disneyland ad executive who became Nixon’s press secretary, spoke to the
Time
editors. They gave Ziegler a standing ovation too.

On yet another morning, Wilbur Mills was the honored guest. The same correspondent took the opportunity to ask him whether he had lobbied to become Speaker of the House when John McCormack had stepped down. According to an observer, Neil MacNeil,
Time
’s Congressional correspondent, “went bananas.”

“How could you ask the chairman that?” MacNeil demanded of the correspondent. “He was very insulted.”

It was not just the Nation editors from New York who seemed so completely wedded to the establishment. It was also some of the men who had been in the Washington Bureau for a long time like MacNeil or the bureau chief, Hugh Sidey. Sidey was known around the bureau as Hugh Sidestep. He was famous for the weekly pieces he wrote about the Presidency for
Life
. The pieces were loaded with “mood” and “color,” but they did not have a great deal to say about what was really happening inside the Administration. Some of the reporters in the bureau felt that while Sidey might have had a flair for the
form
of politics, he never bothered really to study the
substance
—the content of bills, economic programs, or major statements on issues. One morning in the late spring, for instance, Sidey had come into the bureau upset and grumbling about McGovern’s “confiscatory tax program.” Several correspondents had to explain to him what McGovern’s tax program really was and assure him that the Senator did not intend to confiscate wealth.

“The meetings they have in the Washington Bureau sound like cabinet meetings,” said a correspondent who had recently departed
Time
. “The older men are the cabinet members and Sidey is like the President. They sit around and refer to the
Administration as ‘we.’ Like once I was in a meeting—it was around the time of the May Day demonstrations—and Sidey asked me, ‘Do you think we can handle them? Do you think we can keep them from disrupting things?’

“I said, ‘No, I think they’ll succeed.’ And Sidey looked at me as if I were from the Vietcong.”

Newsweek
’s temporary bureau in Miami was just a few feet up the hall from
Time
’s. Enclosed on all four sides with blue muslin, it was smaller, humbler and quieter than
Time
’s office. No guard and no switchboard. Just a couple of reporters chatting around the coffee urn, a secretary on the phone, and three or four other reporters pecking at typewriters. Most of the editors were back in New York. But if there was less boondoggling around
Newsweek
, and less conspicuous waste, its bureaucracy was still very much like
Time
’s. The correspondents whipped out tons of copy, and the New York editors dumped, trimmed, or rewrote almost all of it.