The Boys on the Bus (21 page)

“Well, I couldn’t prove he got the story off me,” Germond said later. “But, come on, I don’t believe in the fucking Easter Bunny.”

After the Florida incident, some of the newspapermen regarded Schoumacher with suspicion. They wanted to discipline him somehow, but couldn’t think of a way. “What do you do?” said one reporter. “Pull out his plugs?”

The rest of the TV reporters were fairly well liked. It was just that they were … different. They were always flying off to the nearest town with a big TV studio in order to edit their film; they missed a lot of dinners and poker games that way. They had to go everywhere chained to a human ball and chain, which consisted of a cameraman, a sound man, a lighting man and sometimes a producer as well. It wasn’t really the TV reporters that got in the way, but those cameramen and sound and light people who looked like garage mechanics and dressed in plastic ski parkas and Hush Puppies were always grunting and shoving and stepping all over everyone to get to the front of the crowd. And in the final analysis, the TV reporters were wedded to their cameramen, to pictures.

The TV reporters were the direct descendants of Nathaniel Currier and James Ives, the pioneers of American pictorial journalism. In 1860, Currier and Ives mass-produced cheap, accurate prints (sold at corner newsstands) of Lincoln, Douglas, and Breckinridge. For the first time, the public knew exactly what the candidates looked like. The Currier and Ives operation was a wild success, and it was based on the principle that would become the cardinal rule of TV news: “Don’t just tell a story, show it.”

Above all else, TV reporters were trained to search for a good picture. Every night, there was a glut of stories pouring into the newsroom, and the surest way to get on the air was to find interesting visuals. If a TV reporter failed to get good footage of the speech, or could not make his sources talk on camera, his piece would probably be killed. Chancellor, or Cronkite, or Smith would take the essential facts of the story and condense them into a twenty-second spiel that would have practically no impact. For years, the networks had slighted stories that were hard to illustrate, such as economic stories. They were just beginning to give such stories the attention they deserved.

A TV story with good visuals could sometimes run a print story into the ground, not to mention a rival TV story with not-so-good visuals. But what a chore it was to get the pictures! “You’ve got all that claptrap equipment,” said Roger Mudd of CBS, “so you can’t move as fast as the newspapermen. You’re always worrying about this shot or that shot and you can’t quite concentrate on what the candidate is saying because you’re worrying about the mechanics, and you’re thinking
Oh, Christ, we ran out of film!
”

So the test of a good TV correspondent was not primarily whether he was a great political observer. It was whether he could deal with all of the technical problems, guide his cameraman toward the right shots, and put the film together to form a coherent story. When a producer wanted to compliment a gifted TV correspondent, he said, “So-and-so writes well to film.” Which meant that the correspondent had a gift for weaving the copy and the film into one neat, indivisible strand of meaning; each picture illustrated a point that the voice was making. The making of a television campaign report was a specialized process that was three parts television technique and one part political journalism.

Take, for example, the California primary. None of the newspapers were printing much about McGovern’s welfare plan or his defense budget, so there was no pressure on the networks to get involved in these complicated, nonvisual stories. In California, the basic story was that McGovern had an incredible organization whose tentacles seemed to reach everywhere, and Humphrey had no organization at all; he was a “one-man band.” So the networks did takeouts (feature stories) on the Black Vote, the Brown Vote, and the Blue-Collar Vote, which reflected the fact that McGovern’s organization was making heavy inroads. “We haven’t been doing so much event coverage,” said Bob Eaton, a West Coast producer for NBC. “Instead we’re doing trends in the campaign, big movements, stories about the state.”

Pretty soon the story became not that McGovern was going to win, but how much he was going to win by. Exactly a week before the election, ABC received the results of a poll it had commissioned. The poll said that McGovern had a twenty-two-point lead over Humphrey. The ABC people got cold feet. They decided to wait two days for a “second wave” of polling they had ordered. There were rumors that Humphrey’s people were putting enormous pressure on ABC executives, telling them that they would look like idiots when the Field Poll came out at the end of the week. The Field Poll, they claimed, would show McGovern only six points ahead. But an ABC vice president denied that Humphrey staffers talked ABC out of running the first results. “It pays to be cautious,” he said. “You don’t fool around if you want to keep your reputation intact.”

Meanwhile, an ABC employee carelessly let the results slip to McGovern’s people, and the McGovern people, being nothing if not shrewd, immediately told CBS. The next night CBS scooped ABC on its own poll: McGovern out front by twenty-two points. ABC was furious, and the night after that, they revealed that McGovern was really only seventeen points ahead (according to their second set of figures). The same day, the Field Poll came out: McGovern out front by twenty points. Four days later, McGovern won the election by only six points. Mervin Field, the director of the Field Poll, said he thought that the poll might have “interfered with the electoral process,” presumably by making the McGovern people complacent in the last week and by frightening the Humphrey people into making a desperate last-ditch effort. “In all my twenty-seven years of polling,” said Field, “I have never seen the likes of the publicity that one got. The publication itself became a campaign event.”
^*

The day after the Field Poll broke was a Friday, and I spent most of it watching Jack Perkins and John Dancy, the NBC correspondents, filing their reports. Both Perkins and Dancy had been newscasters in Cleveland, Ohio, and worked at NBC as all-purpose, general assignment reporters, not as political reporters. But on Friday, June 2, at least, the situation demanded more video know-how than political wizardry. Perkins and Dancy had ninety seconds each. The hot story was obviously the reactions-to-the-poll story. It was entirely predictable, but still hot. McGovern (covered by Perkins) would be delighted with the poll, but warn against overconfidence. Humphrey (covered by Dancy) would dwell on the fallibility of polls and insist that the election wasn’t over yet. So Perkins and Dancy had the job of confirming what everybody knew the candidate would say. The assignment was inevitable, the time limit was set, and the idiosyncrasies of film and TV equipment (and the candidates’ schedules) virtually dictated the content of the stories.

Jack Perkins was a tall, big-jawed man who wore goggle glasses and was just as easygoing and bemused as he appeared on TV When NBC sent him to Los Angeles several years ago, he went native; today he was wearing a white necktie, a blue rancher’s shirt, tan Levi slacks, a handwoven string belt and Hush Puppies. He was with Bob Eaton, his producer, a short, round-faced man also in his thirties and also dressed West Coast informal—he wore cowboy boots. On Friday morning they
were both hovering at the rear of a McGovern press conference in the San Francisco Hilton, where Meade Esposito, the Democratic Boss of Brooklyn, was love-feasting with the Senator. As the conference broke up, I asked if I could follow them on their rounds. Sure, they said, friendly as missionaries. We set off from the Hilton and walked a few blocks to KRON, the local NBC affiliate. At KRON, we walked up a long fluorescent-lit hall to one of the cutting rooms where the processed film was waiting for them.

The cutting room, which was the size of a kitchenette, contained a Bell and Howell projector, a small screen on the far wall, a large boxlike speaker beneath the screen, a counter to one side with a Moviescope film-splicing machine on it, and a middle-aged film editor named Marie. Perkins and Eaton took off their jackets and watched as Marie ran several short reels of film on the projector—footage of McGovern visiting a hospital for senior citizens early that morning, of Perkins doing a “stand-up” introduction at the hospital, and of a McGovern rally at San Jose the night before. Both men began to splice the film inside their heads.

“I was thinking,” said Eaton, “forty-six seconds of your opening and the hospital, twenty of the rally, and that leaves room for something at the end.”

“Sounds good,” said Perkins.

Marie put the first couple of reels on parallel tracks of the Moviescope. When she moved one of the reels by hand, George McGovern’s voice came out of the speaker like a chipmunk’s.

“Make him say, ‘You’ve seen the polls,’ ” Perkins said. Marie wound the reel until McGovern said the words in a little helium voice. (In cutting rooms, politicians are treated like puppets. Later that afternoon, Marie looked into the Moviescope screen and ordered, “Put your tongue in your mouth, Humphrey!” and then rolled the film until he did.)

Perkins and Marie pored over the hospital footage, looking at the part where McGovern advised his troops against complacency. “Schoumacher got the quote,” Perkins said disgustedly.
“He wanted to get a nice close-up, so he didn’t wait for the news conference, he had to get it right there at the hospital. There’s good stuff on McGovern here, but Jesus, we also get these nice close shots of Schoumacher. I’d use the quote from the San Jose rally, but McGovern’s shtick there never ends and it gets no response. So we’re stuck with Schoumacher.”

(Schoumacher would doubtless have smiled his annual smile if he could have heard. The day before, I had overheard him instructing his cameraman to “lean hard on Houston,” who was Perkins’ cameraman.)

Eaton, who had gone out to call the executive producer in New York, came back and said, “We’re fine for a minute and a half. We’re go.” With that, Perkins and Eaton went to the neighborhood Zims for lunch. Even there, they were not free of the producer in New York. In the middle of a hamburger, Perkins was paged by the bartender—New York had some small question to ask him.

Arriving back at the cutting room, the two men kept on doing sums in their heads, trying to make the film clips add up to 90 seconds. Marie kept offering film clips as if they were hats to try on, and the men kept making technical decisions.

“Do you want Jack here?” she asked, showing the end of Perkins’ introductory speech on the Moviescope screen.

“No,” said Eaton. “Give me Jack’s voice from the A roll, but give me a picture of McGovern on the Β roll, with just a little background noise.” Marie slipped the A roll film out of the Moviescope and fitted in the Β roll. Then she pulled the Β roll through the Moviescope while she pulled the A roll over a sound head, so that Perkins talked while McGovern pressed the withered flesh of an old man.

“That’s good,” said Eaton.

“OK, just tell me where you want to go out,” said Marie, as she continued to pull the film.

“There!” said Eaton. Marie snipped the film with a small scissors and Scotch-taped the loop to the counter.

“Now we cut to the old woman,” said Eaton. Marie found the right segment in the Β roll.

“Cut it right there, after she says, ‘Nice to see you,’ ” said Eaton. “Then Jack comes in again.”

Perkins left the cutting room and went to the newsroom to write his script on one of the giant-type typewriters. He wrote about three pages in type that was slightly larger than the letters in a Dick and Jane book. Meanwhile, in the cutting room, eight or nine loops of film were now hanging from the counter like smoked eels. Marie looked at them doubtfully. “You have me completely confused as to how you’re putting this together,” she said to Eaton. It was two o’clock—five o’clock in New York. John Chancellor would go on the air in an hour and a half. Eaton began to draw up an outline for Marie.

Perkins suddenly opened the door, flooding the darkened cutting room with light from the hall. New York wanted two thirty-second clips of Humphrey’s and McGovern’s reactions to Nixon’s Moscow trip. The reactions were incredibly boring and Perkins had tried to talk the New York producer out of the project, but to no avail. “They’re doing a roundup,” he shrugged. The cutting room was getting tense.

Several minutes later, John Dancy, a short, compact man dressed in a light suit, arrived in the cutting room to help prepare the Humphrey footage. Dancy had to do a matching piece about Humphrey. The networks always liked to cover candidates as symmetrically as possible so that no one could accuse them of violating the fairness doctrine.

Perkins had said that the polls showed McGovern leading with every block except senior citizens. Dancy had to say that Humphrey was way behind even with his traditional black and labor supporters, and that he didn’t have the kind of money he needed to catch up.

Marie ran the Humphrey footage on the Bell and Howell. There was some wonderful footage of Humphrey raving at a press conference. “I’m not dropping out, I’m about to take off,” he piped. He babbled on about Victory in Miami. “Nixon thinks Hubert Humphrey is the strongest threat,” said Humphrey. Smoke was coming out of his ears. It was terrific stuff. Better than anything else I had seen, it caught the frazzled desperation
that was Humphrey’s trademark in the last week of the California campaign. But all this footage landed, literally, on the cutting room floor. It was too long (about three minutes) and too blatantly damning. It wasn’t a good match for the light and varied tone of Perkins’ piece.

Instead, Eaton and Dancy decided to use three other segments: Humphrey on an early morning talk show (to show that he had to scrounge for free TV time); Dancy interviewing Humphrey in the street about the poll; and Dancy at a Humphrey Labor Rally, telling the camera that “lukewarm labor support has denied Humphrey both money and campaign workers he might ordinarily have expected.” Dancy left some final instructions with Marie and went off to write his script. Marie put the segments of film on reels in the right order and sent them to another room where the final splices would be made.