The Boys on the Bus (22 page)

Eaton wandered up the hall to the newsroom and sat on the edge of a steel desk among the wire machines and clattering typewriters. Perkins and Dancy were still working on their scripts. It was getting late, but Eaton couldn’t do anything until the control room was ready to “feed” the stories to New York. I asked him whether New York had assigned the stories.

“No,” said Eaton, with his customary smile, “this is very much what Jack and I feel is the story. Even more than with newspapers, TV reporting is an individual thing. Just because of the mechanics. They get our story maybe a half-hour before air time; there’s no time to change it. They have to rely on the whole thing being produced in the field.”

I asked about the thrown-away Humphrey footage. “Surveys have shown that TV news is the dominant factor in deciding undecided voters,” said Eaton, who was beginning to glance nervously at the clock. “So I would feel hesitant about doing anything that would influence the outcome. I mean, over the last week we
have
shown that McGovern is ahead, but I spent the fall of ’68 with the Humphrey campaign, and I’d be reluctant at this point to write his political obituary.”

TV journalists weren’t quite the easy riders that Eaton made
them out to be. In the world of straight, “objective” journalism, the more freedom you gave a reporter, the more he censored himself. “Freedom” scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn’t really freedom at all. “Freedom” simply meant that nobody had clearly marked all the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind man on a battlefield. A network correspondent worried about the FCC breathing down his neck, he prayed that he wouldn’t cross some little quirk of the network-news president, and he thought of all the money he was pissing away—about $5,000 for a two-hundred-word story. (The next day, to cover McGovern’s whistle-stop train, NBC would use two camera crews and a Lear jet—at a cost of about $10,000, or $5,000 per minute of air time.) To say that TV reporting was an “individual thing” was to say that if a reporter fumbled a story, the shit-hammer came down squarely on his head. There were no middlemen to blame.

Finally, at 3:12
P.M.
(eighteen minutes to air time), the director called Eaton, Perkins, and Dancy into the control room. The director, a glowering man with earphones attached to his head, sat behind a huge console in the control room, flanked by four assistants in sport shirts. They were all facing four large TV monitors mounted in the far wall. Perkins and Dancy stepped into a tiny soundproofed booth on the left side of the control room, and sat down in front of a huge, old-fashioned radio microphone. They looked like Bob and Ray.

Down the hall, in the projection room, a couple of engineers had just finished putting the various reels of film on four different projectors. The A roll, the film of Perkins talking at the hospital, was on Projector One. When the director wanted the A roll, he would shout, “P One!” and one of his assistants would hit a button on the console to start Projector One. The Perkins film would show up on a large monitor in the center of the wall, and at the same time it would be fed onto a master tape at the NBC studio in Burbank. Then, at the right second, the director would hit the button to bring in the film of McGovern shaking hands at the hospital, which was on Projector Two, and would
point to Perkins, who would read the commentary from his script: “… things seem to be going so well that the candidate has taken to warning his followers of overconfidence.”

The director had to conduct a crazy little electronic orchestra—cueing Perkins and Dancy in the sound booth, bringing in each new segment of film, bringing up the background sounds of the film segments under the voices of Perkins and Dancy. It would all make one coherent story on the master tape at Burbank, and Burbank would then transmit the whole thing to New York. The director gave all the orders in code, and it sounded like an Apollo launching.

Fifteen minutes before air time. “Stand by,” the director said in the tensely quiet control room. “Ready to come up. Ρ One film. Roll ’em.”

Perkins appeared on the monitor in rich compatible color, smiling and announcing: “McGovern led in every category but senior citizens—and, as it happened, that is where McGovern began campaigning today.”

“P Two background sound,” said the director. No background sound came up.

“What happened?” snapped the director. “Where’s the sound?”

A voice from the Projection Room came over a loudspeaker: “We’ll have to do it again obviously.”

Eleven minutes to air time. Perkins was as unruffled as if he were making a telephone call. “We may have to feed live,” he explained, “while Chancellor is on the air. Feeding live is like swinging across a ravine on a rotten rope. We’re feeding to Burbank, and they’re taping it and feeding it to New York, so there are a lot of switchboards where people can screw up.”

The voice on the loudspeaker announced that the projection room was ready. Eight minutes to air time. Everything went smoothly until a “bloom” showed up on the monitor—a flash of light caused by a sudden transition from a dark to a light piece of film. The machine which was supposed to adjust brightness had overcompensated.

Another wait. Five minutes to air time. The director started to call the plays again. Perkins and Dancy read their scripts with perfect smoothness. An assistant director whispered into his headphone telling New York where to put the mats, the cards which said “Jack Perkins, NBC News.” They finished, and the director picked up a phone.

“Did they buy it?” Perkins asked.

The director listened to the voice at the other end. “They bought it,” he said finally.

Perkins and Dancy got up and sauntered down the hall to the newsroom, where they sat down and watched the news with some KRON people. Chancellor had just introduced the first piece, Irving R. Levine talking about the economy. As the program unrolled, the people in the room dissected it like a journalism school class.

“Three minutes of voice on economic junk, no visuals, and into an ad. And they expect us to beat CBS!” a KRON man bitched.

The roundup of reactions to Nixon’s trip came on. “Mike Mansfield quoting Richard Nixon,” grumbled Perkins. “Scintillating television!”

Then, at seventeen minutes into the half hour, Chancellor began doing a neat little intro into the California story. The screen showed 46 points, in yellow, for McGovern, and 26 points, in blue, for Humphrey. “And here are reports from John Dancy and Jack Perkins,” said Chancellor.

“How about Jack Perkins and John Dancy?” said Perkins.

They watched in relative silence.

“Jack got a Β minus for starting with a shot of himself talking,” a KRON kibitzer said when it was over. “John’s visual was much more interesting.”

There was only one noticeable “media event” in the California primary—McGovern’s “Victory Special” whistle-stop trip down the San Joaquin Valley, which the McGovern
people scheduled as a stalling measure to preserve what they thought was a twenty-point lead. CBS declined to cover the trip (“We’ve done train rides to death,” Schoumacher told someone); NBC and ABC gave it short shrift.

The Conventions, however, were the greatest media events on earth. The Convention Hall was the world’s biggest TV studio, lit for TV with rows and rows of hard white spotlights, wired for TV with 150 miles of electric cable, and with almost every public event staged expressly for TV. The networks dominated the Conventions by sheer numbers. CBS had a staff of 500; NBC and ABC had 450 each. The most popular cliché in Miami was that the Conventions were really conventions of media people; that the reporters were the stars, not the politicians; that the reporters spent a great deal of time interviewing each other about the coverage of the Convention. At the very center of all this attention were the TV people, the biggest stars of all, the most familiar faces in the land. Eric Sevareid, when curiosity prompted him to inspect the Zippie encampment at Flamingo Park, felt it necessary to disguise himself with a false mustache, sunglasses, a Harry Truman/conventioneer shirt, and a cane.

The main attraction of the Conventions was that they brought a mind-boggling collection of rich and powerful people into one small place. So anyone in America with a commodity to sell showed up at the Conventions to try to get a piece of the power and the money. Hookers peddled ass, Mr. Peanut peddled goobers, pushers peddled dope, managers peddled dark horses, and the networks peddled themselves. Since 1952, the networks had used the Conventions as all-purpose promotion gimmicks. As Richard Reeves wrote in
New York
, “The young industry used the conventions to grandly introduce its innovations—coast-to-coast network broadcasting in 1952, Huntley-Brinkley in 1956, the creepie-peepie camera in 1960, then color.” The Conventions gave each network a chance to grab a bigger piece of the news audiences away from the other two networks. And the head of each network-news division broke
his back for great ratings so that he could prove to his boss that the news division ought to get a bigger chunk of the network budget.

Of course, the network newsmen pointed out the great opportunity the Conventions provided—a chance to study a cross section of the nation, to examine the party system, to present a full spectrum of views, to render, in short, a great public service. That too, that too. But the networks came to Miami because it was good business. In July, the networks did a more expensive job of peddling than anyone else in town—including the Democrats. According to Richard Reeves, the networks spent about eight million dollars on the Convention, while the Democratic candidates and Party spent less than three million.

No small amount of this vast expenditure was earmarked for the press departments of the three networks. Each network had a Winnebago trailer in back of the Hall, and each Winnebago was filled with about a dozen gnomes whose job it was to sit over typewriters all day and turn out tons of hype to send to hard-up TV editors at newspapers all over America. Any editor with a six-inch hole to plug on his TV page could throw in a handy handout from CBS entitled “The Shimmering Maze Behind the Convention Hall,” describing the makeshift CBS Convention offices. Or he could use a release that started: “Mrs. George McGovern gave her first reactions to the California credentials vote in her husband’s favor to CBS Correspondent Mike Wallace.” The CBS press department hoped that people who read about Mike Wallace’s coup would switch to CBS and that CBS’s ratings would go up.

These press department trailers were very depressing places. The flacks themselves were wretched, pale, middle-aged men who had the burnt-out look of alcoholics and who invariably wore ascots or loud ties, which only accentuated the blankness of their faces. They would congratulate each other with a false bonhomie whenever a press release showed up on the front page of a newspaper, which sometimes happened. A lot of them were failed reporters, and now they were reduced to touting
successful reporters. Yet they were very important. They helped to pump up the ratings. And that was why the networks were in Miami.

The press departments were also supposed to hand out passes to journalists who wanted to observe the network control rooms and to interview the anchor men. But at the Democratic Convention, the press departments were wary of visiting journalists, mainly because of an article that Richard Reeves had written in
New York
just before the Convention started. Reeves had described the frantic preparations that each of the networks was making to capture the best Convention ratings. He had also tossed in some colorful touches, such as the fact that many CBS correspondents considered Walter Cronkite an “air hog.”

Many network executives were furious over the article. When I asked a lady producer from CBS to get me a plastic pass I needed to get into the CBS compound, she politely replied, “I won’t even ask them, because first of all they’d say no and second of all I’d get my head chopped off—they’re still all steamed up and paranoid about the Reeves article.” The best I could get out of CBS was a cursory tour of the compound from a lady press officer who kept me on a short leash and jerked me around with a brusque “I’m sorry!” whenever I tried to stray in search of a friendly face who might let me into the control booth.

The CBS tour was awkward, but nowhere near so unpleasant as my dealings with NBC. NBC gave me the bum’s rush. My relationship with NBC’s press department had been strange and shaky from the outset. Back in April, Cassie Mackin, an NBC correspondent, had arranged for me to get a couple of NBC passes for election night in Wisconsin; all I had to do was find a press officer named Joe Derby who would give them to me. Late one night I finally located Derby, who was drinking in the Ole! Room of the Pfister Hotel with Ham Davis of the Providence
Journal
. Derby was a burly Irishman with grey, curly hair and a Father Christmas face. I introduced myself and Derby peered at my press tag.

“
Rolling Stone
,” he said, looking at me hard. “You underground guys—you’re always knocking the establishment. Well, what’s wrong with the establishment? I’m gonna get that paper of yours and read what you say, and it better be good.” I couldn’t tell whether Derby was doing a weird Gaelic put-on or threatening my life, but I laughed and said I would watch what I wrote.

Derby took a new tack. “You guys from the newspapers, you’re always putting down the networks, and then you come around asking for help because the networks have all the best resources and you need them.” It was true that NBC had a giant computer in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, all primed and ready to spew out precinct analyzes, and that every reporter in Milwaukee showed up at NBC on election night to get the teletyped print-outs and use the typewriters and phones that NBC had laid out. “But then you turn around and knock the networks,” Derby complained.

“Don’t worry, I like John Chancellor,” I said.

“Listen,” Derby said, “you never worked one-tenth as hard as John Chancellor has worked and you’ll be lucky to get a fraction as far as he’s gotten! You say anything about John Chancellor and he’ll put you in the hospital! And if he won’t, I will—you wiseass!”