The Boys on the Bus (23 page)

Ham Davis looked alarmed at the heavy turn the conversation had taken. “He’s a good guy,” he said, pointing to me.

“Naw, he’s a wiseass,” Derby growled, and then he suddenly surprised me by flashing an angelic smile and putting a big arm around my shoulders. “I’m only kiddin’,” he said. “I can see you got a nice face. I just wish you weren’t a wiseass, that’s all.”

In the morning, I ran into Joe Derby again. He was quiet, sweet, helpful, and only too glad to give me two plastic NBC passes. That was the last I saw of him until the eve of the Democratic Convention in Miami, when he offered to get me into the NBC control booth. “I don’t have any booth passes right now,” he said, “but come back and see me tomorrow.” I went to the NBC press trailer for three days in a row, but never found
Derby. As I stood around the trailer on the third night, I started looking at the bulletin board for lack of anything else to do. The board was hung with trophies—clippings about NBC Convention coverage from
The New York Times
, the Washington
Post
, and the Miami
News
. I took out my notebook and started jotting down the dates and page numbers of the articles. Suddenly, a tall man with a lantern jaw and sinister tinted glasses came at me like a police dog. “I thought I made it clear the other night that NBC has no interest in cooperating with
Rolling Stone
,” he said very firmly.

“What!” I said, my jaw dropping. The man had never talked to me before except to tell me, on one of my previous visits to the trailer, that Joe Derby was nowhere to be found.

“I thought I made it clear that NBC has no interest in cooperating with
Rolling Stone
,” the man said.

“So why’s that?” I said. “This is news to me.”

“I thought I made it clear etc.,” said the man.

“Well, so what did I do to offend NBC?” I asked.

“I think you’d better leave,” he said threateningly.

I left. A few minutes later I was strolling outside the press trailer with Dick Reeves and we came across the man and Joe Derby. We had the same dialogue again, only more heatedly. Reeves copied it down in his notebook and later wrote it up in
New York
. It turned out that the man was Bud Rukeyser, NBC’s vice president of corporate information. Reeves got Rukeyser’s quote a little twisted and had him saying: “I thought I made it clear NBC has no interest in helping publications like yours.” Reeves interpreted the contretemps to mean that NBC was so out of touch that it couldn’t tell
Rolling Stone
reporters from Zippies.

Rukeyser, who liked to think of himself as a friend of the Underground Press, was very upset by the article. He sent a letter to
New York
, saying that the real reason he threw me out was that I had been “rummaging through papers” in the press trailer, not because I was from
Rolling Stone
. So I called up Rukeyser to straighten things out. “You know I wasn’t rummaging through any papers,” I said.

“Well, I saw you taking notes about the things on the bulletin board, and I considered that by itself enough to throw you out,” he said. “But as long as we’re being so frank, what about the beer?”

“The beer?” I asked. He’d surprised me again.

“Well, I heard that someone from
Rolling Stone
had thrown a glass of beer at someone in the Railroad Lounge, and so when I saw you taking notes from the bulletin board I frankly figured I had had enough and I threw you out.”

I later asked Hunter Thompson if he had thrown beer at anybody in the Railroad Lounge, which was a private press bar in the Convention Hall. He looked puzzled, and then the memory dawned on him. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me take my beer out of the lounge so I hurled it into this huge oil drum they had at the door and it made a huge BOOM that you could hear for miles.”

Rukeyser couldn’t seem to make up his mind as to why he had given me the heave-ho. He told his superiors at NBC that I had been “going through drawers,” told
New York
that I was “rummaging through papers,” and told me about the beer. But as I walked away from the press trailer that night, slightly shaken, it occurred to me that the networks regarded themselves as omnipotent and sacred institutions, roughly like the Presidency.

Maybe the correspondents didn’t, but the corporate heavies did. Later in the year, I would come across the same mammoth PR operation, the same desire to classify the most trivial and worthless information, the same arrogance, and the same mindless lickspittle respect for any higher executive—at the White House, of course. Ronald Ziegler and Bud Rukeyser could have traded places with no trouble. Like a White House press secretary, Rukeyser collected a fat salary for keeping the press from revealing that his employers had a human and fallible side.

As I headed toward the Press Gate of the Convention Hall to begin the tedious business of scrounging for a floor pass, I spotted a friend of mine, a professional political fixer whom I will call Paddy O’Hustle. Paddy had come to the Convention to
troubleshoot for three separate clients: John Tunney, Gov. John Gilligan of Ohio, and George McGovern.

“Hey, Paddy,” I said. “Can you get me a floor pass?”

“Maybe I can,” he said solemnly. “Do you know anyone at NBC?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know Cassie Mackin.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ll give you a delegate’s pass if you can do me a favor.”

“Sure,” I said, desperate for a pass.

“You go out there and tell her that Ted Kennedy’s supposed to make a statement at eleven, but she can find out about Kennedy sooner if she talks to John Tunney. ’Cause Tunney’s Ted’s best friend, see, and he knows exactly what Ted’s gonna say. And this way, I get Tunney some air time. But for chrissake, don’t tell her that.”

“OK,” I said, grabbing the pass.

“You think she’ll do it?” he shouted after me.

“Yeah,” I shouted over my shoulder. “I think so.”

I had no idea whether Cassie would do it. She was a smart, pretty, thirtyish ex-Hearst reporter who, having been at NBC for only a year and a half, had landed a job that many male correspondents had coveted for fifteen years. She was a “floor person” at the Convention, an assignment that can put rockets on a career. She had developed an iron self-confidence and a touchy professional pride; she bridled at any suggestion that NBC had made her a floor correspondent as a sop to Women’s Lib. “Five years ago, they’d have said I was sleeping with the right people,” she would snap.

I had seen her the night before, crisscrossing the floor in search of interviewees, and later she had stood alone at the foot of the rostrum, sagging with exhaustion. “I’m so sick of it at this point,” she said. “There’s no one out there left to talk to.” She had developed a waitresslike memory which juggled profiles like orders. She knew the names and salient features of about three hundred county chairmen, delegates, and campaign staffers, and she knew the first questions to ask each of them if an
interview should materialize. That night, she had interviewed Kenneth Gibson, the black mayor of Newark; Ted Van Dyk, the McGovern staffer; Joe Duffey, the would-be-Senator from Connecticut; and Dick Gregory, the war protestor, among dozens of others. In most cases, she herself decided whom to buttonhole and what to ask. Sometimes a voice from the control booth would come through her grey plastic headset to instruct her to ask a certain question. “Reuven Frank, the president of NBC News, came on the headset while I was talking to a kid from Virginia,” she said. “He said, ‘It’s the Harris Proposal he’s talking about,’ so I asked the kid about that. In fairness to me, that’s the only time it happened.”

But I couldn’t sight Cassie tonight. Armed with my delegate’s pass, I elbowed my way through the noisy, hypertense crush of delegates. The only way to make speedy progress through the mob was to yell “Hot coffee!” but so many people were used to the trick that it no longer worked. Celebrities were standing in little pools of charisma. I shoved through delegates who were fighting to snap pictures of Art Buchwald and John Lindsay smoking fat cigars, of Warren Beatty, Germaine Greer …

Over by the Texas delegation, Garrick Utley stood out like the Eiffel Tower. His face was lifted toward the rafters, as if in prayer, and his lips were moving. “Jesus,” I thought. “The pressure really gets to some of these guys.” Then I realized that Utley was talking to one of the NBC telephoto cameras that was perched in the gridwork. One of the reasons that every small-town mayor, fashion model, Jaycee and publicity hound in America will
kill
to get onto the floor is that, once you have arrived, there is no way to avoid getting on TV. The eyes of the networks are constantly scanning the floor, like the cameras that scrutinize shoplifters at Macy’s. If you stand around for a few minutes you will inevitably become part of the background for an interview, or part of an interview.

Finally, I caught a glimpse of Cassie’s blond head and pushed my way to the back of the floor where she was standing with her “floor manager” getting ready to question some delegate. A
floor manager is a portable bouncer; when the interview starts, his job is to put out his arms like a tightrope walker and keep passers-by from blocking the camera’s view.

“Listen, Cassie,” I said, jingling the thirty pieces of silver in my pocket. “I got a hot tip. Ted’s supposed to go on at eleven, but John Tunney can tell you what he’s gonna say. You could probably get a scoop.”

“Oh, that sounds good,” she said enthusiastically. “I have to do this thing, and then I’ll look for him.”

“Great,” I said. “He’s right over there in the California delegation. He’s tall, you can’t miss him.”

“Thanks a lot for telling me,” said Cassie.

“Glad to help,” I said.

About an hour later, Paddy O’Hustle came barreling toward me, grinning wildly.

“Did Cassie ever get to Tunney?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but don’t worry. I went up to Doug Kiker [also of NBC] and I said, ‘Doug, was it you or Cassie Mackin that was interested in seeing Senator Tunney about Kennedy’s decision?’ Kiker said, ‘It was me!’ and ran off to find Tunney. Then I went up to Roger Mudd [of CBS] and I said, ‘Roger, was it you or John Hart that was asking to see Tunney …’ and Roger said, ‘Must have been me!’ Roger got Tunney, too. So in the last hour, I’ve had Tunney on all three networks and I’ve got him in
The New York Times
, the Washington
Post
and the Boston
Globe
for tomorrow. I’d call that a good night’s work.”

Ted Kennedy never had any intention of appearing on television that night, since he had nothing to tell the press. According to [
More
] magazine, a group of bored reporters had asked Dick Drayne, Kennedy’s press secretary, if he would join them at a Hyannisport “fish house” at 11 P.M. “When he accepted,” [
More
] reported, “an overzealous UPI reporter bashed out a bulletin saying Drayne had called a press conference.”

The floor reporters were fueled by a mixture of adrenalin and dogged competitiveness. They had to get to the big stories before the other networks did. One had to compete with the
other floor people from one’s own network for the jangled attention of the executive producer in the control booth. Yet the floor people stayed remarkably cool and civilized. There was nothing to match the scene in 1964 when Frank Reynolds of ABC had tried to grab Bull Connor away from a CBS producer who was setting up an interview. The CBS producer had punched out Reynolds.

There were a few problems at CBS. One CBS correspondent complained that they had “Walter to Walter coverage.” The difficulty, said the correspondent, was that nobody dared tell Walter to shut up. It wasn’t really Cronkite’s fault. In the midst of the turmoil of the 1968 Convention, some CBS executive had sent Cronkite a note advising him that he was using the word “erosion” too much. Cronkite sent back a note which read, “I QUIT.” Now everybody was afraid of offending him.

“When Walter keeps talking and you can’t get your story on the air, it’s terrible,” said the correspondent. “It’s not like on a newspaper. If you’re a newspaper reporter and some editor kills your story, you get pissed off, sure. But if you’re a TV reporter, it’s different. Your face is attached to the story. They’re not just rejecting some disembodied piece of copy, they’re rejecting
you
. So you get horribly angry. Roger Mudd sounded like he was going to quit a couple of times. At the Republican Convention, Mike Wallace quit because they didn’t put him on the air when he had cornered Maurice Stans. But that was nothing new. He had quit three times the day before and three times just that afternoon. We all quit all the time.”

And in spite of the enormous staffs and elaborate preparations—or perhaps because of them—things still went wrong at the networks. On the first night of the Democratic Convention, CBS fell on its face by announcing that McGovern had suffered a defeat on the South Carolina challenge—which was, of course, a major tactical victory for the McGovern forces. CBS later undertook an investigation to find out the reasons for the failure. The results of the investigation remained top secret, but the main reason was simply that CBS had had a bad night.

Roger Mudd, a knowledgeable political reporter by any standards, was in the South Carolina section but did not know what was happening. Later, he ruefully admitted that he simply had not done his homework. Mike Wallace, who kept asking the wrong questions of Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart, did not know either. Neither did Cronkite. All of the floor reporters were supposed to have been briefed by Marty Plissner, CBS’s full-time political editor. But Plissner had been too busy preparing delegate counts. David Schoumacher, who was covering McGovern Headquarters at the Doral Hotel, walked into the pressroom there and saw a bunch of newspaper reporters laughing at Cronkite. He managed to get on the air and say that the McGovern people seemed happy with the way the vote had gone. Hearing Schoumacher’s report in his earphone, Roger Mudd finally caught on. Offcamera, he got Gov. Pat Lucey, a McGovern man, to confirm his suspicion that the McGovern people had thrown the South Carolina vote on purpose. He called this information into the CBS control booth, but it got lost in the gigantic, electronic maw, and Cronkite did not straighten out the story for another couple of hours.