The Boys on the Bus (26 page)

If there was ever a gung-ho Winner’s Bus, it was Kennedy’s in 1960. The reporting was fairly straight. Most of the Kennedy reporters believed, as reporters always believe, that they could be friends with the candidate and still write objectively about him. Some of them pulled it off (just as in 1968, several reporters who liked Bobby Kennedy very much, nevertheless tore him apart for resorting to demagoguery in a speech in Indiana). But the Kennedy reporters did not really stop to examine their writing for traces of creeping anti-Nixon bias. On the plane and the bus they flaunted their personal contempt for Nixon. So what if they made it obvious that they adored Jack? He was going to win, and Nixon was not going to matter any more.

Thus, when Nixon crawled out of his manhole and dusted himself off in 1966, there was more than one reporter who felt like a small-time mobster when he hears that the padrone has got out of the pen and is ready to settle a few scores. Nixon, who was blessed with the acute sensitivity of a paranoiac, knew this. By June 1966, when Jules Witcover interviewed him during a speaking tour of the Midwest and South, Nixon was already
claiming that his infamous “last press conference” of 1962 had worked out for the best.

“California served a purpose,” he said. “The press had a guilt complex about their inaccuracy. Since then, they’ve been generally accurate, and far more respectful. The press are good guys, but they haven’t basically changed. They’re oriented against my views. But I like the battle. I like to take them on in a give-and-take. I used to be too serious about it. Now I treat it as a game. I’m probably more relaxed and not so much is riding on it … I have a lot of friends in the press. They tell me, ‘I like to cover you. You’re news.’ I do give the correspondents a lot of news. And I like the press guys, because I’m basically like them, because of my own inquisitiveness … The press is very helpful with their questions.”
^†

Nixon had roughly the same number of friends in the press as he did in Alger Hiss’ immediate family. His basic strategy (which was to keep himself isolated from reporters) and his basic attitude (which was that reporters were scum) hadn’t changed. But he had smartened up and learned one crucial lesson—to “give correspondents a lot of news,” in the form of handouts and a few discreet one-to-one interviews.

It was a handout that put him back in the headlines in 1966. In November of that year, Bill Safire, one of Nixon’s aides, peddled a handout on Vietnam to
The New York Times
. The
Times
played it on the front page, and once again Nixon was back in the news, just in time to take credit for the Republican Congressional landslide. Then Nixon decided to hide out for a year and stop feeding the press handouts. Instead he fed it George Romney. “I want him to get the exposure,” Nixon had said in private. “We have to keep him out at the point.”

From the time that Romney began his campaign, with an exploratory stumping of the Rocky Mountain states, the reporters who traveled with him pegged him as a lightweight. The
private vocabulary of journalists reeks with obscenity, but the dirtiest word it contains is “lightweight.” A lightweight, by definition, is a man who cannot assert his authority over the national press, cannot manipulate reporters, cannot finesse questions, prevent leaks, or command a professional public relations operation. The press likes to demonstrate its power by destroying lightweights, and pack journalism is never more doughty and complacent than when the pack has tacitly agreed that a candidate is a joke. As soon as a candidate shows his vulnerability by getting flustered, or by arguing when he shouldn’t argue, the pack is delighted to treat him as the class clown.

Such a candidate was George Romney. In February 1967, when Romney began campaigning, it was generally assumed by the national political reporters that the winning candidate would be the one who could come up with a new and independent stand on the war in Vietnam. Unfortunately, Romney didn’t know enough about Vietnam to have a stand, so he had to improvise one, which is always a dangerous game. At first, Romney refused to talk about the issue, but the press hounded him with questions, and Romney could not resist answering. His answers were inconsistent and patently ignorant. The reporters grilled him relentlessly at one press conference after another, and the more he said, the more his credibility crumbled.

Then, in August 1967, Romney went on a Detroit talk show and told the host how he had “had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam.” The remark was forgotten until the talk show host, greedy for publicity, sent the transcript to
The New York Times
. The
Times
ran the story on page 28, under the headline:
ROMNEY ASSERTS HE UNDERWENT
“
BRAINWASHING
”
ON VIETNAM TRIP
. The networks, always guided by the
Times
, picked it up. The papers in Romney’s home state of Michigan, chagrined at having missed such a big local story, compensated by turning it into a monumental issue. The Detroit
News
called on Romney to withdraw from the race. The “brainwashing” remark encapsulated all of
Romney’s ineptness in one easily remembered word, and it finished off his chances. He kept on campaigning until the end of February 1968, in the same way that a corpse’s fingernails keep on growing.

Meanwhile, Richard Nixon had not been obliged to answer any questions about Vietnam, because Romney had been getting all the press’s attention. Now, about three weeks before Romney pronounced himself dead, Nixon rolled the stone back from his own tomb and came out. He announced his candidacy before a well-attended press conference at the Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is
not
my last press conference.”

That night, he gave a party for the reporters at a motel in Concord. He drank with them, joked with them, offered big hellos to old acquaintances, offered candid observations, and generally acted like Conrad Hilton at a Hotel inauguration. Then he got up on a small chair and told a lousy joke about the weather, which received (according to one witness) “polite titters and more than one grimace.” He announced that there would be statements handed out every day and ran down the details of his press operation. He emphasized that he would be accessible; he would give interviews and briefings and the press would always be kept informed of his whereabouts.

The next morning, the reporters woke up and couldn’t find Richard Nixon. Then a Romney staffer tipped them that Nixon had got up early and quietly driven off to the nearby hamlet of Hillsboro to tape a “completely unrehearsed” discussion with a carefully selected contingent of townsfolk and farmers, for use in TV commercials. Some of the reporters protested to Nixon staffers, who blithely explained that the commercials were being taped secretly so that the press wouldn’t inhibit the participants.

The reporters bitched among themselves, and lodged some more protests with the Nixon staff, but they were anxious not to break the tenuous truce with Nixon—Henry Kissinger would
as soon rush to insult Le Duc Tho. Conscious that the press had blown its credibility by openly despising Nixon in 1960, they were in no hurry to get into a pissing match with a notorious skunk. So a compromise of sorts was struck. The next day, a Nixon bus took the reporters to the Hillsboro Community Hall and they were allowed to wait outside while Nixon continued to tape his commercials. The door was guarded by a private security force.

The Hillsboro caper set a precedent for the whole campaign: no newsmen at tapings. Which meant that the reporters could not cover the real campaign. Nixon’s advisers had the revolutionary notion that they could run their candidate from the safety of a television studio, thereby eliminating the meddlesome press. People would believe the version of Richard Nixon that they saw on TV, rather than the version that the reporters presented, secondhand, in the newspapers. Besides, TV had long since eclipsed the newspapers as a means of reaching the electorate.

Nixon’s TV campaign was definitively documented in Joe McGinniss’
The Selling of the President
, a year after the fact. Many reporters resented McGinniss’s book when it came out. They thought it made them look like fools. “McGinnis made it look like he discovered the TV thing,” said Walter Mears, who had traveled a great deal with Nixon in 1968. “Well, come on, that’s ridiculous. We knew what was happening and we all wrote stories about it.”

These stories, however, did not have much impact. Perhaps it was because they did not make their point quite as forcefully as McGinniss, who wrote that Richard Nixon “depended on a television studio the way a polio victim relied on an iron lung.”

The main problem was that the press took Nixon’s campaign at face value. They did not see it for what it was—a charade designed to divert attention from the real campaign, which consisted of stage-managed question and answer shows on television.

Nixon fed the reporters a phony campaign, and many of the
reporters ate it up. Nixon kept showing off a group of “young intellectuals” he had gathered around him, people like Len Garment and Dick Whalen who had no real influence on the campaign. Nixon made a great fuss over his “youth movement” in order to create the impression that he was building up his own New Frontier. More than one reporter was taken in by this ruse and helped to create the myth of the New Nixon, while Nixon’s brightest staffers, long since disillusioned, sat back and laughed.

Nixon gave the reporters a lot of news—rallies, a few press conferences, infinite handouts. He also gave them a great running story, the perennial loser winning for once. However, he did not give them a position on Vietnam.

The first question of the whole campaign, asked by a reporter at the first press conference in Manchester, was: “What are you going to put forward to the American people as a policy toward Vietnam?” Like Romney, Nixon had no policy on Vietnam. But he did have a terrific answer, and he had no qualms about repeating it an infinite number of times. The answer was double-talk. It contained no substance. But it sounded good to the housewives and cab drivers who questioned Nixon on the TV panel shows. After all, they were amateurs at the art of cross-examination.

The pros on the press bus at least knew that Nixon wasn’t saying anything. But somehow they never ganged up on Nixon the way they had on Romney. In nine months of trying, they failed to make him cough up a stand on Vietnam. Some, like Jules Witcover, tried very hard.

At a press conference one day in late February, for instance, Witcover thought that Nixon had left himself open on some point in one of his answers about the war. When the conference had ended and Nixon was about to get into his car, Witcover ran up to him in the snow and began to ask a follow-up question. A look of alarm spread over the face of the aide who was standing next to Nixon, and before Witcover could finish, the aide had shoved Nixon into the car. Witcover got the front seat on
the bus, and sat watching the back of Nixon’s head during the ride to the next stop. When they arrived, Witcover jumped out of the bus and tried to talk to Nixon again.

“No soap,” Witcover said later. “Couldn’t get to him. They hustled him off. Just the idea of your going up there and confronting the candidate—the guys around him were startled, they couldn’t believe their eyes that you were doing this. And they learned very, very quickly, and it didn’t happen much after that. They just didn’t let you do it.”

Witcover was one of the few reporters who felt any urgency about pinning Nixon down on Vietnam during the spring. Most of his colleagues were far more worried about
who was going to win
the nomination—would Rockefeller take Nixon? The Vietnam issue could wait. But then Nixon had the nomination, and he became even more inaccessible than in the primaries. All of a sudden, the men who had seemed so powerful with George Romney felt very impotent. Excuses were made. If only Humphrey would attack Nixon on the war, said the reporters, then we could use Humphrey’s charges to corner Nixon and make him answer. But Humphrey wanted to avoid the Vietnam issue for his own reasons. So the two candidates had a tacit agreement to lay off the war. What could the press do?

It never seemed to occur to the reporters that they had a duty to stand up and take the place of Nixon’s nonexistent opponent.

“It’s easy to look back now and say, ‘
Jeez
, this was very important and you didn’t ask the guy about the war,’ ” said Witcover. “But he would have press conferences and we’d ask him about the war, and he’d slough it off, you know. And after a while you get tired of asking the same question. That was really what it was more than anything else. We just didn’t continue to go at it.

“I remember one guy who did was Ted Knapp. God, right up to the end, every time he got a shot at Nixon, he’d ask him about the war. Got to be a broken record. But most of us, myself
included, figured, ‘Aw, it’s no use, we’re gonna get the same runaround.’ And, you know, maybe we would have continued to get the same runaround, but at least we should have made more of an effort.”

Ted Knapp, the man who had the quixotic habit of always questioning Nixon on the war, was the chief national political reporter for the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers. He was a dapper, fastidious man, with wavy grey hair and a soft, ruminant, cultivated manner of speaking. He never spoke harshly about anyone, including Richard Nixon. Reminiscing in 1972, he was almost fatalistic about 1968. “I feel that the persistence of our questioning him, though unsuccessful, was largely responsible for his shying away from us, and for his having a limited number of news conferences, both in the campaign and during his Presidency,” he said. “I remember one press conference in particular, on a Sunday morning in Pittsburgh, after his nomination in 1968. There was repeated questioning on how he intended to end the war and a refusal to accept the pat answer that he had been giving. I’m 90 percent sure that after the news conference there was quite a spell when he was totally unavailable.”

Richard Nixon learned a lot about the press from the 1968 campaign, far more than the press learned about him. He learned that the press was still on the defensive because of ’60 and ’62. He found out how to undermine reporters in subtle ways. He discovered that he could be an effective performer on TV, and that he could use television to get around the press. The main lesson he took from the campaign was that he could isolate himself from the press with no dire consequences to his political well-being; he could refuse to come to terms with the major issue of the day for nine straight months without risking a mutiny from the press.