The Boys on the Bus (27 page)

As President, he lived by this lesson. He held only twenty-eight press conferences in his first four years of office, by far
the most abysmal record in modern times. In the campaign year of 1972, he held only seven press conferences, and only two of those dealt with political matters. This should have come as no surprise to the reporters. It was they who had let him know that he could get away with it.
^‡

October 17, 1972. Not a very extraordinary newsday in the annals of the White House press. Having breakfasted at their suburban homes and their houses in town, and then perhaps stopped at the office to scan the
Times
and the
Post
, they began to arrive just after 10:30. From the direction of the National Press Building (only four blocks off), they came strolling up Pennsylvania Avenue in ones and twos, past the Treasury, past the Quakers and crazies, and finally they came to the Northwest Gate, where there stood a white guardhouse. Fishing for billfolds, they pulled out their plastic laminated White House passes—a little color picture of the bearer in the middle of each pass—and waved them at the sergeant on duty.

The sergeant, who was not a bad sort, smiled at the regulars from behind the plate-glass window and pressed the button which springs the catch in the wrought-iron gate and, with a push, they were inside the fortress. From there, they trudged up the driveway toward the west lobby; if they had held a straight course, they would have walked smack into the full-dress Marine who stood at attention on the porch of Henry Kissinger’s chandeliered office, but instead they veered to the left, up the path a few yards and through the French doors of the pressroom.

Pressroom? It looked more like an antechamber of a fat Wall Street law firm. Just the kind of venue that made the Nixon staffers feel at home, even if it was not quite what the press was used to. Before the Nixon regime, the reporters had camped out in the West Lobby, piling their coats, hats and cameras on a huge circular Philippine mahogany table, fighting for lounging privileges on the one beat-up sofa, and wandering in and out of the press secretary’s office. The reporters also had a small pressroom just off the lobby, which was crammed with desks and contained forty telephones. For purposes of identification, each of the phones rang on a different note. Often, all of the phones rang at once, producing a jangled symphony that the old hands grew to like.

The White House reporters found the lobby very cozy, but in 1970, Ronald Ziegler announced that he was going to move the press to “more comfortable quarters” in the Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. A number of reporters complained loudly, accusing Ziegler of trying to banish the press and cut off their access to White House staffers. Ziegler indignantly denied this, but he did come up with another plan—fill in the West Wing’s swimming pool and turn it into a press room. Lyndon Johnson had liked to strip down and plunge in with publishers and network executives, but skinny dipping was not Richard Nixon’s style and he did not object to giving up the pool.

Even then, some of the reporters worried that the new setup
would deny them access to Ziegler’s office. “You will always have access to my office,” Ziegler solemnly promised them. Somehow the promise got lost in the move. Ziegler’s office was now well off the main pressroom, and the reporters had to run a gauntlet of remorselessly efficient secretaries to get to Ziegler.

The White House decorators boarded up the old pool and redid the place in various businesslike shades of brown: beige walls, beige drapes, beige sofas along the walls, big chestnut-colored chairs, tan carpet. The ashtrays were cleverly disguised as Roman urns, the table lamps were made out of China vases, and the walls were hung with Currier and Ives snowscapes. At the front end of this long rectangular room was a darkwood lectern, with a light blue curtain on the wall in back of it. An elegant waiting room, in short, steeped in just that flavorless, impersonal gloom that one associates with all rooms where people are made to cool their heels.

On this Tuesday morning, there were already a dozen reporters here, talking about nothing, or reading the
Times
, or simply looking bored. At the rear of the main room, a short corridor led to another room. On the right wall of this corridor, there were coathooks and a row of glass “bins” that contain the day’s handouts—a radio statement by the President, a fact sheet on a bill that he had signed, the schedules for Edward Finch Cox, Tricia Nixon Cox, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and Mrs. Richard Nixon.

The next room contained rows of padded cubicles, each equipped with a typewriter and two phones for all of the major newspaper and news-chain correspondents. At the rear, there were three larger booths, one for each of the networks. The left wall was lined with phones for foreign correspondents, most of whom did not rate cubicles; these were direct lines to the Washington Bureaus of British newspapers, European newspapers, and Iron Curtain news agencies. On the left of the room, another corridor led to a smaller, dark green room which contained
candy and soft-drink machines, a coffee maker, three wire tickers, and a round table where the TV technicians had already begun the daily game of gin rummy. There was a story that Eddie Folliard, having emerged from retirement to be given a tour of the plush new premises, shook his head in disbelief and said, “I’ll have a drink, but I won’t go upstairs.”

Back by the handout bins, a flight of stairs led down to another collection of booths and cubicles—booths for each of the radio correspondents and cubicles for the lesser papers. Also, another row of wall phones—the Avenue of the Rising Sun, it was called, because the phones belonged to the Japanese correspondents. Three or four Japanese showed up for every briefing, took copious notes, and then mysteriously drifted away; nobody knew what they thought or what they wrote, largely because nobody within memory had bothered to inquire. The Avenue of the Rising Sun was a quiet place, except when a major textile agreement was announced. On those occasions, the Japanese stampeded for the phones and screamed the details across bad connections to their home offices. Fay Wells, the dowdy correspondent for the Storer Broadcasting Company, once produced a legendary thirty second spot by saying, “This is how Japan got the message when the White House lifted the United States trade ban with the People’s Republic of China,” and then opening the door to hold out the microphone and record twenty seconds of shrill, hysterical Japanese.

It was an odd congregation, the White House press—a strange mixture of professional witnesses, decree-promulgators, cheerleaders, hard-diggers, goldbricks, and gadflies. There were shadowy figures like Trudy, a small birdlike woman who worked for a Jewish newspaper in St. Louis and who seemed to do nothing but receive dozens of mysterious phone calls on a downstairs pay phone; or Alan Lidow, the correspondent for Gene Autrey’s Golden West Broadcasting Company, who had never been known to ask a question at a briefing, and who seemed to be present mainly so that the FCC would not forget the existence of Golden West.

Roughly 1,500 reporters paid dues to the White House Correspondents Association, an organization whose sole function was to sponsor an annual dinner held in the banquet room of one of the large Washington hotels. But only sixty or seventy of these reporters regularly attended the daily White House briefings.

The regular White House correspondents could be divided into two basic types. There were the old-timers, who had come into the job as a sinecure, a reward for long years of faithful service; to them, the pressroom was one more quiet men’s club. And there were the young, ambitious types, the future Tom Wickers and Max Frankels, who saw the job as a showcase for their talents. If they did well, they would move up to become bureau chiefs and editors. No ambitious young man wanted to stay in the White House forever, because the job was a slow death.

“It is a strange, airless kind of work,” said Russell Baker, who had covered the White House in the fifties and early sixties. The White House was like a Stuart court, Baker thought, and all the correspondents lingered like courtiers in the antechambers. The Preisdent’s aides were like sycophants who protected the monarch, fed the courtiers information that would make the Great Man look good, and nursed the ego of “this monstrosity, this Queen Bee” who was at the center of court life. Whenever he left the White House to cover a story on the Hill, Baker felt as if he were climbing out of a closed sewer and going up onto a mountain, into the fresh air. “There were 435 people up there on the Hill,” said Baker, “and they
all loved to talk
.”

Nevertheless, some reporters thrived in this suffocating palace atmosphere. They began to think of themselves as part of the White House, and they proudly identified themselves as being “from the White House press” instead of mentioning the paper they worked for. They forgot that they were handout artists and convinced themselves that they were somehow associates of a man who was shaping epochal events. The walls of the White House press complex were covered with mementos
of the past, framed and yellowing photographs: a line of somber men in straw boaters and high collars with Woodrow Wilson in the center, like a Sixth Form and its Master; a larger and merrier group with Franklin Roosevelt; a loose circle of men in Hawaiian shirts and Bermudas, laughing with Harry Truman in Key West; several rows of men in flannel suits posing formally with Ike on the White House lawn.

The faces of these men were infused with a funny expression, a pathetic aura of pride, a sense that they were taking part in the colossal moments of history. Now most of these moments were forgotten, and no one remembered a word that any of these men had written. The strikingly sad thing about all these pictures was the anonymity. Except for the Presidents, not a single face was familiar. They were journalistic Prufrocks and they measured out their lives in handouts. Deferential, glad to be of use, they enjoyed some prestige in their day, but none of them had passed into legend as a great reporter—with the exception of Merriman Smith.

Merriman Smith came to the White House in 1941, a young United Press reporter of twenty-seven with slick black hair, a pockmarked face, and a moustache he had grown to make himself look older. He remained on the beat until his death in 1970. A straight, old-fashioned reporter who thought that his job gave him “a front seat at the making of history,” he reported what the President said, whom he saw, and where he went. No interpretation or analysis. But he stood out from the pack because he had the aggressiveness, resourcefulness, and sometimes the ruthlessness of a great police reporter. He was prolific: he once filed 30,000 words of copy in a twelve-hour period on a Presidential train trip. He was fast: he could write a story in his head in the thirty seconds it took him to run from the Oval Office up to the UP’s phone booth in the pressroom. His sprints to the phone booth were legendary. He trampled anything or anyone
in his way; he once slipped and dislocated a shoulder on the way to the phone but dictated for an hour before passing out from the pain.

He went to incredible lengths to score small scoops. It was rumored, for instance, that he always was the first reporter to know that Nixon was going to go to the Western White House, because he had cultivated a clerk at a San Clemente motel who called him whenever the whores came up from Vegas in anticipation of the arrival of the Secret Service.

For years, he doggedly hung on to his seniority privilege of sitting in the middle of the front seat of the pool car on Presidential trips. He was in this cherished spot on November 22, 1963, in the Dallas motorcade. When he heard the sound of gunfire, he grabbed the radiophone (which was on the transmission hump, directly in front of him) and started to dictate. Jack Bell, Smith’s rival from the AP, was in the back seat. After Smith had dictated four pages of copy, Bell demanded the phone. Smith stalled, saying that he wanted the Dallas operator to read back the copy—the overhead wires might have interfered with transmission. Everyone in the car knew that Smith had a perfect connection—they could hear the operator’s voice coming over the phone. Bell started screaming and trying to wrestle with Smith for the receiver. Smith stuck it between his knees and hunched up into a ball, with Bell beating him wildly about the head and shoulders. UPI beat the AP by several crucial minutes on the story, and Smith won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Kennedy assassination.

In later years, Smith watched with alarm as the White House turned into a massive public relations operation, exercising more and more control over the distribution of the news. But by that time, his personal problems had begun to outweigh his professional ones. “Hell,” Lyndon Johnson told Smith in 1966, “I don’t have anything like the troubles you have—you lost your boy in Vietnam while you were going through a divorce from your first wife, behind in your taxes, poor-mouthing me on the
Merv Griffin show to make money for big tuition bills—I’ve got it a lot better than you have.”
^*
Smith also had a bad drinking problem which increased as the White House job wore him down physically. In 1970, he learned that he had incurable cancer and shot himself with a pistol.