The Boys on the Bus (29 page)

It was clear that they wouldn’t get anything out of Ziegler on that subject, so they moved on. John Osborne of the
New Republic
asked a question about Clark McGregor. Fulsom came back to the French Consulate question. “Is the President concerned that it’s taken so
long
to get a report to him on whether these were American bombs?”

“Uh,” said Ziegler, beginning to seethe. “The uh … a very complete investigation of that is being conducted.”

More intricate questions about Kissinger’s travels. And then finally, for the first time in almost twenty-five minutes, someone got around to asking about the scandals.

“Ron, is there anything new on the Dwight Chapin affair?” called out Peter Lisagor of the Chicago
Daily News
.

“Nossir,” said Ron tersely.

“Thank you, Ron,” shouted a harried wire service man.

The room erupted in protest. Ziegler started to walk away from the lectern. “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Ron! Ron!”

McManus got the floor. “Ron,” he said, “there’s a great straining in the back of the room to go tell the world about Henry Kissinger. Now, if we’re going to end this briefiing, let’s have a briefing at three o’clock.”

Ziegler was furious. His voice was cold and hoarse. “The normal procedures that we will follow and we are going to follow is that the wire services will cut this briefing off,” he said, his anger eating away at his grammar. There were shouts for attention.

“There will be a posting at three o’clock,” Ron concluded, and began to leave again.

“Now, wait a minute, Ron,” shouted Robert Pierpoint of CBS. Pierpoint was probably the hardest and most persistent interrogator of any of the network men. (The briefings drove him crazy, but he blamed “the system,” not Ziegler: “It’s kind of fruitless to make life difficult for Ziegler. But I do it. The reason I do it is that I want the people who read the briefings, including, hopefully, once in a while the President, to know that I am dissatisfied with the situation.”)

“The wire services have no more right than any of the rest of us,” Pierpoint said angrily. “You’ve just given them that right. Now, we have other questions that we would like to ask.”

“I did not just give them that right,” said Ziegler, and curiously he sounded just like an angry Richard Nixon.

“It has not been a right that they had before,” said Pierpoint.

“It has been standard procedure,” said Ziegler in cavernous Nixon tones.

“Since you took over, it’s been standard procedure,” said Pierpoint. “Now, several of us have questions we’ve never been allowed to ask and we’d like to go into it if you’re not going to see us at three o’clock.” And before Ziegler could stop him, Pierpoint was sliding into another question about the peace talks.

Ziegler was icy. “Uh, I’m not prepared to, uh, be responsive to that question, Bob,” he said.

“Yeah, but …” Pierpoint began to ask another question, but Jim Dickenson of the
National Observer
had already begun to talk, asking another question about the Atlanta incident, and Ziegler had recognized him to spite Pierpoint.

“Well, wait a minute,” said Pierpoint, in a high plaintive voice. He sounded as if he were about to cry with frustration. “Jim!… aw, Christ!”

Dickenson wanted to know whether the White House had tried to determine whether the sign-destroyer in Atlanta was a government security agent.

No, said Ziegler, because the White House had only been informed of the incident by Phil Potter after it took place. Pierpoint raised his voice again and got in two more questions about the Paris talks. Ziegler answered them curtly.

“Ron, I have a question I’ve been anxious to get in, and I don’t believe it’s been asked,” said John Osborne.

He spoke in a gentle Southern accent from his seat in the middle of the room, and his voice carried a quiet authority. The others listened carefully, because Osborne had the reputation of a man who knew what he was doing. Born in Corinth, Mississippi, sixty-six years ago, Osborne had grey hair, a prominent nose that gave his face a mole-like appearance, and a shy manner that hid an iron will. Having worked for newspapers in the South and for the AP, he became a National Affairs writer at
Time
in 1938 and quickly rose to become Foreign News editor. He was a controversial figure around the Luce offices, a man of strong and often dogmatic convictions. Militantly pro-Soviet during World War II, he later did a complete about-face and
became a terrifyingly hard-line cold warrior. In 1951, he wrote in an editorial: “
Life
sees no choice but to acknowledge the existence of war with Red China and to set about its defeat, in full awareness that this course will probably involve war with the Soviet Union as well.”

Over the years, he had mellowed. “He is,” said a former
Time
associate, “one of the few men I know who keeps improving with age.” In 1961 he left
Time-Life
to free-lance and by 1968, through a process he claims is too complicated to discuss, his views had changed sufficiently to allow him to sign on as one of the two full-time writers on the liberal
New Republic
. Since then, he had devoted all his energies to observing the White House, writing a weekly column called “The Nixon Watch.”

Osborne had been the only journalist in America to give a consistent, clear, comprehensible picture of Nixon’s machinations, aspirations, successes, and failures. He was a meticulous craftsman, and he pieced this picture together like a restorer filling in the missing portions of a Greek vase. He searched for clues in statements, speeches, or simply in the air around the White House, and every Wednesday morning he sat down to write a 1,000-word column that was witty, discursive, personal, and full of educated conjecture. It was this speculative tone which made “The Nixon Watch” so much more useful than anything that appeared in a newspaper, for conjecture was a necessary tool in cracking the secretiveness of the Nixon Adminstration. And Osborne was scrupulously fair. His even-handedness, discretion, and unobtrusive manner appealed to many of the Nixon staffers, who were constantly surprised to receive praise from the
New Republic
when praise was due. So they sometimes cooperated with him to the extent of letting him come into their offices and ask a question or two. It was said that Ziegler’s boss, Bob Haldeman, actually liked John Osborne. Which might have been the reason why Ziegler treated him with respect.

On this Tuesday, Osborne asked the best question of the day. The
Post
that morning had implied that Herbert W. Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, and a fund collector for the Committee to Re-elect the President, had access to the Watergate “secret fund.” Incredibly, no one had mentioned the subject yet.

“Two related questions,” said Osborne. “First, this Mr. Kalmbach of Newport Beach. Is it a fact that he is Mr. Nixon’s personal attorney? And two, has Mr. Nixon been in touch with him in the last two days?”

Ziegler gave him a detailed and courteous answer, saying that Nixon had not been in touch with Kalmbach in months.

Someone else asked whether the White House had tried to contact Kalmbach to determine whether there was any truth in the
Post
story.

“To my knowledge, there has been no contact with Mr. Kalmbach,” snapped Ziegler.

Then Sarah McClendon spoke up. Ziegler saw no need to be courteous with her. Sarah McClendon was a frumpish woman in a purple pants suit and star-in-circle earrings, with tousled platinum hair, and a sweet, toothy smile. At the outbreak of World War II, she had sold her clothes for twenty-one dollars traveling money, left her hometown of Tyler, Texas, and joined the WACs. Her only pair of shoes had high heels, and she drilled in them for two weeks. She was sent to Washington to work in the WAC PR operation. After the war, she married, was deserted by her husband, and went to work as a legwoman for a Washington correspondent, nine days after having given birth to her daughter. She did not tell the correspondent about the baby for fear of being fired.

After years of struggling, she became a correspondent herself, doing piecemeal work for several radio stations in the South, writing for a handful of Texas newspapers and the North American Newspaper Alliance, and turning out a weekly newsletter. She also became the comic relief at Presidential press conferences. Whenever they were in a tight spot, Kennedy, Johnson, and now Nixon would point to her with an indulgent
smile and wait for her to ask some stupid, irrelevant question, which, it was true, she sometimes did. But no matter what she asked, all the male reporters laughed.

Sarah McClendon was vulnerable because she was a woman in a male chauvinist profession and she did not work for a large paper. Lyndon Johnson thought nothing of getting her fired from several of her Texas papers so that she could be replaced by Les Carpenter, a Johnson shill.

In the spring of 1972, she had investigated some questionable government contract dealings by Strom Thurmond and Harry Dent. She wrote up her findings for the NANA syndicate, but when Dent found out about the article he made such loud and horrible threats that NANA not only killed the story in question but stopped running her articles on other matters as well. A thousand such bullyings and petty cruelties had not daunted her. She had a revenge of sorts; she was now as tough as any reporter in Washington, and she was not afraid to ask a question for fear of sounding silly. It was no coincidence that some of the toughest pieces on the 1972 Nixon campaign came from Sarah McClendon, Helen Thomas of UPI, Cassie Mackin of NBC, Marilyn Berger of the Washington
Post
, and Mary McGrory. They had always been the outsiders. Having never been allowed to join in the cozy, clubby world of the men, they had developed an uncompromising detachment and a bold independence of thought which often put the men to shame.

But the men still tittered whenever Sarah McClendon asked a question, and Ziegler still treated her as if she were a wino who had wandered in off the street (although he was always very sweet to her
after
the briefing, which only disgusted her more).

“Ron, was Mr. Kalmbach the man who took Mrs. Martha Mitchell to the hospital to have her fingers sewed up after she was pushed against the glass?” asked McClendon.

“I don’t know,” said Ziegler, as if he were trying to shake off the village idiot.

“You don’t know. Could you find out that for me, please?”

“No, I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not part of the White House information.”

McClendon started to argue, but Ron began talking over her as if she didn’t exist.

“On this briefing matter,” he said, “I’d like to select Pierpoint, Bill Theis [of Hearst], Jack Horner [of the Washington
Star
]—who’s the current president of the White House Correspondents Association?”

“Ed Poe.”

“Edgar Poe [of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
], and Aldo Beckman [of the Chicago
Tribune
] and Jerry Schecter [of
Time
], to, uh …”

“Put a woman on there!” yelled Sarah McClendon.

“Fran Lewine … to gather together and make a recommendation to me as to how these briefings will end. The standard procedure we’ve been following over the last three years is that the senior wire-service reporter has been cutting it off and the press has responded to that. If you want to designate another procedure to do that, that’s all right with me, but we’re not going to have this type of chaos in future briefings. I gave in to it today because there seemed to be some question of understanding these rules. But I’d like to establish a procedure and if that group will meet and make recommendations for me, we’ll follow them.”

Various voices began to argue. Ziegler was furious.

“I don’t want to discuss it here in a public briefing,” said Ziegler, “but those people who are named, please form yourself as a committee as you would and make recommendations to me to how these briefings should be run.”

“Well, Ron, who gave you the right to name a committee like that?” asked McManus, prompting some giggles from the crowd.

“Well, uh, the right to put some decorum into these briefings so that this doesn’t take place again.”

“Will your committee also look into the possibility of returning to the twice-a-day briefing schedule?” asked Fulsom.

“That’s a decision that I will make—and
I’m
the committee on that—and will post this afternoon,” said Ziegler.

“Well, it seems that that’s part of the problem, Ron,” someone said. “If we were having a second briefing, this question wouldn’t come up.”

“As far as this briefiing is concerned, and I’m ending it, it’s ended!” said Ziegler. He was pale and shaking with anger.

There was silence as Ziegler began to stalk out to his own office. Then somebody very cautiously shouted: “Four more years!” Everyone gave a great laugh of relief.

McManus came up, closing his notebook. “Have you got the picture now?” he asked softly.

Yes. The image was quite clear. The White House Press had all the solidarity, effectiveness, and maturity of the French Chamber of Deputies.