Read The Boys on the Bus Online
Authors: Timothy Crouse
“Well, just this once,” said the desk man. “It won’t happen again.”
You’re damn right it won’t,” said Doyle. “I’m not going back to the White House. Ever.” And he never did go back, although he occasionally covered a Presidential trip.
Meanwhile, Jack Horner continued to accumulate gold stars on his wrinkled forehead. Ziegler fed him one exclusive after another as a means of punishing the
Star
’s competitor, the fractious Washington
Post
. Shortly before the 1972 election, Horner’s exemplary behavior earned him what he called the biggest beat of his life, an exclusive interview with Richard Nixon. There was only one ground rule—Horner was not allowed to print the questions he asked the President. Which meant that Nixon could virtually ignore Horner’s questions and simply spew out his carefully prepared remarks. Horner was being used as a funnel, but he did get his scoop. As he sat there in the Oval Office, feeling the delicious whirr of the little tape recorder that he always carried strapped to his waist like a pacemaker, Jack Horner must have thought to himself: “What a good boy am I.”
Stuart Loory was the
Herald Tribunes
Moscow correspondent for several years in the early sixties. He covered the White House from 1967 until 1971 for the Los Angeles
Times
. He left partly because Ziegler and other White House staffers made things uncomfortable for him whenever he wrote an unflattering or unorthodox article about the Administration. “I found great similarities between covering the White House and the Kremlin,” he said later. “When the Kremlin was unhappy with you, they shut you out. They didn’t invite you to press conferences. They didn’t let you travel. The White House put the same kind of pressures on you when you wrote something they didn’t like. The way Marty Schram was treated, for instance, was a typical Russian tactic.”
Marty Schram was the White House correspondent for the Long Island daily,
Newsday
. He was a serious-minded, rabbinical
looking young man who wore black-rimmed glasses and a Groucho Marx moustache. In the summer of 1971, Schram helped Newsday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team of investigative reporters to carry out an exhaustive investigation of Richard Nixon’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo.
The investigation resulted in a six-part series, carefully documented with maps and charts, which laid out the shady business dealings of Rebozo and his friend Sen. George A. Smathers (D.-Fla.). “The deals made by Bebe Rebozo and the Smathers gang have tarnished the Presidency,”
Newsday
declared in an accompanying editorial.
When the series came out in October 1971, Ziegler was asked to comment on it.
“We have absolutely no concern about the integrity of Mr. Rebozo, and I’ll have no further comment on those stories,” said Ziegler. Then he put the freeze on Schram.
Without ever mentioning the Rebozo series, Ziegler suddenly began to act as if Schram did not exist. He refused to talk to him, except to give curt and rude answers when Schram asked a question at a briefing. If Schram tried to broach a question after a briefing, Ziegler would cut him off with a brusque, “I don’t have time now,” and walk away. When Schram made an appointment to see Ziegler about the problem, Ziegler kept him waiting for an entire afternoon and then left via a back door.
Ziegler steadfastly refused to admit that this treatment had anything to do with the Rebozo series. In February 1972, reporters who were not on the list to go to China were summoned to Ziegler’s office, one by one, to receive the bad news. Schram was among those called. Ziegler made a number of excuses as to why there was no room on the plane for
Newsday
. Schram pointed out that
Newsday
met all the criteria that had been set up, while many of the papers on the list did not. Ziegler made more excuses.
“Come on, Ron,” said Schram. “It’s the Rebozo series.”
Ziegler denied it.
“Well, then, what is it, Ron, what’s the reason?” Schram kept asking. Ziegler kept answering that certain, uh, decisions just had to be made.
Even after the China trip, Ziegler continued to exclude Schram from pool assignments. This banishment did not cripple Schram, but it did hurt him because he liked to embellish his features and takeouts with the kind of atmosphere and fine detail that could only be gathered by observing Nixon at close range. He still collected information from several friendly sources he had cultivated on the White House staff, but it pained him whenever he saw the pool trooping into some state dinner, the pool members being mostly “hard news guys who didn’t give a shit about the background stuff.”
Almost a year after the Rebozo series appeared, Nixon went to campaign in Nassau County, where
Newsday
was delivered to seven out of ten homes. As usual, Schram didn’t make the pool. “But what am I supposed to do,” he shrugged, “act wounded? They shouldn’t choose the pool, anyway. The press should choose it.”
Every so often, when bullying and intimidation failed, Ziegler and his superiors would resort to a tactic that can only be described as sheer balls. They would tell a lie so Stalinesque in its grandeur or would make a demand so preposterous that the reporter in question was struck dumb and did not know where to begin his counterattack.
One of the most spectacular examples of White House balls-manship was the attempt to convert Nicholas von Hoffman at the time of student uprisings over the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. Nick von Hoffman was a prematurely grey-haired forty-two-year-old columnist for the Washington
Post
who voted for Nixon in 1960 and 1968 for reasons which he has never been able to explain satisfactorily. People who discovered von Hoffman’s voting record were invariably
surprised by it, because von Hoffman had been slamming Nixon all over the
Post
’s “Style” section ever since the inauguration of the column (and of Nixon) in 1969. One of von Hoffman’s charms was his maverick inconsistency, but his stands were invariably radical and he himself described the content of his column as “bolshie drivel.”
After the invasion of Cambodia, he wrote a column saying that the situation was so appalling that “the Washington monument went limp.” So it came as something of a shock to von Hoffman when the Nixon White House attempted the old Lyndon Johnson hustle of soliciting his advice to try to bring him on as a member of the team. Even Johnson, who used to spend whole afternoons cajoling reporters, would never have taken on a hard-core radical like von Hoffman. Von Hoffman wrote an account of the incident for the
New American Review
, and he swears it’s all true. (He didn’t write it for the
Post
because the
Post
refused to print the exact language he had used.) The article deserves to be quoted at length:
The crew-cut press aide who stands at parade rest while Ziegler does his monologue begins inviting people backstage. I am approached and led into Ziegler’s office. Outside the window is Nixon, hands behind his back, talking to Kissinger, strolling on the lawn, maybe still grooving on his crisis euphoria or maybe he’s already crashed. The four at Kent State have already been killed; two more will die at Jackson shortly.
John Erlichmann [sic] comes into the room …
“I’m sure John would like to hear your ideas,” Ziegler says.
“Suppose you’re right about Vietnam,” I begin, and they make as if I’m about to give them the unique word, instead of being one among who knows how many reporters they’ve run through their office. Most of us believe against certain knowledge that if only we could get in there and tell them, they’d listen. So I am in the White House and the President’s man has said he wants to hear. You don’t have to be a politician to be infatuated with your own possibilities.
“Suppose you’re right about Cambodia,” I continue, “suppose you’re right about the military situation, suppose you’re
right about everything, don’t you see you still can’t fight this fucking war?” I fancy that the word hasn’t been spoken in the building since Lyndon Johnson. I also imagine that bad language may make them pay attention. “In a democracy, see, fifty-one percent is good enough to build a road or exempt the oil companies from taxation, but not to fight a war. You gotta have ninety percent for that, and you boys didn’t pull that in the election. That cocksucker was elected to end the war, not spread it.”
Ziegler is a two-expression man, blank and smiling. No frowns, no pensive looks, no screwing up in distaste, it’s the blank or the smile. The blank is for when you’re speaking; the smile is for when you’re finished and he’s about to talk. Having a conversation with him is like playing tic-tac-toe with a computer.
“People’ll feel differently when it works out. Opinion’ll change when it’s a success,” Ziegler says. An efficient organization silences all opposition by declaring high quarterly dividends.
“Millions of people don’t give a shit if it’s a success. Christ almighty, they don’t even know where Cambodia is much less want to conquer it.”
The President has gone from the lawn.
“We know that. We’re pulling out. We’re withdrawing. Vietnamization is working.”
“Oy!”
“As people see that the President’s policy is a success, they’ll support him.”
“If you keep pushing this way, these kids are going to burn down the country. Get off people’s necks.”
Erlichmann says something to indicate that things are nastier than he’d like to see them. There is more talk about the stock market, the businessmen, the different kind of people who’ve had it. Erlichmann agrees it is serious, remarking it has probably cost Governor Rhodes of Ohio the primary. I repeat the prediction of bloody trouble. Erlichmann replies, “We’re counting on leaders like yourself to keep things calm.”
Leaders like who?
We’re doomed.
In 1969, Jules Witcover wrote a book about Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign called
The Resurrection of Richard Nixon
. The White House, getting wind of the project, called up all of Witcover’s sources and instructed them not to talk to him any more. Fortunately, Witcover had already completed most of his research.
In 1970, when the book came out, Witcover went on
The Dick Cavett Show
to publicize it. Cavett asked him whether the Nixon people had been cooperative, and Witcover recounted how the Nixon people had tried to stop him by cutting off his information. A week later, Witcover’s wife received a phone call from an Internal Revenue Service agent who announced that Witcover was going to be audited.
Witcover had to take time off and assemble all his tax materials. An IRS agent looked through every check Witcover had written in the last year, and found nothing amiss. For weeks, Witcover tried to make the IRS tell him why he was being audited, what in specific they were looking for. The IRS never came up with an answer, except to say that they were testing a new system and that his name had been chosen at random. Witcover, however, was convinced that he was the victim of a political audit.
Witcover was not the only journalist to receive a visit from the taxman. At the time of
Newsday
’s Rebozo series, Robert Greene, the head of the paper’s investigative team, had his tax returns audited by the IRS. So did William Attwood, the publisher of
Newsday
, and David Laventhol, the editor. The IRS also examined the newspaper’s financial records.
Day after day, Ziegler and his superiors frustrated and harassed the White House press corps in petty ways. Yet the correspondents refused to stand up and defend each other. No
one, for instance, ever lodged a protest in behalf of Marty Schram or investigated the IRS audit of Jules Witcover.
Meanwhile, the White House kept building up a powerful public relations machine whose function was to compete with the press, to go over the heads of the press and straight to the people. The White House sent off tons of mailings to newspapers and individuals. The White House frequently demanded and received free network television time so that the President could present his arguments to the public and even so that the Vice President could attack the press.
The Nixon aides were advertising people, Dan Rather said as he sat around the pressroom one afternoon; they knew ten times as much about the media as the Johnson people had. They had known that if they squawked enough about post-speech analyses by network correspondents, they could make the networks back down. And they knew dozens of little tricks which allowed them to use television to their own advantage, said Rather. For instance, in October 1972, Nixon hardened his stand on amnesty in a speech which he made over the radio. CBS had a clip from an old TV interview in which the President had put forth a much softer position, and Rather would have liked to have shown the two statements side by side to demonstrate that Nixon was toughening up his position for political reasons in an election year. But to do this, Rather needed a
picture
of the second statement. The White House people had realized this, and that was the reason Nixon had made the statement on the radio.
So the voice of the White House grew stronger while the voice of the press became weaker.
One morning in September, as we were flying out to California on the White House press plane, I tried to find out from Peter Lisagor why the press corps was so docile. Lisagor was a fixture of Washington journalism; as the veteran “special” correspondent of the Chicago
Daily News
, he could write more or less what he wanted. While his White House articles usually opened with a “news peg” from the daily briefing, rather than the kind of “trend” lead that John Osborne favored, Lisagor was
nevertheless very good at standing back and putting official statements into perspective. When Ziegler announced the end of the draft, for instance, Lisagor carefully pointed out in his lead the political implications of the move—its appeal to young voters. At the same time, Lisagor was a living monument in the Washington press establishment, a former president of the White House Correspondents Association, and a man who did not like to rock the boat too hard.