The Boys on the Bus (32 page)

“Why not a mutiny?” I asked.

Lisagor stopped typing on the lightweight portable he had set up on the tray in front of him.

“Well, you see,” he said, in his polite way, “because the White House people managed successfully to put the press in the ambivalent position of being an entity separate from the public interest or the public, the press has not much to stand on.”

“When did you first see that tactic used?”

“Well, it was first articulated by the Nixon Administration. The others had accepted the notion that the press was a legitimate vehicle for disseminating information to the public. But the Nixon Administration gave the press an identity of its own, separate from the public interest, and then began to characterize the press either as friendly or hostile or what have you.”

As Lisagor continued to talk, it became clear that he felt the Nixon people had maneuvered the press into a kind of Dien Bien Phu, isolated and abandoned without any hope of rescue. If Nixon wanted to make himself inaccessible, there was nothing the press could do. “It can’t sue him,” said Lisagor. The press had no legal rights, except for the First Amendment, which was a thin reed. It wasn’t an institution set up by the Constitution. It could kick and scream, but that didn’t produce any results because “the public doesn’t give a damn about our problems.” The only thing the press could do, Lisagor concluded, was to work more vigorously to ferret out information from the government, “recognizing that no Administration owns the public’s business—that it
is
the public’s business, and that the public is the proprietor of it.”

But not many White House reporters got around to ferreting
out information. One problem was that the White House swamped them with press releases. Perhaps a greater problem was the beat system.

The ideal way to find out what was going on inside the White House was to approach it from the outside—drive over to State or HEW, for instance, and look up some Young Turk who had just had a pet program sold out by Haldeman or Ehrlichman in order to placate some right-wing governor; the Young Turk would be angry and would gladly tell the whole story. But usually a White House reporter didn’t have time to cultivate sources outside the White House. The White House was his beat and he had to stay there to protect himself in case a story broke, and also to fill in his colleagues on other beats when they needed information from the White House.

Bob Semple, for instance, used up large portions of every working day getting the White House reaction to various developments for fellow
Times
men on the Hill or at the State Department. If he could not get a comment from Ziegler, he would have to sit down and write a summary of past White House statements on a certain bill (if he was helping out the man on the Hill) or a certain international situation (for the man at State). Which meant that Semple was tied down to his desk at the White House. Although some newspaper editors and bureau chiefs had begun to talk about freeing up their White House men to do more investigative work, this was not being done during the first Nixon Administration.

Since few of the White House correspondents had opportunities to ferret out information, since they
were
largely sequestered from staffers and outside sources, they needed decent briefings and press conferences if they were going to do a creditable job. Above all, they needed a revival of Presidential press conferences. In the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the weekly sessions in the Oval Office were considered indispensable by the White House correspondents. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in
The Coming of the New Deal
: “By according the press the privilege of regular interrogation, Roosevelt established the
Presidential press conference in a quasi-constitutional status as the American equivalent of the parliamentary question period—a status which future Presidents could downgrade to their peril.”
^‡

For years, political scientists, political reporters and historians like Schlesinger considered the Presidential press conference an unshakable institution. Nixon changed all that.

“What we assumed, and it seems sort of dumb in retrospect,” said David Broder, “was that just because the press conference had grown up from Wilson on and seven or eight Presidents had adhered to it, it had somehow become institutionalized. It’s not institutionalized at all. In fact, you could effectively say that Richard Nixon has abolished the Presidential press conference as an institution. He may grant two or three a year, but when they’re that infrequent they don’t really mean anything.”

There was a school of thought, led by John Osborne, that held that press conferences did no good anyway. Osborne thought that Nixon was “altogether too good for the common good at using press conferences to present himself and his policies in a favorable light.” Other reporters echoed him, saying that reporters never were able to follow through on a line of questioning and pin Nixon down, that too much time was wasted on trivial questions. But many of these reporters had forgotten, or had never known, what a real press conference was like.

“You have to go back to the Kennedy period or even the Eisenhower period to see what a Presidential press conference
system
really looks like,” said Broder. “The key thing is the frequency. If you have them weekly—as was the custom under Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—it doesn’t make any difference if you blow ten minutes on some trivial thing or if you don’t get to follow up on a question, because the President is going to be back there the next week and you’ll have another chance. You can look at those old press conferences and get a
very actute sense of what was agitating public opinion at the time, of what questions were up for political discussion. Now obviously, if you’re down to three or four a year, the press conference doesn’t serve that function at all. You just get scatterings of bits of information. But on a weekly basis, it serves an extremely important function. It requires the President to think about what
other
people may have on their minds.”

For the correspondents to do a proper job of covering the White House, they needed regular Presidential press conferences and they required briefings from a press secretary who was not in love with the art of obfuscation. The only way to extract these necessities from the Administration was joint action—a petition or a boycott, supported by the whole White House press corps, that would put pressure on the Administration to change its smug ways.

But whenever I suggested joint action to reporters around the White House, they looked at me as if I had suggested cutting off their typing fingers. They invariably launched into speeches about how reporters were fierce individualists who defied any attempt to regiment them. Everyone made basically the same speech, but Dan Rather made one of the best. “You know,” he said when I broached the subject of joint action, “journalists by their nature are not an organized lot. The average journalist, including myself, is a whiskey-breathed, nicotine-stained, stubble-bearded guy, and journalism is not a business that attracts very organized people.” Rather was wearing a beautifully tailored blue suit and he gave off the healthy glow of a man who has just emerged from a hotel barber shop. I had never seen him smoke and I doubt whether, on a typical day, his strongest exhalation could budge the needle on a Breathalyzer.

But the curious thing about political journalists is that they often work as a herd when they should act as individuals, and they claim their right to perform as individuals when they should close ranks and act as a group. The most sheeplike herd
in Washington—the Pentagon press corps—boasted the loudest of its individuality; the reporters at the Pentagon bragged that they were so independent that they had never formed even a ceremonial organization like the White House Correspondents Association.

But it was not just the worst reporters who shied away from joint action. Some of the best and the toughest also had qualms. “We’re all reluctant to gang up,” said Jack Germond. “Ganging up is a bad business. I mean, there aren’t many guys I want to gang up with. I don’t agree with their methods. I have a different judgment on what I think is news. I have a different judgment on what I think is a fair way to go at something. I have a different judgment about my ability to beat them on my own, so why should I join up with them?

“There are occasions when some kind of ganging up is necessary, I suppose,” Germond conceded. “And Nixon’s campaign in 1968 was probably one of them.”

“Let the editors fight those battles,” said Jules Witcover. “We’re in the trenches every day and we’re just trying to get access. It’s like professional football. You start going straight in and it doesn’t work, so you loop and you stunt and you just see how the game goes. This business of getting together and forming a committee or boycotting or something else—that doesn’t deal with the ongoing changes. It’s just constant and you’ve just got to keep making your moves and being aware that they’re doing those things, and try to cope with them on your own.”

“But Jules,” I said, “that doesn’t seem to work. The White House keeps getting away with murder.”

“There’s nothing wrong with looping and stunting if everybody does it, but there are not enough guys who do it,” Witcover admitted. “There are not enough guys who see this happening. I think there are still too many guys who just cover a campaign like its an evolving set of speeches.”

Most of the reporters seemed to perceive, however dimly, that they were the people’s representatives in the executive mansion and that the President had no right to keep them in
the dark and to use the media solely for his own ends. But at that point they balked. They would not admit that this extraordinary situation called for extraordinary action by the press; they refused to consider a strike, a boycott or any kind of dramatic gesture that would point up the gravity of the crisis. “There’s just an awareness that this would be a politically unwise thing to do because you’d leave yourself open to attack,” said Jules Witcover. Nixon had the reporters so thoroughly on the defensive that they forgot that they, as a body, had considerable power and that they had certain rights.

It was not as if pressure had never succeeded in the past. In 1967, during the Johnson Administration, Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington
Post
, decided to fight the system of backgrounders.
^§
Bradlee instructed his reporters to “fight like hell” to get everything on the record, and he got
The New York Times
to go along with him. A few days later, when the White House tried to hold a backgrounder on the Common Market, the
Post
’s Carrol Kilpatrick and the
Times’
Max Frankel protested and insisted that they had to know why the briefing was for background only. The briefing was put on the record. Having won a small victory, however, the
Times
and the
Post
did not keep up the fight, and backgrounders continued to flourish.

During Nixon’s first term, there was only one group effort to deal with the White House, the “Washington Hotel meeting,” and all the reporters involved went out of their way to explain that they weren’t trying to gang up on the President. The Washington Hotel meeting took place in December 1971, when Nixon had avoided holding a press conference for nineteen consecutive weeks. When Nixon finally announced that he would hold a press conference on December 10, Jules Witcover
and Stuart Loory, who were both then working for the Los Angeles
Times
, decided that it would be a good idea if some White House reporters got together and discussed how to make Presidential press conferences more productive.

Witcover and Loory realized that if they weren’t careful, the White House would try to brand the meeting a “press conspiracy,” so they did everything they could to make the meeting open and innocent. They got John Osborne, whom the White House regarded as if he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, to chair the meeting. Then they phoned about forty reporters and invited them to come. Some simply refused to consider the invitation, fearing the “conspiracy” charge. Others consulted with their editors and agonized for days over the decision. Bob Semple consented to attend, but only as an observer. Witcover and Loory considered setting up a miniature press section for him—a separate table, with a typewriter and free drinks.

Finally, twenty-eight reporters met one December morning for a coffee-and-cruller session in a room on the mezzanine of the Washington Hotel, a second-class place just up the street from the National Press Building. The meeting was as innocuous as a student council session. The first subject they discussed was whether it was cricket for them to meet. They agreed that it was. Then they talked for over an hour, arriving at a consensus on two points: it would be nice if somebody would ask the President at the upcoming press conference whether he intended to see the press more frequently; it would also be nice if reporters were more diligent in following up each other’s questions, so that the President could not slip by with an evasive reply. Some of the reporters had misgivings about asking the President about the press conference situation—the viewing public might be offended to see the press taking up time with an “inside baseball” type of question. But eventually everyone at the meeting agreed that it was a good thing to ask because it was in the public interest to have more press conferences.

It was a very informal meeting, with everyone gulping coffee and smoking. At the end, John Osborne was asked to go over
to the White House and tell Ziegler about the subjects that had been discussed and the conclusions that the reporters had reached. When Osborne appeared in Ziegler’s office that afternoon, the press secretary smiled and said that he already knew about the meeting. Osborne gave him a short summary of the discussion and Ziegler said “Fine,” thanked him, and led him out of the office.

Of course, Osborne’s mission did no good. Soon after the meeting, Herb Klein (the White House director of communications) wrote an article for the Op-Ed page of
The New York Times
, hinting darkly that the reporters had been up to no good: “… some of the reporters who were there took pains to say they were not part of a cabal or conspiracy and that in no way did they discuss either the order or the subject matter of the questions that would be asked at the forthcoming conference. Whether or not they did, the timing of the meeting did nothing to enhance press credibility.”