The Boys on the Bus (33 page)

Later, Allen Drury,
The New York Times
-reporter-turned-conservative-novelist, painted an even darker picture in
Courage and Hesitation
, his semiofficial book on Nixon: “A group of major correspondents, fantastically, has actually held a secret meeting, their ostensible purpose to arrange the sequence of questions, their real aim to get Dick Nixon.”

It was true that the press conference on December 10 was probably the roughest one Nixon ever had to face. “But that meeting didn’t make it rough,” said John Osborne. What made it rough was the fact that Nixon had piled up a lot of things to answer for, like calling Charles Manson “guilty” before the trial, firing Walter Hickel, and letting unemployment rise. Two or three reporters asked nasty questions, but there were very few follow-up questions, and Nixon dodged the tough ones with his customary skill.

Nixon always had the advantage at these conferences. The reporters were disorganized and many of them suffered from stage fright in front of the live television cameras. Nixon, on the
other hand, spent several days preparing himself, polishing answers to possible questions; he even memorized the seating chart so that he knew exactly where to point whenever he felt the need for a soft question from a friendly or notoriously incompetent reporter.

Toward the end of the half-hour press conference on December 10, Herb Kaplow (then of NBC) asked whether the President would hold press conferences more frequently in the future. Kaplow phrased the question very tactfully, and Nixon gave his standard reply, right out of one of the loose-leaf briefing books he’d been studying for three days. Of course, he had an obligation to inform the American people, but there were several ways—press conferences, formal reports to the nation, television chats with one or two correspondents. He thought that the American people had a right to hear his views directly, not just through the press. “And I think any member of the press would agree on that,” he said. He would like suggestions on how to keep the nation informed without dominating television too much, as some had charged. Maybe the answer was “more conferences in the office.”

“But,” said Nixon, “you make the vote.”

A few weeks later, Peter Lisagor, acting as head of the White House Correspondents Association, sent a list of suggestions to Nixon via Ziegler. Ziegler announced that the President was “pleased.” The list was promptly forgotten. None of the suggestions, including a plea for weekly press conferences, was adopted.

Thus, in the long run, the Washington Hotel meeting was a flop.
^‖
It was like a resolution by the General Assembly of the
U.N.—there was no clout behind it, so it was ignored. If there was a conspiracy in Washington, it was a White House plot to cripple the press, not a press conspiracy to get the President. The White House conspiracy, if anything,
demanded
a counter-conspiracy from the reporters to regain their rights. But the White House reporters refused to assert themselves, except to write a few sniping, ineffective articles about the lack of press conferences. Later, during the 1972 campaign, Nixon naturally felt free to seclude himself.

And even the best of the White House correspondents despaired of making the President account for the actions of his Administration. John Osborne, for instance, wrote a column about a press conference which Nixon held on August 29, 1972. A couple of reporters asked Nixon about the Watergate, and Nixon skated around the issue for a while, finally concluding with a statement that “no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.”

Osborne noted that nobody bothered to ask Nixon about John Mitchell, Hugh Sloan and other assistants who were alleged to be involved with the Watergate affair but were no longer “presently employed” at the White House. “He was not asked, either,” Osborne went on, “whether with all of these investigations on he now knew who had ordered the bugging and why it was ordered. I stood within 10 feet of him and didn’t even try to ask that simple and obvious question.” Later in the article, Osborne summed up by saying that the thing he would always remember about “Mr. Nixon’s first ‘political press conference’ of 1972 was his handling of the funds and bugging matter and our failure to handle him as a vulnerable candidate should have been handled. It was a lesson in the mesmerizing power of the presidency.”

But mesmerizing power had nothing to do with the case of Clark Mollenhoff. Mollenhoff was a fifty-one-year-old bull of a man, with greying closely cropped hair and glasses, who had been drafted by the New York Giants in 1943, but gave up a pro football career to enter journalism. An Iowan who still spoke with a Midwestern nasality, he joined the Des Moines
Register
and gradully earned a reputation as the toughest investigative reporter in Washington.

He prided himself on having “no ideological hangup.” He fought injustices in the State Department and the Agriculture Department and in 1953 he began to expose labor rackets and convinced Robert Kennedy to enlist the Senate Government Operations Committee in the battle against labor racketeering. As Jimmy Hoffa was led off to jail in 1967, he spat on Clark Mollenhoff. Nobody could intimidate Mollenhoff, not even Presidents. Eisenhower once told him to sit down at a press conference. He stayed on his feet. In time, he won every prize in the business, from the American Legion’s Fourth Estate Award to the Pulitzer.

For all his success, Mollenhoff was unpopular among some of his colleagues. In 1964, when he was heir apparent to the presidency of the National Press Club, a group of members mounted a successful stop-Mollenhoff movement. Many people found Mollenhoff dogmatic and egotistical. Moreover, for an investigative reporter, he had a curious weakness for participating in government. Under Kennedy he served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information Policy while still writing about the Administration. While covering the Goldwater campaign in 1964, he wrote a memo bringing one of his pet injustices to the candidate’s attention; Goldwater based a speech on the memo. Finally, in 1969, he became an ombudsman for the Nixon Administration, a $33,500-a-year bureaucrat who was supposed to warn the President against corruption within the ranks of the Administration, investigate complaints, and ferret out wrongdoings in past Administrations. Mollenhoff resigned after a year.
His detractors said that he was eased out after making a fool of himself by clumsily and stubbornly defending the nomination of Clement Haynsworth to the Supreme Court.
He
claimed to have left because the Nixon staffers engaged in “footdragging” over things he “was suggesting for their own good.”

Two years after Mollenhoff had quit the White House and returned to his desk in the Motel Modern surroundings of the Des Moines
Register
’s Washington Bureau, the Watergate affair broke. Mollenhoff was appalled at the implications of the break-in and once again started suggesting moves that the White House ought to make for its own good. But this time he was suggesting them in the public prints. In a long series of tough columns, Mollenhoff called on Nixon to set up a bipartisan panel which could investigate the affair and clear the Presidency of all taint of wrongdoing. He also charged that the Justice Department could, if it wanted to, force at least one of the indicted men to tell who had financed the operation—by granting immunity from prosecution.

On October 5, Mollenhoff was typing in his plaque-studded office when the news came over the bureau’s wire machine that Nixon was holding an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office. Mollenhoff dashed the four blocks to the White House and arrived while the press conference was still in progress. But he was not allowed to go in. Standing around the empty White House pressroom, Mollenhoff began to smolder. He was convinced that the White House had purposely avoided notifying him for fear that he would badger Nixon with questions about the Watergate affair.

Later that afternoon, Mollenhoff stormed into Ziegler’s office to give the press secretary “a piece of my mind.” Mollenhoff accused Ziegler of trying to block the “tough, informed questions” which he had been raising in his column for weeks. Then he began to question Ziegler about the financing of the Watergate burglary. He asked if Ziegler seriously believed that Gordon Liddy and James McCord, two of the arrested men, had used their own money on the project.

“No,” said Ziegler.

“Then where did it come from?” asked Mollenhoff.

“Why, I didn’t think there was any question but that the money came from the Committee,” said Ziegler.

Mollenhoff was startled. He couldn’t believe that the White House press secretary would admit that the Watergate break-in had been financed by the Committee to Re-elect the President. So he asked again.

“There is no question but that the money came from the Committee,” Ziegler repeated.

The next morning—October 6—Mollenhoff had a story on the front page of the
Register
based on the Ziegler quote. Reporters immediately began to phone Ziegler about the quote, and Ziegler read all callers a prepared statement which said that the quote was a “misinterpretation” of what he had told Mollenhoff.

“I said I have no personal knowledge of any aspect of this matter other than what I have read in the press,” Ziegler’s statement continued. “Therefore I am not in a position to draw any conclusion or to make any authoritative statements whatsoever, and the reporter for the Des Moines
Register
was so informed.”

That evening, Ziegler called Mollenhoff and read him the statement, too.

“Well, are you denying that?” Mollenhoff asked him.

“Well, no,” said Ziegler, and repeated that he had not been authorized to say anything, and that he didn’t know anything about the Watergate.

“Well, if it stays within that context and it’s clear it’s not a denial, that’s fine,” said Mollenhoff.

But many papers treated Ziegler’s statement as a denial, which angered Mollenhoff. A week after the story appeared, he went to the morning White House briefing to battle openly with Ziegler and to defend his own reputation as a journalist.

The briefing began with some pleasantries from Ziegler and an announcement that the President would make a radio
speech on crime the coming Sunday. There was a long string of questions on the Paris peace talks. Then Mollenhoff, standing at the front of the room about ten feet from the lectern, initiated his exchange with Ziegler.

Somebody immediately popped up to ask a question on the bombing, leaving Mollenhoff stranded and shaking with anger. Ziegler was pale and his pudgy face was drawn, but the bombing question and some subsequent queries about campaign plans gave him a chance to calm down. Mollenhoff kept raising his trembling hand and coming in with more questions, but Ziegler kept putting him off. Nobody helped him. In the back of the room, a reporter shook his head as Mollenhoff came in for his third attack. “There,” said the reporter, “is the male Sarah McClendon.” Everyone in the room knew all the details of the Mollenhoff affair, which had been reported in the Washington
Post
. Most of them probably believed that Mollenhoff was in the right.