The Boys on the Bus (36 page)

Semple was not intimidated by the White House; it was just that he was a model
Times
man, and therefore painfully conscious of the rules of objective journalism. He came from a large, close-knit, cultured Midwestern family. (His father, who ran the Wyandotte Chemical Company, not only served as president of the Detroit Symphony, but also sat in as second clarinetist several times a season.) Early in his teens, he was sent to Andover, where he ran the school paper. Later, he went to
Yale, became chairman of the
Daily News
, and acquired an accent somewhat similar to that of William Buckley, who had held the same position in an earlier era. After graduating he studied history at Berkeley for a year and flirted with the idea of going to law school. But he could not face the prospect of more schooling; he rejected the professions one by one until he finally settled upon journalism
faute de mieux
.

In 1961, he went to work for the fledgling
National Observer
; two years later he wrote to James Reston, asking for a job on the
New York Times
. He was hired and served a two-year apprenticeship as a deskman in the Washington Bureau. By 1965, he was lobbying heavily for a job as reporter, and Tom Wicker, who was then bureau chief, finally made him the No. 2 man at the White House. From then on, he rose quickly, for he wrote gracefully, worked fiendishly hard, and charmed everyone with his open, good-natured manner. In late 1967, Wicker assigned him to cover the long-shot candidacy of Richard Nixon.

Semple would later think that he had been a good choice for the assignment, for he was able to convince the Nixon people, who hated the
Times
, that he was looking at the candidate with “a fresh eye.” In one of his first pieces, Semple wrote that the old, Red-baiting Nixon had vanished. “In his place,” wrote Semple, “stands a walking monument to reason, civility, frankness.” (Even in June 1973, after the Watergate scandal had broken, Semple claimed that he was not embarrassed by this early assessment. “I guess I’m victimized by the same thing as Scotty Reston,” he said. “I’m perfectly prepared to believe in redemption.”)

Later, after Nixon had won the nomination and launched his Presidential campaign in earnest, Semple became less enchanted with him, but found it hard to express his doubts within the narrow, hard-news form of reporting preferred by the
Times
. In the fall of 1968, a mildly worded piece he wrote pointing out Nixon’s trick of declaring “moratoriums” on issues he did not wish to discuss was greeted with skepticism by the editors; they balked at running it. The
Times
was loathe to
break away from the traditional, simplistic forms of election coverage, and Semple had to fight for over a week to make them accept a piece which contained so much analysis. Though he continued to write such pieces over the course of the next four years, he did so with extreme caution, for he shared the
Times
fear of mixing conjecture with straight news. Although he admitted in 1973 that the press needed some new form of journalism to deal with the obscurantism and dissimulation of the White House, he was always leary of pioneering such forms himself. “I just didn’t know how good I was at it,” he said.

When Semple followed Nixon into the White House, his belief in redemption continued to spring eternal. Though he realized, and wrote, that Nixon’s staff was concerned mainly with re-electing the President, he still searched for higher motivations. In April 1970, for instance, he wrote a magazine piece about John Ehrlichman in which he depicted the Nixon aide as a “compassionate and easy-going” middle American who was seeking to push Nixon away from the right and toward the middle of the road on issues such as welfare and civil rights. Not all of Semple’s colleagues agreed with this appraisal.

“Why are you so nice to Ehrlichman?” Marty Nolan asked him. “He’s just a sleazy arrogant thug like the rest of them around here.”

“I think there’s such a thing as being too cynical,” Semple replied.

Even in 1973 Semple did not feel compelled to apologize for the gentle treatment he had given Ehrlichman. He had been writing about the “substance of ideas, pieces of legislation” rather than about Ehrlichman’s character, he said. He had avoided denigrating Ehrlichman’s character in order not to affront him. “I had to keep lines open to Ehrlichman to find out what the hell Nixon was doing.”

Semple prided himself on keeping the lines open. It was for this reason, he said, that he remained at the White House no matter how discouraging the assignment became. “There were many months when nobody would see me. But I felt that it
would be even more difficult for somebody else to give it a try. They were more likely to return
my
phone calls, simply because they knew what I looked like.”

Semple drove himself hard in the White House job, often growing so absorbed in his duties that he became woefully absent-minded. (On a later Presidential trip to California, for instance, he woke up one morning in his hotel room, packed his suitcase, placed it outside the door, and heard the baggage handler pick it up; it was only as he was about to go out for breakfast that he realized he had packed his shoes. He had to spend the day padding around in his stocking feet.) He was one of the three or four men in the White House press corps who went beyond the briefings and press conferences to cultivate sources on the staff, study the White House hierarchy, and dig out original “inside” stories. But by the time of the 1972 campaign, he was growing increasingly bored and frustrated. With the election at stake, his best sources were drying up. “When you’re reduced to the status, as we were toward the end, of listening to Nixon’s speeches and listening to Ronald L. Ziegler once a day, then you’re reduced to guesswork,” he said later. “And that is not work for a grown man.”

Of course, John Osborne’s work sometimes consisted largely of guesswork, and it was consistently the most informative writing on the White House. But Semple was playing by the rules of
The New York Times
, and they did not allow for guesswork. Nor did he push Ziegler especially hard for more information. That wasn’t Semple’s style. Semple did not want to demean the dignity of the
Times
by getting into any open fights with the Administration. Ziegler usually treated him cordially, and Semple did not seem to know, or want to know, about the ways in which Ziegler abused reporters from lesser papers. Semple resigned himself to writing pieces which did little more than report what Nixon said, and much of his reporting in the fall of 1972 lacked guts. At the end of the year, he left the White House and became a deputy national editor in New York. Many of his colleagues guessed that he was being groomed to be chief of the
Washington Bureau in four or five years time.

Yet people who knew Semple sometimes felt that for all of his complaisance and willingness to play by the rules, he anguished over his failure to confront the Nixon people in the White House. Among his closest friends were some of the toughest Washington journalists—Tom Wicker, Peter Lisagor, and John Osborne—and he often talked to them about the problems of covering the Administration. Semple went out of his way to do things which seemed almost to be acts of contrition. For instance, he pulled the few strings he had in the White House to try to get credentials for Hunter Thompson of
Rolling Stone
. Semple knew Thompson slightly from the days when they both worked on the
National Observer
, and he liked Thompson’s wildly satirical writing. He seemed to enjoy using his influence to put Thompson on the same plane with Ron Ziegler.

When the press plane landed in Oakland, the weather was gloomy and overcast. The White House operatives and the Secret Service immediately herded the whole pack of journalists into a tiny area which had been formed by stretching yellow plastic ropes around red, white and blue oil drums. The band was playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and the crowd, drummed up by the Nixon advance team, was pressing against the airport fence. I looked around and suddenly spotted Hunter Thompson heading for the press enclosure in his springy lope, looking only moderately bizarre in his blue pants, white jacket, red-and-white shirt, and light blue aviator’s sunglasses. I introduced him to a Secret Service man, who got him his credentials. Meanwhile, Air Force One had landed and taxied to within fifty yards of the press. The door swung open and Nixon stepped out on the ramp, grimacing and waving. “Go get ’em Dick,” Thompson yelled. “Throw the Bomb!” The whine of the plane’s engines drowned him out, but he got a few funny looks from immediate neighbors. “Fifty years more!” he yelled. “Thousand-year Reich!”

Then Nixon headed for his panzer-limousine and the press headed for the buses, with the women in curlers screaming “Dan, Dan!” at Dan Rather, who acknowledged the screams with a curt nod and little shooting motion of the index finger, reminiscent of Elvis Presley. They carted all the reporters to a newly finished terminus of San Francisco’s BART system, where Nixon was sighted for a moment, on the other side of a glass partition, shaking hands with six subway functionaries. Then to a San Francisco Hotel to eat a buffet lunch in the pressroom and hear Nixon’s speech piped in over loudspeakers. Most of the men filed, it being early afternoon, typing furiously and then holding up a page and shouting “Western!” for the plane’s resident Western Union man to pick it up.

Next the reporters flew to Los Angeles, where they saw the President emerge from the plane again. The press was bused to the Century Plaza Hotel, where the Nixon people had set up a press headquarters in a little pseudo-Spanish meeting room that had a tiled fountain in its center. Standing outside the pressroom in the late afternoon, Hunter Thompson told Bob Semple how appalling it was to observe the White House press, even for a few hours. “They’re like slugs on a snail farm,” he said, taking a nervous puff on his cigarette holder. “Jesus, Ziegler treats them like garbagemen and they just take it.”

Semple was beginning to reply when Ziegler himself rounded a corner and Thompson went over to ask him a question. McGovern had stupidly charged that Nixon was soon going to introduce a right-to-work law and put an end to collective bargaining—which even McGovern must have known was ridiculous. Thompson asked Ziegler, talking very fast, “Uh, will there be any comment from you people on McGovern’s charge that Nixon is backing a right-to-work law?”

Ziegler didn’t even stop to look at him. “No!” he said, but it was more of a popgun explosion than a word. Thompson was stunned by this display of rudeness.

“Does he ever talk like that to you?” he asked Semple.

“Yes,” said Semple, and mumbled something about how the
job was making him crazy. “Excuse me,” he said, “I have to get a martini.”

That night, there was a large antiwar demonstration outside the Century Plaza. Many of the reporters watched the milling, chanting throng from the hotel balconies, which gave the demonstration a gladiatorial air. A few reporters, Jim Doyle among them, went out to have a closer look at the demonstration. As he stood outside the hotel, watching the protesters wave signs and beat wooden sticks against an iron railing, he said, “I used to think this was power. But these people have no power.”

By 9:30, most of the reporters had returned to the press headquarters in the Granada Room to watch another thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner on the same Sony monitors which had been set up in New York the night before. The dinner was taking place just upstairs. This time the featured guest was Bob Hope, in his pathetic court-jester-to-the-GOP incarnation.

“McGovern’s running out of money,” piped Hope. “Yesterday, he mugged an Avon lady!” You could divide the pressroom into two types—those who laughed and those who didn’t. Cassie Mackin sat there stonefaced, taking notes and furiously chain-smoking small cigars. David Broder looked somber and angry. Germond slumped in his chair, half-asleep, his head in one hand. Bob Pierpoint patted a dour John Osborne on the shoulder, rolled his eyes, and said, “You inspired?”

“McGovern had a hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner the other night,” said Hope, “and they stole the plates.” Over in another corner of the Granada Room a bunch of reporters were jiggling with laughter over Hope’s routine. Bill Theis, a white-haired mesomorph from the Hearst papers found it very funny, as did some other men from Midwestern papers. But no one found it as killingly funny as George Embrey of the Columbus
Dispatch
.

George Embrey loved the President. Nixon had a habit, whenever he got into his helicopter at the airport, of going to the window for a moment and waving at the crowd. George Embrey was the only member of the press who would always
wave back. “Goodbye,” he would cry softly as the helicopter started to take Nixon away, “Goodbye!” Embrey was a blank-faced, clean-cut man who wore white shirts, striped ties, neat suits, well-shined shoes; he spent a great deal of time at the National Press Club bar, soliciting votes to become the club’s secretary. He liked pool assignments, and once blew up at Ziegler for not letting him follow Nixon out the kitchen exit of a hotel. “My job is to stay with him
at all times!
” said Embrey. What he really wanted, many of his colleagues thought, was to become a Secret Service man.

He liked to hang out with other ultraconservative reporters, like the man from the Dallas
Morning News
. Sitting together on the bus, they chatted happily about how much they loathed George McGovern. On one trip Embrey expressed shock that McGovern had used the phrase “Kiss my ass.” Embrey said that he had washed his son’s mouth out with soap for using that kind of language—someone ought to do the same for George McGovern.

Embrey adored Nixon, but he was not considered the foremost shill in the White House. That distinction was generally conceded to Frank van der Linden of the Nashville
Banner
. Van der Linden was a short, redheaded man with the thin lips and rimless glasses of a mean little principal of a very backward high school. The Administration fed Van der Linden an “exclusive interview” whenever it sensed that the right wing was about to blow. In December 1971, when some of the White House aides were beginning to worry that John Ashbrook’s insurgent candidacy might steal the right from Nixon, a White House aide named Harry Dent summoned Van der Linden. Harry Dent, a former factotum to Strom Thurmond, did little chores for President Nixon like rescuing Southern textile firms which were about to lose defense contracts just because they refused to hire Negroes. Frank van der Linden had written a book based on the premise that Nixon was a great leader because he was a super-hawk. “In private, he is tougher than Spiro Agnew,” Van der Linden said approvingly in his book. One of
Harry Dent’s jobs was to keep Van der Linden happy by reinforcing the impression that Nixon would nuke anybody in the world for the sake of peace. So on December 24, 1971, Van der Linden wrote this in the
Banner
: