The Boys on the Bus (37 page)

And so on. Frank van der Linden also liked the Vice President, even though Agnew wasn’t as tough as Nixon. When Agnew went on his trip to Greece, Van der Linden led the pack of shills and conservative columnists who accompanied him. In one of his first dispatches, Van der Linden described Agnew as a “consummate diplomat,” which set the general tone of the reporting. Walter Mears was also along on the trip, and he felt the odd man out. One day on the plane, Agnew announced that the U.S. would keep sending aid to Greece, no matter what Congress wanted to do. After the party landed, Mears went to his hotel room and filed the story. Later he found out that Van der Linden and the rest of the reporters had agreed to “embargo” the story until the Agnew people put out a full text of Agnew’s remarks. They always insisted on handouts, because they didn’t like to have to take notes; the Agnew people always obliged.

When Mears came down to breakfast at the little hotel in Crete the following morning, he found he had unwittingly broken an embargo. “Van der Linden starts leaping all over me and screaming, waving his arms and raising hell,” Mears later recalled. Van der Linden and his cronies got so ugly that Mears finally called New York and told the AP to hold the story for a day. But even then, Van der Linden wouldn’t lay off him. He
kept bitching and whining at regular intervals throughout the day about how Mears had tried to betray the group. Finally, at Knossos, standing right in front of the Labyrinth, Van der Linden started in again. Mears decided to shove him into the Labyrinth. But just as Mears was about to deliver the blow, Spiro Agnew appeared around a corner, surrounded by Secret Service men, waving, smiling, and yelling hello. Thus was Frank van der Linden saved from meeting the Minotaur.

The next morning in Los Angeles, Nixon made a final speech to a group of cancer scientists amidst the tacky splendors of the Biltmore Hotel. Then most of the reporters flew home to Washington with Nixon, but Cassie Mackin stayed behind. She was completing her two-week tour of duty with the Nixon campaign and was therefore expected to do an overview piece. She had been thinking about it for several days, and she knew precisely what she wanted to say. She shot her “standups” at the Biltmore immediately after Nixon’s speech and went to the local NBC affiliate station to edit the piece and feed it to New York. At the time the piece went on the air, she was boarding a plane to fly back to Washington, so she did not find out until late the next morning that she had just filed the most controversial piece of the year. Cassie Mackin was the first, if not the only, member of the press to point out that the emperor had no clothes.

She opened her report by observing that “the Nixon campaign is, for the most part, a series of speeches before closed audiences, invited guests only.” Then she moved into the heart of the matter. She said: “On defense spending and welfare reform, the two most controversial issues in this campaign … the two issues that are almost haunting George McGovern, there is a serious question of whether President Nixon is setting up straw men by leaving the very strong impression that McGovern is making certain proposals which in fact he is not.”

She showed a film clip of Nixon saying: “There are some who
believe that we should make cuts in our defense budget … that it doesn’t really make any difference whether the United States has the second strongest Navy, the second strongest Army, the second strongest Air Force in the world.”

Then Mackin said: “The President obviously meant McGovern’s proposed defense budget, but his criticism never specified how the McGovern plan would weaken the country. On welfare, the President accuses McGovern of wanting to give those on welfare more than those who work, which is not true. On tax reform, the President says McGovern is calling for ‘confiscation of wealth,’ which is not true.”

Mackin concluded: “When all is said and done, it’s like Mr. Nixon says, he is the President and it is the power of the Presidency that makes it possible to stay above the campaign and answer only the questions of his choice.”

Before the Nightly News was off the air, Herb Klein was on the phone to NBC, demanding corrections. The next morning, Reuven Frank, the president of NBC News, looked at Mackin’s script and could not find anything to correct. Nevertheless, as Mackin was about to leave her home for the White House, which was her assignment for the day, she got a phone call from NBC telling her to come to the office instead. That was the first she heard about the White House protests, and she had to spend the day compiling background material from Nixon and McGovern speeches to substantiate her report. She sent the material to New York and heard nothing more about the matter. Rumors circulated in Washington all week to the effect that NBC was getting ready to fire her, but the rumors were apparently generated by alarmists in the McGovern office.

The extraordinary thing about her piece was that it was virtually unique. Nobody else who reported on the trip said in simple declarative sentences that Nixon had made demonstrably false accusations about three of McGovern’s programs. Bob Semple said that you couldn’t do it—it was against the rules. But Mackin did it, without even thinking about the consequences. Even months later, she did not like to talk about the piece, because
she felt that it put her in the position of defending an action that was natural and obvious, an action that required no defense.

The reason that the piece packed such a wallop was that it was so simple and direct. There were no lengthy film clips to
prove
that McGovern didn’t believe in confiscation of wealth. There were no complicated references to “observers” or “experts” who would vouch for McGovern. Mackin was confident of her own honesty and intelligence, and she simply expected people to believe her when she said that Nixon was wrong. This was a revolutionary belief; hers was one of the few reports on the White House during the fall that did not automatically assume a need for dozens of built-in defenses against an anticipated assault from the Administration. Perhaps it was no coincidence that it was a woman who went for Nixon’s jugular. Mackin was an outsider. She had neither the opportunity nor the desire to travel with the all-male pack; therefore, she was not infected with the pack’s chronic defensiveness and defeatism. Like Helen Thomas and Sarah McClendon, she could still call a spade a spade.

Other people on the trip wrote tough pieces about the absurd isolation of the President and the lack of access to even his most junior advisers. David Broder wrote the toughest. In fact, it was clear that Broder had seen things in San Francisco and Los Angeles that touched off his obsession with the fragility of institutions. Broder took one look around and sensed that Nixon was trying to kill off that most sacred of institutions, the Presidential election. He wrote:

With that, Broder retired from the campaign trail for the rest of the year. “You shouldn’t write that kind of a piece and then come back as an ‘objective reporter’ immediately thereafter,” he said. So he left the day-to-day work to his chastened White House colleagues, who actually seemed to like the piece—since they were always momentarily braced by any show of balls—and he went off with Haynes Johnson to take the pulse of the electorate.

I went on only one more “Trip of the President” (as it said on the hexagonal press tag that hung around my neck). This was in late October, an excursion to Westchester and Nassau counties, fat suburbs to the north and east, respectively, of New York City. Nixon was going to motorcade through Westchester County and then fly to Nassau for a big rally. Since it was only a day trip, it afforded small papers a chance to see the campaign on the cheap. Enough reporters came to fill seven press buses. In honor of the motorcade, the Nixon people revived the custom of piping in a running pool report over the PA system of the buses—a technique which they had pioneered during the 1968 campaign.

“It was a big leap forward in press bus technology,” recalled Stuart Loory. “You no longer had to rely on the pool-after-the-fact. You had the pooler up there broadcasting, so you could sit back there in the press bus and know what was happening a mile ahead. This guy became known as the Z-pooler, Z for Ziegler, because he rode in Ziegler’s car.”

In more innocent times, they used to let anybody be Z-pooler. Loory once had the job when Nixon went to Manila. “Having seen a lot of manufactured demonstrations, by what we used to call Rent-a-Crowd in Moscow,” said Loory, “I noticed that the Manila demonstration had all the signs of being manufactured, as if John Ehrlichman had been there with the balloons beforehand. And I reported it that way over the microphone. My colleagues loved it.” Ziegler had been sitting next to Loory in the car, connected by earphone to almost every other aide on the White House staff. “Ziegler was on a different channel, and he was getting feedbacks on what I was saying, or else he was getting heat from Haldeman, I don’t know. They were embarrassed. They wanted to cut me off but they couldn’t. So they started pointing out positive things for me to report. I would attribute that stuff to Ziegler. I was having fun. I was really enjoying it. That was the last time they let me have that job.”

After the Loory fiasco, the White House began to refine the technique of Z-pooling, and by October 1972, they had found the ideal Z-pooler—Forrest Boyd of Mutual Broadcasting. Boyd was such a congenial type that you could hardly tell he was a reporter. In fact, Boyd was one of the very few journalists whom Nixon sometimes invited to a state dinner. Boyd was up there with Ziegler on this cold, gusty October afternoon. First came a limousine containing Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, then came the 500,000-dollar tank carrying Pat and Dick Nixon, then a Secret Service car, then a pool car, then five open pickup trucks containing rheumy-eyed, shivering, mutinous network camera crews, then the seven press buses full of reporters guzzling soda and beer and listening to the squawk of the PA system. Though Forrest Boyd identified himself quite shamelessly
at the outset of the running commentary, almost everyone on the buses assumed that he was a White House flack. Even Bruce Biossat, a syndicated columnist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association who later wrote an amusing column about the commentary, labored under this false impression.

At the outset, Boyd established himself as a master of euphemism. “The President is waving to people along the street …” he said. “A few are holding signs giving a message.”

A “sign giving a message” meant a pro-McGovern sign. There were an astounding number of them that day, considering that Westchester was supposed to be solid Nixon country. The messages included: “Re-elect the Dike Bomber,” and “Robots for Nixon, People for McGovern.” In fact, the anti-Nixon turnout was so striking that Rowley Evans, sitting in one of the buses, became visibly alarmed. The hundreds of McGovern signs did not quite jibe with the Nixon landslide that he and Novak were confidently predicting.

“Rowley was really sweating,” one reporter later said to another. “I mean, he just
shat
.”

“That’s funny,” said the other reporter, “Rowley usually goes back to his room to get nervous.”

“Yeah,” said the first reporter, “it’s hard to get him nervous in public.”

Forrest Boyd managed to ignore all the anti-Nixon signs and plowed on in his Kurt Gowdy voice.

“There’s a lot of noise here,” he said in Mamaroneck. “Some favorable, some unfavorable, but of course the favorable are outshouting the others by a considerable margin … The President has signed a football apparently belonging to the Mamaroneck Midgets. The President is going back to the limousine, I’m going to see if I can get back there too!… This crowd is really terrific! It’s almost impossible to get through here!

“We’re an hour and fifteen minutes behind schedule. The most we’ve ever been behind before was forty-five minutes,
so
this may be an historic first
. We’re trying to make up time, but it’s impossible. The crowds have just been too big, bigger than expected. Ron Ziegler is very apologetic.”

The reporters on the bus found this all very funny, but they listened carefully for the crowd count.

“We have an estimate here from Captain Keefe of the New York State Police, who will be keeping us posted. Up to the last town the estimate is that 312,000 people have seen the President today. Hold it. We just got a new figure on Larchmont. The chief there says it was 80,000 not 50,000. Make the cumulative total 342,000.”

Len Garment and Bill Safire, two White House aides who were on one of the buses, kept promoting Captain Keefe every time the estimate went up. “
Captain
Keefe!” Safire would say. “I’d say that makes him
Lieutenant Governor
Keefe!” Later that day Ziegler told Semple, “Listen, that’s an honest estimate. This Captain Keefe makes an honest estimate.” There was a pause while the implication sank in. “Of course,” Ziegler added, “all our estimates are honest.”