The Boys on the Bus (39 page)

At an all-media conference, Agnew did indeed sit down, with a water pitcher on a little table at his side and a light blue backdrop behind him. The addition of these few props meant that local TV newsmen could shoot the press conference as if it were an exclusive interview in their own studios. Even
though a hundred reporters might be present, the TV men could zoom in on the enthroned Veep and capture a feeling of intimacy. That way, Agnew didn’t have to chase around to three or four local TV stations in every city. The all-media format made the TV men happy. No matter that they didn’t have an exclusive interview; they got what
appeared
to be an exclusive interview.

“It was just a little thing,” said Jules Witcover, “but it underlined how much the Agnew people thought about these things. They realized that by accommodating the press, they could have the press do things their way. They saw that one of our big weaknesses is our desire for convenience.”

Convenience was the order of the week. Agnew gave the press that treasured gift, the easy hook. In his meetings with reporters he was sufficiently cool and low-key that they could go off and happily file portraits on the New Agnew. It was an obvious, inevitable and comfortable story, and nearly everybody on board was pleased to write it. Of course, there were a few brief flashes of the old Agnew, such as when the Veep opined that someone had “set up” the Watergate break-in to embarrass the GOP, or when he mistakenly announced that the FBI had undertaken to investigate the grain deal. The
Times
’ Ned Kenworthy, back in Washington, found out that Agnew had asked Caspar Weinberger what to say if reporters questioned him about the grain affair and Weinberger had said, jokingly, “Tell ’em that the FBI is investigating.” So Agnew had gone out and told them just that. When the story broke, however, Agnew simply issued a brief and dignified denial.

Vic Gold punished the
Times
, but quietly, by making the Veep available for exclusive interviews with
Newsweek
and the Washington
Post
. Jim Wooten, who had requested an interview in August, reminded Vic from time to time and Vic nervously assured him, “We’re working on it, Jim, we’re working on it.” But somehow, Agnew never did find a moment for the
Times
.

A year or two before, Vic might have summoned Wooten and squalled at him for ten minutes, impugning Wooten’s patriotism. But the new style was all cordiality. There was a groggy
truce between Agnew and the reporters. Agnew seemed actually to enjoy sauntering back to the pool section of his plane and getting to know the reporters. One day during the first week, Gold announced on the press plane that the Vice President was going to give a party for the reporters that night. Then he ran around collaring everyone individually, warning them that the conversation at the party was off the record. That night, the party was held in the Mark Twain Room of the Louisville Ramada Inn, a small function room with two well-stocked bars. Agnew arrived early, was handed a Scotch and soda, and stood alone for a while. An awkward silence ensued.

Bob Greene, a 25-year-old columnist for the Chicago
Sun-Times
, describes what happened next in his book
Running
:

To some reporters who were there, the party seemed a curious kind of release. Most of the men on the plane had spent weeks or even years disliking and distrusting Agnew, and the energy lost in hating him had depleted them. Now, the momentary lifting of antagonism came as a relief. But not for everyone. Wooten spent most of the time drinking by himself in a corner of the room. He could not put his finger on what troubled him, but he was vaguely uneasy at the sight of his colleagues making cocktail party talk with Agnew. It was just somehow unseemly, and Wooten did not wish to take part in it. About two thirds of the way through the party, Vic came up to Wooten, took him by the arm, and said, “Come on, I want you to meet the Vice President.”

Wooten gently disengaged his arm and said, “No, Victor, I don’t want to meet him.” Gold was taken aback. “I’ll meet him sometime,” said Wooten, “but not at a party. I just don’t want to.”

“The Vice President’s very interested in you,” said Gold.

“Bullshit, Victor,” said Wooten. “He doesn’t even know me. I haven’t written more than two or three stories about him.”

“Oh, but he knows you,” said Vic. “He’s
interested
in you.”

“Victor,” Wooten said firmly, “I am here to
cover
the Vice President, not to be his buddy.”

Gold was crestfallen. He walked off, his shoulders sagging. The next day he told Agnew about the conversation, and when a pool reporter asked the Vice President how he thought the press was doing this year, Agnew replied that he thought the press was doing fine, that he enjoyed getting to know the reporters better, but that he understood that there was one who had no desire to meet him for fear of injuring his objectivity. And, said Agnew, perhaps the reporter was right.

Wooten was merely saluting the reality that no reporter was truly going to get to know Agnew. Why play the game? In spite of all the press conferences, press parties (three in all), and
interviews, no one was going to lay a glove on the Veep. On the first day of campaigning, a bunch of veteran reporters surrounded Agnew whenever he came down the ramp of the plane. They threw questions at him and tried to eavesdrop on the conversations he had with dignitaries who had come to meet him. Such was the procedure followed with George McGovern. But Gold was appalled. He couldn’t believe his eyes. By the third stop, the reporters found themselves being ushered into a little corral on the airfield when Agnew landed. At a rally, the Secret Service told them that they would not be allowed to cross a certain crack in the sidewalk. At later rallies, the Secret Service laid down red masking tape as the line of demarcation. When the reporters—notably Jules Witcover—complained, Gold grew indignant. Didn’t they understand? This was the Vice President of the United States!

“You make your moves, and you have a little fun, and you let ’em know you’re there,” Witcover said later. “But it doesn’t amount to a row of beans. Because they have control of the operation. They have the extra layer of the Secret Service, they have the aura of authority—the aura of the Vice Presidency and the Presidency. That is a positive tool in their hands. It’s an intimidating kind of thing on a day-to-day basis. It’s fine to say ‘Why don’t you guys get in there every day?’ But the Agnew people know it’s the human element in there—you don’t continue to dog it day after day after day. You realize it’s not doing any good so you don’t spin your wheels. The masking tape didn’t bother me that much, because you could just step over it. What bothered me was the mentality that went into doing that.”

After the first week and a half, the all-media conferences petered out and the campaign settled into a dull hum of one or two speeches a day in which Agnew praised the local Republican candidates, boosted the Administration, and gently lamented McGovern’s errors. Agnew spent most afternoons in his hotel room. When he was not being an ogre, it became clear, Agnew was a bore. A few papers like the Los Angeles
Times
,
had resolved to cover Agnew constantly on the theory that he
was
the Nixon campaign, that if Nixon was going to send out any message, Agnew would be the delivery boy.

But no message came. A mild depression descended on the press. A routine developed. The press plane sprouted decorations—posters and Halloween paraphernalia. Lou Cannon of the
Post
periodically wrote satirical news stories, signing them Irving Doppelganger of the Transylvania News Service. Once a week, Wooten composed something called the Barry Goldwater Memorial Intelligence Test. One day Joe Alsop appeared. He rode on Agnew’s own plane, not the press plane. Agnew went back and talked with him for a half hour, with Alsop handing out advice in his phony Oxford accent. After Agnew returned to his private quarters in the front of the plane, Vic Gold went back. “How was it?” he asked Alsop.

“It was wonderful, Vic,” said Alsop. “Really, really wonderful.”

Few of the regulars thought the campaign was so wonderful. Wooten later said that he had felt angry from first to last—there was no way to make the Nixon/Agnew outfit talk about the issues. His purpose was not to see Nixon defeated and McGovern elected—he claimed not to “give a shit” about that—but he did want to help make the election more of a real plebescite. Other reporters shared his vague feelings of frustration. I doubt whether any of them appreciated the real problem, which was that Agnew’s significance in 1972 stemmed entirely from his actions in the past: in 1970 and 1971, he had poisoned the well against the press. Robert Semple pointed this out at the bottom of a story he wrote in the middle of October:

Was this a planned strategy? If so, who had planned it? Nobody bothered to ask these questions. Reporters, especially campaign reporters, had no mandate to explore the past; recent history was just so much stale news. The story lay in the present. Agnew’s people knew this fact of journalism, and exploited it by feeding the reporters a new Agnew and thus diverting all attention from the past. “I don’t think that we put in nearly as much thought to covering a campaign as they put in to how we’re going to cover a campaign,” said one reporter, quite correctly.

Yet some of the coverage was interesting, especially Jim Wooten’s. Before being assigned to the Agnew campaign, Wooten had spent six years and gone through seven typewriters covering George Wallace. He had followed Wallace in 1968, 1970, 1972, all through the South and into Northern cities; he had gone everywhere with Wallace, in fact, except to Laurel, Maryland. On May 16, 1972, the first event on Wallace’s schedule had been a dinner at 5:30 in Glen Birney. Wooten had a late breakfast with his wife and did some work on a piece suggested by Johnny Apple about the unusually heavy security that surrounded Wallace. He phoned the Wallace Headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, to make sure that no events had been added to the schedule. No, they assured him, the first event was still the dinner. (Later, Wooten would kick himself for not having known better than to rely on the Wallace staff. The Wallace campaign was a badly disorganized affair, run by total incompetents, and the Wallace people were always making changes in the schedule at the last moment, such as the addition of the shopping center rally at Laurel.)

Wooten drove out to the Atlanta airport and caught a 1:30 plane to Washington. Just as the plane was touching down at National Airport, at 3:00 o’clock, Arthur Bremer pulled out a
cheap revolver and emptied it into Wallace. Wooten found out about the shooting five minutes later from the girl at the Avis counter. He felt, he later said, “an almost indescribable sickness in my soul.” He had attended every Wallace rally for six years but missed the one that counted most. He dashed for his rented car and headed for Maryland. When he reached the hospital, he found that four men from the
Times’
Washington Bureau already had the story well in hand, and he soon became convinced that his absence had not gravely damaged the
Times’
coverage. But months later he still felt slightly sick whenever he thought about that day. No one on the Agnew plane was more conscientious about sticking with the candidate than Jim Wooten.

In some ways, the experience of covering Wallace had prepared Wooten well for the Agnew assignment. He had learned to live with ease and confidence inside enemy camps. He and Wallace disliked each other intensely, but they got along. Wooten refused to be bullied. (When Wallace, during an interview, began talking about “niggers,” Wooten said, “Governor, you don’t have to say ‘nigger’; you don’t have to impress me.”) And Wooten refused to be unfair to Wallace. He realized from the start that Wallace only thrived on attacks from the Eastern press, using them to his own political advantage. Now Wooten applied the same principles to the Agnew campaign.

He treated Agnew with scrupulous fairness, taking pains to mention that Agnew had given a well-researched speech or received an enthusiastic reception at a particular rally. But Wooten also pointed out Agnew’s inconsistencies and exaggerations with an exemplary directness. When Agnew lashed out at a group of antiwar hecklers in San Diego, comparing them to Nazi Brown Shirts, Wooten reminded his readers that Agnew had blasted McGovern for comparing Nixon’s policies to those of Hitler. He also devoted four paragraphs to describing how a spectator punched a heckler in the nose, and how plain-clothes-men then dragged the heckler away but ignored the assailant. It was just the sort of description that the Nixon Nassau rally had cried out for.