The Boys on the Bus (44 page)

The straight reporters who worked for news organizations with vast audiences had been taught since their cub days that their first duty was to protect their own credibility and the credibility of their employers. It was for just this purpose that the rules of objectivity had been created. If a reporter wished to retain the trust of his readers, then he had to write about politics from a totally impartial point of view. Most of the reporters covering the campaign hewed closely to the rules of objectivity not only for the sake of advancing themselves in the profession, but also out of a genuine belief that the objective approach produced fair and honest coverage.

As the fall campaign progressed, however, it began to dawn on many of the McGovern reporters that the rules of objectivity
were no longer doing the job. The trouble was the staggering inequality between the coverage of the two campaigns. Given their new mandate to explore “inside” stories, the McGovern reporters were having a field day with the wide-open McGovern campaign. Meanwhile, the White House reporters were failing to get across the obstacle course that the White House had set up; indeed, they were not even trying.
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There was nothing in the rules of objectivity to rectify such a situation. Only the national political reporters had the leeway to write about both campaigns; among them, only Broder expressed real outrage over Nixon’s invisibility, and he declared himself
hors de combat
immediately thereafter. As for the McGovern campaign reporters, they were trapped on the plane and they could do little but file their stories and anguish over the imbalance in the coverage.

Since Richard Nixon was declining nearly all invitations to share the pleasure of his company with the electorate, the only real Presidential campaign belonged to George McGovern. McGovern’s campaign did not officially begin until the second week in August, but soon after the Democratic Convention adjourned, in mid-July, McGovern retreated to his home state of South Dakota for two weeks of rest and strategy-planning. Good Senator that he was, he had been persuaded to take his working vacation in the picturesque Black Hills in hopes that the tag-along press might boost South Dakota’s flagging tourist industry.

McGovern installed himself and a skeleton staff in comfortable cabins hard by Sylvan Lake, in a wooded
area at the top of a hill. The press was parked eight miles down the hill in metropolitan Custer, S.D., a tourist paradise that contained antique shops and Indian souvenir stores—everything but the requisite snake ranch. The reporters were billeted in the Hi Ho Motel, a modern, Holiday Inn-type establishment which was nevertheless overwhelmed by the arrival of thirty-odd national reporters. It was the kind of a place where the desk clerk kept asking for autographs and the chambermaid walked on air for two weeks because she had made Harry Reasoner’s bed. There were no phones in the rooms, a fact which disturbed some of the reporters. But the McGovern staff pulled a bed out of one of the suites, hooked up twenty phones and a defective Telex machine, which received but could not transmit messages, put a big table in the center, and called it a pressroom.

Once a day, McGovern’s press secretary, Dick Dougherty, pulled into the parking lot outside the pressroom and stood in the hot sunshine, dressed in a denim jacket, telling the press what McGovern had eaten for lunch and how many sets he had played with the tennis pro he had imported from Washington. The relaxed routine was perfect for a group of people who were still recovering from the sleepless madness of the Convention. The reporters played tennis, canoed, took long drives to inspect the scenery, or simply sat around the Hi Ho’s swimming pool ogling the Secret Service lady in her bikini. There was a birthday party for McGovern, reminiscent of Muskie’s birthday night but tamer. The staff somehow conjured up a White House-shaped birthday cake, and Jim Naughton talked Dick Stout into coming out of retirement to do another stand-up routine. “The Senator went to Mt. Rushmore for a measurement,” said Stout. “The sculptor will be instructed to comb the rocks forward on the head.” McGovern smiled wanly.

During the first week in Custer, a new nucleus of “regulars” emerged, and they remained the central figures in the McGovern press corps for the rest of the campaign. Besides Naughton and Stout, there were Doug Kneeland, Adam Clymer, and Bill Greider.

Doug Kneeland was a
New York Times
man who had given up a good desk job in New York for a chance to move to the San Francisco Bureau, where he could produce the kind of human interest stories he most enjoyed writing. He was an energetic man who spoke in a sharp, pinched Maine accent; he had long, shaggy black-and-grey peppered hair, which he was constantly pushing out of his pouchy face. In July, he and Naughton were assigned to cover the McGovern campaign as a team; Kneeland would write one day, Naughton the next. At first, many of the other reporters scoffed at this system. It was a typical example of the
Times’
extravagance, they said, to assign two full-time reporters to the campaign when every other paper got along with one. But toward the end of the campaign, when everyone began to crumble from exhaustion, the reporters admitted that there was some wisdom in having two men on the plane.

Adam Clymer, a priggish, pear-shaped reporter for the Baltimore
Sun
, joined the McGovern party in the late spring. A shy man, he communicated most easily by griping. He bitched incessantly about everything—the food, the accommodations, the staff, the press operation, and the campaign in general—but he obviously reveled in all of the rituals of the campaign. A president of the Harvard
Crimson
during the fifties, he had since distinguished himself on the
Sun
with his reporting on India, Moscow, and the Department of Justice. Despite his proven journalistic competence, he remained moody and insecure; more than anyone else in the press corps, he seemed to derive his whole identity from being a campaign reporter. He seemed to love the dozens of ways in which the campaign made the press feel
important
; they had special phones set up for them at every stop, they had entrée to backstage areas, they were men apart. This was his first Presidential campaign, and he clearly longed to be a member of the Inner Circle, to receive the approval of his peers. To this end, he took great pains in writing satirical pool reports for his fellow reporters. After a while, he was accepted as a “character” and a wit.

The most extraordinary reporter on the McGovern campaign
was Bill Greider of the Washington
Post
. Greider grew up in a little town outside Cincinnati, went to Princeton in the same class as Johnny Apple, tried to make it as a playwright in New York City, and ended up writing for a small paper in Wheaton, Illinois. “In a town that small,” he said, “you really learn in a hurry that if you’re gonna kick somebody, you’d better kick him fairly. Because if you don’t, he’s gonna be leaning over your desk the next day, hollering at you and canceling all his advertising.” From Wheaton, he went to Louisville and then to the
Post
, where he gained attention for his superb coverage of the Calley trial. The editors at the
Post
talked him into covering McGovern almost against his will, for he liked neither the high pressure nor the pack quality of campaign reporting. “My real vision, which I sometimes lay on the editors to their horror,” he said, “is to find some backwater college and teach journalism there and get a farm and fuck the whole business.” After doing a few campaign pieces in the spring, Greider joined McGovern full-time in the Black Hills.

Greider was a tall man with a long, sad, big-eared Lincolnesque face and the rumpled appearance of a man in a Matthew Brady photograph; he always looked as if he lived in the age before dry cleaning. His black Corfam shoes were permanently scuffed, his herringbone suit had lost its shape long ago, his collar was always open, his tie undone, his receding brown hair falling down around his ears; once he walked around for an entire day with a splotch of catsup on his shirt front.

Unlike his fellow reporters, Greider did not constantly, nervously check his watch. He didn’t have a watch. Every night during the fall campaign he would leave a wake-up call with the hotel operator and every morning he would awaken with the first light, groggily thinking:
Those bastards, they forgot to phone me. It’s ten o’clock and the buses are gone and they fucked me
. Then he would lie in bed stewing about it, wondering whether he should phone the hotel operator and find out what time it was. This phenomenon helped explain the fact that he always looked tired. But he never bought a watch.

Greider was restless with conventional journalistic formulas. His model reporters were the correspondents of the Civil War. “Have you ever read any of the reporting from the Civil War?” he asked one day. “It would blow your mind! Great stuff. Very partisan, most of it, as you might expect in that situation, but they had none of the mechanical crutches that we’re given. The editors would just put some guy on a train and say go on down and find out where the army is and tell us about it. And these guys were essentially writing letters back which might be two or three weeks old by the time they got in print.”

Many of Greider’s articles read like letters. They described the temper of the campaign, reflected the shifts in mood, articulated the doubt and ambiguity that the press and staff often felt in judging the day-to-day events. “Who knows what the public at large is deriving from all this?” Greider wrote at one point in the fall. “Does the candidate seem more human, more tuned to their bread-and-butter hopes and fears? Or does he seem more frantic and weak?” With the possible exception of Wooten, no reporter on either side of the campaign was as comfortable with ambiguity as Greider.

He was the master of the “soft” lead, backing into his stories with a vignette or a piece of “color” rather than pegging them on the latest press release or most recent speech by McGovern. In September, for instance, he began an article:

The
Post
encouraged this approach, although the editors sometimes kidded Greider about it. Greider would phone the national desk from some distant pressroom to say that he was about to file his piece via Western Union, and the man on the
desk would say, “Okay, Bill, just so you don’t have any substance in your lead.” Of course, his stories were full of substance, but they also contained a deep compassion for McGovern; Greider saw McGovern as a complex, interesting man, not as a dull-witted fumbler, and this view helped to enliven his pieces.

He took great care with his writing. When he had to write a conventional spot story, he never worried; he could come in late and “blow it out.” But he sweated out the longer meaning-of-the-campaign stories. While working on a longer story he would stop drinking and grow tense. When he finally finished it, he would float around in a kind of mystic high for a day.

When Greider, Stout, Kneeland, Clymer, Bruce Morton, David Schoumacher, John Dancy and all the other reporters arrived in the Black Hills, they expected no deep insights into George McGovern or into the workings of his campaign. They had no idea that within a few days, the Thomas Eagleton affair would bring out one of McGovern’s greatest problems: he did not understand how he would look in print, just as a neophyte actor is not prepared for the effect that his performance will have when projected on a screen. “He never got a focus on how his actions as a candidate translated to the people out there,” Greider said later, and that turned out to be as good an epitaph as any. The classic example was the way in which McGovern handled the press during the Eagleton mess.

The Eagleton story took the reporters by surprise, and they were so deeply settled into the tempo of boondoggle that it took them nearly a day to get revved up. On Tuesday, July 25, Eagleton, McGovern’s running mate, was scheduled to drop into Custer on his way to the West Coast and hold a ceremonial press conference with McGovern. They would pose together for photographers and express mutual admiration. The prospect of such a press conference did not excite the reporters, but late Tuesday morning they dutifully drove up the hill in their rented cars and assembled in the little pine-paneled recreation cabin adjacent to the Sylvan Lake
Lodge. They stood around chatting idly and waiting for the candidates. A few of them declared their intention of leaving the next day; nothing was happening and the tedium was getting on their nerves. Noon came, and still no sign of Eagleton. The TV men grew slightly annoyed; they had helicopters waiting in a nearby field to take the film to Rapid City, and it was getting precariously late.

Then Tom Eagleton arrived, was introduced by McGovern, and announced that he had been hospitalized three times for “nervous exhaustion and fatigue.” The reporters asked him embarrassed questions. Eagleton admitted that he had twice received electroshock therapy. Then McGovern said he would discourage any talk of dumping Eagleton.

Given the surroundings, these disclosures did not seem terribly momentous. Some tourists who had snuck in were milling around the back of the room. A sultry breeze was blowing through the screen door. A dog tied to a tree outside was barking. When the press conference was over, Harry Reasoner bet someone that Eagleton would be off the ticket within the week. Not many people agreed with him. Eagleton had seen a shrink, so what? It would blow over. The only drama of the day consisted of watching John Dancy and David Schoumacher dash out of the room to do their hasty stand-ups and throw the film at the chopper pilots.