The Boys on the Bus (46 page)

The evening also revealed a new, disturbing side of McGovern, a side which some of the reporters had sensed but none had witnessed. Greider’s “news analysis” in the
Post
of July 31 described it well:

“The South Dakota senator has always insisted that he is, above all, a pragmatic politican and his handling of the Eagleton crisis confirms this description. Beneath the exterior of the earnest and open man, there is a cautious tactician, more calculating than either his hard-boiled critics or his starry-eyed admirers have admitted.” Greider went on to describe McGovern’s table hopping in the Lakota Room and then wrote: “What McGovern did was either very slick or very clumsy. The people who watched still are not sure which.”

Jim Naughton, who had spent the week back in Washington, was more severe. “In the Democratic primaries,” wrote Naughton, “Senator McGovern managed to convey the impression that he was somehow not a politican in the customary sense—that he was more open, more accessible, more attuned to the issues and more idealistic than other candidates. But his reaction to Mr. Eagleton’s disclosure may have seriously impaired that image.”

It is an unwritten law of current political journalism that conservative Republican Presidential candidates usually receive gentler treatment from the press than do liberal Democrats. Since most reporters are moderate or liberal Democrats themselves, they try to offset their natural biases by going out of their way to be fair to conservatives. No candidate ever had a more considerate press corps than Barry Goldwater in 1964, and four years later the campaign press gave every possible break to Richard Nixon. Reporters sense a social barrier between themselves and most conservative candidates; their relations are formal and meticulously polite. But reporters tend to loosen up around liberal candidates and campaign staffs; since they share the
same ideology, they can joke with the staffers, even needle them, without being branded the “enemy.” If a reporter has been trained in the traditional, “objective” school of journalism, this ideological and social closeness to the candidate and staff makes him feel guilty; he begins to compensate; the more he likes and agrees with the candidate
personally
, the harder he judges him
professionally
. Like a coach sizing up his own son in spring tryouts, the reporter becomes doubly strict.

Most of the reporters who covered George McGovern in the fall campaign preferred him to Richard Nixon and ended up voting for him (if they voted at all). For just this reason, they were careful to be tough on him as
reporters
. The best example is Jim Naughton. In early October, Naughton went home for a couple of days. One of the things he did was go to the Registrar’s Office in Fairfax, Virginia, and apply for an absentee ballot. To his surprise, he was allowed to fill out the ballot on the spot; after a minute or two of meditation, he voted for George McGovern and Sargent Shriver.

Naughton returned to the McGovern campaign almost immediately. Two days later, at a press conference in Chicago, McGovern accused the local Republicans of bribing Spanish-American voters to stay away from the polls in November. The reporters pressed McGovern for details, but he failed to provide any evidence to back his charges. Just as the press conference was about to end, Naughton raised his hand and asked a final question.

“Senator,” said Naughton, “you’ve made a fairly serious charge about Republican involvement in this nefarious activity, but you haven’t given us any details and you haven’t told us where details can be obtained. As a student of history, how do you distinguish what you are doing from what Joseph McCarthy used to do?”

There were groans and startled glances from Naughton’s fellow reporters while McGovern fumbled for an answer. To Naughton, the question seemed perfectly fair. But later, he had qualms about the
tone
of the question. “In looking back on it,”
he said, “I wonder whether I would have been as cutting, as direct, and as vicious in my question if I had not voted for McGovern a couple of days before. I think I may have been tougher on McGovern after that.”

When the press conference ended, Dick Dougherty was furious at Naughton. “That’s the last time I ever get
you
recognized after the time has expired,” the press secretary said. Naughton believed that Dougherty “never forgave” him for having asked the Joe McCarthy question. But by that time, Dougherty was already fed up with the press in general.

Dougherty had been a fine journalist himself (New York Bureau chief for the Los Angeles
Times
), a vice-commissioner in the New York Police Department (public relations division), and the author of four good novels. He looked like a dapper Irish detective, with steely grey hair curling back from his forehead and a cigarette constantly hanging from his lips. He spoke in a growl, which grew more pronounced when he referred to the press. On one occasion he threatened to punch several reporters in the nose. Another time, he warned a group of reporters that they were writing their own obituaries by “sucking up to the moral runts in the White House.” He was convinced that the campaign reporters were portraying George McGovern as a “sneaky bumbler” when they knew all the while that McGovern was really a sincere, honest, capable man.

“I would guess that 90 percent of the news people who covered McGovern voted for him,”
^*
Dougherty wrote in
Newsweek
after the election. He continued:

Dougherty went on to endorse advocacy reporting: only if the reporters let their feelings show could they give a true picture of a candidate. The reporters who read Dougherty’s piece when it came out two months after the election enjoyed the prose style but did not take the content seriously.

During the campaign, Dougherty had not been highly regarded as a press secretary, for he was seldom around when the reporters needed him. Unlike Ronald Ziegler, he was not interested in running a perfect public relations operation; he had been too good a journalist to stomach easily the prospect of becoming a great flack. During the summer, he gradually promoted himself to the position of personal adviser to the candidate. Whenever the reporters saw a shot of McGovern on the evening news, Dougherty would be right at his side, and a great chorus of jeers would go up from the reporters.

One night in early September, on a long, hot bus ride from New York City to Waterbury, Connecticut, Jules Witcover began talking about Dougherty. Witcover was sitting in the back of the bus with Tom Oliphant, a skinny, bespectacled twenty-six-year-old reporter from the Boston
Globe
who was known affectionately as “The Kid.”

“Dougherty said with a straight face that this was less bother for us than riding out to La Guardia and flying up to Connecticut,” said Witcover.

“Yeah,” said Norm Kempster, a UPI man sitting across the aisle, “but Dougherty’s making a big sacrifice and flying up with McGovern in a chartered plane!”

“Have you ever seen Dougherty on a press bus?” asked Oliphant.

“Not lately,” said Witcover. “You know what we ought to do? We oughta give Dougherty a tour of the bus.” Witcover enthusiastically sketched out a scenario. First, they would muster all the reporters outside some hotel one morning. Then they would introduce Dougherty as if he were a total stranger—“You’ve seen him on TV, here he is in person!” Finally, they would give Dougherty a floor plan of the bus, show him where each person sat and how the reporters worked. Witcover and Oliphant decided to leave the execution of this plan to Jim Naughton, who was building a quiet but solid reputation as the most efficient prankster on the bus. Naughton never carried out the scheme, but he did author a memorandum to Dougherty, which was signed by all the regulars on the bus. The memo suggested, among other things, “that the presence of the press secretary on press buses and at access points would be of more benefit to us than the knowledge that he is supervising crowd control.” The reporters didn’t want a great writer for a press secretary; they wanted a Vic Gold, a fussbudget who always knew where to find the phones and the pool cars.

Later on the bus ride to Waterbury, Gordon Weil came aboard and tried to hold a briefing. Weil, the Senator’s personal aide and the alleged author of the thousand-dollar-a-head welfare proposal, was an officious man with curly black hair, goggle-type glasses, and close to no sense of humor. Earlier in the fall, Weil had thrown a well-publicized tantrum because he had been confined to the Washington headquarters when he wanted to be traveling with the Senator. After Weil calmed down, they let him come on the plane. The night Weil joined the campaign, Naughton organized a demonstration in his honor. When Weil got off the elevator in the Minneapolis hotel, he saw the whole press corps lined up in the corridor, waving hand-made posters with slogans like “Gordon Bugs Everybody” and “Where’s My $1,000, Gordon?” They were also singing a song (lyrics by James Naughton) that went in part: “You were number one/When this all begun/And now … you’re … shit.”

Now, on this sultry September evening, Weil decided to brief
the press on an economic statement of McGovern’s which had been handed out earlier in the day. In New York City, he boarded the first of the two press buses which were going to Waterbury and started to speak over the PA system. Stout, Greider and some other reporters were playing bridge on an upended garbage can in the aisle, and they found Weil’s spiel pointless and annoying. So they stopped the bus and made Weil get off. The second bus picked him up. He stood in the dimly lit front section and asked: “Do you want a briefing?” One AP man put up his hand.

“What?” said Witcover.

“An economic briefing,” Oliphant explained. “Shit, of course we want it, with all the fudge in that release.”

“How does McGovern’s plan differ from Nixon’s Phase II, Gordon?” asked Norm Kempster of the UPI. “In a practical way, I mean.”

“Real action,” said Weil. “There would be real action.”

Kempster gave a skeptical nod, Oliphant laughed, and Witcover said, “Right!”

Weil kept talking about the statement and said, “Food prices are not a dominant factor in inflation.”

“Grind that up in your hamburger, Gordon,” somebody yelled.

“Boy,” said Oliphant, “I’ve heard bullshit before but this takes the cake. I can’t believe Gordon checked this out with anybody in the campaign before giving this briefing. We deserve to have a press conference on this.”

“I don’t understand what he’s proposing,” said Kempster, “but it sounds the same as Nixon’s plan to me.”

And so the briefing broke down in confusion. This was not entirely typical of the briefings in the McGovern campaign; Dougherty and Mankiewicz often briefed the press with humor and smooth professionalism. But the point was that such a scene would never have taken place on a White House press bus. No one would have dared throw Ron Ziegler off a press bus or treat him with such patent contempt. The White House press operation
was manipulative, frustrating, and sometimes downright evil; but it was always professional. From Nixon on down, the people in the White House knew the art of feeding news to the press at a proper digestible rate, doling out just the right amount at the right time. The McGovern people never mastered this technique. McGovern’s press secretary was never around. There never seemed to be enough filing time. Reporters who had to write in the afternoon kept getting assigned to afternoon pools.

Frank Mankiewicz constantly complained that the reporters never wrote about the issues. They wrote about staff problems and Democratic county chairmen who refused to support McGovern, he said, but never about McGovern’s ideas on health care and pollution. Mankiewicz claimed to have answered 10,000 questions in the course of the campaign, only seven of them about a real issue. This was a valid point, but the reporters had a valid problem: they were swamped with prepared texts,
but McGovern did not deliver many of these speeches
. On a typical day, the press would receive a statement on anti-trust policy and another on veterans, both of them provocative treatises by McGovern’s most eloquent speech writers. But then McGovern would scrap both statements in favor of a new blast at the Administration over the Watergate affair, and the reporters would have to devote all of their space to the Watergate speech. This frustrated the good reporters, but there was nothing they could do about it. The Nixon people would have carefully scheduled the statements so that each one received maximum coverage.

Dick Dougherty claimed that McGovern “conducted the most open campaign for President in history.” Here a distinction must be made. It is one thing for a candidate to see the press frequently and answer their questions honestly, which McGovern tried to do, thereby providing an admirable contrast to the reclusive Nixon. However, it is another thing for a campaign staff to talk openly about its problems, feuds, and discontents. That is the political equivalent of indecent exposure, and
the McGovern staffers indulged in it with a relish that bordered on wantonness. While the Nixon people, by keeping their mouths tightly shut, managed to keep the lid on the largest political scandal in American history, the McGovern people, by blabbing, succeeded in making their campaign look hopelessly disorganized and irresponsible.

One could not blame the reporters for writing that Lawrence O’Brien and Gordon Weil were threatening to quit—that was just the sort of Teddy White stuff that their editors were demanding. Nor could one blame them for finding George McGovern highly unprofessional; he could not even make his own advisers stop preening their wounded egos in public. And so a certain disrespect grew up among the press corps. They disdained McGovern not only because he seemed a likely loser—although that had something to do with their attitude—but also because he displayed a lack of professionalism. “From the beginning of the fall campaign, when we flew off from Washington on September 3,” said Dick Stout, “nobody ever dealt with McGovern with much respect, as though he might be the next President. It wasn’t that loose with Goldwater in the fall of 1964; he was a loser too, but they showed him more respect.”