The Boys on the Bus (48 page)

The Zoo Plane had the look and air of the poorest but wildest frat house on a Southern campus. There were posters and campaign totems even-where—a cardboard skeleton labeled “Ms. Boney Maroney,” a dandruff ad onto which had been pasted a picture of George McGovern with confetti in his hair, a Roosevelt and Garner poster, Polaroid snapshots of all the regulars, orange and black streamers for Halloween and, taped to the sides of the overhead racks, keys from hotels in every other city in America. Seven hundred fourteen keys, all of which were mass mailed at the end of the campaign.

The excitement of riding the Zoo Plane sprang from the fact that all rules had been totally suspended. As the plane took off on the first flight of the morning, half the reporters crowded into the galleys, mixing themselves Bloody Marys from the endless supplies of free booze. The cameramen were up front, letting loose spools of film, apples, oranges—anything that would careen wildly down the aisle of a plane that was climbing at 45 degrees. Meanwhile, as the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
signs still
flashed their warning, other reporters worked their way up the aisle to fetch their own breakfasts and make more drinks. A Bach organ toccata swelled from speakers in the front of the plane. The Rolling Stones blared from the rear. The stewardesses had long since given up trying to control the situation. They were just happy to be along for the ride. Three of them were McGovern supporters. The fourth, slightly more old-fashioned, had a thing for Secret Service men and entertained no less than eighteen of them before the campaign ended.

You could do anything you wanted on the Zoo Plane; it was like smashing china at Tivoli. The network technicians were the most uncontrollably manic people on the plane, and with good reason—they were making upwards of $1,500 a week. They had constant wars with aerosol cans that shot long, sticky filaments of plastic. And it was the TV technicians who held one of the crew one night while a drunken lady journalist stripped him down to his boxer shorts, which were badly ripped in the rear. The rest of the crew locked the wretched man out of the cockpit until just before landing.

There were drugs on the plane, too, pot, hash, MDA, cocaine. And those who indulged in such stimulants swore that there was no greater thrill than standing in the cockpit as the plane came in for a landing, listening to the crackle of the radio, surrounded by green and orange dials, watching the bright blue lights of the runway rush up at the window as the powerful engines cut back. Then a United Airlines liaison man who called himself the Hippy Dippy Weatherman would launch into his jive weather report over the PA system: “Hey, baby, it’s seventy-one degrees down here in L.A.—that’s
sixty-nine
plus two!” Every night, the pilots played to an overflow crowd in the cockpit.

The planes always taxied to a carefully staked-out corner of the runway. After each flight, the campaign began anew. The arrivals were strangely like reunions. The Zoo Plane always landed first, and the TV crews stampeded for the taildoor,
rushed out and set up their cameras. Then the Dakota Queen II landed, slowly rolled up beside the Zoo, and let down its rear door so that the reporters could disembark. There were greetings, new stories, fresh rumors, a curious delight at seeing these familiar faces in a new city.

Everyone would crowd around the front ramp of the plane in the drizzle, or sleet, or darkness, to await McGovern. Gordon Weil would rush down the ramp first, carrying the Senator’s attaché case. After a pause, McGovern would appear at the top of the ramp with Eleanor, wave, make a statement and submit to questions while all the reporters held their Sonys above their heads to catch his words. Finally, Dougherty would cut off the questions: “That’s it, that’s enough. The Senator is late.” Everyone would dash for the buses, which were waiting in a row. Then the motorcade would start off, with motorcycles roaring and police sirens screaming, and the buses would slice through the traffic of some great city; nobody would admit it, but it was more fun than riding a fire engine. There was all the noise, speed, pomp, and license that only a Presidential candidate could generate, and it was these things that gave the press the energy to survive the eighteen-hour days.

As the campaign unfolded, loose pairings emerged. Stout and Fischer. Naughton and Kneeland. Witcover and Mears. Adam Clymer and Bruce Morton, both Harvard men, both affecting disenchantment with the campaign. Morton claimed that he intended to vote for Benjamin Spock. At rallies, they stood together at the edge of the crowd taking shots at McGovern’s performance. Frank Reynolds of ABC, on the other hand, found a friend in George McGovern, for they had similar problems with their teenage sons.

Other, romantic, pairings formed. These casual affairs produced at least three cases of the clap and one lawsuit—a stewardess, finding out on the last day of the campaign that her paramour was married, sued him for “illegal acts committed over the state of Iowa.” The few serious affairs produced frustration.
The men were invariably married,
^†
if not to a woman then to the paper. There were inevitable arguments.
He
wanted them to go to
his
room, in case he got a call-back.
She
insisted on going to
her
room, in case
her
editor called. Eventually they would settle the quarrel, arrive at the room, and then he would suddenly remember he had to get the “overnight,” the last handout of the day. He would run off to get it, find something he had to file, and return two hours later, barely able to keep his eyes open.

“My God,” one of the veterans said of campaign romances, “all those tired men. It must be dreadful for the women.”

The campaign lurched along in ten-day cycles. Every week and a half, just as everyone on the plane was coming down with the flu and beginning to go crazy with boredom from listening to the standard speech, McGovern would return to Washington for a day. Most of the men would troop off to see their wives with mingled feelings of guilt, dread, and longing. “There’s no way to win,” said one of them. “Even if you’re not screwing around, she thinks you’re screwing around.” At the very least, their wives were jealous of the freedom, the excitement, the sheer fun of the campaign. The men often felt badly about their neglected wives, or guilty because they had not thought to buy anything for the kids and so were forced to take them hotel soap for the third time; and the kids were growing disenchanted with Camay from the Sherman House. Some of the reporters were hopelessly torn between their professional duties and situations that cried out for them to be with their families; one man’s wife had suffered a miscarriage, another’s daughter was dying of an incurable disease, and a third had a mentally disturbed
son. And the campaign served as a kind of Foreign Legion for more than one man who wanted to escape from a shaky marriage or forget about a broken home.

Even the men with solid marriages suffered. Jim Doyle, for instance, believed that you couldn’t survive the demands of the campaign if you didn’t have a healthy family life to replensih your wasted spirits. One Saturday night, he tried to skip a rally in Spokane in order to get back to his family a few hours sooner. The
Star
told him he couldn’t afford to miss the rally; something might happen to McGovern. He flew back with everyone else on the red-eye flight, getting home at 6
A
.
M
. He woke his wife and they agreed that he would get up at 9
A
.
M
. “But my daughters didn’t wake me until ten,” he said, “because I was out on my ass. Then they gave me a pitch about Was the job
that
important to me that I was never home? And I told them, ‘Well, we have to eat, I have to make a living.’ But they knew that was bullshit. And I realized that my wife had put the girls up to it as a joke, but I also knew that they were all really pissed at me and jealous of my time, and I didn’t blame them for being pissed.”

Doyle had breakfast with his wife and daughters, and they chatted and laughed all morning. Being a family of football fans, they watched the football game at one o’clock. At two o’clock, Doyle left to rejoin George McGovern, who was starting off on another ten-day swing.

If you stayed away from the campaign for any period of time and then came on again, the first thing that struck you was the shocking physical deterioration of the press corps. During the summer, the reporters had looked fairly healthy. Now their skin was pasty and greenish, they had ugly dark pouches under their glazed eyes, and their bodies had become bloated with the regimen of nonstop drinking and five or six starchy airplane meals every day. Toward the end, they began to suffer from a fiendish combination of fatigue and anxiety. They had arrived at the last two weeks, when the public finally wanted to read
about the campaign—front-page play every day!—and they were so tired that it nearly killed them to pound out a decent piece.

The reporters were trying desperately to write well, but it sometimes took them five minutes to think of the answer to a simple question. At filing time, everyone would suddenly become jittery and manic—smoking, crumpling papers, biting fingernails, shouting into phones, cruising on the last dregs of nervous energy—and then they would lapse back into catatonia. To do a decent job, they often had to stay up all night to finish a long piece, and there was no way to catch up on sleep. They were coming down to the wire—they had to save a few volts of energy to grind out long pre- and post-election articles. Yet all they could feel was numbness. McGovern, too, was pushing himself to the limits of his strength, pulling out all the stops on Vietnam and the Watergate affair, but through the haze of exhaustion all of his speeches sounded like one long echo of the same speech. The men had to force themselves to listen for new themes, new accusations.

During the last week, the press bus looked like a Black Maria sent out to round up winos; half the reporters were passed out with their mouths wide open and their notebooks fallen in their laps. When they were awake, they often wandered like zombies. On one of the last days of the campaign, Jules Witcover walked from the Biltmore Hotel to a rally in midtown Manhattan and had to be repeatedly stopped from sleepwalking into traffic against the red light. Bill Greider, perhaps the most exhausted man on the plane, had a strange habit of placing his arms by his sides, as if wearing an imaginary strait jacket, and walking around in circles. Toward the end, the only thing that stimulated Greider’s adrenal glands was martial music, and he recorded the high school bands at every rally. Later, when he needed a shot of energy in the pressroom, he would turn up his Sony all the way and bang away at his Olivetti as “Onward Christian Soldiers” or “Happy Days” blasted out of the speaker.

The exhaustion of the final week drew the press together in a strange, almost mystic bond. It was as if the massed weight of fatigue had dragged everyone down into the same dream, where all emotions were electric but somehow inappropriate, and nobody could quite remember why all these people were flying all over America. The scheduling grew increasingly surreal—nobody could explain the long trips to Waco or Corpus Christi or Little Rock, deep in the hostile South. Why not Guam? Toward the end, an eerie serenity descended on McGovern, and he began to act like a man who was not only about to be elected, but beatified as well. Had he actually deluded himself into thinking he would win, or had he merely made his peace with defeat? The reporters couldn’t figure him out, but their natural cynicism gradually turned into a kind of sentimental admiration. They liked him, and as his defeat became more and more certain, they felt it was safe to show their affection. They also began to realize how much they liked the way of life, the womblike protection of the plane, and how sorry they would be to leave it. They were tired, cross, and so overworked that they could not stand another second of the campaign, and yet they wanted it to go on forever.

The last week formally began with the anniversary party which the press gave for the McGoverns late on Halloween night in a function room on the top floor of the Biltmore in New York. As usual, Dick Stout was emcee. The reporters seemed a very close crew that night, bound together by their appreciation of Stout’s arcane jokes, most of which were based on incidents from the campaign. Like the reporters at the long-forgotten Muskie party, these people wanted badly to laugh; their laughter was shrill and almost hysterical, as if this were the last party before the end of some golden era.

Stout introduced Jim Naughton, Adam Clymer and David Murray of the Chicago
Sun-Times
. They huddled around the podium at the front of the room and read imaginary leads which they claimed had been set in type “for possible use next Tuesday night.” All the leads dealt with a McGovern victory.

Joe Alsop: “The end of Western civilization, as we know it … Now only Nguyen Van Thieu stands as the representative of the Free World.”

Tom Wicker: “There is grey in Ted Kennedy’s hair now, and the sap is freezing in the maples around Hyannis …”