Read The Boys on the Bus Online
Authors: Timothy Crouse
William S. White: “Finally, the all-out support of Lyndon B. Johnson …”
R.W. Apple, Jr.: “As I predicted two years and three months ago …”
David Broder: “The clue to the McGovern victory lies in conversations one housewife had in O’Leary, Ohio …”
Evans and Novak: “Despite the revelations of Thomas Eagleton, the American people decided in a secret meeting on Tuesday …”
Finally, Pye Chamberlyne, the UPI radio man, presented the couple with a Tiffany silver bowl, for which everyone on the two planes had chipped in. It was inscribed with the words McGovern had called out to the crew of his shot-up bomber in World War II: “Resume your stations. We’re bringing her home.” As everyone was happily applauding and the Senator was offering good-humored thanks, Dick Dougherty looked at the bowl and growled: “Whaddya want him to do, bleed in it?”
Dougherty had sported a nice, mordant humor early in the campaign. Escorting McGovern out of a Safeway, he turned to the manager and said loudly, “If there’s any breakage, just charge it to the networks.” But by the last week, he and almost everybody else on the staff had grown tetchy as mad dogs. Their blowups were the talk of the press plane. Frank Mankiewicz and Gordon Weil dressed down John Dancy for broadcasting a report that McGovern had pulled as large a crowd in New York “as more traditional Democrats had in the past.” Why was Dancy labeling McGovern an untraditional Democrat, they demanded in a paranoid frenzy. Was he out to get them? Then Pye Chamberlyne put out a story saying that McGovern probably could not capture the twelve states he needed to win the election. He had got his information from McGovern staffers.
But Mankiewicz gave him a severe tongue-lashing, telling him that the piece was inaccurate and that there was no excuse for broadcasting a story that could ruin them five days before the election.
Then Stout’s story hit the stands. Two weeks before the election, Stout had taken a day off, locked himself in a Milwaukee hotel room, and started preparing his final overview piece on the McGovern campaign. He lay in bed, surrounded by all his notebooks, all of McGovern’s speeches, and the 350 pages of copy he had filed on McGovern since the California primary. As he sifted through the stacks of pages he had written, it struck him that “really, there wasn’t very much there.” There were passages from policy statements, descriptions of the candidate’s activities, notations of changes in theme; but Stout felt that he had missed the real story, which had been the grass-roots organization of the campaign. He remembered that four years earlier, writing his book on Eugene McCarthy, he had found that only ten percent of his
Newsweek
files were useful. Nonetheless, he wrote all night and sent off his impressions of McGovern to Peter Goldman,
Newsweek
’s flashiest writer, who was responsible for putting the piece into its final form.
Stout’s impressions were almost entirely negative, a fact which surprised almost everybody on the plane when the piece came out. Stout was always grumbling about McGovern, but everyone assumed that he was simply exercising his bizarre sense of humor. “My wife just sent another check to McGovern,” Stout would say, “but she’s not really a Communist. She’s just one of these liberals who hasn’t thought it all out.” All the reporters made fun of McGovern, but most of them secretly wanted to see him beat Richard Nixon. But Stout did not think that McGovern would make a good President. He did not even like McGovern as a candidate. “McGovern had an attitude of righteous convenience that rubbed me the wrong way,” Stout declared after the election. “He demanded higher moral standards for everybody but himself. He would always be 1,000 percent for everybody but then, in a different situation, he would backtrack. He just annoyed me.”
‡
This attitude, embellished by Goldman’s elegant prose, came through in the
Newsweek
wrap-up:
His eyes go flat and lifeless on television. His voice struggles for passion and sounds like grace at a Rotary lunch. His mandatory candidate’s tan, in these last sunless hours before Election Day, is fading toward vellum.… He is, in a sense, the preacher’s boy from Mitchell, S.D., come home in the end to the politics of rectitude.… But now, with his polls still stubbornly low and his own good-guy reputation tarnished by events, he has returned more and more to the old moral absolutes—and to the harshest rhetoric of any campaign in memory. What he offers is not so much a campaign as a calling—a vocation for virtue that he finds secure in himself and wanting in Richard Nixon.… But there are risks to the politics of rectitude. To charge that the war is racist or genocidal is to impute guilt not only to the President but to the nation; to argue that the society is unjust is to demand further changes of a people grown weary of change. The failure of George McGovern’s evangelism, if that is the final outcome next week, may not be that his manner is too cool but that what he is trying to tell America is too hot.
Although the piece came out on Halloween, nobody mentioned it until November 2. Then, just after the Dakota Queen II took off from Cincinnati for Battle Creek, Michigan, George McGovern walked back to where Stout was sitting, leaned over, and inquired good-humoredly whether Stout had been responsible for the piece or whether
Newsweek
’s editors had written most of it. Stout replied that most of the ideas had been his and that he had agreed with and okayed the final version. The smile
vanished from McGovern’s face. He nodded and began to walk away.
“Why did you ask, Senator?” said Stout.
“Well,” said McGovern in his monotone, “I thought it was just a bunch of shit.”
A few minutes later, Mankiewicz came down the aisle and said, “Dick, you’ll be getting an awful lot of flack from the staff over that story in
Newsweek
.”
“Why?” said Stout, affecting innocence.
Mankiewicz said that it was the worst piece of political journalism he had ever seen, that it was intended to hurt rather than inform.
“Would you please be specific,” said Stout, getting angry. “What was intended to hurt?”
“The whole thing!” said Mankiewicz. He went on to say that
Newsweek
had knocked McGovern from the beginning. “Up in New Hampshire,” he said, “they thought so little of us that they sent us that après-ski reporter, that second-string art critic, Liz Peer.” Soon after Mankiewicz finished his attack, Dick Dougherty came by and added that the piece was “small-minded, mean-spirited and vindictive.” Stout later observed, with some bitterness, that Dougherty, the self-appointed champion of personal, advocacy journalism, did not admire the technique when it was turned against McGovern.
When the plane landed George McGovern got off and told a heckler at the airport fence to kiss his ass. On the long bus ride from the airport to the TV taping at Jackson, Michigan, Stout sat next to Fred Dutton and told him about McGovern’s bunch-of-shit remark. Dutton, once a key aide, had long since grown disenchanted with the campaign and was now on the plane only so the reporters could not write that he had abandoned ship.
“Oh, my God,” groaned Dutton. “The man doesn’t know what he’s doing. You don’t go tell a guy he’s written shit. All you do is say, ‘That’s the way it goes,’ and then you quietly freeze the fucker out.”
That was the clean, professional, Zieglerian way to do it, and
it was doubtless the most efficient method from the candidate’s point of view. But there was something close and personal about the McGovern people’s relationship with the press that didn’t admit that kind of tactic. Mankiewicz and Dougherty were both former journalists, and they kept expecting their brothers to give McGovern the benefit of the doubt, even to help him. Like Richard Nixon, they assumed that the press had a liberal bias. They could never understand why a reporter would report McGovern’s flaws, and thus give comfort to Nixon; after all, Nixon was the press’s natural enemy. So Mankiewicz and Dougherty felt baffled and betrayed whenever a reporter slammed George McGovern, and they reacted from the gut. But their angry outbursts were never as effective as the icy, calculated disdain of the Nixon men. The reporters simply resented the McGovern staffers for blowing up, laughed at them behind their backs, and dismissed them as “unprofessional.”
That night, at a hotel bar in Grand Rapids, Stout stayed up late drinking with Mankiewicz, Bill Greider, Hunter Thompson, the
Times
duo, and a couple of other reporters. That was standard procedure in the McGovern campaign. The staff and the press got along well most of the time; they ate and drank together. Hunter Thompson, who had arrived late that night, suddenly brought up the
Newsweek
article. He said he found it shallow and malicious. Which set off Mankiewicz again. Stout protested that he thought the article had been fair. The other reporters at the table studiously ignored the argument. They liked Stout, but they didn’t agree with his article. Finally Stout excused himself, looking hurt and dismayed. He did not appear on the plane the next day. When he returned, he explained that he had remained in Grand Rapids to finish an article. But he acted shy around the plane for the last few days of the campaign.
On Sunday, November 5, Johnny Apple predicted on the front page of the
Times
that George McGovern was going to lose forty-eight states, with the outcome “in serious doubt” only in
Massachusetts and Wisconsin. The next morning, in a pressroom on the top floor of the Bellvue Stratford in Philadelphia, Jim Naughton passed around a floridly worded challenge; for five dollars a shot, the reporters were invited to bet Apple that McGovern would take more than two states. Everybody signed up. Stout later claimed that he had signed under duress. “Word would have gotten back to the staff if I hadn’t signed, and all my entrée would have been shut off,” he said. “When they passed me the sheet to sign, I had to ask somebody what state McGovern was supposed to win besides Massachusetts.” Naughton telexed the wager to Apple, who replied that so many separate bets would complicate his bookkeeping. So Clymer and Naughton threw in fifty apiece and bet Apple an even hundred.
By that time, Naughton and Clymer had no hopes of a McGovern victory; they merely thought that McGovern might pick up more than two states. There was one among the press, however, who did not so easily give up hope. He represented a mass-circulation Fleet Street daily, for whose quality he made no great claims. “It is considered a serious paper,” he said, “by its readers. I choose my words carefully.” A gregarious chap with a crazy, brown-toothed grin, he was known to take a drink; in fact, his full account of the campaign, had he written it, would have closely resembled
The Lost Weekend
. Somehow he never missed a bus or plane. At the last second some good Samaritan would always pull him away from the hotel bar, waving madly at some new-found American friend and shouting farewells: “Listen, it’s been really great … Yes … yes … I’ve got your address … We
must
send Christmas cards.”
As Naughton and Clymer were passing around their wager in Philadelphia, this refugee from Fleet Street was buttonholing reporters and telling them the good news. “Listen, we’re all going to be writing the story of the century tomorrow night. Just remember there was one Englishman who said so. And buy me a drink when he wins.” It might have amused the forlorn McGovern staff to know that on election eve, some 1,500,000 faithful readers of this great Fleet Street organ went to bed all
across the British Isles thinking that George McGovern was about to pull the upset of all time.
From Philadelphia, the planes flew to Wichita, Kansas, for a brief and pathetically small airport rally that was broken off by a sudden, violent prairie squall. Then a long flight to Long Beach, California, for a larger, floodlit airport rally. At Long Beach, Candice Bergen, who was working for McGovern, walked into the makeshift pressroom where everybody was phoning in stories. She looked around and announced: “You all suck.”
Finally the planes took off into the California night for the last flight of the campaign, the return to Sioux Falls. The mood aboard the Dakota Queen II was quiet and somber. The day had ravaged everyone’s emotions. At a street corner rally in Philadelphia that morning, George McGovern had hoarsely spoken his favorite words from Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” A number of reporters had bitten their lips to keep from crying. For George McGovern grew stronger and calmer as his staffers grew more desolate, and the reporters could not help being awed by his incredible serenity.
In the last forty-eight hours of the campaign, many of the reporters worked on strange ghostly pieces describing McGovern’s victory, to be set in type in advance so that the newspapers would not be completely unprepared if McGovern should do the impossible. Some of the reporters discovered their true feelings about McGovern in writing these pieces. Jim Doyle found that he had only dire predictions for a McGovern Presidency; the stock market, he wrote, would go down, the transition period would be the ugliest in American history, and McGovern would immediately face a pile of crises for which he was hopelessly unprepared. However, Doug Kneeland’s “Man in the News” analysis was an admiring portrait which began:
Sioux Falls, S.D. Nov. 7—As it turned out, George Stanley McGovern, the preacher’s son from Avon and Mitchell, really was “right from the start.”
He kept saying he would win, serenely, earnestly, convincingly. And as the days in his plodding 22-month old campaign for the Presidency dwindled down to the final few, when his closest advisers showed by their eyes, if not by their words, that they thought all was lost, almost everyone on the McGovern trail believed that he believed.
Kneeland knew that this fairy tale would never run in the paper, so he allowed it to be passed around on the flight to Sioux Falls. It set off a massive flow of tears. The press aides cried, the baggage handlers sobbed, and the speech writers got lumps in their throats. From then on, the plane was like a flying cortege.