The Boys on the Bus (10 page)

Four weeks after the night at the Northland, Muskie withdrew from the primaries. Naughton took several days off to write an obituary of the Muskie campaign for
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
. “I never really had a chance to stop and decide whether I was distressed about Muskie’s withdrawal or whether I regarded Muskie as the most capable candidate,” Naughton said later. “But I felt like the guy who had invested his life’s savings constructing a building, only to see it collapse. I mean, I had spent hours and months getting to know the intricate details of the Muskie campaign and how it functioned, to the point where I was finally confident that I knew where to go and who to talk to and could put my fingers on the developments as they occurred. From that standpoint it was a great disappointment, because here was something I had gotten to know intimately and suddenly it wasn’t there any more.”

Muskie’s demise threw the campaign reporters into a limbo of uncertainty. Naughton, for instance, had no idea what his next assignment would be, and at first his editors also seemed unsure. He was sent to Columbus to help analyze the returns
in the Ohio primary. That done, he was told to fly to Detroit to coordinate coverage of the Michigan primary. No sooner had he arrived in Detroit, however, than he got a call from the Washington Bureau, telling him to pick up McGovern in Nebraska. At first, Naughton thought that this was a temporary assignment, but after a couple of weeks he realized that he was on the Winner’s Bus again. Within a few weeks after the collapse of the Muskie campaign, Stout and most of the other Muskie campaign reporters also ended up with McGovern.

This massive influx of new reporters onto the McGovern Bus meant that most of the reporters who had followed McGovern since January had to be transferred to other, less glamorous assignments. For at the beginning of the year, the McGovern campaign, seemingly so hopeless, had been regarded as an ideal training ground for promising reporters who needed seasoning. “I don’t have the vaguest idea what I’m doing,” Michelle Clark, a young, extremely beautiful black reporter from CBS’s Chicago Bureau had said during the New Hampshire primary. “I think they’re just letting me get my feet wet.”
^‡

Like all campaign reporters, the small crew of early McGovern regulars had soon begun to identify with the candidate they were covering, and they spent much of their time trying to insure that their newspapers and networks would treat McGovern as a serious contestant. For instance, Christopher Lydon, a thirty-three-year-old
New York Times
reporter covering his first Presidential campaign, began to feel as early as January that McGovern had a chance to make a strong showing. Lydon rapidly became so enthusiastic about McGovern that Robert Phelps, the
Times’
political editor, felt obliged to remind him not to “write from the heart.” Later, when McGovern surged in Wisconsin, Lydon began to pontificate in private, becoming
a self-appointed expert on the McGovern phenomenon, and he was deeply disappointed at being bumped from the McGovern Bus and transferred to the Humphrey campaign in mid-May.
^§

Quite naturally, this first batch of McGovern reporters had not written in great detail about McGovern’s proposals; they were lucky to get enough space to describe the day-to-day progress of McGovern’s campaign. The band of ex-Muskie regulars who took over in May had a different problem. Coming in late, they had to learn about the workings of the McGovern campaign as quickly as possible. They had no time to study his more complicated proposals. Thus, neither group of reporters was able to give McGovern the careful scrutiny he deserved, and which might have saved him from making disastrous mistakes later on.

The people who saw this problem most clearly were the reporters on the Humphrey Bus, who felt that their candidate, a two-time loser in whom the public had lost interest, was being slighted, while McGovern, a bright and unknown new face, was fussed over. The most outspoken Humphrey reporter was
Newsweek
’s John J. Lindsay, a cynical, witty, melancholic old pro with a penchant for challenging political clichés.
‖

“We were captivated by a goddam hula hoop,” Lindsay said in August of the press’s attitude toward McGovern. By
we
, Lindsay really meant
they
—the editors who doled out space and the reporters who covered McGovern. He felt that the McGovern reporters had failed to look hard at the fact that McGovern would have done poorly in several primaries if not
for the votes of Republicans and of Wallace voters who did not have Wallace on the ballot. Lindsay also thought that the McGovern press corps had failed to quiz the Senator rigorously on his defense budget and income redistribution plan.

“At least,” said Lindsay, “Humphrey managed to turn a very dull primary season into something fairly interesting, and in the end became the only thing that stood between George McGovern and a free ride.

“Humphrey cut McGovern up a little bit in California, which the process is supposed to do. Cut him up on the issues. It disclosed to me for the first time that McGovern had gotten where he was by some alchemist’s formula, but he sure as hell didn’t get there on the basis of what he really stood for. He didn’t know what the hell he really stood for. He didn’t know what the hell his stands really implied. So Humphrey served a good purpose. And the opportunity was given to him on a silver platter by the press, because the press had never done it.

“From Wisconsin on, we should have been all over McGovern’s
ass
, backing him up against the wall on the issues. The fact of the matter is that we’re doing a helluva lot more damage to George McGovern right now, in August, by simply reporting what’s happening to his campaign that if we’d done it last spring when it really didn’t matter.”

Lindsay was quite correct. In fact, only one reporter really probed George McGovern’s stands in the spring of 1972—Richard Reeves, the political reporter for
New York
magazine. Reeves was a seasoned journalist in his late thirties who had recently cut the umbilical cord to what he called the “Mother
Times
” to do free-lance magazine work. Free at last to write with a sweeping authoritativeness that the
Times
had never allowed, Reeves was out on a shooting spree, turning his personal, sometimes opinionated style on every politician in sight. “If there’s anything good about the guy, fuck it, his press officer will get it out,” Reeves once told me. “So why should I waste my time, for McGovern or anybody else. I don’t tend to think in terms of their problems.”

Reeves regarded George McGovern as a garden variety pol
with an unwarranted reputation for saintliness. “George would rather be President than be right,” he wrote in a
New York
piece which came out in early May. In the same article, Reeves pointed out that McGovern was fudging on busing (saying one thing in Florida, another in Massachusetts); that McGovern’s accusation that forty percent of American corporations were paying no income tax was “ridiculous”; that McGovern gave little indication of caring much about the plight of the poverty-stricken Indians in his own South Dakota backyard; and that McGovern’s ADA rating had plummeted from 94 to 43 in 1968, the year he ran for reelection to the Senate.

“Politicians are different from you and me,” Reeves went on, apropos of McGovern. “The business of reaching for power does something to a man—it closes him off from other men until, day by day, he reaches the point where he instinctively calculates each new situation and each other man with the simplest question: what can this do for me?” Reeves saw that McGovern was a politician, and he predicted the compromises that McGovern would make with party regulars later in the year.

The article had little impact, and few of the reporters on the McGovern Bus seemed to share Reeves’ perception of the Senator. Which was not to say that they wrote glowing, laudatory stories about the candidate. During the California primary campaign, in late May and early June, they gave thorough coverage to McGovern’s inability to put a price tag on his welfare plan and to his growing defensiveness in the face of Humphrey’s shrill attacks. At the same time, however, the phenomenon of the Muskie Bus seemed to be recurring; the McGovern reporters did not seem anxious to probe for McGovern’s flaws, to examine the ruthless, pragmatic side of his personality. True, a few of the national political reporters, notably Jules Witcover and Marty Nolan, wrote a satirical song poking fun at McGovern for his political alliance with Meade Esposito, the old-guard Democratic Party boss of Brooklyn, New York. But many of the reporters seemed content to take McGovern at face value, accepting him as the anti-politician he claimed to be. In California,
there was sometimes a feeling of general giddiness on the McGovern Bus. McGovern was so close to victory, and if he won the nomination it would be perhaps the most sensational political story since Lyndon Johnson took himself out of the running in 1968. No one wanted to spoil a story that good.

It would have been far better for McGovern if the reporters had regarded him as a common politician from the outset. For when, in the course of the Eagleton mess, they finally discovered that he could resort to expediency as quickly as the next pol, many of them acted as though they had been deceived and betrayed. Jim Naughton, for instance, sounded shocked and outraged in the “New Analysis” which he wrote on July 31. Naughton described the less-than-straightforward way in which McGovern had disposed of Eagleton and argued that it might have shattered McGovern’s idealistic image. “The biggest political casualty in the Eagleton affair may prove to be not Senator Thomas F. Eagleton but the man who chose him to seek the vice-presidency,” he wrote. “Mr. McGovern appeared, even to disillusioned members of his campaign staff, to be saying one thing and doing another—which was the charge he had been preparing to make against President Nixon. It all seemed to illustrate, as have other events since Mr. McGovern won the Democratic nomination, that he is, after all, a politician.”

Naughton did not sound like the same man who had written about Ed Muskie. His on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand equivocations had been replaced by a tough, certain tone. But then Naughton’s circumstances had changed. He was no longer covering a shaky primary candidate, wondering what the future held in store. He had made it through the eliminations and was one of the two anointed
Times
correspondents who had been assigned to cover the one and only Democratic candidate. As a result, he had a new confidence in himself, a self-assurance which allowed him to operate by the principle he had learned years before in Cleveland: “You should never place your trust in a politician.”