The Boys on the Bus (11 page)

One afternoon after the election, I asked Dick Stout what he thought of a certain campaign reporter. Stout was in one of his darker moods. “He’s as good as any,” he grumbled.

I waited for Stout to elaborate.

“Hell, political reporters,” Stout said disgustedly. “Shit, they’re like sportswriters. The job’s a lot the same. It’s fun to do. And the quality isn’t very high. Anybody can be a political reporter or a sportswriter. Even though publications and networks put some of their best people on the candidates in an election year, they really don’t have to. Because anybody really can do it. But you have to be exceptional to do it well. It really takes something to be a good one.”

There were only a handful of reporters who everyone in the business agreed were exceptional. In any discussion or straw poll, the names that always came up were Johnny Apple, David Broder, Jules Witcover, Bob Novak, and Haynes Johnson.
^*
Nobody could quite define what made these reporters exceptional. It was not just their wide knowledge of politics. Nor the fact that they worked for big papers. Nor that they were right all the time, because they weren’t. When you asked around, the consensus was that they were a lot like other reporters except that they somehow had more energy, they were more monomaniacal about their work.

Here then are portraits of some of the Heavies:

“Take a look at Johnny Apple over there,” said a celebrity-watching politico on the closing night of the Democratic Convention. “He practically goes around with a T-shirt saying, ‘I work for the
Times
: I’m Number One!’ ”

R. W. “Johnny” Apple, Jr.,
The New York Times’
national political correspondent, was standing in a shadowy area at the south end of the blue wooden stands of the Press Gallery. A chubby mid-thirtyish man with a pug nose and narrow eyes, he was wearing a polo shirt and slacks and looked like a country-club golfer. All of a sudden Ted Kennedy, who had just finished his speech nominating George McGovern for President, came around a corner a few feet away from Apple, walking briskly and followed by his entourage.

“Hey, Ted,” shouted Apple, and waved him over. They chatted for about a minute.

“You know,” said the politico as Ted left Apple, “Johnny
thinks he’s better than the pols he writes about. He thinks they need him. He seems to forget it’s
The New York Times
they need, not him. If Johnny worked for the Denver
Post
and he said, ‘Hey, Ted,’ Teddy would have kept on walking.”

Johnny Apple never hesitated to let you know that he was important. He once described to me the elaborate twenty-man “grid system” that the
Times
had developed to cover the primaries. “And then, floating above all that,” he concluded, “is me. Nobody has as much authority as I do. I can do virtually any story I want to, and I can help shape what other people do.”

In the eyes of many of his colleagues, Apple was a compulsive bullshit artist, the kind of man who could not resist adding $5,000-a-year when he told you his salary. Returning to New York from the
Times’
Saigon bureau, Apple announced that he had killed several Vietcong, which prompted one
Times
man to mutter: “Women and children, I presume.” At least a few journalists saw Apple as a ruthlessly ambitious hustler who had stabbed and flattered his way up through the ranks of the
Times
. Not many people had ever accused Apple of dishonest reporting; it was Apple’s personality that turned them off—his braggadocio, his grandstanding, his mammoth ego. In a business populated largely by
shy
egomaniacs, he stuck out like a drunk at a funeral.

I first met Apple around noon on the Sunday before the California primary. Along with a dozen other very heavy media people, he had passed up the tacky Wilshire Hyatt House in favor of the posh Beverly Wilshire, in Beverly Hills. Most of his fellow journalists were lounging by the pool, but Apple had been pounding on his Olivetti since eight, finishing up his story for Monday’s paper. He was phoning the last paragraphs to New York as I arrived. In a room as elegant as a Design Research store window, with bronze foil wallpaper and mod furniture, he was sitting in white BVD’s taking a last hurried look through the mess of yellow legal paper on the desk.

“Hi,” he thrust out his hand, “John Apple.” As he slathered soap on his face to shave, he enthusiastically outlined the
Times
’
campaign coverage. Talking nonstop, he pulled on some sports clothes, led me through the lobby and commandeered a good table on the shaded patio of the hotel restaurant. Having ordered a bull-shot and a pack of Salems, he started attacking the basket of sweet rolls on the table. We were talking about the piece he had written for that morning’s paper, in which he flatly predicted that a pack of Southern governors trying to stop McGovern would get nowhere.

“Believe it or not, they gave me an unlimited travel budget at the
Times
,” he said, buttering a roll. “So when I get into a situation like that piece this morning, I
know
fifteen people in Georgia who I can get on the phone and will level with me, and I know another ten in Kentucky, because I’ve been all these places three and four times. That piece took about sixty-five phone calls—two whole days and part of a third. I’m a great string-saver—while I’m doing one story like that I’ll duck into a phone booth and make half a dozen phone calls for another story.

“My all-time record”—he reached for a second roll and urged one on me—“my all-time record is a hundred calls in one day. That was on a story I did about five state conventions and a couple of territorial conventions or something. But I sat down at my desk at nine o’clock in the morning and got up at ten after seven. And I made about twenty-five of those calls trying to find out what happened in the Canal Zone. ’Cause I was determined I wasn’t gonna have to write: ‘A convention was also held in the Canal Zone, but we don’t know what happened.’ That’s just a little matter of pride.”

The waiter brought the poached eggs and caviar we had ordered. “The important thing is the amount of money a publisher is willing to contribute to travel,” Apple went on. “Because travel is the soul of this business. You’ve gotta be there, you can’t do it all on the telephone.

“Tell you a little story. When Tunney [Sen. John Tunney, D.-Cal.] and Moretti [Robert Moretti, Speaker of the California Assembly] made their announcement for Muskie, which I had
a couple of days early, a rather bitter California reporter said to Moretti, ‘How come we have to read what you’re going to do in national politics in
The New York Times
, when
we
cover California?’ And Moretti looked at the guy and said, ‘If you’d been in my office four times in the last year drinking Scotch the way Johnny Apple was, maybe you wouldn’t have to read about it in
The New York Times
.’ ”

Which implies that Apple got the story from his well-primed source, Moretti. That is not exactly what happened, according to a Tunney aide. The Tunney aide claims to have fed the story to Apple via a couple of intermediaries and for his own purposes. In other words, Apple was being used.

The Tunney endorsement was a big story, the first of a string of front-page scoops that Apple got on major political figures endorsing Muskie. Tunney was a bosom pal, law school roommate and fellow Senator of Ted Kennedy; if Tunney came out for Muskie, it was probably with Ted’s consent and meant that Ted wasn’t going to run.

Late in November ’71, Muskie approached Tunney to ask for an endorsement. Tunney checked it out with Kennedy and got the green light. So Tunney’s aide went ahead to make a deal: Tunney would endorse the Man from Maine if Muskie would promise to make him chairman of the California delegation at the Convention. Muskie agreed, and Tunney scheduled the press conference for a week later—Wednesday, December 7.

Meanwhile, Alan Cranston, the other Senator from California, got wind of Tunney’s plans. Cranston decided he’d better endorse Muskie, too. So he called up Muskie and offered his endorsement in return for a promise that he would be chairman of the California delegation at the Convention. Muskie said yes. When Tunney’s people found out that Muskie had promised the chairmanship to both Tunney and Cranston, they were furious. They called Muskie and raised hell. As usual, Muskie couldn’t make up his mind what to do.

So, late on Monday, December 5, two days before the scheduled announcement, Tunney’s aide decided to pull the rug out
from under Cranston by leaking the Tunney endorsement to
The New York Times
. He found out that Johnny Apple was in Columbus, Ohio, seeing an old friend, John Gilligan, the governor of Ohio. The aide phoned Mark Shields, a Gilligan aide; Shields relayed the information to Gilligan; and Gilligan leaked the story to Apple. A three-cushion shot with Apple as the eight ball—it was hard for anyone to trace the story back to Tunney’s aide and accuse him of screwing Cranston. On December 7, Johnny Apple’s story—“Tunney Endorsement of Muskie in 1972 Race Is Reported Near”—appeared on the front page of the
Times
. It was almost an exclusive, but not quite. Just for insurance, Tunney’s aide had also leaked the story to Sam Roberts of the New York
Daily News
.

In the next month, Mark Shields, the Gilligan aide, became a national coordinator of the Muskie campaign and proceeded to leak several Muskie endorsement stories exclusively to Apple, including the news that Leonard Woodcock of the UAW was going to come out for Muskie. Several high-level members of Muskie’s staff were outraged that Shields was favoring one reporter and felt that Shields ought to be punished. But Shields, one of the shrewdest men on Muskie’s staff, was sure he had done the right thing. By giving the stories exclusively to
The New York Times
, he had guaranteed: a) that
The Times
would give them front-page play and b) that every other paper in America would give them prominent coverage. Once a story hits page one of the
Times
, it is certified news and can’t be ignored.
^†

“You build up confidence in people,” Apple was saying as he
sipped his bull-shot. “They tell you things.” No small part of Apple’s success was that he had been, for as long as anyone could remember, a red-hot, gung-ho overachiever. He was editor-in-chief of the yearbook at his Ohio prep school, Western Reserve Academy. At Princeton, he ran the newspaper, got elected vice chairman of the student council, and was thrown out for bad grades. He worked for
The Wall Street Journal
, did a hitch in the Army (moonlighting for a newspaper in Virginia), and finally graduated
magna cum laude
from Columbia in 1961. He was editor of the newspaper there, too. After a couple of years as a writer for Huntley-Brinkley at NBC, he joined the
Times
and became a protégé of Abe Rosenthal, who was then the metropolitan editor.

“… he never stopped running…,” Gay Talese wrote of Apple in his book on the
Times
. “The result was that he got more good stories into the paper than anyone on Rosenthal’s staff. This is not what bothered his older colleagues so much, for they soon recognized his ability to get a story and write it; what really bothered them was Apple’s incredible enthusiasm for everything he had been assigned to cover—a Board of Estimate hearing, a talk by the tax commissioner, a repetition of political speeches—and Apple’s insistence, once he had returned, on telling everybody in the newsroom what he had seen and heard.”
^‡

Apple practically
ran
up the ladder of good reportorial jobs—Bobby Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign, the Albany Statehouse, Vietnam, Nelson Rockefeller’s ’68 Presidential campaign, Africa, and then the whole national political scene. He was a golden boy. Someone once asked Abe Rosenthal what was the best decision he had ever made. “Hiring Johnny Apple,” Rosenthal shot back immediately.

The lowlier employees of the
Times
were not so enamored of Apple. Among his fellow reporters, Apple had the reputation of
an ass-kisser. He not only flattered Rosenthal, it was said, but also took pains to ingratiate himself with the Sulzberger family, who owned and published the
Times
. He had, for instance, gone out and written an enthusiastic feature about a radio show that was run by Ellen Sulzberger Straus (cousin of Punch Sulzberger, the publisher). It was around this time, in 1964, that David Halberstam returned to the
Times’
New York office after having reported on Vietnam for several years, for which coverage he had won a Pulitzer Prize. One afternoon, as he sat at his desk, Halberstam spotted a round-faced young man walking around the city room as if he owned it. Halberstam realized that this must be Abe Rosenthal’s current pet, Johnny Apple. Apple sauntered over to Halberstam’s desk and announced with studied nonchalance: “Say, I was over at Peter and Ellen Straus’s—you know, Punch’s favorite cousin—last night, and Harding Bancroft [vice president of the
Times
] was there, and your name came up and I thought you’d be pleased—it was very favorably commented upon.”

Halberstam said his first words to Johnny Apple: “Fuck off, kid!”

What constantly amazed people, as the years passed, was that Apple remained the same eager, egregiously ambitious kid he had been when he first arrived at the
Times
. He still had a restless, stir-crazy desire to get every story first—a commendable trait in a reporter. But some of his colleagues thought that he was less interested in covering the election than in seeking out small pieces of information that some of his more eminent rivals, like David Broder, did not have in their stories. He did not seem to develop the depth, reflectiveness, and moral courage necessary to become a great journalist. He never stopped running for long enough to form any ideas; one could not imagine him writing a thoughtful magazine piece or a book review. “Johnny has not grown up in one way,” said a reporter who had known him for years. “And that is that he literally believes that newspapermen are judged on how many by-lines they get, not what they say. We all used to think that way when we were kids
—‘Gee, I got six by-lines this week’—but Johnny still talks that way. He travels all over and spreads himself thin. He should write one or two pieces a week and give people some insight into what the fuck’s going on, but instead he tells people how many delegates McGovern had on Thursday as opposed to Tuesday. Scoreboard journalism, and the
Times
has a hundred good reporters who can do that.