The Boys on the Bus (2 page)

June 1—five days before the California primary. A grey dawn was fighting its way through the orange curtains in the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel in Los Angeles, where George McGovern was encamped with his wife, his staff, and the press assigned to cover his snowballing campaign.

While reporters still snored like Hessians in a hundred beds throughout the hotel, the McGovern munchkins were at work, plying the halls, slipping the long legal-sized handouts through the cracks under the door of each room. According to one of these handouts, the Baptist Ministers’ Union of Oakland had decided after “prayerful and careful deliberation” to endorse Senator McGovern. And there was a detailed profile of Alameda
County (“… agricultural products include sweet corn, cucumbers, and lettuce”), across which the press would be dragged today—or was it tomorrow? Finally, there was the mimeographed schedule, the orders of the day.

At 6:45 the phone on the bed table rang, and a sweet, chipper voice announced: “Good Morning, Mr. Crouse. It’s six forty-five. The press bus leaves in forty-five minutes from the front of the hotel.” She was up there in Room 819, the Press Suite, calling up the dozens of names on the press manifest, awaking the agents of every great newspaper, wire service and network not only of America but of the world. In response to her calls, she was getting a shocking series of startled grunts, snarls and obscenities.

The media heavies were rolling over, stumbling to the bathroom, and tripping over the handouts. Stooping to pick up the schedule, they read: “
8:00–8:15, Arrive Roger Young Center, Breakfast with Ministers
.” Suddenly, desperately, they thought: “Maybe I can pick McGovern up in Burbank at nine fifty-five and sleep for another hour.” Then, probably at almost the same instant, several score minds flashed the same guilty thought: “But maybe he will get shot at the ministers’ breakfast,” and then each mind branched off into its own private nightmare recollections of the correspondent who was taking a piss at Laurel when they shot Wallace, of the ABC cameraman who couldn’t get his Bolex to start as Bremer emptied his revolver. A hundred hands groped for the toothbrush.

It was lonely on these early mornings and often excruciatingly painful to tear oneself away from a brief, sodden spell of sleep. More painful for some than others. The press was consuming two hundred dollars a night worth of free cheap booze up there in the Press Suite, and some were consuming the lion’s share. Last night it had taken six reporters to subdue a prominent radio correspondent who kept upsetting the portable bar, knocking bottles and ice on the floor. The radioman had the resiliency of a battered Timex—each time he was put to bed, he would reappear to cause yet more bedlam.

And yet, at 7:15 Mr. Timex was there for the baggage call,
milling in the hall outside the Press Suite with fifty-odd reporters. The first glance at all these fellow sufferers was deeply reassuring—they all felt the same pressures you felt, their problems were your problems. Together, they seemed to have the cohesiveness of an ant colony, but when you examined the scene more closely, each reporter appeared to be jitterbugging around in quest of the answer that would quell some private anxiety.

They were three deep at the main table in the Press Suite, badgering the McGovern people for a variety of assurances. “Will I have a room in San Francisco tonight?” “Are you sure I’m booked on the whistle-stop train?” “Have you seen my partner?”

The feverish atmosphere was halfway between a high school bus trip to Washington and a gambler’s jet junket to Las Vegas, where small-time Mafiosi were lured into betting away their restaurants. There was giddy camaraderie mixed with fear and low-grade hysteria. To file a story late, or to make one glaring factual error, was to chance losing everything—one’s job, one’s expense account, one’s drinking buddies, one’s mad-dash existence, and the methedrine buzz that comes from knowing stories that the public would not know for hours and secrets that the public would never know. Therefore reporters channeled their gambling instincts into late-night poker games and private bets on the outcome of the elections. When it came to writing a story, they were as cautious as diamond-cutters.

It being Thursday, many reporters were knotting their stomachs over their Sunday pieces, which had to be filed that afternoon at the latest. They were inhaling their cigarettes with more of a vengeance, and patting themselves more distractedly to make sure they had their pens and notebooks. In the hall, a Secret Service agent was dispensing press tags for the baggage, along with string and scissors to attach them. From time to time, in the best Baden-Powell tradition, he courteously stepped forward to assist a drink-palsied journalist in the process of threading a tag.

The reporters often consulted their watches or asked for the
time of departure. Among this crew, there was one great phobia—the fear of getting left behind. Fresh troops had arrived today from the Humphrey Bus, which was the Russian Front of the California primary, and they had come bearing tales of horror. The Humphrey Bus had left half the press corps at the Biltmore Hotel on Tuesday night; in Santa Barbara, the bus had deserted Richard Bergholz of the Los Angeles
Times
, and it had twice stranded George Shelton, the UPI man.

“Jesus, am I glad I’m off the Humphrey Bus,” said one reporter, as he siphoned some coffee out of the McGovern samovar and helped himself to a McGovern sweet roll. “Shelton asked Humphrey’s press officer, Hackel, if there was time to file. Hackel said, ‘Sure, the candidate’s gonna mingle and shake some hands.’ Well, old Hubie couldn’t find but six hands to shake, so they got in the bus and took off and left the poor bastard in a phone booth right in the middle of Watts.”

To the men whom duty had called to slog along at the side of the Hump, the switch to the McGovern Bus brought miraculous relief. “You gotta go see the Hump’s pressroom, just to see what disaster looks like,” a reporter urged me. The Humphrey pressroom, a bunker-like affair in the bowels of the Beverly Hilton, contained three tables covered with white tablecloths, no typewriters, no chairs, no bar, no food, one phone (with outside lines available only to registered guests), and no reporters. The McGovern press suite, on the other hand, contained twelve typewriters, eight phones, a Xerox Telecopier, a free bar, free cigarettes, free munchies, and a skeleton crew of three staffers. It was not only Rumor Central, but also a miniature road version of Thomas Cook and Son. As the new arrivals to the McGovern Bus quickly found out, the McGovern staff ran the kind of guided tour that people pay great sums of money to get carted around on. They booked reservations on planes, trains and hotels; gave and received messages; and handled Secret Service accreditation with a fierce, Teutonic efficiency. And handed out reams of free information. On any given day, the table in the middle of the Press Suite was laden with at least
a dozen fat piles of handouts, and the door was papered with pool reports.
^*

It was just these womblike conditions that gave rise to the notorious phenomenon called “pack journalism” (also known as “herd journalism” and “fuselage journalism”). A group of reporters were assigned to follow a single candidate for weeks or months at a time, like a pack of hounds sicked on a fox. Trapped on the same bus or plane, they ate, drank, gambled, and compared notes with the same bunch of colleagues week after week.

Actually, this group was as hierarchical as a chess set. The pack was divided into cliques—the national political reporters, who were constantly coming and going; the campaign reporters from the big, prestige papers and the ones from the small papers; the wire-service men; the network correspondents; and other configurations that formed according to age and old Washington friendships. The most experienced national political reporters, wire men, and big-paper reporters, who were at the top of the pecking order, often did not know the names of the men from the smaller papers, who were at the bottom. But they all fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout,
the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village. After a while, they began to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories.

Everybody denounces pack journalism, including the men who form the pack. Any self-respecting journalist would sooner endorse incest than come out in favor of pack journalism. It is the classic villain of every campaign year. Many reporters and journalism professors blame it for everything that is shallow, obvious, meretricious, misleading, or dull in American campaign coverage.

On a muggy afternoon during the California primary campaign, I went to consult with Karl Fleming, a former political reporter and Los Angeles bureau chief for
Newsweek
, who was rumored to be a formidable critic of pack journalism. Fleming was beginning a whole new gig as editor of a fledgling semi-underground paper called
LA
; I found him in dungarees and shirtsleeves, sitting behind a desk that was covered with the makings of
LA
’s pilot issue.
^†
He was a ruggedly built North Carolinian with the looks and accent to play Davy Crockett in a Disney remake. He was very busy putting his magazine together, taking phone calls, and giving instructions to one long-haired writer after another, but he seemed to enjoy letting off steam about political journalism. One of the reasons he quit
Newsweek
was that he got fed up riding around on campaign extravaganzas.

“I got so frustrated during the Nixon campaign in 1968,” he grinned, “that I went to Ron Ziegler one day—we were flying some-goddam-where—and said, ‘Ron, I come to you as a representative of the press corps to ask you this question.’ I said, ‘The question is, What does Nixon do upon the occasion of his semiannual erection?’ Ziegler never cracked a goddam smile. Then I said, ‘The consensus is that he smuggles it to Tijuana.’ ”

Fleming leaned back in his chair and laughed hard.

“Gee,” I said, “you must have been fucked after that.”

“It doesn’t make any difference if you’re fucked or you’re not fucked,” said Fleming. “You delude yourself into thinking, ‘Well, if I get on the bad side of these guys, then I’m not gonna get all that good stuff.’ But pretty soon the realization hits that there
isn’t
any good stuff, and there isn’t gonna
be
any good stuff. Nobody’s getting anything that you’re not getting, and if they are it’s just more of the same bullshit.”

I told Fleming that I was puzzled as to why so many newspapers felt they needed to have correspondents aboard the press bus; a couple of wire-service guys and a camera crew should be able to cover a candidate’s comings, goings, and official statements more than thoroughly.

“Papers that have enough money are not content to have merely the AP reports,” said Fleming. “They want to have their own person in Washington because it means prestige for the paper and because in a curious way, it gives the editors a feeling of belonging to the club, too. I’ll guarantee you that three fourths of the goddam stuff—the good stuff—that the Washington press corps reporters turn up never gets into print at all. The reason it’s collected is because it’s transmitted back to the editor, to the publisher, to the ‘in’ executive cliques on these newspapers and networks and newsmagazines. It’s sent in confidential FYI memos or just over the phone. You give the publisher information that his business associates or his friends at the country club don’t have; you’re performing a very valuable function for him, and that, by God, is why you get paid.

“But while these papers want to have a guy there getting all the inside stuff, they don’t want reporters who are ballsy enough and different enough to make any kind of trouble. It would worry the shit out of them if their Washington reporter happened to come up with a page-one story that was different from what the other guys were getting. And the first goddam thing that happens is they pick up the phone and call this guy and say, ‘Hey, if this is such a hot story, how come AP or the Washington
Post
doesn’t have it?’ And the reporter’s in big
fuckin’ trouble. The editors don’t want scoops. Their abiding interest is making sure that nobody else has got anything that they don’t have, not getting something that nobody else has.

“So eventually a very subtle kind of thing takes over and the reporter says to himself, ‘All I gotta do to satisfy my editor and publisher is just get what the other guys are getting, so why should I bust my ass?’ And over a period of a few years he joins the club. Now, most of these guys are honest, decent reporters who do the best job they can in this kind of atmosphere. The best reporters are the ones who sit around and talk about what assholes their editors and publishers are, and that still happens, thank God, with a great amount of frequency, even at the high levels of the Washington press corps.

“All the same, any troublemaking reporter who walks into a press conference and asks a really mean snotty question which is going to make the candidate and his people really angry is going to be treated like a goddam pariah. ’Cause these guys in this club, they don’t want any troublemakers stirring up the waters, which means they might have to dig for something that’s not coming down out of the daily handout, or coming in from the daily pool report about what went on. They’d rather sit around the pressroom at the hotel every night, drinking booze and playing poker.”

Fleming said that in June, and as I followed the press through the next five months of the campaign, I discovered that some of his accusations checked out, but others did not. Almost everything he said held true for the White House press corps,
^‡
but
his charges did not always apply to the men who covered the Democratic candidates in 1972. It was true that some editors were still reluctant to run a story by their own man until the wire services had confirmed it. It was true that newsmagazine reporters and network correspondents occasionally leaked part of a hot story to
The New York Times
or
The Wall Street Journal
; after the story had gained respectability by appearing in one of these major establishment organs, the correspondent would write the whole story for his own organization. And it was impossible to tell how often the reporters censored themselves in anticipation of some imaginary showdown with a cautious editor, preferring to play it safe and go along with whatever the rest of the pack was writing.