The Boys on the Bus (28 page)

Unlike most reporters, Smith left behind a legacy of books. In these books, he chronicled an era of White House reporting that now seems heartbreakingly simple and innocent. In the forties, the reporters gathered once a week in the Oval Office to throw questions at the President for as long as they pleased; and the President, only a few feet away on the other side of a huge desk, responded with wit and candor. Presidential advisers still roamed freely and talked to the press. Reporters were still allowed to badger every visitor who left the President’s office. The reporters felt a patriotic affection for the President, and did not mind engaging in what Merriman Smith called “a friendly conspiracy” to keep the public from finding out that Roosevelt was confined to a wheelchair.

The pressroom, in those days, was as raunchy and intimate as a police shack, and the reporters knew each other well, drank together in the long afternoons, and played pranks on each other.

Now, in 1972, the White House press complex was as flavorless as a large insurance office, so impersonal that the people downstairs scarcely knew the people upstairs. It had lost the sour camaraderie of the police shack—except for an obscure little group of six men who were permanently hunkered down in a corner of the downstairs room. At almost any hour of the working day, you could find them reading the papers and grumbling articulately, slumped in a circular arrangement of armchairs and sofas, with their feet up on the central piece of
furniture from which they took their name, the Knights of the Green Ottoman. The six Knights were united by a bond of vague discontent—with the White House operation, with their jobs, or simply with themselves.

There was Don Fulsom, the UPI audio man. Fulsom was an open, friendly thirty-four-year-old with a long face who was considered a troublemaker by the White House staff. A question of his attitude. He had been fired from his first radio job, at a station in Buffalo, N.Y., when he began the news on Easter morning by saying: “Today, millions of Christians around the world are celebrating the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ.” In private conversation, he never called Nixon anything but “the Trick.”

In the next armchair sat Jim McManus, Westinghouse’s correspondent, a neatly dressed man with a lean, almost Jesuitical face and a quiet manner of speaking. He was one of the few men ever to walk out of a White House briefing in protest.

On the sofa was Howard Norton, sixty-one, grey-haired, wearing a white shirt and a White House tie-clasp. In 1947, his investigations of racketeering had won a Pulitzer Prize for the Baltimore
Sun
. Now he filled the minimal needs of
U.S. News
, which, being almost a house organ for the Administration, did not demand much investigative reporting. Norton did not say a great deal, but when he talked he was very frank. “This job,” he said, “has ruined more good reporters than any job I know.”

Then there were Al Sullivan, a USIA reporter in his thirties who had some surprisingly unofficial-sounding opinions about the White House; Gil Butler, about the same age, the reporter for TV station WTOP, who was chuckling over a volume of Mencken; and finally, Gary Axelson, a plump young man who was sorry that his employers at Metromedia had promoted him from the State Department beat, where he used to be able to dig up good stories. At the White House he found only frustration.

It was quarter after eleven on this Tuesday morning, and the Knights were getting restless. They were making the ritual joke
about tranquilizing gas. The gas, they said, came out of the vents above the sofa before every briefing and subdued nettlesome reporters. “Well, I guess they got us just about comatose enough,” said Fulsom, squirming in his chair. “They can bring out Ziegler now.”

McManus looked at his watch. “Looks like the old squeeze play,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” said Sullivan, “the old squeezeroo.”

“What is the squeeze play?” I asked.

“Well,” said McManus, like a teacher going back to a familiar lesson, “the press briefing is scheduled to begin at eleven. You will notice that it is now eleven seventeen. Inexplicably, the briefing starts late more often than not. Now, if anybody is going to get a telephone and make any sense out of the information they have and still get it moving on the wire or over a broadcast facility, the briefing simply cannot be allowed to run beyond fifteen minutes until twelve. At the absolute outside, say ten minutes until twelve. And if it was the Second Coming, you could probably make it two minutes to twelve, but you’d bust into everything, just absolutely break into all the wire circuits. I mean, it would
have
to be the Second Coming.

“Noon is a crucial hour for newspapers across the country. You see, most of the papers that these wire services do business with are one-edition dailies. The services have got to get that copy out to them or it’s simply not going to get set in type. And they’ve also got their eye cocked on their broadcast clients when it comes up to major newscast hours, like noon.

“The point is that if you are a press secretary, you use all these little tricks. You start the briefing late, you compress the time, you increase the anxiety in the room. Then, you throw out something that the wires are going to want to run with, but that not everyone else necessarily wishes to run with, so that the wire reporters are at odds with the other reporters.”

It almost boiled down to a formula: the more troublesome the briefing promised to be, the later it started. A week before, on October 10, the Washington
Post
had reported that the Watergate bugging incident was merely one facet of a massive spying
and sabotage campaign set up by the Republicans, and the
Post
identified a young lawyer named Donald Segretti as one of the operatives in the campaign. Two days before, the
Post
had charged that Nixon’s appointment secretary, Dwight Chapin, was Segretti’s contact in the Administration.

Because of these articles, Ziegler had had a great deal of trouble with the press. Smelling blood, the reporters had momentarily come to life, stinging him with question after question about the Watergate, Segretti, and Dwight Chapin. Ziegler had piled up record numbers of “no comments” which the wire services dutifully counted. He was beginning to look ridiculous, like a gangster who takes the Fifth when the DA asks him his address. So the briefings got later and later.

As the delay grew longer, the Knights continued to beef about the White House system. It was all they had talked about the previous week, and it was all they would talk about in weeks to come. They complained about Ziegler’s penchant for setting up ground rules—bringing out someone like John Ehrlichman, and then telling the press that they could only question him about one limited subject. “If any governor tried that, he would be laughed out of office,” said Al Sullivan, who used to cover the governor of New Jersey. “But a lot of these guys are caught up in respect for the White House, so they respect the stupid ground rules.”

McManus, who at one time covered the governor of Indiana, nodded in agreement. “This Watergate thing has been going on for weeks now, and all we get is no comment. And what has happened? Do you see the publishers breaking down the gates of the White House, or the editors jamming the switchboard with protests, or the reporters screaming with rage? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“What can you do about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Sullivan, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

“We should hold Ziegler there for four or five hours and make him
run
out of the room,” said McManus.

At 11:23, a voice came on the PA system. “There will be a
briefing in the briefing room,” it said. It was a sweet female voice and Don Fulsom knew it well because it belonged to a secretary with whom he once had a run-in. About a year ago, when Ziegler had quietly dropped the regular afternoon briefings, Fulsom was one of the few reporters who bothered to protest. The secretary, who heard him protesting, called him a creep. So Fulsom mentioned in his radio report that a “White House staffer called a reporter a creep.” The secretary had refused to talk to him ever since.

By now everyone was rushing into the briefing room, the stenographer was seated and ready to take transcript, the Signal Corpsman was at the sound console, adjusting the controls of the PA system, a deputy press secretary and three female secretaries were standing by in case Ron Ziegler needed any additional information, and Ron Ziegler was standing at the podium, smoking nervously and looking wary.

In fact, with his pudgy, baby face, he looked like nothing so much as a high school teacher who is a little too young to command total respect. He began the briefing, but some of the reporters in the back went on talking, so a certain sternness came into his voice, as if to show them that he didn’t care. And like a high school assembly, the briefing started out with a long series of tedious announcements: the President met with labor leaders from twenty-four countries; his remarks would be posted. There was a photo opportunity with the President and the members of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse Prevention; a press release on the meeting would be handed out later.

The announcements went on for several minutes, with everyone fidgeting and coughing and making few notes. Then Ziegler announced plans for trips to Philadelphia and New York State later in the week, and everyone perked up a little and wrote down the itineraries. From there, Ziegler moved on to announcements about seventy-one bills that Congress had sent the President, and about legislation still pending, like the spending ceiling. “Now the eyes of many people in this country
are on the Senate to see if they will meet their portion of the responsibility to keep taxes down and inflation under control by acting affirmatively on the spending ceiling legislation.” Blatant propaganda, and everyone was going to sleep, but someone asked Ziegler if his remarks were meant as a form of pressure on the Senate and Ziegler said yes, and handed out some more propaganda. There were some intelligent and well-informed questions about other bills, but Ziegler told the reporters to save their questions until he had finished making his announcements.

Then he dropped the big sop of news he had been saving: “I’d also like to tell you now at this time that the President has asked Dr. Kissinger to go on from Paris to visit Saigon to review with President Thieu the status of the Paris negotiations.” The questions began, dozens of little questions of detail—when was Kissinger last in Saigon? who will be going with him? had he wrapped up the Paris talks for good? “See,” said McManus, “if there’s a danger they’ll ask about the Watergate, all he has to do is pitch them something about Kissinger, and the wires can hardly wait to get it on.”

For a few minutes, everyone focused on Henry Kissinger’s trip. They asked some probing questions and some stupid ones, but the striking thing was the high school atmosphere that pervaded the briefing. It was as if they were all chafing under the teacher’s authority, and they wanted to humiliate him without getting caught. So whenever anyone asked a question that carried the slightest hint of naughty disrespect, they all giggled. When Ziegler’s microphone suddenly started to vibrate wildly, causing him to back off in alarm, someone shouted “Sabotage!” and there was a great laugh from the whole class.

The microphone, after all, was one of Ziegler’s most effective weapons. It made him sound booming and authoritative, and it made the questioners, who spoke in unamplified tones, sound comparatively timid and mousy. I was standing next to the ancient representative of a formerly great Midwestern daily, who arrived every morning befuddled with drink and proceeded
to pore over the
Times
sports section during the briefing. As he turned the pages, which he did absent-mindedly, they made a noise like a four-year-old jumping in a pile of leaves. Consequently, the reporters standing around him could not hear many of the questions asked at the front of the room. But they could hear Ziegler’s replies coming out of the four hidden speakers in the room.

The questions continued. Someone asked whether Kissinger used an interpreter. “I can’t provide you that information, but Dr. Kissinger does not speak North Vietnamese,” said Ziegler. A wave of mocking laughter and comment moved back through the room. The question was asked twice more. “Ron, why can’t you tell us whether he uses an interpreter?”

“I’m not prepared to discuss the talks in any way whatsoever,” Ziegler said curtly.
^†

After a while, the wire people began to get edgy. Fran Lewine, the No. 2 AP correspondent, tried to end the briefing. “Thank you,” she called out in a bored singsong from the back of the room. The rest of the group roared with disapproval. “Wait a moment, wait a moment,” they all grumbled. So the briefing moved on to other questions, important questions. Fulsom asked whether the President had found out yet if those
were American bombs that had been dropped on the French Consulate in Hanoi. (He had not.) McManus followed up and asked if the President did not have an interest in finding this information out. (He would receive and had received information along this line, but the Defense Department was the place to ask that question.)

Phil Potter of the Baltimore
Sun
asked Ziegler about the President’s trip to Atlanta two weeks before. Potter was an unreconstructed hawk of retirement age who frequently got into noisy arguments about the war at the Press Club bar, but he asked good, tough questions. Potter said that during the Atlanta motorcade, he twice saw somebody, “apparently a security agent,” grab or tear down a McGovern sign being held by a demonstrator. He wanted to know if that was approved. In his blandest tones, Ziegler answered that “our policy is the total opposite of that kind of activity … we are opposed to any violence at all.” (Two weeks later, at a rally in California, Curtis Wilkie of the Wilmington
News-Journal
would see Dwight Chapin instruct a pimply faced young Nixon supporter to go and bat down the signs of the McGovern supporters.)

Someone else followed up, saying that the incident had been widely witnessed and asking if Ziegler was sure that it had not been condoned. Ziegler showed his first flash of anger and spoke sternly: “That was a public motorcade on a public street and I don’t have a comment or any basis on which to judge that situation or comment on it. I’ve given a response to you in terms of what our policy is on this over and over again. I’ve stated it and I think it’s clear.”