The Boys on the Bus (30 page)

Ziegler had called in the old squeeze play, but he had squeezed a little too hard, and it had blown up in his face. The newspapermen and the TV men had been pushed too far and had openly rebelled against the traditional privilege of the wire services to end the briefiing. Ziegler hadn’t counted on that, hadn’t expected the press to break one of its own time-honored rules. He had lost control of his class—terrible humiliation for any teacher.

But no matter. Nothing was lost save face. Within a few minutes everything had returned to normal. Though the briefiing had gone well beyond noon, no one had turned into a pumpkin. Most of the reporters simply walked back to their cubicles and filed something about Henry Kissinger, a quick and easy story. Then they left and had a good lunch. When they returned, about two o’clock, there was, as usual, little to do. John Osborne sat in his captain’s chair and took some notes from transcripts of past briefings, which are kept in a looseleaf notebook. Other reporters sat around and read the
Evening Star
. The Knights of the Green Ottoman snoozed like tycoons on an ocean liner.

A little after lunch, the members of Ziegler’s committee met in the briefing room and had a cordial discussion. Every so often, you could make out a clear phrase among the low voices: “… be firm about it … three points … Ron shouldn’t be the one to say no.” Later in the afternoon, the following communiqué was posted.

Around three o’clock, some of the reporters began looking at a pair of little white plastic stars on the wall. (There was a pair upstairs and a pair downstairs.) The stars were lit with a flickering light. When the light stopped flickering, it meant that there was a “lid” on the day’s news—there would be no more briefings, announcements, or press releases. Downstairs, Don Fulsom was reading the paper, but his peripheral vision noticed the flickering cease. “That’s the lid!” he said. Within ten minutes, the place was almost empty.

That afternoon, McManus came back early from lunch and went to Ron Ziegler’s office. He had a long, calm discussion with Ziegler and urged that the second daily briefing be instituted again. Ziegler listened and, of course, did nothing to revive the afternoon briefings.

When McManus finished treating with Ziegler, he came out and slumped in one of the captain’s chairs in the middle of the empty briefing room. He began to talk to me quietly and almost sadly about the White House. “This morning Ziegler said that his interest was in decorum in this room,” said McManus. “Well, I don’t believe we ought to stand around this room and shout at each other, but the reason the people were shouting in this room today is that they were being denied the
right to ask questions. And that’s all we really get to do around here. We’re sequestered.

“The press secretary has the power to obviate these problems, but instead he plays on what I call our structural incompetency. The weaknesses of our structure are just like a series of levers and any press secretary can manipulate them with ease, if he cares to. I mean, it’s as if he’s been handed five dogs conditioned by the Pavlovian method and a tinkle bell.”

Ziegler had no qualms about playing on the weaknesses of the press. That was, after all, one of the main functions of a flack. And, at thirty-three, Ziegler was the compleat flack. He started as a press agent for the Southern California Central Republican Committee and later, as an executive at J. Walter Thompson in Los Angeles, he touted Disneyland. In 1968, he had watched public relations men win the election for Richard Nixon, and now he saw them beginning to rule the world. His old mentor at J. Walter Thompson, the haughty and automatous Bob Haldeman, was now the second most powerful man in the White House. While many flacks were former journalists who secretly loathed themselves for sinking into the whoredom of press agentry, Ziegler gave every sign of considering public relations a profession superior to journalism; after all, journalists merely wrote what flacks told them. “He was never torn, as some of his colleagues who had been newspapermen often were, between protection of his candidate and the public’s right to know,” Jules Witcover wrote of Ziegler’s performance in the 1968 campaign. “That was journalism school stuff; on the field it was ‘us’ (the Nixon team) against ‘them’ (the press).”
^*

Ziegler was the perfect spokesman for the Nixon Administration. He was totally loyal to his boss and he treated the press with a bland contempt that was quite genuine and unaffected. At the briefing lectern, he was smug, condescending, and relentlessly evasive, often refusing to answer the simplest and
most innocuous of questions. He talked in a kind of flackspeak that would have given Orwell nightmares. He sometimes accused reporters of “trying to complexify the situation,” and he reversed White House positions by the simple expedient of announcing that he had “misspoken” himself in the past.

After the briefings, of course, Ziegler came on as a nice guy, a regular fellow who could tease and be teased. And most of the White House correspondents actually fell for Ziegler’s act. Like Bob Semple of
The New York Times
. One afternoon, I was sitting next to Semple in the White House press plane, sipping wine and eating grapes, and I asked my standard question, which was: When are you people going to mutiny?

“Well,” Semple assured me, “we’ll get tee’d off. And it’s gonna be over the issue of when can we ask the guy [Nixon] some questions. Ziegler’s very, very good at his job. I don’t mean very good about giving out information, but he’s a marvelous buffer. And actually I kind of like the guy because he has a redeeming sense of humor. Ron is capable of saying, you know: ‘Why am I doing this? Here I am on a plane and this is my whole life, and I don’t ever see my wife …’ So, you know, he’s capable of taking on the complaints of the press.”

Of course, Ziegler never did anything about any of those complaints. But at least he was sometimes there on the press plane, and the reporters could go up and actually talk to him, provided they weren’t on his ever-expanding shitlist. They usually couldn’t get in to see anyone else on the White House staff, and Nixon didn’t like to give press conferences. So Ziegler was the only President they had, and they tried very hard to like him.

A few people, like McManus and Fulsom, thought that Ziegler was a royal phony and a menace to the press, and they let him know it. And on one long flight in October, Helen Thomas of the UPI put her cards on the table. She was sitting in the cramped rear compartment of the President’s plane with four other pool reporters when Ziegler came back to banter and remind everyone what a good guy he was. Helen Thomas started in on the Watergate scandal. “Lies,” she said, “we get
nothing but lies. And someday those lies are going to catch up with this Administration.” Ziegler kept smiling and saying things like “Gee, Helen, I can’t agree with you there.” Suddenly Helen Thomas gave Ziegler a very hard look and said, “I’ll say one thing for you, Ron. You’ve never lied to us directly.
But I don’t know how you stomach your job
.”

But Thomas, McManus, and Fulsom were like the last people to crack in a Prisoner of War compound. Here was this awful little POW camp, with an officious pouter pigeon of a junior officer—the camp commander’s favorite—who bullied the prisoners, studied their flaws, rewarded their failures, beat them for their successes, and encouraged them to turn each other in. And yet, under the mind-bending strains of four years’ captivity, nearly all the prisoners had convinced themselves that the little bully was really not that bad a guy. They were grateful for the times when he kidded around with them.

In a way, one could not blame Ziegler for openly disdaining the White House press corps. They were such a bunch of patsies. If they bought his act, they would buy anything. Ziegler, and the men from whom Ziegler gladly took orders, consistently harassed reporters in the most petty and most underhanded of ways. And yet, the reporters never cried “foul” and never mutinied. A few cases of harassment, such as the Daniel Schorr affair, received a good deal of publicity.
^†
But smaller examples of harassment happened almost daily at the White House. These dirty tricks can be divided into several categories, including divide-and-rule operations, freeze-outs, sheer balls tactics, and tax scares.

Divide-and-rule was one of Ziegler’s favorite tactics. One example was the way in which he used the Henry Kissinger story to
set up a fight between the wire-service reporters and the straight reporters. At other times, Ziegler played on the simple fact that one reporter will always cut another reporter’s throat for even the most trivial scoop. In this way, Ziegler drove Jim Doyle out of the White House.

In 1969, having served for several years as the Boston
Globe
’s Washington Bureau chief, Doyle moved into the chair recently vacated by Haynes Johnson at the Washington
Star
; one of Doyle’s assignments was to cover the White House on Saturdays.

During the rest of the week, the job was done by Garnett “Jack” Horner, who had served on the
Star
since 1937 and had covered the White House since the early Eisenhower days. Jack Horner was a White House lifer, the permanent secretary of the White House Correspondents’ Association. He was an overweight sexagenarian who looked like Charles Laughton, and every morning he sat in a captain’s chair in the middle of the briefing room, resting his wattles on his chest. Not that he was a lazy man—he scurried around all day protecting himself by filing new leads and inserts on every handout that issued forth from the White House propaganda machine; he was an absolutely thorough and “objective” stenographer, recording every official happening, never tainting his copy with the smallest speck of insight.

He was also a remarkably complaisant man. Once, when Horner was part of the pool on Air Force One, Lyndon Johnson invited all the reporters up front to have a chat. Horner plumped one soft question after another into Johnson’s lap. After the conversation, as the reporters were making their way back to the rear of the plane, Johnson said in a stage whisper that half the plane could hear: “Boy, that Jack Horner really is a big ass-kisser, isn’t he?”

Horner was always so pleasant and helpful around the White House staff. Whenever Ziegler started stumbling through a particularly tortuous answer, Horner always came to his aid with: “Ron, aren’t you merely trying to say …?” He also liked to make
life easier for the President, and he once sought out Ziegler before a press conference and asked, “Is there any fertile ground we should plow tonight?”

In contrast to Horner, Doyle was young, restless, liberal, and unhelpful in his questioning.

One Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970, Doyle was sitting around the White House pressroom when the
Star
called to say that a report had just come over the wire from the Chicago
Tribune
to the effect that Robert Finch was quitting his post as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in order to become a White House aide. The
Star
wanted Doyle to get the report confirmed and find out more details. Doyle found Gerald Warren, the deputy press secretary, and started questioning him about Finch’s impending move. Warren, an innocuous, spindly, bankerish type, kept protesting that he couldn’t say anything about the matter himself and couldn’t take the problem to Ziegler. So Doyle decided to let the problem wait until later in the afternoon and went off to cover an Agnew press conference on youth and drug addiction.

When Doyle returned to the pressroom, Jack Horner was sitting in the
Star
’s cubicle. Horner was a man who never missed a chance to come in and work for overtime pay. Without saying anything to Horner, Doyle went to a phone and called the Star’s city desk.

“Jack Horner’s here,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” said the man on the desk. “We’ll tell you why when you get back to the office.”

Doyle drove back to the
Star
and asked why.

“Well,” said the man on the desk, “Ziegler gave Jack the Finch story, so Jack’s going to do it. He gave it to Jack on the condition that he doesn’t let you or anyone else in the pressroom know about it.”

Doyle was incredulous. “You mean,” he said, “that you’re letting a guy set ground rules against another guy on the staff?”