The Boys on the Bus (34 page)

But Mollenhoff was a comic figure to his colleagues. He had thought that he was too good for journalism, but he had failed as a mandarin in Nixon’s White House. He was like a cocky kid who had left his small town for good, proceeded to fail dismally in the Big City, and was now forced to come back to the small town covered in shame but putting up a good front. So no one was anxious to defend him. They watched him for a while as he flailed against Ziegler, and then, instead of demanding that Ziegler answer Mollenhoff’s questions, they stepped in with questions of their own. “Ron,” someone said, sounding faintly bored, “may I change the subject?” Nobody seemed to care whether Ziegler denied the quote or not. That was Mollenhoff’s problem, not theirs.

Mollenhoff was no proponent of joint action. “If they don’t have the guts to do it individually,” he said later, “there’s no point getting together to rig a conspiracy to get them off their asses.” But he did expect some help from his fellow newspapermen. He kept looking around in a beseeching way, until someone in the back of the room finally asked Ziegler: “Did Clark
Mollenhoff quote you accurately in that story?” Ziegler said he had already given a response on that point. The subject was dropped.

Mollenhoff managed to get off one parting shot. “The speech Sunday on crime—will that include the Watergate?” he asked Ziegler.

At the end of the briefing, a group of reporters gathered around Mollenhoff to slap him on the back and shake his hand. “That a way, Clark!” they said. “That was certainly some performance! it sure is good to see someone take on Ziegler like that!”

The White House press corps always admired a show of fierce individualism.

Every so often in the course of the fall campaign, Jules Witcover appeared at a White House briefing in his black, funereal raincoat, looking like a cut-rate version of the bad fairy. He would wait until the questioning started to hum and then, with his eyes all blank and innocent, he would catch Ziegler’s attention and ask, “Ron, what did the President do today as a candidate for reelection? Did he do anything?”

Ziegler would bristle and fight the impulse to snap, and then he would give a very composed answer detailing all the Presidential duties that Nixon would discharge that day, and he would completely ignore Witcover’s question. Witcover would come back a minute later with something like, “Ron,
as a candidate
, did the
President read the
Times’
story on Segretti?” Witcover never could get over the fact that all the White House staffers took offense the moment you said or even implied that Nixon was a candidate for President. Around the White House, it bordered on treason to call Nixon a candidate; the big plan was to run him as the President and try to bury the fact that he was a politician. Ziegler tore up the English language looking for euphemisms for the word “campaign.” Someone would ask him about one of Nixon’s upcoming campaign trips and Ziegler would answer, “Yes, on Monday the President will go to New York to, uh,
follow the schedule we’ve announced
.”

Whenever he could, Witcover liked to remind the White House that Nixon was running for office. Dan Rather, for his part, began signing off his reports with the tag line: “This is Dan Rather with the Nixon campaign at the White House.” Some of the better political writers around Washington, like Peter Lisagor and Jack Germond, tried in their articles to point out the political motivation behind each of Nixon’s Presidential acts. Nevertheless, it was difficult to keep writing political copy about a stubborn non-candidate, a man who made only eight token campaign outings during the entire fall.

Nixon had already taken a couple of these trips when the White House press office, which had been ignoring my pleas for accreditation, did a sudden, mysterious about-face. On September 26, a stern, no-nonsense White House secretary phoned to say that I had passed the requisite security check and could ride the press plane on the Presidential Trip to New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The trip had already begun, she said, but I could catch the Presidential party if I got out to Liberty Island in New York Harbor on the double.

I got there just in time to see the press coming into the island in three Chinook helicopters, the kind that were used to carry troops in Vietnam. The choppers circled the island three times so that the cameramen on board could get aerial shots of the Statue; you could feel the blades pounding the air.

Meanwhile, the 36th Army Band played Sousa marches. I was
Standing in back of the crowd—which consisted almost entirely of plaid-uniformed girls from Catholic schools and little boys in yarmulkes from Hebrew schools, all of whom were broiling and screaming for Cokes in this shadeless park right beneath the Statue’s backside—when the White House press corps started charging single file through a hole in a nearby hedge. The wire-service men and the regulars headed straight for a row of phones that had been set up on a table at the rear of the park. They had just found out that Henry Kissinger and Xuan Thuy had decided to extend the peace talks for one more day. Robert Pierpoint’s sound man hastily removed the mouthpiece of one of the telephones and wired a tape recorder to the inner workings of the receiver so that Pierpoint could phone the story into CBS radio. Pierpoint shouted into his microphone above the crowd noise, but the sound man kept looking at the dials on the tape recorder gesturing that something was wrong. “Come on, New York, the sound level’s too high,” the sound man yelled into another phone. “I
told
you the sound level was too high!”

“Christ,” Pierpoint said to no one in particular. “When you try to work with these guys, they
do
not understand that we are under tremendous pressure.”

Ziegler came bustling through the throng of reporters. “Lisagor!” he shouted. “Lisagor! This
is
the first time the talks have ever been extended. All the others have been one-day sessions. But, just off the record—don’t push it too much.” Ziegler accompanied this advice with a vague but ominous cranking gesture.

Lisagor, who was chatting with Carroll Kilpatrick, the tall, grey-haired Washington
Post
correspondent, did not seem greatly excited over the information that Ziegler had checked for him. “I don’t see many Negroes in the crowd, do you, Carroll?” he said.

“Hey,” he continued, “have you heard Claudel’s title? He’s head of Frogs for Nixon.”

Claudel was Henri Claudel, the French Consul General, who had come to present some citation to the American Museum of
Immigration, which Nixon was officially opening this afternoon. Nixon was using the occasion to show how much he admired America’s Heritage Groups—such as Italians, Ukranians, Poles, and especially Jews. Nearly half an hour after the press arrived, Nixon himself finally appeared to the cheers of the schoolchildren and proceeded to give a speech about how immigrants made America great. The speech contained all the old “melting pot” clichés. Most of the reporters crammed themselves onto a wooden platform in the middle of the park and craned their necks for a look at Nixon.

Suddenly a small group of antiwar veterans, who had apparently crashed the rigid security of this by-invitation-only affair, began to shout “Stop the bombing, stop the war!”
^*

Nixon stared into the cameras on the wooden platform. “I have a message for the television screens,” he said. “Let’s show, besides the six over here”—he pointed to the war protesters—“the
thousands
over here.” He gestured to all the schoolchildren, who were dutifully screaming “Four More Years!” Then the protesters were dragged away by the police.

Jack Germond was pacing the pavement at the back of the park, studying a tip sheet. “Jesus,” he said, “this is the ultimate media event. Nixon at the Statue of Liberty! It’s a piece of fiction. I just hope we get into the OTB parlor before five o’clock. I got a good horse in the eighth.”

Frank Lynn,
The New York Times’
specialist on New York City politics, was covering the New York leg of Nixon’s trip in accordance with the paper’s tradition that a reporter from the New York office takes over whenever the President is in the metropolitan area. Bob Semple, the
Times’
White House man, immediately recognized that the day’s story was Nixon’s blatant grab for the ethnic vote. He tactfully suggested this to Lynn,
and he also warned Lynn that the speech which Nixon was scheduled to deliver that evening would harp on a hackneyed theme which Nixon had put forth dozens of times in the past—that America must maintain a strong defense. The next morning, Lynn led his story with the sentence: “Calling for the maintenance of a strong defense establishment President Nixon urged Americans last night ‘never to send the President of the United States to the conference table with anybody as head of the second strongest nation in the world.’ ”

(Several weeks later, seeing Lynn at another Nixon function in Westchester, Semple felt a curiosity welling up inside himself. He wanted to know why that lead had ended up on Lynn’s story. Semple sensed that he shouldn’t question Lynn about the matter, but he could not resist. He had a second or third martini and then went over to Lynn and asked, “Say, Frank, did the desk rewrite that story of yours …?” The moment the words were out of Semple’s mouth, he saw a look of shame in Lynn’s eyes and knew that he shouldn’t have asked.)

Later that afternoon, after the speech was over and the President had taken off in his helicopter to go to a meeting with “Jewish leaders,” the press was taken back to Manhattan on a Circle Line ferryboat and then bused to the Commodore Hotel. Dan Rather went back to Manhattan on a specially chartered tugboat. For some reason, there was a chimpanzee on the deck of the tug, and he was persuaded to clap his hands at the press assembled on the deck of the ferry. Which called for repartee from the press. “Hey, Dan,” they yelled, “is that your producer?”

The monkey provided the best moment of the afternoon. The bus ride through the city was depressingly quiet. There was a pall of defeat and futility over the White House press corps. Inside the White House, their broken, sheeplike behavior seemed somehow natural. But here, in the world outside, it was painful to watch. Three thousand miles away another bunch of reporters were careening about the West Coast with the McGovern campaign. They were suffering from a blinding fatigue,
but at least there were signs of life on the McGovern bus; there was noisy speculation about the prospects of a candidate who made mistakes and acted in unpredictable ways. But here in New York, the White House correspondents knew that nothing unpredictable would happen. The word that appeared most frequently in their pool reports was “uneventful.” They were too resigned to the tedium to fight it. During the fall, the only major acts of protest and defiance came from the shock troops—reporters from outside the White House press corps who were only covering Nixon for a little while.

That evening, the buses picked up the reporters at the Commodore Hotel and took them across town to the Americana Hotel, where Nixon was going to address a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner. At the top of a wide stairway, uniformed guards directed the guests to a huge ballroom on the right and the press to a smaller meeting room on the left. Total Quarantine for the press.

Lyndon Johnson, in the halcyon days when he was still wooing reporters, used to invite three or four of them, and their wives, to almost every state dinner. It gave the reporters a big thrill to see their names on the official invitation list, and on the Washington
Post’
s society page the next morning. Johnson knew that this was a simple enough thing to do—letting the press in with the white folks every so often—and it earned him an enormous amount of good will. But Richard Nixon was hardly ever willing to spoil his parties by inviting the press. He didn’t mind having four hundred Youths for Nixon crash the party that night. (They kept yelling “Four More Years!” on cue.) But he wanted the press out of sight.

The eighty reporters in the pressroom lined up for paper-dry turkey sandwiches and a shot at four bottles of whiskey (which were cleaned out by the first fifteen men in line). The myth dies hard that the Nixon operation was first-class all the way. But it died for me that night. The food was stale and scarce. Although the President was staying at the Waldorf, the press was billeted for the night in the Commodore, a grimy, seedy railroad hotel
whose main distinction lay in having pioneered the technique of piping sexually explicit films into hotel rooms. Some of the men had been to their rooms and caught the porno classic
Vixen
, which the Commodore was featuring that week.
Vixen
was already a topic of conversation.