The Boys on the Bus (35 page)

“Did you see the scene with the trout?”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Naw, that’s famous. Haven’t you ever heard of the trout scene?”

“Four more years in the Commodore, that’s what we need!”

The pressroom was arranged like a classroom, with three rows of baize-covered tables facing a podium and three Sony televisions at the front. Most of the reporters went about setting up their Olivettis on the tables, sipping drinks from a cash bar, and talking shop. One of the local reporters appeared at the well-guarded door with a guest from the dinner across the way—a suburban Marie Antoinette, dressed in a smart neo-Moroccan pant suit. The lady sniffed delicately at the scene, taking in the dozens of slouching, puttering figures. “They don’t seem to be doing anything,” she said. “Why don’t they report something?”

As if to satisfy the lady, the Sony monitors began to buzz and lit up finally with the image of a tuxedoed Robert Dole, the Chairman of the Republican Party. As Dole spoke, a wave of comment gradually rippled through the room. The absurdity of the insult was sinking in. Dole was speaking from a dais not two hundred feet away, just across a marbled hall, yet the press was not allowed to see him live—except for a four-man pool. It was no big deal to see Robert Dole once again in the flesh, or even Nixon, but the restriction was so petty that it began to loom large as a taunt.

“I looked forward to a Convention full of surprises and excitement,” Chairman Dole was saying, “and those of you who were there know just how exciting it was. Tonight we are fortunate
to have a video tape of the most exciting moments of the Convention, and we are going to show it to you on these big screens.” There were different reactions to this statement in the pressroom. There were a few reporters who probably agreed; one or two others may have concluded that Republicans simply had unusual criteria for excitement; but most of the reporters were stunned by the enormity of the lie. The room began to reverberate with jokes about the “exciting moments” being shown on the monitors—Sammy Davis hugging Nixon, Pat taking a bow, Nixon’s banal acceptance speech. Ralph Harris of Reuters, a small, rumpled, grey-headed Englishman who had been stationed at the White House for many years, stared at the monitor and shouted: “Throw Nixon out of work!” John Farmer, a political writer for the Philadelphia
Bulletin
, looked at his typewriter and kept repeating, “You can’t cover this guy. They won’t let you.” Peter Lisagor shook his head and walked off to join the other pool reporters in the ballroom. “I’ve got to smell this crowd,” he announced. “I’ve got a feeling you really got to smell this crowd to know it.”

These comments were mostly muted because Ron Ziegler was on the prowl, pacing up and down the aisles between the rows of tables. Not that there was any crack in Ziegler’s bland smile to show he was picking up hostile vibes. No, Ziegler was like an expert floorwalker who would spot a shoplifter, walk calmly to the nearest phone, ring Security, and adjust his pocket hanky as the security thugs dragged the shoplifter away.

Ziegler was now hovering around the front of the room, where Jim Doyle was sitting. Doyle had locked horns with Ziegler at a briefing earlier in the evening. Doyle kept asking whether “the candidate” was going to have a press conference during the trip. Ziegler became furious and finally snapped: “Don’t worry, we’ll tell you if there’s going to be any news conference, Doyle!”

“Hey, Ron!” Doyle now shouted at Ziegler. “Do
you
get to go inside?”

“Yes,” said Ziegler, staunchly oblivious to the sarcasm. “I’m
going in with the Youth for Nixon. I’m going in right now.” And in he went.

Meanwhile, the Exciting Moments movie had ended and the action had shifted to the simultaneous fund-raiser in Chicago, linked by closed circuit, where Anne Armstrong, the Party’s Vice Chairman, was introducing Spiro Agnew. “All day long,” she said, “I’ve been trying to think of one word to describe Vice President Agnew.”

“I’ll bet it’s shithead,” said Doyle, in a loud voice. “It’ll bring down the house.”

Anne Armstrong listed a number of virtues she associated with the Vice President. “And he can transmit these qualities to others,” she said.

“Like a leper!” said Doyle.

Just then, Gerald Warren, the deputy press secretary, appeared at the door. He was in a floorwalker’s suit like Ziegler’s.

“What’s it like inside, Gerry?” Doyle asked him. “You been inside?”

Warren slumped his shoulders and let his tongue hang out. “Hot!” he said.

“Nice to know there
is
an inside,” said Doyle.

At 10:30, Nixon entered. The reporters watched him on TV as he made his progress through the lobby, came up the stairs, stepped onto the dais, acknowledged applause, and started to speak. There was a low steady clatter in the room now. The reporters were intently taking transcript on their portables. All in a day’s work. Listen for the lead and file the story. Here and there, people were quietly boiling with indignation—mostly people who were not regulars at the White House. Cassie Mackin sitting in the front row taking notes, looked grim. “Isn’t this incredible?” I said to her.

“The Republicans certainly have things organized, don’t they?” was all she said.

“Why do they just sit here and take it?” I asked.

“They’ve been worn down,” she said, very low. “We need some new ones.”

Nixon was making his standard speech, embellished with little winks, gestures, and turns of phrase (“Now, in very personal terms, may I tell you …”) that implied that he understood that a very special bond existed between him and the fat-cat audience. Nixon’s behavior with these people bordered on crassness and cried out to be described; it was a story in itself. But, as far as I could tell, such a story did not suggest itself to the reporters who watched him, and certainly none ever got into print.

About halfway through his speech, Nixon got to the part where he announced how happy he was that young people could vote. It was significant, Nixon congratulated himself, that “right here in this room, at this great dinner where it costs, I understand, a great deal to sit down and eat, that the young people were able to come in and at least enjoy the speeches.”

That was too much for Doyle. The needle in his bullshit detector hit the red zone. He was up on his feet shouting at the tube. “How about the press!” he screamed. “How about the press!”

“You’re not young, Jim,” somebody said. “You gotta be young to get in.” But Doyle went on yelling at the monitor, half joking and half off the handle.

“This is terrible! This is awful shit. I just want to take a look at him! Is he alive? How do I know he’s alive?” People stopped typing for a moment, turned around in their chairs to look at Doyle, assured themselves that he wasn’t really dangerous, and then went back to their jobs. Doyle sat down and looked around him, half expecting to see everyone else up and raging. All he saw was the White House press corps, hunched over the baize like blackjack addicts, taking down every word Nixon uttered. At the end of the trip, Doyle wrote a piece about the “surrealistic atmosphere” of Nixon’s isolation, but the article failed to match the fire of his outburst.

After the dinner ended, Cassie Mackin went out into the hall to do her “standup” in front of the NBC camera crew. She got as far as the second sentence, and then she doubled over in a fit of laughter and had to stop. The guests were being allowed
to leave through only one of the doors, but were trying to get out through all of them. The beautifully dressed people still in the ballroom were actually pounding on the doors, and the security guards and police were leaning against these doors from the other side.

“They’re banging on the doors to get out!” Mackin kept saying between paroxysms. “I’d love to see them break the doors down!” Then she would compose herself, signal the cameraman, try to do her introduction and collapse in laughter again. It was not healthy to flaunt that kind of an attitude around the Nixon people, and one didn’t have to be prescient to predict that within forty-eight hours Mackin would run afoul of the Thought Police.

The next morning, the reporters were bused to LaGuardia. They walked past Nixon’s blue and silver plane, which the White House people insisted on calling “The Spirit of ’76,” and boarded an oversized Eastern 727, which was at once tackier and less comfortable than either of the McGovern press planes. As I came to the top of the ramp, I met Cassie Mackin again. “Welcome to the Spirit of 1984,” she said.

There were four or five assistant press secretaries aboard—Tricia Nixon replicas in neat skirts and blouses. They sat in the first-class section with typewriters and a mimeograph machine, and about halfway to Oakland they began passing out the prepared text for the speech that Nixon would make at a thousand-dollar-a-plate lunch in San Francisco. They also handed out the text of the speech the President would give that night in Los Angeles. Since both speeches ran about ten legal-sized pages in length, the White House press people had helpfully prepared a page of salient excerpts from each.

I was kneeling on a seat in front of Lisagor and Bob Semple, turned around so that I could talk to them. Semple was typing away on his portable Olympia and sipping wine when the handout arrived; he immediately scanned the excerpt sheets and looked alarmed. He underlined a sentence from the Los Angeles speech that went: “Those who call for a redistribution of
income and a confiscation of wealth are not speaking for the interests of people …” Nixon was obviously referring to George McGovern, but at no point in either speech did he actually mention McGovern’s name.

“There is some pretty sleazy operating going on in this thing,” said Semple. “I don’t understand it. The guy obviously isn’t reading us.” He laughed. “I mean, I don’t think McGovern is calling for confiscation of wealth, do you?”

Semple began to read the San Francisco text. He underlined a sentence which referred to certain “proposals that would put the United States in the position of having the second strongest” Navy, Air Force and Army in the world. “It would be a move toward war,” the speech said. The author of these nefarious “proposals” was not identified.

“All right,” said Semple, “let’s say we use a lead saying President Nixon declared today that Senator George McGovern’s defense policies represented—you know, this is simple, wire-service stuff—
a move toward war
. Now how long do you think it would take for McGovern …?” Semple laughed, apparently at the idea of McGovern launching an indignant counterattack. “I mean, that’s tough business.”

“Well,” said Lisagor, “that’s how it’s gonna be handled.”

“It’s an interesting question,” Semple went on enthusiastically. He had curly brown hair, a long, smooth, boyish face, and blue eyes that widened and lit up whenever he grew excited about something. “I think just to put that in your lead is not necessarily serving Nixon’s purpose—not when you’re using outrageous statements like that.”

“Even outrageous remarks seem to help Nixon this year,” I pointed out.

“And to be recorded flatly, it helps him more,” said Semple, completely contradicting his first position.

“Yes, but I don’t know why that is,” I said.

“I can tell you why,” said Lisagor. “It’s because Nixon is one of the best students of journalistic formats of any politician we’ve had in a number of years. He understands the one-dimensional
format of the wire service, where you can’t qualify anything and where you’ve got to go with a hard punchy lead, and that’s what this speech is designed to do.”

“Well, I’m trying to work out a way around it,” said Semple firmly.

“Share it with me,” Lisagor said drily.

“Well,” said Semple, looking at the handout again, “I may just say that he came to California and played on very familiar themes in terms that seem to admit to no debate, that show no consideration for the complexity of the issues.”

Semple thought that over for a moment and then added, “Yeah, but then the desk will go like this.” He made a ripping sound and tore up an imaginary piece of copy.

“Yeah, right,” said Lisagor.

“Yeah,” said Semple, to me. “But not because the editors are pro-Nixon. It’s just the rules—and they’re good rules. But I’ll tell you about that later.” And he went back to his wine and his typewriter, leaving me to talk to Lisagor.

“The rules of objectivity are such,” said Lisagor, “that a man can make political capital out of them by being clever in the way he presents a particular issue.” Joe McCarthy, said Lisagor, was the prime example of a man who had taken advantage of the rules. McCarthy made outrageous accusations, knowing full well that the wires would print his statements deadpan, with no qualifications and no counterstatements from the people he accused. McCarthy had understood what made a headline, what made a good lead. Nixon knew these things, too. He knew that the “move toward war” statement would make a good, crisp lead for the wires.

(Nixon also knew that his attack on McGovern would get good play, while McGovern’s defense, coming a day or two later, would not have as much impact. Nixon himself stated this law of journalism back in the fifties, when he saw himself as a victim of attacks from the left. “A charge is usually put on the front page; the defense is buried among the deodorant ads,” he said.)

“All politicians make these simplistic charges,” said Lisagor.
“It becomes a problem for the press to put these charges in proper perspective. But a lot of reporters feel that they’ve discharged their obligation if they just report what the man said.”

In the next three days, Bob Semple wrote three stories about the trip—one for the
Times
of September 28, another on September 29, and a final piece for the Sunday “Week in Review” section on October 1. In his first piece he wrote:

But not once did Semple write that Nixon had
wrongly
accused McGovern of wanting to confiscate wealth and weaken the country militarily. In effect, his stories said that Nixon had begun to use strong rhetoric and had thrown some tough accusations at McGovern, but then McGovern was doing the same thing to Nixon. We talked about the stories while he was writing them, and at one point Semple said: “You can say that Nixon’s attack on McGovern was couched in severe language and general terms, but you can’t then write—‘and bore no resemblance to what McGovern has been saying.’ ”