The Boys on the Bus (4 page)

If you live in New York or Los Angeles, you have probably never heard of Walter Mears and Carl Leubsdorf, who were covering McGovern for the Associated Press, or Steve Gerstel, who covered him for the United Press International. But if your home is Sheboygan or Aspen, and you read the local papers, they are probably the only political journalists you know. There are about 1,700 newspapers in the U.S., and every one of them has an AP machine or UPI machine or both whirling and clattering and ringing in some corner of the city room, coughing up stories all through the day. Most of these papers do not have their own political reporters, and they depend on the wire-service men for all of their national political coverage. Even at newspapers that have large political staffs, the wire-service story almost always arrives first.

So the wire services are influential beyond calculation. Even at the best newspapers, the editor always gauges his own reporters’ stories against the expectations that the wire stories have aroused. The only trouble is that wire stories are usually bland, dry, and overly cautious. There is an inverse proportion between the number of persons a reporter reaches and the amount he can say. The larger the audience, the more inoffensive and inconclusive the article must be. Many of the wire men are repositories of information they can never convey. Pye Chamberlyne, a young UPI radio reporter with an untamable wiry moustache, emerged over drinks as an expert on the Dark Side of Congress. He could tell you about a prominent Senator’s battle to overcome his addiction to speed, or about Humphrey’s
habit of popping twenty-five One-A-Day Vitamins with a shot of bourbon when he needed some fast energy. But Pye couldn’t tell his audience.

In 1972, the Dean of the political wire-service reporters was Walter Mears of the AP, a youngish man with sharp pale green eyes who smoked cigarillos and had a nervous habit of picking his teeth with a matchbook cover. With his clean-cut brown hair and his conservative sports clothes he could pass for a successful golf pro, or maybe a baseball player. He started his career with the AP in 1955 covering auto accidents in Boston, and he worked his way up the hard way, by getting his stories in fast and his facts straight every time. He didn’t go in for the New Journalism. “The problem with a lot of the new guys is they don’t get the formula stuff drilled into them,” he told me as he scanned the morning paper in Miami Beach. “I’m an old fart. If you don’t learn how to write an eight-car fatal on Route 128, you’re gonna be in big trouble.”

About ten years ago, Mears’ house in Washington burned down. His wife and children died in the fire. As therapy, Mears began to put in slavish eighteen-hour days for the AP. In a job where sheer industry counts above all else, Mears worked harder than any other two reporters, and he got to the top.

“At what he does, Mears is the best in the goddam world,” said a colleague who writes very non-AP features. “He can get out a coherent story with the right point on top in a minute and thirty seconds, left-handed. It’s like a parlor trick, but that’s what he wants to do and he does it. In the end, Walter Mears can only be tested on one thing, and that is whether he has the right lead. He almost always does. He watches some goddam event for a half hour and he understands the most important thing that happened—that happened in public, I mean. He’s just like a TV camera, he doesn’t see things any special way. But he’s probably one of the most influential political reporters in the world, just because his stuff reaches more people than anyone else’s.”

Mears’ way with a lead made him a leader of the pack. Covering
the second California debate between McGovern and Humphrey on May 30, Mears worked with about thirty other reporters in a large, warehouse-like press room that NBC had furnished with tables, typewriters, paper and phones. The debate was broadcast live from an adjacent studio, where most of the press watched it. For the reporters who didn’t have to file immediately, it was something of a social event. But Mears sat tensely in the front of the press room, puffing at a Tiparillo and staring up at a gigantic monitor like a man waiting for a horse race to begin. As soon as the program started, he began typing like a madman, “taking transcript” in shorthand form and inserting descriptive phrases every four or five lines:
HUMPHREY STARTED IN A LOW KEY
, or
McGOV LOOKS A BIT STRAINED
.

The entire room was erupting with clattering typewriters, but Mears stood out as the resident dervish. His cigar slowed him down, so he threw it away. It was hot, but he had no time to take off his blue jacket. After the first three minutes, he turned to the phone at his elbow and called the AP bureau in L.A. “He’s phoning in a lead based on the first statements so they can send out a bulletin,” explained Carl Leubsdorf, the No.2 AP man, who was sitting behind Mears and taking back-up notes. After a minute on the phone Mears went back to typing and didn’t stop for a solid hour. At the end of the debate he jumped up, picked up the phone, looked hard at Leubsdorf, and mumbled, “How can they stop? They didn’t come to a lead yet.”

Two other reporters, one from New York, another from Chicago, headed toward Mears shouting, “Lead? Lead?” Marty Nolan came at him from another direction. “Walter, Walter, what’s our lead?” he said.

Mears was wildly scanning his transcript. “I did a Wallace lead the first time,” he said. (McGovern and Humphrey had agreed near the start of the show that neither of them would accept George Wallace as a Vice President.) “I’ll have to do it again.” There were solid, technical reasons for Mears’ computer-speed decision to go with the Wallace lead: it meant he could
get both Humphrey and McGovern into the first paragraph, both stating a position that they hadn’t flatly declared before then. But nobody asked for explanations.

“Yeah,” said Nolan, turning back to his Royal. “Wallace. I guess that’s it.”

Meanwhile, in an adjacent building,
The New York Times
team had been working around a long oak desk in an NBC conference room. The
Times
had an editor from the Washington Bureau, Robert Phelps, and three rotating reporters watching the debate in the conference room and writing the story; a secretary phoned it in from an office down the hall. The
Times
team filed a lead saying that Humphrey had apologized for having called McGovern a “fool” earlier in the campaign. Soon after they filed the story, an editor phoned from New York. The AP had gone with a Wallace lead, he said. Why hadn’t they?

Marty Nolan eventually decided against the Wallace lead, but NBC and CBS went with it on their news shows. So did many of the men in the room. They wanted to avoid “call-backs”—phone calls from their editors asking them why they had deviated from the AP or UPI. If the editors were going to run a story that differed from the story in the nation’s 1,700 other newspapers, they wanted a good reason for it. Most reporters dreaded call-backs. Thus the pack followed the wire-service men whenever possible. Nobody made a secret of running with the wires; it was an accepted practice. At an event later in the campaign, a New York
Daily News
reporter looked over the shoulder of Norm Kempster, a UPI man, and read his copy.

“Stick with that lead, Norm,” said the man from the
News
. “You’ll save us a lot of trouble.”

“Don’t worry,” said Norm. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble from mine.”

At Bixby Park, Walter Cronkite showed up and rode on the press bus to Fullerton Junior College. Most of the reporters were quite dazzled and wanted to know why Cronkite was around. “He wants to be one of the guys and to get a feel for something outside Moscow,” Connie Chung explained. Fred Dutton, Gary Hart and Bill Dougherty of the McGovern staff had joined the bus too. They were singing football songs and hymns in the back seats. In fact, things were getting chummy as hell. Shirley MacLaine was sitting in Marty Nolan’s lap. Gary Hart was cracking up with the men from
The New York Times
and
Newsweek
. Bill Dougherty was chatting with David Schoumacher of CBS.

“I’d like to lock up the candidate,” Dougherty confided.

“Like to take the vote right now, huh?” said Schoumacher.

Fullerton Junior College looked like a large complex of parking garages. The sweltering gym was packed with kids who treated McGovern as if he were Bobby Kennedy. The cameramen surrounded McGovern as he fought his way to the platform and the kids tried to push through the cameramen. The heat and commotion energized reporters as they squatted around the platform. When McGovern began to speak, they made frantic notes, although he said nothing new. Gradually they wound down.

“If there is one lesson it is …” said McGovern.

Carl Leubsdorf put up his finger. “I know what it is,” he said to Elizabeth Drew of PBS. “Never again.”

“It is that never again …” said George.

By the end of the speech no one was taking notes. As deadlines began to loom for the big-city daily reporters, the early afternoon euphoria began to give way to grumpy sobriety. Walter Cronkite went back to Los Angeles because his back was bothering him and he needed to rest. The rest of the press flew to Oakland.

The schedule began to go to hell. Instead of going to San Francisco, the bus took the press to an airport hotel called the Oakland Inn, where McGovern was going to have a hastily scheduled press conference with some black ministers. The press went to a small function room in the motel that had phony wood paneling on the walls and gold vinyl chairs. While reporters began to munch at the Danish lying on a small table at the rear, or worked at the five typewriters on a large table pushed up against a side wall, the cameramen set up in the front. Soon there was an outcry from the print press. “Do
you
want to go to a press conference where we stand behind the cameras?” James Doyle of the Washington
Star
asked Adam Clymer of the Baltimore
Sun
.

Doyle found Kirby Jones, McGovern’s press secretary, and chewed him out. Jones made some excuses.

“Yeah,” said Doyle, “but you’re
never
organized at these press conferences.”

Jones shrugged and walked away.

The press had to sit behind the cameras for the press conference, which was short and dull. As the reporters were getting up to stretch, Kirby Jones and Gordon Weil, another McGovern aide, began to pass the word that the Field Poll results were out: McGovern was twenty points ahead.

It was the only hard news of the day. Harry Kelly of Hearst, Steve Gerstel of UPI, and James Doyle all headed for the typewriters and began to hunt-and-peck. Pye Chamberlyne, Curt
Wilkie, and about twenty other reporters headed for the four pay phones in the hall outside the function room. People were getting testy. Carl Leubsdorf of the AP leaned over Jim Doyle’s shoulder, took a good look at Doyle’s lead and then asked, “Hey, can I see?”

Doyle looked up and registered what was happening. “Jesus, no!” he exploded. “Fuck you! Get outa here!”

A few moments later Steve Gerstel sauntered over to Doyle and said, “Let me see your lead, Jim.”

“You might as well,” Doyle said unhappily. “The AP just catched it.”

Leubsdorf walked by again on his way to the phones and patted Doyle on the back. “I like it,” he said, and chuckled.

An hour went by, and everybody got a chance to file on the Field Poll. The scene began to look like a bad cocktail party. Haynes Johnson of the Washington
Post
, Elizabeth Drew of PBS, and Jules Witcover of the Los Angeles
Times
were doing Humphrey imitations. Kirby Jones was trying to get nine people to go in the helicopter to San Jose as “pool” reporters—that is, to write a report for all the reporters who could not fit in the chopper. The San Jose rally promised to be McGovern’s major lunge for the Bobby Kennedy Chicano constituency, but no one wanted to go. San Francisco lay ahead, and it was a great restaurant town. Finally Jim Naughton, Marty Nolan, and a couple of camera crews signed up.

At 7:00, Kirby Jones announced another press conference—McGovern would read a statement on Nixon’s Moscow trip. At 7:30, Jones announced that
he
would read the statement. There was a general groan. Kirby launched into a predictable text. “Stop the presses,” said Haynes Johnson, shutting his notebook.

The campaign day was drawing to a dreary close. Had all the events taken place in a single room, the reporters would have been climbing the walls with boredom by mid-afternoon. It was the bus rides and plane flights, the sense that a small army was being efficiently deployed, that had given the day its pace, variety, and excitement. Yet the reporters seldom wrote about
this traveling around, which was so important in forming their gut feelings about the campaign. The day had yielded its one easy story: McGovern was leading Humphrey by twenty points in the Field Poll. This statistic sounded somehow
right
to the reporters, for it jibed with their half-digested notion that the McGovern campaign was a juggernaut about to flatten Hubert Humphrey. And where had this notion come from? “They partly got it from the slickness of the McGovern press operation,” said a reporter who was covering Humphrey in California. “When a reporter got to his room at night his bag was there. When he called the pressroom, he didn’t get a yo-yo saying there was nobody there. He got handouts telling him where the candidate was going to be the next morning and who he could interview at 2
A
.
M
. if he needed to get a fast quote. And so pretty soon the reporter started saying to himself, half-consciously, ‘If the press operation is this good, they must have a helluva voter registration operation!’ The press didn’t create the McGovern juggernaut, but they sure as hell
helped
create it.”