The Boys on the Bus (42 page)

And the process continued. Six months after the election, the Watergate scandal broke open in the courts, and the Washington
Post
found itself magnificently vindicated. Suddenly dozens of editors and reporters from all over the country began calling for more investigative journalism in covering politics and government. The triumphant example of Bernstein and Woodward gave promise of prodding American political journalism into a new era; perhaps, in elections-to-come, reporters would be instructed to investigate candidates instead of merely quoting them.

Even during the campaign year, some of the younger reporters had felt that the changes in political journalism were too few and too superficial, that a full journalistic revolution was called for. Brit Hume, a young assistant of Jack Anderson’s who had helped uncover the ITT scandal, was disgusted with the coverage of the campaign. “You think anyone’s interested in all these polls, or the gruel served up by the guys riding around in the press plane?” he demanded. “Hell, no. It’s just a waste of time. All those reporters care about is ‘Who’s gonna run, who’s gonna win?’ And that just isn’t enough. The press has a greater responsibility than to do a bunch of goddam handicapping stories.

“They ought to do one big story on each candidate’s overall strategy and then bag it. Let the AP cover the candidates and play that stuff on page 7, page 8. Maybe have your best reporter go out and write a highly opinionated story about each guy, and then put him to work on something useful, like the money.”

Hume thought that the real story was the money. Here, in 1972, with the new law that obliged contributors to make public their gifts, was a unique opportunity to follow the big corporate rats as they stole out of their holes to deposit a large bag of cash at the door of some candidate and—almost invariably—ask for some favor in return.

“They ought to just swarm over that money stuff,” said Hume. “Check out every lead. Get pictures of these guys covering their faces with their hands. Quote all the reasons their secretaries give for them not answering your phone calls.

“Like we did a story on this McDonald’s Hamburger king who put up all this money for Nixon because there’s a bill pending which they’re all hot for which will lower the minimum wage for youth. Which is gonna be great for McDonald’s. This guy gave Nixon a thousand dollars in ’68 and 149,000 dollars in ’72. And we think we figured out how he came to be 149 times happier with Nixon.

“There are a lot of stories like that, and the public just loves to read about that stuff. Just loves it. Shit, that’s what Jack does, and he has the single most popular column in America. They ought to have that stuff all over the front page in an election year.

“Those guys on the plane,” said Hume, “claim that they’re trying to be objective. They shouldn’t try to be objective, they should try to be honest. And they’re
not
being honest. Their so-called objectivity is just a guise for superficiality. They report what one candidate said, then they go and report what the other candidate said with equal credibility. They never get around to finding out if the guy is telling the truth. They just pass the speeches along without trying to confirm the substance of what the candidates are saying. What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality.”

Strangely enough, some of the men on the campaign trail might have agreed with Brit Hume. There was a strain of frustration infecting the campaign reporters that nobody could remember having seen in other election years—at least not in such virulent form. Some of the better minds on the plane had begun to feel caged in by the old formulas of classic objective journalism, which dictated that each story had to make some neat point; had to start with a hard news lead based on some phony event that the candidate’s staff had staged; had to begin with the five w’s; had to impose some
meaning
, however superficial or spurious, on the often insignificant, or mysterious, or downright absurd events of the day. Yet if the candidate spouted fulsome bullshit all day, the formula made it hard for a reporter to say so directly—he would have to pretend that
“informed sources” had said so, or actually find someone in the crowd or the opposition who would say so.

A reporter was not allowed to make even the simplest judgments; nor was he expected to verify the candidates’ claims. The classic example came not from a national election, but from the contest for the presidency of the United Mine Workers Union between Tony Boyle and Joseph Yablonski. In that contest, all of the charges made by Yablonski were provably true; at the same time, a resourceful reporter could have shown that many of Boyle’s accusations were lies. Yablonski was an honest reformer; Boyle was a corrupt executive interested only in perpetuating his own rule. But the press insisted on reporting the election as a dispute between two warring factions in the union; using the time-honored techniques of objective journalism, they gave equal weight to each man’s charges. It was objective coverage, but it wasn’t fair. When a gang of hired thugs murdered Yablonski and his family one night, the press suddenly began to hint that the election might have been a contest between forces of good and evil.

One October evening when the McGovern plane had dumped us in Pittsburgh in the course of what was becoming an increasingly haphazard campaign, I had a couple of beers with Jim Doyle at the Hilton. We talked about the fact that many political reporters were beginning to yearn for new freedoms—freedom from the pack, from the routine of the campaign plane, and from the restraints of formula writing. Doyle was a shortish man in his mid-thirties, a dapper dresser who wore a beret and French lunettes on his round, ruddy face. He came from a large Catholic family, and like Marty Nolan, he had grown up among hardhats and conservatives in lower-middle-class Dorchester, but had somehow emerged as a committed liberal.

An outspoken man, he didn’t mind revealing his doubts about the practice of journalism. Doyle thought that the campaign
reporters, especially the national political men, ought to be on a much looser rein.

“I think a guy ought to be able to say something like ‘I’m gonna go into Macon County, Georgia, because I remember that Macon County is more liberal than the rest of the state, and I just want to go in and see if there’s a McGovern organization and what they’re doing,’ ” said Doyle.

“It’s tough deciding what story to pick, because you don’t want to waste your time. But once you go in there, I say that the formulas ought to go out the window. What you ought to do is follow your instincts, follow your training, and then sit down and write as if you were writing a letter to Jules Witcover. Write a letter saying, ‘This is why I came here, this is what I found out’—and then, if you don’t know what it means, I think you ought to say that. I mean, we never write stories in which we say, ‘I don’t know what this means but let me tell you about it.’ We always say, ‘The reason I’m here is because this is the crucial race in the Midwest and it could decide the future of the Senate.’

“And when we write it, we think, ‘That’s bullshit. The one up the hill is just the same.’

“Right now, the big cliché is that this election’s going to decide whether the New Deal coalition dissolves. Well, it may not decide that at all. It may be that the New Deal coalition started evolving the day it was formed and is going to keep on evolving until no one recognizes it, but it’s never gonna dissolve. So to write in those terms just doesn’t make sense. We don’t do enough of saying, ‘We don’t know what this means, but it’s out there and it’s interesting.’

“Look,” said Doyle, “if a reporter knew that he had to say ‘I thought such-and-such’—if he couldn’t hide behind this phony business of ‘informed sources’ and ‘veteran observers’—he’d be goddam careful what he put his name on. He’d be much more worried about being fair and about writing what he really thought.”

Doyle was slouching in an armchair by the picture window
of his bedroom, dead tired from a week on the road. Later that night there would be a McGovern telethon and Democratic party dinner to cover. He took a gulp of beer and looked out the window at the sun setting on the river.

“A lot of people,” he said, “look at this coverage as if it were some kind of a cross-country race—you gotta get two paragraphs in when he stops at Indianapolis and two more when he stops at Newark. If you do it that way, without making any meaning out of it, it
is
going to come out like some crazy disjointed trip across the country.

“The problem is, if you try to write every day, you get caught up in sheer exhaustion. It’s as simple as that. You do it by rote, because that’s all you’ve got the energy for. It’s the lack of sleep, the keeping up with deadlines, the disorientation from all this flying around—your mind just goes blank after a while. When it comes time to write the story, all you can do is just kind of a level job of stumbling through the day’s events.

“I don’t think I know how to cover a campaign. I feel a little bit more confident about it this year. What has to happen is, you have to develop faith in your own judgment. Then you’ve got to develop confidence that your editors will accept your judgment. If you think an editor is back there second-guessing you, then your judgment starts to get watered down and you start to rely on formulas. My impression is that a lot of the guys are getting second-guessed. But you’ve got to know that the paper’s going to back you up—that your by-line’s on the piece and that everybody knows it’s all yours and hasn’t been tampered with, so you’re stuck with it and it has to be good.

“The other thing is that I find it hard not to write, because I’m compulsive. A lot of these guys are. It’s a very hard thing to do—to say, it’s not worth it today, so I won’t file. You always say, ‘But Jesus, Bill Greider’s gonna write today and he’ll be on page one and the editors will think that Greider found a good thing to write today for the
Post
and Doyle didn’t write anything for our paper.’ You always worry about that. But the fact is that we all write too much and we all write with too little in
the piece, with too little to say. So I’m trying to write only when I’ve got something to say that goes beyond the average story.”

A good many of these powerful men began to feel impotent toward the middle of the campaign. The longer they were on the trail, the more exhausted they became; and fatigue made them slaves of the formula, since they lost all will to fight either the desk or their own misgivings. It was fair to argue that the press would become both more interesting and less powerful if given more license. Much of their power stemmed from the fact that they often acted as a pack. Given a chance to ditch the formula, the reporters would produce more complex and ambiguous descriptions of the campaign, and their stories would not sound so similar. If every story took the form of a letter and began, “Damned if I know what’s happening here, but I have a few guesses,” there would be a cacophony of rival voices instead of the usual resounding chorus.

Some of this was already happening. Jim Perry, for instance, wrote weekly pieces for the
National Observer
that approached the letter format. Each week he examined one topic, such as the implications of the Muskie “crying incident” in New Hampshire or the nature of Spiro Agnew’s campaign, and he was original, discursive, and amusing without being partisan. Bill Greider of the
Post
, who covered McGovern throughout the summer and fall, developed an uncanny knack for filling his articles with feeling while still remaining within the bounds of conventional journalism. The
Times
allowed some of its reporters to write an occasional “news analysis”—and James Naughton learned to make excellent use of this device. (Jules Witcover, on the other hand, tried to insert some analysis into his dispatches and found that his paper, the Los Angeles
Times
, was not interested.) Even the wire-service men succeeded in pushing back some of their traditional restraints; the top wire-service men like Mears and Gerstel were allowed to do some cautious analysis.

There were a few reporters who were able to finesse the formula. The best example was Dan Rather, the White House
correspondent for CBS. Rather often adhered to the “informed sources” or “the White House announced today” formulas, but he was famous in the trade for the times when he by-passed these formulas and “winged it” on a story. Rather would go with an item even if he didn’t have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star on CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact, like the three times he had Ellsworth Bunker resigning, the two occasions on which he announced that J. Edgar Hoover would step down, or the time he incorrectly predicted that Nixon was about to veto an education bill. But these were all relatively trivial errors. The important thing was that Rather was making a balls-out effort to deal with a White House staff which refused to release any meaningful information.

In a behemoth democracy, the mass circulation papers would always want to have straight reporters deliver up the political news, and these reporters would always be caught between the demands of objectivity, on the one hand, and the freakish stranger-than-fiction reality of the campaign plane on the other. Of course, there remained the radical solution of simply chucking all pretense of objectivity, and writing from a totally personal frame of reference. This luxury was given only to a few. There were the literary people sent by magazines to cover the Conventions—Germaine Greer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer. “For them,” Renata Adler wrote in
The New Yorker
, “the reporter’s basic question—what is the story and what the point—was resolved autobiographically: story and point were whatever happened to impinge on the author’s sensibility.” There was Bob Greene, the twenty-five-year-old whiz
kid of the Chicago
Sun-Times
, who was dispatched, as a representative of the youth culture, to write his own daily impressions of the Conventions and the fall campaign. There was Ron Rosenbaum, a red-bearded young writer from New York, who did several excellent impressionistic campaign pieces for
The Village Voice
. But the nonobjective journalist who created the greatest sensation, and the only one who covered the campaign full-time from January through November, was Hunter S. Thompson of
Rolling Stone
.