The Boys on the Bus (45 page)

That night, however, the Western Union Telex in the Hi Ho pressroom began to erupt. Since the pressroom Telex was the only such machine for miles around, it received all telegrams addressed to Senator George McGovern. So the reporters were able to take an instant reading of the public reaction simply by sitting around the clattering Telex and reading each wire as it appeared. The telegrams overwhelmingly damned Eagleton. “Listen to this one,” a reporter would say. “
DO YOU WANT NUT FOR VICE PRESIDENT
.
DROP EAGLETON
.” McGovern’s two young press aides, Carol Friedenberg and Polly Hackett, would look at their nails and pretend not to hear.

Earlier that day, just after the press conference, Carl Leubsdorf had seen Tom Ottenad of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
going into McGovern’s cabin for a chat with the Senator. Ottenad was about to join Eagleton in California, and since he represented the biggest paper in Eagleton’s home state, McGovern had granted him an interview. When Ottenad and McGovern came out of the cabin and drove off, Leubsdorf followed them to their destination, which turned out to be the tennis courts. Leubsdorf walked over to McGovern and asked whether he could ride back from the courts with him. McGovern said yes. That was his first mistake. But it was typical of McGovern. “You know how he was,” Leubsdorf later told me. “If he saw a reporter he knew, and the reporter asked him a question, he’d go right ahead and answer it.”

While McGovern played tennis, Leubsdorf sped down the hill to get his tape recorder at the Hi Ho. He found that it was in use. Gregg Herrington, the young AP backup man, was playing a cassette of the press conference for a group of reporters in the pressroom. Leubsdorf couldn’t announce that he was about to grab McGovern for an exclusive interview, so he made up a little story in the best
Front Page
tradition. He said that he needed the tape recorder back so that the McGovern people at Sylvan Lake could make a transcript of the press conference. Then he drove back up the hill to meet McGovern.

During the ride from the tennis courts to McGovern’s cabin, which took place in a violent hailstorm, Leubsdorf asked the Senator what he thought the public reaction to the Eagleton disclosures was going to be. “We’ll have to wait and see,” said McGovern. So Leubsdorf wrote a “roundup” piece for the next day’s afternoon papers, saying that McGovern was keeping Eagleton and was going to “wait and see” about the public reaction.

The next morning, when word of Leubsdorf’s story hit Custer, two groups of people immediately freaked out. First, the press blew up at Dougherty. As usual, Adam Clymer screamed the loudest. “This place is becoming a jungle,” he said. The
others chorused him. They wanted no more exclusives. Either everybody saw McGovern or nobody saw him.

Meanwhile, some people on McGovern’s staff—it has never been determined which people—became very upset over Leubsdorf’s story. They thought it implied that McGovern was wavering in his support of Tom Eagleton. Leubsdorf claimed that the story did not imply this at all, that it merely reported McGovern’s flat statement that he was going to “wait and see” the public’s reaction. Nevertheless, late on Wednesday morning, Dougherty telephoned Carol Friedenberg in the pressroom and dictated a statement from McGovern. She typed it and taped it to the door of the pressroom. It summarized the Leubsdorf story, called it “utterly untrue,” and then said that George McGovern was “1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton.” No one has ever determined whether the statement was written by McGovern or whether some staffer wrote it and McGovern merely approved it. McGovern never said the words in person in front of a press conference, and it later seemed odd that he should have made such a statement at a time when newspaper editorials and party opinion were damning Eagleton and when McGovern clearly
was
wavering in his support of his running mate. Perhaps somebody on the staff panicked in the face of a press mutiny and decided to placate the angry reporters with a perfect nugget of a quote.

Soon after the “1,000 percent” statement appeared on the door of the pressroom, Carl Leubsdorf underlined certain sentences and wrote in the margin, “Not correct. AP story did not say that.” By that time, however, the debate over whether the AP story had really portrayed McGovern as backing away from Eagleton was entirely academic. What mattered was that McGovern had furnished the reporters with a perfect spot story—before evening every reporter in the Hi Ho had seen the statement and filed on it. And in trying to deny a relatively harmless wire story, McGovern had branded himself with one of those little catch-phrases that voters never forget. Richard Nixon, with his hard-won knowledge of the media, would
doubtless have known better than to stand 1,000 percent behind
anything
in the middle of a hot public controversy. But McGovern apparently did not.

What made McGovern’s statement doubly incredible was that two days later, on Friday, he decided to dump Eagleton. And he chose to use the press to send Eagleton the bad news. McGovern’s first step was to try to plant a not-for-attribution story with Jules Witcover to the effect that Eagleton was going to get the ax; McGovern evidently hoped that Eagleton would read the story in the Los Angeles
Times
, take the hint, and resign from the ticket.

On Friday afternoon, Dick Stout of
Newsweek
and Dean Fischer of
Time
were sitting in the pressroom when one of the telephones rang. Carol Friedenberg, a young red-headed press aide answered the phone, said “Yes, Senator, I’ll see if I can find him,” and ran out of the room. A minute later, Jules Witcover dashed into the room, out of breath, and picked up the phone.

“Yeah, Senator … I’m fine,” said Witcover. “Sure … When?… six? Sure, Senator … goodbye.”

When Witcover hung up, Stout went over to him and asked, “What are you going to do, Jules? Why are you going up to see the Senator? And six o’clock on what day?”

“Oh, uh, today,” Witcover said nonchalantly.

“Well,
why?
” asked Stout.

“I don’t know really,” said Witcover. “He just wants to talk. Has something to do with the last chapter in my Agnew book. We’ve talked about it before.”

“Well, what’s the last chapter? I don’t remember it,” said Stout, who hadn’t read the book.

“Well,” Witcover hesitated. “It’s about the importance of the whole process of selecting the Vice President.”

Stout and Fischer immediately set up an appointment to see Witcover after the interview. It was deadline night for both of them; neither wanted the other to get a newsbeat. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight,” Fischer said to Stout, a little apologetically. That evening they ate together at the Sylvan
Lake Lodge. It was the beginning of a strange, symbiotic friendship. The two had close to nothing in common. Fischer, a tall blond, who with his horn-rimmed glasses bore a slight resemblance to the actor Michael Caine, was a silent man who occasionally flashed the tight, cryptic smile of a hatchet murderer; he seemed the complete opposite of the voluble Stout. But their jobs were sufficiently similar to make them professional twins. Without saying anything, each knew all about the other’s work life. They often ate together and rode together on the bus, and every Saturday, when no more copy could be filed, they compared notes.

They were not alone at the lodge that night. Dougherty had tipped Doug Kneeland and some of the other reporters that the Senator might come out of his two-day seclusion to have a buffalo steak in the Lakota Room. Bill Greider was there, too. Having just finished an article based on the fact that McGovern had stopped seeing the press, Greider had a premonition that McGovern would show up and ruin the piece. Adam Clymer was back at the Hi Ho waiting to cook a trout dinner for Kneeland and Greider, who had forgotten all about the date.

McGovern did dine in the Lakota Room that night. He sat at one table with his family, while the press sat at various other tables around the room. An organist played big hits of the forties. Everybody devoured buffalo steaks under a mural depicting “The Legend of the White Buffalo.”

When McGovern finished his meal, he walked over and sat down with Greider, Bill Eaton of the Chicago
Daily News
, and a UPI man. Greider thought: “Well, gee, this is decent enough, the guy is just trying to do a little farewell number and make a little social chatter, and to let bygones be bygones.” The reporters at the table were itching to broach the Eagleton matter, but no one wanted to spoil McGovern’s evening. Then McGovern suddenly brought up the subject himself. He started talking about how a decision would have to be made, and it would be up to Eagleton to withdraw if public opinion ran against him. And McGovern’s tone of voice implied that Eagleton
was dead. “It slowly dawned on us,” Greider remembers, “that we were the ones who were being used.”

McGovern excused himself. “The reporters,” Greider wrote later, “discussed briefly among themselves the question of whether it was proper to quote a casual dinner conversation. Very briefly. Then they took out notepads and began trying to reconstruct what McGovern had said. Ever so casually, they slipped off to the lobby telephones, no point arousing all those other reporters.”

Meanwhile, McGovern went over to Stout and Fischer. They were joined by Doug Kneeland and Bob Boyd of Knight. McGovern repeated his observations on Eagleton, and Stout surreptitiously recorded it all on a tape recorder he was holding in his lap. When McGovern left, the Stout-Fischer group gathered around the tape recorder to try to pick out a few words from the overwhelming organ music. Then they looked around and realized that they weren’t the only ones with the story. Kneeland headed for a phone. The only two in the lobby were being used, so he raced down the hill to the Hi Ho. On the way down he passed Clymer, who was steaming up to the lodge to find out what he had missed.

Later that night, Fischer and Stout cornered Witcover in the pressroom. He showed them the unattributed story he had just finished. “It was learned,” the story said, that McGovern was going to dump Eagleton. Stout and Fischer knew exactly where Witcover had learned it, and they phoned the news to their home offices.

Not that it really mattered what they phoned in—their files made up only a small part of their magazines’ coverage of the Eagleton affair.
Newsweek
’s Washington Bureau chief, Mel Elfin, an old friend of Eagleton’s, flew to California and interviewed him. Eagleton gave Elfin a lengthy, totally self-serving autobiographical monologue, to which
Newsweek
devoted most of its space. Since
Newsweek
had obtained an interview from
Eagleton,
Time
had to get one too. It was equally self-serving. Both magazines appeared on the day Eagleton resigned, July 31, but they helped to pump the public flow of sympathy for him.
^*
The newsmagazines served as Eagleton’s best forum for self-beatification, but not his sole forum. The newspapers gave Eagleton loads of straight coverage, thus allowing him to play the victim and to establish mental health as a red herring issue. The real issue, as
The New York Times
, the Washington
Post
and the Los Angeles
Times
pointed out in editorials, was the difficulty Eagleton had experienced in telling the truth. Eagleton’s great victory over both McGovern and the press consisted in the agility with which he appropriated the hard news columns for his own designs—namely, to portray himself as a martyr for the cause of psychotherapy, a totally cured man who was wrongly suspected of being dangerously sick.

Long after Eagleton was dropped from the ticket, several reporters kept trying to clear up the mysteries of the Eagleton affair. They tried unsuccessfully to reconstruct the phone conversation, held during the Democratic Convention, in which Mankiewicz had asked Eagleton about his possible disabilities. They tried in vain to pry loose Eagleton’s medical records, which were locked in a safe in St. Louis. Bill Greider attempted to follow up a rumor that had Eagleton’s doctors telling McGovern on the phone: Eagleton is a very sick man but he doesn’t know it, so you can’t tell him. But Greider never was able to substantiate this rumor. No reporter effectively counteracted Eagleton’s stunning week of self-promotion by writing a clean, fact-studded profile of the opportunistic, overambitious hack that Tom Eagleton was.

In any case, McGovern did himself no good that night at Sylvan Lake. He succeeded only in making himself look like a
sneak, a man who was trying to get the press to do his dirty work for him. He was hopelessly naïve to believe that Witcover’s story would remain unattributed for more than a couple of hours among such a confined, rivalrous group or that the press would not write about his awkward efforts to slip a big story into an after-dinner chat. Richard Nixon would not have made these mistakes; the least that could be said for Nixon was that he had painfully learned how the press worked. He would have known that while you might hope to plant a story with one reporter at a time, you could not play such a cozy, informal under-the-table game with an entire pack of reporters.