The Boys on the Bus (5 page)

On June 1, a normal campaign day, the reporters had gained no fresh insights into George McGovern; they had not gone out of their way to look for any. They had not tried to find out whether the large sums of money that were suddenly pouring into the campaign coffers had changed the candidate; or whether the prospect of the nomination, now so close at hand, was tempting him to bend on some of his more controversial stands; whether, as some of his detractors charged, he had a ruthless streak to match Bobby Kennedy’s. “We spent tons of ink on that guy,” one of the reporters later lamented, “and I’d be willing to bet that on the night he got the nomination we hadn’t told anybody in the United States who the hell we were talking about, what kind of man he was.”

For the men following the primary campaigns in 1972, and later the general election campaigns, such as they were, campaigning was no longer the easy ride it had once been. Campaign coverage began to settle into a neat and comfortable science around the time of Theodore Roosevelt, the first big-time American politician to rationalize the handing out of news. Stepping into the White House over McKinley’s dead body, Roosevelt had given the Washington correspondents a White House pressroom for the first time; installed phones for them; held occasional news conferences in the Oval Office while his barber gave him a late afternoon shave; frequently leaked items to his favorite reporters; and had given out what were the first primitive campaign press schedules.

“He made our work tons lighter,” wrote a beholden reporter aboard Teddy’s campaign train in 1904. “Whenever he returned to the car after a speech he would round us up and say, ‘Now, the next stop will be Blankville. You don’t have to bother about that; I’m going to get off the usual thing.’ Or, ‘At Dashtown, where we stop next, you’d better be on the job. I’ll have some new stuff there.’ Sometimes he would even tell us in the rough what the new stuff was to be … In this way he not only saved us useless physical and mental work, but economized our time and systematized our schedules. It also aided the editors at home to plan out their work without uncertainty …”

From Teddy Roosevelt’s time until 1956, when Stevenson began taking large jumps around the country by airplane, candidates campaigned by train. For fifty years, the routine hardly changed. In the post-Depression era, the thirty or forty reporters would pile out at each whistle stop, wearing fedoras, carrying notebooks and pencils, and when the high school band had blared its last sour note, and the candidate had stepped out onto the rear platform, they would stand on the tracks making notes and counting the crowd. When the speech was done, the train’s whistle would blow, and the reporters would clamber back into their fetid press car—the aroma was a compound of cigar smoke, whiskey and the stench of men who had not bathed for five or six days. The smell sometimes became so rank that porters burned incense in the Pullmans.

The press car was a Pullman car whose seats had been ripped out and replaced with two boards which ran the length of the car on either side. The men sat at these long tables, looking out at the passing countryside, and wrote their stories on bulky typewriters. The stories contained three simple elements: what the candidate had said, the size of the crowd, and the weather. (In their Sunday stories, the men would usually try to assess the candidate’s chances, or report what hastily interviewed local politicians thought of the candidate’s chances.) Then they would give the stories to the Western Union man. He would tie the stories up in a bundle and toss them off at the next small
station, whence the telegrapher would transmit them to the reporters’ home offices. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Merriman Smith of the UPI, anxious to file a story before coming to the next station, tied pillows around his number-two man and tossed him off a moving train.

After filing, they would repair to the dining car for lunch or dinner—Rocky Ford melon and fresh mountain trout if they had just passed through Denver, and Dungeness crab if they had made a stop in San Francisco. Traveling on Presidential trains, they ate with the Secret Service men, and since these Secret Service men were husky fellows and had a food allowance of only six dollars a day, the reporters would often treat them to sirloin steak.

As for the candidate, he was usually accessible for news conferences or informal chats throughout the trip. Truman even played poker with the boys; one of them, Joe Short of the Baltimore
Sun
, lost four hundred dollars to the President in one afternoon and had to make it up by padding his expense account for the next few months. “We liked Harry Truman very much,” an old timer, Edward T. Folliard, recalled, twenty-four years later. “Of course we felt sorry for him. Poor son of a bitch. We knew he was going to lose.”

“It was all very friendly and romantic,” said Folliard. Once the Washington
Post
’s chief campaign reporter, he was now seventy-four and lived in retirement in suburban Washington. A tall, skinny man with black hair and the face of a Norman Rockwell farmer, he covered his first campaign when he was twenty-eight—the Herbert Hoover–Al Smith contest of 1928.

Folliard remembered his colleagues as hard-working men who wrote objective, unbiased stories. “I think 95 percent of the men wrote what they heard and saw and damn little what they thought,” he said. “They left that to the editorial writers.” Folliard was proud of that objectivity. Yet other observers had a different view of that era of campaign reporting. They saw the reporters of the thirties, forties and fifties as poorly educated men, drawn from the ranks of police reporters and sportswriters,
who had neither the intellectual curiosity nor equipment to dig below the shimmering surface of the campaign.

In 1937, Leo C. Rosten did a scholarly survey of the 127 main Washington correspondents and found that only half of them had finished college. Eight did not have a high school diploma and two had no high school education at all. Rosten concluded that “men without a ‘frame of reference’ and with an uncontrolled impressionistic (rather than analytic) approach to issues are driven to a surface interpretation of events.”

But most of these men were not overly worried by the fact that they lacked a diploma. Some simply sent home the kind of news which they knew would please their publishers. The rest were secure in the knowledge that they were not paid to think, analyze, or judge. With few exceptions, these reporters were interchangeable drones who wrote the same simple formula stories day after day.

When these men began to retire, in the fifties, they were replaced by a new generation of young reporters who had gone to college and were asking different kinds of questions. In those days the younger men wrote the same formulaic stories, but at the same time, they were more comfortable with theories and concepts, and more anxious to analyze the political process and report on how it worked.

Their dominance of the profession was sealed with the rise and election of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy played on the values he shared with these young reporters in order to engage their loyalty. He knew many of them socially, and he was careful to treat them with respect and affection. His Harvard-trained advisers spoke in an academic, sophisticated idiom that excluded many of the older reporters but appealed to the new generation. Because they were so obviously in tune with the youthful, “intellectual” atmosphere of the New Frontier, the young reporters who had covered Kennedy’s campaign in 1960, and now covered him in office, found their stock soaring. It was no coincidence that many of them—reporters like David Broder, Ben Bradlee, Bob Novak, Rowland Evans, Mary McGrory, and Russell Baker—would become leading journalists in the sixties and seventies, and would help to change the techniques of campaign reporting.

But in 1960, campaign coverage had changed very little from what it had been in the 1920’s. Planes replaced trains, and the networks made their first all-out attempt to cover an election, but most of the reporting remained superficial, formulaic, and dull. Newspapers approached campaign coverage as a civic duty, like reporting sermons and testimonials to retiring fire chiefs.

The most devastating comment on the political coverage of the time was the reception that greeted Theodore White’s book,
The Making of the President 1960
. The book struck most readers as a total revelation—it was as if they had never before read anything, anywhere, that told them what a political campaign was about. They had some idea that a campaign consisted of a series of arcane deals and dull speeches, and suddenly White came along with a book that laid out the campaign as a wide-screen thriller with full-blooded heroes and white-knuckle suspense on every page. The book hit the number-one spot on the best-seller lists six weeks after publication and stayed there for exactly a year.

White had started covering American politics in 1953 for The
Reporter
, after fifteen years in Europe and Asia as a
Time
correspondent. Two years later, he signed on with
Collier’s
as the magazine’s national political correspondent and began covering his first Presidential campaign. The press entourage in the first primary consisted of White and an AP man riding around New Hampshire with Estes Kefauver. There were occasional interloping visits from a
Times
man or a CBS crew out on a day trip, but in 1956 primaries were considered minor, local events, too inconsequential to rate extensive national coverage. All spring, White had the candidates almost entirely to himself, and he took advantage of the opportunity to build up good relationships with Kefauver, Harriman, and Stevenson as they passed through the primaries and the convention.