The Boys on the Bus (50 page)

When the plane finally landed in Sioux Falls, at 1:30 in the morning, there was a high school band playing and a crowd that had waited since 9:30 to see McGovern. He spoke briefly. More staffers broke down as they listened to him thank his fellow South Dakotans for their “love and devotion.” It was 37 degrees. Geider stood shivering at the front of the crowd with a flimsy United Airlines blanket pulled around his shoulders for warmth. Other reporters came up to him, raised their hands, and said “How!” When the speech was over, Greider walked slowly to the bus and sat down in the front. Earlier in the evening, at Long Beach, he had been in a sarcastic mood. “McGovern said that voting was a sacrament,” he had said. “You know what comes after the sacrament? The cross and nails, boy!” He had tried to write an article on the plane, but was too tired to finish it. Now he sat in the cold bus, grey with fatigue, his eyes watering.

“Anything exciting happen on the Zoo?” he asked after a long silence. “You get laid?”

“Nothing happened.”

Greider was silent. He started fiddling with the buttons of his Sony, trying to find a certain passage on the tape. Finally he located it and pushed the play button. “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic” came squawking out of the speaker as we had just heard it played by the Sioux Falls High School Band. Greider closed his eyes and soaked it in. When it was over, he flicked off the Sony and sat in silence for the rest of the ride, looking as if he had just lost his best friend.

The next morning, half of the press slept while the other half rose at 8:30 to take the hour-long bus ride to Mitchell, McGovern’s hometown, and watch the Senator vote. After handing his ballot to a grey-haired lady in the basement of a parish hall, McGovern went to shake the hands of the citizens who had gathered along Mitchell’s main street. Adam Clymer and several other reporters bought cowboy hats. Dean Fischer spotted Gordon Weil and asked him, “What did McGovern have for breakfast?”

“Danish, milk,” said Weil.

“Juice?”

“No, I didn’t see any juice.”

Not for nothing was Fischer a golden boy at
Time
.

At lunch, Bill Greider, Doug Kneeland, and several other regulars agreed that McGovern could not lose by much more than ten points. By seven o’clock, they knew that they were wrong. The reporters got the news from the three televisions set up at the front of the pressroom in the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn. It was like every other pressroom of the campaign—long rectangular tables loaded down with office typewriters and telephones. The reporters walked around with hands in pockets, fetching beers from a large cooler, and helping themselves to coldcuts. Nobody could feel any emotion. Mary McGrory sat at a typewriter, calm, smiling, but still obsessed with her Hamtramck story; she kept asking whether anyone had heard the returns from Michigan.

The Englishman who had expected to write the story of the
century stared into his beer bottle. “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it.”

Everyone commented on the general numbness. “It’s like a bad homecoming, where nothing happens,” said Tom Oliphant. “You drink about eighty drinks and you can’t get drunk and all you get is bad breath.”

“It’s like jumping into a cold pool of water so that your balls shrivel up,” said Stout, who was wandering around in rumpled blue pants and a blue shirt. Later in the evening, he put it another way. “For two years,” he said, “I circled the country looking for it. I looked for it in Hackensack, New Jersey, but did not find it there. I did not find it in Hogan, West Virginia, nor even in Kennebunkport, Maine. But I finally found it in a little Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”

“Found what?”

Stout cupped his hands and looked at them as if he were holding the object of his search.

“The perfect pile of shit,” he said.

Greider was pacing the room, looking ineffably sad. He had stayed up all night finishing the piece he started in Long Beach. He had slept for most of the day. The rest had done him little good. He was neat on the surface, having shaved and combed his hair, but the dark rings remained under his eyes. He was talking, almost reminiscing, about how much he liked John Holum, one of McGovern’s aides. “Holum was going to the Pentagon, you know, as a Deputy Secretary of Defense,” he said. “Just think about it. The generals would come to the White House to see George, and George would say, ‘That’s all right, gentlemen, I’d like you to see Mr. Holum at the Pentagon.’ And Holum would listen to the generals and nod in that quiet way of his and say, ‘No.’ And then he would write down a number on a piece of paper and say, ‘That’s what you get.’

“Now it’s just sodden,” said Greider. “Now nothing will happen in this country for another four years. And that’s very bad.”

Some of the reporters had started to file, but without much enthusiasm. There was little demand for news out of Sioux Falls.
Greider and I put on our coats and started to walk the four blocks to a dingy auditorium called the Coliseum to watch McGovern concede. As we walked past pizza parlors and third-class hotels, Greider mused about what would happen when he phoned the
Post
.

“I’ll call the desk and say, ‘Do you want anything on the speech?’ and they’ll say, ‘No, we got it from the networks.’

“Then I’ll say, ‘Do you want to know how it feels?’ And they’ll say, ‘Naw, that’s all right.’

“And I’ll say, ‘Well, how about a piece on the disillusioned McGovern kids?’ And they’ll say, ‘Naw, we don’t need it.’ ”

I lost Greider at the Coliseum but ran into him later back at the pressroom. He was shouting at the TV sets. Richard Nixon was on all three networks, addressing the nation from the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House. “Peace with honor!” Greider yelled. “Right on, Abe! You tell ’em.” There were whistles and catcalls from the other reporters.

Turning to me, Greider shook his head and said, “You remember what I said they’d say on the desk? Exactly what happened. Almost word for word. They said, ‘Well, how are things going out there?’ but you knew it was one of those questions where they didn’t really mean it.”

Adam Clymer was still showing off the cowboy hat he had bought that morning. “Big-time Washington correspondents need hats for their press cards!” he said for the fifteenth time.

Meanwhile, Jim Naughton was walking back from the Coliseum with Carol Friedenberg, the press aide. They spotted a despondent bunch of kids coming down the street, stopping every twenty feet or so to chant: “Awwwwwwwwww,
shit!
” Naughton and Friedenberg took up the chant themselves. They found it made them feel better.

Nobody wanted to stay in Sioux Falls any longer than necessary.
The planes were ready to take off from the town’s tiny airport by midmorning of November 8. The Dakota Queen II was full of men who were trying to figure out what had happened; they were going to have to write articles explaining how George McGovern had got buried by a landslide. All the reporters were trying to trace the roots of the disaster, testing theories on each other. It was the Eagleton thing. No, the trouble started back in California when Humphrey cut him up. Well, actually it was more that the press had started to examine him seriously just as he started to make terrible mistakes. They were all searching for a key incident that symbolized the whole campaign. One reporter would try out an incident on a colleague and then say, “That sums it up, doesn’t it.” The phrase spread through the plane like an epidemic of hiccups.

George McGovern and his wife came aboard at the last moment, entering through the tail section. The reporters stood up and gave him a warm ovation. McGovern slowly began to move up the aisle. He gave each reporter a smile and a good, firm handshake.

“Hello, Bill. Hello, Doug.”

“Congratulations, Senator,” said Kneeland. “You made a great speech last night.”

Some of the reporters exchanged glances. They could not believe McGovern’s composure, and they were deeply moved by his personal farewells. He let his distraction show only once, when he asked David Murray, “You flying with us all the way back to Washington?” Murray’s only alternative would have been to bail out.

After takeoff, Frank Mankiewicz came back with the telegram that Richard Nixon had sent McGovern. The Nixongram was very short. “You and Mrs. McGovern have our very best wishes for a well deserved rest after what I know must have been a very strenuous and tiring campaign,” it read.

Mankiewicz smiled and dragged on a Kool. “It’s worded with the felicity that has characterized the Administration,” he told a bunch of reporters who had gathered around him. “It’s a
perfect example of gracelessness without pressure. Nixon does better for a losing manager in a playoff.”

The reporters and staffers had begun to mill around in the aisles. I was sitting next to Stout when a staffer wandered by and began to make a long, lachrymose farewell speech.

“Don’t do the funeral bit, Bill,” Stout said gently. The staffer nodded, shook hands, and moved on to do the funeral bit elsewhere.

Then Doug Kneeland came by, and I immediately braced for an argument. For the last week and a half, Kneeland had been needling me about an article I had written about the campaign press for
Rolling Stone
. The article was full of cheap shots, he said; it was a snide hatchet job which imputed all kinds of low motives to men who were actually decent, honest and hard working. I tried to argue with him, but he always brought up the same old litany of accusations, and one evening the debate had exploded into a shouting match in the middle of the press bus. After that, I carefully avoided Kneeland, which was not easy to do in a crowded campaign plane. Now here he was again, but mellowed, like everyone else on the plane, and seeking to instruct rather than provoke. Wearing a wilted turtleneck, his face sagging with fatigue, he looked as if he had spent a very bad night.

“You think these guys don’t care,” Kneeland started in. “You think they’re here because of ambition or personal selfishness or something like that. What you don’t see is that they want to change things. They’re idealists, romantics.”

“I’m not sure that’s why I do this,” said Stout, staring into the Bloody Mary he was nursing. “I just wanted to see life. This was the best way I could do it with my limitations.”

Kneeland acknowledged Stout’s dissenting voice and then began to fill in his portrait of the reporter as romantic. Reporters were the kind of guys who cried at movies, he said. He himself had shed tears over animal books as a child and had even wept at
Love Story
. The reporters might not give a damn about the Democratic Party, but they cared about the people
on the campaign who had devoted themselves to McGovern, like Polly Hackett and Carol Friedenberg.

“I cried on Monday,” Stout admitted. “Sitting in that goddam bus in Philadelphia, watching those girls go through their little duties even though they knew the thing was a disaster, knew it was falling apart. Well, I didn’t exactly cry, but I did feel my eyes brimming.”

“A lot of guys were torn up last night,” said Kneeland. “Naughton was torn up. They’d all worked so goddam hard trying to be fair, doing a lot of things they didn’t want to do. I had to write that ‘Man in the News’ piece in case McGovern won. You think I wanted to do that?

“Every two-bit columnist from every two-bit paper that was on this plane for two days took a cheap shot at McGovern,” Kneeland continued. “They’d come on and write a funny story about how the campaign was fucked up. Well, I could have written funny stories, too. I got goddam sick of doing those little daily pieces. It’s a helluva lot more fun to be amusing, but I didn’t let myself do it and neither did most of the other guys.

“You see, we’re idealists,” Kneeland went on in his vinegar New England accent. “McGovern invited us to be harsh on McGovern so we were. He invited us to hold him up to his own standards, and we’ve held him up to them and then some.”

What irked Kneeland more than anything was that no one had held Richard Nixon up to the same standards. Taking comfort from the belief that they were merely following the “rules of objectivity,” the White House correspondents had failed to make Nixon account for the actions of his Administration. Meanwhile, the McGovern reporters had adhered to the same rules of objectivity out of a genuine conviction that they must remain “fair”; they had refused to use advocacy journalism in McGovern’s behalf. “We played the game by street-fighting rules,” said Kneeland. “You don’t kick a guy in the nuts or stick your finger in his eye, even if it means you lose. And the White House people know you won’t. They knew that we played by the rules and they took advantage of that. But what can we do? We can’t help playing fair, that’s just the way we are.”

Kneeland would have gone on, but just then George McGovern’s voice came on the PA system. McGovern said that he wanted to express his “very great affection and appreciation.”

“There are moments we’re never going to forget,” McGovern continued, “and I promise never to say to anyone on this plane what I said to that friend along the fence in Battle Creek, Michigan. In fact, what we extend to all of you is the kiss of brotherhood, and goodbye until we meet again.”

“Class,” said Kneeland. “That is one of the classiest men I have ever known.”

A few minutes later, the two planes taxied up to a huge, empty Coast Guard hangar in a disused corner of National Airport. The reporters spilled out of the planes and stood on the tarmac, their hair blown about by violent gusts of wind. Suddenly everybody realized that it was all over, and their emotions flooded out. They wept, embraced, exchanged manful handshakes, cried on each other’s shoulders, or simply stood in a daze. It was like an orphanage being shut down. Then George McGovern appeared at the top of the ramp and drew them together for the last time. “I don’t think I lost anything yesterday except some votes we would have liked to have had,” McGovern said into the forest of Sonys and notebooks. “The cause is just as bright …”

Then the group broke up for the last time. The reporters stood in little groups around their luggage, looking shipwrecked, waiting to be picked up by their wives. The cause was not just as bright for them. The man who had brought them together, made them the most unlikely of friends, given them common gripes and jokes, given them, in fact, everything that they held in common, had just driven off into political oblivion in a black Cadillac. It would be a good while before any of them would again discover the same irresistible combination of camaraderie, hardship, and luxury. They now had to go back to paying the dues which would earn them another campaign in 1976.