The Boys on the Bus (6 page)

He was flying high on the greatest assignment of his life. The only trouble was that
Collier’s
was going down for the third time. In September, just as the campaign was gearing up, the management called him back with instructions to supervise a total reorganization of the editorial department in a last-ditch move to save the magazine. Four months later, in spite of White’s best efforts,
Collier’s
was dead.

What upset White as much as anything was that he had not had the chance to finish the campaign. “It was a classic case of coitus interruptus,” said White as he sat in the living room of his Manhattan town house, taking a break from writing the fourth
Making of the President
volume. “There I was, stiff cock, ready to go for the massive summary of the 1956 campaign, and here I am out of a job and no place to write it.” Instead, he dined out for the next couple of years on campaign anecdotes, stories about what had
really
happened as opposed to the newspaper accounts, and he found that these stories intrigued a lot of people. He also wrote two novels, the second of which he sold to Hollywood for $85,000. With his financial future secure for at least two years, he decided to indulge himself in his great love, political reporting, and write a book about the 1960 Presidential campaign. He had to go to several publishers before he found one who was enthusiastic about the project, and he assumed that the book would make very little money.

If it was hard to imagine in 1972 that only thirteen years before, a proven novelist had a difficult time selling the idea of a popular book about Presidential politics, it was just as hard to imagine the absolute virginity of much of the territory White set out to explore. “It was like walking through a field playing a brass tuba the day it rained gold,” said White. “Everything was sitting around waiting to be reported.”

The Republicans were not overly helpful; being somehow convinced that White was writing a work of fiction, they kept assigning him to the Zoo plane with the television technicians and foreign reporters, listing him on the manifest as “Theodore White, novelist.” Fortunately, they lost. White had all of his best contacts among the Democrats anyway, and the Kennedy people were especially cooperative, perhaps sensing that they could use White to help them promote the New Frontier. White got to know all the staffers well, and had little trouble seeing Kennedy himself. Flying back from the Montana convention early in 1960, for instance, White had only one CBS correspondent, Blair Clark, for competition. “Blair and I sat around with John F. Kennedy all the way from Montana back to the East Coast, just shooting the breeze,” he remembered. “You can’t do that any more. Because now there are 27 million correspondents squeezing in.”

The reason that 27 million reporters now show up for every kaffee klatsch in New Hampshire has a lot to do with Whites first book. “When that book came out,” said White, “it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. Goddam thing was an unbelievable success.” White is not the world’s humblest journalist, but he is not far off the mark about the book’s success—the number of imitations and spinoffs testify to that. The first rival, published by
The New York Times
, came out in 1964. By 1968, White was competing against seventeen other campaign books. The London
Sunday Express
and
Sunday Times
both sent teams of writers; White began to see himself as a small independent businessman fighting off giant corporations which had swooped down to cash in on his success. Most of the books adopted White’s magic formula: present politics
in novelistic terms, as the struggle of great personalities, with generous helpings of colorful detail to sugar the political analysis.

The book competition was bad enough, but White also had to contend with the newspapers jumping his claim. In 1972, the AP told its men: “When Teddy White’s book comes out, there shouldn’t be one single story in that book that we haven’t reported ourselves.” Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor of
The New York Times
, told his reporters and editors: “We aren’t going to wait until a year after the election to read in Teddy White’s book what we should have reported ourselves.” It took from eight to twelve years for the newspapers to accept White as an institution, but by 1972 most editors were sending off their men with rabid pep talks about the importance of sniffing out inside dope, getting background into the story, finding out what makes the campaign tick, and generally going beyond the old style of campaign reporting.

Of course, reporters had been doing many of these things as early as the 1968 campaign, causing George Romney to howl that he had been a victim of “the Teddy White syndrome.” By that, Romney meant that flocks of reporters had started looking into the embryonic stages of Presidential campaigns, scrutinizing aspirants even before the primaries, killing candidacies with untimely exposure.

If this premature mass coverage upset politicians, it nearly drove Teddy White to distraction. After the
succès fou
of the 1960 book, he had looked to make a living from the
Making of the President
series for the next twenty years. Now, with the market glutted, he was no longer sure that he could. “People have read so much of what I have to say in
Newsweek
, in
Time
, in
The New York Times
and the Washington
Post
,” he lamented that afternoon in New York, as he started on his third or fourth pack of cigarettes.

But his uneasiness stemmed from more than a fear that the 1972 book might not sell as well as the earlier ones. He sometimes felt that the methods he had pioneered had gotten out of
control, had turned into a Frankenstein’s monster. Thinking back to the early spring of 1960, he remembered watching a relaxed John Kennedy receiving the Wisconsin primary returns in a Milwaukee hotel room. White had been the only journalist present, except for a young film maker working on a documentary, and he had blended in with the Kennedy Mafia as unobtrusively as a distant in-law.

Then he recalled the July night, only a few months before, when George McGovern had won the Democratic nomination in Miami. White had been in McGovern’s suite at the Doral Hotel:

“It’s appalling what we’ve done to these guys. McGovern was like a fish in a goldfish bowl. There were three different network crews at different times. The still photographers kept coming in in groups of five. And there were at least six writers sitting in the corner—I don’t even know their names. We’re all sitting there watching him work on his acceptance speech, poor bastard. He tries to go into the bedroom with Fred Dutton to go over the list of Vice Presidents, which would later turn out to be the fuck-up of the century of course, and all of us are observing him, taking notes like mad, getting all the little details. Which I think I invented as a method of reporting and which I now sincerely regret. If you write about this, say that I sincerely regret it. Who gives a fuck if the guy had milk and Total for breakfast?”

“There’s a conflict here—the absolute need of the public to know versus the candidate’s need for privacy, which is an equivalent and absolute need. I don’t know how you resolve it. McGovern was so sweet, so kind to everybody, but he must have been crying out for privacy. And I felt, finally, that our being there was a total imposition.”

The reporters who followed the Presidential hopefuls in 1972 would probably have been surprised to hear White say these things. They were arriving in Washington, or were first beginning to make their reputations, around the time that the first
Making of the President
books hit the stores. Now they took
White and his techniques for granted; it made sense to them to treat a political campaign as a growing, organic drama and to examine the psychological and sociological causes of political decisions. Many of the new generation of campaign reporters looked down on White as a pathetic, written-out hack. They saw him as a political groupie who wrote flattering, mawkish descriptions of major politicians in order to keep them primed as sources for future books. His 1968 volume, with its penitently overkind description of Richard Nixon, had taken a beating from reviewers. A lot of reporters laughed out loud when they read sentences like: “In 1968, Nixon conspicuously, conscientiously, calculatedly denied himself all racist votes, yielding them to Wallace.” It was left for three of White’s British competitors, in a book called
An American Melodrama
, to give a decent account of Nixon’s wholly opportunistic Southern Strategy.

By 1972, the traveling press openly resented White. They felt that he was a snob, that he placed himself above the rank and file of the press. White would suddenly appear in some pressroom, embracing old friends on the campaign staff, and would immediately be ushered off to the candidate’s suite or the forward compartment of the plane for an exclusive interview. And the reporters would grumble about Teddy White getting the royal treatment.

These same reporters forgot that Teddy White’s first books had radically altered the function of the campaign press. Because of him, the press now began to cover political campaigns two years before the election.
^†
Unlike White, the reporters
were not collecting tidbits for use at some remote future date, in case one of the primary candidates went on to win the Big One. They were using the information immediately, exposing flaws and inconsistencies in the candidate that could ruin his chances before he even reached the primaries. As recently as 1960, or even 1964, a coalition of party heavies, state conventions, and big-city bosses had chosen the candidate in relatively unviolated privacy, and then presented him to the press to report on.

Now the press screened the candidates, usurping the party’s old function. By reporting a man’s political strengths, they made him a front runner; by mentioning his weaknesses and liabilities, they cut him down. Teddy White, even in his wildest flights of megalomania, had never allowed himself this kind of power. The press was no longer simply guessing who might run and who might win; the press was in some way determining these things. The classic example was George Romney. Romney had opened his campaign almost a year before the first primary, expecting a press contingent of two or three reporters. Instead, twenty or thirty showed up for Romney’s first exploratory trips around the country, and they all reported Romney’s embarrassing inability to give coherent answers to their questions about Vietnam, thus dooming his candidacy. But Romney was the perfect, textbook example. The process was usually more subtle, and more difficult to describe.

The journalists involved in this selection process were a very small group, consisting mostly of the national political correspondents, and they formed what David Broder called “the screening committee.” Of the two-hundred-odd men and women who followed the candidates in 1972, less than thirty were full-time national political correspondents. Most of the campaign reporters came from other beats around Washington—the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the Hill, or the White House. After the campaign, they would go back to these beats, and if they did well, they would rise to a management position at their newspaper, magazine or network. But the national
political correspondents had covered the whole political scene for five, ten or fifteen years and were likely to continue doing so until they died in harness; and if the actuarial tables were correct, their jobs would kill them at a relatively early age. Many of the members of this group belonged to an organization called Political Writers for a Democratic Society, an organization whose evolution requires some explaining.

In 1966, a stolid, slightly pompous
Christian Science Monitor
reporter named Godfrey Sperling started organizing breakfasts where he and some of his friends could meet with leading politicians and government officials. He would have the
Monitor
’s secretaries call up Warren Weaver of the
Times
, David Broder of the
Post
, Phil Potter of the Baltimore
Sun
, Bob Donovan of the Los Angeles
Times
, Peter Lisagor of the Chicago
Daily News
and nine or ten other political writers, to invite them to breakfast at the National Press Club, where for five dollars a head they would get scrambled eggs and hash-browns and a chance to further their acquaintance with some politician. The breakfasts were also “background” sessions—any news that came out of them was not for attribution but had to be treated as coming from “a highly placed Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.” A great deal of useful information was served up with the orange juice at these sessions. Romney first stumbled over Vietnam at one of Sperling’s breakfasts, and Agnew made his debut as a buffoon by declaring that Humphrey was “soft on communism.” At another breakfast, shortly before the 1968 Republican Convention, the reporters kept suggesting to Nelson Rockefeller that his chances were nil. “Gee,” Rockefeller finally said, “if I thought I was as bad off as you guys say I am, I’d drop out.” The most memorable breakfast took place in January 1968, when Robert Kennedy anguished out loud for an hour as to whether or not he should run. The reporters there recalled the scene in the stories they wrote when Kennedy finally decided to enter the race.

By 1970, Sperling’s breakfast club began to go to hell; almost anybody who wanted to could come, and the guests often spoke on the record, which meant that they said nothing of importance.
But in the early days, Sperling restricted the breakfasts to his friends, which caused great bitterness among the writers who were not invited. Jack Germond, the chief political writer for the Gannett chain, was furious. He had eighteen papers in New York State and he was tired of getting scooped by
The New York Times
whenever John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller or Robert Kennedy appeared at Sperling’s breakfasts. So in 1969 he and Jules Witcover, who was working for the Newhouse chain and was also shut out, organized a rival group. Witcover christened it, with tongue in cheek, Political Writers for a Democratic Society.