The Boys on the Bus (7 page)

The main purpose of PWDS was to get to know politicians in easy, informal surroundings. The meetings were usually held at Germond’s three-story row house in southwest Washington. The fourteen members would assemble once a month, have a couple of drinks with the guest, eat a catered supper downstairs in a big family room, and then go back upstairs to the long, rectangular living room. The guest sat in a large armchair in the middle of the room, taking questions from the reporters, who sat around him on sofas and other easy chairs. More drinks were served. Finally, after the guest had left, the men would pull out their notebooks and reconstruct the main points of the evening, trying to decide what the guest may or may not have meant in certain statements and generally sizing him up.

The most interesting thing about PWDS was its composition, which had been determined largely by Germond and Witcover. I cornered Germond one August night in the McGovern pressroom at the Biltmore Hotel in New York to ask him about the group. He was sitting all alone at one of the long typewriter tables, waiting in vain for a poker game to materialize and slowly getting drunk. He was a little cannonball of a man, forty-four years old, with a fresh, leprechaunish face, a fringe of white hair around his bald head, and a pugnacious, hands-on-hip manner of talking. He was not simply drawn to journalism as a profession; like Hildy Johnson in
Front Page
, he was addicted to it as a way of life.

Although he himself sometimes described his chain as a
“bunch of shitkicker papers,” he was proud of his position as a national political writer and the dues he had paid to win it.
^‡
Nothing made him angrier than small-town newspapermen—“homers”—who came up to him during campaigns and told him that he was ignoring “local factors.” “God,” he said, “I remember this one homer in Columbus. I’ve worked in these jobs, you know, as a homer. I’ve been a city-side reporter, a statehouse reporter, I’ve done the whole bit—and I’ve worked for a bunch of obscure newspapers. Christ Almighty, they were obscure. And for some guy from Ohio who works for this goddam shitty newspaper to come up and tell me that I don’t understand the whole thing—I’ve been covering this campaign for about sixteen months—and this asshole comes up and tells me this after two weeks’ exposure—ooh, I was outraged. Got pretty testy in the saloon, I must say. Told him what I’d do with his fucking newspaper.”

So PWDS was not for homers or tyros. It was for the professionals’ professionals. More specifically, said Germond, sipping a Scotch and soda, the standard was this: Who are the men who cover an obscure Western governors’ conference in an off political year? “Everyone covers the national governors’ conferences,” said Germond, “that’s easy. You go out there and they just drop stories in your goddam lap. But you go out there and cover the Western governors, or the Southern governors in a year like ’67 or ’69, and if you can make a story out of that—if you can even convince your office they ought to pay your fare home—you’re a goddam genius.” Germond and Witcover had found fourteen men who passed this test. Not counting themselves, there were:

David Broder of the Washington
Post

Paul Hope of the Washington
Star

Robert Novak of the Chicago
Sun Times Syndicate

Warren Weaver of
The New York Times

Ted Knapp of Scripps-Howard

Bruce Biossat of the Newspaper Enterprise Association

Jim Dickenson of the
National Observer

Loye Miller of Knight Newspapers

Tom Ottenad of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Pat Furgurson of the Baltimore
Sun

Jim Large of
The Wall Street Journal

These people, said Germond, rated membership because of what they did, not because of the organizations they represented. The rule was that no member could send a substitute to a dinner. It was an elite group of men who, by their own consensus, were the flame-keepers of political journalism—the heavies. “We took a couple of guys who we thought were pretty dumb,” said Germond, “but we brought ’em in because they were entitled by what they did.” No doubt there were some serious omissions—reporters like Johnny Apple of
The New York Times
, Alan Otten of
The Wall Street Journal
, Peter Lisagor, Jim Doyle, Harry Kelly of Hearst, and Jim Perry of the
National Observer
—who either were not congenial to the group or worked for papers already represented. But by and large this group was the elite’s idea of the elite. They did not consider the network correspondents to be serious political reporters, nor did they hold a high opinion of the wire-service men (except for Walter Mears) or of newsmagazine reporters (except for John Lindsay of
Newsweek
). But Lindsay could not be admitted because he would have got more out of the dinners than the rest—little pieces of color that the daily journalists couldn’t use. And Mears had to be excluded because, on the rare occasions when a not-for-attribution story emerged from one of the dinners, he would have put it on the wire and beaten everybody else. “Most of the wire-service reports generally reflect nothing about what is going on,” said Germond, “but Walter’s good enough so that he would
whip our ass off
. Walter and I are good friends and he was pissed and kept asking me why
he couldn’t get in the group. And I said, ‘Jeez, Walter, I brought it up and you had eight co-sponsors, but the vote was 13 to 1 against you.’ ”

The members of PWDS did not constitute a pack. They were too confident, competitive, proud, and self-sufficient for that. They also differed ideologically. Germond for instance was a political agnostic, leaning toward liberalism;
^§
Novak was increasingly embracing the ideological tenets of the Sun King; and Nolan stood, on many matters, to the left of George McGovern.

But they did form a sort of club, with a certain code and certain rituals. If you shared a cab with members of PWDS, for instance, they would invariably dive for the back seat, leaving you to ride with the driver. At the end of the ride, one of them would say, “I think we’d better invoke the Germond rule.”

“What’s that?” you would say.

“The Germond rule states that the person who rides up front has to pay.”

It was an established rule, widely accepted throughout the world of political journalism, and most people paid.

But PWDS was primarily a dinner group, and their main goal was to set themselves up for the 1972 campaign. They did the drudge work of political journalism, therefore they were entitled to an advantage, a closer relationship with the candidates. They saw the dinners as a new tool of the trade. The alternative was to go around, individually, and formally interview each new cabinet member or potential candidate—which would teach them next to nothing about the man’s personality. “What we were trying to do,” said Germond, “was to sit down with the guy without having to file any shit about his program or something.
Have a couple of pops and dinner, talk, and decide ‘What kind of a guy is this, has he got any class?’ You don’t hand down arbitrary, ex cathedra judgments—get to know the man. And this was true of cabinet members, Presidential candidates—you learn—the people are nice, a lot of them anyway. Or sometimes you don’t learn anything. Our great non-learning session was George McGovern. Jeez, we were the dumbest bastards in the world about George McGovern.”

McGovern actually came twice, and the second time, in 1971, he carefully spelled out his entire strategy for winning the nomination. “To show you how strange it was,” says Warren Weaver, “I do not even remember it. I just didn’t believe the man. I thought it was a pipe dream.” That was the consensus of the whole group that night. “We thought he was a nice guy, even a savvy guy,” says Germond. “But we didn’t believe him. We figured he was a total loss.” So George McGovern slipped right through the screening process. The incredulity of the press failed to stop him.

In fact, the dinners yielded very few tangible results. Mel Laird, Bob Finch, Teddy Kennedy provided nothing more than a few minor stories. From dining with George Wallace, the group was surprised to discover that he was consistently witty and genuinely puritanical, but they found out little else. The dinners provided only one solid insight—that Ed Muskie had a bad temper. At his first guest shot, in 1970, the members gave him the old George Romney treatment, boring in with question after question about Vietnam. Muskie kept giving equivocal answers and finally he blew up, attacking the group for trying to trap him. They
were
trying to trap him, but Presidential candidates were supposed to stay cool in the face of such questioning. Some of the members knew about Muskie’s temper from covering his vice-presidential campaign in 1968, but most of them were stunned.

Muskie appeared again in December 1971, accompanied by his press secretary, a former Boston
Globe
editor named Dick Stewart. Every time Muskie began to lose control, Stewart
would say, “Now, Ed, don’t get testy!” They began to wonder a little about Muskie’s stability, but most of them decided that it was just a minor flaw and wouldn’t make any difference.

Nevertheless, when the national political correspondents—PWDS members and a few others—checked their scratch sheets at the end of 1971, Muskie looked like the only man who really had a chance. Johnny Apple had written a series of exclusive articles in the
Times
about various big Democratic politicians endorsing Muskie, and these articles helped to build up an impression that Muskie had it made. If he took New Hampshire he would be hard to stop, but because he looked like the one and only contender, he could not afford to do poorly in that first primary.

On January 9, 1972, David Broder, the most influential political writer in Washington, wrote from Manchester, New Hampshire: “As the acknowledged front runner and a resident of the neighboring state, Muskie will have to win the support of at least half the New Hampshire Democrats in order to claim a victory.” At the beginning of the campaign, that was the wisdom of the screening committee of national political journalists. And when Muskie’s big Scenicruiser bus rolled out of Manchester in January, most of them were on it—writing down every fact that might prove useful six months later when they did the big piece about how Muskie had won the nomination. Thanks to the screening committee, no other candidate in sight had half the press entourage that Muskie had.

The screening committee had never held a meeting to appoint Muskie the front runner. They had never even discussed it at great length. If there was a consensus, it was simply because all the national political reporters lived in Washington, saw the same people, used the same sources, belonged to the same background groups, and swore by the same omens. They arrived at their answers just as independently as a class of honest seventh graders using the same geometry text—they did not have to cheat off each other to come up with the same answer. All signs pointed to Ed Muskie as the easy winner, and as the
wisdom of the national political men began to filter down through the campaign reporters and the networks to the people, victory began to seem assured for the Senator from Maine.

Of course, Muskie made no such predictions for himself. All he wanted to do was win, he said, and with all the time he had to spend shuttling back and forth between Florida and New Hampshire, he’d consider himself
lucky
to get fifty percent. Nobody listened to him. And when the returns came in on the night of March 7, leaving Muskie with only 46 percent of the vote, the press started muttering about a Muskie setback.

The next morning Muskie held a press conference in the dingy ballroom of the Sheraton Carpenter Hotel in Manchester, and several members of the screening committee turned out for it. David Broder and Tom Ottenad kept asking him about the percentage of his victory. Why hadn’t he done as well as predicted? What had happened? Suddenly Muskie’s temper exploded and he launched into a tirade, lashing out at Broder and Ottenad, who were two of the gentlest and most soft-spoken men in the business. The percentage, said Muskie, had nothing to do with anything. The press was misinterpreting it because the press was out to get him.

Nothing daunted, Broder asked him how, specifically, the New Hampshire results would affect his chances in Florida and in the other primaries. “I can’t tell you that,” Muskie snapped. “You’ll tell me and you’ll tell the rest of the country because you interpret this victory. This press conference today is my only chance to interpret it, but you’ll probably even misinterpret that.”

Broder just shrugged, but Marty Nolan, who was sitting directly behind him, raised his hand and said sternly, “Senator, will you answer the question?” Muskie simply looked at him and went on to some other subject. Nolan asked him again, and got the same response.

After the press conference, Nolan stalked over to Dick Stewart and some Muskie aides who were talking in a corner.

“Calm down, Marty, calm down,” said Stewart.

“Look,” said Nolan. “I’ve taken three and a half years of this kind of shit from Nixon and those people, and I’m not gonna take it from you pricks.”

Muskie, who had known Nolan for many years, came over and put his hand on Nolan’s shoulder. “What’s the problem, Marty?” he asked in his gravest tones.

Nolan turned around and looked at him. “The bullshit you’ve been handing out—that’s the problem, Senator.”

Nolan then repeated to Muskie that he was tired of taking bullshit from Nixon and Agnew. “I expect much more of you and I intend to hold you to it,” he said sharply.

“Well, Marty,” said the Senator. “I guess you’re right.” For the next five minutes, he apologized for his outburst.

If the press had ever been more powerful than in 1972, nobody could remember when.