The Boys on the Bus (9 page)

There is nothing drearier than following a loser all the way to his grave. The candidate is exhausted, the staff is crabby, the hotels are bad and get worse, and the campaign generates less and less news. Off in the distance is the Winner’s campaign—a cornucopia of big stories, excitement, power, money, and a burgeoning sense of promise. Everybody in the business is suddenly talking about the Winner’s campaign. The best reporters seem to be there. It grows like a fad; you have to be there, at the center of the action.

But it goes beyond that. A campaign reporter’s career is linked to the fortunes of his candidate. If he is writing about the front runner, he is guaranteed front-page play for his articles, and as Walter Mears once told me, “Everything is measured by play in this business.” If he can hang on to a winner through the primaries, he will probably be assigned to follow him through the fall election—perhaps all the way to the White House.

A campaign reporter who covers one of the two major candidates is usually headed for bigger things. “The Presidential politics beat is one or two steps down from being a junior or senior executive on the paper,” David Broder said after the election. “Most of the guys who covered the first campaign that I was on in 1960 are now editors of the editorial pages of their papers, or managing editors, or bureau chiefs who spend most of their time doing stuff around Washington.” Ben Bradlee, for example, who covered Kennedy for the Washington
Post
, rose within a few years to become executive editor.

Even if the reporter does not immediately receive an editorial job, he may be assigned to the White House, which is also a springboard to executive positions. Robert Semple was a good example. In 1966, he had been covering urban affairs for
The New York Times
. His articles usually appeared at the bottom of page 63. In 1967, he was assigned to cover Richard Nixon, and he followed him all through the primaries and fall campaign,
and then served as the
Times’
White House correspondent for four years. At the end of 1972, he was sent to New York as an assistant editor on the national desk, and many
Times
men assumed that Semple was being groomed for the prestigious position of Washington Bureau chief.

At the very least, a reporter who latches on to the Winner in the primaries can always write a book about a losing Presidential nominee. But nobody wants to read a book about a losing Presidential hopeful.

So the correspondents did not like to dwell on signs that their Winner was losing, any more than a soup manufacturer likes to admit that there is botulism in the vichyssoise. If the Winner turned into a clear-cut loser, the campaign reporter might get assigned to the new Winner. Or he might not. There was always that nagging fear that the editor might have forgotten him, that he might be destined to spend the rest of the year in some dull secondary assignment. Besides, he had spent months making a close, monomaniacal study of the candidate. He had become a very narrow specialist. He could tell you everything about the candidate from his favorite dish to the political opinions of his war buddies. If there was any justice in the world, the reporter thought, the candidate would come through and justify this fantastic expenditure of time. Otherwise, what a tragic, absurd, depressing waste …

For these reasons, I thought that the men on the Winner’s Bus subconsciously pulled for their man to come through.

When Muskie’s campaign began to go down the tubes, it didn’t do much for the morale of Messrs. Stout, Morton, and Naughton. “It didn’t matter six beans to me whether Muskie was or was not the nominee,” Naughton told me months later. But after Florida, Naughton began to have trouble getting his stories in the
Times
. Half the time, he had to contribute his information to some other
Times
reporter who was writing a more general story about the campaign. “We all have large egos or we wouldn’t be in this business,” said Naughton. “It made it a bit harder to go through those twenty-hour days when you
didn’t see any personal involvement in print.”

After Muskie’s birthday party in Green Bay, I walked into the dark cryptlike hotel bar and spotted Naughton, Stout, and Morton at a table behind a blue-mirrored column in the middle of the room. They were exuding gloom like three guys who had just dropped their life savings at the track. Five rounds of Scotch-on-the-rocks came to the table before closing time.

Stout was slumped in his chair with his collar open. Having abandoned all hope that he was riding on the Winner’s Bus, he had found some degree of peace. Or perhaps the absurdist in him had already accepted the whole campaign as a bad joke. He was trying to bet everyone that McGovern would win in Wisconsin. No one wanted to bet against him.

Morton, who had weathered six months in the CBS Saigon Bureau and Nixon’s 1968 campaign, was smoking nervously. He had been the No. 2 man on the Hill when CBS sent him to cover Muskie. He was forty-two, but his neat blond hair, his smooth features, and his eyeglasses made him look like an Eton boy. There was a weird contrast between his deep, confident voice and his frightened eyes.

At the third side of the table was Naughton. If Dickens’ Tiny Tim had reached the age of thirty-four, he would look like Naughton—small, frail, with badly cut short blond hair, red-rimmed eyes, a small puckered mouth, and a bargain basement suit. He was a soft-spoken, meticulously polite graduate of Notre Dame who had learned to get what he wanted by quiet, subtle means. Whenever a petition was circulated or a prank was played, Naughton was almost always the invisible instigator. He would plant an idea in the minds of the other men and then quietly fade into the background. It was he who had organized the entertainment and gift-buying for Muskie’s birthday party, for instance, although Stout had ended up in the spotlight.

Naughton was a natural leader, and the others followed him almost unconsciously. He was always in the middle of the excitement, and when he left a place, the others would slowly filter
away. An ambitious reporter, he had an almost feminine knack for seeming to hold a casual conversation while really sucking out information like a bilge pump. It was no coincidence that he was the big winner in the running poker game—when he wanted to, he could draw another man out and never hint at what was in his own hand. He had a pleasant sense of humor which sometimes emerged in his lighter pieces. His black typewriter case was decorated with a “Dingbat for President” sticker.

The son of a dispatcher for a shipping company on the Great Lakes, he was the first writer in his family, and his greatest ambition was someday to take over Russell Baker’s humor column in the
Times
. He had come to the
Times’
Washington Bureau from the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
in 1969, and had served as the back-up man at the White House. In the summer of 1971, he had put in for a campaign assignment, expecting to be given a minor candidate like Harold Hughes. To his complete surprise, he was told that he would cover Muskie. It was extraordinary for a rookie in the bureau to receive such a weighty assignment, and Naughton was fully aware of the importance of the job.
^†

Naughton was still covering the White House, but he immediately began, as an extracurricular duty, to familiarize himself with the candidate, his staff, and the financial situation of the
Muskie campaign. In trying to find out about the sources of Muskie’s campaign money, he ran up against a roadblock—he learned that staffers and contributors had been told not to discuss the subject. So in August of 1971, he set up an informal, get-acquainted dinner with Muskie and some of his staffers at a Washington restaurant. “During the course of the dinner,” Naughton remembered later, “I mentioned to Muskie that it seemed to me that if he really meant what he was saying about deserving the trust of the voters, he had to do business in a different way on finances. I told him how I had had this difficulty getting this information, and told him that it ought to be made public.” Muskie blew up. He launched into a twenty-minute tirade, pounding the table and shaking his fist. Every time Naughton tried to say something, Muskie cut him off with “Don’t give me any of those lawyer’s tactics! Don’t give me any of your weasel’s words!” Naughton persisted in his argument and finally Muskie looked at him and said, “You’re nothing but a goddam purist!”

“I only hope you think I’m a goddam purist after the campaign,” said Naughton. Muskie laughed, and from that time on, the two enjoyed an amicable relationship. The only thing Naughton regretted about the go-around was that it had been off the record.

Sometimes Naughton seemed to be divided into two separate personalities, the questioner and the writer. As a questioner, he could often be as blunt and fearless as he had been at that dinner with Muskie—prodding, needling, playing a ferocious devil’s advocate. But as a writer he tended to be prudent to a fault. It was as if he felt the entire grey-goddess tradition of
The New York Times
weighing down on him. “The
Times
is after all a record of history,” he once told me. “I wouldn’t want to vilify Richard Nixon if he doesn’t deserve vilification—even though
I
may feel he deserves it.”

His articles on Muskie, at any rate, were extremely cautious. “Naughton didn’t have the confidence in himself to buck conventional wisdom,” said an older, more experienced journalist.
“I think his major problem was that he didn’t understand the internal politics of the
Times
. When he got a job as good as he got, he should have known he had clout to write it the way he saw it.

“But never did Jim say anything first. He was filing AP shit. Every time he talked about this problem or that flaw, it had already been headlined in the Washington
Post
or a national magazine. I think he knew what was happening, but he just wasn’t sure of his instincts.”

There were several examples of Naughton’s pulling his punches with Muskie, but one stood out—the “crying incident” article. In his story of February 27, which was buried inside the
Times
, Naughton did not mention that Muskie “broke into tears” until the sixth paragraph. David Broder, the chief political writer for the Washington
Post
, played the incident in his lead, thereby producing a piece that had a devastating effect on the Muskie campaign. Naughton, constantly on the Muskie Bus, saw the incident as a minor feature in a generally bizarre day of campaigning. Broder, who had just flown into New Hampshire for the weekend, saw it as a major news story.

Since the New Hampshire primary, I had formed my theory about the Winner’s Bus, and I wanted to try it out on Naughton, Stout, and Morton. For some reason, even in the general emotional sag that followed the birthday party, I didn’t feel reticent about inviting myself to join them in the Northland bar, or about bugging them with my theory.

“I think that you’re going kind of easy on Muskie,” I said after my first drink. “I don’t mean that you’re fudging things for him consciously, I just think that you give him the benefit of the doubt because you’ve put in a lot of time with him and you’d like to see him get the nomination to justify that time. I mean, life is short, and four or five months is a pretty big investment of time.”

“Well,” said Morton gravely and politely, “Stout has been
with him on and off for three years, for that matter. But I don’t think we’ve favored him.”

“No,” said Naughton, “I think we’ve been hard on him, if anything. We took him to task for not disclosing finances, just among other things.”

Stout leaned back in his chair and pointed at me. “Listen to the kid,” he said. “He’s got something to say.”

That took me by surprise, and I didn’t know quite what to say.

I began to attack Muskie in vague terms. “He’s a whore like Humphrey,” I said. “He’ll sell out to anybody who will give him the Job.” The interesting thing was that they responded to my attack on Muskie by taking up his defense.

“I’d rather see the nomination go to Muskie than to Humphrey, who
is
a complete whore,” said Naughton. “I’m a pragmatist, and I think Muskie may be the best we can get. Coming off the White House beat, almost any Democrat looks attractive. Muskie has impressed me as being honest and candid. He’s not just a politician.”

“He wants to be President so bad he can taste it,” I said.

“No,” said Naughton. “The man is really a fatalist. He’s been pushed into this race and he’s accepted his role, but he’d be happier being a Senator from Maine for the rest of his life.”

Morton nodded. “I’ll grant you that he’s petulant, that he’s ill-at-ease with the press, and that he doesn’t know what to say sometimes, but that doesn’t mean he’s all bad.”

“You’ve got to remember that he’s a state politician, and that he’s being advised by people who have run state campaigns,” Naughton said earnestly. “But he’s learning. He’s educable. That’s why we told him about the importance of having an open administration during that bull session in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We can educate him before it’s too late.”

Just before closing time, Naughton and I made a trip to the bar to collect the last round of drinks. As we stood at the rail, I realized for the first time that we were both quite drunk. Not pig drunk, but unnaturally loose-tongued. Naughton was talking to me intensely, but it was hard for me to concentrate on
his words because Dick Stewart, Muskie’s press secretary, was sitting only a few feet away and singing “On the Street Where You Live” at the top of his lungs. But I remember the gist of what Naughton said, and he has since repeated the rest for me.

“When I was in Cleveland and I was a young political reporter—fairly naive, fairly idealistic, fairly liberal—there was a state representative named Carl Stokes who came along. Black. A man of immense charm. Seemed to me to represent what was right, what was the future. I thought he would make one helluva mayor. And my news stories may have reflected that, and I’m sure my columns did. And that may or may not have helped get him elected.

“And as soon as he got elected, he turned around and shat on all the people who had worked their asses off for him. He was just a bastard. He had terminal ego. And that convinced me you should never place your trust in a politician. And I think that was a very valuable object lesson.”