The Boys on the Bus (20 page)

“My copy usually ends up looking like a goddam chicken that’s been hit by a fucking truck,”
^*
said John J. Lindsay, a
Newsweek
Washington correspondent, who was known by his friends as “Real John” to distinguish him from the mayor of New York.

“You’ve got to be happy if they get your facts right,” said Lindsay. “Since January I don’t think I’ve recognized a damn thing I’ve filed. I just pour everything out of the goddam boot. Otherwise, you get a phone call at three in the morning asking you why you left out that the candidate had his teeth drilled that morning.”

John Lindsay was a fixture of political journalism, a sensitive and observant man who was deeply dissatisfied with the world and had cultivated a cynical manner to deal with all the hypocrisy
that he saw. He was in his late forties, with a thin face and sharp features, and he spoke with the accents of an old Boston ward heeler, for he was one-half Massachusetts Irish. He grew up in a small Massachusetts town and entered politics for a few weeks in his youth, managing a losing campaign for a man who wanted to be state representative from Milford, Mass. “I had a job digging graves at the time, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to vote anybody from the cemetery,” he said. “It was a clear indication that I wasn’t cut out for politics.” So he confined himself to writing about politics. He had been on various papers and he worked for ten years on the Washington
Post
, but daily journalism frustrated him because he rarely had time to “take that last step and lock in a story.” For this reason, he moved to
Newsweek
.

It was the morning after the last night of the Convention. We were in the Fontaine Room of the Fontainebleau Hotel, a blue ballroom decorated with painted statues of busty Marie Antoinette shepherdesses in low-cut bodices. In front of us, the three hundred-odd members of the Democratic National Committee were sitting in gold chairs, waiting for George McGovern, the newly nominated candidate, to come and address them from the stage. Some network crews were hanging around the stage. A couple of dozen newspaper reporters were standing around the back of the room, looking worn out. They had stayed up all through the night, either drinking or writing. Lindsay had filed copy all night but, being an ex-alcoholic, he did not drink. He and I were leaning against a disused bar at the back of the room, hoping McGovern would show up soon. Despite his lack of sleep, Lindsay looked quite sporting in his blue blazer and beige espadrilles, with his horn-rims and greying hair.

“I can’t write worth anything,” he said with a sad smile, “but I’m a good reporter, I can cut through the bullshit. And there’s a lot of bullshit in this business. You’d almost have to get in on a phone line, or something like that, to get the real story—’cause what goes on up there on the platform isn’t really what’s happening.”

Without the aid of any phone taps, Lindsay had a pretty good idea of what was happening, and in the next few minutes I got a sample of some of the political perceptions that are presumably cut from his copy. I have never seen anything like them in
Newsweek
.

Just then, Lindsay was sighted by one of the ubiquitous political fixers who were plying their trade in Miami.

“Hi,” said Lindsay. “Who you working for now?”

“Matty Troy.”

“Oh, Matty Troy, the liberal Gauleiter!” said Lindsay. A perfect description! Matty Troy was a crazy egomaniac who supported McGovern, drank with Jimmy Breslin, and ran the Democratic Party of Queens with an iron fist—a liberal version of one of the Nazi “Gauleiters” who ran German districts in the thirties.

Lindsay and the Troy aide began to discuss the McGovern forces, whom they mistrusted. “Give me an old pol like ‘Onions’ Burke,”
^†
said Lindsay. “If he was gonna double-cross you, he would wink while he was shaking your hand. But these guys don’t even give you a tip-off.”

McGovern suddenly appeared at the entrance of the ballroom, surrounded by aides. As TV cameramen crowded him, he edged his way to the gold-curtained stage, where Lawrence O’Brien, the Democratic Party Chairman, was sitting. O’Brien was being kicked out of his job to make way for Jean Westwood, McGovern’s choice. McGovern reached the podium and acknowledged the applause of the Democratic National Committee. Then he began to sing O’Brien’s praises, saying what a great chairman O’Brien had been.

“Keep looking for the cloud,” said Lindsay. “They’re gonna take McGovern up on a cloud.”

“I would like to thank Mr. O’Brien for his wonderful service to the party,” McGovern intoned.

“Not to mention for saving the nomination for me last week,” Lindsay said out of the corner of his mouth.

McGovern finally got around to nominating Jean Westwood as the new party chairman. The committee dutifully elected her and she accepted.

Then McGovern nominated Pierre Salinger, his choice for vice chairman of the party. Salinger was standing underneath one of the sexy shepherdesses. The TV crews trained their lights on him and the cameras whirred. He was obviously thinking over his acceptance speech one last time; everyone expected the committee to vote him in without a peep of protest.

But suddenly Charles Evers, the black Committeeman from Mississippi, was on his feet nominating another candidate, Basil Patterson, a black from New York.

“Black power strikes again,” was Lindsay’s comment.

McGovern looked agitated. He couldn’t oppose a black without looking bad. He leaned toward the microphone and said, “I would like to make a suggestion.”

“Take a dive, Pierre, take a dive!” said Lindsay, reading McGovern’s mind.

“I think that either Pierre Salinger or Basil Patterson would be perfectly acceptable to this committee,” said McGovern.

“I think Pierre just got the signal from George to jump out the window,” said Lindsay.

Salinger put up his hand and announced that he wanted to address the committee. He walked quickly to the stage and stood beside McGovern at the podium. Looking deflated, he said brusquely that he sensed it was the will of the committee that Basil Patterson be the next vice chairman.

“He not only sensed it,” piped Lindsay. “He saw how many weren’t standing up!”

Then McGovern took the microphone to praise Salinger for withdrawing. “I would like to thank Pierre …” McGovern began.

“For taking that beautiful parachute dive!” Lindsay said, trying not to laugh out loud. He peered over at the side of the
ballroom, trying to catch a glimpse of Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart.

“Boy, did the McGovern boys ever bail out on that one,” he said. “But tomorrow we’ll find out it was a beautiful scheme that Mankiewicz had in his pocket the whole time.”

McGovern was still droning on, and Lindsay was getting restless. “I’ve had enough of this shit,” he said finally, and went off to file a story on the meeting.

I looked very carefully in the next week’s
Newsweek
, but I couldn’t find a word about the Democratic National Committee proceedings.

The years since 1968 had been rough ones for TV newsmen. Spiro Agnew had been making it hot for them, ranting about how the newtworks slanted the news and hinting darkly about what the FCC might do to incorrigible news-twisters. The phrase “media event” had entered the language, and become a dirty phrase. At some time or other in 1972, nearly everybody—right-wing editorialists, left academics, Nixon aides, McGovern staffers, and newspaper reporters—accused the networks of distorting reality. Many newspapermen complained that they would soon be relegated to the role of drama critics; they would merely write reviews of the spectacles staged for the benefit of TV crews.

The TV people were extremely sensitive to all of this
hostility, and even they were growing slightly resentful of media events. So in 1972, whenever the setup was too blatantly artificial—like Mayor John Lindsay milking a cow in Wisconsin or putting on a wet-suit to probe the muck of Biscayne Bay for ecological disasters—the networks often shied away or tried to be the first to brand it a “media event.” In California, when McGovern’s people began handing out free video tapes of McGovern’s speeches to any station that would take them, NBC devoted three and a half conspicuous minutes to a report on McGovern’s use of the media. The NBC people even spent a day filming themselves filming McGovern.

During one brief period, in the early fall, when McGovern began staging media events, Cassie Mackin, the NBC correspondent, felt downright insulted. McGovern would spend a whole morning hauling the press corps to some farm in the Midwest just so that he could appear against a background of grain silos when he made a statement about the wheat scandal. “This is a Presidential campaign and we don’t need pretty pictures to get on the air,” said Mackin. “Why can’t they just run their campaign and let us take the responsibility of finding something interesting to say about it? It would be fine with me if they did nothing for the media.”

At the same time, TV people were increasingly prone to admit the limitations of their medium. While NBC still had the gall to take newspaper ads claiming that its news program provided “All You Need to Know,” many TV journalists were more humble. “I don’t think people ought to believe only one news medium,” Walter Cronkite told an interviewer during the Republican Convention. “They ought to read and they ought to go to opinion journals and all the rest of it. I think it’s terribly important that this be taught in the public schools, because otherwise, we’re gonna get to a situation because of economic pressures and other things where television’s all you’ve got left. And that would be
disastrous
. We can’t cover the news in a half-hour every evening. That’s ridiculous.”

Others went even further. “A lot of TV reporters are not really reporters at all,” said a CBS correspondent who wished
to remain anonymous. “They’ve come up from local radio and TV stations, and they really don’t know much about politics. But all they have to do is run around and dredge up a minute and a half of thought. It makes no difference if they’re ignoramuses because there’s no space on the program anyway.”

A lot of newspapermen would say amen to that. In the early sixties, when the TV people began appearing in large numbers on the press bus, the older newspapermen had regarded them with outright loathing—they were dilettantes, glamor boys, know-nothings. Over the years, the newspapermen had come to treat the TV people with more respect, but they were still not prepared to accept them as big leaguers. In August 1972, Lewis W. Wolfson, an Associate Professor of Communications at American University, polled fifty-seven major political journalists, asking them: “Which political correspondents (in print or TV) do you respect the most?” Of the fourteen journalists mentioned most often in the results, not one was a TV journalist.

The print men on the bus did admire a few TV reporters, mostly correspondents who covered Washington full-time such as Doug Kiker (who was a refugee, after all, from the old
Herald Tribune
), Dan Rather, Cassie Mackin, Roger Mudd, and Dan Schorr. These people were good, they dug for news; but still, how could you take seriously a person whose daily output lasted two minutes on the air? In newspaper terms, the TV news amounted to putting out a paper that contained only ten stories every day, with only four paragraphs to each story. In fact, if you put a whole transcript of a network news show into newspaper type, it covered only a third of the front page of
The New York Times
.

The galling thing was not just that these TV people, many of them, bordered on being show-biz celebrities, or that they were pulling down big salaries, or that women threw themselves at some of the TV men (who had been in the living room so often that they seemed like second husbands). The worst of it was that the networks were booming while the newspapers kept dying off.

Yet the newspapermen got along well enough with the TV
reporters. They ate and drank together without any conspicuous apartheid. Except, perhaps, for David Schoumacher.

Schoumacher was a tough, somber, extremely aggressive reporter who had a reputation for approaching political campaigns more as an infiltrator than a reporter. He invited staffers out to lunch, took secretaries horseback riding, cultivated anyone who might possibly give him a story. Which sometimes led to accusations that Schoumacher was going too far. Covering Eugene McCarthy in 1968, for instance, Schoumacher had become so obviously immersed in the campaign that supporters of Robert Kennedy complained bitterly that Schoumacher was serving as a shill for McCarthy. Four years later, Schoumacher ran into a different kind of accusation—that of poaching on a fellow reporter’s turf.

In January 1972, Schoumacher went out on a Muskie sortie with Jack Germond and a few other reporters. On the plane one morning, Germond overheard one Muskie staffer telling another that Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois was going to endorse Muskie. It was not a great story, Germond thought, but the Gannett papers in Illinois would be delighted to break it. Around noon, Germond’s deadline, the campaign party finally arrived at a motel in Tallahassee. Germond rushed to the press room and phoned in his exclusive story. The only other man in the press room was David Schoumacher. As Germond was dictating the story, it occurred to him that he should have gone outside and used a phone booth, but he didn’t think much about it.

At the next stop in Tallahassee, Germond heard that CBS radio had broken the Stevenson story. They had got it on the air before his papers had even hit the stands. Germond was pretty sore, but his friend Witcover was furious. When they got back on the press bus, Witcover asked Schoumacher where he had got the story. Schoumacher said he had not heard it from anyone in the entourage.