The Boys on the Bus

PART ONE

COVERING

THE PRIMARIES

AND

CONVENTIONS

CHAPTER I

On the Bus

June 1—five days before the California primary. A grey dawn was fighting its way through the orange curtains in the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel in Los Angeles, where George McGovern was encamped with his wife, his staff, and the press assigned to cover his snowballing campaign.

While reporters still snored like Hessians in a hundred beds throughout the hotel, the McGovern munchkins were at work, plying the halls, slipping the long legal-sized handouts through the cracks under the door of each room. According to one of these handouts, the Baptist Ministers’ Union of Oakland had decided after prayerful and careful deliberation to endorse Senator McGovern. And there was a detailed profile of Alameda County (… agricultural products include sweet corn, cucumbers, and lettuce), across which the press would be dragged today—or was it tomorrow? Finally, there was the mimeographed schedule, the orders of the day.

At 6:45 the phone on the bed table rang, and a sweet, chipper voice announced: Good Morning, Mr. Crouse. It’s six forty-five. The press bus leaves in forty-five minutes from the front of the hotel. She was up there in Room 819, the Press Suite, calling up the dozens of names on the press manifest, awaking the agents of every great newspaper, wire service and network not only of America but of the world. In response to her calls, she was getting a shocking series of startled grunts, snarls and obscenities.

The media heavies were rolling over, stumbling to the bathroom, and tripping over the handouts. Stooping to pick up the schedule, they read: "8:00–8:15, Arrive Roger Young Center, Breakfast with Ministers. Suddenly, desperately, they thought: Maybe I can pick McGovern up in Burbank at nine fifty-five and sleep for another hour. Then, probably at almost the same instant, several score minds flashed the same guilty thought: But maybe he will get shot at the ministers’ breakfast," and then each mind branched off into its own private nightmare recollections of the correspondent who was taking a piss at Laurel when they shot Wallace, of the ABC cameraman who couldn’t get his Bolex to start as Bremer emptied his revolver. A hundred hands groped for the toothbrush.

It was lonely on these early mornings and often excruciatingly painful to tear oneself away from a brief, sodden spell of sleep. More painful for some than others. The press was consuming two hundred dollars a night worth of free cheap booze up there in the Press Suite, and some were consuming the lion’s share. Last night it had taken six reporters to subdue a prominent radio correspondent who kept upsetting the portable bar, knocking bottles and ice on the floor. The radioman had the resiliency of a battered Timex—each time he was put to bed, he would reappear to cause yet more bedlam.

And yet, at 7:15 Mr. Timex was there for the baggage call, milling in the hall outside the Press Suite with fifty-odd reporters. The first glance at all these fellow sufferers was deeply reassuring—they all felt the same pressures you felt, their problems were your problems. Together, they seemed to have the cohesiveness of an ant colony, but when you examined the scene more closely, each reporter appeared to be jitterbugging around in quest of the answer that would quell some private anxiety.

They were three deep at the main table in the Press Suite, badgering the McGovern people for a variety of assurances. Will I have a room in San Francisco tonight? Are you sure I’m booked on the whistle-stop train? Have you seen my partner?

The feverish atmosphere was halfway between a high school bus trip to Washington and a gambler’s jet junket to Las Vegas, where small-time Mafiosi were lured into betting away their restaurants. There was giddy camaraderie mixed with fear and low-grade hysteria. To file a story late, or to make one glaring factual error, was to chance losing everything—one’s job, one’s expense account, one’s drinking buddies, one’s mad-dash existence, and the methedrine buzz that comes from knowing stories that the public would not know for hours and secrets that the public would never know. Therefore reporters channeled their gambling instincts into late-night poker games and private bets on the outcome of the elections. When it came to writing a story, they were as cautious as diamond-cutters.

It being Thursday, many reporters were knotting their stomachs over their Sunday pieces, which had to be filed that afternoon at the latest. They were inhaling their cigarettes with more of a vengeance, and patting themselves more distractedly to make sure they had their pens and notebooks. In the hall, a Secret Service agent was dispensing press tags for the baggage, along with string and scissors to attach them. From time to time, in the best Baden-Powell tradition, he courteously stepped forward to assist a drink-palsied journalist in the process of threading a tag.

The reporters often consulted their watches or asked for the time of departure. Among this crew, there was one great phobia—the fear of getting left behind. Fresh troops had arrived today from the Humphrey Bus, which was the Russian Front of the California primary, and they had come bearing tales of horror. The Humphrey Bus had left half the press corps at the Biltmore Hotel on Tuesday night; in Santa Barbara, the bus had deserted Richard Bergholz of the Los Angeles Times, and it had twice stranded George Shelton, the UPI man.

Jesus, am I glad I’m off the Humphrey Bus, said one reporter, as he siphoned some coffee out of the McGovern samovar and helped himself to a McGovern sweet roll. Shelton asked Humphrey’s press officer, Hackel, if there was time to file. Hackel said, ‘Sure, the candidate’s gonna mingle and shake some hands.’ Well, old Hubie couldn’t find but six hands to shake, so they got in the bus and took off and left the poor bastard in a phone booth right in the middle of Watts.

To the men whom duty had called to slog along at the side of the Hump, the switch to the McGovern Bus brought miraculous relief. You gotta go see the Hump’s pressroom, just to see what disaster looks like, a reporter urged me. The Humphrey pressroom, a bunker-like affair in the bowels of the Beverly Hilton, contained three tables covered with white tablecloths, no typewriters, no chairs, no bar, no food, one phone (with outside lines available only to registered guests), and no reporters. The McGovern press suite, on the other hand, contained twelve typewriters, eight phones, a Xerox Telecopier, a free bar, free cigarettes, free munchies, and a skeleton crew of three staffers. It was not only Rumor Central, but also a miniature road version of Thomas Cook and Son. As the new arrivals to the McGovern Bus quickly found out, the McGovern staff ran the kind of guided tour that people pay great sums of money to get carted around on. They booked reservations on planes, trains and hotels; gave and received messages; and handled Secret Service accreditation with a fierce, Teutonic efficiency. And handed out reams of free information. On any given day, the table in the middle of the Press Suite was laden with at least a dozen fat piles of handouts, and the door was papered with pool reports.*

It was just these womblike conditions that gave rise to the notorious phenomenon called pack journalism (also known as herd journalism and fuselage journalism). A group of reporters were assigned to follow a single candidate for weeks or months at a time, like a pack of hounds sicked on a fox. Trapped on the same bus or plane, they ate, drank, gambled, and compared notes with the same bunch of colleagues week after week.

Actually, this group was as hierarchical as a chess set. The pack was divided into cliques—the national political reporters, who were constantly coming and going; the campaign reporters from the big, prestige papers and the ones from the small papers; the wire-service men; the network correspondents; and other configurations that formed according to age and old Washington friendships. The most experienced national political reporters, wire men, and big-paper reporters, who were at the top of the pecking order, often did not know the names of the men from the smaller papers, who were at the bottom. But they all fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout, the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village. After a while, they began to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories.

Everybody denounces pack journalism, including the men who form the pack. Any self-respecting journalist would sooner endorse incest than come out in favor of pack journalism. It is the classic villain of every campaign year. Many reporters and journalism professors blame it for everything that is shallow, obvious, meretricious, misleading, or dull in American campaign coverage.

On a muggy afternoon during the California primary campaign, I went to consult with Karl Fleming, a former political reporter and Los Angeles bureau chief for Newsweek, who was rumored to be a formidable critic of pack journalism. Fleming was beginning a whole new gig as editor of a fledgling semi-underground paper called LA; I found him in dungarees and shirtsleeves, sitting behind a desk that was covered with the makings of LA’s pilot issue.† He was a ruggedly built North Carolinian with the looks and accent to play Davy Crockett in a Disney remake. He was very busy putting his magazine together, taking phone calls, and giving instructions to one long-haired writer after another, but he seemed to enjoy letting off steam about political journalism. One of the reasons he quit Newsweek was that he got fed up riding around on campaign extravaganzas.

I got so frustrated during the Nixon campaign in 1968, he grinned, that I went to Ron Ziegler one day—we were flying some-goddam-where—and said, ‘Ron, I come to you as a representative of the press corps to ask you this question.’ I said, ‘The question is, What does Nixon do upon the occasion of his semiannual erection?’ Ziegler never cracked a goddam smile. Then I said, ‘The consensus is that he smuggles it to Tijuana.’ 

Fleming leaned back in his chair and laughed hard.

Gee, I said, you must have been fucked after that.

It doesn’t make any difference if you’re fucked or you’re not fucked, said Fleming. "You delude yourself into thinking, ‘Well, if I get on the bad side of these guys, then I’m not gonna get all that good stuff.’ But pretty soon the realization hits that there isn’t any good stuff, and there isn’t gonna be any good stuff. Nobody’s getting anything that you’re not getting, and if they are it’s just more of the same bullshit."

I told Fleming that I was puzzled as to why so many newspapers felt they needed to have correspondents aboard the press bus; a couple of wire-service guys and a camera crew should be able to cover a candidate’s comings, goings, and official statements more than thoroughly.

Papers that have enough money are not content to have merely the AP reports, said Fleming. "They want to have their own person in Washington because it means prestige for the paper and because in a curious way, it gives the editors a feeling of belonging to the club, too. I’ll guarantee you that three fourths of the goddam stuff—the good stuff—that the Washington press corps reporters turn up never gets into print at all. The reason it’s collected is because it’s transmitted back to the editor, to the publisher, to the ‘in’ executive cliques on these newspapers and networks and newsmagazines. It’s sent in confidential FYI memos or just over the phone. You give the publisher information that his business associates or his friends at the country club don’t have; you’re performing a very valuable function for him, and that, by God, is why you get paid.

"But while these papers want to have a guy there getting all the inside stuff, they don’t want reporters who are ballsy enough and different enough to make any kind of trouble. It would worry the shit out of them if their Washington reporter happened to come up with a page-one story that was different from what the other guys were getting. And the first goddam thing that happens is they pick up the phone and call this guy and say, ‘Hey, if this is such a hot story, how come AP or the Washington Post doesn’t have it?’ And the reporter’s in big fuckin’ trouble. The editors don’t want scoops. Their abiding interest is making sure that nobody else has got anything that they don’t have, not getting something that nobody else has.

"So eventually a very subtle kind of thing takes over and the reporter says to himself, ‘All I gotta do to satisfy my editor and publisher is just get what the other guys are getting, so why should I bust my ass?’ And over a period of a few years he joins the club. Now, most of these guys are honest, decent reporters who do the best job they can in this kind of atmosphere. The best reporters are the ones who sit around and talk about what assholes their editors and publishers are, and that still happens, thank God, with a great amount of frequency, even at the high levels of the Washington press corps.

All the same, any troublemaking reporter who walks into a press conference and asks a really mean snotty question which is going to make the candidate and his people really angry is going to be treated like a goddam pariah. ’Cause these guys in this club, they don’t want any troublemakers stirring up the waters, which means they might have to dig for something that’s not coming down out of the daily handout, or coming in from the daily pool report about what went on. They’d rather sit around the pressroom at the hotel every night, drinking booze and playing poker.

Fleming said that in June, and as I followed the press through the next five months of the campaign, I discovered that some of his accusations checked out, but others did not. Almost everything he said held true for the White House press corps,‡ but his charges did not always apply to the men who covered the Democratic candidates in 1972. It was true that some editors were still reluctant to run a story by their own man until the wire services had confirmed it. It was true that newsmagazine reporters and network correspondents occasionally leaked part of a hot story to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal; after the story had gained respectability by appearing in one of these major establishment organs, the correspondent would write the whole story for his own organization. And it was impossible to tell how often the reporters censored themselves in anticipation of some imaginary showdown with a cautious editor, preferring to play it safe and go along with whatever the rest of the pack was writing.

But things had also begun to change since Fleming’s campaign stories in 1968. The men on the bus had more authority and independence than ever before, and many of them were searching for new ways to report on the freakish, insular existence of the press bus, and for ways to break away from the pack. Very few of them filed any confidential memos to their superiors, or phoned in any inside information, except to suggest that such information might be worked up into a story.

Take, for example, the case of Curtis Wilkie, a young reporter for the Wilmington, Delaware News-Journal whom I met for the first time on the morning of June 1. I walked out of the lobby of the Wilshire Hyatt House, past all the black Nauga-hide furniture, and stepped into the first of the two silver buses that were waiting at the curb. It was the kind of bus to which most bus-fanciers would give three stars—the windows were tinted and there was a toilet in the rear, but the seats did not recline. The time was 7:30 A.M. and two-thirds of the seats were already filled with silent and bleary-eyed reporters who looked as cheerful as a Georgia chain gang on its way to a new roadbed. Most of them were sending out powerful No Trespassing vibes. My company was in no great demand, word having gotten around that I was researching an article on the press. Reporters snapped their notebooks shut when I drew near. The night before, Harry Kelly, a tall, hard-eyed Irishman from the Hearst papers, had looked at me over his shoulder and muttered, Goddam gossip columnist.

I finally sat down next to a thirtyish dark-haired reporter wearing a Palm Beach suit and a drooping moustache, who looked too hungover to object to my presence. After a long silence, he spoke up in a twangy Southern accent and introduced himself as Curtis Wilkie. He was from Mississippi and had been a senior at Ole Miss in 1964 when General Walker led his famous charge on the administration building. After graduating, Wilkie had put in seven years as a reporter on the Clarksdale, Mississippi Register (circ. 7,000), and, as I later found out, had won a slew of journalism prizes. In 1968, he had gone to the Chicago Convention as a member of the loyalist Mississippi delegation and had cast his vote for Eugene McCarthy. Soon after that, he won a Congressional fellowship and worked for Walter Mondale in the Senate and John Brademas in the House. In 1971, the Wilmington paper hired him as its main political writer; they got their money’s worth, for he wrote two separate 750-word articles every day, a hard news story for the morning News and a soft feature story for the afternoon Journal

Last night, I filed a story unconditionally predicting that the Hump’s gonna get rubbed out in the primary, he said. Now he was worried that his editors might object to so firm a stand, or that Humphrey, through some terrible accident, might win. As if to reassure himself, Wilkie kept telling funny, mordant stories about the last-ditch hysterics of the Humphrey campaign.

Wilkie had experienced a few bad moments over a Humphrey story once before. During the Pennsylvania primary, Humphrey unwisely decided to hold a student rally at the University of Pennsylvania. The students booed and heckled, calling Humphrey Americas Number 2 War Criminal, until Humphrey, close to tears, was forced to retreat from the stage. Wilkie filed a long story describing the incident and concluding that Humphrey was so unpopular with students that he could no longer speak on a college campus.

There were no TV cameramen at the rally, and of the fifteen reporters who covered the speech, only one besides Wilkie filed a detailed account of the heckling. The next day, when Wilkie went into the office, the managing editor was laughing about the story. We’ve kind of started wondering, he teased Wilkie. Several people have called and said that they didn’t see anything about Humphrey on Channel Six, and they seem to think you made it up. And we’re beginning to wonder ourselves, because none of the wire services mentioned it. Wilkie began to sweat; he nearly convinced himself that he had grossly exaggerated the incident. Late that afternoon, he came across a piece by Phil Potter, a veteran reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Potter’s version of the incident agreed with Wilkie’s. With great relief, Curt clipped the article and showed it to the managing editor.

For months afterward, Wilkie felt slightly qualmish whenever he thought about the Humphrey story. They sort of put me on notice that somebody was carefully reading my stuff, that time, he said after the election. It may have inhibited me, I don’t know. But it didn’t drive him back to the safety of the pack. He continued to trust his own judgment and write about whatever he himself thought was important. In October, when he was one of the few reporters to file a full account of an ugly Nixon rally where the President smiled at the sight of demonstrators being beaten up, the paper printed his articles without questioning them. After a while, he said, the guys on my desk began to have enough faith in me that they would accept anything I gave them regardless of what their wire services were telling them. They may have wondered a couple of times, but that didn’t prevent them from running it.

What made this all the more remarkable was that the News-Journal was owned by the arch-conservative DuPont family,§ and had long been famous for resisting news stories that gave any comfort to liberals. Ben Bagdikian, in his book The Effete Conspiracy, had used the News-Journal as a case study in biased journalism. According to Bagdikian, one of the owners had once even complained bitterly to the editors that the paper’s reporter had written a conventional news account of a Democratic rally when he should have turned it into a pro-Republican essay.‖ In the late sixties, however, stronger editors had taken over, and in the fall of 1972 they decided not to endorse either Nixon or McGovern, much to the displeasure of the DuPonts. The DuPonts’ dissenting editorial, which exhorted readers to vote for every Republican on the ballot, was relegated to the letters column under the coy heading A View from the Top. Wilkie was assigned to write a story about the rift. Interviewing the DuPonts, he asked whether a proposed merger pending before the SEC had anything to do with their endorsement of Nixon. Only a few years before, such impertinence would have been unthinkable.a

But one should not make too much of Curt Wilkie and the News-Journal. There were still lazy men on the bus, and men with large families to feed or powerful ambitions to nurture, who feared losing their jobs and thus played it safe by sticking with the pack. And there were still editors whose suspicions of any unusual story made pack journalism look cozy and inviting to their reporters. Campaign journalism is, by definition, pack journalism; to follow a candidate, you must join a pack of other reporters; even the most independent journalist cannot completely escape the pressures of the pack.

Around 8:15 A.M. on June 1 the buses rolled past the stucco housefronts of lower-middle-class Los Angeles and pulled up in front of a plain brick building that looked like a school. The press trooped down a little alley and into the back of the Grand Ballroom of the Roger Young Center. The scene resembled Bingo Night in a South Dakota parish hall—hundreds of middle-aged people sitting at long rectangular tables. They were watching George McGovern, who was speaking from the stage. The press, at the back of the room, started filling up on free Danish pastry, orange juice and coffee. Automatically, they pulled out their notebooks and wrote something down, even though McGovern was saying nothing new. They leaned sloppily against the wall or slumped in folding chairs.

McGovern ended his speech and the Secret Service men began to wedge him through the crush of ministers and old ladies who wanted to shake his hand. By the time he had made it to the little alley which was the only route of escape from the building, three cameras had set up an ambush. This was the only photo opportunity, as it is called, that the TV people would have all morning. Except in dire emergencies, all TV film has to be taken before noon, so that it can be processed and transmitted to New York. Consequently, the TV people are the only reporters who are not asleep on their feet in the morning. Few TV correspondents ever join the wee-hour poker games or drinking. Connie Chung, the pretty Chinese CBS correspondent, occupied the room next to mine at the Hyatt House and she was always back by midnight, reciting a final sixty-second radio spot into her Sony or absorbing one last press release before getting a good night’s sleep. So here she was this morning, bright and alert, sticking a mike into McGovern’s face and asking him something about black ministers. The print reporters stood around and watched, just in case McGovern should say something interesting. Finally McGovern excused himself and everybody ran for the bus.

The reporters began to wake up as they walked into the chilly Studio 22 at CBS. There was a bank of telephones, hastily hooked up on a large worktable in the middle of the studio, and six or seven reporters made credit card calls to bureau chiefs and home offices. Dick Stout of Newsweek found out he had to file a long story and couldn’t go to San Francisco later in the day. Steve Gerstel phoned in his day’s schedule to UPI. Connie Chung dictated a few salient quotes from McGovern’s breakfast speech to CBS Radio.

A loudspeaker announced that the interview was about to begin, so the reporters sat down on the folding chairs that were clustered around a monitor. They didn’t like having to get their news secondhand from TV, but they did enjoy being able to talk back to McGovern without his hearing them. As the program started, several reporters turned on cassette recorders. A local newscaster led off by accusing McGovern of using a slick media campaign.

Well, I think the documentary on my life is very well done, McGovern answered ingenuously. The press roared with laughter. Suddenly the screen of the monitor went blank—the video tape had broken. The press started to grumble.

Are they gonna change that first question and make it a toughie? asked Martin Nolan, the Boston Globe’s national political reporter. If not, I’m gonna wait on the bus. Nolan, a witty man in his middle thirties, had the unshaven, slack-jawed, nuts-to-you-too look of a bartender in a sailors’ café. He grew up in Dorchester, a poor section of Boston, and he asked his first tough political question at the age of twelve. "Sister, how do you know Dean Acheson’s a Communist?" he had challenged a reactionary nun in his parochial school, and the reprimand he received hadn’t daunted him from asking wiseacre questions ever since.

The video tape was repaired and the program began again. The interviewer asked McGovern the same first question, but Nolan stayed anyway. Like the others, Nolan had sat through hundreds of press conferences holding in an irrepressible desire to heckle. Now was the big chance and everyone took it.

Who are your heroes? the newscaster asked McGovern.

General Patton! shouted Jim Naughton of the Times.

Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, said McGovern.

What do you think of the death penalty? asked the newscaster.

I’m against the death penalty. There was a long pause. That is my judgment, McGovern said, and lapsed into a heavy, terminal silence. The press laughed at McGovern’s discomfiture.

By the time the interview was over, the press was in a good mood. As they filed back onto the buses, the normal configurations began to form: wire service reporters and TV cameramen in the front, where they could get out fast; small-town daily and big-city daily reporters in the middle seats, hard at work; McGovern staffers in the rear seats, going over plans and chatting. Dick Stout and Jim Naughton held their tape recorders to their ears, like transistor junkies, and culled the best quotes from the TV interview to write in their notebooks. Lou Dombrowski of the Chicago Tribune, who looked like a hulking Maf padrone, typed his Sunday story on the portable Olympia in his lap. The reporters working for morning newspapers would have to begin to write soon, and they were looking over the handouts and their notes for something to write about.

So it went. They went on to another interview in another chilly studio, at NBC. This time the reporters sat in the same studio as McGovern and the interviewer, so there was no laughter, only silent note-taking. After the interview there were phones and typewriters in another room, courtesy of the network. Only a few men used them. Then to Bixby Park for a dull speech to old people and a McGovern-provided box lunch of tiny, rubbery chicken parts. Another filing facility, this one in a dank little dressing room in back of the Bixby Park band shell. While McGovern droned on about senior citizens, about fifteen reporters used the bank of twelve phones that the McGovern press people had ordered Pacific Telephone to install.

At every stop there was a phone bank, but the reporters never rushed for the phones and fought over them as they do in the movies. Most of them worked for morning papers and didn’t have to worry about dictating their stories over the phone until around 6 P.M. (Eastern Standard Time).b Earlier in the day they just called their editors to map out a story, or called a source to check a fact, or sometimes they called in part of a story, with the first paragraph (the lead) to follow at the last moment. There was only one type of reporter who dashed for the phones at almost every stop and called in bulletins about almost everything that happened on the schedule. That was the wire service reporter.

If you live in New York or Los Angeles, you have probably never heard of Walter Mears and Carl Leubsdorf, who were covering McGovern for the Associated Press, or Steve Gerstel, who covered him for the United Press International. But if your home is Sheboygan or Aspen, and you read the local papers, they are probably the only political journalists you know. There are about 1,700 newspapers in the U.S., and every one of them has an AP machine or UPI machine or both whirling and clattering and ringing in some corner of the city room, coughing up stories all through the day. Most of these papers do not have their own political reporters, and they depend on the wire-service men for all of their national political coverage. Even at newspapers that have large political staffs, the wire-service story almost always arrives first.

So the wire services are influential beyond calculation. Even at the best newspapers, the editor always gauges his own reporters’ stories against the expectations that the wire stories have aroused. The only trouble is that wire stories are usually bland, dry, and overly cautious. There is an inverse proportion between the number of persons a reporter reaches and the amount he can say. The larger the audience, the more inoffensive and inconclusive the article must be. Many of the wire men are repositories of information they can never convey. Pye Chamberlyne, a young UPI radio reporter with an untamable wiry moustache, emerged over drinks as an expert on the Dark Side of Congress. He could tell you about a prominent Senator’s battle to overcome his addiction to speed, or about Humphrey’s habit of popping twenty-five One-A-Day Vitamins with a shot of bourbon when he needed some fast energy. But Pye couldn’t tell his audience.

In 1972, the Dean of the political wire-service reporters was Walter Mears of the AP, a youngish man with sharp pale green eyes who smoked cigarillos and had a nervous habit of picking his teeth with a matchbook cover. With his clean-cut brown hair and his conservative sports clothes he could pass for a successful golf pro, or maybe a baseball player. He started his career with the AP in 1955 covering auto accidents in Boston, and he worked his way up the hard way, by getting his stories in fast and his facts straight every time. He didn’t go in for the New Journalism. The problem with a lot of the new guys is they don’t get the formula stuff drilled into them, he told me as he scanned the morning paper in Miami Beach. I’m an old fart. If you don’t learn how to write an eight-car fatal on Route 128, you’re gonna be in big trouble.

About ten years ago, Mears’ house in Washington burned down. His wife and children died in the fire. As therapy, Mears began to put in slavish eighteen-hour days for the AP. In a job where sheer industry counts above all else, Mears worked harder than any other two reporters, and he got to the top.

At what he does, Mears is the best in the goddam world, said a colleague who writes very non-AP features. He can get out a coherent story with the right point on top in a minute and thirty seconds, left-handed. It’s like a parlor trick, but that’s what he wants to do and he does it. In the end, Walter Mears can only be tested on one thing, and that is whether he has the right lead. He almost always does. He watches some goddam event for a half hour and he understands the most important thing that happened—that happened in public, I mean. He’s just like a TV camera, he doesn’t see things any special way. But he’s probably one of the most influential political reporters in the world, just because his stuff reaches more people than anyone else’s.

Mears’ way with a lead made him a leader of the pack. Covering the second California debate between McGovern and Humphrey on May 30, Mears worked with about thirty other reporters in a large, warehouse-like press room that NBC had furnished with tables, typewriters, paper and phones. The debate was broadcast live from an adjacent studio, where most of the press watched it. For the reporters who didn’t have to file immediately, it was something of a social event. But Mears sat tensely in the front of the press room, puffing at a Tiparillo and staring up at a gigantic monitor like a man waiting for a horse race to begin. As soon as the program started, he began typing like a madman, taking transcript in shorthand form and inserting descriptive phrases every four or five lines: HUMPHREY STARTED IN A LOW KEY, or McGOV LOOKS A BIT STRAINED.

The entire room was erupting with clattering typewriters, but Mears stood out as the resident dervish. His cigar slowed him down, so he threw it away. It was hot, but he had no time to take off his blue jacket. After the first three minutes, he turned to the phone at his elbow and called the AP bureau in L.A. He’s phoning in a lead based on the first statements so they can send out a bulletin, explained Carl Leubsdorf, the No.2 AP man, who was sitting behind Mears and taking back-up notes. After a minute on the phone Mears went back to typing and didn’t stop for a solid hour. At the end of the debate he jumped up, picked up the phone, looked hard at Leubsdorf, and mumbled, How can they stop? They didn’t come to a lead yet.

Two other reporters, one from New York, another from Chicago, headed toward Mears shouting, Lead? Lead? Marty Nolan came at him from another direction. Walter, Walter, what’s our lead? he said.

Mears was wildly scanning his transcript. I did a Wallace lead the first time, he said. (McGovern and Humphrey had agreed near the start of the show that neither of them would accept George Wallace as a Vice President.) I’ll have to do it again. There were solid, technical reasons for Mears’ computer-speed decision to go with the Wallace lead: it meant he could get both Humphrey and McGovern into the first paragraph, both stating a position that they hadn’t flatly declared before then. But nobody asked for explanations.

Yeah, said Nolan, turning back to his Royal. Wallace. I guess that’s it.

Meanwhile, in an adjacent building, The New York Times team had been working around a long oak desk in an NBC conference room. The Times had an editor from the Washington Bureau, Robert Phelps, and three rotating reporters watching the debate in the conference room and writing the story; a secretary phoned it in from an office down the hall. The Times team filed a lead saying that Humphrey had apologized for having called McGovern a fool earlier in the campaign. Soon after they filed the story, an editor phoned from New York. The AP had gone with a Wallace lead, he said. Why hadn’t they?

Marty Nolan eventually decided against the Wallace lead, but NBC and CBS went with it on their news shows. So did many of the men in the room. They wanted to avoid call-backs—phone calls from their editors asking them why they had deviated from the AP or UPI. If the editors were going to run a story that differed from the story in the nation’s 1,700 other newspapers, they wanted a good reason for it. Most reporters dreaded call-backs. Thus the