Baying At the Heels of the Campaign Pack

A FRIEND SAID RECENTLY that cries for freedom of the press must be answered by the question, "Whose freedom and whose press?" Those who envision deep investigative reporting from journalists no longer hampered by legal threats, he argued, fail to perceive the obstacles never faced in the courtroom--pressures from management and the rest of the "pack," the inevitable effects of a grinding marathon beat, and of simple human frailty.

It is these pressures that limit the campaign press in The Boys on the Bus. The correspondents are bound to each other in a pack by the fear that they will miss something, and as tightly fettered to their editors by the order to produce the right news. Timothy Crouse '68, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, travelled with the pack in 1972, and his book is full of images of weary journalists, their blood and sanity drained by hectic cross-country pursuit. Some of the fatigued assimilated the standard speeches of the candidate to spill them on command, or idled hours away fabricating jingles that parody the man they follow.

But Crouse's book is not a war story and not all his cameos show delirious journalists. The book is wry and anecdotal, and Crouse knows how to be arch. While his writing is slick, sophisticated, and catchy, he retains a gravity in due respect to the political importance of the press. Entertaining as the style is, however, he's presenting a serious critique. What emerges most strongly are the hazards of pack journalism. The reporters have achieved a peculiar fraternity of chummy fellow travellers who, at a moment's notice, will forsake each other for a scoop.

But scoops come infrequently, and more often the newsmen are morbidly conventional, afraid that their leads will be different from the AP's stolid interpretation and so invoke their editors's reproaches. They surround wire reporter Walter Mears at his typewriter, then bandy about the chosen angle of the story, afraid to take chance.

Crouse implies that this obsession with duplicating the standard only enforces a level of mediocrity. In fact, it is the pariahs of pack journalism who can most easily surface with original and effective work. In what Crouse characterizes as a "male chauvinist profession," women can't pierce the camaraderie of the pack and enjoy a mobility the regular pack cruisers do not have.

For instance, Crouse writes that a television piece in which CBS's Cassie Mackin flatly stated that a Nixon allegation was false was "unique."

Perhaps it was no coincidence that it was a woman who went for Nixon's jugular. Mackin was an outsider. She had neither the opportunity nor the desire to travel with the all-male pack; therefore, she was not infected with the pack's chronic defensiveness and defeatism...she could still call a spade a spade.

Two other spurned outsiders were Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who exploded the Watergate story a year and a half ago. Crouse emphasizes that they had both been condemned to the city desk at The Washington Post before they took the assignment. "Their motivation," he writes, "sprang from desperation as much as ambition."

PERHAPS THE MOST ODIOUS effect of pack journalism, though, is the "winner's bus" attitude. Like bees to honey, journalists flock to a winner; it is both glamorous and exciting to herald the victor's progress. Crouse suggests that this feeling unconsciously prompts reporters to fashion their subject into a winner, to write stories that too exuberantly predict his success. Sometimes they are left in the lurch, like the disillusioned reporters who roseately optimized Muskie's rortune but suddenly discovered that the bus had run aground without warning.

One ugly aspect of this situation is the awesome potential of journalistic influence. Crouse fully realizes the power of the press. He relates several stories like that of a Rowland Evans-Robert Novak piece which "helped kill McGovern in Omaha." There is a self-fulfilling nature to a reporter's prophecies, that they not only predict but determine the people's preference.

The plight of the weary pack, however, is minor compared to the afflication that has palsied the White House campaign press corps since 1969--gelded by the tactics of another White House martinet, press secretary Ronald Ziegler. The pressure to remain a conventional and submissive mass is crippling on Pennsylvania Avenue: If the writers don't stay in line, they risk Ziegler's "ominous pat on the back." After that they might expect to receive tax audits, be ignored at press conferences, or be manipulated into squabbles over scoops with colleagues from their own paper. When Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register, reputedly "the toughest investigative reporter in Washington," finds that Ziegler has retracted a statement he made a Mollenhoff in private, his bitter dispute with Ziegler wins no supporters among his cowed associates.

Crouse comes off as a wayward idealist here, stopping at the typewriters of various press leaders to ask why they don't mutiny. They inevitably pause, deliver mealy-mouthed excuses, then resume work. Crouse stresses that again it is only from the outside that one might foil the Ziegler screen.

The ideal way to find out what was going on inside the White House was to approach it from the outside--drive over to State or HEW, for instance, and look up some Young Turk who had just had a pet program sold out by Haldeman or Ehrlichman in order to placate some right-wing governor; the Young Turk would be angry and would gladly tell the whole story. But usually a White House reporter didn't have time to cultivate sources outside the White House was his beat and had to stay there to protect himself in case a story broke.

DESPITE THE MYRIAD accounts of frustration or failure, Crouse's pages also brim with success stories. His biographical resumes of the "heavies" are executed with the clipped regularity of the photo machines that for a quarter will dispose of your physiognomy in train stations. And of course, there are the classic stories:

He [David Broder] broke into journalism at the age of ten, when a friend got a hectograph machine for Christmas, and they began publishing a weekly sheet and peddling it around the neighborhood. After that, Broder never wanted to be anything but a journalist.

Throughout, Crouse tries to find out what makes them tick--in one man, it is the grim resolve to efface with furious work the memory of the sudden death of wife and children. In another, it is his Pheidippides-like determination to sprint to pay telephones and deliver his story before fainting.

These profiles of the men behind the big by-lines are some of the most interesting material in the book. Generally, it is less their own shortcomings than it is editorial censorship that plagues these heavies. Jules Witcover, an ace for the Los Angeles Times, must keep his pieces free of analysis to get them published. R.W. "Johnny" Apple's on-target appraisal of a crucial vote in the 1972 Democratic Convention was killed by his New York Times editors because it didn't jibe with the standard account.

All this doesn't mean that Crouse's book is fit reading only for those newspaper freaks who must know where H.L. Mencken and Russell Baker went to high school. Crouse has a good angle on history. His behind-the-scenes view of McGovern's defeat gives a key to some of the man's personal qualities--an embarrassing candor and an inability to remain detached or be "political"--that figured in his failure.

However, Crouse has a tendency to wax a little too profound, to ascribe what one senses is too much importance to single events. The late-night meeting of a commiserating trio of heavies who have watched Muskie's demise he elevates to the level of a sadly belated conjunction of the Three Fates. Crouse also seizes on a touchy confrontation between the press and the Muskies during the Wisconsin campaign, giving to the event a sense of drama and crisis that one is hesitant to accept.

Despite the occasional tendency to be overearnest in his analysis of certain events, Crouse has a gift for constructive, compassionate criticism. He shows a willingness to fraternize with the boys on the bus, to understand them on their own terms, but it is his trenchant criticism of the institution of which they are a part that makes this book superb.