BOOKS
Blue Smoke and Mears
An AP Vet Ventilates on Eleven Elections
| Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Presidential
Campaigning: A Reporter's Story By Walter Mears. Andrews McMeel. 360 pp. $24.95 |
Hyannis, Massachusetts, 1960. Enter Senate candidate Claiborne Pell, decked out in immaculate blue blazer, crisp white shirt and just the right tie. The Rhode Islander is on hand for a routine back pat from the presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy. But a young Associated Press reporter, Walter Mears, notes that Pell has pulled something a little below the belt: he's wearing torn khaki shorts and beat-up tennies, without socks. Pell's upper half is temporarily back from vacation, but it appears the rest of his body is still on the sailboat.
Today, TV and wire photographers — to say nothing of reporters — would have had such a candidate by the shorts. "Are you taking this race seriously? Aren't you disrespecting your party leader? Are you under a doctor's care?" But 1960 was a less cynical time and the press observed an unwritten guideline: cut these guys some slack. It was "head shots only" for the endorsement session. The hacks kept mum.
Cut to Manchester, New Hampshire, 2000. Mears and a fellow AP primary-election reporter are in the hotel bar. The presidential candidate Bill Bradley's face pops up on the TV screen.
"The blond bartender looked up and frowned," Mears recalls. "'That dick,' she said. We wondered whether we'd heard right, asked, and she repeated it. Bradley, she said, had stayed at the hotel periodically, called for room service and demanded that his food be at his door almost instantly. When it wasn't, he'd call and snarl at the help." What's more, he didn't tip.
Mears likes gossip but doesn't confuse it with news, hence the candidate's churlishness never makes the wire. But word hits the papers soon enough that Bill Bradley is a cheapskate who abuses common folk — which exemplifies how the old unwritten press guideline has been revised. Give these guys some slack — just enough to hang them.
That's the difference forty years of increasingly ugly politics and political journalism has made, according to Mears.
Deadlines Past is not another plodding, self-reverential press fogy tome. It's not a standard campaign history, although it covers everything from the Johnson landslide of 1964 to the "long count" election of 2000.
It is a puckish survey of the blunders and idiocies political flesh is heir to, and a lament that today's stage-managed campaigns make it so hard to put gaffes in context. As old cultural taboos eroded in the seventies and eighties, reporters began revealing what once had been off limits. Political consultants responded by laying down smoke screens around their candidates. Today's frustrated campaign journalists prize any glimmer of authenticity, even when it comes secondhand from a disgruntled room-service waiter.
Gone are the days when a reporter might take a candidate's measure
while sharing swigs from a tequila bottle, as the veteran AP political
reporter did with Barry Goldwater in 1964. And gone are the days
when a nominee could follow Goldwater's unscripted path to self-destruction,
speculating about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam and saying
U.S. field commanders in Europe needed the authority to launch
tactical nukes on their own initiative. Today, one might add,
the boldest foreign policy schemes are carefully screened by handlers
— until after a candidate is commander in chief.
Speckled throughout the book are nuggets that Mears kept from the wire but now discloses, providing fresh insights for one and all. Presidential candidates might glean the following lessons:
- Cultivate those who cover you. Even the press-hating Richard
Nixon understood he had to be on good terms with the AP guy,
whose campaign stories appeared in hundreds of papers. So, when
he first met Mears, Nixon "looked at me intently. Then
he said my name, Walter Mears, slowly, and repeated it, slowly.
It was as though he was recording it on a memory bank."
Nixon greeted him by name ever after. Problem was, he also began calling the wire service's State Department correspondent "Walter Mears," and introduced him as such on foreign trips. Both reporters had crew cuts, and it evidently was that single characteristic Nixon used to drum the name in: "Mears, A.P., crew cut, Mears, A.P., crew cut." Nixon evidently didn't realize that it's TV, not print, where the hair makes the reporter.
Bill Clinton, by the way, was far more adaptable when massaging the wire. Once his dog, Buddy, slobbered on the shoes of AP's president, Lou Boccardi. As Mears is my witness, the Leader of the Free World grabbed some Kleenex, squatted, and buffed like an old-time shoeshine boy.
- Read the crowds. Goldwater once flew into poor, working class, Democratic West Virginia and found a far larger crowd than expected waiting at the airport. Aides declared the turnout part of a surge in blue-collar support for the conservative 1964 challenger. But Mears worked the rope line and discovered that most people had come not to support Goldwater but to see his chartered 727 - a new model that few in those parts had laid eyes on. "Besides, a man added morbidly, they wondered whether the plane would be able to land on the relatively short runway of the mountaintop airport."
- READ THE CROWDS! Delivering his standard campaign speech, the GOP contender Steve Forbes declared with indignation that estate taxes gave the IRS license to molest the dead. "No taxation without respiration," he boomed. Audiences usually cheered and chortled at that line, but this one was silent. Why? Perhaps because he was speaking to residents of a retirement home, replete with wheel chairs and oxygen tanks.
- Use human props with care. To make amends after coming out against school busing for racial balance in 1972, the Democrat Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson "singled out a black TV reporter covering his campaign, draping an arm around the guy's shoulder and repeatedly calling him, 'my little buddy.'" Cringe city.
- Rehearse. Ronald Reagan, of all people, evidently failed to do so before accompanying his wife, Nancy, to a church where communion tradition was to take a piece of bread, dip it, and down it. Nancy led off, but her bread slipped into the cup and she couldn't get it out. Reagan, who was less observant than he let on, "seemed puzzled. He took the bread and paused. Then he dropped it into the wine and walked away."
That last anecdote could be grist for the growing body of journalists who psychoanalyze candidates. Consider also the time when Mears showed up at the Oval Office with a swollen jaw from dental surgery and quipped, "I need your teeth." Instead of flashing the famous ultrabright smile, Jimmy Carter took issue with the premise. He went so far as to open his jaws and to insist that Mears stare into the presidential maw; Carter remained open wide until Mears acknowledged that a molar did indeed need repair.
Did an inferiority complex drive this president to agonize over any imperfection? Perhaps. But Mears attributes the episode to Jimmy Carter's total lack of humor. That theory is plausible. The president was being awfully literal-minded. But if Carter's humor deficit was 100 percent, how did he manage to get a Tokyo audience rolling in the aisles when he told a joke during his simultaneously translated speech? Because the translator had not even translated Carter's jest. "I told them, 'The president has just told a joke.'"
It's important to note that Deadlines Past also offers practical suggestions for working journalists. To cite just one example: when you agree to split the bill equally with heavy-hoisting colleagues, "drink defensively." Journalism's Perrier Generation ought to give that a try.
Mears says little about himself, but takes an understandable pride at having been, in the words of one colleague quoted in The Boys on the Bus, "the best in the goddam world. He can get out a coherent story with the right point on top in a minute and thirty seconds, left-handed." Or as Mears puts it, "almost instantly."
Of course, "almost" means "also ran" if a wire service is competing with live tv on a breaking story. No one can out-type the speed of light, which means fast fingers are becoming about as outmoded as John Henry's hammer. That's why Mears's reputation, and his 1977 Pulitzer Prize, came much more from the clear explanation and shrewd judgments in his stories than from the dazzling pace of their execution.
Like others of the political reporting generation now straddling
seventy, Mears was a world-class crap detector. One suspects that
a Walter Mears or a Jack Germond would have seen through Jayson
Blair in about twenty seconds. These guys were about reading people,
not pushing papers or building an empire. Maybe we'd better yank
them out of retirement.
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