Historical Series Book Club: How Jules Witcover's Writing Illustrates The Bias That So Many Political Reporters Have Towards Their Subject

 

 

One of the most famous lines in political history came in the 1988 Vice Presidential debate when Lloyd Bentsen, Michael Dukakis’s running mate told Dan Quayle: “I knew Jack Kennedy. I worked with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.”

It was a line that Quayle would never live down. However he was able to joke about it and perhaps the most memorable occasion came at the publication of Jules Witcover and Jack Germond’s book covering the campaign just passed was published. By that point Witcover had begun to take up the mantle Theodore White had with his Making of the President series. Quayle took the opportunity to point this out: “I knew Ted White. I worked with Ted White. And you guys are no Ted White.”

Having read as much of Witcover’s books in my life I can safely say that Quayle’s bon mot about Witcover was as accurate as the one Bentsen made about him. But this is not a mere case of the fact that anyone who tried to take up the mantle of Theodore White, who I wrote about in a book review last December, could do anything but compare unfavorably too. Having reread several of Witcover’s books recently I come to realize there is a subtle undertone that Witcover himself was most likely unaware of.

When Spiro Agnew famously referred to the media as ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ it was written off by many as a purely partisan attack from the Nixon White House. In truth Agnew was dead on though he was clearly wrong about reporters purely showing a biased view towards his boss. Having read a lot of political journalism over my life I can tell you with certain that many of them very clearly hate all politicians equally. By extension they often show a similar contempt – if not outright hatred – for the political process at every level, including the voters themselves.

This is a theme that dates back nearly to the dawn of the republic but it became increasingly venomous in the 2oth century. Some of the most famous journalists of all time, such as Heywood Broun and Westbrook Pegler held a visceral contempt for the Roosevelt administration and much of the political structure. H.L. Mencken took a step further, frequently criticizing the public’s intellect, taking a dim view of the progressive era and an increasingly racist attitude in his final years. Witcover was an heir to their style of writing and it is clearly evident in every book of his I’ve read.

I’ve come to think that the political journalists, certainly reporters in the style of Witcover don’t have so much a liberal bias but a reporter’s bias. This is to be expected: the journalist’s agenda is always different from that of the politician by necessity. The difference in Witcover’s work is the timing of them. Written primarily in the 1970s in the aftermath of the Nixon administration the political media took a much harder look at politicians then they ever had before.  This is understandable: like the rest of America they had been manipulated by Nixon and his people for six years and it must have affected them harshly. And after the immense abuses of power they decided to hold politicians to a higher standard in order to safeguard democracy.

That’s the narrative they’ll tell you but they’re writers. In truth writers like Witcover, who were cynical and judgmental of all things political by nature, found something that proved to the public  - in their minds – that their cynicism and contempt for politicians was warranted. And as a result in the post-Watergate era the standard they held politicians and democracy, already very high, to an even higher one and they were far from subtle in their contempt. I find this present in so many contemporary political books of the time but I’m going to use Witcover as my example because I’ve extensively read his work. He wrote many books on politics but I’m going to focus on two for this article: 85 Days, his story of his experience traveling with Robert F. Kennedy on his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968 and Marathon, his book on the 1976 Presidential campaign which, not coincidentally, was the first post-Watergate Presidential election cycle.

85 Days was Witcover’s first book. He was far from a neophyte journalist; he’d been working since 1954 and has been in DC by the time he was assigned to cover Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign from the moment it began until its horrific end. Reportedly he was steps away from where Kennedy was shot in the Ambassador Hotel which has to have been a life-changing as well as traumatic event. I have little doubt he sold and managed to get this book published for that reason and he revisited it 20 years later. He visited the subject again in 1997 in The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America.

I don’t want to diminish the power of Kennedy’s assassination on America at the time, certainly not to a man who essentially witnessed it. It sent shock waves through the country and the world. But as I’ve written in several previous articles including one about Kennedy himself, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, much like his brother’s five years earlier has cemented a place in the mythos of American history that has never been able to be shot down regardless of reality. And while it is understandable that the average person who lived through it would believe this mythos a journalist meant to look at facts objectively is supposed to know better.

Indeed, as I mentioned in my article about White even though he was aware of both the national trauma and tragedy in his 1968 chronicle  (which was no doubt written at the same time Witcover was writing his book) has a much clearer sense of it that either Witcover or indeed the historical record has argued. White noted that there was no guarantee Kennedy would have won the New York primary a few days later, that he thinks it highly unlikely Kennedy would have been able to defeat Humphrey for the nomination at Chicago, or even that if Kennedy had managed both that he would have defeated Nixon, He also speculates that this leaves out what the Republicans might have done and that they might have chosen to nominate Reagan or Nelson Rockefeller instead of Nixon. This is objective journalism and a lucid perception of events.

There is no evidence, certainly not in the version of 85 Days I read (the later edition) that this is even a consideration to Witcover decades after the fact. The fact is Witcover was so blinded by the tragedy and his closeness to it that he remains incapable of realizing many things, not the least of which is the critical difference between White’s book and Witcover. White’s book is objective. Witcover’s can’t remotely be considered such.

Some might not say that’s a fair comparison and that may be true at the time Witcover first wrote 85 Days. (It’s more of an issue he seems locked on to that idea decades after the fact but I’ll let that pass for now.) And I’ll acknowledge that Witcover’s book might be worth being considering seriously as a memoir rather than a historical archive. But even by that standard, it’s ridiculously biased towards all things Robert Kennedy and I don’t know if to this day (Witcover is still alive as of this writing) he ever realized just how much manipulation by the man he was covering was in play.

I’ve argued that JFK’s greatest accomplishment as a President was not so much legislation or policy but how well he performed on camera. JFK was a personal friend with so many reporters – Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post was considered ‘a stooge for Jack Kennedy’ – and none of them seem to have noticed even decades after the fact how much they had been manipulated by his administration for a favorable press to cover up their lies. This was true even now: despite the revelations of the Pentagon Papers and everything we have learned about the Kennedys attempts to assassinate Castro he has an aura that comes away clean even from people who should know better.

Everyone argues that Bobby grew after the death of his brother and that may be true. But his ambition and contempt for Lyndon Johnson never went away. Bobby would have been the front-runner as the  Democratic nominee for President in 1972 had events normally transpired which is why he facilitated so long when Lowenstein looked for someone to challenge LBJ in New Hampshire. He might have wanted not to be this all about him; he might also not have wanted to destroy those choices. So McCarthy became the conscience candidate – and when he nearly beat LBJ in New Hampshire everything changed. McCarthy was named Time’s Man of the Year and there’s a clear argument for it: his movement represented everything that followed. Left out of Witcover’s book is a quote from a McCarthy supporter: “After New Hampshire, it was like Christmas morning. And when Bobby got in a few days later, it was like someone stole all our presents.”

Witcover doesn’t deal much with the McCarthy campaign in regard to Kennedy’s primary run and when he does, like so many Kennedy acolytes he does so with disdain viewing him as an elitist snob. That description isn’t inaccurate but it’s also the kind of thing that would be written by. well, someone campaigning for Kennedy. And make no mistake 85 Days is essentially a love letter to everything Kennedy did during that campaign.

If you believe Witcover’s writing Bobby’s campaign was three months of incredible joy and fun with some politics thrown in. What Witcover never got is that this was no doubt by design by Bobby Kennedy. He knew what his reputation with the media was and he knew the challenge he had was to win them over as much as – if not more – then the voters. And because of that Kennedy did everything in his power to make sure everybody on the press loved him which meant pulling the same tricks his brother did over the years.

And it seems to have worked to the point that not even Witcover and the other writers really realize how much they’ve been buffaloed. There’s a critical moment where the reporters serenade Bobby Kennedy with a satirical song called “The Hoosier Cannonball”. They clearly make this songs up in private (I’ve seen them in other Witcover books) but Kennedy seems to be only candidate who they chose to sing it too when they were finished.  Witcover deals a lot not only with this song but how much Kennedy enjoyed it. To him, more than anything else, this symbolized the Kennedy campaign more than any victory in the Democratic primary.

And that may be the real reason it’s impossible for me to take 85 Days seriously as a piece of campaign journalism. I’ve read books that were written at the time and years after the fact about the 1968 primary campaign. I’ve read them about the campaign itself; I’ve read them from the perspective of McCarthy and Humphrey. All of them can look at this with detachment about both the campaign and the realities of it. Witcover’s book alone reads almost like it could have been written by one of the people on the campaign trail the way it adds to the picture of sainted Bobby.

I don’t deny there are many great things about the primary campaign but I refuse to de facto believe it ran absolutely perfectly, considering among other things the Oregon primary ended up in a loss as well as the fact that Kennedy was never able to persuade McCarthy to drop out no matter how many primary wins he managed. We’ll never know if McCarthy would have done so after losing the June 6^th primary or if Bobby could have won in New York for the most tragic reasons. There’s now become recent knowledge that even the campaign knew that one way or another the California primary was going to be the zenith of their run: they knew that Humphrey was within maybe two days of clinching the delegates needed to win. In a sick way Bobby Kennedy was assassinated  at exactly the right time for his campaign: before he actually managed to face a struggle at the convention he was almost certain to lose if for no other reason then the fact that LBJ would have moved heaven and earth to make sure his mortal enemy never got the Presidency.

Yet Witcover, even 20 years later never seems to have reckoned with that reality. In the new edition he adds an epilogue of a ‘plan’ the campaign had to win over all of the delegates that were supposedly committed to Humphrey before Chicago. Even a casual observer can see how much dreams and air its built on, and like so many of the leftists ideals that were part and parcel of the students movement, it is not built on the reality of the convention that was to come. The actual events at Chicago were a nightmare with Bobby dead; I find it impossible to believe it would be any different even if Bobby and his campaign were still alive.

Half a century later the left refused to let go of this dream and it’s clear that it spoiled their appetite for any participation in politics for at least a generation. Witcover says as much in his afterword and there’s more regret in it then any subsequent political writing I’ve read about it over the years. And when you consider not only how close he was to Bobby Kennedy himself along with everything else that happened in the aftermath, his subsequent approach to political writing is understandable. The difference is he seems to have forgotten his objectivity when it came to Bobby but still is holding every candidate that follows to that nostalgic standard. That’s somewhat forgivable for that cynicism to affect the average voter. But for a journalist who is supposed to be by his nature objective and even-handed, it’s an unforgivable sin. And that bias permeates every single book he wrote afterwards, particularly the ones involving presidential campaigns.

I was introduced to The Making of the President series and Witcover’s books that followed it at roughly the same age and by the time I had graduated college I’d read all of White’s books at least once and three of Witcover’s on the Presidency. As  references as well as snapshots of the era they both have incredible value to the historian. But it’s clear after multiple re-readings on my part that there is a clear difference between the two as writers besides the changes of the eras they cover. White was born in 1914; Witcover in 1927 but the two men were both full-time journalists during the era White covers in his books. The clearest difference, I think, is tone.

White, as I mentioned in my reviews of his books, managed to keep an objective lens about the candidates and the Presidents he covered and went to great lengths to treat all of them with complete impartiality. Whatever personal feelings he had about them or the process itself there is little sign of bias towards them or it during the series. The same can’t be said of Witcover’s books and its very evident in Marathon.

Witcover’s books are superior only in length. Marathon is over 650 pages long, nearly 150 pages longer than the hardcover edition of the 1968 edition, by far the longest of White’s four chronicles. Witcover has clearly has the same amount of access to a much larger field of candidates than any White ever tried to cover and he does a decent job of giving attention to even the minor candidates in the Democratic primary. He also divides his book well, dealing extensively with the leadup to both campaigns, the extensive primaries that took place, the slow movement of Jimmy Carter to the Democratic nomination and the long struggle between Ford and Reagan for the Republican one. He deals with the battles with both conventions, more extensively the Republicans in Kansas City, the leadup to both campaigns for the general election and everything that happened in the fall campaign.

But the tone is different. I don’t see so much objectivity from Witcover as indifference. For a reporter who seems to have as much access to the candidates as White did if not more he seems to be spending all of it concentrating on every single thing each candidate did wrong during the campaign. This was the most extensive campaign to date and a revolutionary one as it was the first where one candidate competed in every single primary. I don’t blame Witcover for missing this fact; I do blame for how he seems to consider it a burden. Not as much for the candidates or even the public but really for him. Marathon may have been a satiric dig on how Witcover viewed the campaign; it’s not the kind of title White would have considered. And that cynicism shows in so many of the titles of his subsequent books. The 1984 chronicle doesn’t even bother to hide Witcover’s (and his co-author Jack Germond’s) feelings with it’s title: Wake Me When It’s Over. Other titles share that similar cynicism such as 1980’s Blue Smoke and Mirrors and 1988’s Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars. White may well be reflected the mood of the electorate with these titles but reading them they’re just as clearly a reflection of how he as a journalist viewed them and if that’s not  being a nattering nabob of negativism I don’t know what is.

And while he acknowledges the success of Carter’s strategy throughout the primaries (though almost always as an afterthought) he doesn’t bother to hide his contempt for Carter himself. This was an overall feeling that most of the Washington media held against him not only during the campaign but was a major factor in so much of his Presidency. Everything that Carter does to make himself appealing to voters, especially his homespun attitude and apparent honesty, rub him the wrong way. But perhaps the biggest factor is the way he chose, like many candidates in both parties, to run as an outsider. Perhaps Witcover thought that this was a dig against him  - a reporter is an insider of a sort -  and that was a source of judgment against him.

A recurring theme on what he considers Carter’s fuzziness on issues. This is clearly something that sticks in Witcover’s craw and I truly believe it shows the media’s blindness when it comes to campaigning for office during this period. The primary campaign was the beginning of the end of print journalism’s ability to control the narrative about candidates the way that they’d had influence involving conventions that were run by the bosses. Carter realized that the path for an unknown governor of a Southern state was to ignore the people in charge – which included the media – and go directly to the people for votes. This was particularly effective in Iowa and New Hampshire and kept working even as he moved on to bigger states. The press’s job, even if they don’t want to acknowledge it, is to create stories and in the gospel according to Witcover, stories involve when a candidate makes a mistake or says something that they can prove as such. This is one of the critical differences between Witcover and White. White may not agree with the process but he respects it. Witcover ends Marathon with the conclusion the process itself is flawed and can only offer a half-hearted argument that direct democracy and primary campaigns are good for democracy. He might get credit for how exhausting the nation will subsequently find them but you wonder if this is because he and his colleagues find it more exhausting.

If his problem was only with the fact that the voters selected Carter as their standard bearer, it would be bad enough. But while he goes through in detail every primary challenger Carter faces  - who he had as much access too and possibly more – he doesn’t seem to be big fans of them either. This is particularly stunning when you consider how accomplished so many of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination were in 1976. They included  two of the most revered liberal Senators of the 20^th century: Frank Church of Idaho and Birch Bayh of Indiana. (Both would lose their seats in the 1980 election.) Bayh was one of the most accomplished legislators in the Senate, being responsible for the foundation of what would become the 25^th amendment and was a huge supporter of the ERA. It also features one of the great Cold War Democratic senators, Henry Jackson of Washington. These men are among the titans of legislative history – and none of them pass muster in Witcover’s eyes to be good candidates for President. His sole judgment seems to be that, in his mind, they ran inadequate campaigns for the Presidency and by that metric, they don’t deserve respect. White was capable of showing respect even for those who failed horribly in his books, such as John Lindsay, even if they had terrible campaigns. In Witcover’s opinion, the only standard is that they failed to win the nomination and more importantly, he considered the campaign lacking.

And he shows, if anything, less support for those on the other side of the aisle. The book deals with the aftermath of Watergate and how Gerald Ford ascended to the Presidency. It’s clear even then that Witcover considers Ford an intellectual lightweight but he mostly restrains himself until he pardons Nixon. Then he can’t wait to pile on every single blunder Ford makes in the first year of his campaign. It’s telling that he doesn’t even think that the two attempts on his life within a month – made by Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore – deserve as much coverage in the book as a song written about Ford by the Gridiron Club that year to the tune of ‘If I Only Had A Brain.”

But he doesn’t have any more respect for Ronald Reagan either. If he blames Carter for being fuzzy on issues, he blames Reagan for being too honest. Even in 1976 Reagan’s penchant for telling stories that had no basis in reality were well known to the media and it was already becoming something that irked them. The Ford-Reagan primary campaign was one between the conservative and moderate wings of the party, one that ended up setting the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution. Reagan’s remarkable success as challenging an incumbent is just as remarkable as McCarthy’s New Hampshire campaign eight years earlier but in Witcover’s eyes everything Reagan succeeds at is just an example of Ford’s failures. Of course he is just as quick to point out Reagan’s blunders on the campaign trail as well and how they cost him primaries. Say what you will about Witcover, but when it comes to what he considers bad campaigning, he's bipartisan in his contempt.

He shows a similar lack of respect for many of the party elders as well. Humphrey seemed the likely frontrunner for the nomination before the primaries began and was a threat throughout but Witcover has no interest in him beyond that. He regards Bob Dole; Ford’s eventually pick for Vice President as barely worthy to be dogcatcher. And his one mention of George H.W. Bush, who Ford considered for his Vice President before picking Nelson Rockefeller is withering: “Everyone knowledgeable in Republican politics considered Bush incompetent to be President’. This may very well have been true given the resistance to Bush’s campaign for the nomination four years later among so many Republicans as well as Reagan’s resistance to picking Bush as his running mate. But it is not the kind of thing White would have let go to print.

Indeed the only people Witcover seems to have any respect for in Marathon are journalists like himself. Again and again, too often really, he puts himself – or at least the media – front and center in a White never tried to do in any of his books. The most passion Witcover shows in Marathon is not for any candidate or the election itself but for he and the press. They’re the heroes of this story. It’s not their fault they spend so much time covering the mistakes the candidates make; they’d like to be covering issues. It’s the candidates themselves that are inadequate. They need to campaign better and then we will give them respect. We don’t want to write about Reagan’s gaffes or how aggressive Dole is on the campaign trail or the fact that Carter flip-flops on issues. It’s the candidate’s responsibility not to make mistakes, not ours.

This is a feeling that only becomes more apparent in each volume. How much of this cynicism is due to the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate I can’t tell but no matter how far Witcover subsequently gets from them both, it’s clear the scars never clearly healed for him. It’s almost as if he thinks every candidate who runs for office or even considers has to potential to be worse than Nixon and must be judged as harshly, if not more so. This attitude became more apparent in journalism in the post-Watergate era and it frequently led, as I read in a different book, for every reporter to consider a blunder on the campaign trail the next Watergate. Joe Biden’s not attributing a quote to Neil Kinnock in the leadup to the 1988 Presidential campaign was the epitome of ridiculousness and it led to him having to withdraw from the race. But even as the media judged it as absurd (Witcover covers it himself in his book of 1988) they never consider if they’ve overcorrected.

There’s also the fact that voter turnout began to drop precipitously during the 1970s and continued until the 21^st century. When White writes about it – and when he did it was still much higher than it was during Witcover’s era  - he considers something to judge with melancholy. When Witcover reports the same statistic at the end of Marathon it’s proof that the public was as indifferent to it as he apparently is.

And this brings me to my final point. White never revealed his political affiliation in any of his books or even who he voted for. In the afterword of 85 Days Witcover doesn’t quite do that but when he rights of the subsequent failures of the Democrats in the 20 years after Kennedy’s assassination and how they essentially have abandoned the principals in the campaign, he all but spells it out. Much of this may very well be because of the impact Kennedy’s death had on him but anyone who read it could clearly get the idea of  liberal bias’ from the mainstream media.

Perhaps that’s the other reason that Witcover wrote the way he did. It wasn’t just that he thought every candidate running for President could be the next Richard Nixon; he thought that the only candidates who should be President was the next Bobby Kennedy. Maybe there is too much amateur psychology on my part but it would explain a lot about the tone not only of Marathon but every book Witcover wrote about the campaign cycle attitude. In his mind he was looking at every candidate and saying to himself: “I knew Bobby Kennedy. I covered Bobby Kennedy. And you sir are no Bobby Kennedy.”  None of the other candidates running for office ever compared themselves to him or tried to be Bobby but that opinion seems to permeate everything that he writes. And as Dan Quayle put when Bentsen used that line, for a journalist who was trying to be objective,  that was completely uncalled for.