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Authors: Timothy Crouse
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in the group. And I said, ‘Jeez, Walter, I brought it up and you had eight co-sponsors, but the vote was 13 to 1 against you.’ ”
The members of PWDS did not constitute a pack. They were too confident, competitive, proud, and self-sufficient for that. They also differed ideologically. Germond for instance was a political agnostic, leaning toward liberalism; § Novak was increasingly embracing the ideological tenets of the Sun King; and Nolan stood, on many matters, to the left of George McGovern.
But they did form a sort of club, with a certain code and certain rituals. If you shared a cab with members of PWDS, for instance, they would invariably dive for the back seat, leaving you to ride with the driver. At the end of the ride, one of them would say, “I think we’d better invoke the Germond rule.”
“What’s that?” you would say.
“The Germond rule states that the person who rides up front has to pay.”
It was an established rule, widely accepted throughout the world of political journalism, and most people paid.
But PWDS was primarily a dinner group, and their main goal was to set themselves up for the 1972 campaign. They did the drudge work of political journalism, therefore they were entitled to an advantage, a closer relationship with the candidates. They saw the dinners as a new tool of the trade. The alternative was to go around, individually, and formally interview each new cabinet member or potential candidate—which would teach them next to nothing about the man’s personality. “What we were trying to do,” said Germond, “was to sit down with the guy without having to file any shit about his program or something.Have a couple of pops and dinner, talk, and decide ‘What kind of a guy is this, has he got any class?’ You don’t hand down arbitrary, ex cathedra judgments—get to know the man. And this was true of cabinet members, Presidential candidates—you learn—the people are nice, a lot of them anyway. Or sometimes you don’t learn anything. Our great non-learning session was George McGovern. Jeez, we were the dumbest bastards in the world about George McGovern.”
McGovern actually came twice, and the second time, in 1971, he carefully spelled out his entire strategy for winning the nomination. “To show you how strange it was,” says Warren Weaver, “I do not even remember it. I just didn’t believe the man. I thought it was a pipe dream.” That was the consensus of the whole group that night. “We thought he was a nice guy, even a savvy guy,” says Germond. “But we didn’t believe him. We figured he was a total loss.” So George McGovern slipped right through the screening process. The incredulity of the press failed to stop him.
In fact, the dinners yielded very few tangible results. Mel Laird, Bob Finch, Teddy Kennedy provided nothing more than a few minor stories. From dining with George Wallace, the group was surprised to discover that he was consistently witty and genuinely puritanical, but they found out little else. The dinners provided only one solid insight—that Ed Muskie had a bad temper. At his first guest shot, in 1970, the members gave him the old George Romney treatment, boring in with question after question about Vietnam. Muskie kept giving equivocal answers and finally he blew up, attacking the group for trying to trap him. They
were
trying to trap him, but Presidential candidates were supposed to stay cool in the face of such questioning. Some of the members knew about Muskie’s temper from covering his vice-presidential campaign in 1968, but most of them were stunned.
Muskie appeared again in December 1971, accompanied by his press secretary, a former Boston
Globe
editor named Dick Stewart. Every time Muskie began to lose control, Stewartwould say, “Now, Ed, don’t get testy!” They began to wonder a little about Muskie’s stability, but most of them decided that it was just a minor flaw and wouldn’t make any
The members of PWDS did not constitute a pack. They were too confident, competitive, proud, and self-sufficient for that. They also differed ideologically. Germond for instance was a political agnostic, leaning toward liberalism; § Novak was increasingly embracing the ideological tenets of the Sun King; and Nolan stood, on many matters, to the left of George McGovern.
But they did form a sort of club, with a certain code and certain rituals. If you shared a cab with members of PWDS, for instance, they would invariably dive for the back seat, leaving you to ride with the driver. At the end of the ride, one of them would say, “I think we’d better invoke the Germond rule.”
“What’s that?” you would say.
“The Germond rule states that the person who rides up front has to pay.”
It was an established rule, widely accepted throughout the world of political journalism, and most people paid.
But PWDS was primarily a dinner group, and their main goal was to set themselves up for the 1972 campaign. They did the drudge work of political journalism, therefore they were entitled to an advantage, a closer relationship with the candidates. They saw the dinners as a new tool of the trade. The alternative was to go around, individually, and formally interview each new cabinet member or potential candidate—which would teach them next to nothing about the man’s personality. “What we were trying to do,” said Germond, “was to sit down with the guy without having to file any shit about his program or something.Have a couple of pops and dinner, talk, and decide ‘What kind of a guy is this, has he got any class?’ You don’t hand down arbitrary, ex cathedra judgments—get to know the man. And this was true of cabinet members, Presidential candidates—you learn—the people are nice, a lot of them anyway. Or sometimes you don’t learn anything. Our great non-learning session was George McGovern. Jeez, we were the dumbest bastards in the world about George McGovern.”
McGovern actually came twice, and the second time, in 1971, he carefully spelled out his entire strategy for winning the nomination. “To show you how strange it was,” says Warren Weaver, “I do not even remember it. I just didn’t believe the man. I thought it was a pipe dream.” That was the consensus of the whole group that night. “We thought he was a nice guy, even a savvy guy,” says Germond. “But we didn’t believe him. We figured he was a total loss.” So George McGovern slipped right through the screening process. The incredulity of the press failed to stop him.
In fact, the dinners yielded very few tangible results. Mel Laird, Bob Finch, Teddy Kennedy provided nothing more than a few minor stories. From dining with George Wallace, the group was surprised to discover that he was consistently witty and genuinely puritanical, but they found out little else. The dinners provided only one solid insight—that Ed Muskie had a bad temper. At his first guest shot, in 1970, the members gave him the old George Romney treatment, boring in with question after question about Vietnam. Muskie kept giving equivocal answers and finally he blew up, attacking the group for trying to trap him. They
were
trying to trap him, but Presidential candidates were supposed to stay cool in the face of such questioning. Some of the members knew about Muskie’s temper from covering his vice-presidential campaign in 1968, but most of them were stunned.
Muskie appeared again in December 1971, accompanied by his press secretary, a former Boston
Globe
editor named Dick Stewart. Every time Muskie began to lose control, Stewartwould say, “Now, Ed, don’t get testy!” They began to wonder a little about Muskie’s stability, but most of them decided that it was just a minor flaw and wouldn’t make any
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