The Boys on the Bus

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

While reporters still snore like Hessians in a hundred beds throughout the hotel, the McGovern munchkins are 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 has decided after “prayerful and careful deliberation,” to endorse Senator McGovern. And there’s a detailed profile of Alameda County (“…agricultural products include sweet corn, cucumbers, and lettuce”), across which the press will be dragged today— – or is it tomorrow? Finally there is the mimeographed schedule, the orders of the day.

At 6:45 AM the phone on the bed-table goes off, and a sweet, chipper voice announces: “Good Morning, Mr. Crouse. It’s 6:45. The press bus leaves in 45 minutes from the front of the hotel.” She is up there in Room 819, the press suite, calling up the dozens of names on the press manifest, waking the agents of every great newspaper, wire service and network not only of America but of the world. In response to her calls, she is getting a shocking series of startled grunts, snarls, and obscenities.

The media heavies are 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 think: “Maybe I can pick McGovern up in Burbank at 9:55 and sleep for another hour.” Then, probably at almost the same instant, several score minds flash the same guilty thought: “But maybe he will get shot at the ministers’ breakfast.” And then each mind branches off into its own private nightmare recollection: of the correspondent who was taking a piss at the Laurel Shopping Center when they shot Wallace, of the ABC cameraman who couldn’t get his Bolex to start as Bremer emptied his revolver. A hundred hands grope for the toothbrush.

It is 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 for others. The press is consuming $200 a night worth of free cheap booze up there in the press suite, and some are consuming the lion’s share. Last night it took 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 Rasputin— – each time he was put to bed, he would reappear to cause yet more bedlam.

And yet, at 7:15 Rasputin is there for the baggage call, milling in the hall outside the press suite with fifty-odd other reporters. The first glance at all these fellow sufferers is deeply reassuring— – they all feel the same pressures you feel, their problems are your problems. Together, they seem to have the cohesiveness of an ant colony, but when you examine the scene more closely, each reporter appears to be jitterbugging around in quest of the answer that will quell some private anxiety.

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

They are 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 whistlestop train?” “Have you seen my partner?”

It’s Thursday, and many reporters are knotting their stomachs over their Sunday pieces, which have to be filed this afternoon at the latest. They are inhaling their cigarettes with more of a vengeance, and patting themselves more distractedly to make sure they have their pens and their notebooks. In the hall, a Secret Service agent is 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 steps forward to assist a palsied journalist in the process of threading a tag.

The reporters often consult their watches or ask for the time of departure. Among this crew, there is one great phobia – —the fear of getting left behind. Fresh troops have arrived today from the Humphrey bus, which is the Russian Front of the California primary, and they have 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 AP man.