(Dobbs) Covering A Campaign Will Throw You Some Curves

It's a privilege, as a journalist, to be a fly on the wall.

Now that we are into the process of presidential primaries, with the first actual primary election tomorrow, my thoughts go back to three of my own memorable experiences during the very first election year I ever covered, which was (OMG) 1972. So here they are, those three stories, a behind-the-scenes look at the kinds of curves the campaign trail can throw at you. And did throw at me.

If you’re old enough to remember, the primaries used to be a big deal, so big that the three networks— and in those days, ABC, CBS, and NBC were the only game in town— would preempt prime-time programming to provide wall-to-wall coverage of that day’s primary.

As a young producer with ABC News, my job during the ’72 primaries was to stage the network’s live prime time coverage on the ground. Along with correspondents and camera crews and technicians, I went from Iowa to New Hampshire, to Florida and Ohio and eventually every state we had decided to cover.

Since tomorrow’s primary is in New Hampshire, I’ll start there. 

ABC’s national affairs correspondent— after a 20 year stint covering politics including the White House for The New York Times— was a gruff and gravelly-voiced man named Bill Lawrence. Bill was a relentless reporter, and our main guy for the primaries.

It’s February 29th, “leap day” in Manchester, New Hampshire. That’s where we would do our live broadcast about the primary two nights later. It was a Sunday night and maybe half a dozen of us had decided to go out to dinner and would meet in the lobby of our suburban Wayfarer Motor Inn at 6 o’clock. Five of us showed up, but not Bill. He was senior in age to any of the rest of us, so we waited, and waited, and waited, until finally, knowing that Bill was a heart patient, someone got worried. She went to the front desk and asked for the key to his room. 

When she knocked but got no response, she let herself in. And there was Bill Lawrence, slouched in a wing-back chair, his eyeglasses resting on his legs, a book fallen to the floor. Bill had had a heart attack. He was gone.

We went into crisis mode. Someone called the authorities, who quickly came to retrieve Bill’s body. Someone else called the Washington desk of ABC News, and as it turned out, the editor who answered on the DC end was one of Bill’s closest friends. Close enough that Bill, who was only recently divorced and had had his will rewritten, had given it for safekeeping to his friend, who had it right there in his desk drawer. 

Immediately, on the spot, he opened it, and among its many provisions were Bill Lawrence’s wish to be cremated wherever he died, then to have his ashes returned to Washington and eventually spread from the air over his favorite golf course. So that became the plan. But we had one little glitch: our live broadcast for primary election night was two nights away, and time was short. We called the mortician who promised to carry out Bill’s wish for cremation and deliver the ashes to us by the very next night.

And he did. After transmitting our day-before-the-primary story for ABC’s evening newscast, several of us were sitting around at the hotel talking about Bill, when the mortician arrived and handed over a plastic bag with Bill’s ashes inside. That was it. No urn, no metal box, just a plastic bag of ashes.

Part of the plan to fulfill Bill’s wish was that a different close friend, an ABC White House correspondent named Bill Gill, would catch the earliest shuttle flight from Washington to New York on primary day itself, then the next shuttle from New York to Boston, then a third from Boston to Manchester. Two of us— a colleague and I— would go to the airport and hand Bill over to him on the tarmac before he re-boarded the same plane he came in on to begin the same journey home.

The trouble was, we didn’t want to hand Bill Lawrence over to Bill Gill in a plastic bag. It just wasn’t dignified. But we had coverage assignments ourselves that day and didn’t have much time, so we stopped by a drug store and bought a naugahyde camera case with a shoulder strap, and put the bag with Bill Lawrence’s ashes inside. 

That’s what we gave to Bill Gill.

But the story’s not over. What Gill told us a few days later was that he didn’t want to unceremoniously shove his friend’s ashes under the seat ahead of his, so he held the naugahyde case on his lap. But he had the bad fortune on one of his flights to sit next to a camera nut, a woman who relentlessly pestered Bill with questions about what kind of camera he had in the case. He told us he tolerated it until he couldn’t take it anymore. He unzipped the case, pulled the plastic bag from its compartment, held it in front of the woman’s face and said, “This, madam, is Bill Lawrence.”

She never said another word.

The next story is about a primary night itself. In Ohio. It’s now late April, and the major contenders for the Democratic nomination are former Vice President (and 1968 presidential candidate) Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and South Dakota’s Senator George McGovern. The format for our election coverage in every primary state was to get each candidate into a hotel suite that we’d turned into a three-camera television studio to talk live about the returns. Each would be interviewed face-to-face by the correspondent who was covering his campaign, then also remotely by ABC’s anchorman in New York. In those days, that anchor was Howard K. Smith. I would be in the room too, sitting to the side between the correspondent and the candidate. 

We did the McGovern interview and all went smoothly. But something went wrong a few minutes later when we came back on the air with Humphrey. 

What went wrong was, at a certain point when Howard K. Smith was asking a question to Humphrey, Humphrey’s earphone went dead. He turned to me and told me in a whisper, so I quickly took off my own earphone and handed it to him so he could hear Smith again.

The trouble was, we used two different kinds of earphones on programs like that. One was for the candidate so he could hear questions from the anchorman. The other was for the rest of us so we could hear not only the anchorman’s voice but also the director’s from the control room in New York.

Normally that wouldn’t matter. Hubert Humphrey was a pro. But he also was a talker. What I mean is, he would talk until someone stopped him. In response to a question late in the interview, he was going on, (and on, and on), until the director, who had missed the transfer of the earphone from my ear to Humphrey’s, said into his microphone, “Will someone please tell the old windbag to wind it up!” 

I didn’t hear it because I no longer had an earphone, but I happened to be watching Humphrey from all of four feet away and saw just the slightest flinch on his face as he efficiently wrapped up his long-winded sentence and went silent. Smith thanked the candidate (who won that primary) and went to a commercial. Humphrey removed the earphone, put it in my hand, leaned right into my face, and said, “Can the old windbag go now?”

The last story isn’t from a primary that year, it’s from the general election, specifically from November 7th, election night itself. 

Once the primaries were over, my assignment was to produce ABC’s daily coverage of the campaign of George McGovern, who had won the Democratic nomination to challenge Richard Nixon’s campaign for reelection. 

I’ve covered several presidential campaigns and you have to understand, even as much as they travel from state to state and speak to thousands of people, candidates live in a bubble. When their chartered jetliner lands in a new city, they go from airplane to SUV and their motorcades, including staff and journalists from the campaign plane, are escorted from one appearance to the next at high speed by the local police. They never even stop at a red light. Generally they’ll be driven to the rear of their destination and pull into the basement to unload, missing any protesters waiting out front. Then when it’s time to speak, usually someone will have warmed up the crowd so that by the time the candidate comes on, everyone’s on high octane as they rise to their feet and applaud as if the next messiah has just walked into the room. 

In a bubble like that, how could any candidate believe the polls if they show that he or she is going to lose?

That’s what the polls showed about George McGovern, that he would lose to Nixon, but he just didn’t believe it. Almost all he had seen for months on end was enthusiasm, even adulation. And he was running against an incumbent who had not just the stain of Watergate but the stain of Vietnam on his hands.

Then came election night. McGovern lost 49 states to Nixon, every state except Massachusetts. 

The correspondent with whom I worked covering McGovern was a man named Frank Reynolds. In some ways, Reynolds and McGovern had bonded. They were only a year apart in age, and both had sons who had struggled with drugs. On election night itself, we traveled with McGovern to Rapid City, in his home state of South Dakota. And once the devastating returns were in, McGovern invited Frank up to his suite at the Holiday Inn, and Frank asked if I could come along.

We walked into the candidate’s bedroom and there he was, sitting on the edge of the bed, bent forward, his head in his hands. He seemed close to tears. He told us he had come to terms with losing, but he couldn’t reconcile himself with the fact that he’d lost so big to a man so flawed.

It was a rare privilege to be a fly on that wall, to see how George McGovern really felt before he put on his brave face and went down to the hotel ballroom to concede.

Covering a campaign will throw you some curves. They can be just as sharp for journalists today as they were more than 50 years ago for me. And with one caucus down, 45 primaries and four more caucuses to go, those curves will come up.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.