A Sense of When and Where

Just after he had concluded his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Richard Nixon was collared by a reporter. Was Mr. Agnew surprised when he was chosen to be Nixon's running mate, the reporter wanted to know. Indeed he was, said Nixon. Only one reporter had suggested that he might be picked. "The only indication he had that he might have been considered was a story some months ago by Dave Broder." Nixon was referring to the national political correspondent for the Washington Post.

Nixon's tribute came as no surprise to the Washington press corps, whose members view Broder as perhaps the nation's top political correspondent. He has earned his reputation not with flamboyance but with meticulousness. Refusing to be confined to Washington, he thrives on the grueling cross-country chicken-and-peas circuit. Day in, day out, he lives with politics. The result is bedrock grounding in the workings of U.S. politics. "I admire the professionals who stay with it," he says, "who don't lose control of themselves in emotional binges, who view politics not as a holy war between virtue and evil but as the glory of the country--and a continuing source of amusement."

Dissatisfied Source. With that view of politics, Broder rarely overstates a case or falls into the common journalistic trap of discovering conflict where none, or little, exists. The results were evident in Broder's stories before and during last week's convention. While others made much of the "erosion" of Nixon support to Reagan and Rockefeller, Broder kept insisting that Nixon's delegate strength was still substantially intact. "I can't find any signs of motion that way," he said last week. He ran his own head counts, published firm numerical rundowns of key delegations. His sources were "not necessarily the top men in each delegation," he said. "Often a man farther down in the ranks can be a better source --particularly if he's dissatisfied with the way the delegation is heading."

Broder's coverage of Miami Beach was not a matter of scoops--that is not his style. Trends are what interest him. He was one of the first to note the Republican Party's switch to a more pragmatic, less contentious brand of politics after the disaster of 1964. He was among the earliest to spot the decay of Lyndon Johnson's consensus politics and the virtual collapse of the Democratic National Committee. Rather than complain, as they might have in the case of other reporters, Democratic politicians privately thanked Broder for pointing out their delinquencies. "Seventy-five percent of covering the political beat," says Broder, "is the ability to sense when and where a situation is coming to a head--and to be there."

Bureaucratic Frustrations. A lean, plain-spoken fellow who grew up in Chicago and was educated at the University of Chicago, Broder acquired his passion for detail on the Congressional Quarterly, which publishes masses of statistics on bills and voting patterns. From the Quarterly, he moved to the Washington Star, then 51 years later to the New York Times, where he found himself hemmed in by the habits of a long-established institution. He eventually resigned with a characteristically detailed 71-page memo criticizing the paper for its "endless bureaucratic frustrations in the New York office," its "proliferation and needless division of responsibility in the field" and "parochialism of outlook."

On the Washington Post, Broder, now 38, is free to roam and write as he pleases. While other reporters bemoaned the monotony of the convention, Broder's attention never seemed to flag. Dull or not, it was his kind of story. "All the political personalities are cased in one place," he says. "All the elements come together here."

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