Thumping the Pols

To most Americans, Gerald R. Ford is a commoner of uncommon candor, an Everyman struggling manfully with the job of President. To Reporter Richard Reeves, Ford is "slow, unimaginative and not very articulate"--and none too candid either. In A Ford, Not a Lincoln (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $8.95), a new and widely discussed account of Ford's first 100 days, Reeves calls Ford's rise to the presidency "a triumph of lowest-common-denominator politics, the survival of the man without enemies, the least objectionable alternative." He adds: "The President of the U.S. is just another pol."

Reeves, 38, a contributing editor of New York magazine, is not just another political reporter. In a journalistic specialty known for apple polishing, he has made his way by following the old maxim that the best way for a reporter to look upon a politician is, as a misanthropic editor once said, "down." "I do have a bias in writing about politicians," Reeves admits. "I don't feel any great obligation to recount their many and varied personal and professional virtues. That is what they, or the taxpayers, are paying for in the salaries and fees of press secretaries, media advisers and advertising agencies." He picked up his fond contempt for politicos from the fetid municipal air of Jersey City, where he grew up as the son of a county judge. "There were two groups of politicians there," Reeves recalls, "those who sold out and those who went to jail."

At first avoiding politics, he studied engineering at Hoboken's Stevens Institute of Technology, graduated in 1960 and worked days as an engineer, nights as editor of a local weekly. Reeves found he liked newspapering so much that he became a reporter for the Newark Evening News, made a name uncovering political corruption and eventually landed at the New York Times.

Pat Reactions. In three years he leaped over a city-roomful of old Times hands to become chief New York political reporter. Reeves also aroused enough jealousies to keep him from climbing further, so he quit in 1971 and became a one-man journalistic conglomerate. He wrote for both Harper's and New York, lectured at a local university, did consulting work for the Ford Foundation, was a host for a local TV talk show and took on a syndicated radio program--a regimen that brought him $75,000 a year.

Reeves began interviewing the first of 150 sources for his book after Ford became Vice President, then followed him to the White House, interrogating aides at their homes and reading mountains of documents. Says he:

"My eyes went blooey and my back hurt." Reeves had occasionally talked with Ford, but never asked for a formal interview after he became President. "His reactions to questions in other interviews seemed pat," Reeves says. "I didn't think he would be of any value to me."

Reeves' methods have long been heterodox. He generally avoids the telephone ("You rarely get into digressions on the phone, and digressions are often the most useful"), and he does not join those colleagues who would cover up a public figure's private pecadilloes. (Ford Aide Robert Hartmann, he writes, was "nasty, vindictive and loud--and that was when he was sober.") Reeves typically refuses to run with the pack. While much of the press was still awed by George McGovern's primary victories early in 1972, Reeves was already debunking his fellow liberal. Says New York Editor Clay Felker: "Dick says things that may not go down well on the Georgetown circuit."

Reeves' pungent observations and equally pungent style do go down well with many colleagues, editors and even some critics who have panned the book.

In a disapproving review last week, Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. accused Reeves of exaggeration but nonetheless placed him "among the two or three sprightliest political writers in America."

In his scramble to success, Reeves has had to spread himself thin--too thin, according to Harper's editors, who did not renew his one-year arrangement with the magazine in 1972. But Reeves has recently been trying to reduce his commitments. Last May he left the TV job with relief ("I felt like Barbara Walters in drag"), and plans to write only one more book about politics; it will be on the 1976 campaign. "After that, maybe I'll get a cabin and write fiction," Reeves says. "I love politics. It's more interesting than the National Football League. But it gets caught up in its own needs and rules. Like wives, politicians need to be beaten regularly."

Reeves seems to enjoy thumping them too much to quit, but his book exudes a pessimism about politicians as sour as the west wind from Jersey City. Like television, McDonald's restaurants and much else in American life, Reeves laments, electoral politics nowadayses geared less toward producing quality than ensuring blandness. He sees fewer capable leaders--even fewer gifted scalawags--and more dull, "least objectionable" alternatives: more Jerry Fords. Says Reeves: "I have seen the future, and it scares the hell out of me."

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