Trapped in the Steel Cocoons

Dawn was breaking over Williamsburg, Va., as four dozen largely unshaven, unfed and unrested journalists climbed into the Jimmy Carter press bus for the 374th time since the campaign's formal launching on Labor Day. Over the vehicle's public address system came the reassuring voice of Gerald Ford: "Hi! How are you? Nice to see you. Good morning. Hi! How are you? Nice to see you..."

Ford's repeated greetings, taped earlier at a factory gate by NBC Radio Newsman David Rush, brought tears of laughter to his weary listeners. As the campaign nears its close, strain is beginning to show. Deprived of sleep and laundry service, herded around by Secret Service agents and local police, forced to hear the same basic speech over and over, the boys and girls* on the bus are responding with mirth and mischief.

When Gerald Ford left Oct. 22 on his grueling twelve-day, 15-state final campaign swing (the "Bataan death march," as some reluctant participants called it), most of the 125 reporters accompanying him had never been within shouting distance of the candidate. They are relegated to a chartered Boeing 707 that flies some miles ahead of Air Force One. At rallies and other public appearances, reporters either watch Ford from roped-in areas some distance away or are kept waiting on the press bus, where they listen to a "pool" reporter's walkie-talkie account. "We're trapped in a steel cocoon," says Larry O'Rourke of the Philadelphia Bulletin. "We're fed what they want us to know."

To mitigate such dependence--and prevent reporters from trying to put their candidate, and themselves, in the White House--more news organizations than ever are rotating correspondents from one candidate to the other. Campaign reporters have also covered the candidates' staffs and even the rest of the press more closely this year. The Washington Post's David Broder, for example, recently reported on the Carter press corps' fondness for wisecracking Trip Director Jim King, who, after reporters found no working telephones at several makeshift press rooms along the day's route, announced that "because of the inexperience of the advance man at the next stop, the phones were not removed from the hotel as ordered. You will be able to file."

Eye-Glaze. Still, both Ford and Carter have an inner circle of permanent scribes who know their candidates all too well. One day in Wisconsin, Ford reached the punch line of his basic speech ("A Government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take from you everything you have"), and the press corps began chanting loudly along with him. Explains NBC Correspondent Bob Jamieson: "The eye-glaze factor begins about the same time each day."

A number of Ford campaign regulars have tried with varying success to clear that glaze. U.P.I.'s Dick Growald organizes venturesome forays into local restaurants and is official keeper of the campaign-plane mascot, "the beast," a stuffed toy buffalo with a Ford-Dole button pinned under its tail. Jim Naughton of the New York Times is credited with masterminding the "Peoria sheep caper." Encamped in that town after Ford addressed a group of farmers, Naughton persuaded one of the locals to lend him a sheep. Hours later, Newsweek's Tom DeFrank, an alumnus of Texas A. & M. University, discovered the animal in his hotel room. He was greatly surprised. So was the sheep, and DeFrank spent much of the night cleaning up the mess. At a Ford rally in San Diego, Naughton spotted a man in a chicken costume, bought the top half of the outfit for $100, and now wears it occasionally to press briefings. Says Naughton: "I guess I'll put it down on my expense account as 'chicken for White House staff.' "

The reporters who shadow Jimmy Carter are an equally irreverent bunch, though they live closer to their quarry. Carter travels with them aboard Peanut One and wanders back into the press area occasionally. When in Plains, he allows--indeed encourages--reporters to attend his Sunday Bible class. "We hope they derive some benefit from it," he quipped after the Oct. 24 class, "though I haven't seen much evidence of it so far. Maybe there's a long gestation period." Carter accepts reporters' cheekiness graciously. He does not complain when, as Peanut One is landing, reporters in the back of the plane roll beer cans past the collection of purloined hotel-room keys taped to the baggage rack (28 at last count) and into Carter's compartment, shouting, "Come out! We know you're in there!" On his 52nd birthday, Carter was serenaded by a number of regulars who rendered Lust in My Heart, a campaign ditty sung to the tune of Heart of My Heart ("Lust in my heart, I love adultery ... I would preach and sermonize. But oh how I would fantasize").

Flying Egg Rolls. Of necessity, Press Secretary Jody Powell has become a man of defensive wit--as when Curtis Wilkie, a walrus-mustached Mississippian who reports for the Boston Globe, organized a food riot on Peanut One, where a seat costs 150% of first-class fare. As reporters chanted "No more swill!" and hurled egg rolls around the plane, Powell charged back into the press compartment brandishing a silver gavel presented to Carter at some long-forgotten civic reception and shouting, "Back to your oars, you scum!" The food soon improved, but Powell jokes, "There's only one way to treat these wild animals. Badly." Despite those diversions, many boys and girls on the bus will be glad to jump off come Election Day. "I'll miss the ropes," jests Ford Follower Fred Barnes of the Washington Star. "The ropes and the worst high school bands in America." Barnes and his colleagues will not miss the fatiguing 20-hour days, the incessant travel that discourages reflection and analysis, the unvarying stump speeches that become newsworthy only when a candidate fluffs his lines, the dearth of opportunity to question a candidate about his views and his strategy or even to see him up close. In fact, if campaign reporters have learned anything from their half-million-mile journey this year, it may be that a seat on the press bus is not a particularly good place to cover an election.

* Since Timothy Grouse wrote his mocking The Boys on the Bus about the 1972 campaign, the number of women journalists on the trail has doubled, but still totals only about two dozen out of 200.

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