The White House Press: Let AP Cover the Assassinations
Osborne, Tudi
The White House Press: Let AP Cover the Assassinations by Tudi Osborne When Richard Nixon announced that he intended to visit Mainland China in 1972, a committee of the White House...
...On Ford’s last trip to Vail as President this past Christmas, he was accompanied by one of the smallest media contingents in memory...
...The press likes them no less...
...and “working vacation’’ trips to Xanadu-like pleasure spots...
...Under Truman, press fares were prorated, as required by law...
...We tried to the point of saying we wouldn’t even brief there...
...plus an overflow of 15 Russian correspondents from the Russian plane...
...25 spouses and 25 children, aged three to 19...
...From the time of his second inaugural in January 1973 until Thanksgiving of that year, the President spent only four weekends of 44 in the White House...
...Further, the kind of glimpses and impressions that are particularly valued by magazines and television are *The White House Transportation Office says costs for planes tend to run seven to ten dollars per mile, but tHey are variable because they must take into account the type of plane, where it comes from, how long it has to wait, etc...
...Forced into feature writing and filming, the press corps gave Americans a rewarding glimpse of China and life in it, a view lost to us since the descent of the Bamboo Curtain a quarter of a century ago...
...Once again the White House press office tried to discourage a large press contingent...
...Before the Nixon Administration, few families went along on these vacation trips, according to Edwin “Jiggs” Fauver, former head of the White House Transportation Office...
...On one occasion in California at a Ziegler briefing, when a reporter suggested a promising topic to the spokesman and asked if it “wasn’t news...
...That, perhaps more than anything else, prompts hordes of reporters, with the acquiescence of their editors, to follow the President on his domestic working trips...
...Philip Hart that he would “take a look at it...
...Not all foreign trips, however, are to veiled and mysterious places, and not all reporters are of the quality of Dick Growald...
...They are, as they put it, afraid that he will get shot and they won’t be there to see it...
...You could say that, but the real reasons are leG noble...
...It’s a good deal,’’ says a former high press office official, one who has heard the press, in pre-Vail briefings, demand exacting answers as to how Ford was going to pay for his own accommodations...
...Charles B. Seib, ombudsman of The Washington Post, whose White House correspondent, with three dependents, was in Vail hustling stones, deplored the amnesty revival and the Post’s play of it as the top page-one story that day...
...Because all journalists know that news happens, and if you are not there you won’t see it happen...
...Once, in a fit of pique, when they had given him a hard time about the gas bill for Air Force One at the beginning of the energy crisis, Richard Nixon told the press to get lost and flew to California commercially...
...Q: Will you find out...
...Lukash was spotted putting something on the President’s hand...
...Schieffer turned full face to the camera and said, “So why are all these grown people standing around out here...
...When Gerald Ford visited China and the Pacific Basin in December 1975, it cost $3,567.73 per person to ride the press plane, and $2,971.58 when he went to Helsinki...
...On many occasions, particularly fund-raising dinners, the traveling press, except for the press pool, is confined to a room quite apart from the proceedings, and must see and hear its leader on a TV set just like anyone else-except, of course, for the mnemonic aid of a transcript supplied to them in advance by the White House Press Office, from which they will construct their stories...
...He called it “wildly inflated . . . overkill...
...Some of them are passports to isolated places...
...UPI’s Helen Thomas thought that Nixon’s last trip to Russia in July 1974 was the least useful presidential trip because, “He was dead...
...Indeed, some of the reporters who followed the 1976 presidential campaign debates around the country chose to watch them on TV in their hotel rooms...
...A less than enchanted wing of the Lafayette Square Escadrille, temporarily grounded in Georgia, made its stakeout on the night of December 13 outside the Governor’s mansion in Atlanta, where Jimmy Carter was interviewing prospects to serve in his administration...
...What was not waived was specified equal fare for dependents...
...Well behind and hopeledy beyond the range of visual perception, the main body of correspondents trundles along in a.bus that is wired to receive a running commentary from the men in the pool...
...All of it fell into the same category as the media’s hotly pressed “right to know” about Amy Carter’s Halloween costume and Rosalynn’s Thanksgiving cranberry sauce...
...From this input and from observation of the crowds in the wake of the President’s progress, and, of course, from the prepared fact sheets supplied them by the White House Press Office, the traveling reporters dateline and write firsthand stories that show their outfit’s man was on the scene...
...Media travel on two planes cost $2,700.95 per person...
...Oh, because it’s cold, and they generally like me to be in cold climates...
...The lack of hard news produced one of the trip’s best results...
...There were only 44 of them, but they brought along 26 spouses and 44 children, aged eight months to 17 years...
...they made up a whole new group of enthusiasts for presidential travel...
...Earlier that same month, the press made much of Secretary of the Treasury William Simon taking a party of 42 (25 of them Secret Service) on a special plane to Russia...
...We went to Romania and learned that there was a measure of real prosperity there...
...Nessen: I don’t know...
...The Russians knew it...
...In Vail, where accommodation, by necessity, is mostly in condominiums (one bedroom, $85 to $90 per week...
...Because we want to picture the President as never letting go the reins of government, we abet the illusion that the vacation trips are really part-time working trips, and that is true...
...Correspondingly, few weekends were spent in Washington by the regulars among the White House press corps, and so accustomed have they become to jetting about that they have difficulty recalling that-before they became conditioned to going wherever the President went, and before their publishers and producers became accustomed to paying for it-Ron Ziegler occasionally had to solicit them to sign up for the Nixon trips, hinting there might be real news on those usually bland runs...
...Schieffer asked the New York Daily News’ man, “Do you expect to get any news out here...
...These men are more accessible on the vacation trips, and the conditions for meeting them are easier...
...Has he got a blister or something from playing too much golf, or a bandaid, maybe...
...It is commonplace...
...It is a story the White House press has yet to uncover...
...And so they do-in that instance a limited 155 of them, up from a maximum of 12 that the Chinese initially agreed to accommodate...
...We learned that there was a completely Russian city in Asia...
...On February 11, 1974 the CAB issued a blanket waiver to parts 207 and 208 of its Economic Regulations to permit the newsmen to fly legally, their presence having been found to be in the public interest as protecting the American people’s “right to know...
...Things get blown way out of proportion...
...In the same week that Nessen failed to discourage a big press invasion of Vail by advising that he would not brief while there, he also announced that arrangements were being made to entertain the correspondents’ 70 dependents with a tour of the Ford Motor Museum during a stopover in Ann Arbor, Michigan-and he had to field questions about lame duck Secretary of the Navy William Middendorf taking a $62,500 trip to the Antarctic and Pearl Harbor...
...Reporters find the ease of their charter flight infinitely preferable to the rigors of arranging individual transportation, and often the only practicable way to operate...
...Their value, says Dick Growald, “is not so much in covering the President as in exposing foreign cultures...
...The working vacation, or Xanadu trip, according to a former Deputy Press Secretary, “In a way is a monster that everybody has helped to create and nobody knows how to handle...
...He, in fact, returned to Washington after Christmas and in advance of the press, which wrote reams about the lack of snow, a power failure hampering Ford’s viewing of a football game on TV, and the Ute Indians dancing, and tried to make (despite admonitions by Ford) a major issue of the revival of the amnesty issue after Ford promised in his condolences to the bereaved Mrs...
...He may...
...Few in this well-subsidized swarm ever see the President or hear his voice any more directly than does the ordinary TV viewer...
...and causes fleets of hired cars to materialize at their hotel, but also...
...It was exciting, and it offered the good life aloft-where the best of foda and drink was served, the latter in quantities so unlimited that some was always made off with-and on the ground, where inexpensive vacations awaited...
...Of the President’s 155-member media entourage, 87 were correspondents of one kind or another, 68 were labeled technical, and some of them were corporate executives (two of whom, at the last minute, bumped a CBS sound man and an ABC camera man...
...Presidents did not always absent themselves from the capital with the frequency of Mr...
...It cost $2,37 1 S O per persdn for airfare and Intourist, and 165 to 170 went...
...At his December 16 briefing, Nessen said, “I do not plan to have any briefings [in Vag] unless something develops...
...In motorcades, a pool of about 12 reporters and sound and camera men follow the President’s car, but between it and them are cars carrying the Secret Service, the President’s doctor, and ever-present communications personnel...
...The howls were so great, we ended up briefing in Vail...
...The Real Reasons Are Less Noble’ ~~ Meanwhile, the show goes on...
...Media employers ended up paying $1,100.96 travel costs per person for 60 newsgatherers, who were accompanied by 21 spouses and 36 offspring...
...It made sense to want a favorable public reaction to the constant shifting from Washington to San Clemente to Key Biscayne to Camp David, so it made sense to help induce that reaction by treating the accompanying media well...
...CBS’s Bob Schieffer, in a standupper, jestingly asked an AP man, “Why are you here...
...Who has the right to blow the whistle on whom...
...The way the crowds were handled in Korea taught us something...
...It is the handlers you miss most,” said former Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus when he left government service...
...Ron Nessen says, “It drives reporters to write stories that are not justified by the news.’’ President Ford’s first vacation in Vail in the summer of 1975 was meant basically to be a vacation, according to a press official who did not go along: “We tried to discourage too much press from going...
...It was a TV spectacular...
...There also was a State Department plane and, in all, 400 news chroniclers-foreign and domestic, diplomatic, defense and general-went along...
...Under Eisenhower (who normally was accompanied by only 15 regulars) and under Kennedy, family members were charged variously from normal commercial fare to nothing at all, for an occasional, infrequently sought ride...
...President Nixon visited delightful watering places, and individual roundfare trip on the press plane for wives and children was only $75 to Key Biscayne and $150 to San Clemente (the latter price today obtains passage to Ford’s resorts, Vail and Palm Springs...
...In a sense, we and the press forced this onto each other...
...Finished...
...The following exchange at the Friday, August 15, 1975 briefing at Vail demonstrates the magnitude of some persistently pursued stories: Q: On the golf course today Dr...
...That trip was uncommon, but the practice of a huge White House press contingent trailing a President on his travels, like a court following a monarch to the castles of his and others’ realms, is not...
...with the help of the White House Press Office, sets up an equipped communications center and, when necessarv...
...Now, there’s some question .as to how much staffing is necessary . . . . They know it’s going to be a soft trip, on the expense account, and it results in a too-large press corps making too much of insignificant items...
...That was not the most exorbitant of press trips, but it probably was the least useful of Ford’s foreign forays, according to UPI’s Richard Growald...
...Not two guys there knew what the participants were talking about,” he says...
...Live news not only was scarce, it was rationed...
...Two thousand applied to go...
...With little exception, the Xanadu trips are of low news yield, and they put the reporters’ objectivity in jeopardy...
...The trip meant ngthing...
...He might have mentioned, too, the elaborate loose-leaf notebook called “The Bible” that is distributed on all foreign trips, with maps handsome enough to frame and information of every kind, plentiful enough to be a course in the subject...
...Reporters manage’d to find some fodder, however, in the portentous fact that upon Ford’s arrival at the airport, the band failed to play “Hail to the Chief,” and played instead “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever...
...Foreign Cultures Whether or not they justify the expense, the press trips abroad have to be seen through Another prism...
...Lobbyists, who know something about it, say dependence and favors...
...sending their guy, you can ~e pretty sure they will print him...
...Possibly his most expensive domestic trip was the one immediately preceding the 1976 election...
...Getting the reporters there is only one of the services performed by the White House Transportation Office, which not only charters their plane and buses, handles their baggage...
...Reporters beefed about being away from home on holidays, and found they were being encouraged to bring their families on the San Clemente and Key Biscayne trips at a minimal fare...
...The White House Press: Let AP Cover the Assassinations by Tudi Osborne When Richard Nixon announced that he intended to visit Mainland China in 1972, a committee of the White House Correspondents Association called on Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and instructed him to “make it clear to the Chinese that when an American President travels, the American press travels with him...
...I don’t expect to get a thing, but if somebody should happen to blow up the building, I’ll be here and my job will be saved...
...I saw only one Asiatic face...
...People wanted to go for the distinction of being included...
...Why bother...
...The most valuable trip in that regard was unquestionably Nixon’s China trip in February 1972...
...Seldom, except at Christmas, did we have a wife go along,” he says...
...and a trained newsman sees no obstacle too steep, considers no odds too long...
...Some press accompanying the President is necessary, of course, but the absurdity of 50 to nearly 200 reporters, depending on the occasion, doggedly tagging after him at home and abroad-often to the consternation of nations that have difficulty accommodating them-is made all the more ludicrous by the logistics of such over-coverage...
...The media managed to fill a lot of space and time slots, graphically validating Dick Growald of UPI’s assertion that “if individual papers go to the expense of...
...Mass coverage does insure wider dissemination of news-or trivia, as the case may be-and finally the media’s audience does sometimes benefit from its perceptions and presence on the scene...
...Today, their bosses pay $693.54 round trip per man to Palm Springs, whereas first-class commerkal fare on TWA, for instance, is $564 and economy fare $354...
...Not all on Nixon’s China trip were even newsgatherers...
...camera platforms...
...that information would be made available only in Washington...
...There was much ado about his looking for a possible homesite in the area and a lot of complaining about a local TV station, owned by one of Ford’s golfing partners, being allowed to film the foursome teeing off while the national press was not...
...Of course the media must accompany the President, but how often and under what circumstances...
...you might] quit doing verbatim transcripts of briefings and not do the kind of work that’s now being done on behalf of the press corps...
...In addition, the office conftracts for the reporters’ hotel rooms and apartments...
...Those who followed him had to do likewise, but the yelp that sounded at the temporary loss of their life style and their efficient baggage handlers was shrill and hostile...
...The Civil Aeronautics Board did not consider the media an affinity group, and except for individual waivers, such as those granted during the 1972 campaign, the chartered White House press flights were illegal per se...
...You’re going to have to give up certain kinds of services,” he said...
...more readily availatjle...
...Trips to Xanadu There are four kinds of presidential travel that the media share: the lusted-after foreign trips...
...campaign trips...
...The regulations further stipulate that anyone accompanying a correspondent must be an immediate member of his family and living in his household, and that has not always been observed...
...Ziegler retorted, “Yes, but it won’t be news tomorrow if I give it to you today...
...It is of dubious value to both the press and the public, and one may doubt the sanity of the bosses of some 70 media men in footing a bill of, for instance, $1,725 air fare per man, plus $60 a day for a Paris hotel room, plus food and drink, to enable their own reporter to trail Gerald Ford to the Rambouillet economic conference in November 1975 in order to supply them with coverage above and beyond that of the wire services and networks...
...We are prisoners of our cliches, and going to some countries is like going to the moon...
...Families loved the Xanadu trips...
...Family travel was not new, nor were reduced rates for wives and children...
...What, one may ask, is unusual about the supplying of transcripts to the press...
...domestic working trips, often characterized as the “death watch...
...The press and the White House should be in an adversary relationship, though not necessarily a hostile one...
...Just being there sometimes stimulates a correspondent’s work, just as seeing a real ball game stimulates to a greater degree than seeing one on TV...
...Who is to say what lulls an adversary...
...Why, we saw Vladivostok...
...And then there is the courtesy of transporting some of the media’s baggage in the holds of the inspection-free cargo planes returning from abroad...
...Nothing, of course, except that flying an escadrille of reporters from coast to coast to get a copy seems a little out of the ordinary...
...Travel costs for the newsmen-though they personally have to pay only for their families-rose above commercial fares to $400 for San Clemente and $200 for Key Biscayne...
...You might reduce the Press Office staff, but that in turn would reduce the amount of information that is made available to the press...
...There was, however, initially an obstacle...
...two bedrooms, $1 10 to $1 15 at this season), there usually is plenty of space, and families share their husbands’ quarters literally for nothing...
...When Richard Nixon began his peripatetic presidency, with its rotating occupancy of multiple White Houses, he set a new pattern of executive functioning...
...We were told before we left there wouldn’t be,” says Fay Wells of Storer Broadcasting...
...The real reason we’re all out here is because we’re afraid to leave as long as our competition is here...
...The family thing grew to the proportions it is now in the Nixon Administration . . . . That President wanted families to go...
...that practice was begun under Johnson, though the Pedernales didn’t draw much of a gate...
...The assistances and services (not to mention favors) that the White House press corps receives from the White House Press Office are such that the necessity of their reduction sprang instantly to the mind of outgoing Staff Chief Richard Cheney when he was asked about President Carter’s goal of cutting the White House staff from 485 to 250...
...Newsmen are in the business of throwing stones, and they cannot afford to live in glass houses...
...There was no hard news until the Shanghai communique at trip’s end...
...Much Ado About No News On Ford’s post-election trip to Palm Springs, on which he was accompanied by 56 newsgatherers, in turn accompanied by 14 wives and 14 children aged five weeks to 17 years, there was no news, according to the AP’s Fran Lewin...
...You could say it’s in pursuit of a story...
...We’re not manufacturing that . . . . The press corps really is required to staff those trips...
...The bigger the flying corps, the bigger the reading audience will be-and that’s our job, to inform...
...Normally, domestic trips are nearer $700-800.* Glimpses and Impressions In fairness, it must be said of traveling coverage that even on the Xanadu trips, there sometimes are opportunities to see high administration officials who have accompanied the President...
...It must be noted that the newsmen’s costs include bus services that deliver them and their baggage, if they so choose, door-to-door from the White House to the hotel at their destination...
...Nessen: Yes...
...In June 1973, when Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev visited President Nixon at his Casa Pacifica, the manifest of passengers aboard the chartered jetliner totaled 90 correspondents, photographers, and technicians...
...For the distinction of being included (and the White House became the object of frothing hatred for its acts of’ necessary but willful exclusion), media bosses fought to pay (at pre-inflation prices) $2,345.12 per reporter in travel costs, or nearly $12,000 for a five-member broadcasting “standupper” team, consisting of one correspondent, one film man, one sound man, one lighting man, and one producer...
...And Gerald Ford, when Barbara Walters asked him what he would chiefly miss after leaving the White House, replied, “The conveniences...
...Trudi Osborne is a Washington writer...
Vol. 8 • February 1977 • No. 12
