Junto Boys

THE BOYS ON THE BUS (1973) by Timothy Crouse - (A book Review)

The Boys on the Bus is a very entertaining look at the reporters covering the 1972 election and the system in which they worked in. If you want to know how the press room in the White House smelled this is your book. If you want to know how reporters interact with each other after the press conference ends this is your book. In addition, Crouse offers great portraits of important journalists covering politics in that era, many of which are still working or known today – David Broder and Bob Novak would be two prime examples.

Crouse demonstrates that most journalists during the campaign were to the left of center politically and he argues that it didn’t really show up in the reporting. He criticizes the press for their inability to offer any kind of news analysis in their stories. The White House was so masterful in presenting information that straight reporting made it very easy to manipulate the press. Plus McGovern’s inept campaign led the politically sympathetic reporters to lose all respect for his ambitions. There’s a funny scene where the reporters kick McGovern’s press secretary off the bus, something that they would never consider doing to the evasive but professional Nixon man, Ron Zigler.

Crouse moves the story along briskly and I poured through it faster than an average book on this subject. I would argue that it’s more influential to members of the press than ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN. Not every reporter is going to do the long and hard legwork that Woodward and Bernstein did in that classic. But any reporter can apply news analysis. It’s as easy as filtering the news through their own opinions, or simply tackling the kinds of stories in line with their own prejudices.

Dan Rather’s insistence that the forged National Guard documents were “fake but accurate” demonstrates news analysis at its most arrogant. But reporters usually take a side by presenting a charge like, “this bill will starve children” and then asking the opponent why he’s for starving children.

The reporters working today frequently deride stories that don’t line up with the goals or filters they’re married to. Even if reporters thought the Swift Boat Veterans campaign against John Kerry was politically motivated, they didn’t even bother to refute the specific charges because they didn’t want the charges to become part of the mainstream argument. Dan Rather would rather chase around forged anti-Bush documents presented by shady figures than give voice to Kerry’s fellow servicemen.

It was a kind of parity for reporters playing sports commissioner, hoping that presenting Bush’s military record as shaky, and refusing to look into Kerry’s record would swing enough centrist votes to the left. The reporters knew that Kerry’s only chance at winning the election was picking off those kinds of Reagan Democrats. It’s not too unlike the racetrack making the better horse carry eight extra pounds in the saddlebags. Had both stories been treated equally either by ignoring them or giving them equal voice, Bush was more likely to have benefited at the polls.

That’s probably why the press made so much hay with the detention at Guantanamo Bay, the Abu Grab prison scandal, and terrorist the surveillance program. If they could liken Bush to Nixon then they could take the moral high ground rationalizing their approach as better for the country. Simply reporting the facts would limit their ability to sway the public to their enlightenment and what if that led to another Watergate? The 1972 press failed to save the country, but we won’t!

All the seeds of modern political reporting are an outgrowth from Crouse’s criticism of the lapdog press. That’s the real genius of this book. You can see how it was effective enough to convince reporters that the ends justify the means. The process of reading BOYS is a joy and its influence certainly puts a lot of modern day reporting into perspective.