Frank Mankiewicz Oral History Interview RFK #8, 12/4/1969 Administrative Information

Transcription

1 Frank Mankiewicz Oral History Interview RFK #8, 12/4/1969 Administrative Information Creator: Frank Mankiewicz Interviewer: Larry J. Hackman Date of Interview: December 4, 1969 Place of Interview: Bethesda, Maryland Length: 50 pp. Biographical Note Mankiewicz was director of the Peace Corps in Lima, Peru from 1962 to 1964, Latin America regional director from 1964 to 1966 and then press secretary to Senator Robert F. Kennedy from 1966 to This interview focuses on the press coverage and logistics during Robert Kennedy s 1968 campaign, among other issues. Access Restrictions No restrictions. Usage Restrictions According to the deed of gift signed March 1, 2000, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. Copyright The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excesses of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. The copyright law extends its protection to unpublished works from the moment of creation in a tangible form. Direct your questions concerning copyright to the reference staff. Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings. Suggested Citation

2 Frank Mankiewicz, recorded interview by Larry J. Hackman, December 4, 1969, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

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4 FRANK MANKIEWICZ RFK #8 Table of Contents Page Topic 1 Logistics involving press coverage of the campaign 15 Senator Robert Kennedy s relationship with the press 18 Eugene McCarthy press coverage 21 Foreign press 24 Local press 26 Campaign technology 28 Comparisons with the 1960 campaign 31 Press coverage of the Kansas and Southern trips 33 Greek theater speech, California 38 Massacre at My Lai 39 Vietnam s draft 41, 47 Johnson s withdrawal

5 Eighth Oral History Interview With FRANK MANKIEWICZ December 4, 1969 Bethesda, Maryland By Larry J. Hackman For the John F. Kennedy Library The last time we talked just briefly about that Kansas trip; we hadn t really talked about what you had to do. You made a few general statements about arranging for the transportation for the press. But what I d like to find out is exactly what you had to do to take care of the press, both on the early trips and then on through. What exactly does the job involve? Well, if it s a particular piece I mean the campaign is different but one speech out somewhere or two, or three or four days to somewhere. The point I m making is that when you go to Indiana for three weeks, then you ve got another problem and you have a question of a base hotel and you ve got to get the advance men into it. Also on the campaign there were additional [-1-] problems of filing and all. But let s take an ordinary speech. First of all, you have to make a small decision which is do you want a lot of people or do you want to keep it ordinary. That applies to something like Kansas or Vanderbilt or trips like that?

6 Yes, well, except those had a slightly different aspect because they were campaign, and presumably you wanted as many people as you could get. But let s say Chicago and the China speech or a poverty jaunt to California or something like that. But they were very good on the campaign, I suppose, depending on accommodations. So if it s just one flight, then you have to look at the logistics. Take Kansas. That was a flight where we were going to Topeka to spend the night with the Governor and then speak the following morning at Manhattan Kansas State. and then in the afternoon at Lawrence at the University of Kansas. Now, those places don t have jet airports and he obviously didn t have a campaign plane at that point so the plan was to fly commercially to Kansas City and then the Governor had a state plane which he was going [-2-] to meet. He d meet the plane and he d fly the Senator [Robert F. Kennedy] and chances are he d probably have room for three or four people maybe. And he was going to fly to Topeka because he had a reception of Democrats that night at the mansion. So then the question was how do you get the press to Topeka, and having gotten them to Topeka, where do they spend the night, and from there how do they get the next morning to the two speeches? So at that point it ceased to be my problem in the terms of the arrangements and I talked to Jerry [Gerald J. Bruno]. But I had to tell him how many people we were going to have because maybe he d charter a plane, maybe get a bus. I think we took a bus from Kansas City to Topeka. It depends, of course, on the distances there and what you have. So it becomes important to know how many press people you re going to have. And, as I say, the difference between getting a lot of people and just having the ordinary number depends on whether you go out and aggressively seek people. Now if we knew that it was going to be an interesting speech or an important speech or an important crowd or something like that, I would call a lot of papers [-3-] and say, Listen, he s going to Chicago next week and he s going to have something interesting to say about this or that. [Interruption] That would involve calling regulars, the New York Times and the Post and the AP and the magazines and so forth. Do you call reporters or do you just call the papers? No, I d call a reporter. Well, again, you see it depends. If we just wanted them to know about it, Pat [Pat Riley] would call the papers, or whoever my secretary was would call the papers. If we really wanted to push, I d call. And I might even call some columnists sometimes. I d call Mary McGrory

7 or Rowlie Evans [Rowland Evans, Jr.] or Joe Alsop [Joseph W. Alsop], Joe Kraft [Joseph Kraft], Drummond [James Roscoe Drummond], somebody like that and say, Listen, you haven t covered him in a long time. If your thinking of doing it in the next couple of months, this would be a good trip to go on. But a couple of days ahead of time I ought to have a fairly rough number because then what we would do is out of my office we reserved the airplane tickets. Now the way that always worked the press, of course, paid its own way whether it was commercial or [-4-] charter. What we would do for the press would be to use a little influence with the airlines and set aside twenty seats on the airplane, something like that. And we d try to give them the names of some of the people who d be calling up and reserving tickets. But as far as paying for the tickets with the airplane or anything like that, the press took care of their own. I don t think the press even billed them. On a charter flight we would rent the airplane and then we would usually look up the standard commercial flight, usually tourist, between the cities we were going to and we d just charge the press for that, and they d pay for it. And sometimes as a matter of fact, on the 1968 campaign when we started going over the campaign bills that were unpaid at the end of the campaign, the airline for the charter was one of the few places where we didn t owe any money. The total charter price to American Airlines was more than paid for by the fares that the press paid. That works out. You see, on a charter you can make a little money, very little, but you can make some because the charter price for an airplane is somewhere around [-5-] 75% of full capacity. So if you have an interesting campaign and you get eighty or ninety press people on all the time, why you don t lose any money on a charter provided you keep it in action if you go somewhere every day. We d have a little slippage on transportation costs on busses and things like that because we just somehow couldn t bring ourselves to send bills to the press for three dollars and twenty cents for the bus fare from Vincennes to Terre Haute or something, but airfare we always got. That s one thing that always bothered me and always bothered the Senator too because there d always be these news stories about how he came to Boise or wherever in his chartered, you know, Eastern Airlines DC-7 or 707 or 727 and, of course, the press was paying for the whole thing. And they d say, There he is with seventy-two reporters, as though somehow he hired the reporters to come along. But the press is very finicky about that. I think if you offered a guy free transportation, he wouldn t take it. I mean the reporters were very edgy about it and they d all bug me to make sure that they were going to get billed. And they all were. And then some of them are a [-6-] little slow to pay, but that s not their fault; that s the newspaper s fault. So I d call the papers where I didn t know anybody, but that would be very rare. And then I d call the individual

8 reporters and tell them that we re leaving at such and such a time, they can get their tickets at American Airlines or whatever it was. And then we d fly, for instance this Kansas thing, we d fly to Kansas City. And then as I recall, the Senator and Ethel and maybe Adam [Adam Walinsky] or someone yes, I know Adam was along and it may be that Adam went with him to finish working on speeches and the rest of us came along in a bus to Topeka from that airport. Jerry had the bus there. We probably put a pool reporter on the airplane. That s a I think I ought to explain that. Okay. You pick one reporter if it s a major event that the rest of the press is going to miss, you might pick one daily newspaper writer, one magazine writer, and maybe a TV crew. If you can t get a crew on, then you put on one TV reporter and one press reporter so that they can see it and then tell the rest of the press crew. But where it s [-7-] simply an airplane trip from one place to another, probably one guy would go along. And I suspect that the press wanted that really because there might be a crash, and if it were that kind of news, at least they didn t want it to be totally uncovered. How was that selection made? I did it. I d just pass it around. The guys didn t particularly want to do it. There was no great competition for it except very rarely and I would just. On the leg before I d go up and down the aisle, I might say loudly so that seven or eight guys could hear me, Who d like to pool the airplane jaunt from Topeka to Kansas City. And some guy d say, I ll do it. And I d say, Fine, you re the man. If there was any competition and I could see that people were getting a little edgy, why I d try to work it out in some kind of compromise, or if two people wanted to. And another thing we d do is that people would frequently ask for individual interviews with the Senator and I could use the pool thing to take care of that too. In other words if a Hays Gorey or a John Lindsay or Warren Weaver or Dave Broder [David Salzer Broder] or somebody had had a request standing for a couple of days to have [-8-] an interview about something, I d make him the pool reporter and let him get the interview then. In general, anybody who wanted that could get it sooner or later. Are there any rules at all that if they get an exclusive interview, that they have to pass on anything. No. No. In other words, they d pass on the general report of the trip

9 and the fact that they had got an exclusive interview. I mean they could have got that on the next leg of the flight as well only it s a lot easier when there are fewer people around that s all. No, we never had any problem with that. No, we never had any problem with that. As a matter of fact, nobody cared about the pool report. I mean once they showed up at Topeka, it s enough to put in your story that the Senator flew from. in a private plane. On that Kansas trip we all stayed at some motel. Jim Tolan [James Tolan] had advanced that and he had us all, I guess, at the Ramada Inn, which is where the reception was that s right, where the reception for all the Democrats was. So the press all stayed there. And again, paid their own. Again, we d get hotels for them. If [-9-] we knew there were going to be forty-seven press people, we d find a hotel that would take them all, advance reserve the rooms so that when they showed up all they had to do is pick up their key they were already registered. And then the press, they took care of their own check out. They just paid as they left. How did you keep track of who was advancing where? Did you work through one person or did you always have to know whether you had to talk to Tolan or Bruno or whoever was going? No, I would check with Jerry all the time. I was probably the key person that Jerry had to leave a number with. In other words, I would know always and have in my pocket three or four numbers where I could always reach Jerry wherever he was. And then a day ahead of time or three days or four days or however far ahead we could get, I would talk to Jerry. I talked to Jerry three or four times a day. And he d say to me, Tolan is doing Manhattan and here s his number. And then I d call Tolan and I d remind him that we needed forty-seven rooms for the press or twenty-three rooms and I d find out what the schedule was going to be. And now we re getting into the campaign [-10-] if there was going to be a motorcade, I would remind Tolan or whoever the advance guy was that Jerry had told me, I d remind him that we needed two busses for the press, that we needed a convertible for the still photographers and a convertible for the TV cameramen. And I d remind him to put one car in front of the Senator s car and one car behind so they could trade off with the shots they got, and the bus behind that. It never worked out that way because they always got local dignitaries who insisted on being in the motorcade, high up, but there was a constant fight; we fought that. As a matter of fact, we fought that right to the end. On the way to Arlington we moved the bus in ahead of Lyndon Johnson, I think, or at least of the Vice President. So I d go over all those details with Jerry or with the advance man, and I d also remind him about the need to have phones at the stops. You know, they d say he s going to speak at such and such a place and it will be in the gym. And I d say,

10 Well, what time of the afternoon is that going to be? Well, if it was at the certain time of day I d say, Well, that s got to be a place where we have. I d go over the schedule with Jerry [-11-] and say, We have to have filing at that point, so figure out something for the Senator to do for twenty minutes or a half an hour after his speech. So he d line up a couple of county chairmen or something at one stop, so that the press could have time to phone and after the speech. Because if you take them on four speeches a day, and they just get out of the bus and go to the speech and hear the speech and get back on the bus and go, the day is wasted because nobody s going to hear about it. So then the question could be phones. And then Tolan or whoever it was, John Anderson, didn t matter, would say, Well, how many phones are you going to need? I d say, Well, ten ought to be enough or twenty and have a Western Union man. And usually it would work out. Sometimes it didn t, but we did all right, particularly as the campaign got going. We had a phone man traveling with us, and he was very helpful, Warren I can t remember his name. We ll find that out. I gather the phone company detaches a fellow to travel with each campaign. It s certainly in their interest. [-12-] Was there any problem We d get these temporary phones where you could only call long distance. It was interesting. And the operators were all set up for us. It was quite good. Was there any problem at particular points in the campaign or particular side trips or whatever in getting enough people to cover, to go along? Did you ever have to Oh god, no. No problem. The other way, huh? Yes. I m sure other people have had that problem. I m sure that s a classic problem of press secretaries because I ve talked to them since, since I moved across the fence. And I suppose there are Senators who do speeches and nobody s there, you know, who get an invitation to go out to the Valparaiso College to speak on Whether NATO and nobody goes. But it would have been inconceivable. Sometimes, of course, when he went to New York he d go alone because the

11 New York press would pick him up there. But we got oh, just in a routine way, five or six calls a day from people who just wanted to know where he was going to be the next day. I [-13-] mean the New York Times always sent somebody with him wherever he went. I mean John Herbers or whoever is was that was covering for the New York Times it wasn t a question of John, do you want to go? The question was would I tell him enough in advance so that he d know where to be and what kind of clothing to bring was it cold or. I mean he d call me and say, I see you re going to Chicago a week from Tuesday. Is that going to be indoors or outdoors? That would be his question. The Times always went along; the Washington Post almost always went along. The only time the Washington Post would not go along would be if it were to a place where they had a correspondent: New York, sometimes Chicago, sometimes Los Angeles. Otherwise the Post would always go Andy Glass [Andrew J. Glass] or Dick Harwood [Richard L. Harwood] or Chapman, what s his name, Bill Chapman [William T. Chapman]. By the middle of 1967, there were some guys who had also been assigned to him until he either became a candidate or, if he did, until the convention. Joe Mohbat [Joseph E. Mohbat] of the AP was with us every single day for a year, even when he was just in the office. John Hart, CBS, a couple of people like [-14-] that; Sylvia Wright of Life was a regular once the campaign began. But even before the campaign, I mean he couldn t go to anywhere without four or five people coming along. Are there points during the campaign where there are problems with particular reporters who either just turn the Senator off, or for some other reason where you would request a newspaper ever, Can t you send someone else other than this guy? I think he obviously liked some better than others. But there were a couple of kind of odd types, mostly practically free lance who were a little irritating. But I can t think of anybody from a major medium that we ever worried about. Let me just take a look. I mean, obviously, there were guys who didn t like him and who reflected it in their writing. And there were parachutists who d come in and spend three days and go away, and I would think and he would think maybe they got the wrong picture, but nothing. We didn t have any enemies or people he d say, Oh God, he s coming then we d get the paper to send somebody else. No. Some of the television he got very mad at Roger Mudd once. Oh, I think [-15-] it was because Roger showed some film of Freckles, I guess it was, eating Ethel s dinner on the plane. That bothered him. He didn t feel that was the most important thing that had

12 happened that day. But, no, no. You know, he d go through periods of time, he d say, God, that so and so, is he still writing about how we re generating the crowds? What always bothered him a little bit was that a lot of the reporters regularly wrote far more about the trappings than the event. You know, they were always concerned about the size of the crowd and how many people were on the airplane and how late he was or did Ethel go along or how much. I remember once he got very mad at Joe Mohbat. It was when the Senator had laryngitis and his voice gave out somewhere it was around Idaho. I was in Pocatello. And he was under orders by the doctor to conserve his voice so he didn t talk at all in between speeches. He didn t talk on the airplane, he whispered or he wrote notes which was a disaster because nobody could read his notes. At one point, I guess late, after the day was over and the stewardesses were asking if anybody wanted [-16-] a drink. And she came to him and said, Bourbon or scotch or something like that. And he just sort of traced a B with his hand in the air. And Joe Mohbat wrote this kind of nice mood piece about how exhausted he was and said that he was so exhausted that all he could do was trace the weakly, he said, trace the letter B in the air with his forefinger to show he wanted bourbon. And it made it seem somehow as though he may have been exhausted but, by God, he knew enough to get the booze that he wanted. And it was so outrageous because, you know, he had maybe five drinks a month. And I guess tempers were a little frayed and I remember chewing Joe out for that. I said, Good God, can t you do any better than that? But that was very minor. No, we never had a problem with trying to get somebody out or trying to get somebody else on. Does he ever indicate that he feels that your requests I complained about others. I complained to CBS a couple of times about Dave Schoumacher [David E. Schoumacher] who was covering the McCarthy [Eugene G. McCarthy] campaign, but [-17-] not about anybody ever covering ours. For what reason? Because I thoughts he was a flake. I mean he was just putting out over the airs, as revealed truths, all kinds of things that were really just sort of rumors circulating in the McCarthy camp. I mean what kind of an interview is it with a candidate who says, Well, Senator, here you are confronting this enormous expenditure of Kennedy money in this state. How are you going to overcome it? Well, I didn t think that was very good, particularly since McCarthy was spending more money than we were in Indiana.

13 How did CBS respond? Edgy. I think they knew something was wrong, but they certainly weren t going to take him out on that day. I think they would have changed him after California. I called three or four times in California. It was just terrible. I called it was really sort of funny you now I d always have some other reason to talk to Bill Small [William J. Small] or whoever it was. We never went to executives. I just think that s [-18-] terrible to go to Frank Stanton or somebody. But I talked to Bill Small about a number of things, and then in the course of it I d say, Gee, can t you, why don t you put Mary Beth McCarthy on and then people will know at least. In fact I said that Schoumacher sounded like a schoolgirl who had a crush on her English teacher, which he really did. From people who might come into the Kennedy side and then move on to McCarthy, do you get much of a feedback from those people on how it is to cover McCarthy? Yes. That was always very interesting and very gratifying because they all had a much better time with us, which I think is understandable. We were much more kind of rollicking and relaxed. I gather the McCarthy plane was always very tense, and McCarthy himself was not very outgoing. I think there were more political veterans around the Kennedy operation which probably made the press happier. I mean I don t see how you could not be happy knowing that Jerry Bruno was handling details rather than some nineteen-year old from the [-19-] University of Chicago who meant well and wanted the war to end, but didn t understand that if an airfield had a landing strip that was only four thousand feet long, you couldn t get a DC- 9 in. So I suspect there were more sort of annoying technical foul-ups on the McCarthy thing. Ours was no Nixon operation. I mean nothing ever went really smoothly. You know, we d ask for. I d tell Jerry I d want thirty-two rooms and then it would turn out to be thirty-eight guys, or I d ask for fifty and it d turn out to be nineteen because everybody else had decided to go up to Chicago that night. And things got lost now and then. We d always say there d be pre-registration and your baggage will be in the John Quincy Adams Room or something, and then it would turn out there was no pre-registration and the baggage was somewhere else. But somehow it worked out and everybody liked everybody. Does the Senator ever feel that you re trying to get too many people access to him, do you think, during the campaign, reporters? Is he frequently negative, I don t want to see so and so?

14 [-20-] Yes, Yes. Yes, he d frequently say, I don t want to see anybody today or I haven t got time now. And I really ran them all by him, knowing that he d turn down a lot of them because sometimes he d say yes. Sometimes he d rather spend half an hour with a guy from Japan. And also he felt the way I did, which is that a lot of these guys had come a long way and that it wasn t they who were giving us trouble; it was their publishers and their bosses, and that there is no point in getting mad at a reporter who has been told by his editor in Stuttgart that he s got to get a cameraman to take a picture of him with a pad in his hand talking with Robert Kennedy in an airplane. I mean maybe he doesn t even think it s the greatest idea in the world. So we d run a lot of those guys in really only as favors because he was kind of softhearted, and I must say, so was I. You know, I d say to him, Look, after this speech we ve got a thirty minute flight to Indianapolis. Why don t I run in all these foreign guys during that thirty minutes and give each three or four minutes, and they can talk to [-21-] you while their cameraman leans over the chair in front and we ll get a shot with no sound so that it doesn t matter what you say to them. And that s what they all want to show that their getting an interview. And he said, Fine. So we decided to spend a jaunt doing nothing but having Belgians and Dutch and Japanese and Italians and French and German doing interviews. Most of the time he d be quite content to sit and talk for the leg of the trip with a Hays Gorey or Harwood or a New York Times reporter or whoever it was, except when something was going on and he d want to talk to Fred Dutton [Frederick G. Dutton] or about a speech or to me about something like that. But, in general, he was quite accessible and anxious. I mean we never had a room sealed off in the airplane, for instance, where he could go and get away from it. He didn t want that. And a lot of the time he d walk up and down the aisle, talk to people, and frequently he d stop in the middle of the aisle to talk to somebody. And promptly you know that commercial where the guy says, My brother is E.F. Hutton, and Hutton says and then suddenly everybody s listening well, that s what would [-22-] happen in the aisle of the airplane. He d walk up and down and Harwood would say, What did you think about that kid this afternoon who asked you the question about the draft? And he d say, Well, that s interesting, all those kids And suddenly people would come out of all their seats, you know, and they d be leaning into the aisle and he d have a little press conference right in the middle of the aisle of the airplane. In general, the rules were that anything said on the airplane was off the record, unless we put it on the record, said, All right, he s going to have a press conference and anything he says, you can use. It was pretty difficult, though, on the airplane because always a lot of guys can t hear.

15 When he s doing a personal interview with someone, a private interview with someone, does he set the rules as he goes along on what can be on and off the record? No, he always left that to me. You re usually sitting in on those then? Almost always, and if not I ll say to him ahead of time, I ll tell him that anything dealing with this or that is off the records or that he can t [-23-] ask about this or that. And he d say, Fine. And sometimes if I wasn t sitting in I d come up to him afterwards and say, Well, how was that? What did he want to know about? And he d say, Well, you know, I think maybe I told him such and such and I don t think that s probably very good to have printed right now. So I d go back and talk to the guy, say, You understand that this or this is off the record. And there were never any problems with that. Any real problems The only real problem was with local press who would come on board. The only reason I say it s a problem there s nothing wrong with the local press but they hasn t heard anything else. And what would happen, for instance, is we d go, let s say from Salt Lake City to Denver so that at Salt Lake City an AP guy from the intermountain region would get on board, also a couple of correspondents from the Denver newspapers, and a correspondent from KDEN, Voice of the Rockies, or somebody from Spokane. And they, of course, were only going to spend fortyfive minutes of the whole campaign on the Kennedy campaign plane. And they wanted to know about Vietnam and the [-24-] draft and Gene McCarthy and Lyndon Johnson and all of that. And, of course, he d answered those questions three hundred times in the last two years, and by this time, the traveling press knew all of that. They wanted to know, How many delegates do you think you have in Utah, and is the Governor going to meet you at the airplane? And it was always very tough because these guys would get on and they d say, Can I talk to him for fifteen minutes? I d say, Well, we ll only be in the airplane for half an hour and he s talking to Dave Broder right now You know, it was very tough to accommodate these local guys because they had only a very small amount of time in which to get all their work done. They probably hadn t seen a presidential campaign yet that year and would only see two or three and spend very little time. So they always posed a problem in terms of exclusivity.

16 Can you deal with these people through handouts on some of these things? Are they given anything ahead of time usually? I mean do all these little stations they aren t all getting material all the time. Well, we ve got texts of speeches, but nothing else. Not position papers or whatever. No. Well, we had some position papers finally, after awhile. And we had such elaborate machines and they never worked. You d said the last time that We had a Xerox machine that could print from ground to air; it was like a missile. The way the thing was supposed to work was that you turned it on and you could transmit whole pages from Washington or anywhere to the airplane. But it never worked, never worked. It would work when we were on the ground, but it never worked when we were in the air. You mean mechanically it wouldn t function while you were in the air? Yes, it wouldn t function. But when we were on the ground, what would happen would be somebody in Washington would start feeding pages of a position paper into this machine and they d come out in the airplane remarkable by phone. You picked up the phone and you set it down and then the stuff would start coming out. It was quite good. It really works. It s incredible. [-26-] Who came up with something like that? How did that get fed in? Any idea? something like that. I got it because the Xerox people came to see me when the campaign began. And they were anxious to promote it; it was very cheap. It didn t cost us anything. I think it cost ninety bucks for two months or It s like renting a service. You rent it, yes. They install the machine. And I always had one now that I think about it. Yes, we d carry it with us off the airplane, thats right, so that we always had it in the hotel. And there it was very valuable. And we also used it for a very good thing which was that in the morning

17 in Washington Pierre [Pierre Salinger] and Barbara Coleman would get up a daily press digest of everything that people were saying about the campaign and they d feed that in. So we d have about three pages We d be out West we d have three pages by 7 o clock in the morning from the Times and the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun and AP stories and so forth. We d be able to show those to the Senator, and that was kind of good to let him know sort of what the feeling was. [-27-] Would you get those things around to the rest of the press to see what other No. No, they wouldn t get those. No, we couldn t print that many of them. I think it took two minutes a page so that meant if and we never had any time to print enough. We used to get two copies of each and that was about all we could do. We sent other documents on it. But on the airplane we had a mimeograph machine and that didn t work too well and we d run out of ink. It was not a slick operation by any means. But people came to understand after awhile what our limits were and so they didn t expect a hell of a lot. They got fed and they got enough to drink. And they got copies of every speech, hopefully before the speech was delivered, and if not, while the speech was delivered. And they had phones and everybody had a room. It wasn t so bad. Did they do a lot of comparisons of 68 with 60 and was it obvious that because in 60 things had developed over a long period of time that they would work much smoother or not? Yes, yes, yes, sure. You know, the 1960 campaign [-28-] began in 58; the 1968 campaign began the day it began sure. But a lot of that was hidden because a lot of it that was out in the states, you know, a lot of it was delegates and conversations and that kind of It wasn t so much in the mechanical things Not so much in the mechanical because Probably the same screw ups in 60. And also in 60 you didn t have nearly as many people to worry

18 about. I mean you could go around in the Caroline pretty much. You know there were times in California when we had as many as a hundred, hundred and ten, press people, which is a staggering amount of people to try to keep track of. Just calling the roll, just checking them off to see if we can leave San José and go to Fresno, it was damn tough I didn t know everybody because some guy would come on from the San José Mercury, you know, and then the fellow, as I said, from the local radio station in Fresno, and the UPI guy from Northern California. I didn t know these fellows. I knew our own guys, but there were only about thirty or forty of them. So we d take a long jaunt, for instance, [-29-] two jaunts it would be jammed three seats abreast and everybody sitting next to strangers. You d said last time that there was a problem in getting Robert Kennedy to approve things like releases I think you talked about the tax statement and all this and that Dutton couldn t do this. Are a lot of people complaining that he s spending too much time on the press or with individual interviews and that he s not focusing on some things like that? Well, there were always a lot of complaints that he wasn t budgeting his time right, which meant that he wasn t spending enough time on whatever it was the complainer wanted him to spend the time on. And I think that s true. That was the kind of guy he was. He wasn t very systematic. He found it very hard to turn off all the things that interested him and spend and hour on something that didn t interest him. But that s what made him the fellow he was and why people were willing to do all that work. I mean he wasn t a Richard Nixon who evidently is quite capable of compartmentalizing his life in a very orderly way. That s a valuable talent, but he didn t have it. [-30-] How satisfactory was the press coverage in general of those first two trips, the Kansas trip and then the Southern trip? Not too good. I think they gave us some bad ideas because they rally did play the mechanics much too much, the crowds and the screaming, and they weren t paying much attention to what he said. Of course, the Southern trip was badly botched logistically. I mean there wasn t anything that we could do about it. But we had to change airlines, and at one point we had to go from one airplane to two. We went to Atlanta and in Atlanta we had to change to two airplanes, Southern Airways, and we misjudged that. We thought that there were going to be about seventy people, so they had to airplanes of about forty each. And it turned out that there were only about fifty people which mean that there were forty people on one airplane and ten on

19 the other. And nobody wanted to be on an airplane with just eight other reporters, everybody wanted to be with the candidate. And in addition to which you had to buy tickets I [-31-] mean everybody had to go through a line and the guy d write the thing down, you know, the painful way airplane clerks have to write out a ticket with the money and the numbers and the okay. It was awful! Everybody was very mad and nobody knew where the baggage was and for a while there was only going to be one plane. Fred Dutton finally paid for the whole thing with his Credit card. American Express card. He chartered two airplanes with an American Express card. And then at the University of Alabama.Of course, he was there the day that Mrs. Wallace [Lurleen B. Wallace] was dying. I don t know whether she no, she wasn t dead yet because she sent a nice message to him. But the Southern trip I thought was too much news about the crowds and screaming and, you know, it was unfortunate. Kansas, I thought was well covered, particularly on the television. What about California then, when I think the Donovan [Robert J. Donovan] article is written, and then maybe it s Harwood who s making the point that the Senator is getting caught up in the emotion of [-32-] the whole thing, particularly the Greek theater speech? Well, of course that was even worse in that first California trip. That was really all that everybody wrote about and I suppose correctly so because there was never a frenzy like that at least in their experience, certainly not in mine. I mean landing there in San Francisco and San José and those crowds in Stockton and elsewhere, and then particularly in Los Angeles. You know Los Angeles has a funny airport where it s a little bit like Kennedy [Airport] in the sense that each airline has it s own sort of thing they have these large round terminals. And we landed at one of those and they re made of glass sort of, or they seem to be made of glass; they have glass walls, mostly glass and there were too many people in there. And you almost had a feeling that after awhile they were going to burst out through the windows. And a couple of fights started and, of course [Interruption] Where are we? Oh, we re in that airport in Los Angeles. And, you know, it s a low ceiling and no open windows and no sort of access except through the little entranceways, and the result [-33-]

20 is the sound is deafening. And there were hell of a lot of people, and it was a little frightening to guys who had not seen a lot of that before. I mean I don t frighten easily maybe I should but it seemed to me like just a jolly good crowd and a lot of activity and an indication that he was going to do very well in California. Bob Donovan wrote an incredible piece I don t know Kennedy [what was it] Mobbed? Big headlines like mobbed and then Carl Yes, right, I ve seen it. And then Carl Greenberg, who s a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, political reporter, accustomed to nothing much more exciting than Goodwin Knight and, whose idea of a real rouser of a campaign would be eight hundred in a high school auditorium that seats seven hundred and fifty, he was just absolutely panicked. And at one point one of the police escort guys on a motorcycle turned too fast and his gun flipped out of the holster and went out on the street near the press box and that was all No, Carl was riding in the pool car which was even worse and he saw it. And all he talked about all day was about that guy s [-34-] revolver. And then down in the Mexican district we had a big crowd. And then the Greek theater, of course. I don t know who advanced that portion of the trip, but that was a great mistake of putting him in the Greek theater because the access is terrible. You can only get to the Greek theater along one rather narrow road which is a double thing, one way both ways. And the police evidently wouldn t open it up so that it would be one way going up and then coming back down after the speech was over. And there was always everybody was very mad. There were a lot of cars getting abandoned no abandoned, but just parked any old where and people were walking and very sore. And in addition, I had the feeling that that audience in the Greek theater was about half stoned. I think you could almost get the whiff of marijuana down on the stage. They were a very happy crowd. And there was something about that Greek theater appearance. It was instead of something else I can t remember what it was. But it was quite a happy, young, turned on crowd. [Interruption] That s where he gave the speech that had the little phrase in it [-35-] about the darker impulses of the American spirit, which I always thought was pretty good. But the problem with that speech was that it hadn t been cleared. It came in late; a lot of people worked on it. And the press was a little sore because they d been pushed around. And a lot of them couldn t get into the place properly. And people were challenging credentials, and they couldn t get backstage and I don t know where the hell they all were. We lost a lot of people I mean didn t loose them, but they didn t get to the press section and they didn t have a text and the sound wasn t very good, and I guess it was hot. And also we d put them in bad motels the night before, and we had to split them up, which is always bad. It s very dangerous not to have the press all in one hotel. What they d done was to put a lot of them in the Sportsman s Lodge, which is a nice place, and then put a bunch of them

21 around the corner at a placed called the I don t know, but it was awful. So the ones who were put in the bad one felt that they weren t getting a fair break, and they didn t get to see anybody. And it wasn t [-36-] good and the busses got lost a couple of times on the freeway. I think one whole load of press missed one speech entirely because they took the wrong turnoff and never caught up. It was not a very happy day. Then he gave that speech about how the President was calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit. I don t know if he says the President or our leadership. It was quite strong. It was a phrase that Dick Goodwin [Richard N. Goodwin] had contributed. I ve read that it was Goodwin s speech. You say a number of people worked on it. Yes. Yes, it was a draft, I guess, that Adam or Jeff [Jeff Greenfield] had done that. Pete Hamill [Peter V. Hamill], Pete had given him some lines about Mexicans, and he just added them in various speeches and I think he put those in there. And Goodwin contributed, sent in phone in maybe the last half of the speech or something like that. So that it was partly an original draft and then some stuff the Senator put in himself. And then either he talked to Dick or somebody had talked to Dick and he thought that that might be a good conclusion. I don t know whether the Senator had ever cleared it or not, but I [-37-] know I hadn t. In context, I think it was quite defensible because I think the President was calling on the darker impulses of the American spirit and had been for about three years and we see the result of it in My Lai. If that s not a darker impulse of the American spirit, I don t know what was. And, as a matter of fact, now that you think about it, the massacre at My Lai had taken place about a week before Robert Kennedy talked about calling on the darker impulses of the American spirit. I just thought of that just now, but it s worth I suppose worth noting. And partly what he was thinking about was all the people who had come back from Vietnam Joe McGinnis and Schoumacher as a matter of fact, and others, Jimmy Doyle [James S. Doyle], and others in the month or so before he d gone into the race, and he was convinced that there was a slaughter going on out there. And he, in his speeches talked about the civilians being killed, not so much by this kind of thing, which obviously he didn t know about but by bombs and napalm and free fire zones and search and destroy. I mean, hell, he knew what the hell search and [-38-] destroy missions were doing. So it wasn t really an outrageous thing to say, but the press

22 seized on that. Hays Gorey, I remember, that night started talking about demagoguery and everybody started talking about demagoguery. That was the big word that night. And it was partly because of bad liaison but also because we hadn t treated the press very well that day. And it was a mad day. I mean, there was too much scheduled; we called off a couple of things. Jerry under anticipated the crowds and the difficulty that we would have getting from one place to another. And it was one of the few times in which we were so late and so far behind that we just canceled one. One of the downtown Mexican things was just called off. One of the other complaints that people were making at that time, and I think they made a couple of times also into Indiana, were the references to the draft and Vietnam as to whether they were really drafting eighteen year olds or nineteen year olds. Oh, yes, that was that terrible thing he was getting into with Phil Potter [Philip Potter]. Yes, Phil Potter especially. Well, Phil Potter of course was a big Johnson [-39-] man and a hawk. And he was stirring up a lot of trouble in the press. He was dead wrong. The Vietnamese were not drafting eighteen and nineteen-year olds. What had happened was that in response to Kennedy s attacks in March when was the Chicago speech February February. in response to those, the Vietnamese had announced that they were going to start drafting eighteen and nineteen year olds and they were going to do it by, I think, July. And maybe they have. But at time they were not. And then there was a lot of talk about why aren t they up fighting at Khesanh and so forth, and Potter was very annoyed at all of that. And he got a sort of a rebellion going on in the press. There was something else about a general mobilization in Vietnam and other things. We wound up getting a lot of facts on those. But it s the kind of argument you can t win because once it appears in print, particularly in that close a press corps, there was a tendency to look on Potter, at least for a while, as sort of the expert on what the South Vietnamese government was doing. And here he wasn t an [-40-] expert at all; he was an apologist. But it did cloud the issue a lot. And then the Senator, also characteristically, then overreacted to that. And then he was very careful about that whole line of argumentation, and I don t think he need have been. It s interesting because we had a

23 conversation about this once. I said to him, You know, you re really very bad for South Vietnam. I mean there must be all kinds of mothers in South Vietnam who are cursing you today because if it weren t for you they wouldn t be mobilizing and they wouldn t be sending the South Vietnamese army out to do some of the fighting. I mean that was really a terrible situation in the early months of 1968 which regularly our casualties would be two and three times the South Vietnamese, but it was their war. And then they started to change that. Now, whether they changed the fighting, I don t know. But it was all clearly responsive to that campaign. But there was a lot of that going on. That s right. That s right. It was not a very happy trip. Then I guess it went from there to [-41-] Arizona. Yes, I think that was the trip which ended with Johnson withdrawing. Yes, when he comes back to what, New York I guess. Yes. Oh, I know, we went all the way around and then came back to Arizona. Right. There was a swing to Oregon, I think, even on that trip and through Arizona, Salt Lake City, Denver. Well, we went to Denver, Salt Lake City, Nebraska. Nebraska, right, right. We went into Lincoln. We had a great appearance at Brigham Young University, which is now very much in the news. But they were very enthusiastic. We went to Brigham Young, then we went to. That s right, we went to Provo, Salt Lake City, wherever Weber College is. It s in Wyoming, isn t it? No, it s in Utah. I know because I ve been Ogden. Ogden, Provo, Salt Lake. We did very well with delegates too. In fact, he even stopped and went skiing in Alta and the press had a laundry day at Salt Lake City. It s the first day off we had. And then we went to Denver. We only went to Denver really because of John Lindsay, the Newsweek correspondent, whose daughter [-42-] had very bad asthma and was staying at the national asthmatic hospital, whatever that s called, at Denver, with his wife and the other kids because she obviously couldn t go out there and leave the kids at home. And he hadn t seen them for about three months, and he figured he wouldn t see them all through the campaign. So I talked to Jerry to see if he

24 couldn t work out a little stop in Denver on our way, I guess, from Salt Lake is that how it works? either from California to Salt Lake or from Salt Lake to Nebraska. I forget which way the geography fits there. So he did and John go tot see his family for most of the day. He [John Lindsay] was in very bad shape then. In fact, in one of those places he went to sleep in the bus on the way back to the hotel and took the bus all the way back to the carbarn and woke up in the bus at 3 o clock in the morning somewhere in Salt Lake or somewhere. That s right. And then we went to Indiana and he filed his nominating papers in Indiana. And then we came back through New Mexico to an Indian day at Table Rock and then into Phoenix with the coldest audience I ve ever seen of Arizona professionals. [-43-] That was funny. In Phoenix, that was a big dinner and we had to worry about whether the press would get any dinner at all. That was always a problem with the press what to do with them at the hundred dollar a plate dinners because nobody wanted them to come in free because then everybody else would get mad. So we d always have to feed them somewhere else and then bring them in after the dinner to hear the speeches. And that was Arizona politicians and they were all wrapped up for Johnson except for, you know, a few rebellious people here and there Moe Udall [Morris K. Udall] and Bill Mahoney [William P. Mahoney, Jr.]. And the Senator gave a speech and he included that rather moving section that he put into a couple of his speeches about the gross national product and what it counts and what it doesn t count. And he said it includes, you know, guns and knives and it includes locks for our doors and armored cars to patrol our streets. And they applauded that. It s the first time that anybody ever applauded that part, you know. You could see what kind of audience it was. How well was the speech writing operation working, lets say through the end of that first trip? [-44-] It was very rocky the first trip because we had too many people involved. And the idea was that there would be inputs from the East, and Milt Gwirtzman [Milton Gwirtzman], I think, was doing some drafts and others. And, of course, the Senator wanted everybody to help out. You know, you ll have Pete Hamill and he d say to me, Come on. Help me with this. And Pete didn t want to. He did a few lines and. And I think what happened is hat he had the feeling and maybe Dutton did too that Jeff and Adam weren t going to be able to handle the whole load. And the result was that there were an awful lot of inputs, and it always wound up with Jeff and Adam anyway because they were there. And after that trip they did pretty much all of it. Occasionally, somebody d do one speech on a particular subject, and then we d re-draft and go over it and the Senator would look at it and he d change it around and so forth. But the bulk of the day to day stuff then fell to Jeff and Adam and they were able to do it. Was there much dissatisfaction on the part of other people in the