by Timothy Crouse
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Product Description
Cheap booze. Flying fleshpots. Lack of sleep. Endless spin. Lying pols.
Just a few of the snares lying in wait for the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential election. Traveling with the press pack from the June primaries to the big night in November, Rolling Stone reporter Timothy Crouse hopscotched the country with both the Nixon and McGovern campaigns and witnessed the birth of modern campaign journalism. The Boys on the Bus is the raucous story of how American news got to be what it is today. With its verve, wit, and psychological acumen, it is a classic of American reporting.
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Political spin-doctoring has become something of an art form in the last few decades. It was less artful in the early years of the information age, and Crouse's entertaining look at the attempts of both the Nixon and McGovern '72 campaign staffs to control the media seems almost comical, so poor were they at the image-and-sound bite manipulation that now defines our politics. Crouse is a serious-minded journalist, however, and his firsthand report on how political news is made and shaped remains important reading. Check out Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 for a more madcap view of the same matters.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 on the campaign trail, 2007-12-14
Crouse details life on the campaign trail, the network of people working together and against eachother in the world of politics. This book is a little dated now but a decent read for anyone interested in political journalism.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Sleepless In...Where Are We?, 2007-06-03
If you wonder how folks like Steve Inskeep at NPR can sound so refreshing, hour after hour, getting up before the crack of dawn, then wonder how the reporters assigned to cover the '08 presidential election are going to file timely, accurately and perhaps with insight as the bus horn beeps (or more likely, airplane propeller whirrs) incessantly. Like no other "inside" piece I've read, Crouse's work paints a textured if somewhat disturbing portrait of a uniformly-messaged, sleep-deprived and occasionally sotted press corps that almost always manages to answer the bell and do its duty on behalf of democracy.
By far the most interesting chapter in "Boys On The Bus" deals with the plight of the late Sen. Thomas Eagleton, revealed during the '72 campaign to have undergone electroshock therapy to curb his chronic depression. In the sylvan Dakota foothills, just when the media thought they could kick up their heels, the story breaks. Working the tables, McGovern plays the media clumsily, one by one (wounded by a categorical statement of support for Eagleton by his press secretary), and the media, casting sideways glances and saying nothing, start to play one another. There's more than a little bit of "The Front Page" in this episode and it makes for a couple of hearty chuckles.
The Fourth Estate proves it isn't perfect in this page-turner, but like democracy, it's the best thing we've devised yet. Look for more grappling for toothbrushes on the trail with Obama, Thompson and (Gore?) in 2008.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Two made a huge crowd in Nixon's campaign, 2007-06-03
Timothy Crouse covered the 1972 presidential campaign. It was a lousy campaign. George McGovern stoodn't any chance against president Richard Nixon. Nixon refused being engaged in any campaigning at all. He seemed to deny that in an election even the president of the United States submits himself to the jury of the America voters. It must have been a frustrating campaign for McGovern who honestly tried to provoke discussions between the candidates. Timothy Crouse gives us an revealing insight in the way the press covered this presidential campaign. The Nixon campaign team led by White House spokesman Ron Ziegler avoided presidential press conferences and sufficed with written handouts. Nixon's team was apt to win the election because they knew the importance of the first strike. 'A charge is usually put on the front page; the defense is buried among the deodorant ads". Ziegler once announced that 700.000 people had come out to see Nixon in Atlanta. Jim Perry of the National Observer phoned the Atlanta Public Works to check it out. He found out that each city block was about 400 feet long. He estimated that 400 people a block, 5 rows deep, for 15 blocks had seen Richard Nixon. That made 60.000 people. He threw in another 15.000 people to cover the side streets and finally he wrote that "in act of charity I am willing to say that 75.000 people turned out to welcome Richard Nixon to Atlanta'. So 75.000 istead of 700.000!! Crouse invented the term pack journalism. It is a kind a groupthink, common when reporters have limited access to information and consensus is emerging about what is newsworthy. The 1972 campaign is not a glorious example of independent stubborn journalism. Crouse's book is fun reading especially when you keep in mind the forthcoming 2008 presidential elections.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Engrossing and Influential, 2007-01-06
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.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Classic reveals the press as they were, 2005-05-29
This brilliantly conceived and executed book pulled back the curtain on the culture of covering presidential campaigns much like Theodore White's The Making of the President before it. Smooth and seemless prose is marred only slightly by the contrived tactic of attempting one line physical descriptions of principals "a bull of a man," "a lovely and smart woman," etc.
Structurally, the book proceeds from the failed Muskie campaign and an introduction of some of the icons of the industry at the time (two, David Broder and Robert Novak, must be packed in ice every night and only thawed out to give television appearences, such is their longevity) to Nixon's campaign, the not yet completed Watergate investigation of Woodward and Bernstein, and then finally the doomed McGovern campaign once again. The technique is man on the scene, interspersed with set interviews in which the interviewer is an actor.
Crouse's classic is entertaining and informative. It is entertaining because of the colorful portraits of a gang of mostly fun loving guys and a few jerks, and informative because it shows that the true bias of the press is an establishment bias, much more complicated than a simple left-right dichotomy, it's the institutional pressures of the job that leads to the press's often distorted views. Yes, the reporters trend liberal, but the editors and publishers trend conservative, and in recent years the line has blurred between the interests of the publishers and their employees. These guys are not scrappily taking in about the same salary as a bus driver or construction worker anymore, their vibe is much more movie star. Yet now as then, the real distortion is the pack mentality and fear of being the outlier in coverage, suspect by editors with no other framework for evaluation. We've become much more aware of this in recent years, with discussion of the press's "meta-narrative," an overarching theme like "Bush dumb" or "Kerry flip-flops," or yet more infamously, the fiasco of weapons of mass destruction, but it is still instructive to see a character study into the precise details of how it happens.
Hunter Thompson's book on the same campaign "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" provides a good contrast to this book, as does Norman Mailer's "Miami and the Siege of Chicago : An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968." Both are worth examining if you are interested in politics and the period.
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