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"FacebookPinterest\n\n The feverish atmosphere was halfway between a high school bus trip to Washington and gambler's jet junket to Las Vegas.... There was a giddy camaraderie mid with fear and low-grade hysteria.\u2014Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus\n\n Once, political reporters lived by a code. They worked hard. They played hard. Those who didn't drink, smoke or chase women pretended that they did. Those who did, did it more. They had style, they had insouciance, they had rules:\n\n&#149; Never order more than two dry martinis before dinner unless you can see the table from where you're standing. &amp;gt;\n\n &#149; Never eat in a revolving restaurant or a restaurant where the specials are written on a blackboard. &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n &#149; Wheels up, rings off. (And the corollary: Anything that happens west of the Potomac River doesn't really happen.) &amp;gt;\n\n\n\n &#149; You can never stay up late enough to go home with a cocktail waitress.\n\n When Rolling Stone writer Timothy Crouse chronicled the life of reporters covering the 1972 presidential campaign, he portrayed a raffish Front Page style of journalism that fascinated and attracted a younger generation of reporters. Freewheeling and flamboyant, political reporting seemed the last refuge of scoundrels. The \"boys\" on the bus were an elite band of tough professionals, outlaws in an increasingly sober and self-important world. Out on the trail, they were the Hole in the Wall Gang.\n\n One of the leaders of the pack, Baltimore Evening Sun columnist Jack Germond, has not changed much since Crouse described him as \"a little cannonball of a man...with a pugnacious, hands-on-hip manner of talking.\" One friend of his, the columnist Robert Novak, boasts that Germond \"still believes that no day is a good day without enormous ingestions of alcohol and cholesterol eaten at breakneck speed.\" Sitting in a Washington restaurant, sipping a Bloody Mary, Germond, 60, reminisces about nights of drinking until 2 A.M. with Bobby Kennedy in a Holiday Inn in Indianapolis, where the waitress was \"a frustrated country singer with a voice that would break your heart\"; tweaking Jimmy Carter with song parodies about lust; and leading expeditions in Alaska to see exotic dancer Cha Cha O'Brien.\n\n Dragging on a Viceroy, Germond lumbers into the sunlight. \"A day like this,\" he snarls, \"makes me wonder why I'm not at the racetrack.\" Off to buy another airline ticket to another campaign in another town, Germond gives his trademark world-weary shrug as he assesses the state of political journalism in 1988. \"I wouldn't recommend my life-style to anyone,\" he says. \"But the campaign just isn't as fun anymore.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Campaign, 1988. The Olivettis are long gone. The trail is high-tech, a Silicon Valley on wheels. On any given campaign, on any given morning, the bus hums with the tap-tap-tap of eager fingers typing on briefcase-size lap-top computers. Reporters wearing Walkman-style earphones hunch over their notebooks transcribing tapes. Occasionally a voice interrupts the silence to ask querulously, \"Did you get what Dukakis said about integrated pest management?\" Or, \"Did Bush say 'naughty stuff' or 'the naughty stuff'?\" Others underline The New York Times in red ink or murmur into cellular phones to their editors about the day's schedule. Some tune in to the morning news shows on their Watchman TVs. When the bus stops at a new and strange city, the reporters race off. They aren't scouting for the best steak house in town. En masse, they swarm toward the nearest Radio Shack outlet. You never know when you may need more AA batteries.\n\n There is a new breed of political reporters in 1988, made up more of Rhodes scholars than of rogues. It is a group that some find appallingly well behaved.\n\n \"Dweebs on the bus,\" mutters Michael Kelly of the Baltimore Sun.\n\n \"Trolls on the bus,\" scoffs Michael Tackett of the Chicago Tribune.\n\n \"Stiffs on the bus,\" sighs Jules Witcover of the Baltimore Evening Sun.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n In the bad old days on the bus, the only noise to be heard first thing in the morning was the raspy sound of grown men hacking. After an hour or so, as their hangovers ebbed to a dull ache, they might have flipped through a local newspaper. By mid-morning, they would rouse themselves and begin grilling the press secretary. Now it is a world of round-the-clock communication, where political information flows fast and furiously from satellites, national newspapers, cellular phones, cable TV, Federal Express packets, fax machines and political hot lines. \"Now if I get on the bus in the morning, I will be assaulted with questions by 6 A.M.,\" Bush aide Pete Teeley complains. \"Before, it seemed as if people didn't focus before ten o'clock\u2014we were too whipped.\"\n\n To old-timers, the atmosphere has about as much warmth and spontaneity as a high-school language lab. \"The thing that kills me is, these guys just sit there with things in their ears at all times,\" says Robert Novak, 57, alias the Prince of Darkness, sounding as puzzled as only he can. \"They're all just frustrated CPAs.\" The bow-tied and whimsical Boston Globe reporter Tom Oliphant is also baffled by \"the endless transcription,\" the new breed's obsession with replicating every pronoun and every pause. \"It's bad enough to hear a speech once, but then to have to listen to it eight times,\" he sighs. \"I do not oppose accuracy in quotes, but the bus ride now is like half an hour in a secretarial pool.\"\n\n Editors who once spent hours calling bars and restaurants to track down reveling reporters now fend off calls from journalists anxiously wanting to discuss second-edition pieces and Sunday stories and, above all, placement. \"We never called, as they do now, to say, 'What do you mean my story is not on A-1, sob, sob,'\" says R.W. \"Johnny\" Apple Jr., 54, deputy Washington editor of The New York Times. \"That would have been considered extremely bush.\n\n \"The ethos in my youth was: If you didn't look like you were having fun doing it\u2014whether it was politics, revolution or war\u2014you were a twit,\" Apple says. \"You wanted to be like Joe DiMaggio, you wanted it to look easy.\" The indomitable Apple was teased mercilessly by his colleagues the time he packed a dinner jacket to go to the opera in San Francisco and catch his favorite soprano. But style mattered in those days. \"Unanimous eccentricity,\" James Wooten, 51, the former New York Times reporter who is now an ABC correspondent, calls it. Time correspondent David Beckwith remembers walking into a Key Biscayne, Florida, bar with Hunter Thompson, the crazed Rolling Stone reporter who invented gonzo journalism and served as the model for Uncle Duke in \"Doonesbury.\" Beckwith watched in awe as Thompson ordered six margaritas and instructed the bartender to line 'em up.\n\n The reporters are men now, not boys, wearing their uniforms of navy blazers, khaki trousers and ties. \"Ties!\" spits Curtis Wilkie, 48, the popular Boston Globe reporter with the droopy mustache and thick southern accent who figured prominently in Crouse's book. And there are women, too, in dress-for-success suits and black pumps. They don't drink. They don't smoke. They keep fit. They know their lipoprotein levels. They call their spouses twice a day. Dinner no longer is the most important meal of the day for these coffee achievers. Breakfast is. \"Reporters used to trade notes on which hotel had the best bars,\" says John Buckley, a CBS political consultant who was Congressman Jack Kemp's press secretary. \"Now it's which hotel has the biggest Nautilus machines.\" Buckley, 31, expected politics to be naughtier. \"All my life I've fantasized about being out on the campaign, playing cards until dawn and waking up with the worst hangover in the world. All I got was running partners.\"\n\n The new robo-reporters don't interview candidates over cocktails; they ercise with them and gasp out their questions. To talk with Michael Dukakis, who strolls with hand weights to stay in shape, they are even willing to take up speedwalking. \"What fun can it be to strap pieces of metal to your arms? Is that not a little weird?\" asks Washington Post veteran David S. Broder.\n\n Walter Robinson of The Boston Globe, a rangy, good-humored reporter, becomes discomfited when people recall his early days as a campaign bon vivant. Now he works out, drinks only Perrier and eats lean meat. \"I don't have as many dinners out,\" he says, pulling back his jacket and patting his stomach. \"But I have a waistline.\" Robinson, 42, claims that an \"endorphin high\" makes sources as voluble as liquor did and sees only one drawback to his jogs with George Bush and others: \"When you're running, you can't take notes.\"\n\n Phil Gailey, the teddy bear-ish Washington-bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times, confesses his shame at having sneaked back to the Jesse Jackson bus during a photo opportunity to eat a bulging box breakfast of home-cooked grits, eggs, sausage, toast and bacon. \"Nobody else touched it: it was a cholesterol nightmare,\" says Gailey in his Georgia drawl. \"I don't take anything away from them; they're professional, bright, well credentialed and hardworking. But if you plundered one of these guys' luggage, the most embarrassing thing you'd find is a wet jogging suit.\"\n\n The original \"boys\" would have known immediately if they had wandered onto a bus with network correspondents. TV types were blow-dried, bright-eyed and well dressed. Print reporters were not. \"Hell,\" Gailey grouses, \"now they're all well coiffed.\" The younger preppies are immune to such aspersions. As Howard Fineman, the collegiate-looking 39-year-old chief political correspondent of Newsweek, observes, \"They're like the old gunslingers in the bar who look on us as the sissified city folk.\"\n\n One 35-year-old newspaper reporter, who freely admits to being \"a leading nerd,\" offers a wry defense of the New Seriousness: \"There are very few guys now throwing up in the course of their working day.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Journalists\u2014even political reporters\u2014have undergone the same gentrification that has tamed the rest of baby-boomer America: Careerism, cocooning and fitness have replaced sex, drugs, and rock and roll. \"This group has a nerve calling Dukakis dull. Hell, they're soul brothers,\" Gailey says, chuckling. \"It's depressing, because not only are your colleagues dull but you can't even venture off the bus because of AIDS.\" Just four years ago, it would have been unthinkable for U.S. News and World Report owner Mort Zuckerman to eschew offering the customary publisher's hospitality suite at the Democratic National Convention. This year, Zuckerman instead issued 200 passes to athletic clubs in downtown Atlanta.\n\n Most of the hotshots of the 1972 campaign\u2014including Apple of the Times, Broder of the Post, Germond and Witcover of the Sun, Wilkie and Oliphant of the Globe and Wooten of ABC\u2014are still out on the trail, as national political reporters, or free-rein, so-called big-foot, columnists. \"This was a job we knew we wanted to do for the rest of our lives,\" Germond explains. The \"boys\" ate together, drank together, sang together. If a rambunctious colleague got drunk and passed out, they would collectively write his copy for him, and they would make sure those with hangovers got safely on the bus. \"We looked out for each other,\" he adds. As Jules Witcover, 61, the basset-eyed reporter who shares a newspaper column with Germond, puts it, \"I'm not saying I ever had to brush Germond's teeth for him, but it would get pretty damn close.\"\n\n Broder recalls that when his wife would drop him off at Washington's National Airport, she would watch resignedly as reporters gathered like excited schoolchildren and scampered off to the campaign beyond. Now many of the reporters, who have small children and working spouses, not only are under pressure to be home more, they want to be home more. As one reporter, who was upset when he missed his baby's first step, argues, \"My wife has a theory that my reporting is better when I don't travel as much.\"\n\n The \"boys\" grumble that political reporters are no longer an elite corps who have worked their way up to a plum campaign assignment. \"In those days, 'everybody' was very few people,\" Germond explains. Candidates now have press retinues of fifty to a hundred, counting reporters, photographers and TV crews. At debates and other multi-candidate events, the horde can swell to more than 1,000. \"There are people out there from papers in cities that didn't even used to have representatives in Congress,\" says Johnny Apple, shaking his head. \"On one trip, I was sitting next to an extremely nice woman, but she was from the city staff of the Orlando Sentinel.\"\n\n For younger reporters, many still in their twenties, the campaign is often seen as one big networking opportunity\u2014the chance to make a name for themselves, meet mentors, and move on to bigger and better things. \"This new breed is very concerned about their reputations and their futures,\" Witcover says. \"For us, it was more like going off to summer camp; we wanted to experience the experience.\" Wooten agrees: \"None of us in that old gang ever thought of becoming rich or famous or successful beyond our own measure of beating somebody's ass the next day.\"\n\n When Newsweek correspondent Howard Fineman read The Boys on the Bus, he thought that going out on the campaign trail \"seemed to be the perfect and fun thing to do for a while. But not for your whole life. I still don't want to do it forever.\" Like many of his well-educated, highly disciplined peers, Fineman\u2014who has a master's degree in journalism and a law degree\u2014regarded the scholarly David Broder as a role model. \"Broder didn't succeed by falling down drunk and staying up all night,\" he says. \"He was the model of the cerebral guy as reporter.\"\n\n One only needs to consider the case of Broder to see how far the pendulum has swung. Broder, 59, a gentle, courtly sort who is the most influential political writer in the country, used to be the straight man of the bus. He drank Coca-Cola and was teased by his more boisterous colleagues for being too buttoned-down. \"I used to be on one edge,\" Broder says. \"Now I'm on the other.\" He finds himself having to urge younger colleagues at the Post, such as David Hoffman, to lighten up. Compared with Hoffman, the bespectacled Broder could be a complete set of Marx Brothers.\n\n It's 9 P.M. in Newark at the end of a long day on the Bush campaign. David Hoffman, one of the most intense and admired reporters in the business, is not thinking about a fine dinner and an expensive wine. He is thinking about tomorrow's story. Hurtling into the hotel with his bouncy step, he asks a colleague if he can borrow his car to look for fresh tapes for his Realistic stereo tape recorder. \"It captures wild sound at gangbangs,\" he says of the recorder's ability to pick up the candidate's voice at crowded press conferences, and then he smiles at his inadvertent double entendre. \"That,\" he says shyly, \"is the only sexy thing I've ever said.\"\n\n Hoffman has already called home; he did it earlier on the bus from his cellular phone. His state-of-the-art model has automatic redial, the better to pester reluctant sources. Hoffman has programmed the phone with three speed-dial numbers: his home in suburban Maryland, his office and Bush national headquarters. His wife of eleven years, Carole, a lawyer who now stays at home with their two small sons, has sewn a denim case for the phone out of an old pair of jeans, and a pink plaid flannel case for Hoffman's rapid-transmission modem.\n\n The Post reporter, who jokingly calls himself the Bionic Man, also carries his own printer and wears a Casio watch that shows the time in two zones, has a wake-up alarm and stores twenty phone numbers. \"I only have nine in here, though,\" he says, punching up the Post's Washington-office number. At one point on the Bush bus, Hoffman marveled as his colleague across the aisle, veteran Post columnist Mary McGrory, wrote out her piece in flowing longhand script.\n\n Thirty-five, sandy-haired and attractive, Hoffman has an investigative zeal and encyclopedic recall that make him a role model for younger reporters who struggle to keep up with his scoops. He has one piece of advice for those who would do their job better on the bus: \"Carry more files.\" Asked what he does to unwind on the road, Hoffman replies, \"I don't unwind.\" One Saturday at 10:30 A.M. in Houston, when George Bush was taking the day off, Hoffman stretched out by the swimming pool and closed his eyes. At 10:31, his eyes shot open. \"I couldn't relax,\" he recalls, shaking his head. \"I wanted to go find someone to interview.\"\n\n Two nights before the New Hampshire primary, Philip Lentz\u2014a Chicago Tribune reporter who doesn't smoke or drink and who had already gotten his evening's worth of ercise\u2014was feeling tense. He made a few calls, looking for a good time. He found it by driving twenty miles upstate to indulge his only vice: contract bridge. Lentz, 38, confesses that when he first read The Boys on the Bus, he was envious of those reporters' bravado and carefree pranks. \"I just don't see where he found the time to do all that stuff,\" he marvels. When he is not working or playing bridge, he collects campaign buttons. His favorite find touts Estes Kefauver in a coonskin cap.\n\n Reporters once guiltlessly indulged vices to pull themselves up through the long, grueling months of travel. Robert Novak recalls flying with Nelson Rockefeller one morning in 1959 when the stewardess announced over the loudspeaker at 7:30 A.M. that there would be no Bloody Marys because the vodka had run out. \"It almost caused a riot,\" he says. The plane immediately divided into two groups: those who cursed and did without and those who settled for a gin substitute. \"A gin Bloody Mary really does start your day on an ebullient note,\" Novak says fondly.\n\n It was just as much a matter of pride to be alert the next day. One night early in the current campaign, Jack Germond stayed up into the wee hours at the Sheraton Wayfarer bar in Manchester, New Hampshire, with Mike McCurry, Bruce Babbitt's press secretary. McCurry phoned Babbitt to warn him that Germond would probably be a no-show for their planned 7:30 A.M. interview. When the former governor strolled into the dining room a few minutes late for the breakfast meeting, there was Germond, impatiently tapping his fingers on the table.\n\n A master of the blas\u00E9 aside, Germond listened during the 1984 primaries as Senator Alan Cranston gave an emotional speech about receiving a letter from a young girl describing what the world would be like after a nuclear blast\u2014quiet, dark and speckled with a strange light. \"Sounds like an after-hours joint to me,\" Germond growled.\n\n One favorite campaign stunt of the past entailed writing a parody of a candidate's stump speech, featuring staff names and suggestive references, and making the candidate deliver it himself in front of the reporters without rehearsal. Warren Weaver Jr. of The New York Times, a top satiric composer who began covering national campaigns in 1952, recalls that candidates were so eager to appear good-humored that they always shared in the laughter. \"Nelson Rockefeller was a good sport and seemed to enjoy making fun of his own ambitions, at least in private,\" Weaver says. \"But all copies of his parody speech vanished immediately, and no quotes ever appeared anywhere. When reporters on the 1964 Republican vice-presidential campaign pulled a similar stunt on Bill Miller, he was so pleased that he had the speech copied and distributed like a press release. Miller wasn't going anywhere, but five years earlier, Rockefeller thought he was.\n\n \"The new breed of political reporters,\" Weaver, 65, adds, \"is a little like the new breed of candidates: young and very serious, tireless, smart, tough, but almost without joy, a little pale, and bloodless. Stunts are out, drinks are out\u2014some of them don't even seem to eat regularly.\"\n\n In contrast, there is Paul West of the Baltimore Sun, whose presence on the campaign trail strongly suggests that the gods of journalism have a keen sense of symmetry. Like the rotund, old-school Germond of the Evening Sun, West, 38, covers politics with a passion. Unlike Germond, West has a lean and hungry look and a full head of hair. As one scribe says of West, \"He drinks, but he drinks with frightening moderation.\" No one has ever said the same of Germond.\n\n Some young reporters have tried to recapture the high spirits of the past but find the pace too exhausting and, as Michael Duffy of Time puts it, \"the rectitude too overpowering.\" The rules have changed now. If it was once cool to organize a dinner, now it's cool to skip a meal and interview the campaign manager instead. Perrier has replaced the martini as the drink of choice. \"It occurred to me that at some point I should crash headlong into the campaign I read about in Tim Crouse,\" the 31-year-old Duffy laments. \"But it doesn't happen.\"\n\n Duffy's pal Michael Kelly, 31, a gifted and puckish Baltimore Sun reporter who gained renown in Washington for squiring first Fawn Hall and then Donna Rice to the White House Correspondents Dinner, had great expectations and even came up with some tips for campaign-trail safe sex (never put anything in any place you would be embarrassed to display to an emergency-room nurse, and don't date Bush aides whose tattoos are not professionally applied).\n\n But Kelly has not needed to worry about dangerous sex on a campaign he calls \"one man's dating hell.\" \"Even if you meet somebody, whose body you want to smear unguent on, by the time you get back to your hotel, it's midnight and baggage call is at 3 A.M. All you want to do is go to your room and see if Young Lady Chatterley is on Spectravision. The one invention that would make our lives better is if hotels installed a fast-forward button so we could get to the dirty parts faster.\"\n\n Casual affairs were once common, and there was even, according to Crouse's book, a lawsuit filed by a stewardess who sued her former lover, after discovering on the final day of the campaign that he was married, for \"illegal acts committed over the state of Iowa.\" During the Carter reelection campaign in 1979, after a particularly arduous few weeks, the press corps found itself with a night off in Chicago. Reporters, photographers, cameramen, Carter aides and the charter-plane crew all went to the hotel disco and partied. In the middle of the night, the Iranian hostage crisis worsened and the whole troupe had to fly to Washington. \"It was like the Keystone Kops, with people dashing around the open Hyatt atrium without shirts or pants, trying to get back to their own rooms,\" recalls Arthur Grace, a Newsweek photographer. \"They could barely get a crew together to fly the plane.\"\n\n Nowadays, reporters are so conscientious that if a male and a female correspondent skip the same late-night political rally, it automatically raises suspicions. But on the bus, men and women rarely form romantic liaisons; if they pair up at all, it is more often as study partners, transcribing tapes together and pooling notes. \"It used to be that we were stuck in this pod together and romance flared in the heavens like great comets,\" Mike McCurry nostalgically recollects. \"No more.\"\n\n Due in part to the infusion of female political reporters, the frat-house atmosphere has given way to a much more domestic, suburban sensibility\u2014what Michele Tourtellotte, Senator Robert Dole's former aide, sardonically describes as a \"giving, caring, sharing kind of thing.\" Far from being turned off by Tourtellotte's detailed descriptions of her wedding plans, male reporters listened raptly. \"I couldn't believe it,\" she says, rolling her eyes. \"These guys really wanted to hear about my dress.\"\n\n Knight-Ridder reporter Angelia Herrin, who had not covered a presidential campaign before this year, was quite daunted on her first trip to New Hampshire, when old pros around the bar plied her with bawdy tales. \"They made me think that to be on the campaign bus would be like joining the Marines\u2014the few, the proud, the 'boys,' \" she remembers. Instead, she later found herself trading stories about her son's science project with other bus-bound parents. A group of single women sat silently listening on the Bush bus one night as David Hoffman talked about the problems of his infant's teething. He warned another young father about the perils of giving skim milk to children less than a year old.\n\n Just as Johnny Apple once got the Rockefeller charter to switch from cheap domestic beer to Heineken, so now Hoffman and others request that their candidates' charters be stocked with yogurt and fresh fruit. Looking across the aisle at a British reporter having a beer with his lunch, Hoffman shakes his head. \"If I did that, I'd be dead.\" Mitch Locin, a sweet-tempered Chicago Tribune reporter, sees it this way: \"At the end of a long day, all I want to do is get some chocolate cookies from the vending machine in the hotel and go to my room.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Although political reporters today are regarded as more aggressive, their reporting has not necessarily surpassed that of their predecessors. \"I'm not sure that the best of today is better than the best of twenty years ago,\" says the Washington Post's national editor, Dan Balz. It is simply that the scope of current reportage has broadened to include areas of character, humor, analysis and opinion that editors previously did not encourage.\n\n Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor, 39, who became instantly famous last May for asking Gary Hart if he had ever committed adultery, epitomizes the new style. Yale-educated and Hollywood-handsome, with curly dark hair and clear blue eyes, Taylor is devoted to his wife of eighteen years and their three children. Quiet and self-contained, Taylor combines cool analysis with hot writing and is considered exceptionally talented by his peers. He can be charming at times but is more often aloof. A workaholic even by his contemporaries' standards. Taylor still worries that he is not doing enough. \"I often feel guilt for not working harder,\" he confesses sheepishly.\n\n Teased that he is the Lancelot of the pack, a perfectionist who holds himself to the highest standard in both his personal and professional lives, Taylor blushes and protests, \"I think of myself as a fun guy.\" Asked to prove it, he relents. \"This is going to sound deadly, but more often than not, I have a room-service dinner, work on my book or type out my notes and call home to talk to my kids and my wife.\" He collects miniature bottles of bubble bath from his hotel bathrooms to bring to his daughter. \"That makes me a hero at home,\" he says.\n\n Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Larry Eichel blames his longtime friend Taylor for his only campaign-related injury. While Taylor and his family were visiting the Eichels in Philadelphia a week after the New Hampshire primary, Taylor decided to spend Sunday afternoon at a Jackson rally. Eichel was reluctant but tagged along: \"He made me feel guilty, I had to go.\" Eichel stepped off a curb awkwardly, broke his leg and spent the next six weeks on the road in a cast. The rabbinic-looking Eichel, 39, concedes his set is square. \"We're pretty straitlaced, conscientious group,\" he notes. Eichel still recalls a dinner with Taylor ten years ago when they discussed the new best-seller Open Marriage, and the two men ruefully agreed their book would have to be called Closed Marriage.\n\n While older reporters mourn the loss of close contact with candidates, the camaraderie best developed over time and bourbon, Taylor does not. \"there is a great temptation to be the 'buddy,' \" he says. \"I am very comfortable resisting the temptation. I've worked out a rule that works for me. There is a line: I want to get to know them, be friendly with them, but I don't want to cross this line that exists in my head. When a politician says, 'I want to talk to you,' it's heady, it's intoxicating. But I'm very aware not to fall into it.\"\n\n Even if Taylor wanted intimacy, he would be hard-pressed to find a candidate willing to reciprocate. The rules have changed. Candidates know that anything they say may be held against them; therefore they speak mostly on the record. If they go off the record, they remain just as guarded. The irreverent mood that once allowed the likes of Witcover and Broder to compose mordant song parodies and perform them for the candidate is gone. \"That was the serious work of the day,\" Broder remembers with a smile. \"We did our story quickly so we could get back to songwriting.\"\n\n Reporters palled around with the candidates, and they felt their coverage was better for it. As Theodore H. White wrote in The Making of the President 1960 about a bus ride in Wisconsin with Hubert Humphrey, \"One of the newspapermen, feeling the chill too, pulled out of his briefcase a bottle of fine expense-account whiskey and some paper, then poured a round for everybody against the bitter cold and offered a cup to Humphrey. We hunched forward about him, for he is a very lovable figure... Humphrey twirled the cup in his fingers and, as I remember his fine voice above the hum of the bus, began to talk in a monologue that lasted fully an hour.\" Today, reporters strain for a quick glimpse of George Bush as he moves through a distant montage of photo opportunities.\n\n \"What you could learn then in a six-hour flight about a candidate would take a year today with all the strictures to free conversation,\" Witcover notes. \"Schmoozing is an important part of reporting, but you can't turn it on and off like an electric switch. It's a way of life.\" Germond recalls chastising Bobby Kennedy in a bar late one night in Evansville, Illinois, for a speech that he considered a \"shameless\" appeal to conservatives. \"We abused him terribly,\" Germond says, \"and, finally, he said, 'Yeah.' \" Familiarity bred badinage. \"We could tease the candidates,\" Apple says. \"We'd say to Rockefeller, Romney, whoever, 'All right, we've been to Sioux Falls, Memphis and Prescott, Arizona. Now we're going to San Francisco, and we don't expect you to plan any night events.' \"\n\n Even though the reporting can be more critical today, the reporters themselves tend to be more docile. Jesse Jackson, a teetotaler, kept alcohol off his press plane for months. The reporters not only didn't complain, they set up their own ban on smoking. (When Time's Michael Duffy broke the embargo and brought a case of beer on board, Jackson glared at him.) One night before the Wisconsin primary, reporters plotted to quiz Jackson at the next day's press conference in a rhyming style that matched his own, with questions like \"Mr. Jackson, you speak of action, but did Wisconsin give you satisfaction?\" But when the time came, nobody spoke up. \"We all of just chickened out; we thought he'd get mad,\" says Michael Tackett. \"Very few people seem willing to take risks. It's a lot of well-scrubbed people who all want to do the right thing, say the right thing and sound smarter than the next person.\"\n\n In Oregon, reporters got a kick out of observing actress Margot Kidder, a Jackson supporter who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, as she traveled with the campaign. After she surprised Jackson off-stage with what one alert Secret Service agent described as \"a huge swallow\" of a kiss, reporters jokingly began humming the theme to Superman on the bus. But they always stopped before the candidate came within earshot.\n\n Meanwhile, over on the Dole campaign, the senator decided, before the Illinois primary, that morale had sunk very low, so he threw a party for staff members and the press. As reporters stood shyly around the buffet table, Elizabeth Dole tried to get the ball rolling. She threw herself into an uninhibited frug with Bill Brock, the former secretary of labor and Dole's campaign chairman, to the rock classic \"Wipe Out.\" The press corps just watched the display awe. Reporters, like candidates, fear that their unguarded moments might end up in print. (Pretty silly, huh?)\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Flash back to the bold, brazen days of the Seventies. After Governor George Wallace took Florida, his first primary win in 1972, reporters felt frisky. James Wooten and others plotted a conspiracy of silence at the post-victory press conference: As Wallace waited expectantly for questions, the reporters mutely stared back at him. Jim Naughton, a New York Times reporter on the '72 campaign, once locked a sheep in a rival correspondent's hotel room. Hunter Thompson, denied an interview with Jimmy Carter in 1976, set fire to the hotel-room door of Carter's aide Hamilton Jordan. And Curtis Wilkie fondly remembers the young lady in 1972 who expertly removed a McGovern-press-plane pilot's pants before takeoff and hid them, forcing him to scurry up and down the aisle in his underwear looking for them.\n\n Ironically, 1972\u2014the quintessential gonzo campaign\u2014was also the year Richard Nixon got reelected. Many reporters still blame Nixon's Watergate scandal for glorifying investigative journalism and attractive a generation of young people who transformed reporting from a scruffy and idiosyncratic craft into a white-collar, stuffy profession.\n\n People called 1980 the last \"fun\" campaign, but connoisseurs know better. Young reporters gravitated to Senator Edward Kennedy, hoping to re-create the rowdy magic of earlier Kennedy campaigns, a Boys on the Bus '80. They drank scotch, played poker and once took over the lobby of a Hyatt hotel with a rough-and-tumble touch-football game. But Germond and others found it too contrived and self-conscious. In San Antonio, the Kennedy press corps playfully sat propped against a wall, with their arms crossed and huge sombreros tipped over their eyes. \"There were Mexican-American garbage workers and truck drivers dressed in their best clothes, with their wives and kids, and here were the reporters in sombreros,\" Germond recalls. \"Christ, it was tasteless. They were trying to re-create what happened with Bobby,\" he says. \"But those things either happen or they don't.\"\n\n There have been a few hopeful signs along the current campaign that suggest that all life on the planet has not been destroyed. The Dukakis press corps once all donned thick fake eyebrows to tease the straitlaced, bushy-browed candidate. On one of Jesse Jackson's last swings through California, reporters indulged in an all-night champagne party and a Motown dancing night. They even spent a half day of downtime by the motel pool as Jackson rested. Tape recorders, hooked up to speakers, blasted Anita Baker tunes. Reporters sipped pi\u00F1a coladas under the sun and called friends on their cellular phones.\n\n But Jackson, ever the showman, heard the noise and came down from his room to hold an impromptu news conference in an adjacent courtyard\u2014the voluble candidate's third such gathering in twenty-four hours. Michael Oreskes, a reporter for The New York Times who was relaxing in his swimming trunks, sauntered over to Jackson and playfully demurred. \"Reverend, if you want to hold a press conference,\" he teased, \"you'll have to come out by the pool.\"\n\n As Jackson stood his ground and began to speak, reporters looked at one another and shrugged. They put down their pi\u00F1a coladas and picked up their pens, pads and tape recorders. The fun would have to wait."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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