This year, there was a faint chance we might get some action again. Nuclear power and arms control were emerging as big medicine in the national campaign, and we’d already had some epic referendum fights on both. (Our voters wished advising the president, the Congress, the United Nations, and the Soviet Union on how to run the world, but it was a root canal job to get them to approve a bond issue to repair their own highways.)
Anyway, The New York Times announced early on that we would be “a crucial testing ground” in the primaries because of our “prairie populist” resistance to such Eastern notions as atomic power and city-flattening missiles.
Not to be outanalyzed, The Washington Post proclaimed that we knew nothing about nukes, but that there would be a “key confrontation” in our state on the issue of dairy price supports.
It also had a ten-thousand-word profile of a guy who had walked away from a job as a New York advertising copy writer to run a dairy farm in our state. He obviously had gone from one job to another to shovel manure.
The lady who did the piece obviously hadn’t spent much time on farms. One of the “anecdotes” in the piece told how she thought only male animals grew horns and was surprised to find that cows, “the female of the species,” come fully equipped in that department. Lent some depth to the piece I thought.
Then, just when we thought we knew what we were concerned about in our state, the Los Angeles Times weighed in with the declaration that our voters really were apathetic about the issues and the battle would really be one of media consultants and direct mail fund-raising skills.
With the stakes so clearly stated, ABC unveiled plans for a six-week series of tracking polls that would place a network researcher with a portable video camera and recorder in each of 467 typical homes to record the ebb and flow of opinion as it took place around the dining room tables of the state.
CBS flew an antinuclear activist, a dairy farmer, and a professional campaign consultant to New York to be interviewed by Diane Sawyer, and NBC responded by sending Jane Pauley to have breakfast on a farm whose owner said he, for one, would be proud to have an MX missile in the south forty if it would help “keep the durn commynists in Roosha where they belonged.”
It was my private suspicion that the real attraction of our state to the national political press was the quality of the German restaurants in the city, where most of the campaigns headquartered. But who was I to question my betters?
So I scribbled out a news coverage plan for Swift and left it in his mailbox. The next day, I got another summons to his fishbowl office.
“This is somewhat better. But we’re going to add something. We need stories by someone who sees this state with a fresh eye. Someone who doesn’t think it’s perfectly normal when a candidate for president of the United States steps in a cow turd,” Swift said with a meaningful look.
He handed me a book. “You know of this fellow?”
I needed only a glance. The book was that classic, Lust, Trust and Bust, Naughton Newton’s abstract impressionistic tour de force on the 1980 campaign. It had a half chapter about our state’s political climate, and so far as I could tell, it must have been written after a careful examination of the situation in California. It was entertaining enough, but the discussion of citrus ranching and alpine ski resorts as the lynchpins of our economy was somewhat distracting.
One of the national political reporters I met during that campaign came through town shortly after Newton’s book was published in 1981, and I asked him where the hell the guy got his information.
“Oh, Christ, don’t tell me you people take Knocko Newton’s stuff seriously? Where does he get his information? Right off the west wall, that’s where. Shit, Knocko was in Boston during most of the 1980 campaign. He was on his way to cover New Hampshire in February when he ran into this half-Latvian, half-Osage Indian girl in the bar of the Winthrop Plaza. He moved in till June with her and her father, an old drunk who sits around wrapped in a blanket and a feather in his hair and puts away a fifth of sloe gin every afternoon. Knocko loved em both. He said the broad had a tongue that should have been awarded an MIT Ph.D., and claimed old Here’s-Looking-at-You-Kid could slice open a fresh-caught mackerel and give you a better reading on the next primary from its insides than Harris or Gallup could get from a week of polling. And lemme tell you, there were a couple times that year he was a lot closer than I was.”
Remembering that, I looked up from the book and started to object. “This guy is a phony…”
“Phony!” Swift roared. “That book contains some of the best writing about politics I have read in thirty years. Most of these campaign books read like they were written by a spinster school marm. Newton may not be one of your deep political philosophers, but at least he recognizes that these politicians you get so excited about are just as susceptible to human failings as any undereducated, oversexed film star. I just wish I could get you and some of the other nancies I inherited on this staff to write like Newton.”
Swift paused, taking the book back from me. “Besides, if he’s a phony, how do you explain the fact that the book was twenty-eight weeks on the bestseller list?”
How could you argue with logic like that? I opened my mouth to try, but Swift raised his hand.
“I called you here to tell you that we’ve signed Newton to do two weeks of exclusive primary coverage for us. I want you to fit him into the coverage and assign one of our people to help him with the logistics—transport, reservations, and so on.”
“Christ! He’s got to have a wet nurse, too?”
“Just do it, bucko. We’re paying a good piece of change for this, and I want to see some writing like he did in this book.”
We didn’t see Newton right away. The candidates—the skinny senator with all the hair, the young governor who married the movie star, and the old general who wanted to prove he could do the job better if somebody would just put him in charge—all made forays into the state as the primary pace picked up in the East and the South, and we did a credible job of covering them without Knocko’s help.
One sunny afternoon, Liz and I were at the airport waiting for the governor’s charter to arrive when she poked me in the arm and pointed to a hangar about a quarter mile away. A small tractor was pulling the oddest-looking aircraft I had ever seen out of the building, and behind it came strutting none other than the eminent publisher of the Capital Register & Press.
Shiu, looking like a Smurf in a space suit next to the huge silver-painted helicopter, clambered up into the cockpit and in a few minutes the gigantic rotors began swinging slowly. After a period of running up the engines, the ungainly machine moved out onto the field and slowly rose into the air. It went up a couple of hundred feet and headed toward town with a great clatter.
The governor’s plane landed a few minutes later and we went to work. Liz observed as we followed him around town the rest of the day that he looked passable and sounded plausible, but it must have been something he kept behind a zipper that attracted the famous movie beauty who married him. “He might talk a woman to sleep, but not to bed,” she commented.
Liz still was spending most of her time in the photo lab at the paper, but she was getting more frequent assignments to take pictures. Whine’s initial suspicion of her had given way to a kind of teacher’s pride in an apt pupil, and he was giving her jobs that ordinarily he would have jumped to take himself. I was amazed one afternoon to hear him arguing with Hank Terry about sending Liz to cover a basketball game.