CHAPTER 6
Joining the Journal
MY FRUSTRATIONS AS a regional reporter were eased because the general desk in the AP’s Washington bureau co-opted reporters from the regional desk as “tail gunners” on major hearings. When the main AP reporter left the hearing room to phone in a new lead, the tail gunner would take notes and then either give them to his colleague or phone in an insert himself.
It was considered menial duty by the regional staff’s old-timers. Such chores, they grumbled, cut into time devoted to their regional beats (though I suspected they were really complaining about cutting into their card-playing time). If they hated being co-opted, I loved it.
During my first month in Washington, the general desk assigned me as tail gunner for a week of hearings by the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor-Management Field (shortened by the press to the Senate Rackets Committee)—the first of many assignments there. That was my ticket to a broader new world. I ended up talking to John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Edward Bennett Williams, Kenneth O’Donnell, and Pierre Salinger. That was something for a twenty-six-year-old reporter new to Washington.
Jack Kennedy, running for president in 1960, understood that liberalism was no longer enough to win in America. Republicans were dismantling the New Deal coalition by cutting away ethnics, Catholics, blue-collar workers, and southerners. Kennedy’s answer was to pose as a fearless investigator of ties between organized labor and organized crime. The trick was to concentrate on the mob-infested Teamsters, who were leaning toward the Republicans anyway. Labor leaders feared the investigation would spread beyond the Teamsters and lead to corrective legislation that would adversely affect the nation’s labor-management balance. If it did, Kennedy—and his presidential candidacy—would be held responsible.
Kennedy, walking a political tightrope, was relying on his little brother, Robert Francis Kennedy, his chief political strategist, to keep him upright. Bobby controlled the Rackets Committee as its chief counsel, and brought in the Kennedy first team to run the investigation. Committee chairman John L. McClellan of Arkansas, a conservative Democrat and a segregationist, was deftly manipulated by Bobby.
The committee’s conservative Republicans also were playing a delicate game. Not wanting to seem soft on crime or corruption, they joined Democratic senators in berating the Teamsters and James R. Hoffa. At the same time, they prodded the Kennedys to investigate violence by the United Auto Workers of Walter Reuther, who had become a huge power in the Democratic Party.
Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, elected to the Senate for the first time in 1952 along with Jack Kennedy and now emerging as a dynamic leader of the Republican Party’s conservative wing, was the committee’s most visible counterweight to the Kennedys. But often he seemed erratic and unable to pursue a consistent course.
WHEN THE AP’S general desk discovered I was possibly a more capable and certainly a more enthusiastic tail gunner for Rackets Committee hearings than older regional staffers, I was co-opted frequently and given broader duties—often writing the national wire overnight story that would be published in the first edition of the then more numerous afternoon newspapers until new developments produced a new lead. Newspaper editors often picked which wire service they would use through the day based on the first few paragraphs of the overnight story, and it was important for the AP to win that competition.
By August 1958, I had become an old hand at this sort of thing. Bobby Kennedy, to prove his point that Jimmy Hoffa could not clean up the Teamsters because it was under mob control, was calling as witnesses a collection of bizarre hoodlums—such as three-hundred-pound ex-convict Barney Baker, a prototypical labor goon. For the overnight report of Thursday, August 21, when Baker was scheduled to testify before the Rackets Committee, my competitor with the UP (now United Press International after its merger with Hearst’s International News Service) led his story with a report that Baker long ago had killed vaudeville comedian Joe Penner’s famous duck. I took a different approach:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (AP)—Senate investigators sought today to discover how Robert (Barney) Baker, $125-a-week Teamsters Union organizer, managed to lavish thousands of dollars on a blonde convicted slayer.
Baker was called back by the Senate Rackets Committee to answer questions about testimony that he enabled blonde Mrs. Ruth Brougher to live in plush Miami surroundings in 1955 while she awaited the outcome of an appeal from a manslaughter conviction.
Mrs. Brougher, brought here from a Florida prison to testify, swore Wednesday she had no idea where the money came from. Chairman John L. McClellan (D-Ark.) had asked whether it was from Baker’s own funds, the Teamster treasury, or stolen or kidnap money.
The AP killed UPI competitively on that story. A blond killer would trump Joe Penner’s duck any day.
Information about both the blonde and the duck came from Bobby Kennedy’s daily briefing to reporters regularly covering the hearing. That was where I got to know him a little and dislike him a lot. It was a stacked deck against Bobby’s enemies. He would deal out a preview for the next day’s newspapers, with rebuttal witnesses denied coverage because their comments would be immediately overtaken by a new story line.
Determined as Kennedy was to snare Jimmy Hoffa, he was no less fixed on shielding Walter Reuther. To protect his brother’s presidential nomination, he had to prevent conservative Republicans from drawing equivalency between Teamsters corruption and United Auto Workers violence.
Senator Goldwater was the committee’s most visible Republican face. I found him charming, eager to help me, and always committed to the conservative cause, without Bill Jenner’s overriding hopelessness. But I also found him far less focused than the Kennedys and tending not to follow through on what he had told me and other reporters he planned to do. It was an uneven contest. Two feckless Republican staff investigators, constantly harassed by Bobby, were aligned against Kennedy’s seventy-two staffers. As a witness, the voluble Reuther talked down the committee.
I THOUGHT I discovered an entry to the AP’s general staff: a new beat created to cover atomic energy. I had written a national wire analysis on a Michigan dispute over a proposed nuclear power plant that I had covered closely for the regional staff. The AP did not have anybody specifically covering this important field (as the New York Times and the Washington Post did). I wrote a detailed two-page memo to Beale, proposing an atomic energy beat and adding that I was eager to cover that beat. Jim Marlow, the AP’s venerable national columnist who was a mentor to me and other young AP reporters, thought the memo was cogent, and Beale’s secretary (who liked me) thought her boss would buy it.
She was wrong, as was shown in the first of two face-to-face meetings with my bureau chief. William L. Beale, very thin with a long face and a crimson complexion, seldom smiled. Having read my memo, Beale ascertained, correctly, that I was a lot more interested in getting off the regional staff than I was in atomic energy. He made clear he had no intention of creating a new beat and strongly implied there was no prospect for me joining the general staff in any capacity.
A few weeks later, in late August 1958, I was approached in the House Press Gallery by Alan Otten, senior congressional correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. I had briefed him on Indiana politics earlier that year in preparation for his reporting trip to Indianapolis. Now Otten asked me whether I would be interested in interviewing for a job with the Journal covering the Senate.
ALBERT CLARK, BUREAU chief of the Wall Street Journal, took me to dinner at the Ambassador Hotel, across the street from the newspaper’s offices on 14th Street in midtown Washington. After perusing my AP clippings and interviewing me over dinner, Clark offered me a job covering the Senate and politics all over the country.
That might seem a dream job that a frustrated regional reporter would snap up. In fact, it was not that easy for me. By 1958, its genius publisher, Bernard Kilgore, had made the Journal America’s first national newspaper through simultaneous publication in five regional publishing plants, but its 536,000 circulation was far from the two million level it would reach. Nobody I knew read what was then still wrongly considered a stock market tip sheet. The WSJ had yet to become must reading in the political community, and I never read it myself.
The AP exerted a powerful tug on me after four years, if only I were given some hope of getting off the regional staff. So I requested another meeting with William Beale to tell him I was considering a job offer from the Wall Street Journal. My second meeting was no more productive than my first. I asked bluntly whether I had any chance in the foreseeable future to get on the AP’s general staff covering Congress or anything else. Beale replied bleakly that he saw no likelihood of that. Not once did he ask me to stay.
Considering Doug Cornell’s role in getting me to Washington, I felt constrained to tell him I might be leaving the AP. After hearing about my meeting with Beale, Doug thought I should snap up the WSJ offer. So did Jim Marlow. Unlike Beale, both expressed regret that the AP did not find a place for me.
I accepted the Journal’s $160-a-week salary, offered me on a take-it-or-leave-it basis after I said I would not take the job if I was not paid more than the $150 the AP was paying me then.
EVEN AFTER I gave notice to the AP, I kept trying to develop exclusive regional stories. I dropped into the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which ran the party’s Senate campaigns. They told me that a Republican senator on my beat, Charles Potter, was dead meat for reelection in Michigan. That assessment was not surprising, but the fact NRSC managers would speak so frankly was news.
On September 26, 1958, my AP account ran throughout Michigan. (“GOP Is Aware Potter May Be Defeated,” headlined the Adrian Daily Telegram’s front page):
WASHINGTON (AP)—Republican campaign strategists here now agree with their Democratic counterparts that only a political miracle can save Sen. Charles E. Potter (R-Mich) from defeat in November.
A check of national-level party officials shows bipartisan agreement that all signs point to a win for the Democratic Senate candidate, Lt. Gov. Philip A. Hart….
GOP campaign planners…say Potter has less chance than any other incumbent Republican Senator. And they concede the Republicans will lose some seats this year.
Potter went down to the defeat, as predicted, by 170,000 votes.
My report contained too much truth for Republican politicians and some small-town newspapers in Michigan. Potter’s handlers were enraged, and talked Republican publishers of several newspapers that had run my story into writing a letter of protest to the AP. A friend of mine who worked for Potter showed me a copy of William L. Beale’s reply to the publishers. Beale agreed the story never should have been written and then provided this kicker: Mr. Novak is no longer with the Associated Press. The implication that I had been fired was unprofessional mendacity.
(In 1978 I was taken into the Gridiron Club, an organization of senior Washington-based journalists that included the retired Bill Beale as one of its elders. In years to come, I avoided any contact with him at the club’s annual white-tie dinner.)
It is unfortunate to conclude my account of four years with the Associated Press on such an ugly note. The AP provided a twenty-three-year-old neophyte journalist fresh out of the army with amazing opportunities that became the foundation of my career. I am profoundly grateful, and shall always consider myself an AP man.