Reporting party conventions - 20 July 1984

A couple of weeks ago the phone rang and a voice asked me when I was going to San Francisco.

It was my oldest friend in what we used to call journalism, a fellow reporter, this, and famous one. Incidentally, if there is a distinction between a journalist and a reporter it was made plain for all time by an old Baltimore newspaperman. "I don’t know how it is in your country," he said, "but in this country, a journalist is a man who cadges drinks from a reporter."

Well, I won’t make any flat jokes about the fact that my old reporter friend is a Scotsman, at least he was, for two short periods in his boyhood. A Clydeside labourer's son, who emigrated here in 1912 didn’t make it, went back home to save his pennies or, better, an occasional sovereign and try again. The First World War trapped the family for four or more years, but in 1919 the labourer, his wife and son came back again, went into the middle west, into Ohio, and made it this time.

The son worked first as a caddy – he developed a mean caddy’s swing, which he still has – and then went into the newspaper game, first as the local sports correspondent, then with a national news agency, then he was their top man. Once he had what must have been the interesting experience of sharing a cabin with Sam Snead, on the transatlantic voyage to cover the British Amateur and the Walker Cup in Scotland.

But Hitler was starting on the rampage, and the young Scot, a Calvinist at heart, came to the conclusion that maybe there were more pressing things to report than the grandeurs and miseries of the old course at St Andrews. He switched shortly to the New York Times, was in their London bureau at the beginning of the war, came back to Washington, and in three or four years became the head of the New York Times’s Washington bureau, won several Pulitzer prizes, and for a time was – and perhaps even now, in his rotund but hearty 70s, is – the most distinguished of American political commentators, certainly he’s the most experienced.

I have never checked how many presidential nominating conventions he has covered but I like to think that I jumped the gun on him by, four years, for the first convention I attended was the ever-memorable Republican convention at Philadelphia in 1940, as it turns out now (we should never have guessed at the time) the last convention of either party in which the overwhelming favourites for the nomination were overwhelmed by a maverick. In this case, a Wall Street utilities lawyer who had never voted Republican, was not a politician, whose hopes were ridiculed even as the balloting started. Well, they went into the sixth ballot, to everybody’s amazement and I shall never forget the scene, or rather, the thing heard, which was far more vivid to the imagination, than anything television could have shown if there had been television.

The clerk of the convention called Kansas. The chairman of the Kansas delegation was the small but politically formidable figure of one Alf Landon. He had been the Republican nominee four years before, in 1936, never mind that in that Roosevelt landslide he carried only two states. By now, he was still very much a power in the party, and through five ballots the great wheat state of Kansas had stayed firm behind the great middle-westerner Senator Taft.

When, on the sixth ballot, Kansas was called, there was a puzzling pause and the microphones, which stood like a row of saplings in those days along the aisles crackled with rumours and expostulations and men breathing hard. The word eventually got through to the chairman that Kansas wished to make a statement from the rostrum.

I will never forget Alf Landon pattering down the aisle – I guess pattering is wrong. If you were at the Republican convention this year, which he might well be, he might patter, because he is 96, but – treading neatly down the aisle. I wasn’t in the auditorium then, I’d already learned that the radio correspondents pooled more information for the listener in the critical moments than any single galloping reporter could gather from using his legs.

But what we heard was the sound never to be forgotten. The sound worthy of a Hitchcock movie, Landon's pants and new shoes and they squeaked in rhythm as they passed each microphone. And at last he got to the rostrum. He paused, he was not a breast-beater or a soul saver, he was a dapper, reasonable, quiet-spoken man. He said, "The state of Kansas wishes to change its vote. Kansas casts all its 24 votes for Wendell Willkie," and that did it.

It took about half an hour for the bouncing, hysterical Wilkieites to stop parading around the auditorium and be shushed into the low uproar which is a convention's definition of silence. The big states came tumbling in and the small-town boy from Indiana, who turned into the big utilities lawyer, was nominated. And he put on a bristling, charging campaign against Roosevelt. He didn’t make it. In Roosevelt’s Cabinet, the secretary of the interior was one Harold Ickes, a rheumy-eyed pudgy man who, like Calvin Coolidge, might be said to have been weaned on a pickle.

He was known as the curmudgeon and his curmudgeonly wit was a devastating weapon during the campaign: he called Willkie the poor barefoot boy from Wall Street, and the image – especially when the Second World War was erupting in the German invasions of France and the Low Countries – the image stuck.

Well, since then, we have had our exciting, dubious moments, but never the shock of seeing the maverick bound into the corral and scatter the famous, branded beasts. I think two, three ballots has been the most we have ever gone to now. And now, as I said last week, the bargaining and the poker plays and the seductions which used to go on in the convention city and, eventually, on the floor in the convention itself, they have been more or less completed beforehand, since more than three-quarters of the states now hold primary elections which commit the delegates to one man before they ever take off for the convention city.

So there were lots of animal spirits exercised in San Francisco but little breath-taking as the clerk called the roll. By the way, this year the clerk was not, as I said he always was, a stentorian baritone but a mezzo soprano. And guiding her was the chairman of the session, the Democratic party secretary, a competent, attractive, unflurried matron in her late 60s, the sight of whom took me back to the Democratic convention of 1948.

This lady, who is now Dorothy Bush, was then Dorothy Vredenburg and she astonished and delighted the convention when she appeared because she was slim, and very pretty and beautifully dressed. This provoked from the old reporter sitting next to me a sudden, jabbing of two index fingers to his typewriter. What Mr Mencken wrote was... "this Mrs Vredenburg has defined the convention and the conventions, she is uniquely slim and smartly clad. A striking exception to the rule that lady politicians in this country should resemble British tramp steamers dressed up for the King's birthday."

Well, as usual this year, the Democrats were something between one and two hours behind the timetable but finally, at two in the morning eastern time, when even most Democrats were in bed, but only eleven o’clock on the coast, the blousy coronation ceremony was all over, as is now usual on the first ballot. And Walter Mondale of Minnesota flashed yet again the grin of triumph he has been rehearsing since last February.

You will gather, correctly, that I was among the two am night owls. I was not there, I was three thousand miles away, having discovered without change 33 years ago, that for all events that are nationally televised for hours on end, the reporter's, or rather, his editor's insistence on a deadline from the place where it’s all happening has become an item of foolish pride.

I see I learnt this precisely 33 years ago, because that was the time, in September 1951, when the Japanese peace treaty conference was being held, in San Francisco. On the final night, the big speech-making show, the foreign press corps was relegated to the back rows of the last gallery of the Opera House and, at that distance, the stage looked like a coloured postcard. It was difficult to pick out all those delectable details that would bring the show alive for a newspaper reader.

I noticed through my squinting gaze a pink, bulky man in an electric blue suit. He seemed to be wearing brown shoes, I was not sure if that was so or who he was. Well, there was a break in the proceedings and I found a call box and phoned my wife 3,000 miles away in New York, who, I asked, is the blue suit with the brown shoes. She was incredulous, "You mean," she said, "the man with the mole on his right cheek?" "Come now, smarty pants," I said. "Well you are there, aren’t you?". Alas I was. She told me it was Governor Earl Warren of California.

After that I thought again about the pride and the actual effectiveness of being in the same auditorium with a couple of thousand other people while your wife is comfortable at home, marking the moles on the cheeks of statesmen we couldn’t identify. That conference was the first coast-to-coast telecast.

Well, for many years thereafter I dutifully went to the scene of the crime, that was when I had it out with the editor. He saw my point. Nervously, distastefully, because like most newspaper editors, he dearly wanted to believe that television didn’t exist. But by the mid-1950s at the latest, the custom of being there, typing out your dateline to show that you knew what was going on, was, as Jefferson said about titles of nobility, a very great and needless vanity.

And if ever the point needs to be proved again, I regularly invite the famous golfing journalist, a magazine writer who is always there, to come up to my apartment when he is back home, and watch the major golf tournaments on videotape. He makes furious notes, and is touchingly grateful to me, and when his stuff appears it's quite clear, that he achieved the miracle of darting all over 300 acres like a helicopter and missing not a stroke, nor a trickle of sweat on the leaders' faces.

In San Francisco on Wednesday night, 3,850 delegates cast their votes, 3,850. In the city of San Francisco there were, some of them actually in the auditorium, 13,000 reporters. That is the new ratio. I doubt I’d have learned or seen much more if I had been the 13,001.

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