pompous
Christian Science Monitor
reporter named Godfrey Sperling started organizing breakfasts where he and some of his friends could meet with leading politicians and government officials. He would have the
Monitor
’s secretaries call up Warren Weaver of the
Times
, David Broder of the
Post
, Phil Potter of the Baltimore
Sun
, Bob Donovan of the Los Angeles
Times
, Peter Lisagor of the Chicago
Daily News
and nine or ten other political writers, to invite them to breakfast at the National Press Club, where for five dollars a head they would get scrambled eggs and hash-browns and a chance to further their acquaintance with some politician. The breakfasts were also “background” sessions—any news that came out of them was not for attribution but had to be treated as coming from “a highly placed Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.” A great deal of useful information was served up with the orange juice at these sessions. Romney first stumbled over Vietnam at one of Sperling’s breakfasts, and Agnew made his debut as a buffoon by declaring that Humphrey was “soft on communism.” At another breakfast, shortly before the 1968 Republican Convention, the reporters kept suggesting to Nelson Rockefeller that his chances were nil. “Gee,” Rockefeller finally said, “if I thought I was as bad off as you guys say I am, I’d drop out.” The most memorable breakfast took place in January 1968, when Robert Kennedy anguished out loud for an hour as to whether or not he should run. The reporters there recalled the scene in the stories they wrote when Kennedy finally decided to enter the race.
By 1970, Sperling’s breakfast club began to go to hell; almost anybody who wanted to could come, and the guests often spoke on the record, which meant that they said nothing of importance.But in the early days, Sperling restricted the breakfasts to his friends, which caused great bitterness among the writers who were not invited. Jack Germond, the chief political writer for the Gannett chain, was furious. He had eighteen papers in New York State and he was tired of getting scooped by
The New York Times
whenever John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller or Robert Kennedy appeared at Sperling’s breakfasts. So in 1969 he and Jules Witcover, who was working for the Newhouse chain and was also shut out, organized a rival group. Witcover christened it, with tongue in cheek, Political Writers for a Democratic Society.
The main purpose of PWDS was to get to know politicians in easy, informal surroundings. The meetings were usually held at Germond’s three-story row house in southwest Washington. The fourteen members would assemble once a month, have a couple of drinks with the guest, eat a catered supper downstairs in a big family room, and then go back upstairs to the long, rectangular living room. The guest sat in a large armchair in the middle of the room, taking questions from the reporters, who sat around him on sofas and other easy chairs. More drinks were served. Finally, after the guest had left, the men would pull out their notebooks and reconstruct the main points of the evening, trying to decide what the guest may or may not have meant in certain statements and generally sizing him up.
The most interesting thing about PWDS was its composition, which had been determined largely by Germond and Witcover. I cornered Germond one August night in the McGovern pressroom at the Biltmore Hotel in New York to ask him about the group. He was sitting all alone at one of the long typewriter tables, waiting in vain for a poker game to materialize and slowly getting drunk. He was a little cannonball of a man, forty-four years old, with a fresh, leprechaunish face, a fringe of white hair around his bald head, and a pugnacious, hands-on-hip manner of talking. He was not simply drawn to journalism as a profession; like Hildy Johnson in
Front Page
, he was addicted to it as a way of life.
Although he himself sometimes described his chain as
Christian Science Monitor
reporter named Godfrey Sperling started organizing breakfasts where he and some of his friends could meet with leading politicians and government officials. He would have the
Monitor
’s secretaries call up Warren Weaver of the
Times
, David Broder of the
Post
, Phil Potter of the Baltimore
Sun
, Bob Donovan of the Los Angeles
Times
, Peter Lisagor of the Chicago
Daily News
and nine or ten other political writers, to invite them to breakfast at the National Press Club, where for five dollars a head they would get scrambled eggs and hash-browns and a chance to further their acquaintance with some politician. The breakfasts were also “background” sessions—any news that came out of them was not for attribution but had to be treated as coming from “a highly placed Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.” A great deal of useful information was served up with the orange juice at these sessions. Romney first stumbled over Vietnam at one of Sperling’s breakfasts, and Agnew made his debut as a buffoon by declaring that Humphrey was “soft on communism.” At another breakfast, shortly before the 1968 Republican Convention, the reporters kept suggesting to Nelson Rockefeller that his chances were nil. “Gee,” Rockefeller finally said, “if I thought I was as bad off as you guys say I am, I’d drop out.” The most memorable breakfast took place in January 1968, when Robert Kennedy anguished out loud for an hour as to whether or not he should run. The reporters there recalled the scene in the stories they wrote when Kennedy finally decided to enter the race.
By 1970, Sperling’s breakfast club began to go to hell; almost anybody who wanted to could come, and the guests often spoke on the record, which meant that they said nothing of importance.But in the early days, Sperling restricted the breakfasts to his friends, which caused great bitterness among the writers who were not invited. Jack Germond, the chief political writer for the Gannett chain, was furious. He had eighteen papers in New York State and he was tired of getting scooped by
The New York Times
whenever John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller or Robert Kennedy appeared at Sperling’s breakfasts. So in 1969 he and Jules Witcover, who was working for the Newhouse chain and was also shut out, organized a rival group. Witcover christened it, with tongue in cheek, Political Writers for a Democratic Society.
The main purpose of PWDS was to get to know politicians in easy, informal surroundings. The meetings were usually held at Germond’s three-story row house in southwest Washington. The fourteen members would assemble once a month, have a couple of drinks with the guest, eat a catered supper downstairs in a big family room, and then go back upstairs to the long, rectangular living room. The guest sat in a large armchair in the middle of the room, taking questions from the reporters, who sat around him on sofas and other easy chairs. More drinks were served. Finally, after the guest had left, the men would pull out their notebooks and reconstruct the main points of the evening, trying to decide what the guest may or may not have meant in certain statements and generally sizing him up.
The most interesting thing about PWDS was its composition, which had been determined largely by Germond and Witcover. I cornered Germond one August night in the McGovern pressroom at the Biltmore Hotel in New York to ask him about the group. He was sitting all alone at one of the long typewriter tables, waiting in vain for a poker game to materialize and slowly getting drunk. He was a little cannonball of a man, forty-four years old, with a fresh, leprechaunish face, a fringe of white hair around his bald head, and a pugnacious, hands-on-hip manner of talking. He was not simply drawn to journalism as a profession; like Hildy Johnson in
Front Page
, he was addicted to it as a way of life.
Although he himself sometimes described his chain as
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