The Boys on the Bus
New York: Random House, 1973. Fourth printing [stated]. Hardcover. ix, [3], 383, [5] pages. Occasional footnotes. Illustrations. Index. Cover has some wear and soiling. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Name in ink inside the front cover. Occasional ink comments noted. Timothy Crouse (born 1947) is an American journalist and writer. He wrote for the Boston Herald before joining the staff of Rolling Stone where he worked as a contributing editor from 1971 to 1972. Crouse is the author of The Boys on the Bus, a largely critical look at the journalists who covered the 1972 US presidential campaign. The only other writer interested in covering the election was his colleague, the legendary writer Hunter S. Thompson. "It only took a few days of riding the bus for me to see that the reporters themselves would make a great story," Crouse said. Crouse also profiled Hunter S. Thompson in the book. [Thompson] "wrote to provoke, shock, protest and annoy," wrote Crouse. Crouse also profiled R.W. Apple, the legendary reporter and editor at the New York Times. Reporters "recognized many of their own traits in him, grotesquely magnified. The shock of recognition frightened them. Apple was like them, only more blatant. He openly displayed the faults they tried to hide: the insecurity, the ambitiousness, the name-dropping" and "the weakness for powerful men." Crouse coined the term pack journalism. "The press likes to demonstrate its power by destroying lightweights, and pack journalism is never more doughty and complacent than when the pack has tacitly agreed that a candidate is a joke." Crouse was a columnist for Esquire & wrote for The New Yorker and The Village Voice. Derived from a Kirkus review: Theodore H. White invented the making of the President business back in 1960 and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson raised it to New Journalistic eminence in 1972. Somewhere in between the stars like White and Thompson are a whole gaggle of political reporters -pundits, pontificators, network glamor boys, fawners, drunks, wire service virtuosos, hacks, hatchet men, comers -- all crammed like monkeys with typewriters in the press bus, frenetically dogging the candidates, all looking for a piece of the story, something to peg their best words on, and perhaps, after the quadrennial gig is finished, a book which might do half as well as White's or be a quarter as perceptive as Thompson's. Now young Crouse -- a Rolling Stone editor via the Harvard Crimson -- has a new angle: why not cover the boys who cover the candidates, letting us in on how the national press makes its copy, regards its members, wields its influence, reacts to the Nixon-McGovern hustle. And he does a quite decent job too -- there's an ample quota of anecdotes like the time Jane Muskie pushed a cake into Dick Stout's (Newsweek) face or how Johnny Apple's (NY Times) South Carolina challenge story was almost killed; there's a good analysis of what Crouse calls "pack journalism"; there's an instructive discussion of the informal but influential "screening committee" comprised of mogul reporters like David Broder and Robert Novak; there' are wonderful descriptions of Crouse's colleagues -- e.g., Jim Naughton: "If Dickens' Tiny Tim had reached the age of thirty-four, he would look like Naughton"; and there's coverage of the coverage of the campaign itself which provides additional insight into the press's attitudes and techniques. Leave the driving to Crouse -- his Making of the Press 1972 reads right along in high gear. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Political Campaigns, Reporters, Journalists, Hunter Thompson, Richard Stout, George McGovern, Jim Naughton, Robert Novak, David Broder, Edmund Muskie, Spiro Agnew, Adam Clymer, William Greider, Robert Semple, Jules Witcover, Ronald Ziegler
ISBN: 0394484436
[Book #81191]
Price: $45.00