NY Reporter:"....Get off this Watergate Shit.....", to Frank Mankiewicz.
When I developed the telephone news conference for the McGovern for President campaign, in order to push Watergate as an issue, the Chairman of the Democratic Party, Larry O’Brien would fly me from DC to New York to put together such a conference for him.
After picking me up at the airport in his personal limo, he would ask me to stay over to socialize. I declined, and would fly right back to Washington. Now, anybody who had even a slight interest in furthering his or her career would have accepted. But not me. Later I found out that Attorney O’Brien had one major client. It was billionaire Howard Hughes.
I was never interested in politics as business. Too often big firms just become defenders of the status quo. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn’t see politics as just a series of cocktail parties.
Prior to going to DC to push Watergate, under the direction of Frank Mankiewicz, and before McGovern started his California Primary campaign, I was working for Los Angeles Councilman Tom Bradley, when I received a flurry of calls from the Mcgovern for President campaign in 1972. They wanted me to be his California Press Secretary for the Democratic Primary.
I liked working for Bradley, didn’t want to take the job of the guy who was already filling the Press Secretary seat, and was told by Senator Hughes (D-IA) that McGovern was, “Too negative to run the country.”
But, by the fourth time they called, I was starting to get pressure from the Bradley people.
Frank Mankiewicz, who was sharing national campaign manager duties with Gary Hart, named me as California Press Secretary for the Primary.
I was hesitant, but accepted. (It should be noted that Fred Epstein was the California hero who opened his own office for the candidate in Westwood, when McGovern only had 2% support in the national polls. He later married Vicki Huxtable whose foods you may have scene at Costco's.) It would be the first time I had not worked directly with the candidate, and therefore would not have any input directly to statements, timing, and pronouncements.
Also, I had the unpleasant reaction a couple of years later in Sacramento, when the guy I replaced started yelling across the State Capitol lawn, “There’s Bob Kholos, he took my job away.”
With the California Primary at stake, and respected campaign manager Joe Cerrell running the Humphrey effort, we had to increase our free news saturation.
With the help of Marsha Temple, presently an Attorney who has remarried broadcaster Warren Olney, the West Coast version on KCRW FM of media host Charlie Rose, we developed a fly-by-night television news operation.
Marsha organized a statewide group of mostly Vietnam Veteran pilots, to fly daily news excerpts of McGovern news conferences in California.
I would edit down the speeches and statements to what I guessed would be the wire service lead on what he said, and then copies would be made at a mobile facility, paid for by industrialist Miles Rubin. The Video footage would be handed to these former combat pilots, and they would fly their single engine planes to small media markets around the state. The local television stations would read the AP or UPI copy for their evening news casts and have, otherwise unavailable, pictures to match.
Without the pictures, it was unlikely that they would have used the wire copy for their newscasts. It was a big success and I believe had a lot to do with McGovern’s victory over Humphrey (who I wish had become President in ‘68).
Once McGovern won the California primary, we went to Miami for the National Convention. It was there, when the Humphrey forces tried to keep the California McGovern forces from being accredited. That’s when Assemblyman Willie Brown gave his famous statement of, “I want my delegation.” The McGovern forces were accredited and the former World War II combat pilot won the nomination.
We stayed at the Doral, a fancy, upscale hotel in Miami Beach, and the hotel management had a hard time adjusting to the big change in political delegates, from the stayed cigar smoking middle class democrats of past generations, to the new group of pot smoking challengers of the established order.
Some of the hotel residents complained when the McGovern women took their tops off in the swimming pool. It was quite a scene when the management asked politely if the delegates could refrain from smoking marijuana and removing their clothes in the swimming pool.
When Mcgovern became standard barer for the Democratic Party against President Richard Nixon, I pushed the idea of putting together the telephone news conference from national headquarters. It was a cost effective way of getting press attention in a national campaign by using the telephone with reporters throughout the country. After sending a memo to Frank Mankiewicz about the idea of using the telephone as a part of the media/scheduling operation, I received an initialed “Why Not,” in response.
As I found out later, the “Why Not,” response was pretty much the modus operandi of the McGovern campaign.
It was easy working for Frank Mankiewicz, but it was hard to figure out where Gary Hart, with his omnipresent cowboy boots, was coming from.
Staff members would get a cold detachment from the Hart side of the operation.
Pushing Watergate before the Headlines
The telephone operation was actually billed as a radio news conference, but I would add an AP or UPI reporter, a journalist from a major newspaper, and every once in awhile, a local television station who had a political specialist, would join in to monitor the call. In this way, from a technical point of view, if the person made legitimate news that day, and his voice ran on local radio news as a result, it would be backed up statewide by the wire service story, which would increase the number of potential voter’s who would listen to the statement.
After setting up the operation in the McGovern for President national headquarters in Washington, I had to jump my next hurdle, which was getting the candidate to do it. The scheduling operation never caught on to the idea, and as a result, I remember George only used it once.
I had Vice Presidential candidate Sergeant Shriver try it. But, he was always so late, that it screwed up the reporters waiting at their respective news bureaus on the other end of the phone. One staff guy said Shriver was late a lot, “because he was always praying.”
Working closely with Frank Mankiewicz, we developed a surrogate system of campaign spokespeople to use the system nationally to push Watergate.
The three prime users of the conference call were National Democratic Chairman Larry O’Brien, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Mankiewicz.
Hubert Humphrey was the most zealous of all the telephone press conference practitioners. He loved to talk. The guys at the Democratic National Committee, housed in the Watergate complex, were telling me how Humphrey would go over to the DNC so he could get on the radio operation. They got tired of him overusing the equipment. The radio feed operation, something I had developed in the 1968 Cranston for Senate campaign, was now widely used by everyone. The radio feed operation would transmit topical tape actualities on an important issue of the day and send it over the telephone to hundreds of radio stations throughout the country. Attorney Sandy Berger, the nation’s National Security Advisor to President Clinton, once said to me, “We should have patented the Radio News beeper system, you could have made a fortune.”
When I came to the Humphrey people about my newest concept in news propaganda, they were ecstatic. Humphrey had just lost the nomination for the presidency to McGovern, and there was a lot of tension between the campaigns. Because Humphrey was a team player, he decided he would help bring moderate voters into the democratic fold against the Richard Nixon forces.
Humphrey had lost four years earlier in a squeaker against Nixon. Liberal Democrats had stayed out of that campaign, because they wanted him to be more aggressive in his stance against the Vietnam War. That decision gave America a Nixon presidency. It was not much different on how Gore lost the presidency to Bush in 2000. Nader picked up over 90,000 votes in Florida, as a result of thousands of liberal democrats shunning the more moderate Gore. That vote, not the Supreme Court, gave the Republican the White House.
The Radio Telephone press conferences became a blessing for the Humphrey staff, and the Democratic Party. It gave a voice to an otherwise split party. Humphrey held a number of telephone news conferences.
After getting very good results from the first few news conferences, Frank Mankiewicz suggested we use this operation to push the Watergate break-in. It was before Watergate became a major issue. Reporters were skeptical as to why we were pushing the break-in.
When I had Frank hold one of these conference calls from Washington, DC to New York City, the mere mention of why we were holding the telephone news conference raised the ire of one reporter. Before Frank began with his two minute opening statement, one of the Big Apple reporters on the other end of the line said, “Hey, Frank, why don’t you guys get off this Watergate shit.” It was a statement, not a question.
My favorite quote from the telephone interviews came when Sen. Humphrey was holding a news conference hook-up from his Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill to the Minneapolis-St.Paul press corps.
I was leaning down to make sure the equipment was working properly. I noticed that the Happy Warrior had only one photograph in his office. I often wondered why, out of all the people Humphrey had known throughout his political career, he chose a picture of Frank Sinatra?
As I monitored the questions, I noticed how much he enjoyed the give and take of a press conference.
When one reporter challenged the Senator on whether he had information that this, “Watergate thing,” was really a serious issue in the McGovern campaign, Humphrey responded in his classic style: “When I was a young man working in the pharmacy, I could open the lid of one of those vials and smell whether the medicine was going bad. And this Watergate business smells ‘bhaaaad’ to me.”
After Senator Muskie dropped out of the presidential contest because he was the victim of Nixon’s “Dirty Trickster’s,” and McGovern lost for a combination of reasons, I went home to my beachfront maid’s quarter’s apartment in Santa Monica. The rent was only 150 bucks a month.
Photo: Bob Kholos showing Humphrey Telephone news conf.
Photo: Bob with Daryl
McGovern DC Hqs.
Hey, Bob,
Your post on McGovern in California and at the Doral brought back some great memories of exciting times to this erstwhile head of security for the campaign during those months - not the least was a late night long drive down the wrong way of a one-way Miami Beach Street in Hunter Thompson's blue Chevy convertible! Much appreciate your memoirs.
Tony Barash
Posted by: Tony Barash | May 09, 2006 at 02:15 PM