MOVE OVER, BOYS

The Girls in The Van: Covering Hillary
By Beth J. Harpaz
Thomas Dunne Books
320 pp. $24.95

REVIEWED BY ANDIE TUCHER

In the innocent days of 1972, when covering the journalists who covered the candidates was still the kind of kooky stunt only Rolling Stone would pull, the young reporter Timothy Crouse romped along the campaign trail as Hunter Thompson's back-up and brought forth The Boys on the Bus. Reviews at the time were generally favorable to the sharp and snarky book, which paid more attention to David Broder, Johnny Apple, and Brit Hume than to Nixon and McGovern. But while Newsweek doubted many people would be interested in so "specialized" a book (wrong), The New York Times expressed an "ominous foreboding" that the popularity of the Crouse/Thompson school of political reporting "will bring the imitators out of the woodwork" (well . . .).

Now Beth J. Harpaz, a reporter for the AP -- perhaps the least kooky news organization in America -- gives us The Girls in the Van: Covering Hillary, the latest in that long line of campaign howdunnits, her resonant title clearly inviting us to ponder how the political press has changed in the days since all grown women were "girls," mimeographs and portable Royals were high tech, and only a hard-core few knew that "Watergate" was something more than a building.

Much of it is great fun. Like Crouse's book, Harpaz's account of Hillary Clinton's successful 2000 run for senator from New York has gossip, it has inside dope, it has juicy tales of press screw-ups and campaign snafus. Some of it would sound perfectly familiar to any grizzled campaign veteran: the manic and insular camaraderie of the press bus (or van or plane), the screeching boredom of hearing the same speeches over and over, the elaborate mating dances between the press corps and the candidate's staffers, the obsessive deconstruction of how funny this joke really was or how badly that gaffe might have hurt, the exasperation with the excruciatingly tight control over access to the candidate (Nixon then, Hillary now, to such an extent that one Newsday reporter found "shocking" a glimpse of the first lady yawning like a normal person). The personnel may have changed, but many of the questions seem eternal: How can a reporter tell the difference between a staged media event and a genuine human event? (Or, was that woman in the audience who stood up during Hillary's UN speech to sing "We Shall Overcome" moved by the moment, or was she planted by the campaign?) How chummy should a reporter get with the candidate? (Or, is it okay to accept from Hillary a copy of Dear Socks, Dear Buddy inscribed to your children?) And how much privacy does a candidate deserve? (Or, should you follow Hillary into the bathroom?)

But obviously journalism, politics, and life have all changed since 1972, and Harpaz's snapshot can be wonderful at showing us how in some ways the Boys have become Geezers. Their bus itself is extinct, at least in its old incarnation as a rolling frat house of poker and free booze and cigarette smog and "at least three cases of the clap." A few women, including Mary McGrory, Sarah McClendon, Helen Thomas, and Cassie Mackin, the up-and-coming NBC reporter who would die of cancer just ten years later, did cover the '72 campaign, but they were outsiders, "having never been allowed to join in the cozy, clubby world of the men." Nearly thirty years later, most of the reporters on Hillary's campaign van were women, and when her opponent's staff neglected to arrange any special accommodation for the women reporters covering a sex-segregated Orthodox Jewish event, their failure to manage so routine a task was taken as a sign that Rick Lazio's campaign wasn't ready for prime time.

A swaggering self-confidence seemed endemic to the press corps in '72, most visible perhaps in what Broder called the "screening committee" of heavy-hitting national political correspondents (from newspapers only -- TV and the wires weren't serious enough) that in effect anointed the frontrunner at the start of the race. Who happened to be Muskie. In contrast there is something refreshing, even endearing, about Harpaz's confessions of uncertainty, the occasional "panicky feeling that I get sometimes when I'm not sure I'll be able to figure out what's really going on" -- which she then seemed perfectly able to do. She leaves us to hope her attitude is not unusual, and that the recent decades have taught the press as a whole a bit of humility.

Other traits, though, have not changed enough, like the one that was near the top of Crouse's list of gripes about the '72 press corps -- its tendency toward "pack journalism," its reliance on the "news" created by the campaign itself, and its disinclination to dig for a complicated story. Assuming that one accepts the need for as many as a hundred reporters to dog the candidate's every step in the first place, it's true that the modern campaign in general and Hillary's in particular, with their strictly controlled schedules of staged events and their limited "press avails" with the candidate, don't give a reporter much opportunity for breaking out of the pack to pursue something unusual, complex, or challenging. Harpaz and others did try, gamely at times. It was Harpaz who asked Hillary whether she planned to march in the St. Patrick's Day parade, eliciting the chirpy "I would hope so!" that betrayed the candidate's ignorance of the dark labyrinth of Irish-gay politics in New York City and fueled her opponents' claims that she was a carpetbagger. Still, it's a little disheartening that an AP reporter, generally considered the pacesetter of the press pack, should decide that even though the issue of soft money "seemed like a big deal" in the campaign (and in fact was a signature issue for both candidates), she would "write as little about [it] as I possibly could" after one interviewee commented "I don't know what soft money is and neither does anybody else."

In the end, Harpaz doesn't quite deliver on her title. First, while she seems to promise a focus on the women who covered the campaign, and does include a short round-up of opinions by female reporters at the end, this is mainly a book about the experience of one particular girl -- herself. None of the other women emerges as the sort of full-blown characters we learned to love (or not) in Crouse's book. And she doesn't begin to address any of the larger questions that cluster silently around her account of this historic campaign. Most of Hillary's press corps was female, much of Lazio's was male, but, says Harpaz breezily, "In most cases, the assignment was not consciously made on the basis of the reporter's gender" and leaves it that.
 
Not only is her assessment unconvincing (and unsubstantiated); it raises intriguing questions about whether women reporters do work differently than men, whether reporters in general can or should cover people of different genders or even races or ethnicities, whether assigning mainly women to cover a woman is a sensitive step or a condescending one, whether finally losing their old "outsider" status also meant that women reporters lost what Crouse had admired as the "uncompromising detachment and a bold independence of thought which often put the men to shame." (And while adult female humans in the twenty-first century generally seem to have graduated from being called "girls" except in a cute book title, they still haven't quite attained womanhood; Harpaz generally refers to them with the silly term "ladies," as in "one lady from Bensonhurst" or "undecided suburban ladies" or even a "cleaning lady.")
And second, this particular girl wasn't actually in the van very often, for a reason that may represent not just one of the biggest changes in the political press corps since 1972 but also one way of thinking about the sort of questions raised above. While Harpaz covered Hillary's visits to the New York City area, she was content to let other AP reporters cover the days-long road trips because, she said, "I hated being away from home and my kids overnight."
In fact we hear a lot about her kids and "the old conflicting-values dilemma," as Harpaz puts it, swiping one of Hillary's own campaign phrases. In an e-mail to the communications director asking for a quick answer because she was trying to leave the office early, Harpaz was direct: the choice was between "Hillary on the one hand. Seven-year-old Danny and two-year-old Nathaniel on the other . . ." And Hillary wasn't a shoo-in. Harpaz tells us of her child-care crises and her late-dinner stratagems, of her anxiety over whether her kids would be "scarred for life" or "in the long run, benefit from having a mother who had an interesting career," of her decision to take the family's vacation as usual that summer because "it didn't seem fair to deprive [her school-age son] and his brother of our annual trip to the country just because I was covering Hillary." In Crouse's book, on the other hand, just about the only reference to anyone's children or family at all came in a description of how, near the end of the exhausting campaign, the Boys felt bad about neglecting their wives or "guilty because they had not thought to buy anything for the kids and so were forced to take them hotel soap for the third time."

You could certainly make an argument that this change is all to the good. That society (and employers) ought to recognize and aid the tough work of raising kids. That journalists are not just better human beings but also better reporters, more perceptive and understanding, less isolated, if their work is just one part of life, not life itself.

You could, but Harpaz doesn't try. She's come up with a charming, funny, gossipy account of life on the inside of a landmark campaign, but, like a good wire-service reporter on deadline, she's left the heavy lifting for others.
 
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Andie Tucher, a former reporter, is an assistant professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. She was a campaign speechwriter for Clinton-Gore in 1992.