Oral History Interview with
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| Preface | |
| Interview #l: Reporting for the United Press | |
| Interview #2: Regional Reporter on Capitol Hill | |
| Interview #3: Politics, Conventions, and Campaigns | |
| Interview #4: The Senate Periodical Press Gallery | |
| Interview #5: The Standing Committee of Correspondents | |
| Interview #6: Addendum | |
| List of Subjects Discussed (Index) |
Preface
The United States Senate established its first "reporters gallery" on July 8, 1841, in response to the demand from the increasing number of newspaper correspondents who wanted to cover the annual sessions of Congress. At first the Vice President, and later the Senate Rules Committee supervised admission of journalists into the press gallery. But during the years following the Civil War a number of Washington correspondents lobbied for private business interests, and lobbyists posed as journalists to gain access to the galleries and the committee rooms of the Capitol. When some journalists became involved in the Credit Mobilier scandal and other sensations of the Gilded Age, other Washington correspondents feared that the deteriorating ethics of the press would disrupt their regular channels of congressional information. These reporters approached the Speaker of the House and the Senate Rules Committee with a proposal to allow journalists to assume control of accreditation to the press galleries. In 1879 the House, and in 1884 the Senate ceded such rights to a Standing Committee of Correspondents, elected by the correspondents themselves. Rules of accreditation were published in the Congressional Directories, along with lists of the journalists who had access to the press galleries.
At first Senate doorkeepers loosely supervised the press galleries, until the 1890s, when James D. Preston began to expand the post to that of superintendent of the press gallery. To assist reporters, Preston took notes on Senate proceedings, arranged interviews with senators, and otherwise facilitated the daily reporting from the press galleries.
The rules that the Standing Committee of Correspondents adopted initially required that those seeking admission must earn their principal income from news correspondence, that they must not engage in lobbying, and they must file telegraphic dispatches to daily newspapers. When adopted in the 1880s, the last requirement automatically excluded all women and black reporters. At that time, women journalists were hired to write society news which they mailed to their papers, rather than pay the higher telegraph tolls. Black reporters were
limited to reporting for black-owned and operated newspapers, which were weekly rather than daily papers. Not until the Second World War did women reporters return to the press galleries in any appreciable numbers. The Standing Committee of Correspondents did not admit a black reporter until 1947, and then only after being ordered to do so by the Senate Rules Committee.
Newspaper correspondents similarly excluded radio and magazine reporters from their gallery. In 1939, radio reporters finally convinced Congress to create a separate Radio Gallery (later the Radio and Television Gallery). The House and Senate also established Periodical Press Galleries for magazine and newsletter writers, and a Press Photographer's gallery. Standing Committees of journalists elected from each gallery continue to grant accreditation.
For eighteen years, Roy McGhee served as Superintendent of the Senate Periodical Press Gallery. After serving as a reporter in Missouri, and as United Press International bureau chief in Denver, he came to Capitol Hill in 1959 as a regional reporter for UPI. He covered the Southwestern members of Congress, who at that time include Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn. He remained a Washington reporter until 1973, when he took charge of the Periodical Press Gallery, a post that he held until his retirement in 1991. "Roy McGhee has burned the midnight oil as the Superintendent of the Senate Periodical Press Gallery," commented Senate Republican leader Bob Dole. "That is more than a political lifetime for many over those eighteen years, Roy has seen 218 Senators come and go .... And while periodicals, by definition, are often published only once a week or once a month, Roy's gallery is open every day. So make no mistake, there is nothing periodic about the running the Periodical Press Gallery."
About the Interviewer: Donald A. Ritchie is associate historian of the Senate Historical Office. A graduate of C.C.N.Y., he received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. He has published articles on American political history and oral history, including "Oral History in the Federal Government," which appeared in the Journal of American History. His books include James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (Harvard Press, 1980), The U.S. Constitution
(Chelsea House, 1989), History of a Free Nation (Glencoe, 1991), and Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Harvard, 1991). He also edits the Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series) (Government Printing Office). A former president of both the Oral History Association and Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), he received OHMAR's Forrest C. Pogue Award for distinguished contributions
to the field of oral history.
REPORTING FOR THE UNITED PRESS
Interview #1
Thursday, January 16, 1992
RITCHIE: I understand that you call Jefferson City, Missouri home. Was your family from there originally?
McGHEE: No, they were originally from Centralia. My paternal grandparents migrated west in the early days of the last century from Virginia. I have a great great some kind of grandfather of whom I have a Brady tintype. He was born in Virginia around 1780. My own grandfather was born in 1840 in Missouri, but in between that time the family had migrated west through Tennessee into Missouri. I still have furniture in my house to this day that the family says was carried down the Ohio River from Louisville or someplace in the migration, three or four tables and antiques that are in my house. My grandfather then was born in Boone County, Missouri, in 1840, and he was in the Civil War, and he died at 86 or 88, close to 90 years old in the 1920s when I was a very small child, but I remember him very well.
RITCHIE: Which side did he fight on?
McGHEE: He was a Confederate, and I remember that one of his closest friends in Missouri was a former Union solider. It used to irk my grandfather that his friend received a pension and he did not.
RITCHIE: Missouri is one of those states where you could have fought on either side.
McGHEE: Well, I can remember stories he told me. He was at some battle in Arkansas. I can recall him telling about his unit, I don't remember whether it was a regiment or a division, or what it was, but they were bivouacked on either side of a stream. Food was in short supply, and a deer ran
down the middle of this little creek, and both sides started shooting at it, and there were some casualties--the same people, but from both sides so friendly fire is not something that first started in Vietnam, it was going on in the Civil War.
RITCHIE: What did your family do in Missouri?
McGHEE: My father left Centralia early in life, that's in northern Boone County, and went to Jefferson City in 1913 to work on the new capitol. That's when the present capitol building was built. The old one burned and they replaced it. It was a mammoth project. He worked on that capitol building for several years and joined the Missouri National Guard in Jefferson City, and when [Woodrow] Wilson became president and federalized the Guard to send them with [General John J.] Perching to the Mexican border to chase Pancho Villa, my father was along. That was his first military adventure, under fire and in actual pursuit. I can remember as a boy, my father had relics of that campaign. He was lying once on the ground in a shelter half and a rattlesnake wriggled into his place and he and his tent mate somehow or other wrestled the snake to death, and for years we carried around this huge rattlesnake skin. I have pictures at home of my dad at the Mexican border.
Then when World War I came along he went to France and was a machine-gunner of Company M--I'm not going to be able to remember the regimental numbers. But he was gassed at the Meuse-Argonne battles, I think. It didn't impair his health a hell of a lot. Ten years later or so he was awarded a pension, when I was ten years old. I was born in 1920. I can remember in the midst of the Depression my father was out of a job. He had applied for a pension years and years before. Through the bureaucratic process, I'll be damned if they didn't award him one with back pay for several years. I can remember very well, I was about ten or eleven years old then, the elation. It was 1931 or 1932, and boy that was a windfall!
RITCHIE: Did your father come in contact with Captain Harry Truman in France?
McGHEE: Well, they were in Europe at the same time. Truman was from the western part of the state and my dad was from a Guard company in the middle of the state, and I don't think they ever came in contact. However, I came in contact with Harry Truman when he was a senator. In my final year in high school I was a page at the Missouri supreme court. Some of my duties were running the elevator. I recall one time that Truman came down for some court case when he was a U.S. Senator, and I was operating the elevator. There were some lawyers with him, and he got on the elevator and we started for the second floor where the hearing rooms were and the elevator got stuck, right in the middle of the floors! There was quite a little hubbub about it. There was a little door in the ceiling of the elevator, and they got that opened. There were no phones in the elevators then.
They boosted me up through that opening and I got out on the second floor and got help, and they got the elevator fixed. But--this gets a little raunchy what I'll never forget is one of the lawyers saying, "We should have walked up the stairs. It's only one flight up." And I can remember Truman saying, "No, there's two things a man shouldn't do when he's past thirty five" this is raunchy as hell, but Truman said it within my hearing. "One of them is walk upstairs if he can ride an elevator." And one of the lawyer's said, "What's the other one, senator?" He said, "It's make love dog fashion." [laughs] I'll never forget that!
My relationship with Truman continued--of course, I lost all track of him, I went in World War II in January, 1942, I quit school and enlisted, but when the war was over and I finished my education and became a reporter on my hometown newspaper for a while, it was then that Truman brought [Winston] Churchill to Missouri, and he made the famous speech at Fulton, which was just twenty miles north of Jefferson City. There was a huge parade, and I was a reporter at the time, my first job out of college, so I covered that parade for my hometown newspaper, and I remember Churchill and Truman. Then sometime later I worked for the A.P. [Associated Press] for a while and then went to work for the United Press. Three or four years after that, Truman came back to deliver the commemorative speech on the occasion of an anniversary of Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech.
That was my first conflict, I guess you might say, with television reporters. I was working for United Press then and they were going in the television business by supplying news film. So they asked me to go over there and cover Truman's speech, which I did. But the network television people were in opposition to the independents--the United Press then was filming everything and selling it to small, non network affiliated stations. They didn't have an electrician along, somebody to plug in the camera and lights. So the union was not going to cover Truman's speech if the United Press television people covered it. And I was the only U.P. representative there, so everything fell on me to try to straighten that out. I didn't get to Truman, but I got to one of his aides, and explained the situation. They said, "There's nothing we can do about that." Truman wasn't about to get involved in some labor dispute. That was my first real contact with Truman.
Later, when I was a reporter in Kansas City, when Truman would come out there. The senior White House correspondent then was a famous reporter named Merriman Smith, you may have heard of him, although fame is fleeting in our business.
RITCHIE: I've got a couple of his books here.
McGHEE: Anyway, he was quite a character, and a boozer. When he would come out there he would hole up with three or four other boozers and the coverage of Truman when he was in Kansas City was really left to the local bureau, and I did a lot of that with Truman and got to know him pretty well.
I guess the best story I have about Truman was that I used to be heavy, I'm no longer heavy but in those days I was fat, and young, and drinking, like a young reporter would do, thinking this was important to show you're a man. I was quite heavy and I got heavier. Truman made a trip to Hawaii after he was president. The first thing he did was go to Hawaii. When he came home, he
came to Union Station, and I was sent down there to cover his arrival back and see if he had anything to say. I was the only reporter there. Truman got off the train and walked along that big esplanade of the station. I said, "Hi, Mr. Truman." He said, "Hello." And I said, "Are you going to continue your walks
now that you're home to Independence for good." He said, "Yes, McGhee, and from the looks of your belly you'd better come join me." [laughs] Great guy, I liked him very much.
The final story about Truman: Truman was given an office in the federal building in Kansas City to write his memoirs. One day a message came from Washington to the Kansas City bureau, signed by Merriman Smith, that Truman had been in New Orleans, making a speech, and while he was there he had fallen down some steps and had broken some ribs, and the supposition was that he had had a drink or two. So the office sent me over to Truman's office, which was on one of the upper floors of this skyscraper building in the city. I went in and talked to his secretary and asked if I could see Mr. Truman. She said, "What about?" I told her. She said, "Well, sure, Merriman Smith was a friend of his." So I went into his office and I told him what I wanted. I said, "We got a message from Washington that said that Merriman Smith has heard that you broke a couple of ribs and he wanted me to check up on it." Truman said, "No, nothing to it. I didn't fall down, I'm fine." I said, "Fine, thank you very much."
I went back to the office and sent Washington a message: Truman says there's nothing to it, and he personally told me that. So Smith was a big man in the U.P. then, and a big man in American journalism, influential. He sent another message back and said, "That's not right. My source is absolutely impeccable. I know Truman fell down, and I know a doctor saw him, and I know he broke some ribs. Get back over there and verify this so we can write it." So the office told me to go back to see Truman again. I went back, and I was embarrassed to have to go back, didn't want to, but I did. I explained again, and Truman again saw me, and again for the second time he said there's nothing to it. I did not fall down. I am not bound up, nothing's wrong with me at all." So I went back and wrote that message out to Washington.
Then I got a message from New York: Merriman Smith says the Kansas City bureau is not following up on his requests, and not doing it properly, and he knows that this is true because of his source--whom I have no idea who it was--and he's absolutely confident that this is correct. So for the third time I had to go back over there. This time I resisted. I said, "No, you can't make me
go back over there. Hell, he's the ex president of the United States." That didn't matter to them at all. I had to go back. Again I talked to the secretary and told her that I really had to see the president again. On my own I made a promise that I wouldn't bother him on this subject any more, I'd quit before I'd do it again.
So I went in again and I showed Truman the message traffic from Washington to Kansas City. I said, "I know this is a burden on you, and I hate like hell to keep bothering you, but I've got to have another comment from you on this." And I showed him this stuff. He said, "I wonder what would please them?" And with that, Truman took off his shirt and stood there bare-chested, and there were no bandages. I went back to the office and I told the bureau chief what had happened. He couldn't believe it. He took over then and wrote a message to Merriman saying "Don't bother us anymore. Our man's been over there three times now and there's absolutely nothing to this. Get it from some other sources and print it on your own from your source if you want. We're not verifying a damn word of this. Truman denies it." Well, that was the end of that!
RITCHIE: When you're president you have to go a long way to satisfy the press!
McGHEE: You sure do, and Truman went the extra mile on that one. He was a great guy, I liked him very much.
RITCHIE: I'd like to go back and talk a little more about your Missouri years. You started in college in 1939 at Jefferson City Junior College, and then you went into the service. Were you drafted or did you decide to enlist?
McGHEE: I enlisted after Pearl Harbor. I was ready to be drafted, but I enlisted instead. I quit college and enlisted. That was rather funny. Missouri was playing Fordham in the Sugar Bowl that year and I had tickets, and I wanted to go to the game, but I wasn't supposed to leave town, because that was within the month after Pearl Harbor was bombed. There was a great uproar in the country then, and everybody was full of patriotic fervor, oh it was really
something. But I had these tickets, and I was just a kid, so I said, "The hell with this, I'm going to go to the football game." I sat around there for a month and they hadn't called me. Incidentally, I had learned to fly when I was in high school, in a civilian pilot training program. It was one of these preparatory things that the military was sneaking through to have at least a cadre of pilots in the event of war. They could see war was coming and we were going to have to get in. They paid for my flying lessons, so I had a license to fly. I couldn't afford to do it, and I didn't after I got my license. But before I went down to the football game I had gone down to the Jefferson barracks in St. Louis to see if I could become an army air force pilot. They took all my papers, gave me a physical examination, and said: "Go home and we'll call you."
In the meantime I went to New Orleans to the football game. And the night before the football game, on New Years' eve, I was walking through the grand arcade of the Roosevelt hotel and I ran into somebody from Jefferson City. He said, "The draft board is looking for you! You're down here and they've called you!" It scared the bejesus out of me! I didn't know what to do about it. There wasn't anything I could do about it New Year's eve. So the next day I went to the football game, and then the following day I went down to enlist.
There were lines, marine corps, army, navy, and the coast guard, and the coast guard had the smallest line. So I got in it. I must be the only person in the history of the U.S. military that as a condition of enlisting--there was competition among the services for anybody. I had already signed with the army air force that they would call me, but I hadn't taken the oath or been sworn in. And here the draft board was after me, or so I thought. I was real confused about it. Anyway, I got on that line and I said to the recruiting man: "I will sign up right now, can you give me a leave? I've got to go home and straighten up my affairs there." So they did. I enlisted, and my first duty was a two week leave! I went home and came back to New Orleans and took my training there.
RITCHIE: Where did you spend the war then in the coast guard?
McGHEE: Most of the war I spent in the Caribbean on a sub-chaser. Let's see that was January 14, 1942, when my duty actually began. I had had that two-week leave in the meantime. I took my training and then was sent over to Mobile Bay. A German submarine had penetrated the bay and gotten into Mobile Bay actually. There were lots of ships being sunk then by German subs. And there was an old lighthouse service, which was a paramilitary organization like the public health service, but really not in the military. So they sent a half a dozen or so recruits down to this lighthouse, after the submarine had penetrated, and what we were supposed to do was just keep sentry duty, constantly, and radio if we saw anything suspicious at all. This must have been February or March, 1942--miserable weather, cold and lonely and far out. The island wasn't a square block. It was just a rock pile with this huge lighthouse on it. So that was my really first assignment in the military. I got out of there as soon as I could. They sent me to a bosun's school in New York. So in April I went to New York and was there until October in school.
RITCHIE: On Staten Island, I'll bet.
McGHEE: Well, no, I was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but we took our real ship's training at Manhattan Beach, right next to Coney Island. That had been a summer resort. Coming from the midwest I had never seen anything like it. Oh, there were a thousand little small houses no bigger than this room, right next to each other. They turned these into barracks and quarters for training purposes, and the owners had given them to the military for the war. Anyway, I had one hell of a time that summer. I had never been to New York before and just went wild there. When I got out of that training school I was sent back to New Orleans, and I was just there a very small time and I was sent to Key West, and got on a ship to Cuba, and then I got on a bigger ship. I spent the next couple of years, maybe not that long, until September of '43 I was in the Caribbean. Sometimes I was ashore in Curacao and Trinidad and other places. But most of the time I was shuttling back and forth between Guantanamo Bay and Trinidad, with occasional forays south of there, in convoy duty. And we would lose ships on almost every trip. We couldn't stop to pick up any survivors or anything, we had to stay on station. That was my war, really. I was safe.
They would never waste a torpedo on an escort vessel, you know, when they could get a big transport ship.
RITCHIE: My dad was in the coast guard, and he was stationed at Staten Island. He went up and down the coast all the way to Rio de Janeiro. It was the best time of his life, I think, the war years.
McGHEE: Yeah [laughs], well I certainly had a grand time during that period. Looking back on it, it was a magnificent experience. Of course, I hated it. I wanted to be in a more active war setting, and kept trying. I came home in 1943 and was sent to radio school, electronics school, at Atlantic City. I was there until the spring of '45, and then assigned to the U.S.S. Sabago, which was a state-of-the-art communications ship that was supposed to lead the American forces after the minesweepers in the second wave of the invasion of Japan, ahead of the landing craft carrying troops. It was a new ship, we put it in commission in San Francisco. I was at Treasure Island there for several weeks, and then shipped to San Pedro. The ship was floated down there, really, to be refitted down there, but when it got there we lived on the thing for a while.
To back up a moment, in San Francisco, I was there in August when the first atom bomb was dropped in 1945. I can recall when we got the news we were undergoing a gas mask drill with tear gas, live gas. We had done it without any gas and then they put this real tear gas in there, so you had to get your mask on in a matter of seconds or else you'd get sick if you breathed this stuff, not fatally, but it wasn't pleasant, I'm sure. It didn't happen to me, I got my mask on on time. But when we were out there, I can remember the site very clearly, and the atom bomb was dropped. I had been to college and I had almost flunked physics, but I was among the very few that had any college education at that time, with us. When they said an atomic bomb, I vaguely had an idea of what the hell was going on, that somehow or other they had exploded the atom and released energy from matter. I knew it was a tremendous thing, and I can remember telling my shipmates about what the hell was going on there.
Later we went down to San Pedro, and within a couple of weeks the war was over. Everybody wanted to get out and go home. I had enough points since
I had been in that Caribbean stuff for a couple of years to get out right away. But I had a ranking then of a radio man, and they froze all communications rating because all of a sudden there was open traffic. Before they had to be encoded and there were restrictions on the use of military communications equipment for personal messages and things like that. When the war was over, all this was over, so they had a great need for everybody who knew Morse code, who could send stuff, and who knew the radio business, so they froze us.
Well, this is the funniest story of my military career. We were supposed to be on the ship at a certain time. The ship was getting ready to go to the Far East. We had leave everyday, but you had to be back aboard at midnight, and I didn't make it back one time until one or two o'clock in the morning, and I was broken. They took away my rating. This was before they froze the ratings. And I was eligible to get out of the service, the coast guard. This ship was run by the navy, incidentally, and I was assigned to the navy. I'll never forget it, the captain took away my rating, and then he called me back up when they froze it and said, "We're going to give you your rating back." I said, "No, I won't take it, I want out." [laughs] He Was furious! I hated the military. I hated the discipline. I hated the bureaucratic nonsense that went with it. I never adjusted to it, really. So I was enlisted as a second-class seaman and I got out as a first-class seaman after four years. But I had one hell of a good time.
I can recall when I got off of that ship I was carrying that huge seabag. The ship was moored right at a dock in San Pedro. The officers were all lined up, and the crew, when we got off of the ship to go to the train. I was going back to St. Louis to be discharged. I had this seabag which was as big as that desk, almost, on my shoulder, and I was a small man too. I got down and I said, "I don't need anything that's in this." Looking back on it, it was a terrible thing to do, but I was contemptuous of the whole goddamn navy, and I just threw the seabag in the water and walked off. And some people came after me and said, 'You can't do that, you're destroying government property. It's yours' but you can't do that." I said, "What are you going to do about it?" And they let me go. [laughs] The first thing I did was go into Los Angeles and buy some civilian clothes!
RITCHIE: It's a funny thing about the military, on one hand it gives you the world, it gives you a chance to travel and see things you would never have seen or done, and on the other hand it puts you into this restrictive discipline situation.
McGHEE: I hated it. When I was on one of these ships, I was a reader, and I joined the Book of the Month Club. We'd be three months at sea and then we'd come into a port, and here would be a bushel of books. And of course, my berth where I slept was about that high [gestures], and there were forty men in a room this small. I had a lower bunk, next to the bulkhead, and there was a little place there where you could keep books. And we had a locker about this big [gestures] to keep our clothes in. That was the only private space you had on this ship, and I got all these books.. I just took them and put them down there by my bunk. Well, there was a fire inspection and they found these books. Oh, there was holy hell to pay! "Where did you get all these books? What are you doing with these things?" Well, I got these books all during the war. I could never cancel. I'd write them a letter but they kept sending these books. When the war ended and I got out of the coast guard I had a bill with those people that was astronomical. And I couldn't keep the books. I gave them to the navy, and they made a ship's library out of them! [laughs] But the military was not a good time in my life.
RITCHIE: When you came out, did you use the GI Bill to go back to college?
McGHEE: Yeah, I did. I got out in 1945, in October or November, and I was too late to get into the University of Missouri. I had quit college after a year and a half, but I took courses in the military during the war, I took correspondence courses, and with those I had enough for two years, so I could enter as a junior. Well, I was too late to get into the University of Missouri, the term had started in September and this was November. I did not want to waste time. I was anxious to get back into school and then get out and go to work. So I went up to the University of Minnesota, which was on the quarter system, and they started right after Christmas, on the first of the year. I went up there, froze to death, and lived in a boardinghouse in St. Paul and rode the streetcar--
had to walk about nine or ten blocks to the streetcar line--over to Minneapolis across the river, where the campus was. I can recall how cold that was. I'd say, "Well, the military wasn't bad, there I was floating around the Caribbean most of the time!" [laughs] But I went to school up there in 1946, and then I went back to the University of Missouri in the fall and graduated from there in 1948.
RITCHIE: When did you decide that you were interested in journalism as a career?
McGHEE: When I was about ten years old. Jefferson City was a political town, and I was always interested in reading the newspapers. I watched the reporters from Kansas City, and St. Louis, and Joplin, and Springfield, all the big towns that had press representatives at the state house. It just seemed to me that they never worked! [laughs] I think I learned the essence of journalism when I was about ten, eleven, or twelve years old, and as far as I could see somebody would tell them something, and they would write it out and send it away, and they'd get paid for it, and had a hell of a life. So I always knew I wanted to be a newspaper reporter.
At Minnesota, I was in the j-school. I took the normal editing and reporting courses. When I got back to the University of Missouri, it was not a graduate school there but it was a professional school, and you couldn't enter until you had two years of specific undergraduate work, which I had had okay by then, but they would not accept transfer credits from any place else. At Minnesota I didn't take anything except journalism courses. I got down there and I was going to have to stay in school another year if I stayed in journalism. So I talked to some friends who were newspapermen in Jefferson City. They said, "The hell with that. Take some economics and some American history, it will serve you a hell of a lot better than what they're going to teach you in that j-school." So I did. I got a degree in liberal arts and went to work immediately as a reporter. I never regretted not having a journalism degree.
RITCHIE: What was your first job as a journalist?
McGHEE: When I was in school, remember I told you I was a page at the supreme court? Well, one of the supreme court justices had a friend who was the editor of the Missouri bar journal, which was the official magazine of the Missouri bar. He hired me when I was in school to do editorial work for him, which I did, which really helped me too. It gave me extra income to live on. The GI Bill gave us fifty or sixty dollars a month, and my folks would help me a little but not a lot, so this was a big boon for me, but I didn't keep the job. I wanted to be a daily reporter, so I went to work for my hometown paper. They hired me right away.
My career was short circuited there, though, quite a bit. I really liked the job there. It wasn't long before I was promoted, and I was the city hall and county offices reporter. I did everything, but that was my beat, and the city council. The Jefferson City Post-Tribune and the Capital News--the Capital News was an a.m.--you worked on both, but you were assigned really to one paper or the other. I got real well acquainted with everybody in the city hall. One day--this was the way I lost my job--I was messing around looking at the old archives in the street commissioner's office, and I found that Daniel Boone had laid out the city of Jefferson City. He was hired by the first state legislature to find a site, well, they had found the site overlooking the bluffs of the south side of the Missouri River, in the middle of the state, and they hired Daniel Boone as the city architect, like Latrobe or whoever it was ....
RITCHIE: L'Enfant.
McGHEE: L'Enfant did it here. They hired Daniel Boone to do that, and they paid him a gallon of whiskey and five dollars a day for his services; and I think two dollars a day for the men that he had, who were essentially slaves. Very interesting. I wrote a whole series on those archives, and I made good friends with the street commissioner. I put his name in the story every time, and he thought the world of me.
One day the society department needed somebody to go out and interview some rich woman whose daughter was getting married. I had to go out with a photographer and write a story about this, which was out of my milieu but
anyway I did it. I drove my car, and there was a blizzard in town. Coming back, the front wheel of my car, which was an old rattletrap--I had only been out of school for less than a year--hit a hole. There were all these snowbanks, and here was my car down in this hole. I had to get it pulled out and fixed.
I remonstrated with the street commissioner about it. I said, "Goddamn, how come you let these holes be in the street like this, particularly in a snow storm? People can't see them, can't avoid them." He said, "Well, we didn't know anything about it, it's probably a water company hole, the water company dug it." I said, "Don't you monitor them? Don't you make them fix them?" He said, "Yes, the statutes are here, they're supposed to pay a dollar, and the dollar is supposed to go to pay for the inspector to go over when they dig a hole in the street to make sure they fix it. This dollar is to pay a man to go out and do this." I said, "Well, why wasn't that done?" He said, "It hasn't been done since 1922." I said, "The water company hasn't paid you that dollar since then?" No, they quit paying in the early 1920s. I said, "How many holes a year do they dig in the streets here." He gave me the figure, and I multiplied it out and it came to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of twenty years or more. So I went back and wrote a story about it.
Now, small town journalism is different from bigtime journalism, I can really assure you. Those were still the days of itinerant editors. We had had a new editor come in. So I went back to the office and I wrote this story that the water company owed Jefferson City hundreds of thousands of dollars, and explained the situation. It was a private water company, too. The owner of the paper was an absentee owner. He was in Florida for the winter. His name was Goshorn. He was a golf-playing friend of the president of the water company, very close, high, rich people. So the story appeared in the Capital News, the morning paper. In about twenty minutes this guy was on the phone to the publisher in Florida, the publisher was on the phone to the managing editor, who called in me and the new itinerant editor and said, "A story like this should never appear in our paper without us knowing about it." It was absolutely the truth, every line of it. But there was quite a furor about that, and they forced the water company finally to fork over some payment and start fixing the streets after they dug holes in them.
But spring came, and Mr. Goshorn returned from Florida and he called me in. He said, "Look, we don't think you're going to work out here on this paper." He said, "I'll help you get a job." He called a friend on the Kansas City Star, and he said, "I think you'll be much better off and happier working someplace else. I said, "Well, fine." Well, as it turned out, I got an offer from the United Press also at the same time. The Star offered me seventy five bucks a week to be their Olathe, Kansas correspondent, which was a suburb of Kansas City. In addition to my pay, they would give me ten cents an inch for everything I got printed. The United Press offered me seventy five dollars a week too, and in the interim time before I did this, I was working for the A.P., and they were only paying me sixty bucks a week. So I took the U.P. job. I said, "Hell, I don't want to be living in Olathe, Kansas. I'll be in the same kind of thing I was in Jefferson City. So I went to work for U.P., and I worked for them until I took this job here.
RITCHIE: Where did you work for U.P?
McGHEE: Well, in Kansas City, and then I covered the Missouri and Kansas legislatures. I actually covered in the midwest the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson. Then I was sent to Denver as chief of the bureau there; and I was there during the latter Eisenhower years, and then sent to Washington in '59.
RITCFIIE: What did you do in Denver?
McGHEE: In Denver I was the manager of the bureau, I ran the place. I was half businessman and half editor and half everything else. I didn't like the job at all.
RITCHIE: So you came back as a working reporter?
McGHEE: Yeah. I got out of the management end of it. I was on the track to get into U.P.I. management, but I never regretted getting out of it at all. I really loved working for United Press as a reporter.
RITCHIE: Did you cover Congress when you came here?
McGHEE: Yes, I was assigned up here.
RITCHIE: Could you tell me, what's the difference between covering a state legislature and covering Congress?
McGHEE: State legislatures are much more venal. It was a revelation to me. I guess it's because of the national diversity in the national Congress. Everybody is watching everybody else. The criticism of Congress, you're well aware, is that they're a bunch of loafers, they're in the public till all the time, they take junkets and rape the taxpayers every chance they get. But to me that's all representative of our society, of our democratic institutions and the way we work. I'm not condoning dishonesty or saying that that's okay, I'm just saying that I don't believe there's near as much of that minor corruption in the national Congress as there is at the state level, at least in my experience at the Kansas and Missouri state legislatures. Those legislatures, when I was covering them from 1950 to 1955 or so, both of them, were absolutely owned by the utilities and the railroads and the interests. Absolutely owned, no doubt about it. It was common knowledge. And that's not true in the national Congress. Nobody is big enough to own the whole Congress. They may be big enough to own a chunk of it, but there's always watchdogs around here. And frequently you don't have those on the state level. In my experiences they weren't there in the state governments.
Another thing journalistically that hit me, that I think is completely different is that Washington works on reaction. If an event occurs, the very first thing that a reporter does is get comment on that from somebody else, from the opposing side or from anyone. And a synthesis is eventually arrived at. That process fascinated me when I came here. Frequently, a journalist is the messenger, unappointed, without portfolio, but when he gets a reaction from one side he will go back to the original source and say: "Well this guy says this about this." "Oh, he does?" And through the workings of that process, sometimes the process is affected, and the result is affected. I saw it many times. I don't think I can recall an example at the moment, but that fascinated me. I think that's
another big difference. That's just not true in state legislatures. That process does not occur. The journalist is usually bought, to begin with, or frequently bought--not usually, frequently bought. Politics is at a much different level, if not better or worse.
RITCHIE: Was a state legislature more open and accessible and available than the national legislature?
McGHEE: I think so. If you're a state house reporter you know everybody. You can't know everybody in the national government. You can't even know everybody in the Congress. But you can know almost everything that's going on in a state house. At least in Kansas and Missouri, I don't know about New York and California, maybe they're more similar to here. And everybody knows everything else, too. For instance, the Santa Fe Railroad owned Kansas. No doubt about it! Anything they wanted they got. It was common knowledge, and it was not thought venal at all. That was the natural order of things. Well, that isn't the way it is here. If someone gets an advantage, however slight, there is another side that wants a similar advantage or they're going to raise hell about the competitor getting one.
RITCHIE: Was there a lot more socializing in a state legislature? I get the sense of people living in hotels and hanging out at the bar together.
McGHEE: That's exactly right. I lived in Kansas City and I worked in Jefferson City, my hometown, and Topeka, and I lived in a hotel during those legislative sessions. You consorted much more with the representatives and state senators than you do here, socially I mean. You were part of the local scene. Here, a reporter doesn't feel in awe of a committee chairman, but he recognizes that this chairman has almost absolute control and that the position is different from a committee chairman in a state legislature. Change is slow in the national Congress, and it's not in state legislatures. A committee chairman is seldom deposed. In my thirty years around here, not until recently over in the House was any chairman ever kicked out. I mean, he could stay there forever. That's not the case in many state legislatures. The people there hold consensual power, not because of seniority or anything else. The politics is freer, it's different.
RITCHIE: How would you rate the job that the press does in general of covering state legislatures?
McGHEE: Well, I'd have to speak from the 1950s, which was the last time I covered one. I think the wire services, which were big in the states that I covered, were very good. They had high standards. There was no bias at all in the writing for any of them. But that's just not true of the newspapers. The Kansas City Star was obviously Republican and they gave no house room to Democrats. Now, the reporters for the Star did. Conversely, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was a liberal, and a great one in my opinion, and also more prestigious than the Star, but again richer, in those days it was, not now.
RZTCHIE: That was Irving Brant's paper then.
McGHEE: Yeah. The one thing that the Post Dispatch did that goes against my grain is that they would have investigative reporters working with the prosecutors. They would testify in trials and go before grand juries and give testimony. I could never quite understand that, but they did it. And it was the only newspaper in the state that did do it, so far as I know.
RITCHIE: When you came to Washington, what was your initial beat?
McGHEE: Well, I was assigned up here at the Capitol, but as a regional reporter. The A.P. for years had had a regional staff. They had a man assigned frequently to one state, and sometimes to four or five, and sometimes to a region. Well, the U.P. was always behind the A.P. in money and everything except journalistic ability and peer prestige, but they were always behind in resources to cover. You had to do twice as much work as the A.P. guy did. They established a regional service in 1959 here.
I had threatened to quit in Denver. I liked Denver very much, I enjoyed the mountains and everything, but I did not like the work. It was about a twenty man bureau, and we relayed all of the Asian and Eastern, Oriental news. It would come through San Francisco, and Denver was a relay point. We would break everything and rehandle everything from the Orient in Denver to the east
and eventually to Europe, although there were also break lines in the Orient. Conversely, everything that happened in the eastern United States did not go straight through to California. It was broken in Denver and we would re-edit, boil down--time zones were different, markets were different--and we would rehandle everything and rewrite. Consequently, it was a traffic job. I was a personnel manager. Even though it doesn't sound like a lot of people, when you are dealing with them they've all got personal problems, you've got schedules. We actually had more desk tricks to man by the table of organization than we ever had people to man them. And you were on a budget that you could pay only so much amount of overtime, which meant that I was working a lot of desks, because I was the boss and the work had to be done. And then I had to hold hands with publishers and call on them. They were bitching about rates or why we didn't have this story or that story. I didn't like it, so I wanted out of there. Of course, they had a man who was doing a creditable job, and the money was okay.
Eventually I said, "Look, if you don't get me out of here by such and such a time, I'm going to quit." So the president of the company came through one day and he said, "Well, what do you want to do?" I said, "I don't care." I'd like to go abroad, or I'll go to Washington." He said, "Well, we can send you abroad." Actually, in 1956, when the British and the Egyptians had that set to and Egypt broke away, they were going to send me to Paris then, but I couldn't speak French and it fell through. But the president came out and said, "We're going to open a bureau in Delhi and we'll give you the bureau there." I said, "Fine." So I was all arranged to go to India, and then they said, "Well, you're going to have to take a pay cut." I said, "What do you mean." They said I was in management and I was going back into reporting, and my salary was higher than the salary for correspondents in Asia and if they sent me out there at my salary it would become known overnight almost and there would be a hullabaloo. They said, "You have to take a pay cut, that's all." I said, "Bullshit, I'm not going to do it. I won't go then." That was along in August or September of 1959. I said, "I'm going to quit, soon as I find a job." They didn't want me to quit at all.
The North American Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs, which was responsible for tracking missiles that might come in and operating the DEW
Line up in Alaska, they were one of my jobs, and the Air Force Academy was just getting started out there then, and I did all that stuff, and I got acquainted with the military. Castro had come into power the first of that year in Cuba, and by August or September things were terrible. The Air Force was having an Air Force Association meeting in Miami, so their chief press agent called me up and said, "How would you like to spend the weekend in Miami?" I said, "What's the story?" He said, "We're going to take a contingent from here to the Air Force Association meeting down there. And we'll be happy to put you on the airplane and give you a hotel room and let you loaf for a weekend." Well, fine, it didn't bother my moral scruples a bit. I got down there, and I left word of the hotel where I would be, but I no sooner got there that I said, "Well, the hell with this, I'm not interested in this military bullshit."
So I got on an airplane and I went to Havana. I went to the [U.P.] bureau there, and I'll never forget it. The bureau in Havana was in the arcade of the Seville Hotel. It was an old, old hotel, prestigious, and the arcade ran from one street on the street level clear through the building for a whole block. There were shops and things on either side, prestigious kinds of stores. And the U.P. bureau was there. At that time, Castro really hadn't consolidated his revolution yet. There had been some gunfire a couple of weeks before, and bullets had actually come into the U.P.I. offices off that arcade. Havana at that time was the main relay point for all of North American news to a vast client network in South America. I'll never forget this huge radio transmitter that was in the bureau. It was as tall as the ceiling and about this wide [gestures], and a formidable looking machine. And they had shot it! Bullets had gone through the glass windows and had disrupted the hell out of the whole service. So the bureau was then in the process of moving from that ground floor office to an office on the eighth floor of that building, the theory being that if somebody shot at you from the street they wouldn't hit the machinery, because they would set it back in. Well, I remember that very well. That was just a side light on my other story.
But I stayed there that weekend and went back to Miami on Sunday night, and there was a message there for me at the hotel. It said: "Call New York immediately." I decided, "well, I won't call New York immediately." I
called the office in Denver and I said, "What's this all about?" They said "We don't know. A message came in and we told them you were in Miami at this hotel, and they want you to call as soon as you get the message." And the message had come in on Friday and here I was in Havana for the whole weekend. Nobody knew where I was, really. When I got back to Denver I called New York and I told them I had been out of touch for the weekend. I didn't tell them where I was. They said, "Are you still going to quit?" I said, "Yep, I'm going to quit unless you transfer me someplace." They said, "Well, how would you like to Washington?" "Fine." So that's how I got here!
RITCHIE: But they started you as a regional reporter when you got here.
McGHEE: Yeah, and I covered nine states in the southwest: Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming. The U.P. at that time had four or five divisions, and that was the southwestern division. They sent a man here for each division, to handle regional news, and gave us a special wire and everything.
RITCHIE: Did you cover both the Senate and the House for that region?
McGHEE: Both the Senate and the House and the whole government, everything. It was a difficult job. Except I was on my own. My bosses were not here, they were back in Missouri and Texas. I was isolated from the bureau here considerably for four or five years and then they put me on the general staff covering the Senate.
RITCHIE: Well, that was a pretty good assignment to get, considering that in 1959 the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate were from Texas.
McGHEE: That's right. I remember covering [Sam] Rayburn and [Lyndon] Johnson very, very much in 1959 and '60, and '61.
RITCHIE: I understand that Johnson in particular was very concerned about how he was covered and which reporters covered him.
McGHEE: He was. He was a contemptuous son of a bitch, so far as I'm concerned.
RITCHIE: He gave you a lot of trouble?
McGHEE: Well, he gave me a lot of trouble not when he was Majority Leader but after he became Vice President. I had a very difficult time with him. Johnson had an office in what is now the LBJ Room, we in the press called it his "nooky room." He had several [laughs], but this one was very ornate, and right off of the Senate Reception Room, which is in my opinion the prettiest room in the U.S. Capitol Building. Johnson was bigger than life and he could never, never stand to be in second place or beneath anybody else. He just was chomping all the time. He needed adoration. He needed people to think that he was a big shot. And generally reporters would say, "Well, he's a big shot, so what? We've got a town full of them." But I was a regional reporter and knew him fairly well. He lived up here on the Hill much more than any vice president well, I won't say before, because I understand that [Alben] Barkley never used an office downtown, nor did Truman. But Johnson didn't either. He stayed around the Senate quite a bit.
He would frequently call up to the Senate press gallery at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, five thirty, and he'd tell the superintendent, "You can tell any reporters that want to come down that I'm available, send them down." So, when a vice president calls he might have something to say. Generally, he didn't, except blowing his own horn. Very little hard news ever came out of those things, but a lot of regional news did. So me and a fellow named [L.T.] Tex Easley [Jr.] were really regulars in those. I had to go to every one of them, in case he said something about Texas, which I would make a story out of. Nobody else gave a damn about it, but the Texans ate it up. Tex Easley was the A.P. man, and he'd been here since the mid thirties. Johnson had tried to hire him, and Tex had sense enough not to go to work for him. So he and I would always go down there and we'd sit and drink with him and then come back. and
write some innocuous story for Texas. Frequently it was difficult to do. Sometimes we wouldn't write anything.
Well, this afternoon he had quite a contingent of people down there. Sarah McClendon was one of them, she covered Texas stuff, and people from the Texas newspapers were down there. There were a dozen of us, maybe, and Johnson was passing out the whiskey, he was drinking it by the glass himself, and he was just yakking. But he would always say, "This is off the record," or "This is for background." "Now, this is really deep background." "This is not for attribution, now." Tex and I understood this method, and we discounted about ninety percent of what he was saying anyway. But Tex was off that day. There was some kid, some other reporter who didn't know Johnson, he was new around here. Jack Bell, who was then head of the Senate A.P. staff, said, "Go down to Lyndon's office and see if he's got anything to say." So we were down there for an hour or two.
Among the things that Johnson said and I remember him very well saying, "this is deep, deep background, don't allude to this, don't say anything about this, but you know the United States is in negotiations with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines." Now, this was 1961, not long after the inauguration. Well, I didn't even make notes on it. We had had three or four drinks down there, and I came back up and wrote some little story for Texas and then went down to the National Press Club. I was at the bar at the National Press Club about eight o'clock. Our bureau was in the Press Club Building at that time, and they tracked me down at the bar there, and they said, "You were at that Johnson press conference, right?" I said, "Yeah, I was there, I wrote a story about it." They said, "Didn't you hear him say something about negotiating with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines." I said, "Yeah, I heard it, but it was completely off the record, deep background, no allusions, nothing, we couldn't use it." He said, "Well, you've got to come down and write a story about what he said, because the A.P. wrote it, and we've got to match it." I said, "I can't do that. I don't believe a damn word he was saying. I'm not going to do that." They said, "You've got to do it." I said, "Well, I'll see if I can get ahold of the vice president and see if he will permit me, when I tell him what happened, to write it." They said okay, so I called George Reedy, who was his
press secretary--an old U.P. hand, incidentally, from the bureau here. Reedy hit the ceiling, he said, "God Almighty, you know there's not a damn word of truth to that, don'tcha?" I said, "Yeah, I know it."
What had happened was, the A.P. kid went back up to his booth there, and Bell said to him, "What did the vice president have to say, anything?" The kid was thumbing through his notebooks, and he said, "I didn't understand much of it, but I think it may be news, he said we were negotiating with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines." Bell said, "What?" The kid said, "Yeah." So Bell grabbed the notebook out of the kid's hand and looked at it, and his notes were very clear, but there was no mention in his notes that this was deep background and off the record, not for attribution, don't use it in any sense. Bell wrote a bulletin that said that Vice President Johnson told Capitol Hill reporters today that the United States was in negotiation with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines. A bulletin! And he added an "urgent: this is a break through in international negotiations and atomic politics," and all this. Of course, any reporter worth his salt has background at immediate recall almost and he can take the smallest fragment of information, blow it up, and, make it look like it's really important, when it may or may not be. Well, Bell did this with the story. It went to England, it went to France, it went all over the world. And it just upset the hell out of embassies, everybody: what in the hell is this? And there was not a word of truth to it.
So the office said, "You've got to match this story." I said, "I cannot match the story that way. If you give me some time--and I can't get a clearance to write it from Reedy and Johnson--I'll do my best to back off of it so we will be in print with something, but I cannot write that the United States is doing this because Lyndon Johnson said it. He said it, but he said it off the record. I can't write that he said it off the record when it's on the record here." But the office was adamant. They had to match that story or knock it down. I called Reedy and he was just beside himself. He said he knew something like that was going to happen one of these days, and now it did. So he called Johnson, who at that time was living in Pearl Mesta's old house in northwest Washington, where I had been several times as a guest of Johnson's. He was drunk by then, full of booze and at home and not thinking clearly. Reedy always swears that he told
him that it was the A.P. that did it and not the U.P., but he mentioned my name, that I had called him and reported this, and Johnson got it in his head that it was me that wrote this. For six months he didn't speak to me. Six months! Well, here's the vice president from one of your regional states--I tried to get to him I don't know how many times to tell him that it wasn't my fault, that I didn't do it at all.
The White House knocked the story down the next day. They said, "Absolutely nothing to this." Johnson denied ever having said it. It was a one-day wonder. But to me it wasn't a one day wonder because Johnson was pissed at me, really pissed. I did not really get back into his good graces until he became president.
RITCHIE: I guess he wanted to be in complete control of the news that was reported on him at all times. He in a sense courted reporters ....
McGHEE: Oh, he did, he did. He courted us. He'd call you in, give you whiskey, and joke with you. But he was a mean son of a bitch, too.
RITCHIE: Which was somewhat self defeating. If he didn't speak to you for six months, that interrupted your coverage of him for that six month period.
McGHEE: But he really didn't care. He was moving on to higher things. He'd been cheated out of the presidency he thought by a whippersnapper. He was a funny, funny fellow.
RITCHIE: What was he like as majority leader of the Senate?
McGHEE: Well, I was covering regional items then, but you know they have what they call "dugout chatter" before the daily sessions and Johnson would show up and he'd banter with the reporters. Very seldom did any information come out of it. I remember one time--he was a crude, crude man. I think Sarah McClendon had asked him some question that nettled him a little bit. He was sitting down instead of standing up, and he reached down and pulled his crotch
and said, 'Well, Sarah, I don't know." [laughs] And he was scratching himself, it was terrible.
RITCHIE: On the Senate floor?
McGHEE: Right on the Senate floor [laughs].
RITCHIE: His counterpart in the House, Sam Rayburn, had a very different personality. How was he to cover, as a reporter?
McGHEE: Well, everybody feared Rayburn, nobody feared Johnson reporters, I'm talking about. Rayburn was a presence, an austere man. You just didn't fiddle with him at all. You seldom got to see him or talk to him. Now, he did talk to Tex Easley all the time. He was a friend of Tex's. He was, I think, a very good man, at heart, too; but he was stern. He had this visage of strength and no nonsense about him. He was, I guess, in his eighties when I came here. I remember--the type of stories you do regionally--up from the Rio Grande Valley every year the onion growers down there would send a boxcar full of onions to Washington, to Rayburn, and he would distribute hundred pound sacks of onions to everybody in the Capitol Building, all the congressmen and anybody else who wanted them. That was always a picture, Rayburn would pose with these onions. It was in the Speaker's office, and Rayburn then was an old, old man, and a hundred pounds of onions was not something that you easily picked up. But some reporter asked, "Can we get you to hold an onion." And Rayburn thought they wanted him to hold the whole sack, so he reached down and finally hoists this bag up. I'm standing there amazed. I thought, "That old bastard's going to die right here!" He's lifting up this hundred pound sack of onions and holds it there. It never got into print, but it's just a recollection I have. When I think of Rayburn right now, I think of him holding that hundred-pound sack of onions in the Speaker's office.
RITCHIE: George Smathers said that Rayburn used to eat raw onions, and would pass them out to other people: "Have an onion." Was Rayburn concerned about how the press covered him?
McGHEE: I don't think so. The press more or less idolized him, too. The press doesn't idolize people, but they had a genuine respect for him. He was a powerful, powerful man. But his power arose from his willingness to really go by seniority. He would never interfere with the system. He believed in the regular order.
RITCHIE: He used to say, "You've got to go along to get along."
McGHEE: Yeah, that's what he used to say.
RITCHIE: You covered Louisiana too, so you must have followed Russell Long's career in those days.
McGHEE: I knew this subject would probably come up. I have a couple of pretty good stories about Russell Long. Russell Long was on the Finance Committee and on the Foreign Relations Committee, and he gave up Foreign Relations to go on Commerce because his theory was that Finance and Commerce would go together and he didn't really give a damn about foreign relations anyway. He traded with Gale McGee, who wanted on Foreign Relations, and I think he was on Commerce. That's the way it worked. So he traded and went on Commerce. It wasn't long after that that [Harry] Byrd died, and then Long became chairman of the Finance Committee.
RITCHIE: That's right, [Robert] Kerr died, and then [Harry] Byrd died, and then Long took it over about '65 or so.
McGHEE: Kerr, I remember him very, very well, got a lot of stories about him too [laughs]. Russell Long, after he became chairman of the Finance Committee--I've forgotten what year it was, but I had been a regional reporter and drank with Russell Long a great deal in his hideaway there in the Capitol Building, particularly. I remember it was one of those adjournment nights when something was holding up the sine die adjournment, some bill was in conference and they couldn't quite get it straightened out and everybody was just sitting around waiting for the papers to get here or over there and the adjournment resolution to pass. [portion of interview closed]
But he was the whip. "You know," he said, "I'm going to be chairman of the Finance Committee, and that's a fulltime job, and I don't want to mess with this whip job. It ain't worth a damn anyway." He said, "If I could find a real good conservative, if I could get Bob Byrd, for instance, or somebody like that, elected to my job, I'd quit." I wasn't taking notes, but I recalled this conversation. [portion of interview closed]. Long gave me that spiel and I made a mental note of it, but I didn't write anything down. I wasn't taking notes in there at all.
So Congress adjourned, in October or November, whenever it was; and when the Congress is out of session, there's not a lot to do around here. You search for stories. So I remembered that conversation, and I wondered if he'd told anybody else that and I could verify it, get another source or two. So I called up his drinking buddy. I called him up and I said, "Say, I've heard something. I want to run it past you and see if there's anything to it or not." .I told him what Long had told me, but I didn't say Long had told me that. He said, "Hell, yes, it's true. He's going to be chairman of the Finance Committee. He doesn't want to mess around with that piddling job there as whip." I said, "Well, fine, has he told anyone else that?" This guy said, "In certain circles it's well known that he would give up that job if he could get somebody of his political persuasion to succeed him." So I wrote a story that said that Russell Long had confided to associates that he would give up the whip's job if he thought that he could be succeeded by a conservative Democrat. Then I said: "Among those that he has reported to have mentioned were Senator Robert Byrd". I wrote this story in December, and fleshed it out--like I told you Bell does, and any reporter can do, tell them what the hell the whip does, and make a story out of that little bit of information.
The story moved on the "A" wire and went to the Washington Post's Senate correspondent, who was then an old man, Bob Albright. So the Post gets this story that says that Long is going to be chairman of the Finance Committee and it's a fulltime job and very prestigious and he doesn't want to do that and
be whip too. He couldn't take both, so he was going to take Finance and give up the whip's job if he could find the proper successor. Ted Kennedy at that time was skiing at Sun Valley, when he saw the story or heard about the development that Long might step down. Kennedy immediately got on the telephone and started lining up support for the job if it became vacant. When the story got to the Washington Post, without any of the Kennedy stuff in it, the Post called their Senate man, who was a supernumerary at that time and asked him if there was anything to the story, and could he match it. Long was in Louisiana, nobody was around Washington, it was late December, close to Christmas, and Albright said, "Go ahead and run the wire copy, that'll be okay." Well, the Post didn't do that. Somehow or other somebody knocked the U.P.I. logo off of the story and put Albright's name on it.
So the story appeared all over the country under U.P.I, but it appeared in the Washington Post under the Post's Senate reporter's name. When the story hit the Washington scene the next day, everybody in Washington was looking at the Post, and they thought that this guy had gotten the story himself. They were on the phone to Long: "What the hell is going on?" The Senate leadership, the White House, everybody was wanting to know what in the hell is going on here. He said, "Goddamn, I never talked to that man! I never talked to Albright." To this day, I don't know whether Long remembered that he talked to me about that. He said, "What's the source of that story?" Somebody told Long that it was United Press International, and all Long got was International, and that had only been two or three years after U:P. had merged with I.N.S., and he got it mixed up in his head that it was International News Service, which was out of service even. In any event, he never connected me with that story the rest of the time he was here, and didn't until the time that he left, and hasn't to this day [laughs], that I was the one responsible for causing him all that trouble. Well, as it turned out, Kennedy beat all comers and was elected whip, and then screwed up in the job and a couple of years later Byrd beat him.
Long was an expansive, wonderful, hale-fellow-well-met kind of guy. I used to go up to the National Press Club with him. I'll never forget one night we were up there at two or three o'clock in the morning. Long was driving his
car--he wasn't capable of driving, really--and I lived, still live in same place, in Northwest Washington, in an apartment. Long had a girlfriend who lived there, he later married her. She was a secretary to Senator [Sam] Ervin of North Carolina. Anyway, Long knew that I lived there, and he said, "C'mon, I'll take you home." I didn't know whether to ride home with him or not, but I couldn't abandon a U.S. senator in the Press Club at that hour, so I said okay. We get on Foxhall Road, and Gwen Cafritz lived out there in a big mansion, huge English manor type house on a vast estate there off Foxhall Road. So we were driving up there, going to take me home, and Russell turns into her driveway at three o'clock in the morning, drunk out of his mind, and I'm well on my way too.
We go up this gravel driveway and park in front of the place, and a big dog starts barking like hell. Russell gets out of the car and says, "C'mon, c'mon, she'll love to see us." I said, "Goddamn, senator, we can't do that, it's three o'clock in the morning and you're waking these people up!" He said, "No, no, we'll get in." So he goes and bangs on the door and yells: "Gwen, Gwen, let us in, this is Russell." I am cringing there, wondering what in the hell I'm doing there with this guy." And the door opens and the dog bounds out, and we think he's going to eat us both up, and then the door slams. The butler or somebody said: "I'll get rid of these guys," and he let that dog out. Well, Russell Long and I are falling down on that gravel, we finally get back in the car before that dog got us, and got home. But that was only by way of illustration of what a great guy he was. He really liked newspaper people and he fiddled around with them all the time. He wouldn't trust them [laughs].
RITCHIE: What did you do in the situation where you were there, and he told you that [portion of interview closed]?
McGHEE: I didn't write a line about it.
RITCHIE: Exactly, but what do you do with stories that you can't write?
McGHEE: I've got notebooks full of stuff like that at home. You know, you always have illusions of writing a book about it some day, putting all the
remnants together and writing it, but really they're too specialized. I'm not a stylist, and it would be very difficult.
RITCHIE: But how do you know at the time, as a newspaper reporter, what you can write and what you can't write? How did you determine that you couldn't publish that story?
McGHEE: I could not publish that story because it occurred between me and Russell. There were no witnesses. All he'd have to do is deny it and I'm out on a limb, I've got no proof at all. [portion of interview closed] I had no interest, really, in exposing Russell Long's machinations; but if I had, I would have had to have been secure myself that the story would stick. I couldn't prove it at all, and he wouldn't have said it, had he been sober. I would have been taking advantage of him. It was the same way in writing that story. I confirmed it. I could have written the story that Russell Long told me, and he did, but he could have denied it. I went to his friends and got absolute proof that he had been thinking along these lines, and I had no compunction about writing the story then.
RITCHIE: One old time newspaper reporter, back in the 1920s, described himself as a "graveyard of secrets." That people told him these things that he could never publish, and that was one of the problems of being a Capitol Hill reporter.
McGHEE: Well, it is. I don't know where you draw the line on that. Without reporters being friends--there's a lot of criticism about journalism today, where you draw the line between what's private and what's public, and what you can prove and what you can't prove, and what's within fair game and what isn't, to write. That all changed in the '60s, when reporters became belligerent with their sources. I attribute that to the advent of television and the oversimplification of complicated stories. If I had carte blanche, if I had felt secure myself, if I had wanted to do Russell Long in, and somehow or other contrived to write that story, and been able to write it, I think I would have been doing him a disservice. [portion of interview closed] A lot of people, I think, attribute venality that really isn't there to many of our elected officials. God
knows there's enough venality, but it isn't endemic, or even in the government pandemic. It just isn't that way. Most people are honest.
In my time here, I have seen the Congress go from everybody hating them--well, everybody's always hated them, not hated them but held them in contempt--but the viciousness of attacks on Congress. You know, this business about their pay raises, Jesus! It is too bad that they don't have some mechanism that their pay can keep apace with their needs; but that's the way our system is. But then to blame the people personally is wrong. Then some of them of course are craven and they make a big pretense of giving it to charity. I mean, there are all kinds of ins and outs about it, but if you apply the general morality of the nation, you're not going to find it any different. Everybody wants a raise. And as far as I'm concerned they earn it. I don't know, my attitudes have changed over the years about that.
RITCHIE: I wanted to ask you about some of the other colorful characters in your region.
McGHEE: Bob Kerr was there.
RITCHIE: Yes, in Oklahoma you had Bob Kerr, in New Mexico you had Dennis Chavez, in Arizona you had Carl Hayden.
McGHEE: Well, I didn't cover Arizona.
RITCHIE: But you had Arkansas, which was a powerhouse.
McGHEE: [J. William] Fulbright was there, and [John] McClellan.
RITCHIE: And you had [Allan] Ellender in Louisiana.
McGHEE: Ellender was a funny old man, too.
RITCHIE: Could you tell me about some of these people?
McGHEE: Well, I guess among the people that I personally disliked, and I generally don't dislike people, I get along with almost everyone, but I did not like Bob Kerr. I always felt in my heart that he was really a crook and a no good. I could not find any redeeming qualities about the man to balance those suspicions off. I just never liked him.
RITCHIE: How was he as a news source?
McGHEE: He was great for Oklahoma news: "I called up the Bureau of Public Roads and we're not going to put that road through." He was on the Finance Committee, too. But he was mean spirited. He was like Lyndon Johnson, tough. I'm probably talking in bromides, everybody knows that. I've forgotten what the story was about, but I remember the context, I said to Senator Kerr, "Isn't that a rather parochial view that you're expressing here, senator?" It was something about the nation versus Oklahoma. And in a room full of people--and I used the word "parochial" in the sense that it was limited to this region, and he knew what I meant, it was before a bunch of Oklahomans, I guess and he said, "Now what in the hell are you bringing religion into this for?" I mean, he knew what I meant! [laughs] But that was his response.
Clint Anderson was a wonderful old man. In his later years of course he had palsy and he could hardly move, he shook all the time. But Anderson almost got through a health insurance bill once. I guess it was Medicare.
RITCHIE: Yes, in 1962.
McGHEE: And Kerr defeated him on it by one vote, somehow or other, bullied somebody into defeating him. I interviewed Anderson afterward. It was a great story at the time. Generally, even when one senator hates another one, they won't tell you, they won't say so, but Anderson was really hurt. He was deeply hurt by what Kerr had done to him. He thought he had had Kerr's promise on this compromise, and he didn't. Kerr double-crossed him.
RITCHIE: And he expressed it to you in the interview?
McGHEE: Yeah, he did. And I tried to get that across in what I wrote. I don't know if I made it or not. Desks don't want you to get anything in a story particularly in a wire story. "If he said it, quote him outright, don't embellish it, let the reader make up his mind," which I guess is a good way to do things.
I think one of the most colorful characters in my time here was John Pastore, but he also was a man with compassion and a great heart, and it came home to me personally. The head of the House U.P.I. bureau and I were walking through the Rayburn garage one time and we saw all these cars, Fords, Lincolns, big stretch Mercurys, that these congressmen were driving. There was a congressman here named [Paul] Rogers from Florida, and he had a press secretary who later quit him and went to work for the Ford Motor Company. This other newspaperman and I noticed all these damn cars, so we decided to look into this to see where in the hell they were getting all these cars. Why are there so many Lincolns? So I called up this friend, who had worked for Congressman Rogers and now worked for Ford. I said, "Have you all got some
plan or some program with the Congress that you let them use cars, or lease them to them, or something?" He said, "Yeah, we got a real cut rate for committee chairmen and ranking members." I said, "Both House and Senate?" "Yeah, both House and Senate." I said, "All they have to be is the chairman or a ranking member and they get this?"
The deal was you could lease a Lincoln for a hundred dollars a month, you'd keep it for a year and you could turn it back and they'd give you a new one, a nominal fee, which is essentially a bribe by the Ford Motor Company to these senators and congressmen. I said, "Who else gets them?" He said at that time (Everett] Dirksen had one of them because he was no, Dirksen did not have one at that time, that's another story I'll tell you in a minute, which is funny. I was going to say that there was some leadership in it, it might have been that the lower ranking people in the leadership got them too, those who weren't supplied by the Senate. In any event, [Frank] Eleazer--he was the House bureau chief, and he and I were the ones whose suspicions were aroused by all these Lincolns in the Rayburn building--he said, "You take the Senate and I'll take the House and let's just see how many of these cars are out here."
I called up every chairman and every ranking member of a committee in the Senate, and I found twenty five people that admitted that they were taking these cars, admitted it. Alan Bible, all the chairmen, practically all of them. A quarter of the Senate was on the take from the Ford Motor Company. And Eleazer found essentially the same thing over on the House side. We put all this together, and I had everybody except Margaret Chase Smith--God, this was funny. We didn't want to go with the story until we could name the people that had them. We didn't want to leave anybody out since that would tarnish the others--why didn't you get him? So we insisted, one of the things about our story this was a big story, a very big scandal story, and we knew we had one, and the office wanted to make damn sure that there was no fuck-ups in it.
But I could not get to Margaret Chase Smith. She never talked to reporters. She only talked to the Maine reporter, and we didn't want to give our story to him or to anybody else. So I kept going to Mrs. Smith's office and running into her in the hall. She would ignore me. I would try to talk to her and she wouldn't talk to me. So finally I went over and I wrote a note into a guy named Bill Lewis, who was her paramour and her A.A., a colonel or something in the army. I was camped out in her anteroom, I think she was in the Russell Building, and I wrote a note into Lewis and I said: "We are writing a story about automobiles that the Ford Motor Company is supplying, practically gratis, to chairmen and ranking members. I'm wondering if Mrs. Smith is taking advantage of this offer or not?" I wrote that out on a note, something to that order, and sent it into Bill Lewis. And I got a written note back from him and he handled all of her affairs, she didn't handle anything, really. She was window dressing up here, really. Anyway, he wrote the note back out to me, I never saw him, I never went in and talked to him, but the note came back. It said: "No, we were unaware of this program, but now that we know about it, we'll look into it and get one." [laughs] It just fit in with our story beautifully! [laughs]
So then we had them all, we had everybody in the House and Senate and we had the names, twenty-five of them in the Senate. We wrote the story late one afternoon for the a.m.'s, and we held it off deliberately until late in the afternoon so the A.P. couldn't match it, because if they got it early enough they
could get to these people. They could get to them anyway, and they tried, but everybody didn't know what in the hell the story was. But we had it all set up. [John] Stennis was chairman of the Ethics Committee then, so we went to him and the Senate Ethics Committee and laid this stuff out to them before we wrote a line, and we got assurances that they would look into it to see if there were any rules being violated or anything. In our copy, we also wrote that this situation had been brought to the attention of the Senate Ethics Committee and the House Committee on Standards and Conduct, or whatever they call it over there--they didn't do anything about it, they didn't give a damn. But Stennis was straight laced, and he did.
But then we didn't write the story, we held off on it, and we kept after the guy to give us a break when the committee did anything about it. The committee did something about it, they roasted these people, you wouldn't believe, it was really something. Stennis went on the Senate floor with a resolution out of the committee saying that these people had to give these cars back, they could no longer have them, roasting the hell out of the Ford Motor Company for trying to subvert the legislative process. These people were appearing before all kinds of committees up here for corporate purposes, and here these guys who were acting on it were on the take from them. Stennis was pissed about it. And among the people that he singled out, and why he singled out Gordon Allott, I don't know. He was ranking Republican on the Interior Committee, anyway he had one of the cars too, and Gordon Allott was a very good friend of mine and a good source too. But we wrote his name in there.
I started this anecdote out by telling you what a great guy John Pastore was. Pastore was not one of the people that had one of these cars. I don't know whether you know how wires work or not, but I was the reporter on this story, and my name appeared on it along with Eleazer's, but actually the Senate chief up here when we finally got the thing we put out bulletins. When Stennis went on the floor with this, we had it, and nobody else did. It took them hours even to get copies from the Ethics Committee. But we had the story. I did not have a list written out of the senators, so I grabbed a Congressional Directory, and here the guy is writing the story and I'm dictating, essentially, to him, and we get to the point where we want to name the names in the copy. So I had the
Directory with the list of names and I said, "These are the senators who have these cars," and I made checkmarks in the Congressional Directory. Somehow or other the checkmark went through Pastore's name instead of the name above or below, and Pastore did not have one of those cars. He was ranking, on something or other, I guess it was Commerce maybe. But he did not have one of those cars.
The story appeared in the Providence Journal the next morning. They had rewritten it: "Senator Pastore has a free car from the Ford Motor Company." And of course, Pastore didn't have one. So the next afternoon he took to the Senate floor, and he was furious. He was always accused--any Italian you know is supposed to have Mafia connections and all that--and he said, "I have lived my life apart from this kind of stuff." He said, "I do not have any such car. I don't know anybody who has such a car. I don't know anything about anybody else's business." But he was furious that he had been tarred with this. Immediately I knew what had happened. It kind of dampened our enthusiasm for this story when we had made this grievous error. So we got a correction out right away. The story went on for two or three cycles, and we explained in one of the cycles the story that Pastore's name was included through error and that he did not have one of these automobiles.
I went down and I called Pastore off the floor. We were in the President's Room down there, and I told him that I was the one responsible for that story in the Providence Journal. I said, "I have absolutely no excuse, and no alibi, and I'm not trying to get out of this, but I do have an explanation of what occurred, if you'd like to hear it. He said, "Well, I sure as hell do." So I had the Directory with me that I had used, and I explained to him what had happened. People don't understand how newspapers work, or how wire services work particularly. I had to get it through to him that although I was responsible for the story, I actually didn't write it myself. He couldn't understand that. "Who did write it then?" I had to explain this business to him, so I showed it how it happened, and before we left that afternoon he said, "I'm sorry that this happened to you. I don't believe in this kind of stuff in the Senate." He said, "I understand what happened. Thank you very much for coming and telling me." He was the perfect gentleman about it. I told him that I would write personally to the editors of the
Journal, if he wanted me to. No, he didn't want to do anything more about it, forget about it. We had written that he was listed in error.
Pastore was wonderful about it, absolutely wonderful. I have a big framed picture of John Pasture at home in my house now, signed. I got to know Pasture after that pretty well. He was a New Englander, I had nothing to do with him as a regional reporter for the southwest. He and I became pretty good friends in the Senate.
RITCHIE: Tell me, why did you wait to run this story until after the Ethics Committee had made some comment on it? Why not blow the story first?
McGHEE: Well, the Ethics Committee was very interested; and they said, "We will do this. We will look into this, and we will give you a progress report." We put them a time frame on it: "When are you going to do it?" They said, "right away." They didn't have anything to do, the Ethics Committee. I've forgotten the name of the man who was the staff guy who really did the work on it. But it got a hell of a lot more impact when we came out saying that the Ethics Committee had ruled--I've forgotten the official term, it wasn't censure, it wasn't any big deal, like a big trial in the Senate. Stennis just said: "Get rid of these cars." And they did.
RITCHIE: But didn't you run the risk that the story would get out?
McGHEE: Well, nobody knew we were doing it, except the guy from Ford who was my source, who told me this. Then he was scared to death that somehow or other he was going to lose his job because of it. He didn't. But nobody knew it except for our office and me and Eleazer. We were in much better shape if we could get the official stuff on it. Then we had them, and a big break on it. We were put in for prizes for that story. We never got one. I think there was some other big scandal occurred that year, and we were washed out.
RITCHIE: Is there a danger of getting too far out ahead of a story sometimes? Of not knowing how to verify information that's in it. Do you hold off until you can be absolutely certain?
McGHEE: We didn't hold off because we weren't sure of the information at that time. Because we had it from the senators themselves, and even had this wonderful line from Bill Lewis. We had the information, but we were looking at impact then, and the impact of course was great when the Senate Ethics Committee condemned this action. That's something for the Senate to tell a quarter of its members: You're doing wrong here, cut it out.
RITCHIE: And its most powerful members.
McGHEE: Yeah! It really was a big story and a big thing, but the only thing that marred it was listing Pastore in our haste to get the thing out when we finally had the Ethics Committee report, and we had that exclusive for several hours. There really wasn't all that necessity to move that fast, I could have just as easily copied out a list of names and given them to him. Then I would have had it right, but I was going through the directory and he was writing at the same time, and Pastore's name got in there. It was Godawful.
REGIONAL REPORTER ON CAPITOL HILL
Interview #2
Friday, January 17, 1992
RITCHIE: We were talking yesterday about the region that you covered for U.P.I. You mentioned the states and some of the senators you covered. One of the states was Arkansas, and one of the senators I've always been interested in is J. William Fulbright. Could you tell me about your dealings with Senator Fulbright back at that time?
McGHEE: Well, I was a regional reporter and of course Fulbright's interests were worldwide. The regional information about Fulbright I didn't write a hell of a lot of stories about him in my early years. But through that association I became friendly with Senator Fulbright, and he became one of my intellectual heroes in the Senate. I have a couple of stories about Fulbright. I guess I should tell you, to lead into this one story that I want to tell you, is that I had an interest in Latin America. In my war years I was in and out of several countries in Latin America quite a bit. One time when I was in Puerto Rico, I was coming back to the United States to go to Officers' School, and I had to wait a long time for transportation. This was in 1943. I didn't have anything to do, except sit at the Naval Air Station there waiting for transportation, which was very difficult because I was very low on the priority list for getting back to the United States. I was itching to do something, so I enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico. I went to the commanding officer and he said, "Sure, you don't have anything else to do, go ahead and do it." So I did. I lived, believe it or not they let me live in a hotel downtown. It was the old Palacio Hotel in downtown San Juan, and the rent was only a dollar a day. Every morning I would get up and take the bus out to Rio Piedras, where the university was. It was about an hour's ride on the bus, but I went out there every day and I took a couple of courses. Nothing ever came of it, but I got interested in speaking Spanish. I never had any formal education in it, but through street Spanish more or less
I picked up enough. I like to fancy myself as being able to talk it, I really can't. But in any event, I had an interest in Latin America.
Then one year, I guess it was '62 or '63, it was before Kennedy was killed, I was down in Latin America when Kennedy was there as part of the Alliance for Progress; and he dedicated a new airport in San Jose. Again, one of these years previous to that, when the Senate was not in session, I was over in the House press gallery playing gin rummy one afternoon, and the phone rang. It was the office, and they wanted to know--I'm way ahead of myself, let me back up. There was nothing to do one year, and we were always searching for things to do when Congress wasn't in session; and I wrote a story about the Inter-American highway, which was going to be dedicated shortly. I wrote a great long series of stories about it, and what the Americans had done to facilitate its construction and building. So when they got ready to open the highway, the automobile manufacturers' association and the Commerce Department sent an invitation to the A.P. and the U.P. and the big newspapers to accompany a caravan of three buses. One for the press, one for the public works people and dignitaries from the country we were going through--they would ride on the Pan American segment through their country--and then a bus for the public roads people that accompanied the whole trip from someplace in Argentina to Detroit. Well, I picked it up in Panama. Anyway, I wrote this story, so this trip came along to the office and they said, "Why don't you go on this, but you can't file very much," because tolls then were thirty nine cents a word from that part of the world. So they limited me to two hundred words a day. it was a kind of feature thing anyway, but I had a good time. It was a three-week trip and I went through all of those countries, and we spent two or three days in each one. I ran into a revolution in Honduras and did some actual reporting because of that. But it was a fun trip. That's part of the background of my having an interest in Latin America--the war experience and then that.
Then again when I was playing gin rummy, the phone rang and it was the office. The bureau chief wanted to speak to any United Press man, and I was the only one in the gallery. He said, "What are you doing at this very moment?" This was 1965, late March or April. I didn't want to tell him I was playing cards, so I said, "Well, I've got some phone calls out arid I'm just waiting for
returns. He said, "Is it anything earthshaking that you have to do?" I said, "Not particularly, why?" He said, "I want you down here in the bureau as soon as you can get here. You're going to Santo Domingo." You know, it was a real shock and a surprise to me, because I was a regional reporter, I hadn't even gone on the general staff yet. But anyway, I went down there and said, "Well, can I go home and pack some clothes?" He said, "No, we've got your ticket. I want you to go to New York right away and you'll get briefed there about what to do and where to go." So I did, I went down to the bureau and called my wife and I said, "Look, I'm being sent to Santo Domingo," the revolution was brewing. I didn't know when I'd be back or anything. I left without even a toothbrush. I bought everything in San Juan--they gave me a ticket to San Juan and then the military transported me to Santo Domingo. Anyway, by way of background of my relationships with Fulbright, I had a distinct interest in Latin America.
I liked Costa Rica very much, and Costa Rica as you may or may not know has a reputation of having more school teachers, no army, and a higher literacy rate than the United States. Primary education is compulsory, everybody has to go to school, and they learn, it's not like here. Those kids when they get out of school, they're literate. I loved the country and I still go back there, I'm going back there next month again for the rest of the winter. But one time I was traveling around in the countryside--no army now--and I saw a jeep with a machinegun mounted on it. I couldn't figure out what was happening here, why the rural civil guard would need weapons of that sort. They were obviously not weapons that were for general riot control or civil disturbance that the constabulary would need. So I came back and I went to Fulbright. I didn't report any of this, it was beyond my ken, but I told Fulbright I was traveling in the back country down in Costa Rica--I've forgotten what year it was, whether it was before the Dominican thing or after, after probably. He was very interested and he called up the Pentagon people and said, "What in the hell are you doing? Are you supplying those people with war weapons, when all you should be supplying them with if anything is maybe sidearms, perhaps rifles?" Fulbright really got onto them about that, and I think he stopped them from arming those people to the teeth, because they're really volatile people, they're like everybody else, but they do have a democratic basis, grounding, and respect for democratic institutions.
Then of course when Fulbright split with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam war, that was a big, big story. By that time, I think, I was on the general staff and I wrote about that considerably. I always had a soft spot in my heart for Fulbright. Johnson would call him "Halfbright," and he was ridiculed considerably by the right wing in the Congress, and the hawks; but he was a real gentleman, one of my favorite people in the Senate. He had an intellectual side to him that's really rare in the Senate. I remember a colleague of mine who covered the Foreign Relations Committee, a woman. She wrote about the difficulties of diplomatic communication between the Arabs and Western people. It was something that struck Fulbright as good information, a good
interpretation of things. She had in her story about how Arabs frequently will shout and give an appearance of violence when that's cultural with them and really does not mean that they hate you. It's their way. Fulbright made a speech on the Senate floor about it. That's just by way of illustration. In my opinion, Fulbright was a cut above the normal senator.
RITCHIE: You mentioned the other day about Russell Long and Gale McGee trading committee assignments, from Foreign Relations to Commerce. Long wanted to get on Commerce, and McGee wanted to get on Foreign Relations. I understand that Fulbright didn't want McGee on Foreign Relations, as a matter of fact he even bumped him off of the committee at one point.
McGHEE: I was unaware of that. I remember when he got bumped, though, because I covered Wyoming, I covered Senator McGee too.
RITCHIE: I wondered whether you had any insights into that.
McGHEE: No, I don't recall it. I don't believe that Fulbright would have bumped anybody if he could not have done it in the regular order. I don't remember the details of it, although I do remember when he went off of it briefly, but he got back on, in my recollection. It must have been because the ratios changed. Maybe Fulbright engineered with the fellow from Kentucky who was the ranking member then.
RITCHIE: John Sherman Cooper.
McGHEE: They may have arranged to change the ratio to get rid of McGee. I don't know what happened inside there. But I don't ever recall seeing Fulbright rambunctious on the Senate floor. A great guy, I liked him very much. I liked him better than I liked McClellan [laughs].
RITCHIE: Why, what was the matter with McClellan?
McGHEE: Oh, he was just gruff. Real conservative. My only disappointment with Fulbright was that he signed the Southern Manifesto, but so did McClellan. Matter of fact he probably wrote it! But that was for his own political base. He couldn't do anything else at the time. He never really felt that way, anyway.
RITCHIE: You mentioned that you were in the Dominican Republic, were you there when the revolution took place?
McGHEE: Yes, that's what I was sent down there for, to cover their revolution.
RITCHIE: There was a lot of question about whether or not Lyndon Johnson had exaggerated the situation down there.
McGHEE: Oh, he certainly did. He certainly did. It was obvious to reporters on the scene that we were favoring--we were there to keep the peace and to protect American lives, and not to take sides in the revolution but we really did take sides. We were in bed with the fascists that took over the country. I remember the general, his name was Palmer, and I saw one day when they were distributing food--they divided, they put a line in the city, and on one side were the forces loyal to the elected government, Caamano, and on the other side were the forces that were loyal to those who had seized official state power, a general named Imbert and his chief guy, a fellow named Wessin y Wessin. I'll never forget those names. The American forces were aiding them all the time. Food was hard to come by, and the military was distributing food to one side and not the other. Palmer denied that, and I got in a hell of a brawl with him on the embassy grounds, which was one of the few safe places in the city, real safe.
It was an outdoor news conference.
I had seen that morning that the American forces were distributing food to the ones who were trying to overthrow the government, rather than sustaining the government. Palmer denied it. He said it wasn't occurring, and I had seen it personally, and so had other reporters, absolutely seen it, and had written it. We were furious, the reporters down there, because the military lied to us all the time about the state of things. You really had to get behind what their story was. You couldn't take anything they said as truth. You wrote everything very qualified, what you did, that they told you. I got in this brawl with Palmer, argument with him, about this mere fact that I had personally seen the food being distributed to these people. I was unaware of it, but the television cameras were filming this press conference. I was as close to Palmer as I am to you, and he lied right in my face. I said, "That's not true, general," or something like that. "I personally saw your forces doing it this morning." And the cameras caught it. I was down there several weeks, and phone communications were terrible, but my family, wife saw that on the television! [laughs]
RITCHIE: She must have worried about your coming back!
McGHEE: Well, not really. It was quite an experience. But that has very little to do with the Senate or the Congress.
RITCHIE: Although the Dominican Republic was really the beginning of the break between Fulbright and Johnson. Fulbright stood up and publicly questioned whether or not Johnson was telling the truth about the Dominican Republic.
McGHEE: And of course he wasn't. He said people had their heads chopped off. That wasn't true. Actually, I remember writing at that time that the show of American force down there was uncalled for. We had more than thirty thousand troops in that little island in a matter of a couple of weeks. What it really was was a rehearsal for our about to become build up in Vietnam. That was more troops than we had in Vietnam at that time. More troops than we had in Vietnam we had in the Dominican Republic, and the Vietnam thing
had been going on for three or four years, or longer. '65this was. I remember writing that intervention had really changed the course of Latin revolutions. Generally you get one bunch of thieves overthrowing another, and it's their turn to steal for a couple of years until somebody else comes in. And they're generally bloodless. They'd let the old bunch go to some other country that will take them, and they'll live off what they've stolen. I mean, it's a way of life. But this was different, absolutely different. The United States was afraid that there would be another Cuba, and they could not stomach that. They could not let democracy take its course there. I interviewed Juan Bosch, who was the first democratically elected leader of that country after Truijillo was overthrown. He was a Spanish poet and a visionary. Our military didn't like him a bit. It was an interesting assignment, I enjoyed it very much.
RITCHIE: I get the sense that Johnson was obsessed with not making the same mistakes he thought that Kennedy had made, that Kennedy had let the Bay of Pigs fail, and he wasn't going to let the Dominican Republic go the same way.
McGHEE: My God, we had forces down there! We had battleships off of the coast of Santo Domingo, guns trained on the city. It was, I think, a black mark on our diplomatic history, in this hemisphere.
RITCHIE: It's an interesting point in time in terms of the press and the military. The military had gotten a pretty good press in the '40s and '50s for the most part, but in the '60s the press became very suspicious and critical of military tactics and the line that the military was giving. I don't think the military had any experience with that kind of a critical press.
McGHEE: You know, that was only fifteen years after World War II. America really isn't militaristic, really it isn't, despite the fact that we've got all this blowhard phony patriotism extant all the time, but it really isn't militaristic. People are very suspicious about turning things over to the military. I am not that way, really. I think that when the military goes in to do something, particularly in the humanitarian field, they are tremendous. That came home to me right before I came to Washington, when I was in Denver. There was an
earthquake in West Yellowstone Park. It was in a remote area in the Montana part of Yellowstone Park. There was a lake out there called Hebron Lake, and it was an artificial lake where they dammed the Madison River, which incidentally was the favorite fishing stream of Herbert Hoover, he used to go fishing out there all the time. It's beautiful country. The Madison River below that dam ran between two real precipitous mountains, through a mountain valley, very narrow, and where the stream was there were campgrounds on either side. Well, the earthquake came, and there were campers in there, and this earthquake took that lake and just did it like a saucer, and emptied all the water over that dam and it just flooded the valley. It killed lots of people. The army went in there with helicopters and was rescuing people. I went up there from Denver, me and a guy from the Scripps-Howard newspaper there rented an airplane and flew up. We were among the first to be in there and watch it and report on the disaster. The military there was fantastic. They did a job that only they are equipped to do. But of course that was peacetime, relative peacetime.
RITCHIE: Well, while we're still talking about the regional part of your reporting, I wanted to ask you about some of the other senators in your region. We just briefly the other day mentioned the senators from New Mexico, Chavez and Anderson, interesting old-time Senate types. I wondered if you could give me any insights into those two senators?
McGHEE: Well, Chavez as you may or may not have heard was a notorious drinker. When I first came to Washington in September of 1959, somebody took me to lunch at the old Carroll Arms. I remember going to lunch there, it was the first time I had ever been in the place. I don't know whether you remember the restaurant. You kind of descended a few stairs there into the waiting room before you'd go into the restaurant itself. Well, I went in there and when we emerged a couple of hours later there was a man, whom I didn't know, I had never seen him before, lying on the floor between the door to the restaurant proper and the door to the street. The door to the street was up a couple of steps. I've forgotten who I was having lunch with, but it was somebody from the U.P., from our bureau, who had been an old hand here, I think it was Warren Duffy. When we got out of there, no one was helping this man. He was
just lying there, and Duffy, or whoever it was, said, "Watch out, you're new here, don't step on that United States senator." I couldn't believe it! [laughs] Here was Chavez passed out at one thirty in the afternoon in the lobby of the Carroll Arms!
I liked the old man, though, very much. He had a daughter named Ymelda, and she was married to a columnist.
RITCHIE: George Dixon.
McGHEE: George Dixon, correct. George and I became pretty good friends. Of course, Chavez was his father-in-law. I've forgotten when Chavez died, but he died of cancer. He was taken out to the NIH [National Institutes of Health] out in Bethesda. This fellow I spoke to you earlier about, my counterpart in the Associated Press, Tex Easley, he also covered New Mexico. He and I went out there to see Chavez one day. We knew he had cancer, but nobody ever wrote it. It was before the days you didn't mention it. If someone had cancer you'd fuzz it up. The reader was aware of what was happening, but you never overtly said this man has cancer. So Tex and I arranged to go out to NIH and have an interview in the hospital with Senator Chavez. I inquired, to make small talk, "How are you getting along, senator?" "Oh, I'm fine," he said, "you know I've got cancer very bad." And he kept talking about it. He knew who we were, he was alert and aware, apparently they didn't let him have any whiskey.
So when we finished the interview and got out of there, I got to thinking: my God, here's this man in command of his faculties and he tells a newspaper reporter that he's got cancer. So I wrote that he was dying of cancer, and wrote about what we were talking about in the interview. What we talked about was that he had built a record. He was on the Appropriations Committee, headed the military subcommittee. I got out the old records and added them up and discovered that he had presided over the largest appropriations in American history. He had been here for years and years and years, and I believe during World War II was on that same committee when we spent billions on the military. Anyway, he had set a record of sorts, and I wrote that in there. I
practically wrote an obituary of the man and said that he was dying of cancer. And Ymelda was furious. She called me up and said, "That's really low life." And here everybody in the state knew what was wrong with him. I guess I'm trying to defend myself for doing it, but I did it, anyway. George Dixon, why he understood. He kept saying, "Don't pay any attention to Ymelda." I felt real badly about it. Chavez had a son who was a renegade, just one step ahead of the sheriff all the time [laughs]. I never had much to do with him, but he was on the payroll. Chavez was a nice old man, though, I liked him.
RITCHIE: It seems as if there was a different standard. Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but the press just allowed public figures to have private lives and private indiscretions that they knew about but they didn't write about, including their health, and their drinking
McGHEE: And womanizing, and gambling, and everything, certainly.
RITCHIE: What was the prevailing thought about that?
McGHEE: The prevailing thought was that unless it somehow or other was detrimental to their public function and public duties and responsibilities that it was their own business. I'm still of that persuasion. I don't believe that you can set a moral standard for anybody else. It's the root of democracy. It's why I like representative government, really. People that bash the Congress, of
Course, I just maintain that they don't like it, they want some other system. When they blame the institution for the peccadilloes of the members, we've always had that. It just hasn't been published and widely disseminated, or that it made a difference.
RITCHIE: I remember reading an article by a young woman reporter who had just come to cover the Capitol and she was sitting in the gallery watching Harrison Williams manage a bill, and he was clearly drunk on the floor. She wrote a story back to her newspaper in New Jersey about this, and the editor responded: "We don't want to know about this, we want to know whether he passed the bill or not."
McGHEE: [Laughs] I remember Harrison Williams and Russell Long on an adjournment night when Russell was whip and he was standing in for Mansfield on the floor, and both of them had been drinking too heavily. Williams came on the floor when Russell was calling up little innocuous bills, the final things they were doing that night, and one of them was a resolution commending some movie star for something he'd done, or some entertainment figure. Williams walked on the floor and he said, "I'd like to amend that." And he named somebody else. And then some other senator who had had a few got up to add his movie star to it, and the first thing you know this list of people that the Senate was memorializing included Rin Tin Tin, for Christ's sake. It was a funny, funny scene; and finally Long realized that it was out of hand and he called the bill back. It never passed. [laughs]
RITCHIE: From talking to a lot of people here, I get the sense that alcohol really was a problem for many senators in the 1950s.
McGHEE: It was, and it was tragic in some instances. One of the most brilliant men in my time covering the Senate was a senator from my state of Missouri, named Tom Hennings. He was an absolutely brilliant man, great lawyer, great jurist, thinker, and alcohol really did him in.
RITCHIE: I've read Drew Pearson's diary, and he talks about Hennings disappearing for days and they would find him in a hotel room or somewhere, and that was when Pearson was hoping that Hennings would be the champion against Joe McCarthy.
McGHEE: Hennings was on the Judiciary Committee, and when he'd go off on one of these binges, there was a staff member, he was a good friend of mine, his name was Stan Chapman from Kansas City, and they used to let him sit in the committee proceedings in the mark ups, which were then closed to the press, and he could vote. This staff guy, Chapman, a character himself, would vote Tom Hennings' vote. And sometimes he'd piss off Eastland [Senator James O. Eastland, (D MS), chairman of the Judiciary Committee] so much, of course they were on different sides of the liberal conservative spectrum. But Hennings was a great senator. Liquor really got him though.
I can recall reporters that were drunks. Willard Edwards was a great Chicago Tribune reporter, until he sobered up and didn't drink anymore at all, he had whiskey in his desk all the time. Lots of reporters had bottles in their desks in the gallery. They'd nip from time to time.
RITCHIE: I guess there was a sense that everybody did it, and it was available. There didn't seem to be much of a stigma against it.
McGHEE: No, there wasn't. Johnson was a drunk. Jesus, he'd just get blotto [laughs]
RITCHIE: Well, one other state in your region I wanted to ask you about was Wyoming. The two senators were McGee and O'Mahoney.
McGHEE: Well, when I came to Washington O'Mahoney was an ill man. I can recall Johnson having him wheeled in on a stretcher to vote. I also remember Johnson on a critical vote, I've forgotten the subject, but a real critical one, bringing in Clair Engle of California, who had suffered a stroke, my recollection is.
RITCHIE: That was the '64 Civil Rights bill.
McGHEE: Yeah, they brought him in, and they called his name and the man stood up. I was in the gallery at the time, and you didn't really know how he voted, but they counted his vote as for the Civil Rights bill. I don't think Wyoming ever elected a Democratic congressman until they elected an Italian fellow, again his name escapes me, to the House.
RITCHIE: Was that [Teno] Roncalio?
McGHEE: Roncalio, yeah. I went to the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, covering the delegations from my region. My essential assignment was to write regional stories about the activities of the delegations at the convention. The night they nominated Kennedy, Wyoming was the state that sealed the nomination for him, although it didn't really. It's a very interesting
story. I was standing at the Texas delegation and the Wyoming delegation was some distance away, and the hall was so crowded you couldn't move. But I had been stationed there because that's where Rayburn was. Rayburn had presided over Democratic conventions since the early 1930s, since he had become Speaker. He was for Lyndon Johnson, and he gave the podium to [John] McCormack from Massachusetts who at that time was the Democratic floor leader in the House. They had a rule in the convention that if a state passed, that the chair was obligated to go back to that state at the end of the roll to get their vote. Kansas was one of my states too, and Kansas wasn't very far, it was just across the aisle and back a delegation from Texas. But I was standing there watching Rayburn and Price Daniel, and did not get to the Wyoming delegation at all. My recollection, and it's vivid, is that Rayburn knew the rules.
When Kansas was called to cast their votes, they had twenty two votes, but they could not reach a majority. Kennedy had so many, Stewart Symington had so many, and Johnson had so many, and they did not have a majority to report. So they passed. They were caucusing all the time during the roll call, trying to get on the proper bandwagon, but some of them were holding out. Under the rules, Kansas had a right to be recognized at the end of the roll call to vote. Rayburn was aware of this, and he was in contact with those people in Kansas that wanted Johnson. So when Wyoming announced its vote for Kennedy, that put Kennedy over the top and he was the nominee, if there were no objections or anything. Rayburn got up and grabbed the microphone and tried to get McCormack's attention. I thought he was going to die. I thought he was going to pass out, kill himself, right there in that convention that night. And Price Daniel was standing next to him, who was later a senator for a brief time. Rayburn could not get McCormack's attention, and he was so frustrated. He wanted McCormack to go back to Kansas and give them time to regroup, to see if they couldn't do something about Johnson getting beaten. Well, it was futile, of course.
As a consequence, I was reporting that end of the story, watching what I thought was the most important element there that night, when really it wasn't. It was the fact that Wyoming had put Kennedy over, and they were the ones who were responsible. It was a matter of luck, but that's the way it was.
There should have been a reporter there interviewing those Wyoming people, but I couldn't make my way over there then. I didn't even think about it. I wanted to write this dramatic thing of Rayburn and the Kansas delegation, which was really my story. And how McCormack, if he heard Rayburn, ignored him, and if he didn't hear him, if the communications were such because everything was confusion. But it was a dramatic incident in my coverage of national conventions.
But anyway, I was responsible for Wyoming. It was my job to be there and report on those people and get a reaction from them, whatever words they had for history that they had to utter after they were responsible for the nomination of Kennedy. But I never got there. The newspaper publisher in Wyoming, which was a big U.P.I. client, he just raised holy hell with me. I got my tail eaten out. You know, it's a passing thing. [laughs]
RITCHIE: It would seem to me that in your region, from Louisiana to Wyoming, one of the big issues had to be oil. Did you wind up covering issues related to oil?
McGHEE: I certainly did. I covered Oklahoma and Texas, which were the big oil states, there was production in Colorado and New Mexico also, and Kansas. Yeah, I remember how all the reporters hated--what's that allowance?
RITCHIE: The depletion allowance.
McGHEE: Depletion allowance, and every year there was a fight to reduce the depletion allowance from twenty seven and a half percent to some lower figure. It took them a generation or longer to do it, because there were some thirty or forty states in which there is some kind of oil production or refining or something that had an interest in keeping the depletion allowance. That was a real scandal, in my early days of reporting here, about the influence that the oil industry wielded, not over just the tag situation but public lands and utility regulation and a whole raft of things which are complicated but very important, very difficult.
One of my triumphs in the energy field, and I'm not immodest about talking about it, because I thought how to do it myself: one of the great issues in those days was the deregulation of natural gas. The agency that was the economic regulator of the gas industry was the Federal Power Commission, which is no longer in existence. That was owned by the oil industry, but public pressure was getting so much for more competition in the industry--but again it was under the guise of competition but it was to get rid of long-term gas contracts that were uneconomic to the producers in the southwest. So the Federal Power Commission decided to deregulate or abrogate eastern and western city contracts with the producing section of the country on a basin by-basin basis. And the Permian Basin underlay much of New Mexico and part of West Texas. If you dug a hole and dropped a match the whole Goddamn place would blow up. Millions of cubic feet, jillions of cubic feet of gas that were transported to the east and west, to California and the east coast. Pipelines were heavily involved in this, too. But the issues were very difficult to explain, they were technical as hell. You know, this contract called for so many cents per cubic feet to be delivered for thirty years as such and such a cost which was then uneconomic, but the local gas distributors had the right to impose it, although the Federal Power Commission could change things. It was all very, very arcane.
So they took on the Permian Basin first, they decided they would attempt to do it with the Permian Basin. Get rid of these old contracts which were completely uneconomic, unfair to the oil industry claim, to the energy industry claim, to the producers. There were volumes of testimony of hearings which I covered on a day-to-day basis for months and months. They finally reached a decision, and they called all of the energy reporters who were interested down to the Federal Power Commission, and they said, "This is so complicated, we're not just going to pass this out to you, because if we do you're going to get a wrong slant on it. We're going to make you read it. We'll call you in here at eight o'clock, we'll give you these documents, you read them, and nobody gets out of here until noon. At noon you can leave and write your story, but you cannot do anything here." No telephones out, and they made you stay there, and you had to agree to that.
My big opposition was the Associated Press. And Easley was a great guy, he was my closest friend, poker playing buddy, drinking buddy. But I really did him in on this one. I had some advance information on the basics of what the decision was going to be, so when I went in there I started reading the documents and making notes. I can dictate pretty well and keep it in my head. So I had my bulletin ready to go and I was making notes, actually I was writing at the time. So at noon when they let us out, I went to the telephone, picked up the phone and called the office and said "I've got a bulletin." And it was a huge economic story, big economic story, big in this country, equivalent today to a major development in the S&L scandal, say. The A.P. guy, he just sat there reading documents the whole time, didn't write anything out, wasn't formulating a story. He was going to go back to the office and write his story. I got on the phone and I dictated that thing and I had it down cold. Front page in the New York Times the next morning--beat him, he didn't even get in the papers! [laughs] Oh, that's a personal triumph. But oil was a dominant subject in the Senate in those days, and Bob Kerr was a master at getting what he wanted for the oil industry.
RITCHIE: And the oil lobby must have been very powerful.
McGHEE: Yes it was, very powerful.
RITCHIE: Did you find that lobbyists tried to influence you, as to how you covered stories?
McGHEE: Oh, certainly, but you could use lobbyists also. It was a two-way street. You would not necessarily write the industry position, but you'd have to report it because it was an important part of the story. But you didn't let it dominate--or I never did--the story. One thing that opening up the mark-up sessions, on legislation in committees, did was diminish the lobbyists' influence with the press on important legislation. Lobbyists always knew where the votes were, they knew the arguments in the mark-up, they knew how the bill was going to come out. And frequently they were in the damn sessions where reporters weren't! Particularly if the chairman was amenable. So they were a very good sources of information. But one of the congressional reforms in the
'70s opened up the process and that aspect of the lobbyists' influence over reporters diminished considerably. They were more important than the senators, they knew more than the senators did about what the hell was going on in the legislation. Lobbying is a part of American life, it's a part of the democratic process, at least the way it runs here in this country. I have no quarrel with it. I'm always for reform, but they serve a purpose.
RITCHIE: Did you find it more difficult to cover economic issues than political issues. As a reporter, is one more complex or harder to boil down?
McGHEE: Yes, economics is a lot more difficult.
RITCHIE: I would think it would be more difficult to cover something that was on going for a long period, like a series of hearings.
McGHEE: It is difficult. The problem is that reporters are not trained really in the intricacies of economics and business. Most of them aren't. A good reporter, however, can take almost any subject and make it comprehensible to a reader. Even if he doesn't know anything about it. That's part of the skill of the reporter. Politics is the fascinating part of the job, though. You're dealing with human beings, emotions, and skullduggery. I really loved to cover the political aspect of things.
RITCHIE: When you were a regional reporter, did you find that you spent more time on the House side or on the Senate side?
McGHEE: Well, I gravitated toward the Senate. There were nine of us regional reporters. We had one man for Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and one for California alone, and then six or seven divisions each had one. It was a matter of space. You couldn't have space in the press gallery on both sides. You had to work both sides, but I had my desk in the Senate. When I went on the general staff, I went on the Senate side, not the House.
RITCHIE: So you spent most of your time in the Senate press gallery?
McGHEE: Yes.
RITCHIE: Is that the way it usually works out, that people tend to specialize in one or the other?
McGHEE: Yes, one or the other, they do. Although some people have to cover both houses. But I know the Senate rules pretty well, and I'm really not familiar with the House rules. I find the Senate much more interesting, but many people don't--they like the hurly-burly of the people's house.
RITCHIE: I interviewed Griffing Bancroft, who covered Congress in the 1940s, and he said the first day he covered the House there was a joint session, and a senior Senate reporter for one of the wire services came over and sat with him. Bancroft asked the other reporter to tell him what was going on, and the senior man said, "You cover the House, I don't know anything that's going on over here on the House side." It startled him how much reporters divided up the House and the Senate, and how some of the Senate people never seemed to cross the Rotunda.
McGHEE: That's true, but the converse is true too. The House people very seldom came over to the Senate in those days.
RITCHIE: Well, tell me more about your competition with the Associated Press. You mentioned Jack Bell. His name is familiar to me, but I'm curious about him, and what kind of a competitor he was. The Associated Press was the older and the wealthier wire service. What was it like being up against them?
McGHEE: Well, it was challenging. Where I think Tex Easley, my good buddy in the A.P., I think he only covered New Mexico and Texas. And the A.P. also had a reporter assigned to nothing but oil. That's all he covered! Well, I covered everything. Consequently, I had a lot of sources, and I was never a lazy reporter, and frequently the A.P. guys were [laughs]. It was just the nature of our business, to keep up we had to work twice as hard as they did.
Bell was a commanding figure in the press gallery. I remember one time when Nixon was vice president, Bell and I were leaving the building at the same time. We got to the first floor, out the carriage entrance door, and the Secret Service was there. They wouldn't let Bell out until Nixon got in. That was before these days of magnetometers and all of the security arrangements, but the cops were there, and they made Bell wait. Bell said, "Who in the hell are we waiting on?" When Nixon walked through the door--I didn't like Nixon, I thought he was a terrible man, but I respected the office--but Bell said, "Why that son of a bitch!" [laughs] I mean, he felt that Nixon should have waited for him to leave rather than the reverse!
Many reporters, I've found, have that attitude, particularly since the upheavals of the '60s. They don't understand that reporters are in these buildings, in the Capitol complex, as guests, at the sufferance of the Congress. They don't have to have them in here at all. They can say: "The hell with you, you don't have any space here; we're going to kick all of you out and take these quarters that you use. If you want to talk to a senator, you go over to his office and talk to him, or meet him on the street. We're not going to give you a special place here." And they would be perfectly justified constitutionally, democratically, and every other way to do that. I have a great reverence for our elected people, even the ones I don't like, even the ones I'm opposite to politically on, on issues. But I don't find that in the new generation of reporters at all.
RITCHIE: I guess some of them feel it's safer to be cynical about the politicians than appear to be too reverential.
McGH.EE: Well, I'm not reverential. My relationships with the senators was always respectful. Absolutely. I never even called my close friends by their first names, if anybody else was around, I never did. Ted Stevens is a very close friend of mine, so is Bob Dole. I call Dole "Bob," but I don't call him that in front of anybody else. I call Stevens "Ted," but not in front of anybody else. I remember a reporter here named Sam Shaffer, for Newsweek for years, he was a pain in the ass. He would so ostensibly try to equate his position with that of a senator. He'd call Mansfield "Mike" in front of a crowd, "Well, Mike, you know.
. . ." And Hugh Scott, he'd never say "Senator." He'd say "Hugh." I used to cringe when I was with him and he'd do that.
RITCHIE: When you first came, who were the reporters in the gallery that you looked up to? Were there any old-time reporters or senior people that you particularly admired as a new reporter on the Hill?
McGHEE: That gets into friendships, I guess, and non working associations. Frank Eleazer, who was head of U.P. in the House gallery, was a magnificent fellow, and smart as hell, and up against the same things that the Senate was with the A.P., but could out-write and out-report the head of the AR, who was a nice guy too, his name was Bill Arbogast, and a favorite of Rayburn's, but so was Eleazer. Eleazer was a Georgia fellow. He was a southern fellow. I've forgotten who the chairman of the Armed Services Committee was [Carl Vinson], he was an autocrat, but Eleazer was a favorite of his. Eleazer, in my opinion, was the best reporter on Capitol Hill at that time, and was until he quit to become chief editorial writer of the St. Petersburg Times.
Another man whom I Liked and respected very much was a fellow named Dick Lyons, who worked for the Washington Post. He also favored the House, but he had to come over to the Senate occasionally. His father ran the Niemann Fellowships at Harvard. Dick was a New England aristocrat, but very old shoe, a good, close personal friend. That's why I said personal relationships kind of color that. I don't really think that I looked up to anybody. The big names in American journalism when I came here were Arthur Krock, and [Edward] Folliard, and those people all covered the White House. Hill reporting was the best assignment in Washington, because everything gets up here. I briefly covered the White House in the Johnson years, and I was assigned down there during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for several days and nights. I hated it. You didn't have any freedom. You couldn't walk around and you couldn't buttonhole people. You couldn't talk to them. They'd hand feed you the news. But up here it's different. This is really the showcase of democracy. This American parliament is absolutely the essence of democratic government.
RITCHIE: Russell Baker said that when he left the White House and came to cover the Congress he felt like he was crawling out of a sewer and coming into the fresh air.
McGHEE: That's certainly true! [laughs]
RITCHIE: And yet the White House carries the prestige that takes the people like the Krocks and Folliards down there, cultivating the sources there.
McGHEE: I remember the first year that the budget exceeded a hundred billion dollars, or was about to exceed a hundred billion dollars. There was great secrecy on the numbers. Johnson was president. In my years as a regional reporter, I knew a lot of governors as well as senators, because of covering politics and national conventions, and delegations, and so forth. There was a governor of Colorado named John Love, a Republican, whom I respected very much, although I'm a "pinko, Commie Democrat" myself. But he was a great guy, and I liked him. Johnson had all the governors in to explain his budget. After the audience with Johnson, all the governors came out and were on the White House lawn talking to the reporters. Well, John Love was a retiring sort of man. He didn't push himself forward or anything. He didn't rush for the microphones. He was ambling off and I grabbed him and walked off the White House grounds with him.
I said, "What did he tell you about the budget." He said, "He's going to keep it below a hundred billion, it's going to be nine hundred and ninety nine," just below, you know. I said, "Did he give you an exact figure?" He said, "Yeah, we got it." So he told me what it was. And he gave me some other details about the budget--and detail, exact information, not generalities. I came back to the Hill, and I wrote a story that said that Johnson had told these governors that this was the figure that the budget would be, and that it really did break a hundred billion, but he fixed it up cosmetically so that it wouldn't look like it. I couldn't quote Love. Love said, "You can't quote me on that." I said, "Fine, I won't." But he gave me the exact stuff and I wrote it.
Johnson read the U.P.I. copy--he used to have the U.P. and A.P. printers in his office and he'd tear the copy off them and read them, and here this story came over the wire that Johnson's budget was really going to exceed a hundred billion but the one he was going to send up here was just under a hundred billion. It infuriated him. So he called Merriman Smith and told Smith that this was a goddamn lie, it was under the U.P. logo and he wanted a correction on it. So Smith called the office and said, "That story is wrong. Johnson says that story is wrong." They called me, and I said, "The story's not wrong. The story's absolutely right." And I told them my source. I said, "John Love, the governor of Colorado, is the man who told me this. But he asked me not to identify him, so I didn't." They said, "Smith says that we've got to retract that story and rewrite it and say we were wrong or he's going to get squeezed out of Johnson's circle." Internal journalistic politics is quite something, sometimes. I said, "I'm not going to back off this story. If you want to change it, you're the bosses; but I stand by that story." They said, "Well, get Love to go on the record with it." So I called John Love, and I caught him at National Airport on the telephone, and I explained the predicament. He said, "Sure." [laughs] So I called back to the office, and I rewrote the story and put it on Love, Governor Love reported this. That changed the whole dynamics of the thing, when I had a sovereign governor saying that Johnson had said this, and Johnson couldn't lie out of it then. But Smith was irate. I was encroaching on his bailiwick down there.
RITCHIE: I gather that reporters often find they can learn as much about the White House from talking to people on Capitol Hill as they can from talking to the White House.
McGHEE: More so. The evil of that, though, is that if you get something--and I've done it myself and I'm not proud of it but you get something from an administration source and they want it hidden. This government runs by leaks. It runs by truthful information obtained illicitly. Frequently, a reporter will cite an unnamed congressional source as the source of the story when it's actually right out of the White House, or right out of one of the executive agencies. I've done it myself. You protect your source, so that Johnson or whoever can't trace your source, can't find it. And there are very few things in this town that aren't eventually up here, that don't come up here.
Very, very few really closely held secrets. Everybody doesn't know all of them, and just doesn't report them, that's true.
RITCHIE: The paradox of Lyndon Johnson always seemed that he had such a wonderful intelligence network, he knew what everybody else was doing, and he loved to find that out, but somehow he thought he could control information from getting to other people. I can't imagine how he spent all those years on Capitol Hill and still thought he could keep a secret about anything when he got into the White House!
McGHEE: I don't either. It was a flaw in the man as far as I'm concerned. Obviously you've read [Robert] Caro's books. They're magnificent. [laughs]
RITCHIE: Well, when was it that you moved from regional reporting into general reporting?
McGHEE: I think it was 1967 or '68. The first presidential campaign that I was assigned to was with Humphrey in 1968, and they did not use regional reporters for presidential campaigns, so I must have been on the general staff then. But I don't remember the year I transferred over.
RITCHIE: I was going to ask what the difference was for a reporter covering Capitol Hill to go from regional to general.
McGHEE: Well, the big thing about it is that as a regional reporter, when I'd write a story for Kansas, every paper in Kansas would run it, and under my by line. When I transferred to the general staff, I'd write a story about some development on some bill in the Commerce committee, and it would go out without a by-line. I mean, you were lost! Of course, if you got a big story, why then you were given credit, and you got the adulation and the plaudits.
Along that line, my next door neighbor was a woman named Gloria Dalton. She was Abe Fortas' private secretary, a very close friend of mine and
my wife's. We shared dinners, we were right next-door neighbors. When Fortas was named to the Supreme Court, she followed him up to the Court. She was very closed mouth, but over the years she became a prime source of news for me. I never mentioned it to anyone. The big story in the Court then and the White House, with repercussions up here, was when Earl Warren would resign, and how they were going to do that, and who would replace him. So I asked Gloria, "Look, if you ever hear that Warren is going to resign, tip me off, will you?" She said, "Well, you know, not really." But one day, I got a call from Gloria, and she said, you know, you asked me a long time ago about Warren, if he was going to quit. There's been an exchange of letters between Johnson and Earl Warren. Warren is going to step down, Fortas is going to be nominated for the chief justiceship, and a former congressman named Homer Thornberry,"--a colleague of Johnson's then a federal judge in Texas--" was going to be named to fill Fortas' position."
I said, "Gloria, is there any chance I can get a copy of those letters?" She said, "Well, I can't get them for you, but I can tell you what's in them." And she did. I found this byplay between the president and the chief justice fascinating. Johnson did not want Warren to resign until he had ducks in a row for Fortas. He even had this exchange of letters in which almost a contract was made. It was all hush hush and secret. I had told my office before, I said, "I may get a break on Warren's resignation, I don't know. I'm after it, but if I do get it, I can't have a by line on it because of the delicate nature of how I got the information. I can't even tell you about it. I don't want a by line, but if I ever call you with a story that Warren is going to quit, with any solid information, you write it, and run it out to maximum advantage to the U.P., but keep my name off of it." That was the arrangement I had with the desk and the re-write people, and everybody knew that that was the situation.
Well, when Gloria told me this, gave me the contents of these letters, I wrote the story. I said to her, "Now, am I under wraps on this now, or not?" She said, "No, it's rather common knowledge in the court now and you could have gotten it anyplace." Well, that relieved the injunction, it could have gone out under my name. So I wrote the story, but I made a fundamental error. I put it out at two or three o'clock in the morning for p.m.'s--p.m. papers--I should have
done it in reverse. I knew that the A.P. could not match it in the early morning hours, we would have a several hour beat on it. As a matter of fact, the beat ran three days, because Johnson was furious about the information getting out. Eventually, it held up, but I was sweating blood for three or four days, I'll tell you. Anyway, I told the desk man when I phoned in the story at two or three o'clock in the morning, when I had it all crafted, exactly like I wanted it. I said, "If you make any changes in this, check with me first, because the nuances were important too." I told him I was off the wraps and it was my story. Well, he called the bureau chief, and I hadn't talked to him. He said, "Make sure that this story is anonymous, that it doesn't have his name on it." So it didn't have my name on it, which was bad for me. I would have loved to have had my name on that story.
But nobody could confirm the story. Warren wouldn't say a word, neither would Johnson. Queries were going in. We were out two or three days by ourselves with the fact that this had occurred and that there was an exchange of letters. Well, finally they made them public. Of course, that was a regional reporter's beat from Capitol Hill on a major appointment in the American courts, which led to scandals and everything else eventually. But that's why I liked to be a reporter on Capitol Hill.
RITCHIE: That brings up the question: when one person gives you a tip, when do you feel confident in putting it out? Is it your confidence in that individual, or do you look for a second source? When you do feel like this is the moment to go?
McGHEE: I felt confident that Gloria would know. I trust what she said, and I knew that she wouldn't lead me astray. It was just personal friendship, she was my neighbor, and we were good friends. I knew that she wouldn't deliberately lie to me, and I knew that what she was telling me was the truth. Then I felt further secure when she said that this was rather common knowledge here among the court personnel, so it could come from anybody, so she took her own self off of it. I was comfortable with that.
But in a follow up on the Fortas story, I'll tell you another story. When the nominations were made to elevate Fortas and put Thornberry on the court, I covered those Judiciary Committee hearings. I was talking to somebody in the Justice Department, and they told me that they were investigating under some section of Title 18, the criminal code, activities of Fortas. I wrote a story to that effect, an anonymous source story, that the Justice Department was doing this. I took the story down, I didn't even put it on the Hill wire to downtown, because everybody can read those wires. I took the story downtown and gave it to the vice president in charge of Washington for United Press, and I told him that I had this information from the Justice Department that they were thinking about prosecuting Fortas under the criminal law.. It was a big story. You don't call an associate justice of the Supreme Court a crook very easily, you know. As it turned out, that's what he was.
The man's name at the office was Julius Franzen, who was a vice president here in charge of Washington coverage. He said, "Well, we've got to have another source on this." I didn't know what to do. I thought, well, I don't think I can source this from another source. But at that time there was fellow named Joe McDonald, who also was a neighbor of mine, I used to ride to work with him occasionally, who was the head of the Appropriations staff for the State, Justice, and Commerce appropriation bill, and of course he was clued in on the Justice Department, being he was the Hill guy that did their budget up here, that got their appropriations through. Alan Bible was his sponsor, and he was the senator who was chairman of that subcommittee. So I called Joe and I told him. Joe had come here with [Pat] McCarran. He was a real right wing guy, [laughs] loved J. Edgar Hoover, and I hated him! [laughs] We used to fight tooth and nail about that. So I called Joe and I told him that I had this information but I couldn't publish the story because my desk was insisting on another independent source. I said, "Is there anything you can do to help me?" He said, "Well, he'd see."
He called down to the Justice Department, verified that what I had was correct, even got the subsection of Title 18 to the Code in which they were going to move against Fortas. He called back and said, "It's true," and not only that he gave me some more information. I said, "Joe, I know I can't quote you, but
may I have your permission to tell my editors that you are the source of my information." He said, "Well, yeah, if my name doesn't get out." So I did, and we wrote the story, which led eventually to Fortes' resignation from the court and almost his prosecution for taking money from American University and from his relationship with this guy ....
RITCHIE: [Louis] Wolfson.
McGHEE: Wolfson, yeah, the transit man in Florida. But again, in my opinion, if a reporter has got any character to him, he's not going to put somebody in jeopardy who has benefited him by giving him some information. It's a funny business. People don't understand it. People absolutely don't understand how newspapers work, [laughs] how reporters work--you do, but most people don't.
RITCHIE: It's sort of ironic now that the Senate is having another formal investigation of a leak concerning the Clarence Thomas nomination, considering as you say that information is spread by leaks all the time, and the Senate is certainly involved with a lot of leaks, on every level. Why they think they can do anything about the process of leaking amazes me.
McGHEE: Nothing's going to come of this Nina Totenberg stuff. I doubt if they find the source of her information. I think it's highly problematical that it was even a Senate staffer.
RITCHIE: I was reading James Reston's memoirs about how John Foster Dulles once leaked the Yalta Agreement by just handing out copies to selected members of Congress on the assumption that at least one of them was bound to leak it to the press. So it does tend to move in both directions.
McGHEE: Well, I never blamed [Barry] Goldwater for it, but during the Watergate investigation, when there was pressure on Nixon and there were rumors around here that Goldwater had led a delegation of senators down to tell Nixon he had to resign or he was going to be impeached, the story got out, again anonymously without attribution. And Goldwater took the floor. I was in the
gallery. He raised his hand and pointed to us and said, 'you're liars, you're no-goods!" And Goldwater had just come back from the White House from telling Nixon that very thing!
RITCHIE: Did you have any problem with people who might have been floating trial balloons, giving you information anonymously that they wouldn't stand behind, or they'd deny when it got into the press?
McGHEE: Yes, I had a very close call with such a thing. It involved a fellow who later went to work for Hill and Knowlton, and I've lost track of him, I don't know what he does now, but at that time he was press secretary for [Paul] Fannin, a conservative senator from Arizona, who I believe succeeded Carl Hayden.
RITCHIE: Goldwater actually, when Goldwater ran for president.
McGHEE: Maybe it was Goldwater, yes. There was a long period when everybody was pretty sure that the Nixon administration was going to reach some rapprochement with Communist China. The right wing, epitomized by Fannin and others of his persuasion, did not want this to occur. Everybody was trying to get a jump on when there would be real change in our relationship with China. This fellow, I had pretty close relations with him, and he had given me a lot of information on various things. He kept trying to tell me that Nixon was about to do something with China, open up an office there, or have some kind of formal relations which we hadn't had in many, many years with them. There were rumors out of the White House that a major foreign policy announcement would be made at such and such a time, and everybody was wondering what this was. This guy called me and says, "I know for sure that Nixon's going to announce recognition of Communist China."
I called the office--this was another thing that you would want a second source on. I just figured if that were true the State Department people would have it before this guy up here. And I got to thinking about it--as it turned out, it wasn't true, either. The desk and me, collectively we decided that we weren't going to go with this information. This guy was trying to float this in order to
prevent it from happening. Fannin was. But we saw through it in time and I did not go out with an unsourced story that Nixon was ready now to recognize China. I've forgotten now what the big announcement was, but it was something concerning the United Nations, it was not recognition of Red China. I almost got taken in. Oh, there have been a lot of occasions, I guess, where something just doesn't quite sound right to you. You're leery about it--you're always leery about an unsourced story anyway. There's something essentially unfair, or possibly unfair to somebody else about it.
RITCHIE: Does the press corps in general form opinions about sources? If a person was to put you in a position like that, and you got burned, would the word get out that so-and-so was a bad source?
McGHEE: Well, if it happened enough it would. And many people you don't believe at all. You don't even truck with them. They're unreliable. But you don't draw that line simply because they have a position to push, I mean that's part of it, you understand that they're using you as well as you're using them. But the trade offs are, I believe, beneficial to the people, to the reader.
RITCHIE: How much communication is there between reporters in the press gallery or in the Press Club about stories? How far are you willing to let other reporters in on what your story is, to find out if it's safe or not?
McGHEE: There's a great deal. You hear a lot of talk about "pack journalism," and how reporters will get on a story and hound it to death. They travel in packs, and they're all of the same mentality. There is some truth to that. But it's not the truth that people believe. What happens is that if there are several reporters onto a story, and you're in a press conference say, in a big, confused kind of a situation, where there are too many things happening that you can't possibly cover yourself, reporters are very good about sharing information with others, if the information is widely shared already, is widely known. I have no compunction at all, never had, and benefited from the practice, of filling other reporters in, so they would have an equal shot. Everybody else had the information, by some happenstance you didn't get it, they'd give it to you. And conversely, if you'd get something, you'd share it with
somebody else too, in a similar situation. But where the line is drawn--at least I always drew it at that--if I had something exclusive, and I knew nobody else had it, I wouldn't tell anybody except my office. I'd say, "Read it in the paper." I mean, that's the name of the game.
But there is this business of reporters having a narrow focus and a single objective to make anybody look bad. That's what the victim always thinks. He'll say, "Well, look at them!" And I must say, since the advent of television, it's an impossible situation. They just hound people to death, it gets into their privacy again.
RITCHIE: I was thinking about Allen Drury's novel, Advise and Consent, where he uses the press like a Greek chorus. There's a group of them, and they're just identified by who they report for. Newsweek says this, Time says that, and the New York Times says such-and-such. It's a very good device throughout the book to keep the reader up to what's going on, but you get the sense of the press testing out: "What do you think about this?" "How far do you think he'd go?"
McGHEE: I think I touched on that in our earlier session, that the Washington press corps much more than the state press, I believe, has developed a function, or they have grasped it, of creating news through the conduit of seeking reaction to everything. Reaction, reaction, reaction. The first thing you know, a consensus may come from the very reactive process. I'm not sure that's a function of the press, but it's something that occurs.
RITCHIE: I've heard that from time to time members will actually plant stories with a reporter, to get the reporter to ask a question of the president or a cabinet member at a press conference.
McGHEE: Oh, yes. But usually they do it with a reporter of their persuasion, who has already made up his mind. There were a lot of reporters, much more so formerly than now, that represented the editorial opinion of their newspaper in their coverage. And the editorial position of their coverage would frequently open doors to this person if he wrote that way. Willard Edwards
always had an in with Joe McCarthy. He'd tell him anything, lies maybe, and Willard would print it, because the [Chicago] Tribune was for McCarthy.
RITCHIE: Walter Trohan was another Tribune reporter who agreed with their editorial completely.
McGHEE: Absolutely. Well, Willard was up here, Trohan was downtown.
RITCHIE: And so some reporters would gravitate towards some politicians because their papers admired them editorially.
McGHEE: Sure, I can name them right now, some of them that are still around here do that.
RITCHIE: And watching who presidents call on in press conferences, there are clearly some reporters whom they know are going to ask a favorable-type question, or a soft pitch question, that they're likely to call on in press conferences.
McGHEE: Generally, reporters are contemptuous of other reporters who pitch soft balls deliberately. Sometimes its a funny kind of thing, comic, or light-veined, which is fine, but for someone to do it for political or partisan purposes is beyond the pale. And reporters resent that, too, of their own people doing that.
RITCHIE: I'm interested in the self-identity of the Washington reporter: what you can do and what you can't do. What the written rules and unwritten rules of behavior are. Part of it seems to be your standing among your peers.
McGHEE: Exactly. But I don't think that's any different from any other profession, do you? Or any other calling.
RITCHIE: No, it's probably more informal among the press. You don't have quite the same codes that doctors and lawyers do, but it really winds up to be pretty much the same.
McGHEE: I think so.
RITCHIE: It's a very competitive fraternity--but it's still a fraternity.
McGHEE: Well, there is a certain feeling that it's "us against the world." The reporter against everybody else. He frequently feels that he's the most important guy in the story, and he's not. He's a very minor player most of the time, but when he becomes a major player it's really a major thing. There's no doubt in my mind that the press drove Nixon from office. If there hadn't been an alert, vigilant, aggressive press corps, Christ, he would have finished his term and it would have been fine for him.
RITCHIE: Well, I'd like very much to talk about Watergate and Nixon, but since it's noon now this might be a good time to break.
POLITICS, CONVENTIONS, AND CAMPAIGNS
Interview #3
Tuesday, January 21, 1992
RITCHIE: Thinking back about some of the people we haven't talked about, you came here in 1959 and covered the '60 convention, and you were in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so you had some opportunities to observe John Kennedy as a senator and a president.
McGHEE: I did, both.
RITCHIE: I wondered if you could give me some of your observations about him.
McGHEE: Well, I was caught up in the liberal euphoria of the time with Kennedy. I attended his press conference when he announced for the presidency in the Caucus Room, in the Russell Building. Being a regional reporter, I watched him on the Senate floor, and covered the convention, of course; but I really never had much to do with him, either as a regional reporter in those days or on the national scene, because that wasn't my beat. But I thought he was a magnificent man. Now, in retrospect, we know that he had his underside, the way most of us do. But at the time, none of that was apparent. Kennedy, well, he always seemed so suave, so sure of himself. When I was a reporter covering the Missouri legislature, his book came out, Profiles in Courage, and I thought it was strange that the Kennedy family, I suppose it was his father at that time, sent around hundreds of copies of that book, and distributed them to everybody in the Missouri state house, including the press room. That struck me about Kennedy, well this guy knows what he's doing, he's a pro, he's touching all bases.
I think probably the first story I ever wrote and put Kennedy in the lead was well after he was elected. There was a great hullabaloo about Kennedy stealing the election, or buying it, in West Virginia. He demolished Humphrey in that primary. There was some pressure in the Senate and in the Congress to do something about money in politics after that, largely generated by the Republicans, I guess, since Joe Kennedy just used his own money. But in writing about I don't remember the story at all, but I do remember the lead, and it was that Joe Kennedy told Jack that he didn't mind spending the money for him to win the election in West Virginia, but he'd be damned if he would pay for a landslide! I used that in the lead of my story.
The other thing I remember about the convention, was that I had to cover Kennedy's appearance at one of the caucuses of one of the states I was covering. I remember the imperiousness of Ted Kennedy, who was real young then. He might have still been in college, I'm not sure. They just wouldn't brook any kind of interference with the candidate, you were kept away from him. He was distant. Already he was president and you couldn't get close to the man. Another thing I remember about that convention and Jack Kennedy was Lyndon Johnson, what great despair there was in the Texas delegation the following day and that night too. I attended the post nomination night activities of the Texas delegation, and everybody was just up in arms. And then when Kennedy offered the vice presidency to Johnson, they were even more enraged, and then even more enraged when he accepted. I can remember John Connally making a speech to the Texas delegation, trying to calm them the next day and telling them that the vice presidency was nothing to be sneezed at, and defending Johnson's acceptance of it, being on the ticket.
RITCHIE: They thought they were going to lose his influence as majority leader?
McGHEE: No, they were just outraged that he would take the second place. Texas is first in everything, and he had subordinated himself to this upstart from Massachusetts. But Connally calmed them, he really did. I remember him making that speech. And then Johnson did work his tail off as the vice presidential candidate. He went all out. The great joke, early in that
campaign, was Johnson made a train trip through the south. I was not on that train, but the great joke came out of the very beginning of that trip and sort of set the tone for the rest of it. Johnson was on the rear of this train and they pulled in the first stop at Culpepper, Virginia, and Johnson's great high pitched voice yelling: "What have the Republicans ever done for Culpepper?" [laughs]
After Johnson was ensconced in the vice presidency, after he was sworn in, he bought that house from Perle Mesta, out in Northwest Washington, a huge mansion. It wasn't long before he found out that he wasn't anything in the administration. They ignored him, they looked down on him. You know all that. So Johnson kind of reverted to whom he thought were his real good friends--they weren't really--the reporters that covered Texas. I don't know of any reporter that ever liked him, ever, any reporter. But he'd have us all out to "The Elms," and quite frequently. He would load you with deer sausage and mementoes of Texas. I remember Kennedy sending him--getting him out of his hair--to the Middle East, really the Middle East, not the Near East although he went to Lebanon, too. Lady Bird went with him, and when he came back he had gifts for all the Texas press; and Lady Bird had gifts for all the Texas press' wives. He had us out there and they distributed these gifts to us. I don't remember what the hell he gave me, but I remember what he gave my wife, Frances. Lady Bird gave her a handsome pair of shoes that she had picked up someplace in the Moslem world. They were real fancy with gold stuff all over them. I remember that very well.
But Johnson would have us out, and they were boring evenings, but everybody had to go. That was the first time I ever saw a big television screen. His television room at "The Elms"--the den wasn't any bigger than this office [10'x15']. There was a couch and a couple of chairs along one wall, and the other wall was practically nothing but a tv screen. It was absolutely huge. And that was even the days before this modern kind where they look like a movie screen, and they somehow or other project the image back onto this screen. This was a real television set, but it was huge. I'll never forget that, that struck me, among other things out there.
RITCHIE: In those evenings, would he ruminate about how bad things had gotten? What would his focus on, in those times? Was he unhappy with his lot?
McGHEE: Well, he would brag about what he was doing in his job. He always was a boastful man. There was nothing retiring about him at all. They were social evenings, really. They always had sit-down dinners for us. And he'd give you autographed pictures of himself. I must have a dozen of them at home. [laughs]
RITCHIE: Did they ever help his publicity?
McGHEE: Nah. Never did.
RITCHIE: In 1968 you covered Humphrey's campaign. You must have seen Humphrey a lot during his Senate years as well.
McGHEE: I did.
RITCHIE: What was your assessment of Hubert Humphrey?
McGHEE: Well, at first I thought he was a big blow hard. I think I told you that I went to the University of Minnesota for part of a year in 1946. He was mayor of Minneapolis when I was there, and getting ready to run for the Senate. He was already a national figure as mayor when I was at the university out there. He had a heart as big as the Capitol building with the public purse, but I have an impression that he was a fairly parsimonious man privately. I can't remember the story, but I do remember that Max Kampleman was his advisor; and Max got mixed up in some kind of a shady deal. I can't recall the details of the story at all, but I know in the press corps, Humphrey really lost respect because of that incident. And then later, when he ran for president, his press agent, a fellow named Sherman was made the scapegoat of another financial scandal. You probably are aware of what I'm talking about. But I rather liked Humphrey. Being a liberal, I liked his politics. But he did not run
a good campaign. He could not break away from Johnson; he just couldn't do it.
I lost almost all respect for the man when Johnson bullied him into getting on to a horse down there at the ranch one time. I couldn't help but think of that the other night when I was watching some program, maybe you saw it, on the campaign managers, did you see that?
RITCHIE: Yes I did, I was very impressed with that program.
McGHEE: Well, you may remember Horace Busby saying that Johnson tried to put a Stetson hat on Kennedy, and Kennedy absolutely wouldn't have anything to do with it. That was when [Susan] Estridge was talking about what a disaster the picture of Dukakis was, in the tank and the helmet. Then Busby said that. I was not there, I don't recall the incident at all when Johnson tried to do that with Kennedy, but it's absolutely typical. But he bullied Humphrey into getting on that horse.
RITCHIE: Fortunately, that was after the '64 election. But I remember that picture very well, and Humphrey looked ludicrous sitting on that horse!
McGHEE: Uncomfortable.
RITCHIE: And a little overweight.
McGHEE: I guess my favorite story is kind of raunchy about Johnson; but he had a Secret Service man named Henderson, and there was a woman who lived in my apartment house. Her name was Bell, and she worked for some radio network. Johnson one time down at the ranch got in his Cadillac or Lincoln or whatever he drove down there, and had two or three of these female reporters with him; and he was driving out over the rough country, no roads. And the Secret Service was having to keep up with him. Johnson had to relieve himself. He stopped the car, and the Secret Service got out and ran up. He walked around to the tail end of the car, so the story goes--I did not see it, but it's a famous story in the press gallery--and Johnson relieved himself. Suddenly,
the Secret Service man who was peering around in all directions, felt warm water on his leg. He looked down, and said, "Mr. President, you are urinating on me." And Johnson's response was, "I know I am, Henderson, it's my prerogative." [laughs] That was after he was president. [laughs] If it was true--I don't know whether the story is true or not, but it's certainly typical.
RITCHIE: And it was certainly the press gallery's image of him.
McGHEE: Right. And hunting deer from that car, shooting at a deer from that limousine. I think he was the worst man--and absolutely corrupt.
RITCHIE: In that '68 campaign, the other candidate who ran in the primaries was Eugene McCarthy. Had you any opportunity to cover him, or draw any assessments of him in the '60s?
McGHEE: Well, my only shoo-in with McCarthy was at a press conference that he gave here in Washington. It was on the Hill, I think it was in one of these hotels up here. In any event, McCarthy said something that was absolutely either false or he shouldn't have said. I thought he was mistaken when he uttered whatever he said. I can't remember what he said, but it's in the clips. I said to him, "Senator, did you really mean to say what you just said?" And he had a short temper, too, McCarthy did. He said, "Yes, I meant to say it." I persisted a little bit. I wasn't going to be argumentative with him, but I pointed out what he had said and how ludicrous it was. He said, "I don't want to talk about that, you're boring." Those were his words to me. So I crawled back in my shell a little bit. But that story got written in the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, and the New York Times, about this back and-forth that we had. People would clip them out from all over the county and send them to me [laughs]. I remember an editorial writer on the Tulsa World, whom I had known for years, cut one out and sent it to me with a real funny message on it. I covered the '68 convention in Chicago.
RITCHIE: That must have been a trip!
McGHEE: Oh, it really was. I was staying at the Hilton, used to be the Stevens Hotel, that huge big hotel there, and the tear gas was all over. There was a taxicab strike at the same time. You could not move in Chicago. And there was a telephone strike at the same time. And you had difficulty with communication. The whole things was messed up. I have two stories about that convention. We had a small office in the basement of the Hilton, we had a printer down there, but we couldn't get telephones installed because of the strike. There was a bank of public phones on the wall outside our office, and there were other newspaper offices down there, real little bitty places, not half as big as this room, just a desk space, and you couldn't get a telephone. So everybody had to use those dozen or so phones that were out in the basement lobby there. Behind the wall where the phones were was where the Chicago police had their security office. You had to stand in line to use the public phones, and even when you got up to the phone you'd frequently have difficulty dialing, and you're calls wouldn't go through. I went out there one day and there was a sign on one of the phones that said: "Out of Order." But I put a dime in the thing anyway, and I got a dial tone, and got my call through. I was talking to whoever it was and the door opened and out came this cop. He said, "Can't you read? That's an out of order sign. That's our phone." Well, I didn't take any bullshit off of cops. I hate them! They're natural enemies of the press." So he roughed me up, this guy did. When the convention was over, I wrote a story about it for Editor and Publisher and caused some stink. [laughs]
The other story I have involves Max Kampleman. I saw this. Dan Thomasson, who is now head of Scripps-Howard bureau here in Washington, and a reporter for the Boston Globe, were talking on the press stand at one of the convention sessions. The police were everywhere there. There was a hippie poet named Allan Ginsburg. And Ginsburg was sitting on the top row. The press stands were really not very full at that time, and here was Marty Nolan, who was a reporter here for the Boston Globe, funny man. Ginsburg was sitting on the top row, with nobody around him, in a yoga position. He had this beard and some kind of funny costume on; but he took himself pretty damn seriously anyway. How he got press credentials and got on the press stand, nobody knows. But there he was, up there all by himself. He looked funny, and he looked dangerous maybe, the cops anyway thought he was. The cops walked
around him but they didn't say anything to him. They came down and they stopped with Thomasson and Nolan. The Secret Service guy says, "Do you guys know that fellow up there." They were suspicious of him. And this Boston Globe knew it was Ginsburg, and he said, "Yeah, it's Max Kampleman." [laughs] The Secret Service guy turned away immediately. I don't know what happened when he went back and found out who Max Kampleman was, but they never bothered Ginsburg. [laughs]
That was a tough campaign. As I think I told you before, I covered Adlai Stevenson in the midwest, only in the midwest, in Missouri and Kansas when he was out there in '52, but I had no experience covering presidential campaigns, but they put me on the Humphrey campaign. It was disorganized, I never got a feel for it. Everybody knew that Humphrey had one hell of a time squaring a circle with Johnson. He hated the war, he wanted it over, he couldn't stomach it, but he just couldn't do anything about it. He couldn't say anything about it. And it was the uppermost issue. I was on the trip when he made his swing through Texas. Everything was very, very strained. Johnson had come out for the reelection of Ralph Yarborough, who was his opponent. And he did it because of labor--I can't remember if that was '64 or '68.
RITCHIE: That was the primary where [Lloyd] Bentsen beat Yarborough, wasn't it? And then Bentsen went on to beat George Bush in the election.
McGHEE: That was it, I guess. Anyway, Johnson supported Yarborough. A very good friend of mine in the Texas delegation was representative Joe Kilgore, who ran against Yarborough either in that election or the previous one, must have been that one. Everybody thought that Kilgore
had the nomination, he was a very popular man, but Johnson knifed him. It was bad business. I remember how strained everything was during Humphrey's Texas swing. We went all over the state, too. We started in the east and ended up in El Paso, on the way to California. It was a hard, long couple of days. At all these stops, Connally was on all of them, and the Texas Democratic
establishment, and Yarborough was a sore thumb, but they had to live with him.
They didn't like Humphrey either. As a matter of fact, I don't think Humphrey carried Texas, he may have.
RITCHIE: I'm not sure what happened to Texas in '68. (Humphrey carried Texas 41.1% to Nixon's 39.9%.] But that was a memorable year and a memorable campaign.
McGHEE: At the Republican convention that year in Miami, I was a floor man. During Nixon's acceptance speech, the security, which is always the bane of a reporter's existence, was very, very tight. The delegates were in the front of the hall, and behind the delegates, rising a little bit, were the alternates. The Secret Service would not permit any reporter into the delegate section, or any movement in that section, during Nixon's acceptance speech. In those days we were using primitive walky-talkies, the people who were covering the convention floor. I don't know whether you know how the wires operated or not, but they'd write what they called a "running story," which is any report, it's just a continuous story, anything that occurs or comes in goes into what they call the "running." It's raw material for the use of other reporters to look at and see. Reporters are never satisfied with getting reaction after an event. They know what's going to happen. They want the reaction before so they can get it in the main story. During Nixon's speech, all of the floor men were kept behind the delegate section, and the only people you could talk to were the alternates, which we did, and then we would get on this walky talky and dictate the alternates reaction. "Is Nixon making a great speech?" "Why, hell yes he is." You know, it's ridiculous stuff, but it's all color and they wanted it.
There were a dozen of us covering the floor for the U.P., and we'd all get on this radio and dictate to a dictationist up there. The editor that was running it, was taking the copy from the dictationist, marking it up, and giving it to the operator to go in the running story. He was in touch with us, and he wanted us to go to some particular place. He knew where we were and whoever was closest could go over there and answer a question that he might have, or somebody might ask him about. He didn't bother us during Nixon's speech, he knew we couldn't get down in it for meaningful reaction from anybody very big. But when the speech was over the Secret Service parted the curtain, so to speak, and
all of the reporters were able to get down into where the big wheels were. I fought my way down till I ran into John Rhodes, who was the Republican leader of the House, talking to Paul Fannin, who was senator from Arizona. Rhodes was quite a powerful man, he was the Republican leader in the House. I signaled to the platform and they came on. The fellow that runs the Newsday bureau here now was the editor at that time, his name is Pat Sloyan. The communication was never very good. We never knew when they were hearing us, and it was only happenstance when we heard them. You had to move a "squelch" thing on the walky talky, it was very difficult to get information to the platform. But I'm standing there talking to Rhodes and to Fannin. I said, "Pat, I've got the Republican leader, John Rhodes here, with Senator Fannin from Arizona, with comment on Nixon's speech." I turned the thing up and switched it so I could hear back if he got me, and just at that time, Sloyan yelled out and I had this thing real loud--and he said, "All right you floor men, I don't want any more of this chickenshit reaction! I want some real reaction!" And I had just identified Rhodes, and it sounded as if he was saying that to him." Oh, I could have gotten under the floor. That's light stuff, but funny.
RITCHIE: Well, I wanted to ask you about some of the leaders in the '60s that you covered. We haven't mentioned people like Rhodes, and Mansfield, and Dirksen, and others in the Senate and the House. As a regional reporter, did you cover much of the party leadership?
McGHEE: Well, I covered Johnson, of course, but only as a regional reporter, when he was majority leader. I told you of the instances of going down to what is now the LBJ Room and drinking with Johnson late in the afternoon on several occasions. Mansfield was a great fellow. After I was on the general staff I had a lot more to do with him than I had before. I'd go down to these pre session news conferences. I really worshipped Mansfield. I liked him as majority leader after he succeeded Johnson. I liked his style, and everybody remembered what a bully Johnson was. Mansfield brought a completely different type of leadership. When Jack Kennedy was shot, I was in the Senate press gallery and I saw the flash that came over the wire. I ripped it off and ran downstairs to the President's Room, and I told the press messenger, "I want to see Mansfield right now." I saw Mansfield come out. The press is not permitted
beyond those doors [to the corridor behind the Senate chamber], but Mansfield was walking in that inner lobby. There's a big screen, but I could see that he had come out from the floor, so I brushed past the messenger, it's the only time I ever really did anything wrong as a reporter in the Senate, but I brushed past the press messenger, and he was horrified of course, and I went there where I wasn't supposed to be, and I handed Mansfield the wire copy that Kennedy had been shot. The flash was: "Kennedy shot, perhaps fatally." Mansfield took it in, and Ted Kennedy was presiding. He immediately adjourned the Senate.
As you might imagine, there was utter confusion around here. The desk was going wild. They wanted every bit of information they could get. Events were moving very rapidly then. They told me to go over and camp out outside Ted Kennedy's door. Well, that was useless, he never came out. But on my way, I ran into Maurine Neuberger. We were getting reaction from everyone, every senator that we could possibly see or talk to or by chance run into. I asked Senator Neuberger what she thought about these events, and she said to me something of the nature as they may as well--she used the name of H.L. Hunt, saying that if he wasn't involved he may as well have been, he may as well have pulled the trigger himself. It was a very unsenatorial comment, and very vicious against Hunt and the Texas right wing. She said it from her heart, nobody knew yet who was responsible, so the assumption was it was a right wing nut that shot him. Well, I dictated the quote to the office and it got out, and Hunt later sued the United Press.
RITCHIE: For what somebody else said?
McGHEE: Well, he did, we distributed it. Oh, there was all kinds of legal stuff involved with that. Of course, he had more money than the government, and U.P. was always strapped for money. But anyway, Mrs. Neuberger took us off the hook. She said she had said it, she had said it in the heat of the time; but it caused us a lot of problems on down the road. There was a fellow named Ken Towery who later became head of the U.S.I.A. under Nixon. He was John Tower's press man. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing some land frauds in Texas years before. He was one of the nicest guys I ever knew. He was in league with the right wing, but he wasn't a right-winger. He was working for them, but he really wasn't. He was a magnificent fellow, and
a good friend. I got into Tower's office almost immediately, I don't remember if it was before or after I ran into Neuberger, but probably after. It was after they had identified Oswald; and Ken Towery turned over the correspondence that Oswald had had with Tower's office trying to get out of Russia. That was the first time anybody knew that he had been in Russia. Maybe the Secret Service knew it, maybe the FBI knew it by then, but it was not public information. My God, we ran that stuff out, and it was my major beat on the assassination story, because the A.P. wasn't there. I had it cold.
Tex Easley of the A.P. and I met John Tower at National Airport when he arrived to take his Senate seat as the first Republican from Texas since Reconstruction. We rode with him to the Mayflower Hotel downtown, with he and his wife and two or three young daughters in a limousine that the RNC had provided, and over the years I kept very close ties with John Tower. He didn't do anything that other senators didn't do, but he had a nasty way about him that did him in.
RITCHIE: I get the sense that he hadn't made a lot of other senators very happy over the years, and they didn't cry too many tears when they voted against him.
McGHEE: Yeah, that's right.
RITCHIE: What was it about Tower? I think of him as a feisty person, maybe compensating for his size. He had an edge it seemed to me.
McGHEE: Yeah, if you knew him--I knew him real well because I covered him as a regional reporter, and regional reporters get to know their people much more than the general staff does. You deal with a different kind of issues. I liked him. I liked him very much. I can understand why others didn't. He had a mean streak about him, but for that matter so did a lot of others. I'll tell you a couple of stories, both of them involving elevator operators in the Senate. One of them involved Lee Metcalf. If there was ever a liberal that served in the Senate it was Metcalf. Both Metcalf and Tower were boozers. Metcalf kicked an elevator operator one time and broke his leg! It was a terrible
thing around here. He also decked a policeman during the May Day disturbances on the East Plaza of the Capitol Building. The cops had it all cordoned off, and Metcalf, exercising his prerogative to go anywhere he damn well pleased on the Capitol grounds ignored the cops. The cops came up and gave him some trouble, and he just hauled off and knocked one of them down.
But one day in the Dirksen office building, Tower got on the elevator in the basement to go to his office on one of the upper floors. The senators' bell rang, so the elevator operator went to a different floor and opened the door, and Senator Ted Kennedy got on. He said, "I want to go to the basement." So the elevator operator reversed the thing and took him to the basement, leaving Tower standing there. Tower wore these Saville Row suits, you know, but he also wore cowboy boots. When Kennedy got off and the doors shut, Tower said, "I thought I told you to take me to my floor," and the elevator operator, a kid, looked at him and said, "Hold your horses, cowboy, that was a U.S. senator on this elevator." [laughs] Well, he got fired. Tower had him taken off the payroll. He was furious about it.
There are several elevator stories in my time around here. I was on the elevator one time with Senator Goldwater. The elevator doors started to shut, and there was a tourist who got in between and the doors opened up and the tourists got on. Goldwater said, "That's pretty dangerous." He winked at me I was on the other side of the elevator--and he said, "You know, I had a friend out in Arizona who got his head cut off in such an incident." He winked when he said it. Of course, these tourists were horrified. He kept talking, and finally I said--I knew he was joking--I said, "Senator, it could have been worse, couldn't it?" He said, "What could be worse than my friend getting his head cut off on an elevator?" I said, "Well, it could have been a liberal!" [laughs] Well, he broke up, and these tourists didn't know what to think.
Wayne Morse ruined the press elevator. Single handedly he did it. The press used to be very jealous of its prerogatives, still is, as I'm sure you're aware. They had designated that elevator [in the Senate wing of the Capitol] as a press elevator. It had been there for years, strictly for the use of the press. It didn't
have "Press and Staff' on it then, it was the press elevator, and the press wouldn't let anybody else on it. You had to be a credentialed reporter to use that elevator. Well, Wayne Morse was making a speech; and he told his aide, "Go to the cloakroom and call my office, I need some papers and I want them right now." The aide did, and told them "Morse wants this stuff right now." The person from his office came over and the elevator on the first floor, by the carriage entrance, where the press elevator is, he punched the button, the door opened, and he tried to get on, and some reporter wouldn't let him on. Said, "No, sir, this is for the press. Use the other elevators." Well, this guy was scared of Morse, he knew he had to get up there right away, and he told Morse about what had happened. Morse raised holy hell, and the elevator was changed to "Press and Staff."
Morse also was the reason why the gin rummy games had to be stopped during the sessions of the Senate.
RITCHIE: In the [press] galleries?
McGHEE: In the galleries. Morse was really long winded, he would talk for hours. A brilliant man, but he just bored the hell out of everybody. He'd empty the galleries when he got up. He was always outraged about something. He delivered what he considered a real good speech one day, and not a soul was in the press gallery to take down his words or report on them. So he walked up to the press gallery afterward, and he saw about six gin rummy games going on. [laughs] He went to the leadership, and the leadership called the old man who ran the gallery then, a fellow named Joe Wills, and said, "We can't have this, you've got to stop this." So they put a rule in that you couldn't play cards when the Senate was in session.
RITCHIE: Essentially, there's a lot of time to kill when you're covering the Congress?
McGHEE: Oh, nine times out of ten you're not doing anything! You're reading or you're joking, or you're trying to get the better of somebody. If you're enterprising you're calling up somebody, you can always get a story somehow or
other. But there's a lot of times when you're not, you're just loafing, just having a good time. Makes a great life!
RITCHIE: One other House leader from your region was Carl Albert, who was House majority leader before he became Speaker. What was Albert like as part of the House leadership?
McGHEE: Albert was really an ineffectual man, but a nice guy. In those days when I was covering him regionally, the Oklahoma delegation used to have functions all the time, they'd have a lunch every week and invite the people that were covering the delegation to it. The tab on that was always picked up by Bob Kerr. When McCormack moved up to Speaker, that left the majority leadership open. Dick Bolling tried to get the job, and there was a campaign among the Southwest oil interests to get the majority leader job for Albert, and they did, and then later he just automatically moved up to Speaker when McCormack quit. I don't think he was a very good Speaker, really, and he had personal problems too, in his later years. [portion of interview closed] The booze got the better of him, too. He lived next door to me, in the apartment house next door to where I lived, for a long while. [portion of interview closed]
We went home the same way, too, through Rock Creek Park. I've often thought, I did Albert a disservice. I spread the word around the Capitol Building that Albert not only had a drinking problem, but he talked to himself. Well, in retrospect, I used to see him, I'd pass him in a car, or he'd pass me driving, and there was no dictaphone he was holding or anything, and that was before these cassettes that they've got now, but he'd be talking to himself. Now I think probably he was dictating, but I'm not sure at all! [laughs] I'd see him driving home and talking to himself.
RITCHIE: Was he a good source for you as a reporter?
McGHEE: Not necessarily. He was afraid. I don't think I ever got any exclusives out of him, or not for attribution stuff. He didn't deal in that kind of thing. He wouldn't go off the record with you and tell you what was really going on, and let you disguise it somehow or other and write it. He never did that with me.
RITCHIE: You mentioned that he beat Dick Bolling, who was always a great might-have-been in the House of Representatives.
McGHEE: Yeah, he was. Bolling beat himself, too, though. I covered him because Missouri was one of my states. He was an austere man. He was an intellectual. He never really was part of the camaraderie of the House. He was a cut or two above that. And his power was Rayburn, of course. He later became chairman of the Rules Committee, but that was simply through seniority.
RITCHIE: He was known as "Rayburn's leg man" in the late '50s.
McGHEE: There were some colorful characters in those delegations that I covered as a regional reporter. Clint Anderson of New Mexico, Dennis Chavez.
RITCHIE: As a regional reporter, did you build relationships with the papers in your regions? Did they request special things as well as what the U.P.I. in general was looking for?
McGHEE: Oh, yes, all the time. They'd send requests to the bureau for a particular story. It was tough. The A.P. had a big regional staff here, and we only had a few guys. As I said, I had nine states. Most of the A.P. guys had a couple at the most. So it kept me hustling, and all of us that were with the U.P. staff. We had to write an awful lot. But fortunately those guys were lazy, because they had never had any competition around here. It wasn't difficult, it really wasn't. Sometimes you'd get behind, but it really wasn't difficult.
The way it worked was, if a paper in Wyoming say knew something was going on in the Interior Department, they'd send a message to Washington: We'd like coverage of this. They'd turn the story over to me, and I'd go get it. Generally, I got it by phone. But sometimes you had to go to hearings downtown. I covered everything in this town from the Senate. There wasn't even desk space in the bureau downtown. They didn't want you there. They wanted you out getting the news.
RITCHIE: Did you have a round that you would make? For instance, on a typical day would you go to various offices to check in with people? Or did you go to them on an at-need request?
McGHEE: No, we didn't do it necessarily at request. If they were generating news you covered it. If you had requests from newspapers for a particular story, or slant, or quote from somebody about something, a reaction, you'd always go get it. You always had stuff to do. But you had a lot of time to play cards, too!
RITCHIE: You mentioned John Tower's press secretary as being somebody with whom you had good relations. Did you find there was very much difference between the press aides that the senators had? Were some of them really good and some really bad ....
McGHEE: Yeah.
RITCHIE: Or was there sort of a standard?
McGHEE: No, some of them were excellent. Generally, the ones that were best were those who had been reporters. But that wasn't necessarily true. All in all, if I had to make a generalization, I'd just say that they were a reflection, absolutely, of their principal in press relations. Some of them were a lot more helpful than others, of course. Some of them had a sharp sense of P.R., which we didn't necessarily like. Sure we'd take this and make a story out of it, but again if a senator's press representative, press agent, got a story to write a story that was self story, or made the senator look good, why that always
paid off later. It's just exactly like chits on the Senate floor. I mean, you know, you give me your vote on this--it isn't a quid pro quo so stated at that time, but if you write a good story about a senator, the press agent's going to remember, and he'll tip you off on a good one sometime. I don't know whether that's good or bad, but that's the way it works.
RITCHIE: Part of it also had to be a matter of trust, the information they gave you had to be right.
McGHEE: Well, that's true. Most of the press people that I dealt with were honorable, and I liked them. Some of them have gone on to make great names for themselves. Jim Jones, for instance, when he was in law school, was a press aide to Congressman [Ed] Edmundson from Oklahoma, then he went to the Johnson White House and was a principal aide down there, and then ran for the Congress, later became head of the Budget Committee, now runs the American Stock Exchange, for God's sake! That's just an example. I made a close relationship with Jim in very young days, and I wrote good stories about Ed Edmundson, and Jim Wright. They were both on the House Public Works Committee. When I first came to Washington, a special investigating subcommittee was authorized by the Congress to investigate the fraud in the interstate highway system. Big series of hearings, and the first three or four states that they investigated happened to be in my region. And of course Edmundson and Wright were both on the committee. They became very good sources, that's where I really got acquainted with them.
RITCHIE: What was your impression of Jim Wright?
McGHEE: Well, I really liked the guy. I think he got himself in trouble because he was arrogant. He thought that that Speakership gave him the right somehow or other really to intervene with the agencies on behalf of his constituents. I think justice worked in that case, although I was sorry to see it, because I liked Wright. We were good friends as well as having a professional relationship.
RITCHIE: The few times I ever saw him personally in action, he was always very impressive. He always seemed to know everything about what he was talking about ....
McGHEE: Sure of himself.
RITCHIE: He would walk into the room, and he had probably only looked at the material two minutes before, but he was the master of what he had to say. You had to admire somebody who could perform that well in public. You mentioned investigations, and during that period there were a couple of big investigations involving Texas in Congress. I think about Billie Sol Estes. . .
McGHEE: I covered that from the beginning.
RITCHIE: And Bobby Baker. They happened just about the same time, in Lyndon Johnson's backyard while he was vice president.
McGHEE: Yeah, that Billie Sol Estes thing was quite a story. Johnson was up to his ears in that, but kept himself clean. There used to be a reporter around here named Les Whitten. He worked for the Post at that time. He and I went down to the Agriculture Department and went back through the records of approvals and relationships with everybody in the Agriculture Department with this Estes guy. And we ran across--I never will forget this, we were in the basement of that main Agriculture building going through these old records--and we ran across a note that indicated that Billie Sol Estes had given Lyndon Johnson money. We could see that from this--it was just a note, a small piece of paper--but we knew that was what had occurred. The Kennedy administration didn't give a damn about Johnson. They would have just as soon see him really get entangled with this business. But somehow or other he escaped, he passed it off and said he had no recollection of ever getting any contributions from Estes at all. But the record was in the Agriculture Department files, I mean this evidence of it.
Oklahoma was involved in that too. The Stabilization and Conservation Service somehow or other was involved, and the head of that was an Oklahoman.
That was the first time that anyone attempted to bribe me, with money. This guy's name was Red Something [James P. Ralph?]--big rawboned, red-faced, red-haired guy. They traced some skullduggery, I can't remember all the details of it, to this guy, and the correspondent for the Daily Oklahoman and I--his name was Al Cromley, and a very good friend of mine--we found him. Red had disappeared, everybody was looking for him, the FBI and everybody else. Well,
we found him in a motel over in Virginia. We cornered him, and he invited us in and opened a bottle. We were sitting in this motel room, and the table was there, and Red was drinking. He pulled out his wallet and just put a whole bunch of money in front of me and Al, with the obvious intent that we would take some of it and get off of him. Well, we didn't of course. That was an overt bribe attempt. He later went to jail, I think.
I had a run-in on that Billie Sol Estes story also with the guy that is now if not the publisher, at least the editor--his name was Siegenthaller, you probably know the name.
RITCHIE: The [Nashville] Tennessean, right?
McGHEE: Tennessean, right. He was Bobby Kennedy's press agent. The FBI had investigated, under the bank fraud statutes, Billie Sol Estes' dealings in Texas, and had bungled the investigation, and didn't follow through, although there was clear evidence that Estes was manipulating the banks stealing really, getting all this money for non existent machinery, it was storage tanks, for millions of dollars. They investigated him and they found out that it was true. [laughs] I was had by that Siegenthaller. I've never been so mad in my life! I kept asking him to give me information. Somebody was feeding me some information, and I've forgotten who it was, but they said, "It's in the FBI files, but they bungled it, and they're doing it because of the Democrats." So I called Siegenthaller and I said, "Look, I want to know what's in that damn file." He kept stalling me off and stalling me off. Finally, I had the information and I said, "Well, if you don't refute it, and if you don't give it to me, I'm going to report that the FBI really bungled this case. They had this guy a couple of years ago and let him off the hook." So Siegenthaller called me at home on a Saturday, and I was off. He said, "If you'll hold off writing that story, and if
you'll come down, I'll show you the file. Is that a deal?" I said, "Hell yes, I'll hold off until I see the file." So I went down to the Justice Department, went in his office. I don't know whether you've ever seen an FBI file or not, but the one that he had had a steel backing on it, there was steel at the top and the bottom of it, and that impressed me right there, that the FBI put their files in steel cases. Anyway, I get in Siegenthaller's office, and I'd made this deal with him, let me see the file and I will hold off writing this story until you give me clearance. Well, Siegenthaller sat on the other side of the desk and he said, "Here's the file," and he held it up. I moved forward assuming he was going to hand it to me, and he didn't, he backed off. The ornery bastard, he said, "Now I have shown you the file." [laughs] I never saw the inside of it a bit! I was furious about it! [laughs]
Years later when Siegenthaller was the editor of that Tennessean, the Nashville paper, some investigating subcommittee in the House was investigating secrecy in the executive department. I had done some stories about being unable to get information which should have been public information from the Pentagon. What happened was that the recreation association of the Pentagon, the employees that were there, belonged to this association, and it was funded the Pentagon would lease out space to department stores in their mall, which was in the basement of the Pentagon, and the profits from leasing that space would go to this recreation association. They would hold picnics and do all kinds of stuff with public money, essentially. I tried to get the details. Woodward and Lothrop was mixed up in it up to their ears. The office space should have been leased for such-and-such a figure per square foot, and this association, there was a colonel over there that was doing it, and he was giving it to them for half of that amount, with the understanding that they would give the other part of the money, a portion of it, to this recreation association. It was a neat little scheme, and they did a lot of things with that money, it subsidized their baseball leagues and their dances and all that kind of stuff. No big fraud, but here was the Pentagon leasing out their space and they wouldn't show us the contracts or give us the information that we needed. I wrote about that, and that enraged this House committee which was looking into secrecy in the government. But Siegenthaller had a different story. They actually gave us subpoenas. We didn't have to testify, but we did. I did, there were four of us who did, and
Siegenthaller was one of the guys. This was years later, after the Billie Sol Estes incident. I apologize, because I can't really remember the details of these old stories.
RITCHIE: Well, it's your impressions in many ways that really count. Did you cover the Bobby Baker case?
McGHEE: Peripherally.
RITCHIE: Had you seen much of Baker when he was Democratic Secretary?
McGHEE: Yeah, he really ran the Senate for Johnson. He was the nose counter. He knew everything. And for Bob Kerr, also. But he was from South Carolina, a different region, I never covered him as a regional reporter. Knew who he was, of course.
RITCHIE: Johnson really escaped doubly on those two scandals.
McGHEE: He sure did, and then Kerr died before they could put him in jail.
RITCHIE: January 1963, he died of a heart attack.
McGHEE: Right, in the hospital, I was working the desk downtown that day; and a guy called me and told me about it.
RITCHIE: Well, when you became a general reporter in the late '60s, did you still focus on the Congress, or did you do the White House as well.
McGHEE: No, I was strictly in the Senate then. I didn't cover anything else.
RITCHIE: So at that time would you go down for the "dugout chatter?"
McGHEE: Yeah, every day. I was a regular Senate reporter, was assigned to various committees, they'd change from year to year. I covered Armed Services for a while. Judiciary was my big committee.
RITCHIE: Under [James] Eastland in those days.
McGHEE: Yeah, and Larry Speakes was Eastland's press agent.
RITCHIE: Could you get much out of Eastland?
McGHEE: Well, you know, I've got a theory about him. I don't want to do him a disservice, and I could be a hundred percent wrong, but I really think that the man was anti-Semitic. I was able to get information out of him and I couldn't figure out why, and I finally suspected that I have a WASPish name. I got along with him, I got along with Eastland.
RITCHIE: "Sunny Jim" was his nickname.
McGHEE: "Sunny Jim" [laughs] you know that was a satirical nickname for him.
RITCHIE: Was it?
McGHEE: Oh, yeah, hell no, there wasn't anything sunny about him at all. People were afraid of him.
RITCHIE: I just remember the great puffs of cigar smoke around him.
McGHEE: Yeah, he always had it around him. But there was one incident about Jim Eastland, he was a great friend of the Kennedys. Nobody knew that, and they were at completely different sides of the political spectrum. During some investigation somebody came into Eastland's office and was hoping to make points with Eastland by denigrating the Kennedys, saying "the Kennedys are pinko Commie liberals," and he said something to Eastland like that, and Eastland got up from his chair and showed the guy out the door. He
was some southern guy that was trying to make points with Eastland. I always admired him for that. Eastland was a handy man with a bottle too. He was making a speech on the Senate floor one night, and I was covering it. I've forgotten who it was on the other side, but somebody said something and Eastland got up and said, "that's a lot of crap." I couldn't believe my ears, but I took it down and I wrote a story about "language seldom heard on the Senate floor," and put out the story and they published it, put it on the wire. The next day the Record came out and he'd gone in there and edited it out, or somebody had for him, and it read: "that's a lot of claptrap." [laughs]
RITCHIE: There's a lot of judicious editing of the Congressional Record!
McGHEE: Yeah. But in the later investigations of Fortas and the Supreme Court nominations, Eastland--he always treated me fine, I didn't agree with him at all on anything, hardly, but he treated me okay. And he had a different reputation among the senators than he did among the general public, too. Everybody got along with him. McClellan wasn't that way, though. Everybody respected McClellan as being elected by the people of Arkansas, and that was about the extent of it. I don't think they liked him personally.
RITCHIE: He wasn't quite the Senate type? He couldn't relax with them?
McGHEE: I don't think he could. I don't know.
RITCHIE: I get the sense that politics stops at a certain time, they can open the bottle and sit back and tell some stories, and there's a lot of relaxing that goes on off the floor.
McGHEE: Well, certainly Dirksen and [Roman] Hruska had that relationship. When I was a general staffer I dealt with Dirksen quite a bit. He was a great guy, funny. Jesus, he was funny. One of the stories about him, and I know this happens to be a true story, when Johnson was majority leader and Dirksen was minority leader, Johnson had a telephone in his car, and Dirksen was never authorized to have one as minority leader. It rankled him and he
kept bugging Johnson for a telephone, and Johnson would ever approve it. So when Johnson became vice president, the first thing Dirksen did was go to Mansfield and. say, "I would like to have a telephone for my car." Mansfield was a good egg and said, "Why not? I don't care. Get yourself one." The story is that after all those years of trying to get a telephone out of Lyndon Johnson, Dirksen was driving in from his country home in Leesburg, or wherever he lived out there, and he got on the telephone and called Johnson, and Johnson was in his vice presidential limousine. Johnson tells the story, he said, "Ev said to me, guess where I'm calling from? I've got a phone in my car now, Lyndon." And Johnson said, "Hold on a minute, would you please, Ev, my other phone's ringing." [laughs]
Dirksen would come up to the press gallery frequently, sit there and bum cigarettes and have press conferences. Never tell you much. I remember one time he got mad up there, though. I can't remember the correspondent's name, but he worked for the Chicago Sun-Times, maybe the Daily News. Didn't work for the Tribune. Dirksen was involved in some kind of a minor scandal in Peoria, which I think involved a law firm with which he was still of counsel. This reporter wouldn't give it up, he kept after him, and Dirksen finally got mad up there in the press gallery. He'd sit on that table there, right in the middle of the room, and the couch is facing it with just a narrow space in between. The two wires would always be there side by side, right beside Dirksen. Well, he got up and made a lunge at this reporter, whom he claimed was blackening his name. It was quite a scandal around the press gallery for a little bit.
RITCHIE: Was that fairly common, for the senators to come up to the press gallery and hold impromptu press conferences, or was it more likely to be the leadership?
McGHEE: It was only the leadership. I can remember when I first came to Washington those reporters were very jealous of what went on in that press gallery. They didn't want senators in there. Of course, they couldn't do anything about it if the minority leader came up there and wanted to hold a news conference. But they didn't like it. The people that really ran the gallery, the old timers, they were jealous of the gallery. What went on in there was the
press' business and nobody else's. They felt very strongly about that. I remember one senator had a delegation of veterans that were here. They wanted to distribute some of their press releases, propaganda, in the gallery, and the senator brought them in. I can recall Jack Bell and the U.P. guy going up to the superintendent and saying, "Get those men out of here. Get them out of here!" And he did. They didn't want them in there. And the senator was chagrined, you know, but he didn't do anything about it.
RITCHIE: I guess the senators, or their staffs at least, were always bringing up their own press releases.
McGHEE: Well, in later years it changed, with the passing of that Old Guard. Any senator can go up there now and hold a news conference if he wants to. It got so bad--that's one of the main reason when they moved the Document Room off that third floor [in the Capitol, in 1983] that they gave all that to the television people, with the proviso that they have a press conference room. They used to just come in the press gallery and it would get really crowded in there. That was in later years, then they moved over to where the Document Room had been. Now, very seldom does anyone come up to the press gallery, but they still do, occasionally some senator will come in there. But he's welcome now. Times have changed.
RITCHIE: One time I took Joseph Alsop into the press galleries. He said that he hadn't been in the press gallery since the 1940s. We walked in the door and he said, "Oh, this is terrible! Look at all these desks pushed together. It's like a rabbit warren in here. It used to be a couple of desks, some nice pictures on the wall, some nice couches you could sit down on. This is terrible!" Oh, he was just disgusted with the place. And he spoke in a loud voice, so there were all these people at their desks trying to figure out who he was, and what he was talking about. But I guess he remembered more of a club-like atmosphere up there.
McGHEE: Yeah.
RITCHIE: I suppose it depended on there not being that many reporters who were using it. The more demand for it, the more crowded it became.
McGHEE: Well, that was a bad precedent that they set then, too. People got squatters rights in there, and there were a half a dozen people that had individual desks. When I came to Washington it was just the beginning of this great explosion of reporters. The press corps I think almost doubled in the first three or four years I was here. It got so that there was demand for private space by everybody, and the gallery committee had one hell of a time accommodating everyone. There's been two or three revisions and expansions in that gallery. There used to be a big Western Union operation in there. But in that first room where you come in, from where the elevators are, there were a dozen news organizations that had places there. But mostly you just went in, took a typewriter, and sat down. It was yours, you could use it as long as you wanted. But people used that facility that didn't even maintain an office downtown, which rankled a lot of people. It couldn't rankle us. Hell, we had half the gallery! [laughs]
RITCHIE: The wire services?
McGHEE: Yeah.
RITCHIE: That was traditional, that the wire services had the better space.
McGHEE: Yeah.
RITCHIE: And everybody else depended on them.
McGHEE: That's true.
RITCIi1E: Did you have many dealings with the reporters who had smaller regional services? Say the Texas chains.
McGHEE: Oh, yeah, I had a lot of dealings with them. You cover the same people and the same events, when you're thrown together, you become good friends.
RITCHIE: There were some colorful reporters there. Sarah McClendon was one of them, and May Craig, covered for those smaller papers in Texas.
McGHEE: Well, Sarah did. May Craig was up in Maine. Doric Fleeson was around then. Dorothy William s, she worked for a Missouri paper. I think I liked being a regional reporter better than being on the general staff, really. You get to know people a lot more. And they get to know you. There's a wall between--as I guess there should be--between reporters and their sources. But if you're a social being you tend to overlook that, or work around it, within bounds.
RITCHIE: You must have regretted when some members of Congress left, having established a good relationship with them. When they went you had to start all over again with their successors.
McGHEE: Mostly, it was the other way around. If somebody got beat that son of bitch should have gotten beat! [laughs]
RITCHIE: Well, what was it that made you move from being a reporter to becoming superintendent in the periodical press gallery?
McGHEE: I covered the McGovern campaign from beginning to end.
RITCHIE: In '72.
McGHEE: ' 72. Actually, my first assignment was Henry Jackson, and I covered him until he got beat in the Florida primary; and McGovern had won a couple of primaries before, small ones. So they assigned me to McGovern, and I was very happy covering McGovern. When he won the Ohio primary I was really happy that they had assigned me to him, because it was fairly obvious by then that he was going to get the nomination. Although, oh, my God, the party
establishment fought it every inch of the way. Anyway, it was hard work. It's probably the only assignment that I've ever had where I was thoroughly exhausted, physically and mentally, and craved rest to get away from it. I always loved being a reporter, and I never considered it work. I loved to get up in the morning and come to the Capitol Building, and wonder "What's going to happen today? What crazy kind of stuff." It's an absolutely fascinating life. But covering a presidential campaign is tough. I was fifty-two years old when the McGovern campaign came on, and it's a young man's game, too. I was dog tired when that thing was over. And Watergate had occurred in June of that year, a thoroughly minor story, everybody thought. It was a campaign year, so there were other interests. But it became a complicated, difficult story to get into.
Well, after the election, the first day I was back at work in the Senate gallery, Congress was gone and I was expecting a couple of months of loafing up here and recuperating. The desk called me, the Washington Post had come out with some horrendous story about Watergate that morning, and we didn't have it. Nobody had it except the Post. There was a mean guy on the desk, and he said, "I'm going to assign you to the Watergate story. The first thing I want you to do is match this story in the Post." I thought he was kidding. I mean, the resources of the Washington Post, they had worked on this story probably for weeks, and he wanted me to call up somebody and write our own story. I said, "I can't do that. There's no way I can match that story." I said, "Use the time-honored system, go ahead and write it and then quote the Washington Post, there's nothing demeaning about that. If they have something exclusive they earn it. Go ahead and do it that way." Well, I got cross-ways with the desk because I had not jumped full feet into the Watergate story, but I was just exhausted.
And I had some rather harsh words with the desk people, which is not a good thing. No reporter likes an editor. In the first place, they can't read, they can't spell, they get things mixed up. You can write something absolutely clear, perfectly clear to any idiot, and to justify their existence they'll change it somehow or other. If a nuance is important, it passes them. It's a conflict between reporter and editor. Well, they weren't going to fire me or anything for that.
I had a personal problem at that time, too. My wife had come down with manic depressive illness and she was in and out of the hospital. She came down with it in 1970, and during the next couple of years she was in and out of hospitals quite a bit, and the bills were horrendous. Reporters didn't make a lot of money, and the insurance wasn't covering it all. I had exhausted all my assets. The insurance wasn't good enough, and the government had a very, very good insurance system, the Senate did.
I was sitting in the gallery one day and Sam Shaffer of Newsweek came by and said to me, "I've been appointed to the search committee for a new superintendent of the [periodical press] gallery." And he was asking me if I had any recommendations for him. I said to him, "How about me, Sam?" He had no idea that I would even be interested in the job. Normally, I would not have been. It didn't pay but a thousand or so dollars more a year than I was earning, and certainly not enough for me to give up twenty five years with the U.P. to go for a thousand bucks. I didn't do it for the money. I did it for the security of the job, to take care of my wife, really. Anyway, that was the genesis of my becoming superintendent of the gallery.
RITCHIE: Being a reporter must be hard on your family life. Your hours had to be unpredictable, and you were traveling.
McGHEE: It is, it's very difficult.
RITCHIE: There must have been a lot of strains, another reason why they call it a young man's job.
McGHEE: That's true. I never regretted quitting, either. I never regretted at anytime my life as a reporter. I loved it. That was my life. I never considered it work, although campaigning is tough, it's exhausting. Again, it's not like dull office work, it's not like editing, even, being a reporter. It's fun. That's the bottom line. It's a good life. I would still be doing it, probably, if my wife had not been ill.
RITCHIE: About that ' 72 campaign, what was your assessment of George McGovern?
McGHEE: Oh, big heart, few brains. We were in Columbia, South Carolina, one time, and the Vietnam War was the big issue in that campaign, of course. McGovern was at a private meeting at a downtown mansion with the political wheels of South Carolina from the Democratic Party. He was trying to justify his position on the Vietnam War, which was come home. Remember "Come Home, America" was his slogan. He said in this private meeting, no reporters were there, "I would crawl on my hands and knees to Hanoi if it would result in bringing our boys home." There were two parts to the quote: "I would crawl on my hands and knees to Hanoi," well, the right-wingers who were in that meeting came out and talked to the press, and the quotes that appeared in the papers left out the second part. "George McGovern groveled before the Commies, and said he would 'crawl on his hands and knees to Hanoi."' It did him in, absolutely did him in. From then on, he didn't have a chance.
RITCHIE: Almost all the senators think that they would be great presidential candidates, and wonderful candidates, and they're always running for it, and yet senators really don't get elected president very often. Kennedy was the last one who went straight from the Senate to the White House. And yet all those senators like Jackson, and Bayh, and Church, McGovern, spent all
that time campaigning, and they never got there.
McGHEE: Well, I think that had to do more or less with the change in American politics. Senators have always been on the ticket, frequently: Truman, Barkley, Nixon, Johnson, Mondale. It's a good place to go from to the ticket. But I think you're probably right. Truman seemed to have adapted very well. Nixon certainly was a fiasco.
RITCHIE: Did you have much opportunity to cover Nixon, or to observe him?
McGHEE: Not really. My first brush with Nixon was when I was the bureau chief in Denver and he came to Colorado Springs, one time, between trips
from somewhere, but just for a weekend to rest, really. I went down to Colorado Springs, from Denver, to the famous old hotel there, the Broadmoor. It had a small lobby, and I took my wife with me. She's funny, a funny lady, except this incident wasn't very funny. We got in the hotel before Nixon was to arrive. You go into the lobby of that hotel, and then just off to one side is an anteroom, big heavy columns of wood and panels, with chairs in there. So I put Frances, my wife, there, and I said, "Now you just stay right there while I wander around here." So Nixon's limousine came up and the Secret Service preceded him in. They were checking everybody, and she went like that [makes a finger like a pistol] to them. Holy Jesus! [laughs] Well, I rescued her, of course. They said, "What is this?" [laughs] Nixon thought it was funny, said he did, anyway, but I didn't get any information out of him. That was my first run-in with him. I've got some pictures of me and Nixon, though, at various things, at airport arrivals.
RITCHIE: For a man who spent so much of his life dealing with the press, he didn't like dealing with the press at all.
McGHEE: And the press certainly didn't like him.
The gallery business was really interesting, though, and it gave me some insights into people's view of themselves as reporters. I was on the other side, now, I was supposed to be watching them, and watching out for them. You wear two hats in the gallery. One, you're a Senate employee, and the other you're selected by the gallery committee to do the job. When I first came here, I could hardly believe my eyes, the resources that went into the care and feeding of the press. It was a revelation, although I wasn't sure I agreed with it. They supply everything. It seemed to me then that that wasn't the way things should be at all. I'm still not sure of it. But I liked my job in the press gallery. Again, it was easy, there was really no work. A big racket, really. But, you know we were sued two or three times, and I was involved in the intellectual stuff, I really enjoyed it.
THE SENATE PERIODICAL PRESS GALLERY
Interview #4
Wednesday, January 22, 1992
RITCHIE: Before we begin talking about the periodical press gallery, Bob Barr [of U.S. News and World Report] told me to be sure to ask you about George McGovern and the beer bottle.
McGHEE: Oh, yes, that was during the '72 campaign. We were traveling in New England and the eastern part of the United States on that particular swing. It came the weekend. We had had a hectic week with McGovern, and he had had a hectic week too, and he was going to take the weekend off and go up in the Catskills. Some fat cat Democrat had given him his country retreat up there. So they arranged for the press that was traveling with him to stay in a motel, and they put a lid on. There would be no news during the weekend, so we didn't have to worry about that. We could lay around the swimming pool.
On the way up, McGovern rode in an open convertible, he and his wife and his driver, and there may have been someone else in the car. But the press bus was following him. We got outside of the environs of New York into the country, and the bus was right there, we could look down out of the bus and into McGovern's car. And there it appeared that he was drinking a bottle of beer, which was fine. Everybody thought that was a nice little touch. When we got to wherever we were going in upstate New York in the mountains someplace, everybody had to update their stories and write a new story for the next morning, and then that was it. Well, you were struggling for any kind of information that you could get to liven up some kind of a story. As I say, McGovern had had a busy week, a pretty rough one, and he had a perfect right to relax and drink a beer if he wanted to. Or ten if he wanted to. In any event, it was colorful. He was drinking in this open convertible and laughing, and his wife was there, and we could tell that he was relaxed, and he was going to
unwind that weekend. So everybody wrote the story about McGovern traveling in an open convertible for a restful weekend.
One of the reporters who was my seatmate, we were all together, so everybody knew what everybody else was doing, this guy said, "I'm going to put the lead on the story: McGovern drinking beer." I didn't say anything. He wrote his lead, and it said: "McGovern headed for a weekend of relaxation in an open convertible, drinking Budweiser." It was a pretty good lead for a reprise of the rough times of the week. But I got to thinking about that. As a reporter I've always considered myself very careful, and not to write anything I didn't know for absolute fact. That kept me out of a lot of trouble in a lot of stories, by sticking to what I absolutely knew, and never making the leap to supposition, or because something was logical to follow to jump to that conclusion. So I wrote that McGovern was headed for a weekend of relegation in an open convertible and was drinking from a beer bottle. I didn't say he was drinking beer at all. That always impressed Bob Barr, when I told him about that. Because as it turned out he wasn't drinking beer, it was near-beer or something. [Frank] Mankiewicz, who was running McGovern's press operations, didn't give a damn. I mean, it was insignificant. But it caught Bob Barr's attention.
I remember previously in that week, we were in Manchester, New Hampshire, and McGovern was visiting a shoe factory. The Union Leader that morning had come. out--McGovern had made a speech the night before, and the Union-Leader in reporting on the speech said that McGovern's plans and programs were "as phony as his capped teeth." So when I was dictating a story to New York, they said, "Well, what about this business of McGovern having capped teeth?" I said, "For Christ's sake, I don't know whether he's got capped teeth or not." They said, "Well, find out. The Union-Leader says this is true in a front page editorial, saying his programs are as phony as his capped teeth."
It's always difficult in a presidential campaign to get to the candidate at any time that you need to. There's always access, but it may be several hours later. It's difficult sometimes to answer your editors who are demanding immediate answers to questions that somebody might have. So I couldn't get to
McGovern to ask him. I didn't want to ask him anyway if he's got capped teeth! But I did ask Mrs. McGovern, and she started laughing. She was aware of the editorial. She said, "No, he doesn't have any capped teeth. He's got some crowns, but no caps, no cosmetic teeth." So I said, "That's fine." She said, "If you want verification about his dental work, here's the name of his dentist in Washington." So I took the name down and I called the guy from a street telephone booths. It was one of those rare things where you can really get to shove it right into somebody that you want to, but you can do it legitimately! Here I got a hold of this dentist and he told me, "No, I never capped any teeth for the senator." Then he told me what Mrs. McGovern told me that he had made him some crowns. So I was asking him about his bona fides as a dentist, and he had accompanied Nixon to Russia as his dentist! [laughs] And had treated Nixon, who did have some capped teeth. So it was a beautiful opening! I wrote a whole story about it, [laughs] about McGovern not having any capped teeth, but his dentist had capped Nixon's teeth. I don't know what the Union-Leader ever did with the story, if they even got it. They probably flushed it when they got it. But it was one of those rare moments. I could answer the unfair charge, and also satisfy my editors, but give the Republicans a dig! [laughs] Not that I wanted to, necessarily, for the Republicans, but it was a fine moment in that campaign.
RITCHIE: I gather that reporters will bristle at what editorial writers put in. They seem to have a different kind of license completely.
McGHEE: Well, they do. It's strictly opinion and they're loose with the facts. They will make these leaps that I was talking about that are unjustified. But editors are the same way, they will look at a sentence, and you have stated it precisely, and if they don't fiddle around with it, it's the exact truth. Now the exact truth is not always from an exact recitation of the facts, as you know. You have to account for circumstances. But frequently a reporter will write something and an editor will think, "if this is true, then this must be true," and they will conclude that this is true without checking with you even. Then you may get a whole false story altogether. Then you've got to backup and rewrite, and write through it again. For wires in my reporting days it was a pretty hectic business, but enjoyable.
RITCHIE: Well, we had just begun to talk about the press gallery. Could you start by telling me what is the nature of the Senate periodical press gallery, and how does it differ from the other press galleries?
McGHEE: Well, it differs in two or three vital respects. The periodical press gallery was authorized in 1939, I think, but actually didn't have a gallery until maybe after World War II. There was an individual credentialing apparatus but they didn't have the office space or a staff or anything like that, that wasn't authorized I believe until 1948. The reason for its creation was because the daily gallery at that time had a rule, as you're aware, that correspondence must be transmitted telegraphically on a daily basis. And of course, magazines don't fit that criteria. So the magazine reporters got together and convinced Sam Rayburn that they needed a gallery of their own, the daily wouldn't let them in. Rayburn really did it. He got the legislation through both the Senate and the House, changing the rules to authorize the galleries.
In writing the rules for admission, we generally followed the daily gallery but with some refinements, and the principal refinement was that the publication had to be published for profit. Now, that's assumed in a daily newspaper. I'm not so sure it was wise, when you think about Tom Payne, for God's sake. Our gallery said, "published for profit and chiefly supported by advertising." "Chiefly supported by advertising," not by subscription. You had to be supported by advertising. Well, that kept out the newsletters. It also kept out a great many legitimate journalistic enterprises which were subsidized somehow or other. Strictly speaking, the New Republic wouldn't have qualified. They stretched the rules and they were in. And "published for profit" was a big restriction, big difference. The National Geographic wouldn't qualify because it's a non-for-profit organization, a publication published by a non profit society. Now, Rayburn ordered by fiat the National Geographic as one of the original admitted publications into the press gallery. That was one of the conditions he made to let them form it. But nobody else got in under similar circumstances. Years later, the tax code was changed where the National Geographic had to start paying taxes on its advertising revenue, and they always were actually a profit-making organization in a strict sense, although published by a non-profit group. Since they didn't pay taxes in those early days, they really had an unfair
advantage over publications that were in the marketplace. But that was Rayburn's price, and in order to get the gallery the organizing committee agreed to go along with it. But it was always a bone of contention.
That is the principal difference. The theory is that to publish a daily newspaper it requires quite an enterprise. You've got to have a building, presses, all the apparatus that's involved. It's a huge capital investment to publish a daily newspaper, even a small one. That's not the case with a magazine. You can hire it done. You can be subsidized by anybody that's got an interest, and then almost all non profit organizations have some sort of periodical publication, universities, foundations, businesses. In writing the rules, the committee drew them very narrowly, and they wanted only legitimate, profit making general interest and trade publications in the gallery. In my way of thinking, there's very little distinction frequently between a trade association publication and a magazine that covers the trade. There is a distinction, and it's one that the courts have now recognized through various lawsuits we've had, and it's firmly established. But that is the principal difference between the daily and the periodical galleries.
RITCHIE: What do you think was the motivation behind writing those rules? Was it because that was the definition of the way they reported that they felt that was legitimate, or did they fear that there would be a great opening to a larger number of smaller publications?
McGHEE: The rationale was that we were unable to police. The gallery committee doesn't have any policing authority, or investigative capability, or very little. So in order to avoid having to investigate every applicant publication for admission, we just put down the rule that you had to be published for profit. That was interpreted to mean by profit making organizations, a commercial company, a business. You had to be published for profit. You didn't have to make a profit, but you had to be published for profit--you try to make a profit, and pay taxes, and file returns, and that sort of thing. That was the rationale behind it. Really we could not--I was the second superintendent of the gallery. The first man was there thirty years I guess before I took over. The committee itself did all of the admitting work, the superintendent did not. When they chose
me, the committee indicated that they wanted me to take that over, to start doing that. I had to immerse myself in the rules, the rationale for them. I became convinced that the rules were right. We went on from there.
The periodical gallery is always getting sued by somebody. I don't think the daily gallery's ever been in a law suit. They've had a lot of internal friction over there. The major case being the admission of black publications and the admission of a black columnist several years ago, in the late 1940s.
RITCHIE: Louis Lautier, in 1947.
McGHEE: Yeah. We never had anything like that in our gallery. But we had a lot of problems with publications that always believed--and still do believe that--admission is part of their First Amendment rights. Of course, you're aware that there's a conflict in the constitution. The First Amendment doesn't really spell out what freedom of the press means, that's been done through court precedents and through laws. And there's a great controversy in the journalistic world about whether freedom of the press actually means access or not. Whatever article it is in the constitution that gives the Congress the right to write its own rules, and to be the master in the Capitol Building, is in conflict somewhat, if the Congress says: "You don't have a right to be up here, you're here at our sufferance, you're our guests. We'll be happy to give you the space, and we'll make some rules governing your conduct up here." And among those rules was, for a periodical you had to be published for profit. Well, that was litigated. One of our prime suits went to the Supreme Court twice, as a matter of fact, on procedural grounds. It didn't take me a long time to understand that, but like most people, I thought, "Well, hell, under the First Amendment you've got to have access or otherwise it's meaningless."
But what really brought that to a head was the newsletters. There was great pressure in the early '70s on the Senate Rules Committee to somehow or other make a separate gallery or accommodate newsletter reporters up here. They came to our gallery and wanted us to take them in. We didn't want to do it or our committee didn't want to do it. But it became clear after a while that the Rules Committee was going to insist and they were going to do it anyway,
so we changed our rules, and where the rules said, in rule two, published for profit and chiefly supported by advertising, we put a comma and "or by subscription." We added three words to the rules, that's all. The Rules Committee took that, and then the controversies started in, because everybody's got a newsletter. Again, we get back to this business of no investment required. You can roll a sheet of paper into a typewriter and you're a publisher. [laughs]
We had some people on the committee at that time who could see down the road what was going to happen. And it has happened, exactly as they predicted. The newsletters are now by far dominant in the periodical press gallery, with the demise of magazines, particularly general circulation, magazines of general interests, in addition to the news weeklies and the political journals. You know, we no longer have the Saturday Evening Post, we don't have Liberty or Colliers. Those were great organs in their day. They were widely read. We don't have those any more. We've got a lot of trade press and specialized publications, and newsletters that cover every conceivable subject. Those people demand as much as a Time magazine reporter, and frequently more.
RITCHIE: What kind of demands would a reporter in the periodical gallery put on your position as superintendent?
McGHEE: The chief thing that we are not permitted to do is do journalistic, editorial work for reporters. And these newsletter people want you to do it. They want you to cover things for them. They want you to gather the documents. If they read something in a competitive newsletter that they didn't have, they raise holy hell with you because you didn't alert them to this. Well, I didn't see my job in that regard. I saw my job as a liaison between the press and the Senate and individual senators, solving problems of access and everything else that I possibly could. Doing as much for them as I could, but drawing the line on any kind of editorial work for them. With the advent of newsletters into the gallery, I would have to explain that to every new reporter that came in, and some of them were quite belligerent about it. They figured that their credential is a license, and it really isn't.
RITCHIE: Do some of the other galleries actually do some of that editorial work, station somebody at a hearing or at a press conference and report back to the gallery?
McGHEE: Well, there's been a development in very recent years that I kind of oppose but I finally had to go along with it, because my committee absolutely demanded it. You know, the pre session news conference, which is colloquially known as "dugout chatter," the gallery superintendents attend those. For years, we didn't take notes at those things, we didn't talk about the subject matter, we were there for scheduling information. We wanted to know what the Senate was going to be debating that day, the possible hours that they would be in, and such things as that, if there were going to be any recesses, and if there were any formal ceremonies to be taken care of that day, or if there was a filibuster, or they were going to have executive sessions or a closed session, that kind of information; but never legislative content. The daily gallery began, after Joe Wills retired, to make some notes on what the majority and minority leaders had to say, and then typing them up and putting them on the bulletin board. Well, I objected to that. If a reporter wanted to know what the majority leader had to say, he damn well should have been there to cover it. I should not have to do that work for him. It was no big deal, it took five minutes when you get back to the office, it wasn't the actual work. I objected to it on professional grounds. But the committee saw otherwise, so now it's standard practice in all the galleries to write up for reporters what went on. Now, if a reporter is worth his salt, he's not going to take what you wrote and put it in his story. If he wants to use the information that's in there, he will verify it independently. But some of them don't.
I've written--you know, I'm kind of devious, but I used to write stuff in story form from there, when I objected to having to do it, I oppose it to this day, but I had to do it and I did it. So I would write a story just like I was writing it for a newspaper and I would put it on the bulletin board. You'd be surprised at how much I've seen my prose in a file by a reporter. Now, that's not right. That's wrong, as a matter of fact. We staff members are prohibited from publishing factual articles also, selling them. We can't be in competition with
the people that are in the gallery, and that's understandable too. But there are not a lot of restrictions on the staff.
RITCHIE: When I sit in the gallery, I'll often see Max Barber and Larry Janezich [superintendents of the radio and television gallery] sitting in the press gallery making notes of what was going on, and occasionally I'd see them standing outside of committee. I assumed they were taking notes for the radio and television reporters on what was going on. Did they do more than the other galleries?
McGHEE: No, both the daily gallery and the radio-tv gallery keep what they call a log. And it's official for their galleries. And what it is, it's subject matter and the time. If some senator gets up to make a speech, the log will note the time he began speaking, the subject matter, and during debate the amendments are kept. It's exactly what the Congressional Record is, except it's done in journalistic format. A reporter can look at it, it's the proceedings of the Senate, and everybody can write from it. It's factual information about what has occurred on the Senate floor. You really couldn't write from it, they never say the content of the speech in the log, they just say, "Senator so and so spoke on this topic," and that's it. Or "so-and-so offered an amendment concerning. . . " and that was it. Somebody can read that log, and if they want to know more, if they want to write about it, that's their tip that they can do it. Keeping that log is an onerous chore. You have to sit out there, you have to be alert for everything that's going on, the staff fellow does.
Well, for years we only had two staffers in the periodical gallery; but we had an arrangement with the daily gallery, if our reporters wanted to look at their log, they could go in and do it. Sam Shaffer of Newsweek, who was around here since the gallery was organized until he retired, ten years ago or so, one time insisted that the periodical gallery keep a log too. It became a fight in the committee, and they finally said, "Hell, no, that's not right. There are two people in there, one of them has to be there all the time. They couldn't even go to the john." So we got rid of that. It was very short lived. It was before my time. I wasn't there when this incident occurred. But that's what you're seeing those people take notes on in the gallery. They keep somebody in there all the
time. Now, they have staffs big enough to do it. The daily gallery's got seven or eight people, and so's the radio-tv gallery. The timing of something frequently is important, and that gives the writers a chance to know, and sequence is frequently important in the legislative product. There are great machinations, as you can imagine, that go on. Somebody doesn't want to offer his amendment until the other amendment is offered first, and sometimes that becomes central to the story, the process. It's difficult to understand and explain.
In the files that the major news magazine reporters wrote--I'm sure you're aware that it's only in recent times that Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News reporters actually wrote for their publication. Before they wrote files, and they had editors down there that took their lengthy files--they would put everything in the file--and then a third party would actually write it, then it would be edited by somebody else. The end product seldom--you didn't know what it was, it wasn't anything like what the reporter had originally written. I could never have worked for a magazine like that. I played tennis with Time magazine people lots and I remember, oh, along time ago, I used to have a weekend match with Hays Gorey. He was assigned one time to do a cover story on a campaign advisor, I can't remember his name, he was based in Tennessee. It was on the influence of campaign advisors, how political campaigns were changing, and Hays spent a couple of weeks with this guy, traveling around with him, following him, making notes. He came back and wrote forty thousand words. He had to cancel his tennis match on Saturday because he had to finish up his file and something happened on Friday and he had to get that in, but he wrote solidly for a couple of days. A forty-thousand word file for the cover, got it to New York, something else happened, an earthquake someplace or something, they didn't even publish a line of it, never did.
Now, to me, if I had written a fort- thousand word series, I would damn well expect it be published. [laughs] But it didn't bother Hays a bit. That's just an example of where this log business fits. They're vacuum sweepers, that's what they are. They put every conceivable fact that they can gather, and opinion and everything else into their file, and then the writers go over it and boil it all down in the style of the magazine, which in their news sections is
always distinctive, or peculiar, or specialized for their publication. I'm sure you're aware of that.
RITCHIE: I get the sense that one of the big differences between the galleries is deadline. The daily gallery and the radio-tv gallery, their people are going to file something today. The periodical press must have a little more leeway.
McGHEE: That's not true. That's a common misconception. The reason is that it takes a week to put a magazine together, but there are internal deadlines within that magazine that are every day. And if an event occurs on Monday, although the magazine doesn't come out until Saturday, the reporter can't wait till Friday to file that. He has to file it immediately. He's in the exact same position as somebody whose product is published the same day he writes it. He has to write it that day too, because the publication process takes that long in a news magazine. And with the advent of newsletters, they all have different publication dates. There are something like four or five hundred different newsletters and publications in the periodical gallery now, well, they all have different deadlines. Every day of the week some of them are on deadline. Business Week's deadline is on Wednesday, very early in the week for a magazine to carry a week from Sunday's date on it. Of course, the big three news magazines can hold open. They don't like to do it, because it costs them a lot of money, but if something's really occurring over the weekend they will. They'll hold a blank space in the news section and they'll just fill that in at the last minute, and have everything else printed up.
But deadlines are something that you really can't judge the operations of the gallery on, because the periodicals are under the same deadline pressures as the daily and the radio and tv people. Not the immediacy, but they have the same pressure. Sometimes they can take a little longer. The news magazines go after something that the others do not have, anyway. They address it differently. It's seldom that they ever get a real big exclusive that holds up in its entirety, but they will have facts in their story that the dailies never got in at all, because of this business of having to work rapidly.
RITCHIC: What's the relationship between the reporters in the periodical press gallery and say the ones in the daily press gallery? You mentioned that magazine writers could go in to use the log, but is there a division between them? Do they keep apart?
McGHEE: Not really. The divisions are blurring. It used to be that the daily gallery would not cooperate with the periodical gallery at all at committee hearings. They would grab most of the choice seats. They would send somebody over and mark places for them. Our staff was never able to do that. But I changed that myself, I'm the one that changed that, and I did it because I had been working in the daily gallery for many years before I took this job and I knew those people very well. I changed that system to where now there is a very good working relationship. We have--I assume it's being continued, although I'm not there any more--but on a big hearing where there's competition for space available, we had a formula. Well, not really a formula, it would change depending on the subject and how much pressure there was, but we always got our fair share of the seats at the press table. And if we didn't have somebody who could get there, the daily gallery would generally watch out for us. That was a loose arrangement. There's nothing written about it, but now by precedent we have it, and if it were to be changed now there would be a hue and cry to the Rules Committee and they would have to step in. And you want to avoid that if you can.
RITCHIE: Why?
McGHEE: Well, reporters want us to do it. They don't want to go to the politicians and have them do it. We have unique jobs. We're hired by a private committee, paid by the government; and the government really doesn't have any control over what we do. I remember when I was hired, a fellow named [Bill] Wannell was the Sergeant at Arms. He called me in to his office, the galleries were under his jurisdiction for payroll purposes, not really for management. They were managed independently by the committees [of correspondents] under the rules. But he said, "I don't ever want to deal with any reporters. If there's gallery business to be dealt with, I want to deal with you." He said, "When you're not sick, I want you here at work. If you are sick,
I don't want you here at work. Apart from that, you're on your own." So I seldom went in there. We ignore them, except when we need things. They're the procurement officer for the galleries, so we have to go to them for typewriters and supplies and stuff like that.
RITCHIE: Did you ever have any problems with any sergeants at arms who thought that their authority was greater than that?
McGHEE: Oh, boy, did I ever! It was really touch and go with... memory is really not the first thing to go, but mine is. [laughs]
RITCHIE: Was that Nordy Hoffmann?
McGHEE: Nordy Hoffmann, yeah. I had a big problem with him. He wanted our space. He wanted to expand his space, and where the photographers' gallery is, he wanted that space too. He didn't want it, but he connived and figured that would get that space over there for Senator [Robert C.] Byrd for the Policy Committee, which is under the majority leader. And it used to be, when Johnson was majority leader, before the photographers moved in there, that office was part of the Policy Committee. It was under Lyndon Johnson, and his staff worked out of there. It's a very small office. Anyway, when Johnson left the photographers got it somehow or other and have had it ever since. When I first came it was the Policy Committee office. Well, Hoffmann, wanting our office--before the gallery was made, our office was part of the sergeant at arms' suite up there. There's a beaverboard separation between our office and the room right behind us. You've been in the sergeant at arms office, the main office? This room next door was exactly like it. It was exactly the same size. It went clear from the hallway to the perimeter of the building, with the windows and fireplaces, beautiful.
Well, Hoffmann wanted our office space. He told us that he had talked to Byrd about it and that Byrd was going to take the photographers' gallery for the Policy Committee and he was going to expand his office into our gallery and take that partition out of there and restore it to what it was originally. He would give us space somewhere else in the Capitol Building. This was before the
Senate started televising its proceedings. So he found a space in the basement for us. It was spacious. I mean, we had a lot more room than what's there on the gallery floor, but it was vital that we have access to the floor. So the committee had a lunch and invited Hoffmann and his deputy to lunch to discuss this. We had already been in caucus and said "We're not going to move, but we'll hear him out and tell him why we can't move. If he finds us other space on the gallery floor, fine. We're not trying to block his expansion, but neither are we going to give up our space without a fight."
Hoffmann came down, and he repeated right there that Senator Byrd wanted this done. It was clear from that lunch that Hoffman, if he were telling the truth, had the authority to tell us to get out of there, put us wherever he wanted, and that was it. The lunch was over about one thirty. We thanked him very much and said the committee would consider it. Immediately, Neil McNeil of Time and Henry Hubbard of Newsweek went down to Byrd's office. Byrd always saw the big news magazines singly every week, once a week, not in a press conference, not the three of them together, but each one of them. He would spend an hour with them. And he knew these guys well. Byrd never wanted to fight with the press. So Henry and Neil went down there and Byrd . said, "What's on your mind?" They said, "The sergeant at arms is trying to muscle us out of our quarters. He wants to put us in the basement, and we absolutely have to have access to the gallery, right across the hall there. We have the space in the chamber, and our staff has to be able to get in and out of there all the time, and we can't be running up and down three flights." They gave him all the arguments why we didn't want to move.
Byrd was flabbergasted. He was stunned. He heard them out, he got on the phone, and he got a hold of Hoffmann. He said, "Get down here!" And in the presence of McNeil and Hubbard, he said, "I don't want you ever messing with those galleries. I didn't ask you for any space, and I don't want you to do this." And he dismissed him. I had gone back up to the gallery after the luncheon. I was sitting there wondering what the hell was going to happen. Henry and Neil came back in and were sitting there at the table in the gallery. They were telling me what had happened down there. Well, that elated the hell out of me. But Hoffmann burst through those swinging saloon doors up there.
I was at my desk and I looked up at him, and you know he's a huge man. He pointed his finger at me and he said something to the effect: "You won the skirmish but you haven't won this war." And was livid. He was irate! I've never seen a man so mad. I thought he was going to have a heart attack, really. You know, he was big, overweight, huge man, and old.
Of course, we laughed like hell about that. I didn't think anything about it. I thought, "Well, what the hell can he do?" Well, to show you how petty that son of a bitch is, the next morning when I came to work, I had a parking place right opposite the Senate steps, along the curb there. So did Max [Barber], the superintendent of the daily gallery had his in the daily gallery parking lot, but Max and I and Maurice [Johnson], the photographers' [superintendent] had assigned spaces. Mine was 133. It had been there for the periodical gallery for years. So Hoffmann took my parking space. [laughs] I came in there and pulled in the next morning, and a cop came over and said, "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but that's no longer your parking space. We've got orders from the sergeant at arms that this is a space of his now, and it's not yours." He took it away from me. I said, "Well, where am I supposed to park?" He said, "You can park in any of these spaces that are numbered but not assigned. They would hold that space open, if I had to go someplace during the day, only I could occupy that space. I thought, "what the hell." I went in and I called the committee and told them what had happened, that the retaliation was petty as hell and it didn't bother me any because the cops were going to give me a parking space. I said, "I just want you to be aware that this is going on." So I don't know what transpired in the leadership or in the sergeant at arms office after that, but they changed the system. They did take the assigned spaces away from all of us and made it first come first serve. If you're there you've got the space all day, and if you can get a cop to save it for you, fine. I never noticed any difference, really. But that was the compromise that they made with Nordy. That was so Goddamn petty! [laughs] But he was forestalled, he didn't get our space.
Since then, various sergeants at arms that have come in, I've always had a talk with them, and related that story to them, more or less to ward off a repetition. A new sergeant at arms will come in and he doesn't understand. He
says, "Well, you're on my payroll, Goddamn it! You're – my employee." You have to explain to them, "No, that's not true. We are on here only because they didn't have any place else to put us. Our gallery is not under your management, it's under this independent correspondents committee's management. They hired me, and as long as I don't come to work drunk I'm their employee, not yours. But he was the only one that I ever had any problems with.
RITCHIE: You mentioned that it would have made a difference if the Senate was televised or not. Has televising the Senate changed the nature of your operations?
McGHEE: It's changed it completely. The galleries used to be full. We have ten spaces in there, and on big legislation it was always a premium to get in there and get a seat. We used to have to rotate people, or pool. Well, now nobody uses those seats. I objected to that when they brought the television in, I said, "Look, that's a small office and to have that television on all the time is outrageous, particularly the sound for people trying to work in there. If you're here, you can't cover off of this television set." But they do. And its changed now. Nobody goes in the gallery. Our seats are empty in there, and it's the same way with the daily gallery, same way with the radio tv gallery. Very seldom. Oh, for yesterday's opening session the galleries were full. And sometimes when there's a big vote the reporters will go in there for color and get that kind of stuff. Day in and day out, those galleries are empty. I think it's only a matter of time until the Senate takes that space back, because they're not used.
RITCHIE: The space inside the chamber?
McGHEE: Yeah, because they're not used.
RITCHIE: It must rankle the members on the floor to look up at those empty seats.
McGHEE: Oh, you can imagine! They have constituents coming and they can't get them in the galleries, and they look up there and see all those
empty seats. We had ten seats, the daily gallery had ninety, and the radio tv has around thirty or forty, so there's close to two hundred seats up there that are seldom occupied. You know that rankles the senators. Of course, the leaders don't want to get in a fight with the press, and wisely so, I guess.
RITCHIE: I asked before about the relationship between the periodical gallery and the daily press gallery. But what's the relationship between the print reporters and the broadcast reporters, who have certainly been growing in numbers?
McGHEE: Well, it's rancorous. The television coverage of a committee hearing for a print journalist is really terrible. Their cameras frequently are in the way, you can't see, or get good open views of the senators and the witnesses. They take up an awful lot of space. At breaks, they will move in with these portable cameras. They used to be all just set so they couldn't move them, but now they just walk around everywhere. That's the physical end of it. I'm biased, I'm sure, in my discussion of this subject, but by and large television reporters and radio reporters are not grounded in their subject matter the way print reporters are. I doubt if they can read, really. My experience has been that most of them can't put things in context, they trivialize everything, and except for a very few of them they are several cuts below the normal print journalist, in my opinion. Now, some of them are real good friends of mine. Roger Mudd's a very close friend of mine, and he's an excellent reporter. But you will find that most of the excellent reporters there were former newspaper reporters and moved over. But the ones that just came up through radio and television, they frequently just are terrible.
You know, we were talking about Fulbright a session or two ago. I remember one time at a press conference or an impromptu press meeting after a foreign relations hearing on a complicated subject. A radio reporter asked some stupid, stupid question. Fulbright just withered him. [laughs] He dressed him out. He said, "If you don't have sense enough, or interest enough to know what we're talking about here, don't take up our time." He would never have had to say that to a print reporter covering the Foreign Relations Committee.
RITCHIE: I heard Neil McNeil say one time that there was a period that the greatest thing he could say to a senator was: "We're putting your face on the cover of Time magazine." But he said television has sort of taken that away. Now, "We're interviewing you on Dan Rather" is more important than having your face on the cover of Time. Has broadcasting changed the status of the print journalists, to some degree?
McGHEE: Well, it's certainly changed the whole journalistic atmosphere. When somebody says the press now to the senators, they don't think of the newspapers, really, they think of the telly. And their schedules are frequently deliberately contrived for the television, to get the best results on the television. I've heard press people who write speeches for the senators, they struggle all the time for the colorful quote, and they rehearse the senator on when to say it, and in what context, and what venue, so that it will have the sound bite impact. I was eternally opposed to televising the Senate sessions, and I still think it's bad, after it's been there several years. We live with it, but the posturing that goes on it's exactly what they said it would be. It's not as bad as Russell Long and those people who really fought it and held it off for a number of years thought it would be. It's not as bad as they predicted, but it's bad enough. It's bad enough. I don't think it's lengthened the time that people take. You know, they're long winded anyway. But I think it's been a bad development in communicating the flavor and the truth about congressional government.
RITCHIE: Congressman Lee Hamilton once said that his great objection was that months of negotiation over a bill would have to be summarized in seven seconds...
McGHEE: To accommodate television, yeah.
RITCHIE: And that television didn't handle legislation well because legislation isn't quick, snappy, colorful, picturesque, something that can be depicted in a short segment, that it would require more legwork and maybe a little duller account...
McGHEE: I think what it would require to really serve its purpose and be on more of a par with daily newspapers and periodicals would be if there were commentary on the fact. When a newspaper reporter writes a story, he brings to it a historic perspective on the subject, and if he's any good he puts it in the context of history and of other legislation, and current developments, and that sort of things. Well, that's never the case with the television. It's like televising the courts. If you're covering the courts you have to be better prepared than if you're covering a legislative session. But for television just to cover open court proceedings, the viewer really doesn't get a picture of what's going on. He gets a snapshot kind of thing. He's aware that the jury, if it's a criminal trial, or even if it's a civil trial, but the jury is made up of diverse people, some of them got beards, some of them are lazy and ugly, and some of them are beautiful, but that is difficult for a print reporter to report on, and you'd never do it. You'd never characterize the jury. Maybe you'd write about a jury in some fashion, but you wouldn't do that as an integral part of your covering a court story. Now, television I believe could do a hell of a lot better job, but I'm presumptuous even to utter such a thought, because how do I know? The constraints that they're under, and the time is all they have. The better ones do try, but most of them just can't cut it.
RITCHIE: What qualities make a good periodical reporter? Is there something different about being a reporter for a periodical than for a newspaper or for any other form of media?
McGHEE: I guess it depends on what kind of periodical, what he's doing, what kind of writing, what kind of periodical he's working for. For the big news magazines, I don't think there's any difference in the reporter. I think he has to know what's going on, he has to be able to write rapidly and fully, and he has to be an excellent observer. The prose he uses is not judged on its literary quality. There are different things it has to consist of. It has to be terse. It has to be complete. The subject itself has to be interesting enough to lure the reader, rather than the style of the writing. You really can't make a blanket statement to that effect, because in the final product of a news magazine, it is several cuts above the daily paper stories. But that's because of this process. The product of the news magazine reporter himself, it used to be that he wrote exactly like
a daily newspaper reporter. Now, as I'm sure you're aware from reading the news magazines, frequently the reporter will sign the story. He will actually write it, and they skip this intermediate step. It's a fairly recent development in news magazine publishing that reporters have even gotten bylines. Now they do, they sign them at the end of the piece.
RITCHIE: Although there will often be a group of names rather than a single name.
McGHEE: Yeah. Now, what that means is again there was some writer that put everything together. Those reporters in all probability did not bring any special style or method of writing to the piece at all. Some writer in New York wrote it from reports from everybody mentioned.
There's a specialized knack, I guess, to newsletter writing, which is much more akin to a soundbite on a television. They write a sentence or two and try to make you think that it's really important. I don't understand why anybody subscribes to those things. I think they're a big scam. They seldom have any information in them that isn't available in the daily press or in the general periodical press. They charge a fortune for them frequently, and you can read one in fifteen minutes and then discard it. I've seen hundreds of them come in and out of the gallery, but I've never seen any of them that I thought were worth their salt, even the big ones, Kiplinger. I mean, it's the same stuff, week after week after week: watch for tax increases; or watch for a tax reduction. What the hell? Like they're giving somebody inside information.
The people that work for the political journals, they have to write differently. They don't do much reporting. What they do is read the daily newspapers and then pontificate. And when they do original reporting on a story, their product is frequently far superior to what the daily newspaper report is. They put things in context better. They have more time to polish it. They write better. There is a difference between somebody that writes even the news sections for say the National Review, or the New Republic, or the Nation, Commonweal, any of the magazines that have a thoughtful, deeper content.
RITCHIE: Have many of them come up out of daily reporting into periodical reporting?
McGHEE: Yes, frequently. The basics are the same. You have to be literate and you have to be interested. Apart from that, there's not much to it. [chuckles] I always denigrate the profession, if it can be called a profession. I make people angry all the time. I say, "Jesus Christ, you're really cheating the public, cheating your employer. Somebody tells you something, and you tell somebody else, and that's what you get paid for doing. You're a gossip. You're nothing else. You're not any more than that." It's the simplest thing in the world to write a newspaper story. It is not difficult. And I don't understand, really, how a television reporter can not hate himself for what he's passing off as information. [laughs]
RITCHIE: Could you describe some of the more memorable members of the periodical press gallery, the people that you appreciated the most, or respected the most, or enjoyed the most as periodical reporters?
McGHEE: Well, because I came from the daily journalism wing of the profession, I liked the news magazine reporters better. I mean, I got along with them better, I respected them more than the opinion writers, and particularly the newsletter writers. I have nothing but contempt for them. Well, I don't have contempt for the individual, but I have contempt for the product. For names well, that gets into personalities. You like people maybe because of what they do or write, but you like them for a million other reasons too. I obviously had my favorites, the people that I enjoyed seeing coming into the gallery, that I looked forward to talking to, and exchanging opinions with, and joking. Half of newspapering is camaraderie, a good half of it.
RITCHIE: When they came in, would they want to hear if you'd picked up something lately, what's going on, what's the latest gossip?
McGHEE: Those people that I'm talking about, they understood that when I said something that was calculated to be amusing or funny or just in the give and take of conversation, that they weren't going to write that. It was just
the same relationship that you'd have with a good friend. I don't know whether I'm getting to the answer to your question or not, but I guess it's easier to think about people that I had no respect for in the big time.
RITCHIE: Okay, could you name a few of those or give me an example?
McGHEE: Yeah, I can. I had no respect at all for Sam Shaffer. He had the biggest ego for any reporter I've ever known. I think maybe I mentioned earlier that I never called a senator or a congressman by his first name in public. I never have. Sam used to embarrass people by saying, "Well, Mike, how about this?" to Mansfield. Call Hugh Scott "Hugh" all the time. And if there's anyone you wouldn't call by his first name it was Hugh Scott. Even his wife, I don't imagine! [laughs] Sam would always do that. He made great demands on the gallery staff. I recall that probably during the first week that I was in this job, Sam used to take the Congressional Record home with him at night and read it before he went to bed. He read it thoroughly, I assume. Well, one afternoon, someone had inadvertently gotten the Record of the day before on the top of the pile in the gallery. Sam took the thing and didn't even look at it, went home, crawled into bed at eleven o'clock or whenever, and started reading it, and he noticed that he had gotten the wrong Record. So he called me up and he said, "I got the wrong Record today." I said, "Well, what do you want me to do about it, Sam?" [laughs] He said, "What am I going to do about it?" I said, "I don't know what you're going to do about it." What he wanted me to do was come to the Capitol, get him a Record, and take it out to him. We lived in the same neighborhood. Well, I just sloughed him off. I said, "Hell no, I'm not about to do that." He would send Louise, my assistant on errands for him, personal errands, "go to the Document Room and get me something." He didn't have time.
He was demanding, officious, and also--now, this is personality stuff, but John Lindsay, who was just his opposite, who worked for Newsweek too, was a great fellow. Sam wrote a file one time for New York. He had been talking to Scott, and in his file he wrote: "The Republican leader Hugh Scott, in a major shift of Republican policy, announced through Sam Shaffer of Newsweek today" [laughs]. Well, nobody was supposed to read that except the guy in New York
who would write the final story. But Lindsay, who was an irreverent man if there ever was one, and couldn't stomach Sam, stole a copy of the file and distributed it to Time and everybody else. [laughs]
Neil McNeil was just the opposite. He was a bright guy, and talented, a good reporter. But also he would no more think of asking me to bring him a Record at night than the man in the moon. Individuals, well, I don't know, on the spur of the moment I hesitate to get into characterizations.
RITCHIE: It sounds like some of them took on some of the status of their publications. In other words, a certain imperiousness came if you reported for a certain periodical. If you were Newsweek, you could act like Shaffer did. Perhaps others were a little more down to earth.
McGHEE: Yeah, but generally I guess there's a homogenization. You look at a reporter and you don't really think of him being a magazine reporter or as a daily reporter, and now it's even more so. When people refer to the press now, half the time they call it the media--which is a bad word. I never used that word in regards to journalists, to writers. I don't like to be lumped in that term with electronic people.
Well, I hardly know where to go from here, Don. I can't answer your last question, really. I'm just not capable of doing it.
RITCHIE: Okay, well as we talk about other things, some individuals may come up as particular examples. But I'd like to go back to when you started as head of the periodical press gallery. You started at an auspicious moment, right in the middle of the Watergate investigation, the big story of the seventies.
McGHEE: Of the century. The only one that ever led to a resignation of a president.
RITCHIE: It must have been an amazing time to try to coordinate press coverage.
McGHEE: Well, we got the mechanics of the coverage of the thing down pretty good. That was my first big hearings, which I as superintendent attended almost every day. Our division of seats in the Caucus Room was fortuitous for us. I had enough seats that I could accommodate everyone, and we devised a system we papered the place, I designated where the big three news magazines would be. They got the choice seats. They had seats where they could see the witness, they were up front, they had a profile view of the witness. The color is very important to those people, and once they were in place I put logos down on their spot and nobody else could have that. They had to occupy, and if they weren't there they had to have somebody there, because the seats were at a premium and we couldn't have empty seats there with a reporter not being there. With that caveat, I arranged to have permanent seats for lots of publications, as long as they were occupied. If they weren't, I'd say, "Well, somebody else is going to be sitting in there, and if you come in late that's tough luck. I'm not going to kick somebody out of there because you didn't show up on time." For a reasonable time we'd hold the seats. But the mechanics were fine. It worked out good.
I was fascinated by it. I had just come from being a reporter. And as I told you earlier the desk was just within an inch of assigning me full time to that damn story, with no resources. It would be a very, very difficult story for a wire service to handle. You could not do the type of reporting that the Post and the New York Times did on it, you just didn't have the resources, therefore you were always trailing. You wrote the official record, which really wasn't what that story was about. I was fascinated by those hearings.
I still compare--I guess the two worst men that I've known in public life were probably Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. Johnson was venal. He was a thief, and he used the government to line his own pockets. He used the government politically to assure his reelection. He grabbed for power. But his venality really did not harm the Republic. He didn't subvert the Constitution. In my opinion Nixon would have done anything--and he did do it--he would destroy parts of American liberty without compunction. As far as I know, Johnson never did that. He'd steal, and he personally was power-mad, but I don't think he ever was in a governmental sense. If he could run things, that's all he wanted. I
think he had a respect for the institutions of this country, and I don't think Nixon had that at all. I think he was a main chance guy from the word go. And that all came out, of course, in Watergate. Using the FBI and the CIA for partisan purposes was terrible. Johnson, we are aware now, had [J. Edgar] Hoover over and was listening to all this rubbish about Martin Luther King and his sexual prowess, and all that kind of stuff. It amused him. As far as I know, he never used it. But Nixon did.
Those are just personal insights from the Watergate hearings, and episodes. John Dean was in college when I came to Washington. He was in law school at AU, and I live right by American University. He was a life guard at our swimming pool. He married the step-daughter of Tom Hennings, who lived in my building. I was a swimmer, that was my sport in college, and Dean was a magnificent swimmer, absolutely wonderful. He was a life guard there, a young kid then, twenty, twenty-one years old, I guess. I lost track of him after he got out of school, until he showed up in the Nixon administration.
Many of those characters in the Watergate, who were household words during that whole episode, have rehabilitated themselves. Dean for instance, I guess, has. He seems to be leading a happy life.
RITCHIE: [Jeb Stuart] Magruder's a minister right now at a church in Kentucky.
McGHEE: Magruder and [Charles] Colson, and [John] Ehrlichman, for God's sake, has done a complete about face. I don't know about [H.R.] Haldeman.
RITCHIE: Did the revelations that were coming out at that time shake the assumptions that the Washington press corps had about government and politicians? I know that many of the top political reporters were very disbelieving of the initial story. At least the folklore is that it took two crime reporters for the Washington Post to focus attention on it when the national press didn't think there was much to the story. Was that a watershed in the way that reporters looked at the government?
McGHEE: Yes, I think so. I think when all of the developments came out, and as the story grew, that it resulted in that. It resulted too in a suspicion among the younger people that were coming into the trade that if those two local reporters on the Post could become such celebrities, that they had a chance too. It certainly changed the respect that reporters of my generation had for the elected public official. I mean, if a congressman or a senator can convince several million people to vote for him, and to send him to our Congress, it seems to me that the presumption is that he has something on the ball, and that you should respect the people's choice, and that you shouldn't just assume that he's a crook simply because he holds office. But I think that was turned on its head by Watergate. Many reporters now believe that you have to prove yourself innocent, a public official does. I don't think that's a good development, but it's not something that is going to really retard the development of the nation and the republic, or do it great harm, for people to have a disrespect for public officials. And frequently they don't deserve any. But just to automatically assume that everybody who gets elected is a crook somehow or other seems to me not to be the proper approach for a constitutionally protected entity, the press, and that protection given because the founders thought an informed public was important to a democracy. I, can't make the leap there that thinking that someone has to prove himself innocent is somehow or other good for that process. I think it's bad for it.
RITCHIE: It seems as if now even if the reporter doesn't necessarily think that the politician is venal, at least the editor and maybe the reader expect that that's the case. They seem to think that a positive account of any politician is somehow insufficient. I'm thinking about how the Washington Post did a series on Dan Quayle recently by Bob Woodward and David Broder, and it got terrible reaction from the rest of the news media and from readers writing into the paper, that it was too soft. They wanted something more negative, despite years of negative reporting on Quayle, they really didn't want to hear anything else.
McGHEE: Yeah. I was interested in reading many of the letters to the editor on that series. I didn't read the first part of that series, I was out of the country. But when I came back I did read the final installment, which had some
digs at Quayle. It brought out a lot of things and reinforced some things of people's perceptions of him as being a lightweight and just not having enough substance to him to become president, or to take over the presidency. But the letters were, as you say, many of them just couldn't understand why this idolatry. I don't know, I didn't read all of them. I didn't read the first four or five, I only read the last couple, maybe only the last one.
But generally speaking, I think that the present journalistic class tends to view public officials with a great deal of suspicion. I don't really find the camaraderie between the press and the people they cover as somehow or other incestuous or bad, like many reporters do now. On the other hand, I don't hold them in awe, either.
RITCHIE: Is there as much camaraderie between politicians and the press now as there was when you first came here?
McGHEE: I think there's less. `
RITCHIE: Do you have any sense why?
McGHEE: No, unless it grows out of this Watergate thing. Politicians are suspicious of reporters. They bring a different perspective to what journalism is. I guess most print reporters probably got here to Washington through covering state legislatures, and they're much more loose. You know people, you grew up with them frequently if you're covering your own state legislature. I don't know. I made some good friends among senators. [William] Proxmire was a good friend of mine. Jim Pearson of Kansas was a dear friend, a close friend. I don't want to give the impression--I just liked those people as people. I don't think there's much of that goes on now. I mean, the big columnists, the big time guys, they'll take somebody to lunch and they'll call themselves friends, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about enjoying each other's company without benefit to the senator or to you.
I like to play tennis with Ted Stevens. One time I was playing tennis with him at his tennis court. We had a doubles match and he had invited a senator
from Kentucky, Dee Huddleston, and [Malcom] Wallop., So it was me and Stevens and Huddleston and Wallop. We were playing at seven o'clock in the morning. At that time, Stevens lived across the street from Georgetown Hospital in that development there of fancy townhouses, and they had some tennis courts. I don't live far from there, I don't know where the other two live, but we all showed up at seven o'clock in the morning. I had my tennis bag sitting on the court, and I bent over to get something out of it, and I popped my back out. Now, this was before we started playing. I didn't want to leave those three guys there without a fourth. They weren't going to get anybody else at seven o'clock in the morning. They couldn't call anybody up and have them there in time to play. So I went ahead and tried to play, and I just hurt my back further. Well, I finished the match all right, but I could hardly walk when I got through. I could hardly move. I complained, and I told Stevens what the hell had happened to me. He said, "Christ Almighty, you shouldn't have been playing." But he took me down to his house, which was just a few steps away. He had a fancy bathroom with a Jacuzzi in there. He insisted that I get in that damn tub of his and stay there for several hours. He had a hearing, a meeting at the Capitol, he had to leave. His wife and little baby were there, and they were going to go someplace. He went off and said, "I don't want you to get out of there. I want you to stay in that thing for an hour and then go to the doctor if you don't feel good." But he was genuinely feeling for me, you know. And that doesn't occur very much anymore, I don't think.
RITCHIE: Was one of your jobs as superintendent to try to work as an intermediary between the senators and the press, to set up interviews and facilitate matters at all?
McGHEE: No, never to do that, never to set up interviews. If a reporter wanted to interview a senator he had to make his own arrangements. Generally, what we would do, if the police were unduly restrictive of reporters and their movements around the Capitol, they'd complain to us, to me. I would call the chief of police and say, "What's going on here?" If I couldn't get satisfaction with that, I'd go to the leadership, just go and say, "Look, we've got a big problem here. Why are you shutting off the second floor? I've got a jillion reporters who want to wander around down there." We'd always work things off. That was
one of my jobs, to be a liaison to the Senate, to ease the way for reporters to do their jobs, to cover it. There were all kinds of obstacles put in there way.
But then sometimes you get a privilege and a reporter thinks, "Well, this is the way it is for all times." And circumstances change. When they blew the Capitol up a couple of times, with bombings, the police said, "You can't come down here [to the second floor outside the Senate chamber] anymore." Well, we got that straightened out.
RITCHIE: Did the press ever complain about individual members of the Senate who were uncooperative?
McGHEE: Yeah, occasionally. Committee chairmen you know are really kings. They're really dictators. Whatever they say goes, and if they have a particular reporter friend they might obviously give him a document and somebody else didn't get it. This other guy will come to the gallery and say, "Look here, this is absolutely not fair. That chairman gave this guy this, and he goes out and he beats me with it, and I'm getting all kinds of stuff from my editors." My first reaction always is, "Well, what do you want me to do about that?" I said, "Did you talk to the senator about that?" Half the time no, they didn't go to the senator, so they want to know if I can't do something about it. I just say, "Well, yeah, I can call up the senator and ask him if he's going to make something public if he can't make it public to the galleries, which is the general understanding that we have, and we see that everybody gets it." But I said, "That's his business. If he wants to give the New York Times a document, what the hell? I can't go to him and tell him not to do it."
And the cops. The galleries have more problems with the police than they do with anybody else, more than they do with the members. When they put the magnetometers all over the Capitol, it caused a great consternation among the press. They limited the press to certain entrances, still is limited now, to where they can go in and out of the Capitol and the office buildings. I have mixed feelings about that. I understand that television people have to move their cameras in and out of the building, and their equipment, photographers do, and they dislike being searched, and have to open up all those boxes and carrying
cases that their equipment is in, and have it gone through. I understand their dislike of that. But I always come back to the constitutional right of the Congress to be sovereign in its own house. It really wouldn't upset me much if they said: "Reporters, you are surrogates for the public, but we are not going to give you special privileges to carry out that function. You come in with the tourists."
Now, when they put all the magnetometers in they initially put a system in that reporters could not--that was before they designated the north and south doors on each side of the Capitol as press entrances--before they did that, they locked those doors up. They weren't going to allow anybody to use those doors. They said, "If you've got a credential you can go to the head of the public line." Well, that didn't work well. You've got some tourists standing out there in the hot sun for a couple of hours and some reporter comes up and gets in the head of the line and goes through, that irritates the public. My belief is that reporters are generally covering something for the public and they should be treated like the public. They should not have any special consideration. But as a practical matter that won't work.
They've got a rule in the Senate that the only place that you can make notes in the gallery is in the press gallery. The history of that, which I'm sure you're aware of, is that in the middle of the nineteenth century, lobbyists would write notes and toss them over the railing to the senators and say, "vote this way or that way." It became a terrible thing. They wrote rules one year, and I have no idea when, they said, "the only writing will be in the press gallery." Well, frequently people get pissed off as hell about that. They want to take notes in there, and we have to stop them and say "you can't do that, I'm sorry." The doormen have to do it, we don't have to do it, not the superintendent of the gallery staff. But they say: "Well, look at that guy there, he's taking notes. Why does he have any more privileges than I do? I'm a taxpayer, I've got a right to be here." And so forth. I can understand that attitude on the part of the public. But those are hazards of the trade.
RITCHIE: I asked if you had ever intervened with the senators. Did the senators ever come to you as the superintendent?
MCGHEE: Yep, they have.
RITCHIE: In terms of their interests, or their press releases.
McGHEE: They have on occasion, and it causes us great problems. We turn down a magazine, for instance, and then the magazine publisher goes to his senator and says, "Look, I can't cover the Senate, they won't let me." Then they will write and say, "Why can't we do this? Why can't you let my publisher in, the reporters for this publication?" We would say, "Well, senator, they don't qualify. It's your rules." We have to be politick in our responses, but firm. Frequently what happens--and this occurs all the time a new congressman will come to town from a small, rural paper to write some chit chat on a weekly basis, or even a daily basis, for the paper back home. So the first thing she does is come up here and apply for a press credential. Well, is she a full time journalist? No. Does she earn her living doing this? No. Is she hired for a special article and paid? This is a gallery for professional journalists, and we just can't admit these people unless that's how they make their living. Then you get somebody that's retired. Now, what's the difference between that congressman's wife who wants to do this, and wants privileges of the gallery, wants to wear a press card, and the retired guy who works part time and is also a dilettante really. The press credential will get you a lot of places. It's a valuable document. It should not lightly be given out. It should be reserved for people that actually need it. Well, when a congressman's wife applies, we have to go to him. Nine times out of ten he will just say, "fine, forget about it." He can get her in any place he wants to, anyway. They always understand that we can't give them a credential.
I've forgotten the senator, the publication was from Indiana, it was a Catholic diocese publication, maybe it was just published in Indiana.
RITCHIE: Could it have been Vance Hartke?
McGHEE: Could have been Hartke, but I can't remember. Anyway, this magazine obviously didn't qualify. Under the rules, church publications are not
admitted. In the first place, they're not published for profit. So then they come back and say, "profit has nothing to do with us covering this. What difference does that make?" Well, we try to explain: "You go to your congressman. If you want to change the rules, go to the Rules Committee and we'll do whatever they say. But so far they say this. . . " That was Godawful. They brought down the wrath of the Catholic Church on our gallery. Finally, I just gave up about it. I wrote a long report. It seems to me [Mark] Hatfield was involved in this somehow or other, too. Anyway, the editor was a priest, all of the reporters worked with the Church, and they distributed the thing in the churches on Sunday, there would be stacks of them there and people could pick them up, and if they wanted to pay there was a box they could put a quarter in. If they didn't, they just took it free. All kinds of reasons that they shouldn't have been in the gallery. It wasn't journalism as we understand it, what these galleries were set up for. Well, there is a correspondence file up there in the office I'm sure, but I had to write I don't know how many letters of explanation. I guess I just finally wore down the senators who were involved.
We had a case one time where we had problems with the Secret Service. There was a German fellow who was not really legitimately--he called himself a contract writer, and he had some German publications for which he wanted to be credentialed here to work for. But we could never find out if he was legitimate or not. He had been credentialed in the daily gallery, and they kicked him out. He came over to our gallery, wanting credentials and we investigated him. He was working for an Annapolis weekly, so we gave him a credential on the strength of that. He went in the gallery one day in the chamber and he disrupted the proceedings. So we just took his credentials away and said, "you can't come back." He sued us, and had a lawyer come in. That was right after the Senate hired its own counsel. The White House generally demands that the Congress issue credentials before they will. That's not always the case, but frequently we will not issue them credentials. For political reasons, or other reasons, the White House may want some publication in, so they make an exception and they give them a White House pass. Well, we took this guy's credential away from him before he had gotten a White House pass, so he tried to get one down there, and he didn't have ours, so they turned him down.
I've forgotten what administration it was, but some president was going to go to the National Press Club, and this guy belonged to the National Press Club and he was trying to worm his way in for coverage of this presidential appearance down there. He was an obnoxious guy. Somehow or other he slipped and fell and he blamed the Secret Service for roughing him up, and he sued them. The suit involved us too. To settle the suit, the Secret Service paid him five thousand bucks. Well, we were furious when we found that out. And we could not get it through to the Senate counsel that this guy did not qualify, he was breaking the rules of conduct for correspondents, which were under rule one, and we doubted his bona fides to begin with, and then he had this outrageous thing of getting up in the gallery. There was enough right there to disqualify him. Well, we finally got rid of that case, but it really rankled us that the Secret Service capitulated. They paid him off, I guess, because they didn't want to bother with the suit.
We had another instance, the State Department frequently sends up reporters that come from abroad and represent publications. We apply the same rules to foreign publications as apply to domestic ones. If a publication is a government publication, or if it has governmental ties, as many do, particularly in the Middle East, why we turn them down. That infuriates the State Department press office, because that press office like most governmental press offices is designed not to advance the interests of a free press but to advance the interests of the department or the politician heading it. That's a truism. That's not something I'm making up. But over the years we have discovered that this is the fact. Well, the State Department is interested in pacifying for diplomatic reasons foreign correspondents--correspondents here for foreign publications. They sent this guy up, and he worked for, I believe it was a Syrian publication, but I'm not sure. They'd give us these magazines in Arabic, and I can't read them or understand them. But I got somebody who could read Arabic, and he read the masthead and said this was obviously a governmental publication. So I told the guy, "I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do for you." And he was irate. He was furious, and threatening, and disrupting the operations of the gallery, shouting. We got rid of him okay. It was so bad that the sergeant at arms had to come in and find out what the hell the racket was all about.
Somebody from his office came in. And the cops out in the hall were sticking their head in. I finally just told the police, "Get rid of this guy."
So the State Department called--I guess it was [Claiborne] Pell that was chairman [of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee], just raising holy hell with us about the treatment that we had given this guy. Pell wanted to know: what's going on? He had one of his men come up and inquire and we explained the situation to him. We never did credential the guy. He never applied for White House privileges, but the State Department gave him their credential. He later went up to the United Nations and he was arrested as a terrorist. [laughs] They found arms on him, or bombs, or some damn thing. I'll never forget that incident.
But we have a lot of problems with the foreign press. The most recent incident was with a correspondent for an Egyptian magazine. In Egypt, after they got rid of [King] Farouk, they rewrote the Egyptian constitution and it says that all of the public media is owned by the government. They claim they have freedom of the press. The government gives a franchise to the publisher, and from then on the publishers say that they never have any government interference, but it's there, the ownership lies within the government, which we go to, the ownership of the magazine, to decide whether they comply with our rules. So this correspondent called up and wanted credentials. I didn't know all of this until I got to investigating it. I called the Egyptian embassy and talked to their press office and he explained this to me gratis. He told me that the press was owned by the government. So I wrote back to this Arabic lady and told her that we couldn't do anything for her because her publication was a governmental publication and they were not permitted. Then she gets into this business: it's the biggest Arab magazine there is, circulated all over the Middle East. And she says there has never been any interference. This is a quirk in the Egyptian law, that's why they have ownership, but they don't have anything to do with the publication, they don't have anything to do with the profits. We don't give them money. We're a money-making outfit.
Nevertheless, we turned them down. She finally just gave up. I talked to her and explained to her that I was fully sympathetic with her case, and I offered
that we would do anything we could to ease her time up here. She wanted the credentials, she didn't really care about covering Congress. She wanted it for other purposes. I couldn't give her a credential, but if she ever came up here to the Capitol she should come in and see me and we'd see if we couldn't make space for her in the gallery. If she wanted to use the facilities, we would look the other way. We would give her the privileges, but we couldn't officially recognize her in any sense. She cursed me out on the telephone and said forget it.
RITCHIE: I gather that the larger number of people who are credentialed don't use the galleries. They use the card, they want to be on the mailing list, but they don't come into the galleries. Because there are thousands of people who hold credentials to the daily and the radio-tv gallery.
McGHEE: And to the periodical gallery too. We have close to two thousand up there now, I guess. Actually we have a room about three times this size. If they all tried to use it you can imagine what would happen! But they go to the committees, lots of them do. But you're right, they don't use the galleries much, and the periodical gallery particularly.
RITCHIE: Also in terms of foreign correspondents, I remember when I first started working with the Foreign Relations Committee on some documents I was editing for them, the committee staff assured me: "When we publish these documents, the first people who will show up will be the TASS reporters, and we just assume that they're all KGB."
THE STANDING COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENTS
Interview #5
Thursday, January 23, 1992
RITCHIE: I was saying that the problem for the staff here in the Senate Historical Office is that we have to present the same information to both sides, to both parties, and you said that that's similar for gallery superintendents?
McGHEE: That's right. Surely. That's exactly the case. Frequently reporters will ask us superintendents for information which we may have but are reluctant to pass on, the reasons being if the information is sensitive in any sense because to give one reporter information would give him an advantage over another. It's just not a proper thing to do, but it frequently occurs. Superintendents get asked all the time about inside stuff in the Senate. It's not a real problem with us. We of necessity have to be involved in security matters in the Senate to protect the rights of the press. We have influence but not a veto over what reporters think are outrageous obstacles put in their way of movement, and coverage, and access. But that's an aspect of the job where there really is a conflict between our loyalty to the press and to the Senate. The Senate pays our salary, and it's our boss. Frequently the reporters don't understand that. They fall back on this First Amendment stuff all the time. Oh, the smarter ones understand, but frequently the firebrands don't.
RITCHIE: I guess they want to know: are you one of us?
McGHEE: That's true. We hire you to manage the galleries. You're our employee. I told them, ever since I got the job, "I am not your employee. I am a U.S. Senate employee. If you're dissatisfied with the way I conduct this office, then you go to the sergeant at arms and the leadership and tell them that you want to get rid of me, and that's fine. But you do not have absolute control over what I do, particularly in things that are prerogatives of the Senate." It works
out, but difficulties do arise from time to time in that regard. Generally, it's no problem.
I thought I would like to tell you a couple of things. One is real bizarre. The most bizarre incident I saw in thirty years up on the hill occurred on the eve of the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco. There was very little going on at the Capitol at that time. Many of our staff had already gone to San Francisco. I was preparing to go that night or the next day. Senator Thurmond was holding a hearing, perhaps a subcommittee hearing. My recollection is that it was in the Commerce Committee, but I could be mistaken, it could have been another committee. But Thurmond wanted to have a quorum attend to get some bill out of the subcommittee. And Senator [Ralph] Yarborough was a key vote and a key man, he had to make the quorum. The others had gone to the convention already and were not available. Yarborough was hanging around in the hallway and reporters who were still left here were out there. I've forgotten the issue in the bill, but it was important at the time. Yarborough refused to go inside to make a quorum. Thurmond came out of the hearing room, it was in the Russell Building but I don't think it was called Russell back then, and asked Yarborough to come in and make the quorum. Yarborough said, "No, I'm not going to go in there."
Well, Thurmond grabbed him, and they started a wrestling match. There was a ring of reporters there and Thurmond pinned Yarborough on the floor of the hallway. It was a real wrestling match, they were going at each other. It was a dramatic thing. They finally fell to the floor, and Thurmond was on top, and he had Yarborough down and wouldn't let him up. Yarborough was lying there on the floor looking at the ceiling and the reporters. It was a fantastic scene. Yarborough never did go in to make the quorum, but Thurmond didn't let him up until he said "uncle." That's how bizarre it was. Thurmond said, "Say 'uncle' and I'll let you up. Say 'uncle."' Yarborough finally said it and got up and walked away with whatever dignity he could. Well, it was a big story, and it hit San Francisco before the writers were out there. It was a funny thing, it was a passing thing, it has nothing to do with the great issues, but it shows that tempers can get out of control, despite the elaborate politeness with which senators treat one another publicly. Sometimes that fades.
At that convention, incidentally, at which Goldwater was nominated, there were several incidents that come to mind. Looking back on them, they're not significant, but they're funny, and they're things that I have notes on. The press hotel at that convention was a Hilton, right downtown, and the convention itself was at the Cow Palace, several miles from downtown. Everybody had to take taxis and limousines and cars out to cover the convention itself. Well, there was a panhandler on the sidewalk on a downhill slope of the hotel, where the garage was, and I was walking by there, and this panhandler asked a religion writer for United Press, whom I was going to share a car with out to the Cow Palace, for money. This guy's name was Lou Cassels, an unctuous guy, since dead. But he looked at this fellow and he came out with this absolutely tremendous observation. He said, "Don't bother me. If you had any getup and go about you, you'd go out and inherit a department store." [laughs] Because Goldwater was saying all these things about how people were shiftless and welfare was ruining the country and that sort of thing.
I remember his acceptance speech in which he uttered that famous phrase: "Extremism in defense of liberty was no . . . "
RITCHIE: Vice.
McGHEE: Was that the word? I was going to say offense or sin or something. I was a floor man at that convention, and I was standing in the middle of the Pennsylvania delegation, which of course had backed [William] Scranton, and he was ambivalent. He finally backed out completely. My recollection is that Eisenhower tried to get him to challenge Goldwater, but he wouldn't do it. But when that speech was over, normally there's absolute confusion on a convention floor, you can't make head nor tails out of anything. The noise level is so great you can't hear. You're shouting when you're standing right next to someone. You can't move, it's so crowded. But when Goldwater's acceptance speech was over, there as not a single person in the Pennsylvania delegation that applauded. They sat there just numbed by the tenor and tone of the speech.
One of the most vivid recollections I have of that moment was the convention passed out as favors an elaborate array of gadgets and gewgaws and books and material and they were packaged very attractively in a bag that you would keep and carry as a souvenir itself. Normally, these things weren't for the reporters, they were only for the delegates. And they were sitting on the chairs. I remarked about this in my copy, that everybody was clutching those things and wanting them, they were attractive gifts. The Pennsylvania delegation sat on them during the session, they got up and left and they were all left on the chairs. Those people were in utter disgust. Even though they coveted these things, they didn't want anything to do with the proceedings that had transpired, which is a rare sight at a political convention. Because after the nominee is chosen, everybody comes together. There's a common foe then. This was not the case with the Pennsylvania delegation. Of course, that was the convention in which the security people grabbed John Chancellor and hustled him off the floor. I saw that whole thing, I was standing right there. He made that classic remark: "This is John Chancellor, reporting from somewhere in custody." [laughs] Well, I just wanted to get those observations out of the way before we began whatever you wanted to ask, or whatever you wanted me to ruminate about.
RITCHIE: Like Chancellor, I suppose a good reporter has got to have a sense of humor. Humor can be the most devastating thing you can level at people in authority.
McGHEE: Oh, that was a classic response.
RITCHIE: I was reading in this morning's Washington Post about the election for the Standing Committee of Correspondents in the daily press gallery, a campaign which the reporter pointed out has been going on for longer than the current presidential campaign, and seems to be even more heated. Can you tell me about the Standing Committee of Correspondents? There are different ones for each of the galleries, but what's the idea behind it, and why are people so anxious to run for those offices, and those elections are so contested?
McGHEE: Well, generally they're not contested, and sometimes they even have difficulty finding people to serve on them. But that goes in cycles. In
the convention years, as that article pointed out, there's always a contest. for the vacancies because of the assignment of space at the conventions. The same people that use their influence to gain advantage for their own publication through election in that political content would be the first to just raise holy hell about it with the Senate doing the same thing, with a senator using his official position somehow or other to feather his own nest, so to speak, but that is the reason. It's hypocritical as hell. And they all do it. It's a bread and butter sort of thing. I've seen them in the convention years particularly squabble over work space at the conventions, hotel assignments, it's really a competition for the limited space and the better hotels that are available to the press.
The galleries are really run, of course, by the superintendents. For the first ten years or so that I was superintendent of the gallery I had no direction at all. They were so relieved, the members of that committee--there wasn't a great turnover on that committee in those days, the same people were on the committee forever once they got on it. I think Shaffer was on there for twenty some odd years, and so was McNeil. McNeil was on there almost from the inception of the committee until he retired. He was on the committee when he did retire, and he had been on there for years, and years, and years. They were so happy to get rid of the credentialing that they just had a pro forma approval. I don't think that they overruled my recommendations more than three or four times in all of that period.
Every once in awhile somebody would become dissatisfied and run for the committee. Generally, they were busybodies. On our committee it got to be a terrible thing in--what election was it? The one before last, I guess, two elections ago, there were some crazy people that wanted on the committee. They objected to use of committee funds to defray convention expenses. The Senate doesn't do that. The parties pay for transportation and hotels, and a per diem expense allowance for the gallery people who run the press operations at these conventions. It's a thing that the national committees of both parties do not want to be involved in. They do not want to have to referee fights among the press, and they don't. If some big newspapers or magazines are dissatisfied, or they can't get what they want, they go to the parties, and the parties just say, "No, you have to take that up with the gallery people." They actually pass a
resolution, the parties do, putting the control over the allocation of space generally not the housing, that's a difficult thing, but we have a lot of input on where people go, and we can reason with the housing people, oh, for instance, to place regional reporters with their state delegations, that sort of thing. But the allocation of space and the distribution of credentials is really the big thing. And the parties don't want any part of that.
They don't give the galleries enough money, so in our gallery we'd always take three or four people over and above those authorized by the national committees to each convention. We would pay them out of correspondents association dues that were collected through the four year interval. It was thousands of dollars sometimes, we had to pay these people varying sums, depending upon the convention, and the hotels that we got them in. But we defrayed all of their expenses. What we did, the committee just allocated the same expenses that the gallery staff itself incurred, when we hired extra people. There were not enough people, particularly in our gallery, to go around. In the other galleries, they'd have to go outside too, except in the radio tv gallery. They didn't mess with it. The radio tv gallery superintendent Max Barber declined to do it, completely, and the House radio tv gallery took the chore on for independent television and radio stations, but not for the networks. The networks were handled by special committees in each national committee--party people did it, they didn't go through the galleries. They only went through the galleries for the independents. Again, that was to keep control more or less. But our big bitch at the convention--the print press was always--that they give everything to the tellys. We're always limited as to the number of floor passes we can have, and they're in great demand.
That's the chief answer to your question, as to why the elections in the presidential election years are hotly contested. Most of the other three years they're not, really. There might be three people for two seats, or four people running for three in the daily gallery. It's really not a very good system. But it's one that's going to prevail for a longtime, I think. It has the aura of self-policing by the press, and yet there is this overlay of residual Senate control. Every once in a while a reporter will get outraged at the perks that the government supplies the press, and he'll write a big story about it. And some
senator will say, "Well, this is right, why don't we cut out all this business of supplying these people with everything that we do." It costs a lot of money. I expect for the four galleries, I don't know what the physical stuff is, and there's no dollar value you could possibly place on the rent of the U.S. Capitol Building and the office space that they provide. The stationery stuff is minuscule. For years, our allowance from the sergeant at arms was, I think, a hundred and twenty five bucks a year for paper and pencils and stuff that we supplied the gallery reporters with, but then they did away with that, and just whatever we needed we went in and got, really.
But you get somebody writing a story about the prerogatives of the press and how terrible it is, or with that implication, and then some senator will pick that up and say, "Well, why in the hell are we doing this?" And then the leadership has to go to him right quick and say, "Look, we do not want to get involved in deciding who covers up here and who doesn't. Let the press do that themselves." The system works. And it works a lot better than it does in the state legislatures that I've been familiar with, where there is no credentialing, and no control, and very little services, I might add. [laughs] They usually provide a little place for the wires. And some states have elaborate press rooms, too. But I think the system is here to stay, simply because the Senate does not want to get involved in what could become fights among various factions of the press.
RITCHIE: You mentioned factions, and the article today pointed out that one of the candidates was pitching his campaign toward the regional reporters, and another was Adam Clymer of the New York Times, representing the established press, and you had talked about the periodical press gallery beginning to split between the news magazines and the newsletters. Did that become a factor in the elections in the periodical press gallery?
McGHEE: It absolutely did. It became a factor, and now the newsletters prevail in the gallery elections. The Bureau of National Affairs, for instance, which is a newsletter publisher, despite its name--they named it that so it would sound like a governmental bureau, I guess, but it isn't--they have a hundred and some odd reporters who are accredited. The Army Times has over a hundred for
their various service publications. And U.S. News and World Report used to have well over a hundred correspondents accredited. Most of them never used the credential. They just wanted their name in the Congressional Directory. But they've all cut back now. It used to be that Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News in our gallery, and McGraw Hill, the four of them could dominate any election. They would agree on a slate, or if someone got elected from their magazine they would just stay there forever. When there was a vacancy from one of those, the magazine itself was invited to nominate an interim successor until the next election. It was fined in our gallery.
I wanted, and suggested in the seventies, after we let the newsletters in I could see the trend, and I suggested that while the major news magazines still had control, that they should write in the rules a division. It's not written in the rules in the daily gallery, but it's precedent there. The wires have always had one, and they alternated between convention years, because it's very important for the wires to have a man on the committee for allocation of tickets. They need ten times as much as anybody else, of course, and they need somebody there to watch out for their interests. I suggested, making jokes that democracy rears its ugly head all the time and if you don't put in the rules somehow or other that you're going to retain--that three or four of these seats belong to these three or four big companies, that were the reasons for which the gallery was originally created, because they had to have access, and they couldn't get it through the daily gallery. I said, "If you don't do that, you're going to get booted off this committee one of these days. They're going to outvote you." I suggested that they have the four that I mentioned be written somehow or other, like special language is written into tax bills that only affect one company, that we could do it very easily, they could have done it, so that those four companies would always be assured of a seat and would have dominance, and that these people weren't going to come in and ruin the rationale, or change it, for which the gallery was originally established. I never could get them to do that.
As it turned out, the gallery now is dominated by newsletters, and they give damn short shrift to the news magazines. U.S. News and Newsweek don't even have representatives on the committee anymore. Now, this will be the first convention that I haven't been involved in the allocation of tickets. I always saw
to it that these people that needed the tickets got them. I used all kinds of ruses and disguises and things to make sure of that. And these people knew what I was doing, the ones on the big magazines, and of course they were my big supporters. But now, I don't know what's going to happen this year. The election was fought out two or three years ago. A rump organization actually took control of the committee. They were libertarian in their views. They wanted to do away with credentialing. They did not want to charge anybody anything. They did not want the money spent on conventions, because they claimed that the greater benefit was going to too few of the constituents in the gallery. Actually, that's not true, because at the conventions there are no restrictions on non profit publications. The parties want as wide a representation as they can possibly get. They want all, even opposing views to their party. We would always give the National Review as many seats to the Democratic conventions as we would to the Republicans'. That was the way that I handled it. They've got a greater interest, perhaps, in the Democratic convention than they do in the Republican. They want to know who their enemy is. To me, that made sense. And conversely with the liberal publications at the Republican conventions.
These people, they did not believe in the gallery system. They wanted to do away with the galleries. They got elected to the committee to do away with it. They objected to the collection of dues, and they really caused us some horrible problems. We never filed income tax returns on the collection of these dues. We're created by the Congress, an agency, an arm so to speak, an arcane one, and not a legislative committee, not a formal committee of the Senate in any sense, but in the Senate and House rules under the general rule making power of the Senate itself is the authority for the existence of these galleries, the creation of them. These people believed that this was a limitation under the First Amendment, or freedom of the press, and that collecting a six or seven or ten dollar fee was improper. They looked on the card as a license. And they objected to the spending of the money that we did collect. And they wanted taxes paid on it. And they went to the IRS and said, "Look, these people are collecting all this money down here from private companies and they're spending it for the benefit of themselves, and they're not reporting it. It's a violation of the tax code." Well, we fought that out. And the Rules Committees was agreeing
with these guys. It was the Speaker, Jim Wright it was the House parliamentarian, anyway, after consultation with the Speaker, that gave an opinion that the gallery committees were entities of the Congress, created by the Congress, and they were exempt from any filing of taxes.
At one point we had amassed quite a bit of money. We started collecting more money than we spent, when the computers started coming in. The House equipped the press galleries over there with computers. The Senate would not do it. This started in the daily gallery. The gallery went to the Rules Committee and tried to get them to supply computer systems like they had supplied typewriters for years. The Senate Rules Committee refused to do it. So that meant that with the advent of these laptops, and now with these regular pcs, they've allocated space there to individual publications as much as they have. It's a great problem with them, for their own computers, in place, big pcs. Well, we could see that with the advent of newsletters, and particularly these online services which had a periodical publication but really the reporters up here were filing on a daily basis, like Commerce Clearing House was in competition with the Dow Jones people, and the Financial Services. They sold their computer stuff, which was also printed. They really need computers up here in our gallery. So we could see that we were going to have to buy them.
We raised the dues, and several years ago we spent several thousand bucks and bought six of them. It was a big expenditure that depleted the reserves, but we increased the dues in order to care for them. We devised a way the little publications that didn't use the computers, it wasn't quite fair for them to have to have their dues go for the dozen or so people that wanted them in there, and were in control, and demanded them. We didn't have space in our gallery to let everybody have their own. We had to devise some system. So what we came up with was: I think we had eight original users that were insistent that they wanted to use these computers. So we figured out how much they would cost and we took the money and bought them out of the gallery funds. Then we decided that you people who want these have to pay back on a monthly basis a fee for using these things. In return for the fee, you have priority use of these computers. And we wrote rules in the gallery about their use. And once they were paid for, then the computers reverted to the gallery itself and they
were committee property. They were always committee property, but these people wanted them, so they agreed to divide up the cost. The big users did it.
But these people objected, the libertarians that were elected to the committee. They objected like hell to the use of dues for any purpose. They didn't believe in the collection of the dues. They thought to impose a fee on a reporter in order to have access to the Capitol was anathema. We really had a bad two years when they were on the committee. When I first went over there, all the galleries had it at that time, if the Senate or House worked past seven o'clock at night, they would give you out of the committee funds, give the people that were assigned to stay late, they would give a dinner allowance. I think when I went to work there it was three dollars. Over the years it was increased. I think it was ten dollars when the system ended. Well, they really objected to that. They called it a slush fund, that we were being paid. We never reported that on our income tax. It was in and out. We spent it for food. The daily gallery ended it some years before we did. Then the radio tv gallery ended it. The photographers still do it to this day. But then we ended it too, under pressure from these people. We said, "what the hell," and quit it. But in the course of the debates over whether to continue it, these people raised the ethical question about it, and they actually accused me and the House superintendent of stealing the money. They said, "This is a slush fund, and you're dipping into it.
They also objected--our committee for years had our meetings at noon over lunch. They'd have lunch and talk about the problems of the gallery and whatever they wanted to do, and then when lunch was over was the approval or rejection of applications for credentials, which I would present. The meetings weren't necessarily closed, but they were always in a lunch room in the Capitol, and the gallery committee funds paid for them. We'd have two or three meetings a year. Well, they objected to use of gallery funds for that purpose, and they called it a slush fund and said we were dipping into it, gallery moneys. Well, I got so that I didn't even speak to them for the last couple of years, although they were the majority of the committee. I just said, "The hell with that, I don't have to put up with that crap. If they want to fire me, let them try
it." I was prepared, and so were the big magazines, to go to the leadership and say, "These guys are nuts, they're crazy, and they're going to destroy your system up here if you do that." They were prepared. I didn't even talk to them. I would not acknowledge their existence. And at committee meetings, that's something for an employee. That's the first time it's ever been done in the press galleries. I didn't speak to them for almost the whole two years after they made those accusations. I demanded a public apology, and they never gave it, and I said, "The hell with you, I'm not going to have anything to do with you." I wouldn't answer their questions. I isolated them. [laughs] It was a rancorous period.
RITCHIE: Were they defeated in the next election?
McGHEE: They chose not to run. They claimed that getting rid of the lunches that was really the only reform that they accomplished. The committee now meets in the morning and doesn't eat lunch anymore, doesn't spend money for that. But they're still using the money for the conventions, they did it at the conventions as a matter of fact when they were on the thing.
Then they objected to--I always kept a bottle in the office. We kept office booze. It was paid for by the committee. We put it in the ledgers as "committee supplies." We never labeled it as booze, but there was always a bar at our committee meetings, and everybody had a drink or two before we ate. And they found out about that, of course, and they just raised holy hell about that. They got a resolution through when they were in control that there was to be no liquor in the galleries.
RITCHIE: You could tell they weren't journalists.
McGHEE: [Laughs] Well, we stopped buying booze. But I bought my own and kept it in my desk drawer and defied them to do anything about it. They never did. But they raised hell about it. I was violating the rules of the gallery all my last three or four years there. Not that you drank very much, but if you were around here late at night you'd have a drink. We were a very small gallery, so I spent a lot of evenings in the Senate.
Before I forget, your poster of George Tames' photographs reminds me of a story I wanted to tell: Sam Rayburn was very vain about photographs of himself, he was completely bald, and had a little bit of fringe on the back of his head. I used to have my hair cut, when I had hair, in the House barber shop. The barber over there was the one that cut the Speaker's hair, and he used to tell us that that was really an assignment, because Rayburn had very, very little hair, very little even for a fringe, but he was very particular about how it was cut. He was equally particular about photographs. He would not let anybody photograph him from the rear, or a profile view which showed how little hair he had in the back. He always wanted a frontal picture. George was telling me that one time Rayburn was the speaker at a downtown luncheon, and they had one of these head tables with a long array of people seated up there, Rayburn being to the right of the presiding officer, and there was a big audience out front, in a crowded room. Tames was there to take pictures for the Times, and some other photographer had been sent down from New York who had never taken Rayburn's picture before and was unaware of this attitude of the Speaker about how he was photographed. This fellow came in the door, George said, and had his camera and just started clicking right away, all over. He walked up and down in front of the head table taking pictures of Rayburn from every possible angle. And he started around the back to get up on the raised dies where the seats were and take closer pictures from behind. George said, Rayburn motioned to him to come over, and he did. George said, "Yes, yes?" And Rayburn said, "You tell that son of bitch that if he takes a picture from behind me I'm going to stomp him!" [laughs] I don't know whether George told you that story or not.
RITCHIE: So Lyndon Johnson wasn't the only one who was vain about the way he was photographed.
McGHEE: No, both Texans were.
RITCHIE: That's great. Well, going back to the committees and the galleries, we talked about factions, and the types of journalists, but I was also interested in gender in the galleries. What is the situation with women reporters in general? I know for a long time there weren't that many women reporters,
and now there seem to be a lot more, but has there been much tension between the men and the women, or difficulties about women covering Congress?
McGHEE: I don't think so. Women came, as far as I know, maybe the radio tv gallery had a woman on their committee, but I believe that a Washington Star woman named Shirley Elder was the first woman to be on a standing committee of correspondents up here. And that was in, I don't know, the late sixties or early seventies I guess. I remember it was quite a thing. We didn't have a woman on our committee--well, Nina Totenberg worked for a weekly publication called the Observer, and she ran for our committee one year, not long after I was appointed superintendent. Unlike the other committees, there are seven members of the periodical gallery committee and they're all elected at the beginning of a Congress. The election are held at the beginning of a Congress and that committee serves for the duration of that Congress. They're all up on the ballot. I've forgotten the circumstances. I guess somebody was elected that was on the committee and then quit before he took office. In any event, it used to be a really closed shop. There would be an asterisk by the name. If you were on the committee, you didn't have to get a petition signed by others, you were automatically renominated. And the ballot had a notation, "currently serving," or something of that nature, and those people were always reelected.
Well, Nina ran in any event and I think there were some others that ran that year, and she was the top vote getter, apart from the regulars, those that nominated themselves. So then a vacancy occurred almost immediately after the new committee was constituted, so the committee itself has authority under the rules to fill vacancies if they want to. And they did, they filled it, and they selected Nina, who got the next most votes. I believe that she was the first woman to ever serve on the committee. She only served one meeting. I think she was chosen by the committee and then her office said, "No, if we have somebody on the committee, you got the votes, but we don't want you to serve, we want this other man to serve." I can't remember the guy's name. Anyway, it was quite a thing. Nina either had to quit the committee or lose her job. They wanted this man on the committee, and the regular committee went along with it. They looked at it as a seat for the publication, not personal. So Nina
was on the committee a very short time. Subsequent to that in later years, why women ran and were elected. I think there's a majority of women running the committee now.
RITCHIE: When do you think was the real turning point for women? It seems to me now that there are a lot of women reporters up here, but there clearly was a point when women were not welcome.
McGHEE: Well, I think it had to do with the feminist movement that gained in the sixties after Betty Freidan's book, The Feminine Mystique I think it was. You know, it was just a natural thing. The newspapers started hiring more women, and the radio television did, and the magazines did. It was like hiring blacks. They used to not have blacks on big newspapers, and now I know the personnel recruiter, a very good friend of mine, for Newsday. He spends half of his time looking for women and blacks to work. He goes and interviews them. He has a difficult time finding qualified ones. But they really make an effort to do it. And I suppose that's part of it. It's a change in the whole society. Women are doing a hell of a lot of things that they didn't use to do.
RITCHIE: You mentioned black reporters, and I still get a sense that even though the galleries integrated in the 1940s that there haven't been that many black journalists.
McGHEE: Very few, really. In my gallery, the Bureau of National Affairs just recently hired some blacks, and the big news magazines have them now. Newsweek actually hired a news editor who ran their convention stuff one year, a black fellow. There was never an issue in our gallery about credentialing blacks, like it was in the daily gallery years ago.
RITCHIE: Actually, the first black reporter admitted was in the periodical press gallery. Just before the Senate ordered the daily press gallery to admit a black reporter, there was a journalist named Percival Prattis from Pittsburgh ....
McGHEE: I don't know him.
RITCHIE: When the Rules Committee said they had to admit a reporter to the daily press gallery, the periodical press gallery said they had just admitted P.L. Prattis. But he never got much publicity, since all the newspapers focused on the fight over the daily press gallery.
McGHEE: Yeah. It's a ridiculous kind of rule. But we have a lot of black publications in the periodical press gallery. There are very few daily black publications. I'm sure the reason why we had blacks in our gallery was because there were a lot of weekly newspapers. Most of the black press was weekly. The Johnson Publications, which publish Ebony and two or three other black publications, the biggest black publishing company in the country, is only a periodical publisher. And they've been in our gallery for years and years and years.
RITCHIE: There was a Catch-22 for a while, because the black press were weekly newspapers. They couldn't get into the daily press gallery because they were weeklies, and they couldn't get into the periodical press gallery because they were newspapers and not magazines.
McGHEE: That's right. We changed our rules. We used to not admit rural publications, country weeklies. We still admit damn few. A requirement in the rules is that to qualify for credentials a reporter has to be resident in the Washington area, one, and two that he has to make his living solely from press correspondence. Well, there are very few black publications that can afford to keep a correspondent here. A weekly paper just can't afford to do that. But we've relaxed that rule completely now. We used to not let in weekly papers without national circulation, that was the criteria. If you had national circulation and you could keep a man here--or a person here--fine, we'll let you in. Otherwise, no. And then we were prohibited also from granting temporary credentials to people who would not qualify for permanent credentials if they had a Washington correspondent. So that kept out visitors. I ignored that rule. During inaugurations, for instance, you'd have a lot of weekly papers that would want a reporter here. At the beginning of a new Congress, some congressman's whole district wouldn't have a daily paper in it, there were all weeklies. They would come to town and want to cover the proceedings, want to move around the
Capitol. I ignored the rule. As a matter of fact, I ignored a lot of rules over the years. I never ignored a rule if I thought anybody was going to raise hell about it, but frequently they wouldn't know about it anyway, so I just went ahead and accommodated people. I think you have to use some common sense and good judgment about things like that. After all, a gallery is there to accommodate the press, not to exclude them.
RITCHIE: And as you say, most of them couldn't afford to have a full-time reporter in Washington, so therefore they weren't going to be here very often, except for special events. Also with the black press that there was only one black senator in recent times, and there were a couple of black representatives, perhaps there wasn't as pressing a demand among black publications to cover Congress.
McGHEE: Well during the mid sixties, when the Civil Rights laws were passed, there was quite an interest in the black press, and they covered it. We gave temporary credentials to a great many of them, and we credentialed permanently the black newspapers in Washington and Baltimore, and others we gave temporary credentials to when they were down here on special assignment.
RITCHIE: You've been a member of the National Press Club, and that club went through both of those issues. In 1955 the whole membership voted on whether to admit a black member. And it was not until the 1970s that they admitted women.
McGHEE: I was at the meeting when they admitted women. I was still a reporter I think, so it must have been in the late sixties. The present "Miss Manners" in the Washington Post--there were several women there at that meeting in which the membership voted to admit women. They had a bartender, a man named Kelly, and Judith--was that her name?
RITCHIE: Judith Martin.
McGHEE: Judy Martin, yeah. Women were not permitted in the bar. There was a members' bar, and they were not permitted in there as guests.
They could go anyplace else in the club, but that long, oak bar that was there on the top floor, the thirteenth floor, was a man's preserve and women guests were just not permitted in there. When a woman would, inadvertently, pass through the doors and get in there, everybody would raise holy hell and she immediately would say, "Oh, my God, I'm in the wrong place," and get out. Well, it was a big, divisive issue in the National Press Club about admitting women. I was always for admitting them. Anyway, as soon as that meeting was over, I grabbed Judy Martin and I said, "Come with me, we're going to integrate the men's bar, members' bar they called it. So we did. We walked in there, from the annual meeting which was in the ballroom. We walked in and they had this bartender named Kelly. There were no seats at the bar, it was a standup bar. So Judy and I went to the bar. I said, "What will you have?" She ordered a bottle of beer, and Kelly took the bottle of beer and set it in front of her, mean visaged, horrible. He said, "Here you are, ma'am, and I hope to fuck you choke on it." I was furious! I had been chairman of the house committee up there, more or less overseeing those people. Just like the Senate, once you're on a committee up there or have something to do with it, why they defer to you. I raised holy hell about that. Kelly had enough support among the membership that they didn't fire him over it. But it was Godawful. Yeah, I remember that press club fight very vividly.
As a matter of fact, the press club was quite an institution when I first came to Washington. I came here on a Saturday and went into the bureau from Colorado to present myself. Julius Franzen was there, and he was a great participant in Gridiron affairs and in the National Press Club. I just introduced myself. He said, "Well, the very first thing we have to do is get you to join the National Press Club." We went immediately from the seventh floor to the top floor of the club to sign me up.
RITCHIE: What's made the press club such an institution?
McGHEE: I think it was Prohibition that made it such an institution. It really was an institution, but it was losing its clout when I came. It was on the downhill slide. It's chartered by the Congress, the club is. Because of the charter the original building was built, I believe, with some federal aid. I'm not
sure about that. But when the hippie generation came in, they looked askance at the club. With the advent of the new journalism it was in the decline. I haven't participated in club affairs down there for years now. Working at the Capitol it was inconvenient. When our offices were in the building, I was up there all the time. But when I was at the Capitol, especially in this job, when I quit being a reporter I wouldn't go down there very much. I haven't been down there in a year, I guess, very seldom. It's difficult to go down there after work, the Senate works late, and there's no place to park.
RITCHIE: I get the sense that it was a great watering hole that brought people together. If they weren't at the press galleries, that was one place where reporters could mingle.
McGHEE: Yeah. The problem was they had so many categories of membership that weren't reporters, in order to pay for the damn place. They had lobbyists in there, and news sources, government information people. They had half a dozen categories of membership. But it was fun. I enjoyed participating in club affairs when I did.
RITCHIE: Why was their such a resistance to women reporters as members?
McGHEE: Well, it had always been a male club, like everything else. There are still clubs that don't admit women. The University Club I don't think does to this day. Do they?
RITCHIE: I don't know. But on one hand it was a club, with a bar and a card room, but on the other hand they used to invite in the president and foreign dignitaries, and their lunches were news stories.
McGHEE: When Johnson became president, Liz Carpenter was a real firebrand in wanting women admitted to the club. She actually prevailed on Johnson to discourage foreign visitors from speaking at club luncheons, threatened to anyway. Well, that never held, that never worked, because the foreign visitors wanted to speak up there. They viewed it as a great honor. But
I can remember Liz just raising holy hell about it when she was Lady Bird's press secretary. They finally got them in. So they must have been admitted after 1965 or '66. I'm sure I was still a reporter.RITCHIE: Even the Gridiron Club, women reporters used to picket the Gridiron Club dinners for a while. It wasn't until about 1972 that Helen Thomas was finally admitted into the club. They saw it as a source of news and also as a source of access to news that they were being shut out of. Now, I suppose a lot of members of the club would wonder what was all the fuss about? Why were people in the sense that those barriers disappeared, or at least were reduced.
McGHEE: Well, they've disappeared, at the press club anyway. Women have been presidents of the club now. An Oklahoma woman, Vivian something, was the first woman president.
RITCHIE: Mary Kay Quinlan was president.
McGHEE: Yeah, not long ago. Presently they have a woman president. Kaylor is her name. I've got to do something about my membership. When I went to the gallery, the superintendents were honorary members and I didn't pay any dues for all those eighteen years. Now I'm going to have to go down and reinstate myself in some category. I think they have a retired category.
RITCHIE: We'll give a copy of your oral history to their library. Barbara Vandegrift has been putting together a library and archives and I'm sure they would be happy to get it.
McGHEE: Well, I hope you do.
RITCHIE: Are there any areas that you feel that we haven't been covering, especially with the press galleries?
McGHEE: Well, I guess the major thing that occurred in my tenure as superintendent there was that the Supreme Court in effect upheld the right of
the galleries to operate the credentialing function. And it was touch and go. I'll briefly give you the history of that.
Consumer's Union was a non profit organization, and they publish a publication called Consumer Reports, which is a. very fine publication, they do good work. They applied for membership in the gallery. They wanted to cover the environmental and product safety hearings and all that kind of stuff. We had to turn them down because under the rules they were ineligible. They were a membership organization, they were a non profit organization, and they did not qualify under the rules. We turned them down. They reapplied. They went to the Rules Committee. If the gallery committee turns somebody down, the residual authority resides with the Speaker and the Senate Rules Committee, under both Senate and House rules, and they have the ultimate say about operation of the galleries.
The Rules Committee upheld the gallery committee's rejection, so Consumers Union sued and they went into U.S. District Court, and they asked for a declaratory judgment asserting that the congressional rules violated their rights under the First and I believe the Fifth Amendment, but I can't recall why the Fifth was there. They asserted that the Congress was violating their rights by excluding them from press coverage. There was a trial, and in those days the Justice Department handled litigation for the Congress. This was a pesky suit as far as the Justice Department was concerned, and they assigned a lawyer to it who had never tried a case before for their litigation section. And that person, a young woman, she did not understand the right of Congress to write its own rules and to authorize occupancy in the Capitol. They could do whatever they pleased. Well, Judge [Gerhardt] Gesell took the opposite view. I was named the defendant in the suit, as the officer who declined to issue the credential, and the Congress was named because of the rule, but I was the one they sued. Well, we had the trial, and Gesell wrote an opinion which was really blistering. It said, "A small group of periodical correspondents has arrogated to itself the right to decide who may exercise their First Amendment rights." It was a blistering opinion.
But Consumers Union made a fundamental mistake. They asked for a declaratory judgment. When Judge Gesell issued that opinion, he gave it to them. He declared that our rules were unconstitutional, and violated their rights, but that's all he said. They immediately came back to the gallery and said, "We've got this court opinion now, give us our credentials." And the gallery committee said, "That's Gesell's opinion. The hell with you, we're not going to give you credentials. We work for the Congress." So they went back to Gesell and asked for an injunction. They asked the court under its previous ruling to enjoin the Congress. They asked for a temporary injunction and then a permanent open. Gesell declined both. He said, "I gave you precisely what you asked for. Those rules are unconstitutional. You wanted me to declare that, and I did. I'm not going to enjoin the Congress from anything. This is a coordinate branch." He didn't write an opinion, he just did not entertain their motion for an injunction to enjoin us to refrain from denying them it's all in the negative credentials. So they appealed to the Circuit Court of Appeals.
Well, the Rules Committee was kept apprised of what was going on. Our inclination was: until they get some kind of a clear suit ordering us to do this, then we would take it from there. And that was the position of the Rules Committee too. He's not going to enforce his declaration, so the hell with it, just forget about it. When Consumers Union filed with the appellate court for the injunction, the Rules Committee decided that perhaps they did not want a court judgment on the books saying that Congress is violating somebody's constitutional rights, so they decided to fight the case too. Again, there was no Senate legal counsel in those days. So the Justice Department we had raised hell about this young woman, informally we called up the Justice Department and said, "What the hell are you doing? This is a case involving constitutional rights and you're assigning this neophyte to defend the U.S. Congress here." Well, they gave us another man who was equally bad. He actually agreed with Consumers Union that the Congress was violating their rights.
When we could not make him understand what was going on, Neil McNeil went to Speaker Albert and told him that the Justice Department was giving us Godawful lawyers who weren't defending the Congress at all. Albert called whoever the Attorney General was then and said, "Look, we want to defend this
suit." He did it because of McNeil. The House deferred to the Senate Rules Committee. They did not want to get involved. Lew Deschler, who was then the [House] parliamentarian didn't want to have anything to do with it. He hated the press. He didn't give a damn about it. But McNeil got to Albert. Albert made the call himself, and they assigned a lawyer named Koslow, who was brilliant. He was their leading litigator. He was the man who did all the work for the Solicitor General. He was the brains of the litigation section in the Justice Department. He understood the case immediately, and he devastated the lawyer for Consumers Union at the appellate level.
The appellate court declined first on the temporary injunction, just declined to issue it. Consumers Union went to the Supreme Court on that, and I've forgotten which justice denied it. Whoever the justice was who had jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, he just said no. So then they argued the case for the permanent injunction before the appellate court, and the appellate court, in a very fine opinion in my opinion went into the congressional prerogatives as a coordinate branch of government. What they really came down to, the bottom line was: Congress has a right to say who occupies space in the Capitol. And if they don't want a certain class of reporters in there, as long as they are not doing it frivolously, they have that right. And we're not going to interfere with it. Well, Consumers Union went to the Supreme Court on that opinion also, and again the Supreme Court declined cert on it, and by that method the gallery's rules were upheld.
We've had a lot of lawsuits threatened since on various things, but that is the deciding case in the field. Nobody has ever successfully challenged it. An interesting case, though.
RITCHIE: You wind up with the executive branch defending the legislative branch before the judicial branch.
McGHEE: Well, they've changed that now, you know. The Senate has its own counsel now. And so does the House. I was named also as a defendant in that suit I told you about the other day, when that Nazi nut sued us. That one the Senate counsel handled, but it never got to a court trial because, I think
I told you, the Secret Service settled out of court with him and he didn't pursue his case against us. He got, I think, five thousand bucks, and he said that's all he wanted anyway. [laughs] So we never had to face the issue on that one. Since then, when anybody threatens a suit, I always notify the legal counsel. The only time they ever let us down was they decided with these nuts that gallery committee was misusing funds and maybe they should pay taxes on them. They were very leery and reluctant to say out and out to us, "tell them to go to hell," which the House legal counsel finally did, after Jim Wright intervened with them. But they said no, and they wrote an opinion that we were a branch of Congress and not covered by any IRS regulation, as such we were exempt.
RITCHIE And the IRS never pursued that?
McGHEE: No, I knew they wouldn't pursue it. I was searching for legal advice and I called the general counsel of the National Geographic [Society], and he said, "your best bet is to ignore it. The last thing the IRS is going to want to do is get in a fight with Congress, which could ultimately lead to a fight between the executive branch and the Congress. They don't want to do that either. They want to keep things as quiescent as they can." That was his advice. Of course, it didn't work out that way, because these people insisted that we pay those taxes and that we were obligated to pay them. We had a hearing before the Rules Committee, the counsel of Rules Committee--never got to the full committee. Finally, the House took the Senate off the hook on it. But both the legal counsel over here, and I'm not so sure if the counsel of the Rules Committee had had to make a recommendation to the committee itself that it wouldn't have gone against the galleries. To avoid this sort of thing, he might have said: "Well, they shouldn't be collecting those dues anyway. What are they for?" You know, there were all kinds of questions that they raised. But the system is still intact.
RITCHIE: I wanted to ask you about the relationship between the House press galleries and the Senate press galleries, and the standing committees. Is there much interaction between the House and the Senate?
McGHEE: Well, there's only one committee. It supervises the activities of galleries on both sides of the Capitol. In the periodical gallery case, the original superintendent here, the committee thought was incompetent. And in the House case, he was a drunk. They finally got rid of both of them. But traditionally the Senate has always handled all of the credentialing, and all of the convention work, it was all done on this side. In the periodical gallery it was because the drunk over there was absolutely incapable of doing it. The man that did it over here did it out of his hip pocket. I don't guess you can libel a dead man, but he was on the take. He would take gifts from the big magazines, cases of whiskey, television sets. It was a matter of course, he would sell the tickets to lobbyists, and they'd give him stuff. I'll never forget, the first convention that I handled after becoming superintendent was the '76 one in Kansas City. When both of the conventions were over, Neil said to me, "The office wants to know what you would like them to give you as an expression of gratitude for all the help you did for them in the conventions?" I said, "Well, I don't want anything." Neil said, "Boy, am I glad you said that." He said that for years they had been supplying this other guy with booze and gifts and things. So that ended that right there.
There is some rancor between the two galleries, there always was. The former superintendent in the Senate gallery had great contempt for the guy on the other side, would never let him participate in anything. He never went to the committee meetings or anything like that. The gallery committee at that time was interested in upgrading the House press gallery. When this drunk finally retired or died in office, or whatever happened to him, they wanted to change things around a little bit. The Senate pay in the gallery was a little higher than the House, which rankled an eventual superintendent over there. My pay was raised periodically, not only with the COLA raises that came every year automatically, but with merit raises. At one point I was probably making thirty or forty thousand dollars a year more than the House superintendent, and the galleries were supposed to be level. Well, you can understand how that guy felt about that. But he didn't have anything to do. I mean, we still did all of the credentialing, all of the Congressional Directory work, which is a big chore. It doesn't look like it, but you know from editorial work yourself, when you're dealing with sixteen hundred names and addresses.
RITCHIE: And if you leave somebody out!
McGHEE: Yeah. Anyway, they wanted a pay raise, the House did, understandably. But they couldn't make a good case because they had nothing to do. There was absolutely nothing for them to do except keep the gallery open. Because we did all the work over on this side. So the committee was interested in getting them a raise too, and saw it was unfair that on the Senate side we were able to get merit raises, and they weren't able to do it over there. The gallery committee went to the chairman of the House Administration Committee. I don't think it was Wayne Hays. I think it was the man that succeeded him, I can't remember who it was.
RITCHIE: Frank Thompson?
McGHEE: No, it sticks in my mind that it was [Leon] Panetta, but I'm not sure. In any event, they went to him and told him about this great disparity in the salaries and he didn't like that either. That was looking bad. They made the case that it made the House look bad. So he said, "Well, give him something to do then." He said, "Let him take the credentialing." So they said, "Sure, we'll alternate it every other Congress." Well, that wouldn't work, so we said, "We'll be happy to give it to you, but not for two years." When you've got sixteen hundred people having to come up to the gallery to get their credentials, they don't want to have to go to the House side one year and this side the next year. The Senate anyway issues the credentials. The police identification bureau was always on the Senate side, so it was always easier here. So we gave it to them for five years, and then took it back at the end of five years, so you wouldn't every year have to go to a different place and talk with different people and have it done differently. So that's what we did.
And then we traded with the conventions, too. We said, "Well, every other convention the House will take." That's been fairly recently. The last conventions I handled them all and I squeezed them out. They didn't do anything except go. They worked at the convention. But always before that, we had good comity, but there was a personality clash between me and the superintendent over there. We never got along. I didn't like it, and it was a
mistake to give them the credentialing anyway, to take it away from the Senate. They did it for five years, they screwed it up, and when we got it back it was Godawful. It still isn't straightened out right from them having it that long. And they put in a lot of procedures which succeeding committees accepted as precedent and it really wasn't. It was make work. The fellow over there, I know you aren't interested in our personality clash, but he's really a bureaucrat. He was never a reporter, he was a doorkeeper and they hired him for that, and he succeeded in the job. Doesn't know anything about, has no idea about how the press operates or their rationale.
I can remember when Lyndon LaRouche's magazine applied for credentials and he was handling the credentialing, and the recommendations, and was scared to death. They had threatened him. He wouldn't tell the committee who the magazine was. He didn't want to say the name "Lyndon LaRouche" out in public. They finally beat it out of him. "David [Holmes], that's the most stupid thing there is! You're telling us about a problem you've got and you aren't even going to tell us who it involves?" It was that kind of a mentality. Well, they sued too, but they didn't get anyplace. They're not in the gallery at all. It's a political publication that they had.
But there's this competitiveness in all the galleries between them. In the radio tv gallery, Max [Barber] wouldn't have anything to do with the conventions. He told his people: "If you want to go, that's all right with me, but I'm not going to do anything about it. Your first obligation is here to the Senate in any event." So Tina [Tate], the head of the House gallery would take them to the conventions if they'd like to go. The daily gallery, all the credentialing for the conventions as well as the Congress was done over here. The big events around here are the inaugurations, the conventions, and opening days, that's when you really have pressure for seats and things like that. The only thing the House ever did was take the State of the Union addresses because it's always delivered over there. And that's the same way with our gallery. Now, the photographers only have one gallery, only the Senate's. The members of the photographers gallery expect the gallery staff to handle big House hearings, and they did on the impeachment. You may recall that Iran-Contra alternated
between the House and the Senate, and they had to go over there. That ticked off the staff over here. "Let them get their own!"
I think the separation and the divisions in the galleries mirrors the divisions in the houses themselves. You know, the conferences can get very, very rancorous. I remember one time, there was a congressman one time named [Paul] Rogers from Florida. I think he might have been chairman of the House Labor and Welfare Committee. At any rate on a conference bill he was heading the House delegation, and Ted Kennedy was heading the Senate conferees. I had been assigned to cover an atomic energy hearing. It was in the secret room up there [in the Capitol], which was open to go up there. Unbeknownst to me, the conference was going to be held in that room. In those days, conferences were not open to the public or the press. If you violated the rules and attended, why you could get your gallery credentials lifted and they'd kick you out of the Capitol. Well, I walked into this place thinking that it was my hearing, and I noticed all these strange people. There was Kennedy up there and some House members on this side. It didn't dawn on me what this was. I thought, "Well, they'll get up and go in a minute and my people will come in." Well, there was a fight between the House and the Senate and all of a sudden I heard this outbreak it's a circular dais. Kennedy was way over on one side, way across from Rogers. But Kennedy yelled something at Rogers, and Rogers yelled back at him, and the first thing you know there were oaths passed back and forth. Kennedy: "I'll be goddamned if that's so!" "Well, you son of a bitch, it is so!" That sort of thing. I was flabbergasted. There I was, a reporter in a conference, had no business being in there. I was innocently there, but nevertheless, I got up while this fight was going on and everybody's attention was riveted to those two, I got out of there right quick, and nobody ever knew that I was ever in there! [laughs]
RITCHIE: It wasn't a story you could file, was it?
McGHEE: No, I could not write about it! [laughs] I could not write about the fight that was going on in there even though I heard it.
RITCHIE: I think that's something that people who are outside Congress have a hard time realizing, how different the Senate and the House are, that they have different rules, they have different traditions, they have different ways of doing business, and how hard it is for them to do anything in tandem.
McGHEE: That's true. That is certainly true. Of course you know the story of why we have EF-100.
RITCHIE: About Carl Hayden and Clarence Cannon?
McGHEE: Hayden and Cannon, yeah.
RITCHIE: Well, on the connection between the press galleries, didn't Jim Talbert come over from the House press gallery to replace you after you retired?
McGHEE: Yeah.
RITCHIE: Now, that was an unusual move, wasn't it?
McGHEE: Yeah, that was very bad. That was because of the women on the gallery committee. I am convinced that for all of their feminist talk, women hate other women. My assistant should have been promoted. In the regular order of things, she should have gotten my job, and thought she had it. And they voted her down. They not only voted her down, they made all kinds of bad remarks about her, and me, and the gallery. I was gone. I always said, "I'll not resign until you can count the votes to get the job." Well, she thought she had them. There were four women and three men on the committee. She had the chairman and she thought she had one of the other men she did have his promise and two of the women. As it turned out, both of the women defected, and so did the man. The only person she had was the chairman. Oh it was bitter, and she's still bitter about it. But this was only very recently, it was last September.
RITCHIE: Why would Talbert want to make the switch from one gallery to another?
McGHEE: Well, again it was money. I think he was only making thirty-five or forty thousand a year, and my job was paying seventy-five thousand a year, seventy four five. That's why he wanted it. And those women liked Talbert too.
RITCHIE: Now, when the standing committee would meet, since you have the same standing committee that meets for the House and Senate, would the House people come over to join the meeting on the Senate side?
McGHEE: Yeah.
RITCHIE: And then the standing committee was urging the superintendents to carry out the policies that the standing committee was establishing.
McGHEE: That's correct. Their job is really to lend clout to the superintendents for things that they might want in the gallery. We always need more space, we need more computers. Every time there's a new member elected they come in the gallery and they see how cramped they are and they say: "We've got to do something about this." I say, "Well, try it, but don't try it so much that you get kicked out of where you are."
RITCHIE: Well, what do you think will be the problems for the galleries in the future? What do you see ahead?
McGHEE: I don't see much change. I don't think the Congress is ever going to take over the chore of credentialing. They could create some super-gallery on both sides and combine them. At least they could combine the two print galleries. There's always talk of that. But I don't think anything's going to come of it. The rules are so different for daily papers and periodicals. The only thing they have in common is that they are printed. Even that distinction is disappearing. Newspapers are in this business of on-line computer publication.
You can subscribe to the Washington Post service at home and read whatever you want only on your PC, and half of the periodical gallery's stuff now is online services. And their clients--that's another thing I object to--their clients aren't even newspapers, they're financial houses. The changes will come about because of technical and scientific advances in the transmission of news. But I don't see how you're ever going to get rid of the reporter on the scene, and as long as you have him there, I can't imagine the Congress deciding that they want to take over this chore.
RITCHIE: The way a reporter goes about getting the news has stayed pretty much the same, but the way the news is reported once the reporter is finished with it changes constantly, because technology changes, from the telegraph to radio and tv and computers and newspapers and magazines and all the rest of it. The dissemination of the news is what's changed.
McGHEE: But the gathering has not. It's still a reporter interviewing and covering an event and then writing about it. What happens to it after he writes it is what's changed. It's exactly as you said.
RITCHIE: Looking back over your years of covering Congress and working here as superintendent, would you say that Congress is covered as well today as it was when you started, is it covered better or worse?
McGHEE: It's probably covered better, but it's covered differently. I think we've discussed in these sessions the tendencies which arose in the sixties of reporting the peccadilloes of senators and elected officials. It's commonplace now. I don't think that elected officials have the respect of the reporters that they used to have. There never was a fear, nobody feared them, it's just that you granted them the respect that their office deserved. When they personally did not deserve that respect, you wrote about it if it affected their work. But you didn't just to invade somebody's privacy.
I don't know. I can't predict how it's going to work out in the next thirty or forty years. Obviously there are going to be refinements in the dissemination of news and the transmission of it, and the consumption of it. But I don't think
there's going to be any great revolution in the gathering of it. I can't see how it would come about.
RITCHIE: Still the same problems of developing the sources ....
McGHEE: Correct.
RITCHIE: And deciding between rumor and fact, and culling down the news.
McGHEE: You know who Hunter Thompson is, don't you? Well, in the Watergate hearings, which were my first big hearings as superintendent, he came to cover the hearings for Rolling Stone, I'm pretty sure. He was contemptuous of the protocol that's attendant here on almost everything, and the precedents. After all this is the parliament of the most powerful country, and the biggest, and most open. Well, we couldn't give him a seat at the Watergate hearings by the time he showed up, and he really didn't give a damn whether he had a seat or not. And he traveled with a companion, a reporter for some far out hippie publication. I'd always get them in and have them stand unobtrusively against one of the walls or behind a pillar or something. We weren't supposed to have any standing people in there, but we went around that to accommodate reporters. But I told him, "Absolutely no interruptions, and you be very, very quiet while you're here or you're going to get yourself in trouble, and not only that you're going to get me in trouble."
Well, Thompson had a jacket, and he did this for two or three times before I got onto it, he'd put a bottle of beer in his jacket pocket and have a straw, and he would be in the hearings room when [Sam] Ervin was giving these great orations, and Dean was making these horrible revelations, and here he was half drunk, and maybe drugged, drinking that beer through a straw! And one day he dropped the bottle. He pulled the bottle up and out too far and spilled it, and the bottle burst in the hearing room. Holy Jesus! [laughs] Well, we got him out of there, and he didn't come back to the hearings. We just said, "You're gone." [laughs]
RITCHIE: In some respects, reporters have always been a little more colorful than the people they've covered!McGHEE: That's certainly true.
RITCHIE: Well, I want to thank you for participating in this oral history project.
McGHEE: I'm not sure I've shed much light on things.
RITCHIE: No, this has been tremendous, and we've covered an amazing amount of territory in the last week. We'll make transcripts which you can check out. When you transcribe there's always the possibility of making a mistake in terms of names, or getting words transposed. If you'd like to look at it and make any comments, that will be all right.
McGHEE: Well, I don't think I'm going to make any changes. I was thinking that I've been very frank. [portion of interview closed] There may have been other times when I was too frank, I don't know.
RITCHIE: Actually, the reason why I've enjoyed this interview is because you have been frank. A lot of people say, "Oh, I don't have much to say," but I think the great thing about oral history is people just saying what it was and what was going on. This interview really has been superb on that level.
McGHEE: There's no malice involved, you understand that.
RITCHIE: No, no. It's an accurate reflection of the way the world was as you saw it. That's what oral history is aiming for at least.
McGHEE: Well, I'll read through it, but you have carte blanche to edit it. After all I've been talking, I haven't been talking in sentences, I'm sure.
RITCHIE: I actually think that because of your profession you've learned how to talk in sentences and paragraphs. All of your stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, and it's very clear when you've finished a sentence. I haven't seen any problems with the first transcripts. I think it's a skill that probably comes from years of telephoning in the story.
McGHEE: Yes, dictating. There are a couple of stories that you might be interested in regarding dictation with the advent of computer system. It came about during the presidential election year of 1972, the year I covered McGovern. I mentioned before about going up to the Catskills that day and seeing McGovern drinking from a beer bottle, and declining to say that he was drinking beer, because I didn't know. But McGovern had promised there would be no news, so all the reporters on that trip were going to have a restful weekend after a hellish week. Well, I got up to that motel and I called the New York desk and told them, "I'm ensconced here. If anything comes up, here's where I'll be, but there's a lid on, there's no more news, and I'm going to take some rest." We went up on a Friday afternoon and I called the office as soon as I was up there and had a motel room. They said, "Why don't you do a reprise of the week's stuff?" I said, "Okay, how long do you want it?" They said, "Let it run quite at length, we'll run it out on Saturday for Sunday and for Monday's papers, and you can write fifteen hundred to a couple thousand words, it's okay." It was no problem, you just sit down at the typewriter and do it. No problem in writing it. But it ruined my Saturday morning. I had to write that stuff Saturday morning.
When I got it finished, almost at noon, I called New York and I said, "I've got this story here," and Saturday is a slow day in the wires. Only great big breaking news do they really want. But they wanted this. I said, "Give me a dictationist." Now, the computers at that time that we had would only take 750 words. And my story ran at least fifteen hundred words, maybe two thousand. So when we got to 750 words the person that was taking the dictation, she was doing it on a computer, just putting it in, and somebody else would then edit it. She was just a dictationist, but at the end of 750 words the computer wouldn't take anymore. And they were new, computers were new at this time, so she said, "Wait a minute, I've got to get this fixed." And here I was holding onto that
phone for thirty minutes and not doing anything, and the people I wanted to be out with and running off, they were getting ready to go, they weren't going to wait for me. It was horrible and it ruined my Saturday. All I did was go around to the swimming pool after I finally got free from that. But the computer fouled me up because it would only take 750 words:But that wasn't nearly as bad as what happened to my A.P. colleague in South Dakota. I wasn't out there, but my mate--my U.P.I. guy who was assigned to McGovern too--went out to South Dakota. It was out there that McGovern learned about [Thomas] Eagleton's mental problems. It was a very hectic time. At that point the convention was over and all the political stuff had been moved to Washington. Well, we would file to bureaus during the campaign, but I called Washington, we filed directly to Washington. This was a complicated story, there were new leads all the time. First McGovern said he was standing behind him a thousand percent, and that quote wasn't twenty minutes old before he had to start backing off from it, when more detail came out about Eagleton's electric shock treatments and all that sort of thing. Our man was able to get to Washington, get an intelligent dictationist, and completed his dictation in about an hour. Now that's quite a long time on a story, but it was great big, big news, he was thumbing through his notebooks, dictating as he went, nothing written down.
The poor A.P. guy was doing the same thing to Chicago. And their computer went out and he lost everything that he dictated. Well, that was a pressure story, really pressure, and this poor devil had gotten it all out and then they learned they didn't have any of it, and he had to do it all over again. When they told me that story I'd never felt so sorry for anybody in my life. I can't remember his name but I traveled with him that whole year. He later became the bureau chief of the A.P. in Seattle--Harrington, Greg Harrington was his name but he had a Godawful time with that Eagleton story. And of course they got squeezed out on the play because our story went out immediately and theirs was delayed and delayed. The great book about the U.P., Deadline Every Minute, that's literally true, because someplace you service there's a deadline.
RITCHIE: Well, everybody whose computer has ever gone down on them can sympathize with that fellow.
McGHEE: If they've lost stuff. And poor Greg, he didn't even have anything written out. He was going from his notes dictating.
Let me tell you a story about the advent of televised news conference in the Kennedy administration. It changed completely the way presidential news conferences were covered. Merriman Smith was a past master at dictation. He had a facility for talking a story into a dictationist, which the desk, the editors very seldom had to do anything with it. Very seldom. He could juggle three or four stories in a row. What reminded me of this was how much time is of the essence. For instance, I'm just using these as an example, but he would come out of an Eisenhower news conference, where there was no television and you were locked into the thing until the conference was over. You couldn't get to the telephone. When they were over, everybody broke for the telephones, and Smith was an absolute genius at it. He could say, for instance: "Bulletin. President Eisenhower announced today that he had ordered the Fifth Marine Division into Lebanon. More." And then he would say: "Second story. Bulletin. President Eisenhower today nominated Brennan for the Supreme Court. More." And he'd do four or five stories like that and then he'd go back to the first one and say: "Urgent. Add Lebanon," and then he would give the details. And these stories were going out instantaneously. The reason the U.P. was foremost in presidential coverage and White House coverage was because of Merriman Smith's ability to do that.
Well, when Kennedy came in, he started televising these things, which everybody could listen to and get it first hand. They didn't need it filtered through a reporter. But newspapers still had to have a story on it. So Julius Franzen was an organizing genius. I digress momentarily, but when Khrushchev came to town in 1959, every moment that he was in public view he was in sight of a United Press man. A lot of stories about that, but that's newspaper stuff. But on the televised news conferences, Franzen figured out how to gain a few seconds even though Smith was very, very good. His system was and the A.P. didn't catch onto this for months, and then he snookered them again but what he would do was call a dozen reporters down, who knew the subject matter. News editors know what's going to come up, they know the general subjects. So when a question was asked, I never will forget he had a room double this size
with a long table and a television set at the end of it, and reporters there with notebooks. He'd point to you when a question began. You would listen to the question, take it down, and then the response, and if it warranted a story you'd get up and you'd go out in the newsroom right next door, sit down at a typewriter and write it, and give it to the desk man. We were beating the hell out of the A.P. with that. They were waiting for their man to come out of the news conference and dictate the stories. And by that time we were all gone with it. Well, they quickly figured out what we were doing so they could match that practice
. Then Franzen had his real genius come forward. When I would attend one of those things, instead of going out after my portion was over, instead of going out to the news room and writing it, I'd go out and pick up a telephone and I'd call across the room to a dictationist and I'd speak it. [laughs] And talk it. And the dictationist would take it down. You know, when you sit at a typewriter, it's a lot different than talking a story, a lot different, just completely different. When I'm at a typewriter, I'm looking at what I'm writing, and I'm thinking, "Well, I can do better than that," and I go over it again. That's what a writer does. He revises as he goes along, he backs up and rewrites. Well, you can't do that. So instead of writing, we'd dictate. I have dictated a story across a desk to somebody, and it would go out on the wire immediately. Well, the A.P. finally caught up with that too.
RITCHIE: But all of this made Merriman Smith somewhat irrelevant to the process.
McGHEE: Well, really not irrelevant, because there was a lot that gets to the transmission, to the dissemination, to the quickness of it--but there's still the genius of the reporting part.
RITCHIE: Didn't Merriman Smith sort of fall apart at that stage?
McGHEE: Well, yes, he did. He was drinking an awful lot. As a matter of fact, he was drinking years before that. He was drinking before I even left the Kansas City bureau in '55 or 'S6. When he would come out there with Truman years before, they'd get drunk and the local bureau would handle the news.
Fortunately, the A.P. guy named Ed Cray was also a drunk, And the I.N.S. guy would beat them both, frequently. [laughs]
RITCHIE: Smith committed suicide, didn't he?
McGHEE: Yeah, eventually.
RITCHEE: Do you think that that .had anything to do with the fact that times had changed and that great talent of his was no longer necessary?
McGHEE: Well, I don't know. I have no idea. He had a boy killed in Vietnam. His marriage went on the rocks. He remarried. He had a lot of personal problems.
RITCHIE: He was replaced by Helen Thomas, wasn't he?
McGHEE: She was the second over there, maybe Al Spivak. But I'm not sure whether Helen succeeded him or not.
RITCHIE: But she's been the mainstay ever since.
MCGHEE: I just can't remember whether she had the title or not. But when I came to Washington she was covering the Justice Department, and when a vacancy occurred in the White House staff they sent her over there. She wasn't the first woman that ever covered the White House, but I think she was probably the first wire service woman that ever did. And she fit right in, no problem.
RITCHIE: Well, again, this has been wonderful. Since you are going to be here next week, if there is some point where you think there is some addendum you would like to put onto the record, we're wide open. It's like the wire services, we can continue the story as long as you have something to add to it.
McGHEE: [Laughs] All right.
Photographs on this page in written Oral History.ADDENDUM
Interview #6
Tuesday, January 28, 1992
RITCHIE: You were going to tell me about how TASS got into the congressional press galleries.
McGHEE: Well, after the United States recognized Soviet Russia in the early Roosevelt days, the Soviet Union press apparatus contracted with an American news firm, it was Mac-something Associates here in Washington. They had foreign clients, a lot of them, to which they supplied American news. They did it on a contract basis, and as such they qualified, they were a profit making organization, strictly in the news business, not in the editorial business, and not in any other business. They qualified for congressional credentials.
After World War II, the Soviet Union abrogated the contract or stopped that arrangement and decided to send their own reporters over here, and station them here. Well, that presented a conflict with the congressional rules. It's a government agency, they work for the government, they were government employees, and as such not qualified for credentials. At that time, it was just the beginning of the Cold War and we had a small press presence in the Soviet Union, most particularly the broadcast media, although the New York Times and the wires and some other big papers did have resident correspondents there. Well, the TASS people came to the press gallery and asked for credentials for their reporters over here, and the gallery committee rightfully so turned them down and said, "We cannot accredit under our rules government employees, and
these people are obviously government employees."
That created quite a stir in the Soviet Union's official circles, as well as here, and the State Department got involved. The Soviet Union then decided: unless you credential these people, we're going to kick out CBS, and NBC, and we're not going to permit them to be in our country. The State Department
pondered that a while and then went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and said: look, we can't have this, it's valuable, it's in the United States' national interest to have our free press in the Soviet Union in these times, and we've got to make some arrangement. So the Senate Foreign Relations Committee went to the Senate Rules Committee, which has residual power over these galleries, and by fiat they were ordered in the gallery. Whereupon, the USIA had been knocking at the door trying to get its reporters credentialed here, and they were always turned down for the same reasons. But when TASS reporters were permitted to have credentials, and put on the same footing with correspondents who were regularly credentialed, the USIA came in and said: now you've admitted these people, admit us. The rules had not changed, it was just that the Rules Committee of the Senate had exercised its authority and, at the request of the Foreign Relations Committee, at the request of the State Department, for reasons of state, had ordered the TASS reporters into the gallery.
The gallery committee of the daily press gallery turned them down. Well, the USIA in addition to having a world wide daily wire service operation, they also publish periodicals, so they came over to our gallery and asked if there was some way that we could admit them. Well, our rules did not permit government employees to enter the galleries either. But the committee in its wisdom decided: we don't have to admit you, but we will grant you privileges of the gallery, but not official credentials. That system is still in operation. It came in jeopardy when the Voice of America petitioned the Congress for credentials for its reporters and its staff here in Washington and were rejected on the same grounds by the Senate radio-tv gallery. Well, they went to the Rules Committee too.
The Rules Committee indicated that this was a correspondents' affair. They held a hearing at which all the galleries testified, and I wrote the testimony for our representative, and I came down on the side of not letting them in. The reason I did was that was right after the Iranians had trashed our embassy and taken hostages during the Carter administration. In doing a little gum shoe work I discovered--well, let me back up a moment. The Voice of America claimed that they were like the BBC, government affiliated but absolutely without
government control. They gathered and reported the news objectively, without regard to American policy. Well, that didn't sound right to me. So I got the information from the agency about how many hours in a week and a month they were broadcasting to various places behind the Iron Curtain and around the world. Lo and behold, I discovered that there are several Farsi dialects, Iranian dialects, that run from Afghanistan clear to Azerbaijan, and some of the Soviet republics. Well, they had added several Farsi dialects to their broadcasts, had increased their hours of broadcast into Iran tremendously. It was clearly propaganda. They were clearly doing this in response to the Persian government taking our hostages. It proved to me that the Voice of America, and properly so as far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly okay for governments to engage in propaganda, it's the oldest thing in the world in communications, but it is not according to the American standards of objective journalism.
Well, the Rules Committee dodged it, but the gallery committee in the radio tv gallery decided on their own, much the same as we did, they would give these people a card, but it would be a separate kind of a card. Also, that was about the time when you needed special credentials to get in the Capitol Building. So they gave them unofficial status in their gallery. A little bit higher grade than we had extended to the USIA. But it's an interesting story. So they're here now in the Capitol Building to cover the congressional hearings as the USIA has done under the periodical gallery since the beginning of the Cold War.
RITCHIE: So the issue really was more than just space, it was who was a legitimate journalist and who was a government employee.
McGHEE: That's correct, and as it turns out, just in recent months since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have now discovered that not only were these TASS people government employees, but they were actually spies. [laughs] But, for reasons of state, we wanted our people there, and they would have been kicked out had we not credentialed their employees. So it worked out all right in the long run.
Now, changing the subject, I have a funny I think it's funny, it shows Stevenson's absolute, great wit. I think I told you earlier than when he campaigned in the midwest in '52, that I was sent along with him. I covered him in Kansas City and the environs for a while. When he was Ambassador to the United Nations, I went up there one time with some other reporters on some kind of a junket or boondoggle, and Stevenson had us into the United Nations for a little press conference and tour. I remember this incident occurred where the Security Council meets, and he was kind of a guide, showing everybody around and explaining how the UN worked. Well, it was a small group and I said to him, "Governor, you probably don't remember me, but I covered your campaign in the midwest." He looked at me and said, "Well, I'm sorry to have put you to the trouble." [laughs] Then later he came down here, and we were laughing about that incident, in that picture with Gale McGee.RITCHIE: Let me take these pictures and ask you what's the story behind these particular pictures.
McGHEE: They're twenty years old now, most of them, or older, and I've really forgotten the incidents. Obviously, I was interviewing Stevenson for some purpose. I don't know how the picture got taken. You know, I remember where it was taken, though, it was taken in the vice president's ceremonial room, off of the lobby of the Senate. Have you been in that room, do you know where I mean?
RITCHIE: Yes. And that's a young Gale McGee. It must have been shortly after he came to the Senate in 1959.
McGHEE: I do not remember the context of the story or what I was doing there. Now this one was strictly a social affair. The Republicans when I first came to Washington had something they called the Republican Chowder and Marching Society. Bill Ayers, the congressman from Ohio, a Republican, lived across the hall from me in my apartment house. He and I became friends. He had a flair for press agentry, and he always wanted me to come along with him on things, so he invited me to this Chowder annual meeting. And I went with him. [Gerald] Ford was then--I think [Charles] Halleck was the minority leader,
but he was number two man and later staged a coup against Halleck, you remember. But this was before he became the leader.
RITCHIE: And this is Nixon on the campaign trail?
McGHEE: Well, someplace, and I can't remember again where it was. Obviously it's in an airport. I just can't remember. This fellow's face is familiar. I believe it's in Washington. I'm positive it's in Washington. He must have been vice president, I guess it's when he was running for president in '60, but I'm not real sure about that.
RITCHIE: You've got your pad of paper doubled over and you're making notes.
McGHEE: Well, you will notice, it's strange, when I started reporting reporters used copy paper. We didn't carry notebooks and computers and portable desks and things like that. We just grabbed a sheet of paper and used it. But you'll never see a reporter doing that these days, they've always got notebooks, and well and good because sometimes they keep their notes forever. I started doing it too in later years. But in those days I was still using copy paper.
RITCHIE: And the copy paper probably was discarded as soon as the story was published, I suppose.
McGHEE: That's true!
RITCHIE: And here's Truman.
McGHEE: Again, I don't remember where the picture was taken. That might have been in Kansas City. I really can't tell you. This lady, I can't remember her name either, but I remember his name. He was later chairman of the Democratic party in Kansas. His name was Theis. Somebody appointed him a federal judge out there. He may still be on the bench. But he was a
friend of Truman's. I don't know, the sun must have been shining brightly, it looks like my eyes are squinting.
RITCHIE: I guess you spent a lot of time in airports waiting for people to come in or depart, and train stations.
McGHEE: Well, that's true. But, you know, you meet an awful lot of people that way! Well, that's all I had to tell you.
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Agriculture Department, 90
Albert, Carl, 86, 160-161
Albright, Bob, 28-29
Anderson, Clinton (D-M), 33, 47, 87
Appropriations Committee, 48, 65
Army Times, 145
Associated Press (A.P.), 3, 15, 18, 22-25, 35, 41, 48, 55, 57, 61, 64, 83,
87, 173-176
Attribution of news, 23-24, 66, 87
Barber, Max, 112, 144, 151
Barr, Bob, 104-105
Bell, Jack, 23-24, 57-58, 97
Bible, Alan (D-NV), 35, 65
Black Correspondents, 153-154
Bolling, Richard, 86-87
Boston Globe, 78-79
Bosch, Juan, 46
Broder, David, 129
Bureau of National Affairs, 145, 153
Busby, Horace, 76
Business Week, 114
Byrd, Harry F., Sr. (D-VA), 27
Byrd, Robert C. (D-WV), 28-29, 116-117
Cafritz, Gwen, 30
Cannon, Clarence, 167
Capital News, Jefferson City, MO, 13-14
Caro, Robert, 62
Carpenter, Liz, 157
Carroll Arms, 47-48
Carter, Jimmy, 179
Castro, Fidel, 20
Caucus Room, Senate, 72, 127
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 128
Chancellor, John, 142
Chapman, Stan, 50
Chavez, Dennis (D-NM), 32, 47-49, 87
Chicago Sun-Times, 96
Chicago Tribune, 13, 51
China, 67-68
Civil Rights, 51, 155
Coast Guard, 7, 9-11
Colson, Charles, 128
Commerce Committee (Senate), 27, 37, 43, 62, 65, 140
Commonweal., 123
Computers., 148, 168-169, 172, 182
Congressional Directory, 36, 37, 146, 163
Congressional Record, 95, 112, 125
Consumer’s Union, 159
Conventions
(See also Democratic and Republication conventions), 143-144, 146-147, 153,
Connally, John, 73, 79
Costa Rica, 42
Craig, May, 99
Cray, Ed, 176
Cuba, 8, 20, 46
Cuban Missile Crisis, 59, 72
Daily News, Chicago, 96
Daily Oklahoman, 91
Dalton, Gloria., 62-64
Daniel, Price (D-TX), 13, 52
Dean, John, 128, 170
Democratic Conventions
Dirksen, Everett M. (R-IL), 34, 81, 84, 95-96
Dixon, George, .48-49
Dixon, Ymelda Chavez, 48-49
Dole, Robert (R-KS), 58
Duffy, Warren, 47-48
Dukakis, Michael, 76
Eagleton, Thomas (D-MO), 173
Easley, L.T., “Tex”, 22, 26, 48, 55, 57, 83
Eastland, James O. (D-MS), 50
Ebony, 154
Editor and Publisher, 78
Editors, 14, 37, 66, 105-106, 113, 132, 174
Edmundson, Ed, 89
Edwards, Willard, 51, 69
Ehrlichman, John, 128
Eisenhower, Dwight, 15, 141, 174
Eleazer, Frank, 34-36, 38, 59
Elder, Shirley, 152
Ellender, Allen (D-LA), 32
Engle, Clair (D-CA), 51
Ervin, Sam (D-NC), 30, 170
Estes, Billy Sol, 90, 91, 93
Estridge, Susan, 76
Ethics Committee, Senate, .36, 38-39
Fannin, Paul (R-AZ), 67-68, 81
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 83, 91-92, 128
Federal Power Commission, 54
Finance Committee, Senate, 27-29, 33
Fleeson, Doris, 99
Folliard, Edward, 59
Ford, Gerald, 34-38, 181
Foreign Correspondents, 136-138, 178-179
Foreign Relations Committee, 27, 43, 120, 137-138, 179
Fortas, Abe, 62, 63, 65, 66, 95
Franzen, 65, 156, 174-175
Fulbright, J. William (D-AR), 32, 40, 42-45, 120
Gallery Committee (See Standing Committee of Correspondents)
Gesell, Gerhardt, 159-160
Ginsburg, Allen, 78-79
Goldwater, Barry (R-AZ), 66-67, 84, 141
Gorey, Hays, 113
Gridiron Club., 156, 158
Halleck, Charles, 181-182
Hartke, Vance (D-IN), 134
Harrington, Greg, 173
Hatfield, Mark (R-OR), 135
Hayden, Carl (D-AZ), 32, 67, 167
Hennings, Thomas (D-MO), 50, 128
Hoffmann, Nordy, 116-118
Hoover, Herbert, 47
Hoover, J. Edgar, 65, 128
Hruska, Roman (R-NB), 95
Hubbard, Henry, 117
Hunphrey, Hubert H. (D-MN), 62, 73, 75-76, 79-80
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 29, 176
Iran-Contra Scandal, 165
Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 147, 162
Jackson, Henry (D-WA), 99, 102
Janezich, Larry, 112
Johnson, Lady Bird, 74, 158
Johnson, Lyndon (D-TX), 21-26, 33, 43-46, 51-52, 59-64, 73, 74, 76-77, 79, 81, 89-90, 93,
Judiciary Committee, Senate, 50, 65, 94
Justice Department, 65, 92, 159-161, 176
Kampleman, Max, 78-79
Kansas City Star, 15, 18
Kennedy, Edward (D-MA), 29, 73, 82, 84, 166
Kennedy, John F. (D-MA), 29, 41, 46, 51-53, 72-74, 76, 81-82, 84, 90-91, 102, 174
Kerr, Robert (D-OK), 27, 32-33, 55, 86, 93
Kilgore, Harley (D-WV), 79
Kiplinger’s Magazine, 123
Krock, Arthur, 59
LaRouche, Lyndon, 165
Latin America, 20, 40-42
Lautier, Louis, 109
Leaks, 61, 66
Lewis, Bill, 35, 39
Lindsay, John, 125-126
Lobbying, 55-56, 133, 157, 163
Long, Russell (D-LA), 27-31, 43, 50, 121
Los Angeles Times, 77
Love, John, 3, 30, 60, 61
Magazines, 13, 107-108, 110, 113-115, 121-124, 126, 134,
137, 144, 165
Magruder, Jeb, 127
Mansfield, Mike (D-MT), 50, 58, 81-82, 96, 125
Martin, Judith, 155-156
McCarthy, Eugene (D-MN), 77
McCarthy, Joseph R. (R-WI), 50, 70
McClellan, John (D-AR), 32, 44, 95
McClendon, Sarah., 23, 25, 99
McCormack, John, 52-53, 86
McDonald, Joe, .65
McGee, Gale (D-WY), 27, 43-44, 51, 181
McGovern, George (D-SD), 99, 100, 102, 104-106, 172-173
McNeil, Neil, 117, 121, 126, 143, 160-161
Medicare, 33
Metcalf, Lee (D-MT), 83-84
Mondale, Walter (D-MN), 102
Morse, Wayne (R/D-OR), 10, 84-85
Mudd, Roger, 120
Nation, 123
National Geographic, 107, 162
National Press Club, 23, 29, 136, 155-156
National Review, 123, 147
Neuberger, Maureen (D-OR), 82-83
New Republic, 107, 123
New York Times, 69, 77, 127, 132, 151, 178
Newsday, 81, 153
Newsletters, .107, 109-110, 114, 123-124, 145-146, 148
Newsweek, 58, 69, 101, 112-113, 117, 125-126, 146, 153
Nixon, Richard M. (R-CA), 58, 66-68, 71, 80-82, 102-103, 106, 127-128,
182
Nolan, Martin, 78, 79
Observer, 152
O'Mahoney, Joseph (D-WY), 51
Oil, 53-55, 57, 86
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 83
Panetta, Leon, 164
Pastore, John (D-RI), 34, 36-39
Pearson, Drew, 50
Pearson, Jim (R-KS), 130
Pell, Caliborne (D-RI), 137
Police, Capitol, 131-132, 137, 164
Policy Committee, Senate Democratic, 116
Post-Tribune, Jefferson City., 13
Prattis, P. L., .153-154
Prerogatives, 84, 139, 145, 161
Press Club, National, 23, 29, 30, 68, 136, 155-156, 158
Press Corps, .68-69, 71, 75, 98, 128
Press Galleries, Capitol, 22, 41, 56, 58, 68, 76-77, 81, 85, 96, 97, 99, 103-104, 107, 110, 112,
Proxmire, William (D-WI), 130
Quayle, Dan (R-IN), 129-130
Radio, 8-10, 20, 76, 80, 112-114, 119-120, 138, 144,
149, 152-153, 165, 169, 179-180
Rayburn, Sam, 21, 26, 34, 52-53, 59, 87, 107-108, 151
Reedy, George, 23, 24
Regional reporters, 18, 21, 22, 25, 27, 38, 40, 42, 56, 60, 62, 64, 72, 81, 83, 87, 98, 144-145
Republican conventions
Rogers, Paul, 34, 166
Rolling Stone, 170
Roncalio, Tino, 51
Rules Committee, 87, 109-110, 115, 135, 148, 154, 159-162, 179-180
Santo Domingo, 42, 46
Scott, Hugh (R-PA), 59, 125
Scranton, William, 141
Secrets, 31, 62
Sergeant at Arms, Senate, 115-118, 136, 139, 145
Shaffer, Sam, 58, 101, 112, 125-126, 143
Siegenthaller, John, 91-93
Sloyan, Pat, 81
Smith, Margaret Chase (R-ME), 35
Smith, Merriam, 4-5, 61, 174-176
Soviet Union, 178-180
Speakes, Larry, 94
Spivak, Al, 176
Standing Committee of Correspondents, 98, 103, 108, 139, 142, 149, 152, 159-160, 162-164,
State Department, 67, 136-137, 178-179,
Stennis, John C. (D-MS), 36, 38
Stevens, Ted (R-AK), 58, 78, 130-131
Stevenson, Adlai, 15, 79, 181
St. Petersburg Times, 59
Supreme Court, 3, 13, 63, 65, 95, 109, 158, 161, 174
Talbert, Jim, 167-168
Tames, George, 151
TASS, 138, 178-180
Television, 4, 31, 45, 69, 74, 97, 112-114, 119-120, 138, 144, 149, 152-153, 163, 165, 169,
Texas, 21-23, 52-54, 57, 63, 73-74, 79, 80, 82-83, 90-91, 98-99
Thomas, Clarence, 66
Thomas, Helen, 158, 176
Thomasson, Dan, 78
Thompson, Hunter, 170
Thornberry, Homer, 63, 65
Thurmond, J. Strom (D/R-SC), 140
Time, 69, 113, 117, 146
Totenberg, Nina, 66, 152
Tower, John (R-TX), 82-84, 88
Towery, Ken, 82-83
Trohan, Walter, 70
Truman, Harry S, 2-6, 22, 102, 175, 182-183
Tulsa World, 77
United Press International (U.P.I.), 1, 3-4, 5, 15, 18, 20-21, 24-25, 29, 34, 40-41, 47, 59, 61,
U.S. News and World Report, 104, 113, 146Union-Leader, Manchester, NH, 105, 106
Vietnam War, 2, 43, 45, 102, 176
Voice of America, 179-180
Wallop, Malcolm (R-WY), 131
Wannell, Bill., 115
Warren, Earl, 63-64
Washington Post, 13, 18, 28-29, 59, 73, 77, 90, 100, 110, 127-129, 142, 155, 169
Washington Star, 152
Watergate, 66, 71, 100, 126, 128-130, 170
West Virginia, 73
Whitten, Les, 90
Williams, Dorothy, 99
Williams, Harrison (D-NJ), .49-50
Wills, Joe, 85, 111
Wolfson, Louis, 66
Women Correspondents, 151-153, 155-158, 167, 168
Woodward, Bob, 92, 129
Wright, Jim, 89, 148, 162
Wyoming, 21, 43, 51-53, 88
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