Chronologically speaking, my Bob Haldeman and Ron Ziegler experiences were at the end of my 13 years with TV Guide so I’ll relate my Los Angeles highlights in that order. For those of insufficient recall, Haldeman and Ziegler were two of the major players in Watergate. We’ll get to them at the end of this communiqué and no fair peeking.
Joe Finnigan
became a pal and confidant in 1966 when I was transferred to head up the office
located in Hollywood near Sunset and Doheny. He was a good guy and fair-handed reporter without being a patsy in a
town where patsies are revered.
Having first
written about Tinseltown for United Press
where Vernon Scott was a peer, Finnigan had moved to the Guide where he did feature articles and helped fill the yellow
pages of the National Feature Section. Lest your fingers do some erroneous walking, the yellow pages referenced
carried the latest about shows in the planning stage, star tidbits and network
maneuverings.
Whether or
not Joe was assigned to take me under a protective wing I know not. He did take me along on some assignments and
we managed some carousing, much of it business-connected. One evening we hooked up with actor Robert
Wagner in a bar near Universal Studios. Talk led to Natalie Wood and R.J. said he felt her mother was the cause
of their divorce four years earlier.
The Academy
Awards rolled around and Finnigan and I, dressed in tuxedos, wandered across a
Santa Monica parking lot en route to the festivities. As we ambled toward the Santa Monica
Auditorium, a teen-ager approached me with a very direct question: “Are you
anyone?” “No,” I answered, “but my friend
is.” Joe worked the gig while I did a
reasonable impression of a gawker. Properly
credentialed, I was admitted to a basement area where photographs of winners
would be taken prior to TV, radio and print interviews.
It was somewhat surreal watching the Oscars awarded on TV, then seeing the winners moments later as they moved from photo opportunities in one area to interviews in the media cavern. To get from photos to interviews, the stars climbed three steps to a small platform, then down three.
I have a
vivid memory of that evening when Julie Christy won an Oscar for Best
Leading Actress in Darling. Presented her award
by Julie Andrews who had won the honor the prior year for Mary Poppins, the two finished with photo ops and headed for the
stairs where I stood. Andrews was
arguably the biggest star in the business then and her ebullience suggested she
was delighted with Christy’s good fortune—she being a fellow Brit, don’t you
know? Climbing the stairs, they poised
on the platform just before Christy was enveloped by the media mob. I noticed Andrews’ bemused smile.
“How quickly
they forget,” was my observation to her as she descended in regal manner. She laughed, then stopped and we chatted a
few moments. I couldn’t help but think
what a fragile thing success is in such a tough business.
Getting
bored with my TV Guide job and a curriculum
vitae heavy on party going, I began looking for other work. It was through KNBC-TV manager Jimmy Parks
that I met a couple of guys who were all but on their way to Washington and key
White House jobs. They were H.R. “Bob”
Haldeman, eventually sent to prison for participating in the Watergate
cover-up, and Ron Ziegler. The latter,
as press secretary, would offer a dogged defense of a presidency struggling for
survival. When I met them they were
employed by advertising agency giant J. Walter Thompson. Haldeman, vice –president in charge of the
L.A. office, and protégé Ziegler were looking for someone to replace Ziegler as
Disneyland account executive.
After 15
rather chilly minutes with Haldeman, I was passed along to Ziegler with whom I
discussed at some length the games of his profession: advertising, promotion
and marketing. The next day I got a call
from Parks asking how things went. I
replied in the affirmative although Ziegler and Haldeman seemed to me
“distracted.” “Don’t you know about them,”
asked Parks who went on to explain to this political ignoramus that they were Richard
Nixon’s people and would go to Washington with him when he won the next year’s election. Parks suggested it was all but set in stone
and, indeed, it was.
I didn’t get
the job I was interviewed for in 1967 although Ziegler spoke with me at length
a second time. I was a finalist—probably
competing with two other applicants. While I rarely play the What If game, I have wondered about the large
number of Southern Californians who were drafted into the Nixon Administration
on the basis of fraternity palships at USC and business connections. Some of
those people went to prison.
As Nixon’s
miscast press secretary, Ziegler had impossibly bad media experience as in
none. The President’s damning tapes make
it clear communications with the young man were quite limited. Those tapes reveal both Nixon’s press
paranoia and a reluctance to keep Ziegler fully informed. In terms of similarity of style, George W.
Bush did the same thing with some of his press secretaries—most notably Scott
McClellan who eventually returned the favor by writing a book, What Happened-- both damning and
self-serving.
Perhaps
Ziegler’s most embarrassing moment came in 1973 at a veterans’ convention in
New Orleans when Nixon, irate about press pursuit, was caught on camera shoving
and spinning the beleaguered press secretary.
Ziegler’s
death in 2003 received a lot of press attention. Of the many obituaries I read, only the New York Times made reference to the
White House spokesman having coined the term “photo opportunity” to describe a
news event staged to create favorable images. At 29 the youngest ever White House press secretary, Ziegler also added
to our language by calling the Watergate break-in a “third-rate burglary” and
described Nixon’s denying White House involvement as “inoperative.”
It was
shortly after the Haldeman/Ziegler interviews that I got a call from Playboy and soon I was on my way to
Chicago and 23 terrific years.
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