Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 1:26 PM by Gene

The more things change....

Crouse is especially tough on the White House press corps, "a strange mixture of professional witnesses, decree-promulgators, cheerleaders, hard-diggers, goldbricks and gadflies." He quotes Russell Baker, who served time there, as calling it an "airless kind of work" because "the White House was like a Stuart court, Baker thought, and all the correspondents lingered like courtiers in the antechambers." The White House is the ultimate Winner's Bus, with predictable consequences:

"Some reporters thrived in this suffocating palace atmosphere. They began to think of themselves as part of the White House, and they proudly identified themselves as being 'from the White House press' instead of mentioning the paper they worked for. They forgot that they were handout artists and convinced themselves that they were somehow associates of a man who was shaping epochal events. . . . The faces of these men [in old photos on the pressroom wall] were infused with a funny expression, a pathetic aura of pride, a sense that they were taking part in the colossal moments of history. Now most of those moments were forgotten, and no one remembered a word that any of these men had written."

"Men" is the word, all right. Women were rarities, at the White House and even more so on the bus. Crouse argues that "some of the toughest pieces on the 1972 Nixon campaign" were done by women because "having never been allowed to join in the cozy, clubby world of the men, they had developed an uncompromising detachment and a bold independence of thought which often put the men to shame." Perhaps that was true then, but women are in the club now -- and blacks and Hispanics and gays and everyone else -- and guess what? The pack is bigger than ever -- at this year's Democratic convention the media outnumbered the delegates 3 to 1 -- but it's still a pack.