The uncertain estate // A journalist's endless agony: Mistakes in the search for truth

Behind the Front PageBy David Broder. Simon & Schuster. $18.95.

I recommend this book for everyone who dislikes reporters, foreveryone who just knows that we are a shiftless lot, deliberatelycareless with the facts and with the reputations of those we cover.

At first glance, this book would seem to give such people a lotof ammunition. David Broder's Behind the Front Page is loaded withhorror stories of mistakes made on journalism's front lines, many ofthem, Broder confesses, his own. For instance, he tells the famousstory of how he and other reporters may have cost Sen. Edmund Muskiethe Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 by misreportingMuskie's most dramatic campaign appearance.

After watching Muskie stand in the snow in front of theManchester (N. H.) Union Leader building and denounce publisherWilliam Loeb for printing attacks on him and his wife, Broder wrotein the Washington Post: "With tears streaming down his face and hisvoice choked with emotion. . . .Muskie broke down three times in asmany minutes."

It was a devastating account of emotional instabilityincompatible with being president. Broder now concludes that it mayhave been snow in Muskie's eyes, not tears, an altogether differentstory - and one that, if written, might not have knocked Muskie outof the race. The incident clearly has nagged at Broder's conscienceever since.

But that's the point of this book and the reason I think thosewho mistrust reporters should read it. We care about our work, worryabout doing it right, are personally distraught when we get it wrongand constantly argue among ourselves about how to do it better.

Broder is first and foremost a reporter of politics andpolitical campaigns, and among his recommendations for "doing itbetter" are to reduce the emphasis on the horse-race coverage anddrop the idea that a campaign should be reported according to itsmanager's orchestration: "The campaign is not the candidate'spersonal property. It is the public's hour of judgment."

Broder wants reporters to dig harder, but at the same timethinks they can be less intrusive, particularly at such events asnational nominating conventions. There, he suggests, reportersshould be barred from the convention floor during sessions."According to many politicians, reporters - especially the televisionstars - have converted the political conventions into showcases fortheir competitive egos and ambitions."

As one who every four years since 1964 has strapped on 10 poundsof bulky equipment to go charging up and down aisles, sweating andcursing, administering and suffering body blows and crushed instepsin an effort to do the first interview with the "oldest left-handeddelegate from a town under 2,000 population" or some other suchsilliness, my ego and I wholeheartedly endorse that suggestion.

Broder takes the reader through the main Washington beats,including the White House, the one I know best. He paints anaccurate picture of how the Reagan PR team has been able to managethe news better than any of their predecessors by playing to thetelevision cameras. And he zeroes in on Ronald Reagan's mind, atonce a wondrous and mysterious thing.

Broder recounts a telephone call he received from Reagan in thesummer of 1986, when the president, taking exception to a Brodercolumn on the huge budget deficits, argued sincerely but blindly thatit was all the fault of those "big spenders on Capitol Hill." Brodercountered by reminding Reagan "that you have never in five yearsproposed to raise enough in taxes to pay for the spending youyourself were recommending."

But the president simply repeated his standard arguments beforehanging up to take a canter on his horse. "I realized once again,"writes Broder, "that nothing I asked or said would wean Ronald Reaganfrom the familiar and comforting lines of the screenplay that wasunreeling in his own mind - a drama in which he was fighting the BigSpenders of the Deficit Gang, all of whom were to be found on CapitolHill."

Broder is so exasperated with Reagan's mind that in a 1985column he wrote, "The task of watering the arid desert betweenReagan's ears is a challenging one for his aides, even when they havehim pinned down in the White House and he can't hide." That's toughwriting.

But it's not in Broder's book, and if there is a criticism aboutBroder's writing, it is that he doesn't draw enough sharp verdicts.He is not certain how far reporters should go in doing that. "Ishould hold my distance, but I worry that this journalisticdetachment can be a crutch for avoiding responsibility," he writes,never quite resolving the conflict.

But if Broder agonizes, it stems from thought, not cowardice.He is an insightful, careful, fair, ever courteous practitioner ofhis craft, and this book is a reflection of that.

The jacket blurb describes Broder as "the most respectedjournalist in America," but he does not write as if he believes hisown press clippings. His personal claim to glory is relativelymodest. He recounts how Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state,invited him for a private chat after a Broder column angered him.Broder wanted the talk on the record so that Kissinger's complaintscould be passed along to his readers, but Kissinger refused. Broderfolded his notebook and left.

Two years later, when Kissinger introduced him to someone as theman who "walked out on me," Broder writes, "I thought, by God, I gotto him. It still rankles the so-and-so. That's what I'd like on mytombstone: He walked out on Kissinger." That seems high enough praiseto me.

Sam Donaldson is the White House correspondent for ABC News andthe author of Hold On, Mr. President! (Random House).