Photo courtesy of Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, hears the keeper out on his account of experiencing the Washington press corps’ wrath for using different strokes while swimming in the press pool aboard the Delta Queen as it floated down the Mississippi with President Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn aboard. Here’s the keeper’s first-person account.
The press pool consisted of the three reporters on board and was overseen by Jimmy’s press secretary Jody Powell, who told me if he needed anything from me for the pool he would let me know, which he did later, asking me to write an account of the President and first lady attending Sunday morning church service in the Delta Queen dining room. Powell was satisfied with what I wrote and sent it off to the pool.
In the meantime, I was jumping off the boat at every docking to desperately find a telephone to file stories for the Milwaukee Journal and then sprinting to get back on the Delta Queen before it left me haplessly stranded, and with my job likely in jeopardy.
That was the drill for three demanding days until it ended with debarking and a press tent full of resentful Washington reporters who had been trying to follow the POTUS activity from shore-bound buses and who then yelled at Powell and, indirectly me, about an inept press pool not reporting the real story.
Above the angry din, Powell suggested that I use one of the press tables and do a summary account of the three-day POTUS river float.
In a mind-set of wanting to be cooperative, I sat down and stared at the typewriter as my thought process sorted through arrogant big-time reporters obviously put off by being shunted off on buses while the flat-land amateur consorted with Jimmy on the boat as it was recorded in Milwaukee Journal accounts that had nothing to do with the pool but had likely been accessed by the unhappy Washington press corp.
Such a thought train was not conducive to writing a creative review of the previous three days, and after a final view of the tent full of unhappy big-city journalists, I got up and walked out with the farewell thought that I was happily climbing out of the pool and heading back to the dry land of Midwest journalism.
Several weeks later I received a wonderful autographed White House photo showing me and the Carters conversing at the Delta Queen deck as Powell looked on. The conversation had been about both of us trout fishing in the Yellowstone River the year before and I had allowed Jimmy to talk about catching a bigger fish than I had.
My solitary style journalism career more or less spared me from press pool participation. A slight edit of a Groucho Marx quote comes to mind: “I would never swim in a pool that would allow me into its polluted water as seems to be the current situation!”
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