Free The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse

the time the Wisconsin primary rolled around, in April, they had begun to look like characters in a Solzhenitsyn novel—forgotten men, and for no reason but fate’s perverse amusement.
    The member of the trio who had spent the longest time with Muskie was Stout. Stout had covered the Man from Maine in the ’68 and ’70 elections, had traveled to Moscow and Israel with him, and had come to know him more intimately than any other writer. Stout looked like an overgrown schoolboy—tall, hulking, overweight, his suit always rumpled, and his blond forelock constantly falling down over his perspiring forehead and his glasses. A native of Indianapolis, he had gone to De Pauw University and worked for papers in Dayton and Chicago. In the early sixties, he contracted “Potomac Fever” by reading
Advise and Consent
, and landed a job in
Newsweek
’s Washington Bureau as a general assignment reporter. He was capable of writing well, witness his book on Eugene McCarthy
(People)
or the campaign piece he did for the
Atlantic Monthly
in March 1972; but little of his prose survived the blades of the
Newsweek
blender.
    Stout was a man of startling moods. When he was depressed, his gloom could drown the good mood of a room. But when he was feeling happy, he often displayed a terrifying sense of humor that hovered somewhere between Jack Benny Deadpan and Jonathan Winters Bizarre. He had an alarmingly strong sense of the absurd.
    In August 1971, for instance, Stout was sent to Zanesville, Ohio, to interview a sample of twenty-five people for a segment in an ongoing mood-of-the-country series, which
Newsweek
had announced with much fanfare several months earlier. Stout did his twenty-five interviews, and he was on his way out of Zanesville when he came upon an encampment of Jesus freaks. Joining their prayer circle, he fell to his knees, threw up his arms and cried, “Oh, Jesus, I am a sinner! Dear Jesus, come and help this poor sinner!” The Jesus freaks were thoroughly convinced by Stout’s performance. Later that evening, they insisted thathe come to a formal church service, where they proudly pointed him out as their prize convert.
    The day after Stout filed his Zanesville article, President Nixon announced his wage-price controls. Stout’s editors decided that the announcement made the article dated and irrelevant, so it was killed. A week later, Stout was put back on the Muskie watch and the whole mood-of-the-country series was forgotten.
    One of Stout’s first moves was to refresh his acquaintanceship with the Muskie family. In the late summer of 1971, he had supper with them at their home in Maine. After dinner, he rushed back to his room in the Naragansett Hotel in Kennebunkport and scribbled in his notebook for an hour. The dinner had been full of just the kind of material that most appealed to Stout, and he could not resist writing it up as an FYI memo for his editors—one of the few such memos he filed all year. In the memo, Stout detailed Muskie’s swearing at table in front of his kids, his pride in property, his observations on his golf game, and his arguments with his wife, Jane. At one point, Muskie had realized that he needed his tuxedo the next night, and that it was too late to send it to the cleaners. Muskie and his wife had locked horns in an argument over who was going to iron the tux. “You iron it,” she said finally. “You’re the tailor’s son.” Muskie had exploded in a rage.
    Half a year later, during the Wisconsin primary, Dick Stout played a star role on the night when Muskie and the press had what was probably their most intimate get-together. After a long day, the Muskie Bus had finally pulled in at the Northland Hotel in Green Bay, one of those huge, ancient salesman’s hotels that are forever burning down on the front pages of tabloids. The press gave off an aura of cheerfulness as they came out of the wretched snowy night into the relative snugness of the seedy hotel lobby, and then hunkered