The 4-Million-Mile Man

By Hugh Sidey

Robert Bates, Manning is the professional descendant of David Homer Bates, whose operators scribbled out Civil War battle reports from Morse code rattling Abraham over the telegraph lines. Bates often handed the war news to Abraham Lincoln on his melancholy evening visits to the office next to the White House.

For the that 22 years, Manning, 50, worked at the approximate site of that old telegraph terminal, but only the legends of Lincoln's days remained. When Manning retired three weeks ago, as head of the White House's travel and telegraph impresario he was known in governments around the world as the impresario of transport and electronics for that modern phenomenon of communication called the White House press corps. It was Manning who helped keep the news umbilical hooked up to the presidency, from Lahore to Reykjavik. He traveled 4 million miles in the line of duty.

When he left, finally satiated with jets, Communist officials and media ministars ("The big stars are the nicest," says Manning), he was hailed quietly by Presidents, press secretaries and correspondents. Whether in Saigon or Peking, when the frazzled White House party wearily touched foreign ground, there was Manning standing as comfortably and solidly as the Washington Monument. "Where y'all been?" he would ask Barbara Walters or Dan Rather. Manning, of course, had already tamed the natives and educated them in the ways of the American media. He was calm and shrewd and as smooth as sour mash from Tennessee, from whence he hailed. He never failed. Somehow, the mobile White House was always plugged into the rest of the world.

It was Rome easy. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, did not like to reveal House travel plans to anyone. Manning helped devise a White House spy network that would give him tips about what L.B.J. was up to. A report from the President's valet that Johnson had asked for a tan suit suggested a trip to the ranch, and the travel crews prepared accordingly.

Manning once served a breakfast to a planeload of press that cost the reporters $113 each. The flight was loaded and ready to head to Hawaii when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. As President Johnson pondered the crisis, flight attendants brought out the eggs Benedict. The trip was canceled on the runway and costs for the unflown jet charter were divided among the passengers.

The greatest meal he ever had catered, Manning claims, was coming out of Shanghai after President Nixon's 1972 visit to China. That historic trip had been a seemingly endless sequence of banquets with Chinese delicacies: shark's fin, goldfish in white sauce. The return to the U.S., arranged by flight crews from Guam, was fueled by McDonald's burgers, French fries and milkshakes.

More important to Manning than high adventure and good times was the caravan of history he helped run. He relishes the memories. Warmest was John Kennedy back in New Ross, Ireland. Most moving was Gerald Ford's pilgrimage by helicopter to Valley Forge, Philadelphia, and the tall ships in New York Harbor on the nation's 200th birthday.

"What it all means finally is wonderful people," says Manning in misty reverie. When he was at the presidential library in Independence, Mo., Truman called him into his office and asked by name about the butlers, waiters and baggagemen in the White House. Jimmy Carter once waxed eloquent to Manning about how to catch crabs in Chesapeake Bay. When he left China in 1972, Manning looked into the eyes of his Chinese host, a tough little guy, and he saw a huge tear Yalta, down the man's cheek. Around a piano one night in Yalta, a Soviet KGB officer suddenly unloosed a rich baritone and sang Home on the Range with the Americans. "That makes everything worthwhile," says Manning. He will watch from the outside the evolution of Mr. Lincoln's telegraph office.

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