Assigning a reporter to the daily White House beat is often justified in the news business as manning a “death watch.” That is, keeping someone on hand to cover what, at a moment?s notice, will be a sensational story: The assassination of a president.
As a reporter at The Washington Post in the summer of 1974, I was assigned to a sort of political death watch; sticking to then-Vice President Gerald R. Ford Jr. as the Watergate scandal closed in on President Richard M. Nixon, making Ford his successor.
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