Miami and the Siege of Chicago (4 page)

Then Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania was on. Scott had modest but impeccable aplomb as he explained that since only 12 per cent of the delegates had been in San Francisco in 1964, he did not expect bitterness from old Goldwater followers to hurt Rockefeller's chances now. A fine character actor had been lost when Hugh Scott went to politics—he could have played the spectrum from butler to count.

Leonard Hall, heavy, imperturbable, was there with figures—he counted 535 for Nixon, 350 for Rockefeller. He was a man noted for relative accuracy, but was probably structuring his figures today. He gave the impression of an extraordinarily intelligent man, in appearance not unlike Jack E. Leonard doing a straight turn, as if all of Jack E. Leonard's hyper-acute intelligence had gone into the formidable bastions of Squaresville. “My goodness,” said Hall at one point, “Rockefeller means the difference for thirty or forty Republican Congressmen between getting elected ... and being in trouble.” He was not about to say Nixon would certainly make them go down. “These Congressmen are human beings. They want to win.” But picture Jack E. Leonard talking like that. Some part of conviction was lacking. When Hall said “My goodness” he looked too much like the director of the most impressive funeral establishment in the nation, the kind of man who certainly couldn't think much of you if, my goodness, you wouldn't spring ten thousand smackeroonies for a casket.

There had also been Bill Miller, the man who had run for Vice President on Barry Goldwater's ticket in '64. Now he was supporting Rockefeller. When asked if he and Gold-water were still friends, he said, “I've promised to go along with Governor Rockefeller, and he has said that if he is not nominated, he will support the convention's choice. Gold-water has said he will work for anybody the convention nominates. So sooner or later, Barry and I will be together again.” Miller had the big head, big nose, and little hunched shoulders which are reminiscent of an ex-jockey. He had become popular with the Press during the last Presidential campaign. Becoming convinced somewhere en route that Barry's cause was hopeless, he had spent his time on the Vice Presidential campaign plane drinking bourbon and playing cards; when the plane came to a stop, he would get out, give his airport speech to the airport rally—usually a small crowd at a small airport—get back in the plane again, his card hand still warm, and pick up the play. Now he was wending his way through trick questions, emphasizing his long continuing relations with Rockefeller, whom he had supported for election four times while Rockefeller indeed had supported him seven times, so no curiosity that he was back of Rocky now. Miller talked in a barking voice full of snap. Where it had once been disagreeable in a formal speech, it was not unattractive here. Maybe all that bourbon and bridge had mellowed him since '64—he no longer looked like the nastiest yap in town.

To the contrary, he now had all the political oils. He was for Rockefeller because Rockefeller solved problems through action. “You name a problem, and in New York we've got it.” So he went on to cite the Governor's fine record in highways and air pollution and conservation. It was hard to know just what he was talking about. Every year the traffic in New York was worse, and the air less possible to breathe, the Hudson River more polluted. It gave a hint of the extra-terrestrial dimension where Rockefeller and his advisers must live. Plans, large projects, huge campaigns, government fundings, mass participation in government, successful prosecution of air pollution, comprehensive surveys of traffic control, people's candidate, public opinion polls—the feather of doubt would whisper that Rockefeller was better suited for the Democrats than the Republicans. There were nuts and bolts and small tools necessary for unscrewing a Republican delegate from a first attachment to a second, and Rockefeller might have nothing smaller to employ than a bulldozer. But on to the Nixon camp.

The Orpheum Room in the Hilton Plaza where Herb Klein, Director of Press Relations for Nixon, held his conferences, looked like a public room for small gatherings which had been converted to a surgical theater. The approach was along a red corridor with red carpet, red ceiling, red velvet flock on the walls, and mirrors in gold frames, but the Orpheum Room had gold flock on a cream base in ivy figured wallpaper with heavy gold molding on the ceiling, and a gold and tan figured rug. Two huge glass chandeliers with about 800 prisms in each completed allegiance to the eighteenth century. The twentieth century was a foot away from the chandeliers in the form of a big square aluminum baffle plate flush in the ceiling for air conditioning. The chairs for Press were the ubiquitous brown leatherette sprinkled with gold dust.

The podium was a structure covered with formica processed to look like walnut grain. Behind it hung a shrinelike photograph of Richard Nixon, exhibiting the kind of colors one saw on Jack Kennedy photographs after his assassination; also on pictures of Manolete, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln.

Klein was a slim neat man with a high forehead, a pleasant demeanor—men in public relations are not noted for disagreeable dispositions—and a smile which would have delivered the simile of a cat licking cream if no previous investor of the simile had yet existed. He was claiming 700 votes for Nixon on the first ballot. Since Leonard Hall had insisted not two hours before that his most careful estimates put Nixon at 535, it was obvious— both men revealing no shiver of incertitude—that one of them was a liar.

Since Nixon would not be arriving until Monday, he had little news to offer before introducing Governor John Volpe of Massachusetts, a Republican of Italian extraction who had come into prosperous political life by way of the construction business. Volpe was a self-made man, and looked not unlike a small version of Rockefeller. He was no great orator as he read his prepared speech which declared him all-out for Nixon, indeed he seemed to hire no great speech writers either. “Americans see in Mr. Nixon a leader who can unite this country in an effort that will preserve and enhance our position in the world, while simultaneously providing the needed inspiration and new thoughts required in the next four years.” Sock it to 'em, Volpe! His strength was in other places. In concrete. All the while, standing behind him, Herb Klein smiled his happy tabbycat smile. They made a good pair standing side by side. When he smiled, Herb Klein's narrow eyes became slits. Just after Volpe smiled, his narrow mouth became a slit. It was a modest conference without much news and nothing was disturbed. Afterward came a fashion show: outfits were shown for the Nixon dancers, and the Nixonaires— airline stewardesses based in Miami who were willing or eager to work for Nixon in their spare time. A bevy of good-looking chicks with sharp noses and tight mouths modelled the stuff. They were carefully balanced between blondes—Women for Nixon—wearing sleeveless blue Aline cotton dresses, and several brunettes—Nixonaires—in orange leatherette vests, white miniskirts, and black and white leatherette jockey caps.

By the next day, when Nixon's daughters arrived, it was obvious that such notion of balance—blondes to share stage with brunettes—had been calculated for many an aspect of his campaign. There were, for instance, two complete bands in the lobby of the Hilton Plaza to celebrate the arrival of his daughters, and one band was white, the other Black. Yet if not for the mezzanine which was inlaid, it will be recollected, with red velvet flock for the walls and red fleur-de-lis for the rugs, the Hilton Plaza could have been converted to a hospital. Even with entertainment, the lobby was relatively bare and colorless. Compared to the Fontainebleau and the Americana it was ascetic. Hints of some future American empire and some future American sterility were in the seed of the architect's conception.

It was filled now of course with the two bands and the Nixon Dancers and Nixonaires and TV cameras and crowds and Nixon workers and a man dressed like Uncle Sam on ten-foot stilts who bore a curious but undeniable resemblance to Senator Eugene McCarthy. The Nixon daughters had come in to pleasant cheers, cries of pleasure from those who could see them in the crowd, the beating of the two bands, and they had passed through the crowd and into the lobby, both lovely looking girls. The older (who looked younger) was Tricia, gentle, bemused, a misty look to her face, but incontestably a beauty with very blonde hair. She had an extraordinary complexion— one would be forced to describe it with the terminology of the Victorian novel, alabaster and ivory could vie for prominence with peaches and cream. The other daughter, Julia, brown-haired, apple-cheeked, snub-nosed, was healthy, genial, a perfect soubrette for a family comedy on television. She was as American as Corporate Bakeries apple pie. And now engaged to David Eisenhower, grandson of Old Ike. It was an engagement which had caused much bitter chortling and a predictable tightening of the collective mouth when word came to liberal circles. There seemed at the time no limit to Richard Nixon's iniquity. But in fact daughter Julia was a nice-looking girl, and Ike's grandson who looked to be not yet twenty had a pleasant face, more than a hint of innocence in it, not only small-town but near to yokel, redeemed by the friendliest of simple smiles. An ambitious high school dramatics teacher might have picked him to play Billy Budd.

The arrival of the girls and covert scrutiny of them by the reporter had produced one incontestable back-slapping turn-of-the-century guffaw: a man who could produce daughters like that could not be all bad. The remote possibility of some reappraisal of Richard Nixon was now forced to enter the works. It was, of course, remote, but the reporter was determined to be fair to all, and the notion was incontestably there. Nothing in his prior view of Nixon had ever prepared him to conceive of a man with two lovely girls. (Since the reporter had four fine daughters of his own, he was not inclined to look on such matters as accident.) And indeed later that night, the voice (agreeably well-brought-up but not remarkable) of one of Nixon's daughters was heard for a fragment of dialogue on radio. No, she was saying, their father had never spanked them. It was indicated that Mother had been the disciplinarian. “But then,” the girl's voice went on, simple clarity, even honest devotion in the tone, “we never wanted to displease him. We wanted to be good.” The reporter had not heard a girl make a remark like that about her father since his own mother had spoken in such fashion thirty-odd years ago.

Of course the remote contingency of reappraising Nixon had been kept comfortably remote by the nature of the entertainment provided in the lobby of the Hilton Plaza after the daughters had made their entrance and well-regulated escape to some private suite upstairs. The Nixon Dancers were now entertaining the crowd. Thirty-six adolescent girls all seemingly between five feet, four inches and five feet, six inches came out to dance various sorts of cheerleader-type dances. Impossible to define the steps more neatly, it was some sort of cross between television entertainment at half-time and working on a farm team for the Rockettes. Later the girls made an exit in file, in profile, and a clear count was there to be made in noses. Six of the thirty-six had aquiline curves, six were straight-nosed, and the other twenty-four had turned-up buttons at the tip.

Now heard was the white band. There were sixteen of them, about as good, and about as simple, as a good high school marching band. The Black band was something else, Eureka Brass Band by name, right out of Beale Street sixty years ago, ten Negroes in black pants, white shirts and white yachting caps with black visors did a Dixieland strut up and around the floor, led by their master, a tall disdainful wizardly old warlock, a big Black in a big black tuxedo, black felt Homburg on his head, medals and green sashes and Nixon buttons all over him. He was no ad for anybody but the most arcane Black Power, he was an old prince of a witch doctor—insult him at your peril—but the other ten musicians with their trumpets and snares and assorted brass would prove no pull for Nixon on TV with any Black votes watching, for they were old and meek, naught but elderly Black Southern musicians, a veritable Ganges of Uncle Toms. They had disappeared with Tom Swift and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

That evening at the Fountainebleau, on the night before the convention was to begin, the Republicans had their Grand Gala, no Press admitted, and the reporter by a piece of luck was nearly the first to get in. The affair was well-policed, in fact strict in its security, for some of the most important Republican notables would be there, but strolling through the large crowd in the lobby the reporter discovered himself by accident in the immediate wake of Governor Reagan's passage along a channel of security officers through the mob to the doors of the Gala. It was assumed by the people who gave way to the Governor that the reporter must be one of the plainclothesmen assigned to His Excellency's rear, and with a frown here, judicious tightening of his mouth there, look of concern for the Governor's welfare squeezed onto his map, offering a security officer's look superior to the absence of any ticket, he went right in through the ticket-takers, having found time in that passage to observe Governor Reagan and his Lady, who were formally dressed to the hilt of the occasion, now smiling, now shaking hands, eager, tense, bird-like, genial, not quite habituated to eminence, seeking to make brisk but not rude progress through the crowd, and obviously uneasy in the crowd (like most political figures) since a night in June in Los Angeles. It was an expected observation, but Mr. and Mrs. Reagan looked very much like an actor and actress playing Governor and Wife. Still Reagan held himself sort of uneasily about the middle, as if his solar plexus were fragile, and a clout would leave him like a fish on the floor.

Once inside the ballroom, however, the reporter discovered that the Governor had been among the first guests to enter. His own position was therefore not comfortable. Since there were no other guests among whom to mix (nothing but two hundred and forty empty tables with settings for two thousand people, all still to come in) and no cover to conceal him but small potted trees with oranges attached by green wire, since Security might be furious to the point of cop-mania catching him thus early, there was no choice but to take up a stand twenty feet from the door, his legs at parade rest, his arms clasped behind, while he scrutinized the entrance of everybody who came in. Any security officer studying him might therefore be forced to conclude that he belonged to
other
Security. Suffice it, he was not approached in his position near the entrance, and for the next thirty minutes looked at some thousand Republicans coming through the gate, the other thousand entering out of view by an adjacent door.