Miami and the Siege of Chicago (7 page)

Question from the Press:
You emphasized the change in the country and abroad. Has this led you to change your thinking in any shape or form specifically?

Answer:
It certainly has
. (But he was too eager. Old Nixon was always ready to please with good straight American boyhood enthusiasm. So he tacked back, his voice throttled down.)
As the facts change, any intelligent man
(firm but self-deprecatory, he is including the Press with himself)
does change his approaches to the problems
. (Now sharp awareness of the next Press attitude.)
It does not mean that he is an opportunist
. (Now modestly, reasonably.)
It means only that he is a pragmatist, a realist, applying principles to the new situations
. (Now he will deploy some of the resources of his answer.)
For example
...
in preparing the acceptance speech I hope to give next Thursday, I was reading over my acceptance speech in 1960, and I thought then it was, frankly, quite a good speech. But I realize how irrelevant much of what I said in 1960 in foreign affairs was to the problems of today
. (The admission was startling. The Old Nixon was never wrong. Now, he exploited the shift in a move to his political left, pure New Nixon.)
Then the Communist world was a monolithic world. Today it is a split world, schizophrenic, with
...
great diversity
...
in Eastern Europe
(a wholesome admission for anyone who had labored in John Foster Dulles' world.) ...
after an era of confrontation
...
we now enter an era of negotiations with the Soviet Union
.

While he was never in trouble with the questions, growing surer and surer of himself as he went on, the tension still persisted between his actual presence as a man not altogether alien to the abyss of a real problem, and the political practitioner of his youth, that snake-oil salesman who was never back of any idea he sold, but always off to the side where he might observe its effect on the sucker. The New Nixon groped and searched for the common touch he had once been able to slip into the old folks with the ease of an incubus on a spinster. Now he tried to use slang, put quotes around it with a touching, almost pathetic, reminder of Nice-Nellyism, the inhibition of the good clean church upbringing of his youth insisting on exhibiting itself, as if he were saying with a YMCA slick snicker, “After we break into slang, there's always the danger of the party getting
rough
.” It was that fatal prissiness which must have driven him years ago into all the militaristic muscle-bending witch-hunting foam-rubber virilities of the young Senator and the young Vice President. So, now he talked self-consciously of how the members of his staff, counting delegates, were “playing what we call ‘the strong game.' ” SMILE said his brain. FLASH went the teeth. But his voice seemed to give away that, whatever they called it, they probably didn't call it “the strong game,” or if they did,
he
didn't. So he framed little phrases. Like “a leg-up.” Or “my intuition, my ‘gut feelings,' so to speak.” Deferential air followed by SMILE—FLASH. Was it possible that one of the secrets of Old Nixon was that his psyche had been trapped in rock-formations, nay, geological strata of Sunday school inhibitions? Was it even possible that he was a good man, not a bad man, a good man who had been trapped by an early milieu whose habits had left him with such innocence about three-quarters of the world's experience that he had become an absolute monster of opportunism about the quarter he comprehended all too well? Listening to Nixon now, studying his new modesty, it was impossible to tell whether he was a serious man on the path of returning to his own true seriousness, out to unite the nation again as he promised with every remark: “Reconciliation of the races is a primary objective of the United States,” or whether the young devil had reconstituted himself into a more consummate devil, Old Scratch as a modern Abe Lincoln of modesty.

Question from the Press:
A little less than six years ago, after your defeat for the Governorship of California, you announced at the ensuing press conference that that was going to be your last news conference. Could you recall for us this morning two or three of the most important points in your own thinking which made you reverse that statement and now reach for political office on the highest level?

Answer:
Had there not been the division of the Republican Party in 1964 and had there not been the vacuum of leadership that was created by that division and by that defeat, I would not be here today
....
I believe that my travels around the country and the world in this period of contemplation and this period of withdrawal from the political scene
(some dark light of happiness now in his eye, as if withdrawal and contemplation had given him the first deep pleasures, or perhaps the first real religious pleasures of his life)
in which I have had a chance to observe not only the United States but the world, has led me to the conclusion that returning to the arena was something that I should do
(said almost as if he had heard a voice in some visitation of the night)—
not that I consider myself to be an indispensable man
. (Said agreeably in a relaxed tone as if he had thought indeed to the bottom of this and had found the relaxation of knowing he was not indispensable, an absurd vanity if one stares at Nixon from without, but he had been Vice President before he was forty, and so had had to see himself early, perhaps much too early, as a man of destiny. Now, reservation underlined, he could continue.)
But something that I should do
(go for the Presidency)
because this is the time I think when the man and the moment in history come together
. (An extraordinary admission for a Republican, with their Protestant detestation of philosophical deeps or any personification of history. With one remark, Nixon had walked into the oceans of Marx, Spengler, Heidegger, and Tolstoy; and Dostoevski and Kierkegaard were in the wings. Yes, Richard Nixon's mind had entered the torture chambers of the modern consciousness!)

I have always felt that a man cannot seek the Presidency and get it simply because he wants it. I think that he can seek the Presidency and obtain it only when the Presidency requires what he may have to offer
(the Presidency was then a mystical seat, mystical as the choice of a woman's womb)
and I have had the feeling
(comfortably pleasant and modest again—no phony Nixon here)
and it may be a presumptuous feeling, that because of the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party, because of the need for leadership particularly qualified in foreign affairs, because I have known not only the country, but the world as a result of my travels, that now time
(historical-time—the very beast of the mystic!)
requires that I re-enter the arena
. (Then he brought out some humor. It was not great humor, but for Nixon it was curious and not indelicate.)
And incidentally, I have been very willing to do so
. (Re-enter the arena.)
I am not being drafted. I want to make that very clear. I am very willing to do so. There has never been a draft in Miami in August anyway
. (Nice laughter from the Press—he has won them by a degree. Now he is on to finish the point.) ...
I believe that if my judgment—and my intuition, my “gut feelings” so to speak, about America and American political tradition—is right, this is the year that I will win
.

The speech had come in the middle of the conference and he kept fielding questions afterward, never wholly at ease, never caught in trouble, mild, firm, reasonable, highly disciplined—it was possible he was one of the most disciplined men in America. After it was over, he walked down the aisle, and interviewers gathered around him, although not in great number. The reporter stood within two feet of Nixon at one point but had not really a question to ask which could be answered abruptly. “What, sir, would you say is the state of your familiarity with the works of Edmund Burke?” No, it was more to get a sense of the candidate's presence, and it was a modest presence, no more formidable before the immediate Press in its physical aura than a floorwalker in a department store, which is what Old Nixon had often been called, or worse—Assistant Mortician. It was probable that bodies did not appeal to him in inordinate measure, and a sense of the shyness of the man also appeared—shy after all these years!—but Nixon must have been habituated to loneliness after all those agonies in the circus skin of Tricky Dick. Had he really improved? The reporter caught himself hoping that Nixon had. If his physical presence inspired here no great joy nor even distrust, it gave the sense of a man still entrenched in toils of isolation, as if only the office of the Presidency could be equal (in the specific density of its importance) to the labyrinthine delivery of the natural man to himself. Then and only then might he know the strength of his own hand and his own moral desire. It might even be a measure of the not-entirely dead promise of America if a man as opportunistic as the early Nixon could grow in reach and comprehension and stature to become a leader. For, if that were possible in these bad years, then all was still possible, and the country not stripped of its blessing. New and marvelously complex improvement of a devil, or angel-in-chrysalis, or both—good and evil now at war in the man, Nixon was at least, beneath the near to hermetic boredom of his old presence, the most interesting figure at the convention, or at least so the reporter had decided by the end of the press conference that Tuesday in the morning. Complexities upon this vision were to follow.

The next press conference to be noted was in the French Room of the Fontainebleau for 11:00
A.M.
The Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, former assistant to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and leader of the Poor People's March after King had been assassinated, was scheduled to read a statement and answer questions. While the assembly was nowhere near so large as Nixon's, close to a hundred reporters must nonetheless have appeared, a considerable number of Negroes among them, and then proceeded to wait. Abernathy had not shown up. About fifteen minutes past the hour, another Negro came to the podium and said that the Reverend was on his way, and could be expected in a few minutes.

The gossip was livelier. “We had to look for him in five hotels,” said a Black reporter to some other members of the Press, and there was a mental picture of the leader waking heavily, the woes of race, tension, unfulfilled commitment, skipped promises, and the need for militant effort in the day ahead all staring down into whatever kind of peace had been reached the night before in the stretch before sleep.

Still it was unduly irritating to have to wait at a press conference, and as the minutes went by and annoyance mounted, the reporter became aware after a while of a curious emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before—it was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him—he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the Republican convention itself, this congregation of the clean, the brisk, the orderly, the efficient. A reporter who must attempt to do his job, he had perhaps committed himself too completely to the atmosphere as if better to comprehend the subterranean character of what he saw on the surface, but in any event having passed through such curious pilgrimage—able to look at Richard Nixon with eyes free of hatred!—it was almost as if he resented the presence of Abernathy now (or the missing Abernathy) as if the discomfort of his Black absence made him suddenly contemplate the rotting tooth and ulcerated gum of the white patient. What an obsession was the Negro to the average white American by now. Every time that American turned in his thoughts to the sweetest object of contemplation in his mind's small town bower, nothing less than America the Beautiful herself—that angel of security at the end of every alley—then
there
was the face of an accusing rioting Black right in the middle of the dream—smack in the center of the alley—and the obsession was hung on the hook of how to divide the guilt, how much to the white man, how much to the dark? The guiltiest man alive would work around the clock if he could only assign proportions to his guilt; but not to know if one was partially innocent or very guilty had to establish an order of paralysis. Since obsessions dragoon our energy by endless repetitive contemplations of guilt we can neither measure nor forget, political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt. Torrents of energy would be loosed, yes, those same torrents which Hitler had freed in the Germans when he exploded their ten-year obsession with whether they had lost the war through betrayal or through material weakness. Through betrayal, Hitler had told them: Germans were actually strong and good. The consequences would never be counted.

Now if suburban America was not waiting for Georgie Wallace, it might still be waiting for Super-Wallace. The thought persisted, the ugly thought persisted that despite all legitimate claims, all burning claims, all searing claims, despite the fundamental claim that America's wealth, whiteness, and hygiene had been refined out of the most powerful molecules stolen from the sweat of the Black man, still the stew of the Black revolution had brought the worst to surface with the best, and if the Black did not police his own house, he would be destroyed and some of the best of the white men with him, and here—here was the sleeping festering hair of his outrage now that Abernathy was scandalously late in this sweaty room, over-heated by the hot TV camera lights, the waiting bodies, yes, the secret sleeping hair of this anti-Black fury in himself was that he no longer knew what the Black wanted—was the Black man there to save mankind from the cancerous depredations of his own white civilization, or was the Black so steeped in his curse that he looked forward to the destruction of the bread itself? Or worst of all, and like an advance reconnaissance scout of the armies of the most quintessential bigotry, one soldier from that alien army flung himself over the last entrenchment, stood up to die, and posed the question: “How do you know the Black man is not Ham, son of Evil? How do you really know?” and the soldier exploded a defense works in the reporter's brain, and bitterness toward Negroes flowed forth like the blood of the blown-up dead: over the last ten years if he had had fifty friendships with Negroes sufficiently true to engage a part of his heart, then was it ten or even five of those fifty which had turned out well? Aware of his own egocentricity, his ability to justify his own actions through many a strait gate, still it seemed to him that for the most part, putting color to the side—if indeed that were ever permissible—the fault, man to man, had been his less often, that he had looked through the catechism of every liberal excuse, had adopted the blame, been ready to give blessing and forgive, and had succeeded merely in deadening the generosity of his heart. Or was he stingier than he dreamed, more lacking in the true if exorbitant demand for compassion without measure, was the Black liberty to exploit the white man without measure, which he had claimed for the Black so often, “If I were a Negro, I'd exploit everything in sight,” was this Black liberty he had so freely offered finally too offensive for him to support? He was weary to the bone of listening to Black cries of Black superiority in sex, Black superiority in beauty, Black superiority in war ... the claims were all too often uttered by Negroes who were not very black themselves. And yet dread and the woe of some small end came over him at the thought itself—it was possible the reporter had influenced as many Black writers as any other white writer in America, and to turn now ... But he was so heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments, so depressed with Black in-humanity to Black in Biafra, so weary of being sounded in the subway by Black eyes, so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in blood-shot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon, so envious finally of that liberty to abdicate from the long year-end decade-drowning yokes of work and responsibility that he must have become in some secret part of his flesh a closet Republican—how else account for his inner, “Yeah man, yeah, go!” when fat and flatulent old Republicans got up in Convention Hall to deliver platitudes on the need to return to individual human effort. Yes, he was furious at Abernathy for making him wait these crucial minutes while the secret stuff of his brain was disclosed to his mind.