Miami and the Siege of Chicago (8 page)

Abernathy came in about forty minutes late, several other Negroes with him, his press secretary, Bernard Lee, wearing a tan suede collarless jacket, sullen and composed behind an evil-looking pair of dark sunglasses, possessor of hostility which seemed to say, “I got the right, man, to look at you from behind these shades, but you deserve no chance, man, to look at me.”

Abernathy was of different stuff, deep, dreamy, sly, bemused—one could not detect if he were profoundly melancholy, or abominably hung over. He spoke in a measured slow basso, slow almost beyond measure, operatic in a echoes, but everything he said sounded like
recitatif
for he seemed to read his statement with more attention for the music of the language than the significance of the words. “If the Republican Party can afford this lavish convention, and the Administration can spend billions of dollars in a disastrous war, and America can subsidize unproductive farms and prosperous industries, surely we can meet the modest demands of the Poor People's Campaign,” he read, and the logic was powerful, the demands well nailed to the mast, but his voice lingered on “lavish” as if he were intrigued with the relation of sounds to palpable luxuries he had known and glimpsed, “disastrous” appealed to him for its sibilants as though he were watching some scythe of wind across a field, so “subsidize” was a run of the voice up and down three steps, and “unproductive‘” hung like the echo of a stalactite. He was a man from Mars absolutely fascinated with the resonance of earthly sound.

He had begun by apologizing to the Press for being late, and had said this in so deep and gracious a voice that pools of irritability were swabbed up immediately, but then he trod over this first good move immediately by saying, “Of course, I understand much of the convention is running behind schedule.” The one indisputable virtue of the convention hitherto had been the promptitude of each event—how casual and complacent, how irresponsibly attracted to massacre! that he must issue the one accusation all courts would find unjustified.

But the reporter was soon caught up in trying to form an opinion of Abernathy. He was no equal, it was unhappily true to see, of Martin Luther King. The reporter had met that eminent just once: King in a living room had a sweet attentive gravity which endeared him to most, for he listened carefully, and was responsive when he spoke. He had the presence of a man who would deal with complexity by absorbing its mood, and so solve its contradiction by living with it, an abstract way of saying that he comprehended issues by the people who embodied them, and so gave off a sense of social comfort with his attendance in a room. Abernathy had no such comfort. A plump, badgered, perhaps bewildered man, full of obvious prides and scars and wounds, one could not tell if he were in part charlatan, mountebank, or merely elevated to monumental responsibility too early. But his presence gave small comfort because he was never in focus. One did not know if he were strong or weak, powerfully vibrant and containing himself, or drenched in basso profundos of gloom. “Poor people,” he intoned, with his disembodied presentation, “no longer will be unseen, unheard, and unrepresented. We are here to dramatize the
plight
of poor people...”—his voice went off on a flight of reverberation along the hard “i” of plight. Later, he asked for “control by all people of their own local communities and their own personal destinies,” incontestable as a democratic demand, but no fire in the voice, no power to stir, more an intimation of gloom in the caverns of his enriched tone as if he must push upon a wagon which would never mount his hill, so he went off again on “communities”—the hard “u” concealed certain new mysteries of the larynx—and relations to re
mun
eration. He ended by saying, “Part of our Mule Train will be here on Miami Beach in front of this hotel and Convention Hall to dramatize
poverty
”—he stated the word as if it were the name of a small town—“in this beautiful city of luxury.”

In the questioning, he was better. Asked if he considered Ronald Reagan a friend of the Blacks, Abernathy smiled slowly and said with ministerial bonhomie, “Well, he may have
some
friends....” Queried about the failure of the Poor People's March on Washington, he offered a stern defense, spoke of how every campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been described as a failure, an obvious cuff at those who had once described King's work as failure, and then for a moment he rose above the dull unhappy scandals of Resurrection City, the mess, the breakdowns of sanitation, the hoodlumism, and the accusations by his own that some had lived in hotels while they had been squalid in tents, and spoke of what had been gained, funds pried loose from the government “to the tune of some many millions,” he said in his musical voice, and named the figure, more than 200 million, and the fact of the continuation of the Poor People's Campaign, and the sense came again of the painful drudgery of the day to day, the mulish demands of the operation, the gloom of vast responsibility and tools and aids and lieutenants he could count on even less than himself, and the reporter, as though washed in bowls of his own bile, was contrite a degree and went off to have lunch when the conference was done, a little weary of confronting the mystery of his own good or ill motive.

Of course, having lunch, the reporter, to his professional shame, had not the wit to go looking for it, so here is a quotation from Thomas A. Johnson of
The New York Times
concerning the immediate aftermath of Abernathy's appearance:

It was a confrontation the reporter should not have missed. Were the Reagan girls livid or triumphant? Were the Negro demonstrators dignified or raucous or self-satisfied? It was a good story but the
Times
was not ready to encourage its reporters in the thought that there is no history without nuance.

After lunch, in a belated attempt to catch up with the Governor of California and the direction of his campaign, the reporter had gone up to one of the top floors of the Deauville where Mrs. Reagan was scheduled to have a conference at 2:30
P.M.
, indeed the listing in the National Committee News had stated that the Press was requested to be present by 2:15, but embarrassment prevailed in the high headquarters of the Deauville, for Mrs. Regan was not there and could not be found: the word given out was that she had not been informed. The inevitable deduction was that no one in his headquarters had read the Schedule for the day, and the Press was disassembled with apologies by an attractive corn-fed blonde young lady possessing a piggie of a turned-up nose and the delicate beginning of a double chin. Her slimness of figure suggested all disciplines of diet. The young lady had been sufficiently attractive for the Press to forgive much, but a few of the more European journalists were forced to wonder if the most proficient of performances had been presented here by representatives of the man who cried out, “What is obviously needed is not
more
government, but better government....”

At any rate it was time to catch up with Nixon again. It was not that Nixon's activities attracted the reporter's hoarded passion, it was more that there was little else which puzzled him. If he had been more of a reporter (or less of one) he would have known that the Reagan forces were pushing an all-out attack to pry, convert, cozen, and steal Southern delegates from Nixon, and that the Nixon forces were responding with a counter-offensive which would yet implicate their choice of Vice President, but the reporter worked like a General who was far from the front—if he could not hear the sound of cannon, he assumed the battle was never high. Nothing could have convinced him on this particular intolerably humid afternoon that Nixon's forces were in difficulty, and perhaps he was right, perhaps the lack of any echo of such strife in the lobbies of the Deauville or the Hilton was true sign of the issue, and the long shadows of history would repeat that the verdict was never in doubt.

The reporter was off at any rate to witness the reception for delegates in the same American Scene of the Hilton where Nixon had had his press conference early that morning, and if one was interested in the science of comparative political receptions, the beginning of all such study was here. As many as eight thousand people had ganged through the aisles and banquet rooms and exits of the Americana when Rockefeller had had his party, and that, it may be remembered, was a bash where the glamour was thrown at a man with the cole slaw, and the bottom of every glass the bartender handled was wet, the caviar on the buffet table crawled along the cloth and plopped to the floor. Here in the comparative stateliness of the Hilton—only God could save this mark!—not twenty-two hours later, the Nixon forces were showing how a reception for Republican delegates should be run. If a thousand men and women were waiting outside, jammed in the lobby and the approaches to the stairs, and if the resultant theater-line, six and eight people thick, inched up the stairs at a discouraging slow rate, there was consolation at the top for they were let through a narrow door, two by two, and there advanced behind a cord which ran around a third of the circular curve of the room to move forward at last onto a small dais where Mr. and Mrs. Nixon were receiving, there to be greeted individually by each of them with particular attention, and on from that eminence to the center of the room where a bar was ready to give a drink and food to be picked up from a buffet table, turkey, ham, a conventional buffet, a string orchestra.

Perhaps two thousand people went through in the hours from three to six, probably it was less, for Nixon spent five or ten or fifteen seconds with each delegate or couple who passed by. Perhaps the invitations had been restricted to those delegates who would vote for him or leaned toward his candidacy. No matter how, there were not too many to handle, just the largest number consonant with the problem which was: how to convert a mass of delegates and wives and children back to that sense of importance with which they had left their hometown.

Nixon knew how to do it. Here was Nixon at his very best. He had not spent those eight years in harness, highest flunky in the land, aide-de-camp to a five-star General, now President, who had been given such service in his NATO days that no new servant could ever please him, yes, Nixon had not put in his apprenticeship as spiritual butler to the Number One representative of the High Beloved here on earth, without learning how to handle a Republican line of delegates by ones and twos.

This was no line like the wealthy Republicans at the Gala, this was more a pilgrimage of minor delegates, sometimes not even known so well in their own small city, a parade of wives and children and men who owned hardware stories or were druggists, or first teller in the bank, proprietor of a haberdashery or principal of a small town high school, local lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on tidy income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor corporations, men who owned their farms, an occasional rotund state party hack with a rubbery look, editor of a small-town paper, professor from Baptist teachers' college, high school librarian, young political aspirant, young salesman—the stable and the established, the middle-aged and the old, a sprinkling of the young, the small towns and the quiet respectable cities of the Midwest and the Far West and the border states were out to pay their homage to their own true candidate, the representative of their conservative orderly heart, and it was obvious they adored him in a quiet way too deep for applause, it was obvious the Nixons had their following after all in these middle-class neatly-dressed people moving forward in circumscribed steps, constrained, not cognizant of their bodies, decent respectables who also had spent their life in service and now wanted to have a moment near the man who had all of their vote, and so could arouse their happiness, for the happiness of the Wasp was in his moment of veneration, and they had veneration for Nixon, heir of Old Ike—center of happy memory and better days—they venerated Nixon for his service to Eisenhower, and his comeback now—it was his comeback which had made him a hero in their eyes, for America is the land which worships the Great Comeback, and so he was Tricky Dick to them no more, but the finest gentleman in the land; they were proud to say hello.

The Nixons talked to each one in turn. The candidate was first on the receiving line and then his wife, each taking the arm or shaking the hand of the delegate before them and saying a few words, sometimes peering at the name on the delegate's badge, more often recognizing the face from some all-but-forgotten banquet or fund-raiser in Platte, or Akron, or Evansville, Chillicothe, or Iowa City; in Columbia, South Carolina, and Columbia, Mo.; in Boulder or Fort Collins; in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Fayetteville, North Carolina; in Harrisburg and Keene and Spokane and Fort Lauderdale and Raleigh and Butte—yes, Nixon had travelled the creeping vine of small-town Republicanism, he had won delegates over these last two years by ones and twos, votes pulled in by the expenditure of a half hour here, an hour there, in conversations which must have wandered so far as the burial specifications of Aunt Matty in her will, and the story of the family stock, he had worked among the despised nuts and bolts of the delegates' hearts, and it showed up here in the skill and the pleasure with which he greeted each separate delegate, the separate moves of his hands upon them, for some he touched by the elbow, others patted on the back, some he waved on to his wife with a personal word, never repeating the sequence, fresh for each new delegate. He still did not move with any happiness in his body, the gestures still came in such injunctions from the head as: “Grab this old boy by the elbow,” but he was obviously happy here, it was one of the things in the world which he could do best, he could be gracious with his own people, and Pat Nixon backed him up, concentrating on the wives and children, also skillful, the tense forbidding face of her youth (where rectitude, ambition, and lack of charity had been etched like the grimace of an addict into every line of the ferocious clenched bite of her jaw) had eased now somewhat; she was almost attractive, as if the rigid muscle of the American woman's mind at its worst had relaxed—she looked near to mellow: as a husband and wife they had taken the long road back together, somewhere in the abyss she must have forgiven him for “America can't stand pat.”