Miami and the Siege of Chicago (9 page)

And the reporter had an insight that perhaps it was possible the Nixons had grown up last of all. Young ambitious couple, electrified by sudden eminence, and for eight years slave to eminence, false in every move—for how could any young couple so extravagantly advanced ever feel true to themselves (or even perhaps cognizant that there might be a psychic condition one could term
the true
) how was one ever to acquire such a knowledge when one's life was served as a creature of policies, a servant of great men and empty men, a victim of the very power one's ambition had provided. Nixon had entered American life as half a man, but his position had been so high, the power of the half man had been so enormous that he could never begin to recognize until he fell, that he was incomplete. Nor Mrs. Nixon.

As the string orchestra near them played away—five violins (four male musicians and a lady) plus one guitar, one accordion, one bass—as this elderly band continued to pick out the kind of sweet popular string music which is usually background for movie scenes in inexpensive Brighton hotels where elderly retired India colonels brood through dinner, as the afternoon and the orchestra continued and the slow procession of the delegates, so a sense came at last to the reporter of how Nixon must see his mission. There was a modesty among these delegates today, they were the center of the nation, but they were chastened in their pride—these same doctors and small-town lawyers, or men not so unlike them, had had their manic dreams of restoring order to America with the injunction and the lash just four years ago. Then the nation had lived in their mind like the sure strong son of their loins, and they had been ready to take the fight anywhere, to Vietnam, to China, into the Black ghettoes, they had been all for showing the world and some minorities in America where the real grapes of wrath were stored. But the last four years had exploded a few of their secret policies, and they were bewildered now. No matter what excuse was given that there might have been better ways to wage the war, the Wasp had built his nest with statistics, and the figures on the Vietnam war were badly wrong. How could the nation fail to win when its strength was as five to one, unless God had decided that America was not just?—righteousness had taken a cruel crack on the bridge of its marble brow. Much else was wrong, the youth, the Negro, the dollar, the air pollution and river pollution, the pornography, the streets—the Wasps were now a chastened crew. It was probable the Presidency would soon be theirs again, but the nation was profoundly divided, nightmares loomed—for the first time in their existence, the Wasps were modest about power. They were not certain they would know what to do with it.

What a vision must exist then now in Nixon, what a dream to save the land. Yes, the reporter would offer him this charity—the man had become sincere. All evidence spoke for that. How could there be, after all, a greater passion in a man like Nixon, so universally half-despised, than to show the center of history itself that he was not without greatness. What a dream for such a man! To cleanse the gangrenous wounds of a great power, to restore sanity to the psychopathic fevers of the day, to deny the excessive demand, and nourish the real need, to bring a balance to the war of claims, weed the garden of tradition, and show a fine nose for what was splendid in the new, serve as the great educator who might introduce each warring half of the nation to the other, and bring back the faith of other nations to a great nation in adventurous harmony with itself—yes, the dream could be magnificent enough for any world leader; if the reporter did not think that Nixon, poor Nixon, was very likely to flesh such a dream, still he did not know that the attempt should be denied. It was possible, even likely, even necessary, that the Wasp must enter the center of our history again. They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous ruminating government gut of every cow-like Democratic administration, an insane Republican minority with vast powers of negation and control, a minority who ran the economy, and half the finances of the world, and all too much of the internal affairs of four or five continents, and the Pentagon, and the technology of the land, and most of the secret police, and nearly every policeman in every small town, and yet finally they did not run the land, they did not comprehend it, the country was loose from them, ahead of them, the life style of the country kept denying their effort, the lives of the best Americans kept accelerating out of their reach. They were the most powerful force in America, and yet they were a psychic island. If they did not find a bridge, they could only grow more insane each year, like a rich nobleman in an empty castle chasing elves and ogres with his stick. They had every power but the one they needed—which was to attach their philosophy to history: the druggist and the president of the steel corporation must finally learn if they were both pushing on the same wheel. Denied the center of political power, the corporation and the small town had remained ideologically married for decades; only by wielding the power could they discover which concepts in conservative philosophy were viable, and what parts were mad. One could predict: their budgeting would prove insane, their righteousness would prove insane, their love for order and clear-thinking would be twisted through many a wry neck, the intellectual foundations of their anti-Communism would split into its separate parts. And the small-town faith in small free enterprise would run smash into the corporate juggernauts of technology land; their love of polite culture would collide with the mad aesthetics of the new America; their livid passion for military superiority would smash its nose on the impossibility of having such superiority without more government spending; their love of nature would have to take up arms against the despoiling foe, themselves, their own greed, their own big business. Yes, perhaps the Wasp had to come to power in order that he grow up, in order that he take the old primitive root of his life-giving philosophy—which required every man to go through battles, if the world would live, and every woman to bear a child—yes, take that root off the high attic shelf of some Prudie Parsley of a witch-ancestor, and plant it in the smashed glass and burned brick of the twentieth century's junkyard: see from that what might grow in the arbors of modern anomaly. Of course, Republicans might yet prove frightening, and were much, if not three-quarters, to blame for every ill in sight, they did not deserve the Presidency, never, and yet if democracy was the free and fair play of human forces then perhaps the Wasp must now hold the game in his direction for a time. The Left was not ready, the Left was years away from a vision sufficiently complex to give life to the land, the Left had not yet learned to talk across the rugged individualism of the more rugged in America, the Left was still too full of kicks and pot and the freakings of sodium amytol and orgy, the howls of electronics and LSD. The Left could also find room to grow up. If the Left had to live through a species of political exile for four or eight or twelve good years, it might even be right. They might be forced to study what was alive in the conservative dream. For certain the world could not be saved by technology or government or genetics, and much of the Left had that still to learn.

So the reporter stood in the center of the American Scene—how the little dramas of America, like birds, seemed to find themselves always in the right nest—and realized he was going through no more than the rearrangement of some intellectual luggage (which indeed every good citizen might be supposed to perform) during these worthy operations of the democratic soul when getting ready to vote.

The force of his proposition, however, was there to taunt him early the following day, so early as two in the morning. He had begun to drink that evening for the first time in several days. He did not like to drink too much when he was working, but the Wednesday session, nominating day, would not begin until five in the afternoon tomorrow, and it would be a long night, seven or nine or ten hours long, and at the end, Nixon all nominated, he did not believe that would be cause sufficient for him to celebrate—besides, it might be too late. Besides, he wanted to drink. Equal to the high contrast a stain can give to a microscope slide, was the clarity his dear booze sometimes offered a revery, and he had the luck to finish downing his drinks at Joe the Bartender's in the Hilton Plaza, a large and this night rollicking cellar bar where the Nixon people came to celebrate. The kids were out, the Young Republicans and the YAF (the Youth for American Freedom), a table or two of Southern delegates, even a table of Rockefeller Republicans he knew, so it was not the political make-up of the audience so much as the mood, a mood he could have found as easily in a dozen bars he knew in New York on almost any night, and a thousand there must have been in America, a thousand at least, maybe ten thousand. It was at first no more than a loud raucousness of the kind one could hear in many a bar with college drinkers, or skiers, or surfers, intricate interlocked songs with nonsense syllables and barnyard howls—Old Macdonald is perhaps the first of these songs—but the songs were more sophisticated, variations with fraternity house riffs, and jouncing repetitions, which could twist you off the beat. The band had three singers, girls in electric blue and electric green and electric pink dresses, not miniskirts so much as little girl dresses, girls a cross between cheerleaders, swingers, and Nixonettes—that hard healthy look in the blank and handsome face which spoke of action each night and low tolerance for being bored—they sang with a cornucopia of old-fashioned cutes, hands on hips, dipping at the knees, old-fashioned break into two bars of tap dance, more they could not fake, arms around each other's waist in four bars of can-can, they did solos, made faces, stuck their hips akimbo, and a virtuoso on the trombone played loud gut-bucket backings, cluckings and cryings, trombone imitating unrest in the barnyard, neighings and bleatings in the air-conditioned cool, the trombonist big and fat with a huge black sack of a shirt on which was the legend TUBA 24, and there was a tuba player as well, also virtuoso, top hat in tricolor, Uncle Sam with black coat, black pants. Two banjos in black shirts, red and blue striped pants, were there to whang away, one of the girls played a drum, a red drum, there was a rooty-toot to the barnyard, and rebel yells from the crowd all next to broken eggs and splats, some stew of loutishness, red-eyed beer drinkers pig-faced in the dark, and the hump on the back of their neck begins to grow fat, beef on beef, pig on pig, primeval stirrings, secret glee, fun and games are mounting and vomit washed in blood, it was oom-pah, oom-pah and upsy daisy weight lifters dancing, merry and raw, beer hall, beer hall, bleat of a cow, snort of a pig, oomps went the tuba and yes, the boar of old Europe was not dead, the shade had come to America, America it was.

There was slyness in the air, and patience, confidence of the win—a mood was building which could rise to a wave: if there was nihilism on the Left, there were dreams of extermination on the Right. Technology land had pushed cancer into every pore, so now the cure for cancer was dismemberment of order, all gouging of justice. There would be talk of new order before too long.

Nixon might have his dream to unify the land, but he would yet have to stare, face to face, into the power of his own Right Wing, soon to rise on the wave of these beer-hall bleats, the worst of the Wasp, all bull in his muscles, all murder in his neck—would Nixon have the stance to meet them? Or would he fall captive to the madmen in the pits of his own party, those madmen absent from Miami, those madmen concealed this week? The convention had been peaceful, too peaceful by far.

At large on the ocean, would people yet pray for Nixon and wish him strength as once they had wished strength to old Hindenburg and Dollfuss and Schuschnigg and Von Papen? Oom-pah went the tuba, starts! went the horn. Blood and shit might soon be flying like the red and brown of a
verboten
flag. It had had black in it as well. For death perhaps. Areas of white for purity. They would talk yet of purity. They always did. And shave the shorn. God give strength to Richard Nixon, and a nose for the real news. Oom-pah went the tuba,
farts
went the horn.

On Wednesday night Alabama ceded to California, and Reagan was first to be in nomination. Ivy Baker Priest made the speech, Ivy Baker Priest Stevens was her name now, a handsome woman who had been Treasurer of the United States in Eisenhower's cabinet, and then an assistant to Reagan. She had a dual personality. She was a wretched speaker with the parched nasal mean stingy acid driving tones of a typical Republican lady speaker: “A man who will confront the radicals on our campuses and the looters on our streets and say, ‘The laws will be obeyed.' ” It was a relief when her nasalities began to drive up the hill and one knew the mention of Reagan's name was near. “A man to match our mountains and our plains, a man steeped in the glorious traditions of the past, a man with a vision of the unlimited possibilities of a new era. Yes, Destiny has found the man.” A minute later she was done, and a fairly large demonstration went to work. It was to prove milder and less impressive than the Rockefeller and Nixon break-outs, but it was at least notable for a sight of the opposite side of the lady's personality. She now looked confident, enthusiastic, round, sexy, warm, and gloriously vital, the best blond housemother you could ever see, waving the fraternity boys around the bend as they sang “Dixie” and “California, Here I Come,” clapping her hands in absolute delight at signs like “I'm gone on Ron,” as if that were absolutely the most attractive thing she'd ever seen, then jazzed it like a cheerleader beating her palms and smiling, smiling at the sight of each new but familiar crew-cut face who had gotten up to whoop and toot it through the aisles for Ronnie. There were five cages of balloons overhead, and Reagan got one of them, the balloons came down in a fast cascade—each one blessed with a drop of water within so as to tend to plummet rather than tend to float—and they came down almost as fast as foam rubber pillows and were detonated with lighted cigarettes and stomping feet thus immediately that a string of firecrackers could have gone off.