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.”
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 mi
ght 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.
13
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 f
rom 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.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago Page 7
