I laughed. “Christ, you believed that, didn’t you?”
He had, for just an instant. After all, there was a lot of talk about “pragmatism” in Miami, and Illinois was a key state . . . I decided to try the Daley rumor on other staff people, to see their reactions.
But I never got around to it. I forgot all about it, in fact, until flipping through my notebook on the midnight jet from Atlanta. I came across a statement by Ron Dellums. It depressed me, for some reason, but it seems like a good way to end this goddamn thing. Dellums writes pretty good, for a politician. It’s part of the statement he distributed when he switched his support from Shirley Chisholm to McGovern:
The great bulk of that coalition committed to change, human freedom, and justice in the country has moved actively and powerfully behind the candidacy of Senator McGovern. That coalition of hope, conscience, morality, and humanity—of the powerless and the voiceless—that did not exist in 1964, that expressed itself in outrage and frustration in 1968, and in 1972 began to form and welded itself imperfectly but courageously and lifted a man to the brink of the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States, and within a short but laborious step from the Presidency of the United States. The coalition that has formed behind Senator McGovern has battled the odds, baffled the pollsters, and beat the bosses. It is my conviction that when that total coalition of the victims in this country is ever formed, this potential for change would be unheralded, for it could pose a real alternative to expediency and status quo politics in America.
—Ron Dellums, July 9, 1972
The Campaign Trail: More Fear and Loathing in Miami: Nixon Bites the Bomb
September 28, 1972
The summer is over, the harvest is in, and we are not saved.
—Isaiah circa 8:21
Miami Beach, August 28, 1972—Earlier tonight I drove down the beach to a place called Dixie’s Doll House, for two six-packs of Ballantine ale. The place was full of old winos, middle-aged hookers, and aging young hustlers who looked like either junkies or Merchant Marine rejects; bearded geeks in gray T-shirts staggering back and forth along the bar, six nasty-looking pimps around a blue-lit pool table in the rear, and right next to me at the bar a ruined platinum-blonde Cuban dazzler snarling drunkenly at her nervous escort for the night: “Don’t gimmie that horseshit, baby! I don’t want a goddamn one-dollar dinner! I want a ten-dollar dinner!”
Life gets heavy here on the Beach from time to time. So I paid $2.70 each for my six-packs and then wheeled my big red Chevy Impala convertible back home to the Fontainebleau, about forty blocks north through the balmy southern night to the edge of the fashionable section.
“Bobo,” the master pimp and carmeister who runs what they call “the front door” here in these showplace beachfront hotels, eyed me curiously as I got out of the car and started dragging wet brown bags full of beer bottles out of the backseat. “You gonna need the car again tonight?” he asked.
“Probably,” I said. “But not for a while. I’ll be up in the room until about midnight.” I looked at my watch. “The Rams–Kansas City game is on in three minutes. After that, I’ll work for a while and then go out for something to eat.”
He jerked the car door open, sliding fast behind the wheel to take it down to the underground garage. With his hand on the shift lever he looked up at me: “You in the mood for some company?”
“No,” I said. “I’m way behind. I’ll be up all night with that goddamn typewriter. I shouldn’t even take time to watch the game on TV.”
He rolled his eyes and looked up at what should have been the sky, but which was actually the gold-glazed portico roof above the entrance driveway: “Jesus, what kind of work do you do? Hump typewriters for a living? I thought the convention was over!”
I paused, tucking the wet beer bags under the arm of my crusty brown leather jacket. Inside the lobby door about twenty feet away I could see what looked like a huge movie-set cocktail party for rich Venezuelans and high-style middle-aged Jews: my fellow guests in the Fontainebleau. I was not dressed properly to mingle with them, so my plan was to stride swiftly through the lobby to the elevators and then up to my hideout in the room.
The Nixon convention had finished on Thursday morning, and by Saturday the hundreds of national press/media people who had swarmed into this pompous monstrosity of a hotel for convention week were long gone. A few dozen stragglers had stayed on through Friday, but by Saturday afternoon the style and tone of the place had changed drastically, and on Sunday I felt like the only nigger in the governor’s box on Kentucky Derby Day.
Bobo had not paid much attention to me during the convention, but now he seemed interested. “I know you’re a reporter,” he said. “They put ‘press’ on your house-car tag. But all the rest of those guys took off yesterday. What keeps you here?”
I smiled. “Christ, am I the only one left?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, there’s you and two others. One guy has that white Lincoln Continental—”
“He’s not press,” I said quickly. “Probably one of the GOP advance men, getting things settled with the hotel.”
He nodded. “Yeah, he acted like he was part of the show. Not like a reporter.” He laughed. “You guys are pretty easy to spot, you know that?”
“Balls,” I said. “Not me. Everybody else says I look like a cop.”
He looked at me for a moment, tapping his foot on the accelerator to keep the engine up. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. You could pass for a cop as long as you kept your mouth shut.”
“I’m usually pretty discreet,” I said.
He smiled. “Sure you are. We’ve all noticed it. That other press guy that’s still here asked me who you were the other day, when you were bad-mouthing Nixon . . .”
“What’s his name?” I was curious to know who else in the press corps would endure this kind of shame and isolation.
“I can’t remember now,” Bobo said. “He’s a tall guy with gray hair and glasses. He drives a blue Ford station wagon.”
I wondered who it could be. It would have to be somebody with a very compelling reason to stay on, in this place. Everybody with good sense or a reasonable excuse had left as soon as possible. Some of the TV network technicians had stayed until Saturday, dismantling the maze of wires and cables they’d set up in the Fontainebleau before the convention started. They were easy to spot because they wore things like Levi’s and sweatshirts—but by Sunday I was the only guest in the hotel not dressed like a PR man for Hialeah Racetrack on a Saturday night in mid-season.
It is not enough, in the Fontainebleau, to look like some kind of a weird and sinister cop; to fit in here, you want to look like somebody who just paid a scalper $200 for a front row seat at the Johnny Carson show.
Bobo put the car in gear, but kept his foot on the brake pedal and asked: “What are you writing? What did all that bullshit come down to?”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s just what I’ve been trying to put together upstairs. You’re asking me to compress about two hundred hours of work into sixty seconds.”
He grinned. “You’re on my time now. Give it a try. Tell me what happened.”
I paused in the driveway, shifting the beer bags to my other arm, and thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Nixon sold out the party for the next twenty years by setting up an Agnew-Kennedy race in ’76, but he knew exactly what he was doing and he did it for the same reason he’s done everything else since he first got into politics—to make sure he gets elected.”
He stared at me, not grasping it.
I hesitated, trying to put it all in a quick little capsule. “Okay,” I said finally, “the reason Nixon put Agnew and the Goldwater freaks in charge of the party this year is that he knows they can’t win in ’76—but it was a good short-term trade; they have to stay with him this year, which will probably be worth a point or two in November—and that’s important to Nixon, because he thinks it’s going to be close:
fuck the polls. They always follow reality instead of predicting it . . . But the real reason he turned the party over to the Agnew-Goldwater wing is that he knows most of the old-line Democrats who just got stomped by McGovern for the nomination wouldn’t mind seeing George get taken out in ’72 if they know they can get back in the saddle if they’re willing to wait four years.”
Bobo laughed, understanding it instantly. Pimps and hustlers have a fine instinct for politics. “What you’re saying is that Nixon just cashed his whole check,” he said. “He doesn’t give a flying fuck what happens once he gets reelected—because once he wins, it’s all over for him anyway, right? He can’t run again . . .”
“Yeah,” I said, pausing to twist the top off one of the ale bottles I’d been pulling out of the bag. “But the thing you want to understand is that Nixon has such a fine understanding of the way politicians think that he knew people like Daley and Meany and Ted Kennedy would go along with him—because it’s in their interest now to have Nixon get his second term, in exchange for a guaranteed Democratic victory in 1976.”
“God damn!” he said. “That’s beautiful! They’re gonna trade him four years now for eight later, right? Give Nixon his last trip in ’72, then Kennedy moves in for eight years in ’76 . . . Jesus, that’s so rotten I really have to admire it.” He chuckled. “Boy, I thought I was cynical!”
“That’s not cynical,” I said. “That’s pure, nut-cutting politics . . . And I advise you to stay out of it; you’re too sensitive.”
He laughed and hit the accelerator, leaping away with a sharp screech of rubber and just barely missing the taillight of a long gold Cadillac as he turned down the ramp.
I pushed through the revolving door and crossed the vast lobby to the elevators, still sipping my ale as I thought about what I’d just said. Had Nixon really sold the party down the river? Was it a conscious act, or pure instinct? Had he made a deal with Meany during one of their golf games? Was Daley in on it? Ted Kennedy? Who else?
I finished the ale and dropped the empty bottle into a huge spittoon full of blue gravel. Two elderly women standing next to me looked disgusted, but I ignored them and wandered over to the door of the world-renowned Poodle bar and cocktail lounge. It was almost empty. An imitation Glenn Miller band was playing the “Tennessee Waltz,” but nobody was dancing. Three nights ago, the Poodle had been so crowded that it was difficult to get through the door. Every high-powered hotrod journalist in the western world had made the scene here last week. At least that’s what Sally Quinn told me, and she knows about things like that.
I went back to the elevators and found one ready to go. The sight of my ale bottle in the spittoon reminded me of Nixon again . . . Who else might be in on that deal? I picked a Miami Herald off a stack in the rear of the elevator, then handed the matron $1.
“Twenty-five cents,” she said briskly, bringing the car to a stop at my floor . . . but before she could hand me the change I stepped out and waved back at her. “Nevermind,” I said. “I’m rich.” Then I hurried down the hall to my room and bolted the door.
The game had already started, but there was no score. I dumped my ale bottles in the Styrofoam cooler, then opened one and sat down to watch the action and brood on Nixon’s treachery. But first I concentrated on the game for a while. It is hard to understand how somebody else thinks unless you can get on their wavelength: get in tune with their patterns, their pace, their connections . . . and since Nixon is a known football addict, I decided to get my head totally into the rhythm of this exhibition game between the Rams and Kansas City before attempting the jump into politics.
Very few people understand this kind of logic. I learned it from a Brazilian psychiatrist in the Mato Grosso back in 1963. He called it “Rhythm Logic,” in English, because he said I would never be able to pronounce it in the original Jibaro. I tried it once or twice, but the Jibaro language was too much for me—and it didn’t make much difference anyway. I seemed to have an instinct for Rhythm Logic, however, so I picked it up very quickly. But I have never been able to explain it, except in terms of music, and typewriters are totally useless when it comes to that kind of translation.
In any case, by the end of the first quarter I felt ready. By means of intense concentration on every detail of the football game, I was able to “derail” my own inner brain waves and re-pattern them temporarily to the inner brain wave rhythms of a serious football fanatic. The next step, then, was to bring my “borrowed” rhythms into focus on a subject quite different from football—such as presidential politics.
In the third and final step, I merely concentrated on a pre-selected problem involving presidential politics, and attempted to solve it subjectively . . . although the word “subjectively,” at this point, had a very different true meaning. Because I was no longer reasoning in the rhythms of my own inner brain waves, but in the rhythms of a football addict.
At that point, it became almost unbearably clear to me that Richard Nixon had in fact sold the Republican Party down the tube in Miami. Consciously, perhaps, but never quite verbally. Because the rhythms of his own inner brain waves convinced his conscious mind that in fact he had no choice. Given the safe assumption that the most important objective in Richard Nixon’s life today is minimizing the risk of losing the 1972 election to George McGovern, simple logic decreed that he should bend all his energies to that end, at all costs. All other objectives would have to be subjugated to Number One.
By halftime, with the Rams trailing by six, I had established a firm scientific basis for the paranoid gibberish I had uttered, an hour or so earlier, while standing in the hotel driveway and talking with Bobo the night-pimp. At the time, not wanting to seem ignorant or confused, I had answered his question with the first wisdom capsule that popped into my mind . . . But now it made perfect sense, thanks to Rhythm Logic, and all that remained were two or three secondary questions, none of them serious.
The pervasive sense of gloom among the press/media crowd in Miami was only slightly less obvious than the gungho, breast-beating arrogance of the Nixon delegates themselves. That was the real story of the convention: the strident, loutish confidence of the whole GOP machinery, from top to bottom. Looking back on that week, one of my clearest memories is that maddening “FOUR MORE YEARS!” chant from the Nixon Youth gallery in the convention hall. NBC’s John Chancellor compared the Nixon Youth cheering section to the Chicago “sewer workers” who were herded into the Stockyards convention hall in Chicago four years ago to cheer for Mayor Daley. The Nixon Youth people were not happy with Chancellor for making that remark on camera. They complained very bitterly about it, saying it was just another example of the “knee-jerk liberal” thinking that dominates the media.
But the truth is that Chancellor was absolutely right. Due to a strange set of circumstances, I spent two very tense hours right in the middle of that Nixon Youth mob on Tuesday night, and it gave me an opportunity to speak at considerable length with quite a few of them . . .
What happened, in a nut, was that I got lost in a maze of hallways in the back reaches of the convention hall on Tuesday night about an hour or so before the roll-call vote on Nixon’s chances of winning the GOP nomination again this year . . . I had just come off the convention floor, after the Secret Service lads chased me away from the First Family box where I was trying to hear what Charleton Heston was saying to Nelson Rockefeller, and in the nervous wake of an experience like that, I felt a great thirst rising . . . so I tried to take a shortcut to the Railroad Lounge, where free beer was available to the press; but I blew it somewhere along the way, ended up in a big room jammed with Nixon Youth workers, getting themselves ready for a “spontaneous demonstration” at the moment of climax out there on the floor . . . I was just idling around in the hallway, trying to go north for a beer, when I got swept up in a fast-moving mob of about two thousand people heading south at good speed, so instead of fighting the tide, I just let myself be carried along to wherever they were going . . .
Which turned out to be the “Ready Room,” in a far corner of the hall, where a dozen or so people wearing red hats and looking like smalltown high-school football coaches were yelling into bullhorns and trying to whip this herd of screaming sheep into shape for the “spontaneous” demonstration, scheduled for 10:33 PM.
It was a very disciplined scene. The red-hatted men with the bullhorns did all the talking. Huge green plastic “refuse” sacks full of helium balloons were distributed, along with handfuls of New Year’s Eve party noisemakers and hundreds of big cardboard signs that said things like: “Nixon Now!”. . . “Four More Years!” . . . “No Compromise!”
Most of the signs were freshly printed. They looked exactly like the “We Love Mayor Daley” signs that Daley distributed to his sewer workers in Chicago in 1968: red and blue ink on a white background . . . but a few, here and there, were hand-lettered, and mine happened to be one of these. It said, “Garbage Men Demand Equal Time.” I had several choices, but this one seemed right for the occasion.
Actually, there was a long and active time lag between the moment when I was swept into the Ready Room and my decision to carry a sign in the spontaneous demonstration. What happened in that time lag was that they discovered me early on, and tried to throw me out—but I refused to go, and that’s when the dialogue started. For the first ten minutes or so I was getting very ominous Hells Angels flashbacks—all alone in a big crowd of hostile, cranked-up geeks in a mood to stomp somebody—but it soon became evident that these Nixon Youth people weren’t ready for that kind of madness.
Our first clash erupted when I looked up from where I was sitting on the floor against a wall in the back of the room and saw Ron Rosenbaum from the Village Voice coming at me in a knot of shouting Nixon Youth wranglers. “No press allowed!” they were screaming. “Get out of here! You can’t stay!”
They had nailed Rosenbaum at the door—but, instead of turning back and giving up, he plunged into the crowded room and made a bee-line for the back wall, where he’d already spotted me sitting in peaceful anonymity. By the time he reached me, he was gasping for breath and about six fraternity/jock types were clawing at his arms. “They’re trying to throw me out!” he shouted.