Once inside the ballroom, however, the reporter discovered that the Governor had been among the first guests to enter. His own position was therefore not comfortable. Since there were no other guests among whom to mix (nothing but two hundred and forty empty tables with settings for two thousand people, all still to come in) and no cover to conceal him but small potted trees with oranges attached by green wire, since Security might be furious to the point of cop-mania catching him thus early, there was no choice but to take up a stand twenty feet from the door, his legs at parade rest, his arms clasped behind, while he scrutinized the entrance of everybody who came in. Any security officer studying him might therefore be forced to conclude that he belonged to other Security. Suffice it, he was not approached in his position near the entrance, and for the next thirty minutes looked at some thousand Republicans coming through the gate, the other thousand entering out of view by an adjacent door.
It was not a crowd totally representative of the power of the Republican Party. Some poor delegates may have been there as guests, and a few other delegates might have chosen to give their annual contribution of $1,000 for husband and wife here ($500 a plate) rather than to some other evening of fund raising for the party, indeed an air of sobriety and quiet dress was on many of the Republicans who entered. There were women who looked like librarians and schoolteachers, there were middle-aged men who looked like they might be out for their one night of the year. The Eastern Establishment was of course present in degree, and powers from the South, West, Midwest, but it was not a gang one could hold up in comparative glitter to an opening at the Met. No, rather, it was modesty which hung over these well-bred subscribers to the Gala.
Still, exceptions noted, they were obviously in large part composed of a thousand of the wealthiest Republicans in the land, the corporate and social power of America was here in legions of interconnection he could not even begin to trace. Of necessity, a measure of his own ignorance came over him, for among those thousand, except for candidates, politicians and faces in the news, there were not ten people he recognized. Yet here they were, the economic power of America (so far as economic power was still private, not public) the family power (so far as position in society was still a passion to average and ambitious Americans) the military power (to the extent that important sword-rattlers and/or patriots were among the company, as well as cadres of corporations not unmarried to the Pentagon) yes, even the spiritual power of America (just so far as Puritanism, Calvinism, conservatism and golf still gave the Wasp an American faith more intense than the faith of cosmopolitans, one-worlders, trade-unionists, Black militants, New Leftists, acid-heads, tribunes of the gay, families of Mafia, political machinists, fixers, swingers, Democratic lobbyists, members of the Grange, and government workers, not to include the Weltanschauung of every partisan in every minority group). No, so far as there was an American faith, a belief, a mystique that America was more than the sum of its constituencies, its trillions of dollars and billions of acres, its constellation of factories, empyrean of communications, mountain transcendant of finance, and heroic of sport, transports of medicine, hygiene, and church, so long as belief persisted that America, finally more than all this, was the world’s ultimate reserve of rectitude, final garden of the Lord, so far as this mystique could survive in every American family of Christian substance, so then were the people entering this Gala willy-nilly the leaders of this faith, never articulated by any of them except in the most absurd and taste-curdling jargons of patriotism mixed with religion, but the faith existed in those crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some.
Their own value was in this faith, the workings of their seed from one generation into the next, their link to the sense of what might be life-force was in the faith. Yes, primitive life was there, and ancestral life, health concealed in their own flesh from towns occupied and once well-settled, from farms which prospered, and frontiers they had—through ancestors—dared to pass. They believed in America as they believed in God—they could not really ever expect that America might collapse and God yet survive, no, they had even gone so far as to think that America was the savior of the world, food and medicine by one hand, sword in the other, highest of high faith in a nation which would bow the knee before no problem since God’s own strength was in the die. It was a faith which had flared so high in San Francisco in 1964 that staid old Republicans had come near to frothing while they danced in the aisle, there to nominate Barry, there to nominate Barry. But their hero had gone down to a catastrophe of defeat, blind in politics, impolite in tactics, a sorehead, a fool, a disaster. And if his policies had prevailed to some degree, to the degree of escalating the war in Vietnam, so had that policy depressed some part of America’s optimism to the bottom of the decade, for the country had learned an almost unendurable lesson—its history in Asia was next to done, and there was not any real desire to hold armies on that land; worse, the country had begun to wear away inside, and the specter of Vietnam in every American city would haunt the suburb, the terror of a dollar cut loose from every standard of economic anchor was in the news, and some of the best of the youth were mad demented dogs with teeth in the flesh of the deepest Republican faith.
They were a chastened collocation these days. The high fire of hard Republican faith was more modest now, the vision of America had diminished. The claims on Empire had met limits. But it was nonetheless uncommon, yes bizarre, for the reporter to stand like an agent of their security as these leaders of the last American faith came through to the Gala, for, repeat: they were in the main not impressive, no, not by the hard eye of New York. Most of them were ill-proportioned in some part of their physique. Half must have been, of course, men and women over fifty and their bodies reflected the pull of their character. The dowager’s hump was common, and many a man had a flaccid paunch, but the collective tension was rather in the shoulders, in the girdling of the shoulders against anticipated lashings on the back, in the thrust forward of the neck, in the maintenance of the muscles of the mouth forever locked in readiness to bite the tough meat of resistance, in a posture forward from the hip since the small of the back was dependably stiff, loins and mind cut away from each other by some abyss between navel and hip.
More than half of the men wore eyeglasses, young with old—the reporter made his count, close as a professional basketball game, and gave up by the time his score was up to Glasses 87, No Glasses 83. You could not picture a Gala Republican who was not clean-shaven by eight A.M. Coming to power, they could only conceive of trying to clean up every situation in sight. And so many of the women seemed victims of the higher hygiene. Even a large part of the young seemed to have faces whose cheeks had been injected with Novocain.
Yet he felt himself unaccountably filled with a mild sorrow. He did not detest these people, he did not feel so superior as to pity them, it was rather he felt a sad sorrowful respect. In their immaculate cleanliness, in the somewhat antiseptic odors of their astringent toilet water and perfume, in the abnegation of their walks, in the heavy sturdy moves so many demonstrated of bodies in life’s harness, there was the muted tragedy of the Wasp—they were not on earth to enjoy or even perhaps to love so very much, they were here to serve, and serve they had in public functions and public charities (while recipients of their charity might vomit in rage and laugh in scorn), served on opera committees, and served in long hours of duty at the piano, served as the sentinel in concert halls and the pews on the aisle in church, at the desk in schools, had served for culture, served for finance, served for salvation, served for America—and so much of America did not wish them to serve any longer, and so many of them doubted themselves, doubted that the force of their faith could illumine their path in these new modern horror-head times. On and on, they came through the door, the clean, the well-bred, the extraordinarily prosperous, and for the most astonishing part, the almost entirely proper. Yes,
in San Francisco in ’64 they had been able to be insane for a little while, but now they were subdued, now they were modest, now they were looking for a leader to bring America back to them, their lost America, Jesus-land.
“Nelson Rockefeller is out of his mind if he thinks he can take the nomination away from Richard Nixon,” the reporter said suddenly to himself. It was the first certitude the convention had given.
8
Still, Rockefeller was trying. He had been mounting a massive offensive for weeks. In speeches which came most often as prepared announcements for television and in full-page advertisements in newspapers all over the country, he had been saturating America with Rockefeller philosophy, paying for it with Rockefeller money, the rhetoric in the style of that Madison Avenue Eminent, Emmet Hughes.
On Vietnam: The country must never again “find itself with a commitment looking for a justification.... The war has been conducted without a coherent strategy or program for peace.” Of course he had been until recently a hawk with the hawks—like Nixon, he was now a dove of a hawk, a dove of a hawk like all the Republicans but Reagan.
The ads had come with text in 20-point type, 30-point type, larger. “We must assure to all Americans two basic rights: the right to learn and the right to work.” (The right to learn would come in mega-universities with lectures pulled in on television and study halls with plastic bucket seats—the right to work? or was it the right to take pride in one’s work?)
On Cities: “.... the confidence that we can rebuild our great cities—making slums of old despair into centers of new hope....”
Or: “I see ... the welfare concept ... as a floor below which nobody will be allowed to fall, but with no ceiling to prevent anyone from rising as high as he wants to rise.”
It was the best of potency-rhetoric for the thriving liberal center of America where most of the action was, building contracts, federal money for super-highways, youth programs for the slums, wars against poverty, bigotry, violence, and hate. (But how did one go to war with hate? “On your knees, mother-fucker!” said the saint.)
Yes, Rockefeller had only to win the nomination and it might take an act of God to keep him from the Presidency. He was the dream candidate for all Democratic voters—they could repudiate Johnson and Humphrey and still have the New Deal, the Fair Deal, Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, and Folk Rock with Rocky. He would get three-quarters of the Democrats’ votes. Of course he would get only one-fourth of the Republicans’ votes (the rest would go to Humphrey or Wallace or stay at home) but he would be in, he could unite the country right down that liberal center which had given birth to a Great Society, a war in Vietnam, and a permanent state of police alert in the cities in the summer.
He was like a general who had mounted the most massive offensive of a massive war but had neglected to observe that the enemy was not on his route, and the line of march led into a swamp. Rockefeller took out ads, pushed television, worked with hip musicians and groovy bands (Cannonball Adderley, Lionel Hampton) got out the young at every rally (the adolescents too young to vote) hob-nobbed with governors and senators, made the phone calls, hit the high pressure valve (Bill Miller and Meade Alcorn and Leonard Hall and Thruston Morton called in old debts from old friends) hit the hustings in his plane. “Hiya fellow,”—did everything but enter the campaign at the right time, fight it out in the primaries, or design his attack for the mollification of Republican fears. He did everything but exercise choice in serving up the best political greens and liver juice for the rehabilitation of Republican pride. In secret he may have detested the Average Republican—it was no secret that same Republican hated him: they had never forgiven each other for his divorce and his remarriage. A man married for thirty-two years should have known all marital misery by then—to smash such a scene spoke to the average Republican of massive instability, no fear of God, an obvious hankering for the orgiastic fats of the liberal center, and no saving secret gifts of hypocrisy—this latter being indispensable, reasons the conservative mind, to prudence and protection in government.
Besides, the sort of passion for a late-entering candidate which can lead a delegate to make a last-minute switch in his choice must have roots in hysteria, and thereby be near to that incandescent condition of the soul when love and/or physical attraction is felt for three or four people at once. Hysteria is not in high demand among Republicans. Their lives have been geared to keep ménage-à-trois at a minimum. If love is then sometimes also at a minimum, well, that’s all right. Misers can feel vertiginous titillation if they are worked upon for years to give up their coin, their kiss, their delegate’s vote. And Nixon had worked on them for many months and just some of those years, you bet! The miser giving up his gift once is the happiest of men—being asked to switch his choice again is the invitation to hysteria—it can only end by sending him to the nut house, the poorhouse, or a school for the whirling dervish.
What Rockefeller needed was delegate votes, not millions of Americans sending good thoughts. There were dreams of repeating Wendell Willkie’s sixth ballot in 1940, but those were scandalous military dreams, for Republicans then hated Roosevelt to such distraction they would have nominated any man who had a chance against him, whereas in 1968 their loyalty was to the philosophy of the party—to Republicanism!
Rocky had spent and would spend, it was said, ten million bucks to get the nomination. (One journalist remarked that he would have done better to buy delegates: at $25,000 a delegate, he could have had four hundred.) On Sunday afternoon, there was an opportunity to see how the money was spent. Some rich men are famous for penury—it was Rocky’s own grandfather after all who used to pass out the thin dime. But generosity to a rich man is like hysteria to a miser: once entertain it, and there’s no way to stop—the bitch is in the house. Having engaged the habit of spending, where was Rocky to quit? After the television came the rallies and the chartered planes; now in Miami, the rented river boats on Island Creek for delegates who wanted an afternoon of booze on an inland waterway yacht; or the parties. Rocky threw open the Americana for a Sunday reception and supper for the New York delegation. On Monday from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M., after Nixon’s arrival, he gave a giant reception for all delegates, alternates and Republican leadership. The party jammed the Continental Room and the Grand Ballroom of the Americana, and the numbers could not be counted; 5,000 could have gone through, 6,000, the Times estimated 8,000 guests and a cost of $50,000. Half of Miami Beach may have passed through for the free meal and the drinks. On the tables (eight bars, sixteen buffet tables) thousands of glasses were ready with ice cubes; so, too were ready shrimp and cocktail sauce, potted meat balls, turkeys, hams, goulash, aspic, éclairs, pigs in blankets, chicken liver, pâe de volailles, vats of caviar (black), ladyfingers, jelly rings, celebration cakes—where were the crepes suzette? What wonders of the American gut. On the bandstand in each room, a band; in the Continental Room, dark as a night club (indeed a night club on any other night) Lionel Hampton was vibrating a beat right into the rich middle octave of a young Black singer giving up soul for Rocky. “We want Rocky,” went the chant. Sock ... sock ... went the beat, driving, lightly hypnotic, something reminiscent in the tempo of shots on the rim of the snare when the drummer backs the stripper’s bumps. But Rocky wasn’t coming out now, he was somewhere else, so members of his family, his older children and wives of his older children and sister and Helen Hayes and Billy Daniels were out on the stage with Hampton and the happy young Black singer snapping his fingers and the happy Black girl singer full of soul and zap and breasts!
Everybody was eating, drinking—young Rockefeller family up there on happiness beat, arms locked, prancing, natives of Miami Beach on the floor cheering it up, America ready to truck its happiness right out on One World Highway One.
And here and there a delegate, or a delegate’s family from Ohio or Colorado or Illinois, delegate’s badge on the lapel, mixed look of curiosity, wonder, and pleasure in the eye: “If the ma
n wants to throw his money around like that, well, we’re not here to stop him!” And the pleasure in the eye is reserved for the thought of telling the home folks about the swinishness, sottishness, and waste expenditure of the occasion. “They were spilling half the drinks they were in such a hurry to serve them up.”
And in the corridor between the Caribbean Room and the Ballroom a jam of guests. The line would not move. Trapped in the rush hour again. In the first world war, Marshal Haig used to send a million men over the top in a frontal attack. One hundred yards would be gained, one hundred thousand casualties would be the price. It was possible Nelson Rockefeller was the Marshal Haig of presidential hopefuls. Rich men should not surround themselves with other rich men if they want to win a war.
9
Nixon had come in earlier that day. A modestly large crowd, perhaps six hundred at the entrance to the Miami Hilton, two bands playing “Nixon’s the One,” and the Nixonettes and the Nixonaires, good clean blonde and brown-haired Christian faces, same two Negresses, a cluster of 2,000 balloons going up in the air, flings of color, thin dots of color, and Nixon himself finally in partial view at the center of the semicircle of cameras held overhead. Just a glimpse: he has a sunburn—his forehead is bright pink. Then he has made it into the hotel, pushed from behind, hands in hand-shakes from the front, hair recognizable—it is curlier than most and combed in roller coaster waves, not unreminiscent of the head of hair on Gore Vidal. (But where was Nixon’s Breckenridge?)