Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer Page A

brother—Romney used all of forty minutes, Nelson Rockefeller’s band boosting his demonstration as Romney troops were later to boost Rockefeller’s. Senator Carlson of Kansas was named as favorite son, then Hiram Fong of Hawaii. It was after nine before Governor Shafer of Pennsylvania stood up to put Nelson Rockefeller on the lists. More than two and a half hours had elapsed between the end of Reagan’s presentation and the beginning of Rocky’s. Reporters had left the convention hall, and were huddled backstage in places like the Railroad Lounge where free sandwiches and beer were available, and everybody was concerned with the most attractive proposition of the night—that if they were all to go to their hotels, check out, and catch a plane, they could be at their homes before nominations were done and balloting had begun. They could watch it on television, which was the real gloom of the occasion. The convention had demonstrated that no reporter could keep up any longer with the event unless checking in periodically with the tube; the politicians, themselves, rushed forward to TV men, and shouldered note-pads aside. During this lull, therefore, one bitter reporter, a big heavy Southern boy with horn-rimmed glasses, delivered the remark of the evening. Sipping beer and glumly munching his sandwich (which held an inch of paper-dry turkey) he said, “Yessir, the only thing which could liven up this convention is if Ike was to croak tonight.” So the respect journalists had been obliged to pay over the years could be tolerated now only by the flensing knives of the club.
    Shafer put Rockefeller in “... because he is in tune. The people, young and old, rich and poor, Black and white, have responded to him. He has never lost an election.... Ladies and gentlemen, we should nominate Nelson Rockefeller because he is the Republican who can most surely win....” It was an inept speech—Rocky’s name was mentioned seven times before the signal was given to the delegates, and tension was dissipated. It didn’t matter. Everyone knew that Rockefeller would have an enormous demonstration and that it would not matter. The day when demonstrations could turn a convention were gone. The demonstrators knew they would be chided in newspaper editorials the following day, and therefore were sheepish in the very middle of their stomping and their jigging. Soon they would hold conventions in TV studios.
    Then came Spiro Agnew for Nixon. If he had not been selected for Vice President next day, his speech would have gone unnoticed and unremarked—“It is my privilege to place in nomination for the office of President of the United States the one man whom history has so clearly thrust forward, the one whom all America will recognize as a man whose time has come, the man for 1968, the Honorable....”
    Nixon’s demonstration was about equal to Rockefeller’s. Hordes of noise, two cages of balloons, machine-gun drumfire as they went out—no lift in the audience, no real lift. Nothing this night could begin to recall that sense of barbarians about a campfire and the ecstasy of going to war which Barry Goldwater had aroused in ’64.
    Still the demonstrations gave another image of the three candidacies: Reagan’s men had straight hair cropped short, soldiers and state troopers for Ronnie; so far as Republicans were swingers, so swingers marched with Rocky; and for Nixon—the mood on the floor was like the revel in the main office of a corporation when the Christmas Party is high.
    More nominations. Harold Stassen for the seventh time. Senator Case of New Jersey, Governor Rhodes of Ohio, Senator Thurmond who immediately withdrew for Nixon. At 1:07 A.M. , eight hours and seven minutes after the convention had opened for nomination, it was closed, and over the floor rested the knowledge that nothing had happened tonight. It had been Nixon on the first ballot from the