Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page B

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,