A Still-Born Baby

Television, of course, suffers from the self-justification syndrome worse than any other group. While reporters have to fill a few pages a day with Convention material (which varies remarkably little from one newspaper to another), the network people--especially CBS and NBC--have committed themselves to feeding the monster as much as eight or nine hours a day with this stuff. This is a little like trying to write a full-length biography of a still-born baby. The networks end up interviewing delegates and candidates over and over again, asking them the same insipid questions, occasionally shifting to the speaker at the rostrum, and then concluding, as Walter Cronkite concluded Tuesday night, that this session was "sometimes dull."

In a real sense, the Convention is actually what happens on TV and in the press rooms in the basement of the Fontainebleau Hotel, the butt of even more jokes than the Grand Old Party itself. For a convention is nothing more than groups of delegates making decisions state by state--perhaps after meeting with one or more of the hotel-hopping Presidential aspirants, but more likely way before arriving in Miami Beach. But it is only in the basement of the Fontainebleau that all these decisions are collated and sent out over the wires as comprehensive polls of the delegates. This is the quintessence of the pre-vote period of the convention--predicting who is going to win, and on what ballot.

There are some aspects of all this convention action that cannot be culled from the press and TV. Perhaps the most important is the hotel-hopping. On Tuesday, having decided to take the afternoon off, I picked up my bathing suit and drove with a friend to the Versailles Hotel, where I would swim as his guest. As we walked up to the hotel door, a car swooped by, the doors opened simultaneously, and four men hopped out, wearing Secret Service badges. As I got within ten yards of the door of the hotel, the crowd gathered outside began to scream, "Here he comes, here comes Reagan."

The Jewish Barber

For an instant, I felt like the Jewish barber played by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator when he was mistaken for Hitler. I thought the crowd was going to stomp on me the way I had seen another crowd stomp on Rockefeller the day before and the way I knew this one was itching to stomp on Reagan. And in a way, I wanted to get up there on somebody's shoulders and render a version of Charlie's corny speech in which I would tell all those Reagan supporters a thing or two about the problems of this nation. But the spell was broken when Reagan himself drove up, smiling and waving, and worked his way through the crush to an elevator, which the Secret Service would not allow anyone else to enter.

This, I now know, went on all day in triplicate. Each hotel was broken out of its lull for only a minute or two, until the candidate went upstairs to meet with a delegation, but the candidates and their staff were working all day long.

The supporters of the candidates, mostly young people, showed up in groups of forty or fifty at these hotel entrances, basically because there was nothing else for them to do. By Monday, they had buttoned and pinned everyone who would be buttoned and pinned. After that, they served primarily as walking advertisements, especially the very attractive girls in Rocky dresses. But what does a walking advertisement do to fill up the hours in her day?

Dried Up Oranges

That then, is what a convention is all about. Candidates, trailed by their faithful, talk to many delegates. Delegates stick together with their own states. Newsmen by the thousands scurry about squeezing juice out of dried up oranges and Republican leaders toss out more partisan crap than any thinking human being should be asked to tolerate.

Governor Rockefeller said recently that this campaign was the most exciting thing he's ever done in his life, and he looks like he feels that way about this Convention too. Delegates, who are spending generally between $400 and $1200 dollars for their week here, say it is an experience not to be missed. One uncommitted Kansas delegate, a 61-year old lawyer, told me with obvious pride that Governor Rockefeller had personally called his home a week ago to talk to him.

For most reporters, the Convention is something we have to live with, because no one has thought of anything better.

For me, as I write this a few hours before Wednesday night's voting session, the Republican Convention is something of a joke. When Mayor Lindsay and Sen. John Tower of Texas can agree on a Vietnam plank although one is a dove and one a super hawk, when Rockefeller can talk about winning (and the New York Times can try so hard to believe him) at a convention whose delegates go wild for Barry Goldwater and give a louder ovation to Max Rafferty than to Mayor Lindsay, when Gov. Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland can switch his allegiance from Rockefeller because of a personal slight and end up making the nominating speech for Nixon it makes me wonder about the efficacy of the two party system and especially of the nominating process.

But I wouldn't think of discussing my doubts here, in the doubly unfriendly atmosphere of a conservative Republican Convention and Miami Beach. When I arrived at the airport, I got a ride from a friend of someone I knew on the plane. The man, born in Georgia, had a Wallace sticker on his car. He drove us back to his house for a drink and while there said, "Excuse me, I have to wash my hands. I shook hands a while back with a nigger." Of course, I thought it best to say nothing to him about his politics. But three days later I feel the same way about the whole GOP convention.