Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer Page A

headquarters had read the Schedule for the day, and the Press was disassembled with apologies by an attractive corn-fed blonde young lady possessing a piggie of a turned-up nose and the delicate beginning of a double chin. Her slimness of figure suggested all disciplines of diet. The young lady had been sufficiently attractive for the Press to forgive much, but a few of the more European journalists were forced to wonder if the most proficient of performances had been presented here by representatives of the man who cried out, “What is obviously needed is not more government, but better government....”
    At any rate it was time to catch up with Nixon again. It was not that Nixon’s activities attracted the reporter’s hoarded passion, it was more that there was little else which puzzled him. If he had been more of a reporter (or less of one) he would have known that the Reagan forces were pushing an all-out attack to pry, convert, cozen, and steal Southern delegates from Nixon, and that the Nixon forces were responding with a counter-offensive which would yet implicate their choice of Vice President, but the reporter worked like a General who was far from the front—if he could not hear the sound of cannon, he assumed the battle was never high. Nothing could have convinced him on this particular intolerably humid afternoon that Nixon’s forces were in difficulty, and perhaps he was right, perhaps the lack of any echo of such strife in the lobbies of the Deauville or the Hilton was true sign of the issue, and the long shadows of history would repeat that the verdict was never in doubt.
    The reporter was off at any rate to witness the reception for delegates in the same American Scene of the Hilton where Nixon had had his press conference early that morning, and if one was interested in the science of comparative political receptions, the beginning of all such study was here. As many as eight thousand people had ganged through the aisles and banquet rooms and exits of the Americana when Rockefeller had had his party, and that, it may be remembered, was a bash where the glamour was thrown at a man with the cole slaw, and the bottom of every glass the bartender handled was wet, the caviar on the buffet table crawled along the cloth and plopped to the floor. Here in the comparative stateliness of the Hilton—only God could save this mark!—not twenty-two hours later, the Nixon forces were showing how a reception for Republican delegates should be run. If a thousand men and women were waiting outside, jammed in the lobby and the approaches to the stairs, and if the resultant theater-line, six and eight people thick, inched up the stairs at a discouraging slow rate, there was consolation at the top for they were let through a narrow door, two by two, and there advanced behind a cord which ran around a third of the circular curve of the room to move forward at last onto a small dais where Mr. and Mrs. Nixon were receiving, there to be greeted individually by each of them with particular attention, and on from that eminence to the center of the room where a bar was ready to give a drink and food to be picked up from a buffet table, turkey, ham, a conventional buffet, a string orchestra.
    Perhaps two thousand people went through in the hours from three to six, probably it was less, for Nixon spent five or ten or fifteen seconds with each delegate or couple who passed by. Perhaps the invitations had been restricted to those delegates who would vote for him or leaned toward his candidacy. No matter how, there were not too many to handle, just the largest number consonant with the problem which was: how to convert a mass of delegates and wives and children back to that sense of importance with which they had left their hometown.
    Nixon knew how to do it. Here was Nixon at his very best. He had not spent those eight years in harness, highest flunky in the land, aide-de-camp to a five-star General, now