Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer Page B

President, who had been given such service in his NATO days that no new servant could ever please him, yes, Nixon had not put in his apprenticeship as spiritual butler to the Number One representative of the High Beloved here on earth, without learning how to handle a Republican line of delegates by ones and twos.
    This was no line like the wealthy Republicans at the Gala, this was more a pilgrimage of minor delegates, sometimes not even known so well in their own small city, a parade of wives and children and men who owned hardware stories or were druggists, or first teller in the bank, proprietor of a haberdashery or principal of a small town high school, local lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on tidy income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor corporations, men who owned their farms, an occasional rotund state party hack with a rubbery look, editor of a small-town paper, professor from Baptist teachers’ college, high school librarian, young political aspirant, young salesman—the stable and the established, the middle-aged and the old, a sprinkling of the young, the small towns and the quiet respectable cities of the Midwest and the Far West and the border states were out to pay their homage to their own true candidate, the representative of their conservative orderly heart, and it was obvious they adored him in a quiet way too deep for applause, it was obvious the Nixons had their following after all in these middle-class neatly-dressed people moving forward in circumscribed steps, constrained, not cognizant of their bodies, decent respectables who also had spent their life in service and now wanted to have a moment near the man who had all of their vote, and so could arouse their happiness, for the happiness of the Wasp was in his moment of veneration, and they had veneration for Nixon, heir of Old Ike—center of happy memory and better days—they venerated Nixon for his service to Eisenhower, and his comeback now—it was his comeback which had made him a hero in their eyes, for America is the land which worships the Great Comeback, and so he was Tricky Dick to them no more, but the finest gentleman in the land; they were proud to say hello.
    The Nixons talked to each one in turn. The candidate was first on the receiving line and then his wife, each taking the arm or shaking the hand of the delegate before them and saying a few words, sometimes peering at the name on the delegate’s badge, more often recognizing the face from some all-but-forgotten banquet or fund-raiser in Platte, or Akron, or Evansville, Chillicothe, or Iowa City; in Columbia, South Carolina, and Columbia, Mo.; in Boulder or Fort Collins; in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Fayetteville, North Carolina; in Harrisburg and Keene and Spokane and Fort Lauderdale and Raleigh and Butte—yes, Nixon had travelled the creeping vine of small-town Republicanism, he had won delegates over these last two years by ones and twos, votes pulled in by the expenditure of a half hour here, an hour there, in conversations which must have wandered so far as the burial specifications of Aunt Matty in her will, and the story of the family stock, he had worked among the despised nuts and bolts of the delegates’ hearts, and it showed up here in the skill and the pleasure with which he greeted each separate delegate, the separate moves of his hands upon them, for some he touched by the elbow, others patted on the back, some he waved on to his wife with a personal word, never repeating the sequence, fresh for each new delegate. He still did not move with any happiness in his body, the gestures still came in such injunctions from the head as: “Grab this old boy by the elbow,” but he was obviously happy here, it was one of the things in the world which he could do best, he could be gracious with his own people, and Pat Nixon backed him up, concentrating on the wives and children, also skillful, the tense forbidding face of