The Convention - A Glittering Bore

MIAMI BEACH. Aug. 7--"Conventions are always dull," one veteran newspaper reporter said to me Tuesday night as we watched part of a session on TV. "But this is the dullest one yet."

Dullness was the one thing I did not expect. When I got off my plane in Miami Sunday. I found myself thrust into a boisterous demonstration of young and old Rockefeller supporters, armed with brassy instruments, who had come to the airport to greet the Massachusetts delegation. They screamed and played so loud that no one could hear the public address announcements about departures and arrivals.

But when you've seen one of Rockefeller's support demonstrations, you've seen them all. And when you've seen one Miami Beach hotel, you've seen them all. And when you've seen one GOP elephant, and one airline-stewardess-turned-Nixon-hostess, one real-life U. S. Senator close up, and one television camera you've seen--if not all--all that you care to see.

By Monday afternoon, with the convention officially only a few hours old, almost everyone seemed subconsciously to have realized that there wasn't enough of substance to do to fill the time, and the rest of the week was devoted to justifying one's presence.

The news media people justify their presence by creating the maximum amount of drama out of a situation which would be rather undramatic without their help. Every day they poll the delegates and report the fluctuations--a few votes up for one candidate here, a few down for another there, will Nixon win on the first ballot?

What do all these polls mean anyway, when CBS, AP and UPI can come up with different answers? After all, there is no sampling error--they are polling all 1333 delegates. And why the small shifts every day? It is because one day, a poor defenseless woman delegate is cornered by three aggressive Nixon aides and practically battered into switching her allegiance. By the next day, Rockefeller would have heard about this, and his men would go and batter her back. In between, she may tell AP she favors Nixon, UPI she favors Rockefeller, and CBS she's uncommitted.

The Elks

The delegates, meanwhile, justify their presence by talking to each other a good deal. This is not unlike what they would do at the local Elks or Rotary Club meeting, but here it is considered more important because they are all uncommitted or will be when their delegation is released from certain obligations, and they have the power to choose the next President of the United States (at political conventions, the candidate for such-and-such job is always referred to as so-and-so, the next such-and-such).

But despite the talk, it is a mistake to believe there is really much delegate interaction at this convention. Delegates talk primarily to other delegates they knew before they came, almost exclusively to delegates from their own state. The delegations are so spread apart in the various hotels along Miami Beach's Collins Ave, that it is almost impossible to see people from other delegations unless you are a candidate for President in which case you make a special effort.

Now what does a delegate talk about to other members of his own delegation? In general, they already agree on the issues, so they talk about when their obstreperous governor will release the delegation from its commitment to him as a favorite son. They may disagree on which candidate to support (this is relatively independent of positions on the issues), but they will probably conclude by saying any candidate will do in the end, and the GOP is going to win this year.

What you do not see is delegates from the North talking to delegates from the South, or black delegates talking to Southern segregationists, except perhaps on the most superficial social level. There is simply no institutionalized opportunity for interstate dialogue.

On the Beach

Meanwhile, I see delegates on the beach (there is plenty of time for me to be one the beach) saying to each other, "I guess I ought to go to so-and-so's rally. I haven't really done much since I've been here."

The people who make up the program for the Republican National Convention have trouble filling the time too. For both sessions on Monday and the one Tuesday night, they had to find a glittering cast of speakers who would bring honor to the Republican party without touching at all on the question of who should be nominated. To be sure, Barry Goldwater, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Mayor John V. Lindsay in their own ways indirectly supported their choices for the top spot on the ticket through what they said, but for the most part those first two days were uncontroversial, and insufferably boring. The television networks do well to cut into and out of speeches in a kind of on-the-spot editing (based on advanced copies of the text). Sitting in the Convention building, all I could do was walk out of the hall and hide in the room where reporters can get free roast beef sandwiches.

Most experienced reporters do not even attend the Convention sessions until the voting Wednesday night. There is little to be gained by attending anyway. I overhead one newspaperman saying to his editor Tuesday evening, "We ought to get a Sony portable television for the voting tomorrow night, because we can't see anything from our seats." To the extent that the Convention takes place in the Convention hall, television is bigger and better than the real thing. This disturbs me somewhat, because I didn't have to fly to Miami to watch television.

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.