Miami and the Siege of Chicago Read Online Free Page A

was somewhere deep inside the brain, working through the anxiety-ridden calculations with which he must have come to Miami, for Nixon with his six-hundred-plus votes now almost secure was a handful or a score or at best not fifty votes from the first ballot nomination. Anxiety had to be stirred by every omen: the weather, the first unfamiliar face to greet you off the plane, the sudden flight of a bird, the warmth of the policeman’s salutation, or the enthusiasm of the Press corps.
    But if it were for that, he was elected already. Rockefeller was obviously the near-unanimous choice of the Press, and above all, the television—a mating of high chemical potentials existed between the media and the man as if they had been each conceived for the other. Except for his complexion, Rocky had an all but perfect face for President, virile, friendly, rough-hewn, of the common man, yet uncommon—Spencer Tracy’s younger brother gone into politics. He had only one flaw—an odd and unpleasant mouth, a catfish mouth, wide, unnaturally wide with very thin lips. In the center of the mouth there seemed almost another mouth which did the speaking, somewhat thicker lips which pursed, opened, deliberated—all the while the slit-thin corners of the mouth seemed off on their own, not really moving with the center. So he gave the impression of a man to whom expert instruction had disclosed what he might be expected to say—therefore only the middle of the mouth would be on call.
    The rain which had begun to come down and then providentially stopped, was coming on again. So he was able to slip out of the tight ring of interviewers locked about him after answering fifty more of the million political questions he would reply to in his life, and now the press bus and the private cars were off in a race across Miami to the 72nd Street public beach in Miami Beach maybe ten miles away where a big rally was scheduled. The helicopters rode lead and flank cowhand overhead, the cavalcade sped from Opa Locka; not thirty minutes later, band playing, cymbals smashing, Rocky walked a half-block through a crowd on 72nd Street and Collins Avenue, accepting the mob, walking through them to partial deliriums of excitement, a crazy mob for politicking, dressed in bathing suits, bikinis, bathrobes, surfers’ trunks, paper dresses, terry cloth shirts, they jammed the pavement in bare feet, sandals, clod-hoppers, bathers screaming, calling out, falling in line around the free Pepsi-Cola wagon, good-natured but never super-excited—the rally was on the edge of the beach after all, and a leaden milky-green sea was pounding an erratic, nervous foam of surf onto the water’s-edge of the beach not fifty yards away.
    As Rocky moved forward in his brown-gray business suit, murmurs went up everywhere—“There goes the next President of the United States.” But the crowd was somehow not huge enough to amplify this sentiment—they looked more like tourists than Republicans—all those votes he would get some day if ever he would capture the nomination. And as he moved forward through the crowd, shaking hands, saying “Hiya, hiya,” big grin on his face at the shouts of, “We want Rocky,” so also at that instant a tall skinny Negro maybe thirty years old leaped in front to shake hands and with the other hand looking for a souvenir, he flipped Rocky’s purple handkerchief out of his breast pocket. But Rockefeller showed true Republican blood. A look of consternation for one stricken gap of an instant— was this an attempt? —until seeing the handkerchief in the man’s hand, the situation was recovered: Rocky strode forward, pulled the handkerchief back, gave an admonishing look, as if to say, “Come on, fellow!” and immediately had some cardboard sunglasses pilfered from the same breast pocket by a heated happy hysterical lady tourist with whom he could not wrestle. Kerchief