The speech had come in the middle of the conference and he kept fielding questions afterward, never wholly at ease, never caught in trouble, mild, firm, reasonable, highly disciplined—it was possible he was one of the most disciplined men in America. After it was over, he walked down the aisle, and interviewers gathered around him, although not in great number. The reporter stood within two feet of Nixon at one point but had not really a question to ask which could be answered abruptly. “What, sir, would you say is the state of your familiarity with the works of Edmund Burke?” No, it was more to get a sense of the candidate’s presence, and it was a modest presence, no more formidable before the immediate Press in its physical aura than a floorwalker in a department store, which is what Old Nixon had often been called, or worse—Assistant Mortician. It was probable that bodies did not appeal to him in inordinate measure, and a sense of the shyness of the man also appeared—shy after all these years!—but Nixon must have been habituated to loneliness after all those agonies in the circus skin of Tricky Dick. Had he really improved? The reporter caught himself hoping that Nixon had. If his physical presence inspired here no great joy nor even distrust, it gave the sense of a man still entrenched in toils of isolation, as if only the office of the Presidency could be equal (in the specific density of its importance) to the labyrinthine delivery of the natural man to himself. Then and only then might he know the strength of his own hand and his own moral desire. It might even be a measure of the not-entirely dead promise of America if a man as opportunistic as the early Nixon could grow in reach and comprehension and stature to become a leader. For, if that were possible in these bad years, then all was still possible, and the country not stripped of its blessing. New and marvelously complex improvement of a devil, or angel-in-chrysalis, or both—good and evil now at war in the man, Nixon was at least, beneath the near to hermetic boredom of his old presence, the most interesting figure at the convention, or at least so the reporter had decided by the end of the press conference that Tuesday in the morning. Complexities upon this vision were to follow.
11
The next press conference to be noted was in the French Room of the Fontainebleau for 11:00 A.M. The Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, former assistant to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and leader of the Poor People’s March after King had been assassinated, was scheduled to read a statement and answer questions. While the assembly was nowhere near so large as Nixon’s, close to a hundred reporters must nonetheless have appeared, a considerable number of Negroes among them, and then proceeded to wait. Abernathy had not shown up. About fifteen minutes past the hour, another Negro came to the podium and said that the Reverend was on his way, and could be expected in a few minutes.
The gossip was livelier. “We had to look for him in five hotels,” said a Black reporter to some other members of the Press, and there was a mental picture of the leader waking heavily, the woes of race, tension, unfulfilled commitment, skipped promises, and the need for militant effort in the day ahead all staring down into whatever kind of peace had been reached the night before in the stretch before sleep.
Still it was unduly irritating to have to wait at a press conference, and as the minutes went by and annoyance mounted, the reporter became aware after a while of a curious emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before—it was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him—he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the Republican convention itself, this congregation of the clean, the brisk, the orderly, the efficient. A reporter who must attempt to do his job, he had perhaps committed himself too completely to the atmosphere as if better to comprehend the subterranean character of what he saw on the surface, but in any event having passed through such curious pilgrimage—able to look at Richard Nixon with eyes free of hatred!—it was almost as if he resented the presence of Abernathy now (or the missing Abernathy) as if the discomfort of his Black absence made him suddenly contemplate the rotting tooth and ulcerated gum of the white patient. What an obsession was the Negro to the average white American by now. Every time that American turned in his thoughts to the sweetest object of contemplation in his mind’s small town bower, nothing less than America the Beautiful herself—that angel of security at the end of every alley—then there was the face of an accusing rioting Black right in the middle of the dream—smack in the center of the alley—and the obsession was hung on the hook of how to divide the guilt, how much to the white man, how much to the dark? The guiltiest man alive would work around the clock if he could only assign proportions to his guilt; but not to know if one was partially innocent or very guilty had to establish an order of paralysis. Since obsessions dragoon our energy by endless repetitive contemplations of guilt we can neither measure nor forget, political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt. Torrents of energy would be loosed, yes, those same torrents which Hitler had freed in the Germans when he exploded their ten-year obsession with whether they had lost the war through betrayal or through material weakness. Through betrayal, Hitler had told them: Germans were actually strong and good. The consequences would never be counted.
Now if suburban America was not waiting for Georgie Wallace, it might still be waiting for Super-Wallace. The thought persisted, the ugly thought persisted that despite all legitimate claims, all burning claims, all searing claims, despite the fundamental claim that America’s wealth, whiteness, and hygiene had been refined out of the most powerful molecules stolen from the sweat of the Black man, still the stew of the Black revolution had brought the worst to surface with the best, and if the Black did not police his own house, he would be destroyed and some of the best of the white men with him, and here—here was the sleeping festering hair of his outrage now that Abernathy was scandalously late in this sweaty room, over-heated by the hot TV camera lights, the waiting bodies, yes, the secret sleeping hair of this anti-Black fury in himself was that he no longer knew what the Black wanted—was the Black man there to save mankind from the cancerous depredations of his own white civilization, or was the Black so steeped in his curse that he looked forward to the destruction of the bread itself? Or worst of all, and like an advance reconnaissance scout of the armies of the most quintessential bigotry, one soldier from that alien army flung himself over the last entrenchment, stood up to die, and posed the question: “How do you know the Black man is not Ham, son of Evil? How do you really know?” and the soldier exploded a defense works in the reporter’s brain, and bitterness toward Negroes flowed forth like the blood of the blown-up dead: over the last ten years if he had had fifty friendships with Negroes sufficiently true to engage a part of his heart, then was it ten or even five of those fifty which had turned out well? Aware of his own egocentricity, his ability to justify his own actions through many a strait gate, still it seemed to him that for the most part, putting color to the side—if indeed that were ever permissible—the fault, man to man, had been his less often, that he had looked through the catechism of every liberal excuse, had adopted the blame, been ready to give blessing and forgive, and had succeeded merely in deadening the generosity of his heart. Or was he stingier than he dreamed, more lacking in the true if exorbitant demand for compassion without measure, was the Black liberty to exploit the white man without measure, which he had claimed for the Black so often, “If I were a Negro, I’d exploit everything in sight,” was this Black liberty he had so freely offered finally too offensive for him to support? He was weary to the bone of listening to Black cries of Black superiority in sex, Black superiority in beauty, Black superiority in war ... the claims were all too often uttered by Negroes who were not very black themselves. And yet dread and the woe of some small end came over him at the thought itself—it was possible the reporter had influenced
as many Black writers as any other white writer in America, and to turn now ... But he was so heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments, so depressed with Black in-humanity to Black in Biafra, so weary of being sounded in the subway by Black eyes, so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in blood-shot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon, so envious finally of that liberty to abdicate from the long year-end decade-drowning yokes of work and responsibility that he must have become in some secret part of his flesh a closet Republican—how else account for his inner, “Yeah man, yeah, go!” when fat and flatulent old Republicans got up in Convention Hall to deliver platitudes on the need to return to individual human effort. Yes, he was furious at Abernathy for making him wait these crucial minutes while the secret stuff of his brain was disclosed to his mind.
Abernathy came in about forty minutes late, several other Negroes with him, his press secretary, Bernard Lee, wearing a tan suede collarless jacket, sullen and composed behind an evil-looking pair of dark sunglasses, possessor of hostility which seemed to say, “I got the right, man, to look at you from behind these shades, but you deserve no chance, man, to look at me.”
Abernathy was of different stuff, deep, dreamy, sly, bemused—one could not detect if he were profoundly melancholy, or abominably hung over. He spoke in a measured slow basso, slow almost beyond measure, operatic in a echoes, but everything he said sounded like recitatif for he seemed to read his statement with more attention for the music of the language than the significance of the words. “If the Republican Party can afford this lavish convention, and the Administration can spend billions of dollars in a disastrous war, and America can subsidize unproductive farms and prosperous industries, surely we can meet the modest demands of the Poor People’s Campaign,” he read, and the logic was powerful, the demands well nailed to the mast, but his voice lingered on “lavish” as if he were intrigued with the relation of sounds to palpable luxuries he had known and glimpsed, “disastrous” appealed to him for its sibilants as though he were watching some scythe of wind across a field, so “subsidize” was a run of the voice up and down three steps, and “unproductive‘” hung like the echo of a stalactite. He was a man from Mars absolutely fascinated with the resonance of earthly sound.
He had begun by apologizing to the Press for being late, and had said this in so deep and gracious a voice that pools of irritability were swabbed up immediately, but then he trod over this first good move immediately by saying, “Of course, I understand much of the convention is running behind schedule.” The one indisputable virtue of the convention hitherto had been the promptitude of each event—how casual and complacent, how irresponsibly attracted to massacre! that he must issue the one accusation all courts would find unjustified.
But the reporter was soon caught up in trying to form an opinion of Abernathy. He was no equal, it was unhappily true to see, of Martin Luther King. The reporter had met that eminent just once: King in a living room had a sweet attentive gravity which endeared him to most, for he listened carefully, and was responsive when he spoke. He had the presence of a man who would deal with complexity by absorbing its mood, and so solve its contradiction by living with it, an abstract way of saying that he comprehended issues by the people who embodied them, and so gave off a sense of social comfort with his attendance in a room. Abernathy had no such comfort. A plump, badgered, perhaps bewildered man, full of obvious prides and scars and wounds, one could not tell if he were in part charlatan, mountebank, or merely elevated to monumental responsibility too early. But his presence gave small comfort because he was never in focus. One did not know if he were strong or weak, powerfully vibrant and containing himself, or drenched in basso profundos of gloom. “Poor people,” he intoned, with his disembodied presentation, “no longer will be unseen, unheard, and unrepresented. We are here to dramatize the plight of poor people...”—his voice went off on a flight of reverberation along the hard “i” of plight. Later, he asked for “control by all people of their own local communities and their own personal destinies,” incontestable as a democratic demand, but no fire in the voice, no power to stir, more an intimation of gloom in the caverns of his enriched tone as if he must push upon a wagon which would never mount his hill, so he went off again on “communities”—the hard “u” concealed certain new mysteries of the larynx—and relations to remuneration. He ended by saying, “Part of our Mule Train will be here on Miami Beach in front of this hotel and Convention Hall to dramatize poverty”—he stated the word as if it were the name of a small town—“in this beautiful city of luxury.”
In the questioning, he was better. Asked if he considered Ronald Reagan a friend of the Blacks, Abernathy smiled slowly and said with ministerial bonhomie, “Well, he may have some friends....” Queried about the failure of the Poor People’s March on Washington, he offered a stern defense, spoke of how every campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been described as a failure, an obvious cuff at those who had once described King’s work as failure, and then for a moment he rose above the dull unhappy scandals of Resurrection City, the mess, the breakdowns of sanitation, the hoodlumism, and the accusations by his own that some had lived in hotels while they had been squalid in tents, and spoke of what had been gained, funds pried loose from the government “to the tune of some many millions,” he said in his musical voice, and named the figure, more than 200 million, and the fact of the continuation of the Poor People’s Campaign, and the sense came again of the painful drudgery of the day to day, the mulish demands of the operation, the gloom of vast responsibility and tools and aids and lieutenants he could count on even less than himself, and the reporter, as though washed in bowls of his own bile, was contrite a degree and went off to have lunch when the conference was done, a little weary of confronting the mystery of his own good or ill motive.
Of course, having lunch, the reporter, to his professional shame, had not the wit to go looking for it, so here is a quotation from Thomas A. Johnson of The New York Times concerning the immediate aftermath of Abernathy’s appearance:
When the news conference ended about 12:30 P.M., 65 members of the Poor People’s Campaign, dressed in straw hats and blue work shirts, entered the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel.
With raised fists, they greeted Mr. Abernathy with shouts of “Soul Power! Soul Power!”
Convention delegates, few of whom are Negroes, crowded around. In the background, two white girls dressed in red and blue tights, paraded through the hall singing “When Ronnie Reagan comes marching in,” to the tune of “When the saints come marching in.”
The Negro demonstrators would not be interrupted, however.
Thirteen-year-old James Metcalf of Marks, Miss., wearing an army jungle fatigue jacket that came down to his knees led the group in a chant.
“I may be black,” he shouted.
“But I am somebody,” the demonstrators responded.
“I may be poor.”
“But I am somebody.”
“I may be hungry.”
“But I am somebody.”
It was a confrontation the reporter should not have missed. Were the Reagan girls livid or triumphant? Were the Negro demonstrators dignified or raucous or self-satisfied? It was a good story but the Times was not ready to encourage its reporters in the thought that there is no history without nuance.
12
After lunch, in a belated attempt to catch up with the Governor of California and the direction of his campaign, the reporter had gone up to one of the top floors of the Deauville where Mrs. Reagan was scheduled to have a conference at 2:30 P.M., indeed the listing in the National Committee News had stated that the Press was requested to be present by 2:15, but embarrassment prevailed in the high headquarters of the Deauville, for Mrs. Regan was not there and could not be found: the word given out was that she had not been informed. The inevitable deduction was that no one in his 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.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago Page 6