1968 - Mark Kurlansky [157]
Conventions chose candidates by a series of ballots—delegate counts, state by state. These ballots would go into the night, ignoring the broadcast needs of prime-time television, until a single candidate had an absolute majority of delegates. Usually the more ballots that took place, the more the front-runner’s support would erode. Rockefeller imagined the delegates turning to him after a few rounds. Reagan fantasized that Rockfeller and Nixon would be deadlocked ballot after ballot until the delegates finally turned to him as a way out. Lindsay, though no one believed it, harbored a similar fantasy about himself.
Nixon won on the first ballot.
The only drama was Nixon’s struggle with Nixon. His political career had been considered over in 1948, when he attacked former State Department official Alger Hiss. It was supposed to be over again in 1952, when he was caught in a fund-raising scandal. And in 1962, when he was defeated for governor of California only two years after losing the presidency to Kennedy, he gave his own farewell to politics. Now he was back. “The greatest comeback since Lazarus,” wrote James Reston in The New York Times.
Then something weird happened: Nixon, in his acceptance speech, started talking like Martin Luther King. Mailer was the first to notice it, but this was not just one of his famously eccentric imaginings. Nixon, who also adopted the SDS’s two-fingered peace salute, never put limits on what he could co-opt. Martin Luther King in the four months since his death had journeyed from rebel agitator to the heart of the American establishment. His organization was picketing outside the convention hall. Six miles away, Miami was having its first race riot. The governor of Florida was talking about responding with necessary force, and black men were being shot. Richard Nixon was delivering a speech.
“I see a day,” he repeated nine different times in the unmistakably familiar cadence of “I have a dream.” Then, further on in the speech, seemingly enraptured with his own or whomever’s rhetoric, he declared, “To the top of the mountain so that we may see the glory of a new day for America. . . .”
The Republican convention in Miami the second week of August 1968 was a bore that according to pollsters alienated youth, alienated blacks, and excited almost no one. Even the one possibility for drama—the complaints of black groups that black representation was unfairly excluded from the delegations of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee failed to produce drama because it was quickly glossed over. Norman Mailer wrote, “The complaints were unanimous that this was the dullest convention anyone could remember.” One television critic said the coverage was so long and dull that it constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.” But the boredom helped the Republicans. It kept people from paying attention and consequently kept them from noticing the rioting in the street. A poll taken in segregated white Florida public schools in 1968 had found 59 percent of white students were either elated or indifferent to the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination. While Nixon was being crowned in Miami Beach, Ralph Abernathy, head of the late Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was leading daily black demonstrations outside, and across the bay in the black ghetto called Liberty City, a violent confrontation erupted between police and blacks, with cars overturned and set on fire. National Guard troops were called in. While Nixon was selecting his running mate, three blacks were killed in the Liberty City riot.
There was only the question of vice president left, and logic seemed to dictate a liberal who could pick up the Rockefeller votes—either Rockefeller himself or New York City mayor John Lindsay, who was campaigning hard for the nomination, or Illinois senator Charles Percy. Rockefeller, who had declined to be Nixon’s running mate in 1960, seemed unlikely to accept now.
In the end Nixon surprised everyone—at last a surprise—and picked the governor of Maryland,