Political Conventions as Showbiz

Every four years America renews itself. The President delivers his inaugural and the country and the world wait for him to answer the great collective question: Now will he deliver on his promises? Already stored in the nation's attic are the trappings of last summer's political conventions. To rummage through those faded souvenirs one would think they were left over from an already-forgotten high school football game. But as we take a backward look we reflect that those buttons and bows are not the playthings of an undergraduate cheering section but of its politically minded parents and grandparents gathered together for their unique quadrennial rites.

Every four years finds this summer madness as American as apple pie à la mode, doughnuts dunked in coffee, hot dogs anointed with yellow mustard, drum majorettes, 4-H hog-calling and beauty contests, Billy Graham, floating crap games, Christmas office parties, flagpole sitting, bingo, advertising jingles, Momism and, lately, Big Daddyism. But there is a method in this summer madness, this all-inclusive political big top that envelops all of the above and, indeed, boasts everything from milestones of social philosophy to funny hats, gaudy balloons and mechanical noisemakers. I'm referring, of course, to the political convention. Not only the ones I observed this past summer, but the American phenomenon of premeditated and haphazard political process through which our motley but somehow effective major political parties manage to select their Presidential candidates.

We are a kind of democracy, which means our leadership is chosen with a considerable degree of popular choice. But the type of republic cast by each democracy reflects the very special ethos, the way of being, of the people who flesh it and mind it. Just as the Greek city-states differed in the atmosphere and quality of their institutions from the Roman Republic, so today our American democracy differs from the British form, the French style, the Canadian attempt, the groping South American adventures in representative government. Our wacky, ingenious, baffling, blundering, tasteless, but often, inexplicably, responsible political conventions are the measure of our difference. They are an embarrassing and yet reassuring sign of our unique political pragmatism. England may snort and France may shrug, India may regard us with a patronizing smile and Mexico may watch on her newly installed television screen and laugh at the antics of those crazy gringos. The only answer to them all: It works. Somehow out of all the confusion, hoopla, leaden showmanship, verbosity, duplicity, single-mindedness and triple talk, the damn thing works.

Attending a convention is something like throwing yourself into the jerry-built pistons, levers, cogs and coils of a giant-sized Rube Goldberg contraption. The component parts are obviously absurd, much of it is there strictly for laughs and has no ostensible use, a good deal of it is clearly, quaintly obsolete, it's at least ten times larger than it would have been if its creators had known how to build an efficient machine, and yet, like the hammer that finally drives home the nail at the far end of an outrageous Rube Goldberg device, the crazy thing finally delivers. Its cumbersome machinery has ground out nominations for great leaders from Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to F. D. R. and J. F. K. Through the coils of mediocrity have emerged men of intelligence and moral courage like Sam Tilden, Horace Greeley, Woodrow Wilson, Wendell Willkie and Adlai Stevenson. Our political convention is a paradox, a most congenial paradox. For every slob of a Warren G. Harding cynically chosen by the party satraps in that glorious institution known as the smoke-filled room, one thinks of a dozen able and qualified men, from Martin Van Buren to Lyndon Johnson, who became the darlings of their conventions. Even Hoover, Eisenhower and Nixon, that triumvirate of aging boy scouts, cannot be faulted as the legitimate choices of their conventions, expressing the collective personality of the Grand Old Party. They say a country gets the leaders it deserves and the same holds true for the country-on-the-half-shell we find at major political conventions.

One reason our conventions are so confusing, and yet so typical of us is that we really do not have political parties, in the European sense. Only rarely, as in 1936 and 1964, do our major parties represent a clear choice between liberal and conservative, in the manner of the British division. And certainly not the fine shadings from far left to far right that have made French and Italian politics so frustratingly complex. No, our parties are tents as big as the sky thrown over millionaires and workers left of center, egalitarian democrats who passionately believe in liberty and justice for all, and red-necked or stiff-white-collar bigots who would block their schools and their neighborhoods to Negro children, genuine pacifists who welcome the nuclear test ban and hot-blooded zealots who would trigger the bomb at the drop of an ultimatum. These extremes are still to be found in both major parties and it is an incredible fact that every four years, given some scattered but spectacular exceptions, these wildly diverse elements from sober Maine to erratic California pour into their hopped-up headquarters from San Francisco to Atlantic City, from Chicago to Los Angeles, and agree on a platform---be it ever so evasive---and a Man Who.

A decade ago when the party of Stevenson of Illinois was also the party of Russell of Georgia, Europeans were bemused. Clearly in a sophisticated political order each would lead his own party to demonstrate their widely divergent policies. In that same convention year, when Eisenhower was lead into the list against Taft, it was the liberal East of Lodge and Rockefeller outmaneuvering the stolidly conservative Middle West of Bricker, Halleck and Dirksen. At San Francisco last summer, when the Goldwater coup de party changed the face of what had been traditional Republicanism, the convention only came to life to drown out Rockefeller with its angry boos. Yet Rocky had barely lost the vital California primary to Gold water, commanding the support of 49 percent of that state's more than 3,000,000 Republicans. The man that convention did not want to hear had the support of the Atlantic seaboard Goldwater sorely needed in his lonely race against "the President of all the people." But that was an unconventional convention, for the Birchers and the hard-core Gold waterites who filled the Cow Palace were vindictive winners who refused to accommodate the moderate opposition. This was reactionary idealism at work, rather than the search for soothing compromise to fit together the oddly divergent pieces in the crazy jig-saw puzzles we call political conventions.

We may laugh at the Prohibition Party, but at least we don't expect to find anyone at its conventions boldly espousing the cause of booze. We may snicker at the Trotskyite Party ticket, but at least it maintains its own political purity. You won't find any Trotskyites sweating over a platform that somehow will be appealing or at least acceptable to implacable capitalists and die-hard Communists alike. But the Republican Platform Committee spent exhaustingly verbose days last summer trying to devise ingenious ways of saying they were against the Civil Rights Bill without quite driving away the Scrantons and Rockefellers and Romneys and Keatings who accepted civil rights as a fact of life we must learn to live with in the middle Sixties. It is these contrasting policies over which the party leaders try to throw their unwieldy tent that lends an air of the ridiculous to our great conventions. If Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad is considered way-out Theater of the Absurd, it is still a mild exercise in surreality compared to some of the more outlandish contradictions fired and fused in that unique American kiln of "political unity."

Could anything be funnier, for instance, than the vaudeville turn in which Ev Dirksen, the garrulous old lion from Illinois and G. O. P. Senate leader of the fight for the Civil Rights Bill, nominates for President the Republican Senator who voted against the Civil Rights Bill? In Alice in Wonderland this would be considered wonderful nonsense. In conventionland it becomes political realism. For months Ev Dirksen had been extolling civil rights, as only he can extol, as the most vital piece of legislation facing the nation. Yet there he was, up there on the podium, apparently in good conscience or in nonconscience, telling us why he wanted as our next President the man whose name had become a rallying call for the white backlashers who wanted to follow Barry on his brave march backward into the past. Or at that same significant and absolutely absurd convention let us examine the case of poor Bill Scranton, the well-heeled Mod from Scranton, Pennsylvania. On the eve of their convention, Poor Bill had been calling Backlash Barry just about every dirty name in the political book, and a few that even went beyond that permissive lexicon. If the big gun from Arizona was nominated, Scranton darkly warned his disorganized last-minute men, at worst we would be plunged into the ultimate darkness of nuclear war, at best the Republicans would be unable to survive the leadership of this irresponsible Don Quixote who seemed bent on driving their party to self-destruction. They were meant to be words of fire, but they fell on the convention like cold matzo balls and there was the spectacle of Scranton on his hands and knees eating every one of them in the closing days of the convention, and through the lackluster fall.

Sometimes it is the comedians, not the politicians, who have the last word at these political tentings, and as Mort Sahl surveyed the philosophical shambles of San Francisco he was heard to say, "This would never have happened if Eisenhower had been alive." As if out to prove the accuracy of Mort's shaft, the ex-President-general who copes with the niceties of our language as if he had just memorized it somewhat imperfectly from (continued on page 221) Political Conventions (continued from page 98) a Linguaphone, first voiced his disappointment at the failure of his party's civil rights plank to be more explicit. At least that's what the television interviewers thought he was trying to convey. Then was the old President-general withholding support of the anti-Mod front-runner who had considerable difficulty with the language himself but seemed to be pretty clearly opposed to the Eisenhower record of fuzzy good will? No, the Big Daddy of well-meaning doublethink smiled, he thought the platform was just fine and "Anybody who runs on that platform can't go far wrong." But it wasn't until the last strands of confetti were swept from the Cow Palace and the last Goldwater Girl shed her form-fitting jerkin that the recent G. O. P. standard-bearer got around to admitting that he hadn't read the whole platform until after the San Francisco Week That Was. And of course neither had Ike. Was it not to laugh as well as to cry, that gathering of tribal chieftains and their elegant squaws dancing to their primitive drums, some of them with deadly snakes in their mouths, as is the custom of the exclusive sect to which Barry belongs?

Nor does Oh Dad, Poor Dad have anything on Oh Rocky, Poor Rocky, the experienced loser, would-be leader of the 20th Century wing of the Grand Old Party, who jollied up to his political enemy with this glorious non sequitur: "Yes, I may have basic disagreements with him [Goldwater] on vital issues" (tossed off as an amiable aside, as if he were saying yes, I like vanilla and Barry prefers pistachio) "but I support Barry for his honesty and integrity and character." So the man reviled by his convention as a dangerous and subversive moderate (no better than a Commie to the right-wing kids who packed the gallery) stooped to embrace in this day of doomsday decisions the very man he had just been attacking as a medieval monster leading us hell-bent down the devil path to fascism and war. No wonder Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl and the other political comics seemed to be working for their laughs a little harder than usual. At some of these conventions the candidates seem to be telling the jokes and the comics seem serious, thoughtful and consistent in comparison. For comics become straight men in a conventionland of delegates in funny hats, Babbitts from the backlands tooting their horns and having their little moments of glory in the spotlight of the Presidential hullabaloo, disporting themselves in the aisles with show-off capers for candidates who aren't really candidates, the Walter Judds and the Hiram Fongs, nominated not for quick laughs but only after weary hours of polysyllabic oratory, atonal verbal music in futile search of a Schoenberg. You mean to tell us, ask our European friends, that these are the more responsible members of your republic gathered to choose the right man to guide the world's most powerful democracy and as such, the entire free world? Can such a man be sensibly chosen in the rooty-toot atmosphere of a four-day carnival, a nonstop Today-and-Tonight Show attracting 100,000,000 teletized citizens? It's a good question. And of course it sounds like one of those rhetorical questions anticipating a resounding No! Ah, but the answer is a firm if very small yes. It is like the lyric by Scott Fitzgerald's great-great-granduncle who could see through the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air through the perilous night that his flag was still there. Through the bright glare of the demonstrations, spontaneous and concocted, and bombs, largely rhetorical, bursting and thudding over the thousands of delegates, one can see through the occasionally electric but most often long-winded night that our political convention---the circus-tent display of the mediocre and the marvelous---is still there. Shot through with holes of illogic and hypocrisy, whipped and sometimes ripped in the gales of opportunism that howl around it, frightened by an unrelenting Goldwater majority or lulled into submission by a Machiavelli with a Texas drawl, there she stands in all her word-spangled glory.

Moving on from the encouraging Republican absurdities of San Francisco, we found ourselves plunged into the eye of the hurricane that swept down on Atlantic City from Washington last August: Hurricane Lyndie. Political hurricanes are still named for boys. Political storms with names like Margaret Chase Smith quickly ebb to gentle breezes. Our political totem is still crowned by the white man. The ladies are now allowed to vote and occasionally to sit on the floor as delegates, more often as alternate delegates, but they are still just a head above the Negroes on our tribal totem. This does not purport to be a play-by-play of the ritualistic yes-dance on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City some months ago. After all, you may be only now digging yourself out from under the avalanche of words that threatened to bury you with newsprint and TV-radio reportage, keeping you informed of the color and fabric of Lady Bird's apparel as she disembarked from her helicopter on the lawn of a great beachwater hotel, not to mention exactly what Hubert had for breakfast as he sweated out a solution to the insoluble problem of how to reconcile the differences of the freedom-hating regular Mississippi delegation and the Freedom Now rump Negro delegation. Atlantic City was supposed to be a who-cares, cut-and-dried, all-over-but-the-cutting-of-the-L. B. J.-birthday-cake convention, but not to this delegate watcher as I wandered the main floor of Convention Hall from Alaska to Wyoming, looked down on the panoply from the bird's-eye booth of Huntley-Brinkley, or from a balcony vantage point between the maroon, Texas-chic Ladies for Johnson and the Presidential box, or watched the three conflicting TV channels all booming at once in Babelic counterpoint over beers at the press lounge under the massive floor of this indoor football field, or attended the endless round of parties and receptions, or shared choice political tidbits with press and political friends in their hotel suites ringing the hall or retired to a quiet seaside cottage to catch my breath and reflect on the meaning of this madhouse convention of 5000 delegates, 15,000 spectators, 5000 working press, countless thousands of onlookers making passage into the hall a physical ordeal, plus more people than had ever watched a convention before hanging onto the words of Huntley and Brinkley and Trout and Mudd and Sevareid and all the rest of the electronic pundits without whom a convention would no longer seem official, this whole phantasmagoria of seemingly conspicuous waste---of time, of words, of money, of energy---this chautauqua invasion of 40,000 people moving in on a summer resort like ants on an unprotected picnic, and all to go through the motions of nominating a man whose right to carry the Democratic standard could have been affirmed at a quiet luncheon gathering of the party faithful in the private dining room of the White House.

The scene at Convention Hall the Sunday before the start of festivities was one of such wild confusion as to suggest an unruly army of hysterics getting ready for the Second Coming. My introduction to this political bedlam was like walking into Kafka's Castle redecorated by the Ladies for Johnson. The entrance to Convention Hall was thronged with convention drones, ushers, pressmen, Pepsi Color Girls and early arriving and already lost visitors. Uniformed guards blocked my entrance. "Got a pass or a badge, can't get in without a pass or a badge." But that's why I was here so early this Sunday morning, I explained, to pick up my press credentials which could only be obtained on the inside. "Nobody gets in here without a pass or a badge," the guard mouthed his prerecorded announcement. "Those are my orders." New victims arrived behind me and during this momentary distraction I pushed my way in. Dozens of frantic ladies with official convention badges seemed to be running around asking one another questions. A freckle-faced junior miss with an usher's badge intercepted me. "You're not supposed to wander around in here without an usher leading you." I told her I was on my way to the office of John Bailey, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. I had a letter to him from Attorney General Kennedy. "Oh, can I have it?" she said. "An hour ago I got Senator Humphrey's autograph." I finally settled for surrendering the envelope. Mr. Bailey's office was a hive of confusion. "Mr. Bailey's isn't here---I wish they'd tell us where they go when they don't show up here," said a hard-pressed, round and ruddy young Irish face. Nobody knew where the convention tickets were, either. "They should have been delivered here, but we don't know who's supposed to send them. Maybe downstairs near the entrance ..." he trailed off vaguely. I was to return to this den of frustration half a dozen times, but there were never any tickets and never Mr. Bailey. "I guess he's gone off to lunch and isn't coming back," the young Irishman said. A long line of frustrated ticket seekers was forming outside, but he had given up and was watching the ball game on TV. "Things are a god-awful mess here," he confessed. "We knew about Kennedy's request for your seats, but nobody can find the goddamn tickets." His eyes rolled back to the ball game. It seemed his Boston Red Sox were losing. By that time I had run into a big-shot Hollywood contributor to the Democratic coffers who snagged me a pair of President's Club tickets. And as I wandered the labyrinth of crowded corridors while the band inside the hall practiced trumpet flourishes, the convention theme song, Hello, Lyndon!, and America. I gradually acquired from passing friends so many assorted badges and pendants that I began to look like an overdecorated Red Army marshal. Only none of it was official. The seats I should have had, the press credentials that were my professional due, were never forthcoming.

"Is the entire convention being run this way?" I asked an old friend who happened to be a member of the Democratic National Committee. "Oh, every convention is run this way," she said airily, "only this one is a little worse. This one is really a mess." It was a refrain I was to hear as frequently in convention hallways as Hello, Lyndon! was to be heard from the big makeshift band in the hall. What seemed to be the trouble was that the fellow who was supposed to be in charge of this 30-ring circus, a J. Leonard Reinsch, apparently had disappeared. People who needed him for OKs for their office supplies couldn't find him. There were rumors that Lyndon had fired him and was bringing in a crony from Texas to take over the show, But in the offices where I had friends that of the vice-chairman in charge of the Women's Division of the National Committee, for instance, no one could locate the outgoing or the incoming convention director. "Even if we want stationery supplies we don't know where to go," said a distracted Southern lady in the Women's Press Room. "I had to but the typing paper myself. Nobody know anything. It's really a terrible---"Mess," I chimed in. The nice Democratic lady nodded. "Let's just hope the Republicans don't ask, how can we expect to organize the country if we cant even organize the convention." She smiled at me with partisan candor. Then the sound of the determinedly practicing band burst in from the vast convention floor again and her face brightened. "But it's all terribly exciting, isn't it?"

Yes, it is. It always is. Even when you know in advance who the candidates are going to be, and that their platform is bound to be the good old Let us continue for peace and prosperity and justice for all, against war, poverty and sin. The long-anticipated candidates and program were about to be presented in an atmosphere of considerable repetition and entraptured boredom, and yet, like the nice lady in that press room, I had a titillating sense of a big event getting ready to explode all around me. The fact that knew the score in advance in no way diminished my sense of excitement. I walked around the pulsing hall within quickening sense of convention fever not unlike the pleasurable pregame jitters I experienced over a year ago in Los Angeles on my way to see Koufax and Drysdale knock down the Yankees, or and I feel on my way to the bull ring an hour before the appearance of El Cordobés. It's fiesta con suspense, and while I'm with this image of the corrida detoros, it occurs to me that I do not sit on the shady side to see whether or not El Cordobés or Paco Camino or our talented Mexican Joselito Huerta will kill the animal, but to observe how well he is able to perform with it; in a similar mood, I have been curious to see how well F.D.R. or Harry Truman, or now Lyndon would perform, how an entire convention which must breathe the spirit of the man who dominates it will perform.

Every political convention is a condensation, a distillation of American history. When Willkie tilted with the pros, when Eisenhower opposed Taft, when Kennedy took on the field: it is a political contest and of course that adds to the excitement and the fun. But even when they are as predictable as the conventions of 1964, they command our interest as pageants. Pageants are elaborate charades of our historical past, repeating back to us the stories that have become our favorites. They are different from plays in that they lack the element of surprise or of compelling dramatic choice. They unfold majestically. The closely contested, open conventions do double service as suspenseful drama and impressive pageant. But the convention that renominates a President, sans conflict and surprise, still moves us, not as a pageant of the past but as a pageant of the future. From the performance of Jack Kennedy and his Harvard boys in 1960, from the tenacity of Bobby Kennedy and his precision football operation, from the class of the late President's acceptance of the nomination and the tough-minded savvy that bade him turn tables on his liberal and labor friends and offer the fateful second spot to Lyndon Baines, if we could not exactly foresee the future, we could at least foresmell or foresense the chemistry of the Kennedy tenure in Washington if he had been able to live out the years that had been promised him there. It is not only what the candidate says, the quality of the people with whom he surrounds himself, the aura or ambiance he creates, that colors this pageant of the future. Almost as important are the tangential event that every convention attracts and inspires. These may have nothing to do with official programs and procedures and planned demonstrations. They may be the angry words of rebellious delegates or would-be delegates, or wacky improvisations, or the gallery packing, or the slogans and songs of both respectable minority groups and attention-seeking crackpots. For the official convention inside the hall has a monopoly neither on funny hats nor on flashes of eloquence and wisdom. And these extracurricular people and their extracurricular message belong to the convention as truly as do the acting chairman, the keynote speaker and the Credentials Committee.

Our political convention is more than a giant proscenium arch: It offers the multiplatformed stages, ramps and runways, entrances to and from the audience, the sense of scenes unfolding all around the audience, and even involving that audience, that marks the true epic theater. In fact, it is only if you accept it as such that political conventions---especially those uncontested---come to life and meaning. At play here are all the political tremors and rumbles that will inevitably grow in volume and violence until the body politic is bestirred to adjust to them. The peripheral happenings press in on the center as the outer reaches of the metropolis impinge on and contribute to the culture impact of a Greater New York. So at the conventions before World War I, the suffragists who chained themselves to fences outside the halls and challenged the assemblies to remove the feminine taboo from the polling booths may have been haughtily ignored by indignant delegates, but they were members of those conventions just as surely as the prosperous and complacent supporters of William Howard Taft. So were the visionaries picketing for a working week of 48 hours instead of 60. Even the longhaired fanatics with placards advising that doomsday is at hand and that the convention must prepare to meet its Maker belong to the scene. Because this is the mecca to which America has grown accustomed to bringing its wares, be they spiritual, ideological or crassly commercial. Big-business lobbies and industrial institutes are at home here, with their opulent open-house bars and the ballroom parties that remind us of Grand Central Station at rush hour, only with all the passengers holding cocktail or highball glasses instead of cummutation tickets. The Bell Telephone Company offers service with the smiles of its comeliest operators and the Teamsters Union will gladly ply you with free cocktails washed down with attacks on Bobby Kennedy and whitewash of Jimmy Hoffa.

Yes, the convention is a political smorgasbord and there is something here for every conceivable taste. A reminder for the Democratic Convention is a smashed and bullet-ridden car on display as proof of terror in Mississippi. To the Republican Convention came a straight-faced comic who claimed to be the darkest of the dark-horse candidates, "running on the Lincoln platform of 1860 because it's so much more advanced than the one they got this year." At Atlantic City a mammoth billboard overlooking the Boardwalk presented to outraged Democrats an evangelic image of Barry Gold-water and the sly inscription in your heart, you know he's right, which an ingenious heckler amended with a small additional shingle secretly installed an hour before dawn: Yes---Extreme right. The election may be over, but the implications of this free-for-all pageant linger on. The suffragettes, the Prohibitionists, the anti-Prohibitionists have gone, but their places in the procession have been taken by those who march against capital punishment, against possession of the bomb, against againsters. A small army of senior citizens descend on the convention waving their placards for Medicare. Nor is it surprising to find Indians from the hard-pressed reservations decked in their bright-colored eagle feathers handing out leaflets listing the abuses they've suffered from Republicans and Democrats alike. Legitimate protests and pet private peeves find a favorable climate at these conventions. A live donkey is lead into a teeming hotel lobby and we overhear its trainer saying, "Keep your head up now, you're supposed to look proud of yourself." A small child in a stroller is dragged into the act, with a large charcoal ring around its eye and oblivious of the sign in its hand, i'd Rather Fight Than Switch. And because this is the American way of making politics, there are the invariable beauty queens, like the Symingteeners of 1960, and the Kennedy debs, and now the Goldwater gals and the Johnson ladies, not to forget those leggy models who continue to sashay around Convention Hall promoting Pepsi-Cola. There go the aged and the halt and the clowns and the pussycats, all with their parts to play in this cast of thousands without which we seem unable to nominate our candidates or help them hammer out their policies. They may lead us to better life or sudden death and from the look of these conventions we'll follow them up the high road or to the brink wearing buttons on our lapels with bright sayings like vote for Chester a. Arthur, Magoo for President and I'm for sex, from the ridiculous to the sublime, from Bring on the Beatles to Freedom Now.

Of all the pressure groups leaning on these conventions, one in particular casts a dark shadow of desperation, of barely maintained forbearance, of restless hope. The Negro continues to wait, but not much longer, outside the hall, asking for his rights. He comes to every convention to redeem the promissory note that was first given to him a century ago. A few of them managing to gain the convention floor, most of them still clamoring to get in, 20,000,000 second-class citizens have moved up from bit players to principal performers in this pageant of the future. From the San Francisco convention we remember the Negro delegate, a lawyer from Washington, D. C., who clashed with his party's Presidential choice at the Platform Committee meeting on civil rights. And the lifelong Negro Republican who had made a seconding speech for Eisenhower at an earlier convention but who was refused his credentials this time as a member of the Tennessee delegation that was now lily white. And another veteran Negro delegate whose clothes were partly torn from his back on the convention floor. And the Negro girls from CORE who protested with their bodies prone in the aisles of the Cow Palace. And the army of pickets outside who lay down in the streets in nonviolent but desperate siege of a convention whose white leaders and white delegates found themselves temporarily imprisoned. Negroes had been a respectable minority in the G. O. P. ever since the days of Reconstruction. Now they were being read out of their party. The gentleman whose suit had been torn from him, this bourgeois respectable, tractable Republican, was too shaken to make a statement to the TV and radio mikes pushed into his face. But his silence and his bowed head were far more telling than, say, the third seconding speech for Congressman Miller. This Negro delegate who was allowed no voice on the floor of this white-backlashed convention was to have his say in the pageant of the future, How large a part eventually will be his should be clearer at the next conventions, and the next.

At the Goldwater convention, the Negro element was downcast and defeatist. At the Democratic stand it was no longer an underground stream but came swirling and rushing to the surface. Given Johnson permissiveness, A. D. A. encouragement and the aggressive challenge of the Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama ofays, the Negroes came militant and organized. On the eve of this convention, I was sitting in the Railroad Lounge, a free-beer hangout for the press laid on by the Railroad Association, listening to an inside story that the canny L. B. J. had handed Humphrey a hot potato---to work out a compromise between the regular white Mississippi delegation and the predominantly black. Freedom Democrat Party delegation that claimed the right to represent its state in the roll call. The Johnson objective was to avoid an embarrassing fight on the floor. "That Lyndon is a sadist," said my friend, a veteran political reporter. "He's warned Hubert he won't get the nod unless he can solve this Mississippi mess. Then he leans back in his old White House chair and watches Hubert sweat. And Hubert will do anything to get that nomination. He wants it so bad you can positively smell it all the way down the corridor of his suite at the Shelburne."

Around the clock, with a hot line to the Johnson people in their suite and another to old-pro Governor Lawrence who chaired the Credentials Committee, Hotbreath Hubert tried to compromise the uncompromisable. To seat both delegations and allow them each half a vote? Both sides were insulted. To seat only those white Mississippians who would sign an oath of loyalty to Lyndon and let the Negroes fill the vacated seats? Five Mississippi Charlies signed the loyalty pledge but refused to share their section with Freedom. The Negroes were offered some crumbs, backed by the promise that things would be different in '68. I talked to two of them in the back of the hall. "Damn it, it's always tomorrow and tomorrow," one of them said angrily. "When will they ever learn, we're finished with tomorrows." " 'Sixty-eight is four years too late," his colleague added. "We've been working day and night to bring our people into the Democratic Party and the party won't let us in the door. Why shouldn't we be angry?" The official decision was to pare the Mississippi delegation down to those five white loyalists, with the Negroes allowed two seats as delegates at large and the rest to be seated in the balcony as honored guests. Joe Rauh, Jr., the white delegate from the District of Columbia who argued the Freedom Party case, was for accepting this, as a small step forward. And so was Martin Luther King. But the Negro delegation, just as two of them had warned me, were not to be appeased. It seemed more like a morality play that Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, wife of a sharecropper, 200 pounds of political passion, should have come up from Ruleville, Mississippi, to argue a change in the rules that would let her people in. "Do you think I came all the way here just to sit in the back of this convention bus?" Mrs. Hamer demanded. Thus the stage was set for one of those episodes in the pageant that had no official bearing on the convention at hand but is destined to weigh heavily on the conventions of the future.

This was the play within a play wherein black Mississippi hoped to catch the conscience of the Democrats: Instead of submissively accepting those seats in the balcony, the Freedom group waited stubbornly just outside the hall while two of their leaders were admitted to the floor as delegates at large. Then sympathizers from Northern delegations---and they were numerous---offered them badges and floor passes which were quickly and secretly handed back through the police cordon to the members of the would-be delegation outside the doors. Soon the Negro delegation had physical possession of the seats vacated by disgruntled regulars who had withdrawn to their motel to plan another Civil War. Embattled sergeants at arms demanded that the Negro usurpers show their credentials or leave the hall. But they stood their ground. A few of them even sang We Shall Overcome. There followed an awkward wrestling match of awful pushing and pulling. L. B. J. had fretted that an open floor fight would embarrass his cause, but here was a physical fight in full view of a TV audience of some 50,000,000. To this fearsome end had Hubert's vaunted compromise evolved. Watching from the White House, the President phoned his aides to call off the forced eviction, regardless of the merits or demerits of the Freedom Party case. "Illegal sorehead troublemakers," a leader of white Mississippi called Fannie Lou Hamer's people. They may have been voteless at that convention, but their sit-in was one of the highlights of the pageant in which, officially, almost nothing of consequence was to happen but which at the same time was pregnant to bursting with the shape of things to come. A small crowd followed their mountainous Joan of Arc, Fannie Lou Hamer, back to her stuffy, unairconditioned motel room near the Boardwalk and I found myself thinking of this phase of the convention as "A Tale of Two Motel Rooms." for in another motel room a block away sulked Sheriff Bull Connor, the Simon Legree of Birmingham. The convention was too liberal for him. And there sat Fannie Lou, who belonged to the cotton pickers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for whom the convention was not yet liberal enough. Already in Dickensian mood I wondered if Bull Connor was the Spirit of Conventions Past and Fannie Lou the Spirit of Conventions Future. As I walked down the Boardwalk after the battle of Mississippi I came upon a line of white and Negro kids of college age moving in a slow circle singing, softly, perhaps because they had grown weary from their long vigil, "America, America ..." The night was dark and they moved as gray shadows in filtered moonlight. State troopers and the idly curious looked on in neutral silence. After the flood of words from long-winded politicos inside the hall this quiet tableau reminded me again that official political conventions are buoyed up by the spontaneous convention of peoples who have no badges or credentials but nonetheless are members of this razzmatazz political wedding.

One of the illegal but influential maneuvers of political conventions over the years has been the filching of passes and badges in behalf of a cause strong in heart but weak in official sanction. Actually, convention spectators are supposed to be good children, seen but not heard. But we all remember conventions where the spectators' gallery, mysteriously packed for a dark-horse candidate, played a decisive role in the final choice. Abe Lincoln's legendary integrity did not extend to his campaign managers who counterfeited convention tickets for the supporters of Honest Abe and swayed the delegates by this proof of his popular appeal. Wendell Willkie didn't stoop to counterfeit tickets, but somehow he managed to pack the gallery and rode the crest of a "We Want Willkie" demonstration that finally upended the pros who were backing Dewey and Taft. The Stevenson forces tried the same caper in 1960. The emotional high-water mark was the parade of thousands of volunteers calling for Stevenson outside the hall. Meanwhile, Adlai, the unique "to be or not to be" candidate of American political history, was fencing with his immaculate conscience. Too finely drawn for the rough and tumble of our political arena, he could not help be swayed by the Stevensonian tumult outside his window. Finally, on the third day of that tense convention, his complex mind decided that he was in the race because events seemed to be choosing him, whether or not he chose them. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota ("the good McCarthy" as he was called) put Stevenson's name in contention with one of the rare, brilliant nominating speeches of the modern era. Eleanor Roosevelt made a seconding speech. The explosive demonstration on the floor went on so long that the Los Angeles Coliseum had to be plunged into darkness to restore order. The gallery was a solid mass of "We Want Adlais." How had this been done? Shades of the ticket steal perpetrated for Honest Abe! The Stevenson people first had collected the gallery tickets allotted to them, then returned disguised as Kennedy supporters sporting conspicuous Kennedy buttons and skimmers. The Stevenson hysteria mounted to a point where it seemed to many observers that the longshot Willkie ten-strike was about to be repeated. But this time what was taking place was not a pageant of the future but a passing show. The band was not plaving "Hail the Conquering Hero," but "Farewell Our Defeated Prophet," Those who had loved Adlai for the mettle of his wit, the precision of his mind and the quality of his statesmanship were lifting their voices in a passionate leave-taking. The Kennedy brigade pulled in their heads and waited for the final barrage to fade away. They knew the Stevenson demonstration, overwhelming as it may have seemed, was not a cavahy charge but the sounding of taps.

What the Kennedys had brought to conventioniana was a style, a crispness, a grasp of the electronic advantage that was an elaborate adaptation of communications under the pressure of battle conditions. In a cottage near the convention hall the Kennedys had set up a command post with direct lines strung to special telephones installed at various strategic points on the convention floor. In addition, 40 Kennedy lieutenants headed by Bobby and Governor Abraham Ribicoff roamed the floor keeping the pressure on individual delegates, using walkie-talkies to report their progress to the cottage nerve center which also had special lines running to the Kennedy suites at the Biltmore Hotel and another hot line to Jack Kennedy's secluded hideaway in Hollywood. The Stevenson and Johnson staffers resented the Kennedy communications control and it was largely due to the tactics at the L. A. convention that Bobby Kennedy owed his image as a bloodless toughie and a high-pressure hatchet man. It took four years, a profound personal tragedy and another convention to reveal an entirely different and in fact more accurate image of Bobby. In 1960 he personified a new order with new, fresh ways of winning nominations. His use of battle-plan communications was significant, for the members of the Kennedy team taking over the Democratic Party were all products of World War II. The ghosts of that convention were Harry Truman and Jim Farley, and assistant ghosts were Eleanor Roosevelt, Sam Rayburn, Averell Harriman and Stevenson. It was a true turning of the historical corner and Bobby could hardly be blamed for filing the personal characteristics of every delegate with computerlike efficiency or employing walkie-talkies, the new tool of a new generation, to ride herd 1960 fashion on wavering delegations. Goldwater was to employ a similar communications system four years later at San Francisco. Conventions, remember, are a pageant of the future, not unlike world's fairs, and in years to come we may see closed-circuit television sets recording the moment-to-moment questioning expressions of the delegates so that the candidates' lieutenants may play on their sensibilities as on an electronically controlled organ. The Bobby Kennedys of tomorrow, the alert lieutenants of 2064, will probably be able to plug in to the very brain cells of the delegates with some ingenious encephalograph that will record the mental processes of these guinea-pig delegates even before they are able to point their minds to conclusions. The electronic possibilities of our future conventions are staggering to the old-fashioned mind.

But all the electronic "improvements" in store for us will not change the essence, the mystique of the convention. It is as if each convention, despite the over lapping of soaring balloons, catchy slogans, funny hats and exposed ambitions, has its own peculiar soul. The soul of the Eisenhower conventions, for instance, could be summed in likability, fuzzy good will. The soul of the Stevenson conventions was "Let's talk sense to the American people." The soul of Harry Truman's was "Give 'em hell." The soul of the William Jennings Bryan conventions could be found in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes. The soul of the F. D. R. conventions was benevolent, reassuring Great White Fatherhood, "We have nothing to fear ..." The soul of the Goldwater convention was more hating than loving: "Extremism ... is no vice ..."

I believe it will be long remembered that while the Johnson convention gave its mind to its shrewd and capable standard-bearer, it reserved its heart and its soul for its martyred President. So the 15-minute ovation for Bobby Kennedy when he rose to introduce the film dedicated to his brother's 1000 days in the White House, and his real tears, and the terrible hurt that all could feel in him as he took part in that prolonged, wordless communication with the convention---there was the passion and the essence of the last Democratic Convention. All through the weeklong revelry, the gaudy irrelevancies, the Credentials Committee insolubles, the self-righteous oratory, the shadow presence of John F. Kennedy was in the hall. At one of the myriad cocktail parties around which conventions seem to revolve, a lady alternate delegate suddenly saw a vision at the bottom of her martini glass. In the midst of social laughter and insistent political chatter she paused to say, "Somehow it almost seems wrong, all these gay parties and just four years ago we were all in Los Angeles together helping to nominate Jack." That was the spirit behind the frenzied, cut-and-dried but still unpredictable convention. When they stood with Bobby, many of them unashamedly crying with him, the delegates and spectators spontaneously unified were finally having their say at the convention. For once the fine, firm, almost too-sure hand of L. B. J. was not upon them. A satisfactory convention is not a deliberative conclave but an emotional tribal ceremony, like the Seminoles converging for their green corn dance in the moonlit spring of the Everglades, and it wasn't until Bobby Kennedy spoke with moist eyes and his appealing diffidence that the heart and the soul of that convention received the spiritual and emotional nourishment it craved.

"I want to speak just for a few minutes," he was finally allowed to begin. It may be forgotten that Lincoln spoke for only a few minutes at Gettysburg while his colleague Edward Everett on that same occasion spoke for more than an hour. Through Bobby Kennedy, the late President's taste for literature was back in the hall. "When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet: 'When he shall die/Take him and cut him out in little stars/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night/And pay no worship to the garish sun.'" At that moment all the convention was truly in love with night and if nominations had still been open for Vice-President the delegates would have stampeded for this young man who had so smartly quarterbacked their 1960 convention and who had served his fallen brother so faithfully and well.

I have said earlier that one approaches an uncontested convention as one does a bullfight. Since the end is a foregone conclusion, it is the performance of the número uno that arouses suspense. Johnson's style is neither noble nor beautiful, rather crafty and technically perfect, what aficionados denigrate as "dry." It was unprecedented for Lyndon to change his plans and appear in the hall 24 hours before "Kennedy's Night" and virtually nominate Humphrey. Thus Johnson, the compleat professional, held a tight rein on the convention. His unexpected appearance was not only to stand off a Kennedy in-surgence but a possible white Southern rebellion. Johnson---a man devoured by ambition not only to be President but to capture the imagination of history, as another Roosevelt---has considerable qualities for his time. He has mastered the art of prudence and the game of consensual politics. He is clever enough to know what he does not know and to feel his way. I happened to be sitting close to his Presidential box at his convention last summer. I could watch him smile. If I may read faces rather than platforms for a moment, it is not an easy, open smile. It is a smile that turns in upon the corners of its eyes and mouth as if it is always watching itself play upon its audience. Roosevelt and Kennedy were also calculating men, but their spontaneous smiles had the power to light up the world around them. They were, simply, beautiful men. Johnson's smallness seems to be constantly in the way of his greatness. But he has gone to the school of greatness and he is an apt if uninspired pupil and he has copied down some of the lessons and learned them by mind if not by heart. He carries them forward in the pageant of the future, reluctantly sharing the pageant spotlight with the Kennedy team that promises to return to the scene and perhaps even to dominate it again one day.

If I had not encountered the gentleman I am about to introduce, I might have had to invent him, because he is the ideal doubting Thomas come to question our convention ways. Last summer I was having cocktails at one of the plush hotels that had become political headquarters, on a terrace overlooking the Boardwalk. My host was St. John Terrell, the young theatrical wizard who was in charge of the President's birthday party which was to be just the biggest birthday party of all time, with the biggest birthday cake in the history of the world and the most fireworks ever shot into the sky in the history of the world. Listening to the ebullient St. John with me was an official observer from India, a ranking member of her diplomatic corps. A member of one of the ruling families, he had been educated at Oxford and he sounded more like highborn British Establishment than the Indian revolution that had overthrown it. The Indian diplomat listened with barely concealed disdain while St. John (or Sinjin as he is called) was unfolding his manic plans for the birthday. "Every ethnic group you can think of, Poles. Germans, Norwegians, Scottish bagpipers, Greeks, Turks, thousands of them, busloads, and we even have Cypriot Greeks and Turks riding in the same bus, they come from Trenton and get along fine--- and they're all coming for free, just to be part of the scene, all we have to do is feed 'em, it means about five thousand box lunches [nothing at conventions seems to come in smaller lots than five thousand] and we're even putting up kosher box lunches for the Orthodox Jews!" Sin-jin had even wanted to have paratroopers free-falling through simulated ack-ack fire, with one dummy hurtling into the ocean as if shot down---only to reappear again as a parachute Lazarus. "But Lyndon wouldn't go along with it," said Sin-jin ruefully. "Didn't think it was dignified." I looked up at the sky where a small plane trailed a banner reading hello, lyndon. Right behind it was another urging send home fourstar fudge. On a patio below our balcony a state delegation, which shall be mercifully nameless, was having a party before going over to conduct business in the hall. Members of the delegation were all wearing identical gold-and-purple sports jackets. A number of them were already listing as if they had been left over from the party the night before. A girl in an itsy-bitsy bikini was dancing the frug or something. Visitors kept dropping in with loud guffaws and much back-slapping. A potbellied delegate put his straw hat on the frug dancer's head and performed a crude imitation of her sensuous gyrations while fellow delegates and their wives howled.

"What all this has to do with democracy I wish someone could explain," said the Indian diplomat in honest bewilderment. "I wonder if anyone here realizes what a dreadful example of democracy a spectacle like this gives the world? A world that is looking to you for leadership. Do you realize that there hasn't been a single vote taken at this convention? Everything's by acclamation. Couldn't you even have a vote for Vice-President instead of just sitting back and waiting for the President to appoint him? These delegates have absolutely nothing to do. And even when there is a vote of sorts like at San Francisco, their state bosses are telling them what to do, or they're bound by something called a unit vote or by a primary election like the one Goldwater won in California by an eyelash. It's all such a hodgepodge. I do think it's going to be an unfortunate day for democracy when these things are shown to the rest of the world via Telstar."

I tried to explain how delegates are chosen, and frankly bogged down. I acknowledged that conventions had not been conceived by the founding fathers and are not prescribed in the Constitution but my memory of their history was faulty. Something about candidates being chosen by Whig and Democratic Congressmen in caucus until the Democratic caucus of 1832 refused to back Andy Jackson. So delegates from the various states assembled and took over the job themselves. No body ever passed a law ruling that Presidents must be nominated this way. It just growed, and growed bigger every four years. "Surely there must be a better way, a more dignified way, a wiser way to choose your candidates and consider the great issues they will have to face," our visitor from India was insisting.

Below us the festive delegation in their extrovert blazers were loudly playing their Hello, Lyndon! record. Nearby a young folk-song group was twanging "Barry---Barry---King of the Radical Right ..." A candy vendor on the Boardwalk was peddling chocolate memorial Kennedy coins. A wax museum on the corner was offering action studies of Jack Ruby murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. A group of young Minnesotans passed by with an improvised band tooting The Minnesota Rouser, in honor of "Who but Hubert Humphrey!" There was even a flagpole sitter holding up something we couldn't read. It might have been vote for mickey rooney, who was starring on the Steel Pier, not far from "Her Sexellency, Sally Rand."

Yes, this great decision-making body, playing a vital role in deciding our fate, not just for the next four years but for the future of our civilization, was oddly dressed in the harlequin colors of the fool. I could see how it might irritate and baffle our visitors from the far shores. I had to admit that the American political convention was a noisy and overextended carnival and clearly an odd way to choose a Chief Executive and a program for the most powerful office on earth. As pure democracy it was a farce. Positively god-awful. It has only one defense. Not all the sages and philosophers and statesmen, neither in this country nor in the sister republics so quick to criticize, have ever been able to dream up anything better. She may not look like pure Guernsey, but she's been nourishing our political system for more than a hundred years.