Nation: NOW THE REPUBLIC

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While Rockefeller fumbled with Romney's candidacy, supporting him with money (at least $250,000), staff help and increasingly hollow pronouncements of loyalty, Nixon continued to capitalize on the contacts and loyalties he had built up during 22 years in and around politics. Rocky staged his great revolving-door act over whether he would be an active candidate, in the process losing such important friends as Spiro Agnew. Nixon advanced cautiously, tying up delegate after delegate and winning primary after primary. The former Vice President was able to campaign at a leisurely pace, usually accompanied by wife Pat—who looks more chic than in 1960—and their pretty daughters, Tricia, 22, and Julie, 20.

Fargo Friend. By the time Rockefeller clumped back into the race April 30, Nixon's momentum was almost impossible to stop. Rockefeller roared around the country, berating Nixon for refusing to stand up and fight. It was a weak argument coming from a man who had ducked the primaries. Rocky had style and good humor, and the crowds liked him. But he bet heavily on the public-opinion polls, only to have them backfire after the Harris and Gallup surveys clashed. When Rockefeller visited delegates, it was to get acquainted, "to show I don't have horns," as he himself acknowledged. When Nixon visited, it was old-home week. Nixon could drop in at Fargo, N. Dak., and say: "Hiya, George, remember that night when you were telling me about that time with Harry . . ."

Nixon took the Oregon primary on May 28 against the disembodied competition of Rockefeller and Reagan, and that 73% vote, he believed, assured him the nomination. Only some self-inflicted stab or an act of Providence could stop him. Privately, he said: "Everyone is waiting for Nixon to blow his stack or confront Rockefeller directly. Well, it hasn't happened up to now, and I think it's too late to start."

In the final days before the convention, it was not Rockefeller who kept a whiff of competition alive but the increasingly obvious availability of Ronald Reagan and the threat that George Wallace would cut into Nixon's post-convention strength in the South. By this stage, Nixon's campaign organization was tooling along flawlessly. He had assembled a talented crew of old and new aides from in and out of politics and from varying ideological backgrounds.

Logistical plans for the convention were already being made in November of 1967, three months before Nixon announced that he was running. Rooms in the Hilton Plaza were booked even before the hotel was finished. Finally, Nixon established a virtual colony in Miami Beach populated by 500 staffers and roughly 1,000 volunteers. An elaborate telephone and radio communications system was created. Besides command posts in Nixon's hotel and in a trailer outside Convention Hall, branch operations were maintained in 35 hotels housing delegates.