Reporting: Search Beyond Sadism

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It was only natural that reporters should investigate the grooming of the conventioners. Maxine Cheshire of the Washington Post reported that Miami's hairdressers were tearing their hair over the fact that none of the leading candidates' wives had patronized their establishments. If they brought along their own stylists, the Miamians fumed, they could be in trouble with the law because Florida forbids hairdressers to operate without a state license. Thomas Winship, editor of the Boston Globe, visited a makeup specialist who discussed the candidates' facial difficulties. Nixon, she said, had the most. "He has a hairline problem, greying sideburns, heavy shadows in the eye sockets, a black beard. Let's face it, he hasn't much going for him."

Craig Claiborne, New York Times food critic, made the rounds of Miami's restaurants and found their cuisine good for laughs but not for digestion. Affronting his gourmet tastes at one restaurant was a mousse au chocolat crowned with whipped cream and as a final insult, perhaps, a maraschino cherry. At another establishment, Claiborne complained that a wedge of Camembert cheese had been served cold. The waiter offered to "run it under the broiler." "Now I ask you," wrote the exasperated critic, "isn't that worth the price of the meal?"

Mailer's Dread. One paper made a habit of covering the quirks of the convention. The Manhattan Tribune is a weekly that is due to appear regularly in New York in September, hopes to be staffed largely by Negro and Puerto Rican reporters; its editors decided that convention week was an ideal time to get started. It was edited for the occasion by Dick Tuck, an incorrigible prankster who delights in bedeviling Republican presidential candidates.* The Trib reported that the only "swinging" convention in town was being held by Negro morticians. Robert Miller, who had just been named Mortician of the Year, had a ready explanation. Unlike the Republicans, he said, "We got a lot of real work to do. We just can't be making up a lot of words that don't mean a thing."

The Trib also ran a description of the convention as it might have been written by Norman Mailer, who was covering the event for Harper's. "Mailer," began the Tribune in the third-person style of the author's The Armies of the Night, "came to Miami Beach with a great sense of Dread. He saw John Lindsay right away and that gave him a sharper sense of guilt because his article had elected Lindsay mayor in 1965, and Lindsay had turned out to be an adequate square. He had no existential dimension. By then it was time to go to Convention Hall. So Mailer slipped his .38 caliber under his vest and went down town for the final existential test of wits with the Secret Service. If Mailer was successful, he will have altered the trajectory of history. The nation could be different, somehow, better, more alive, more in touch with its essence, free to choose its fate—if he punched Eric Sevareid in the nose."