Nation: The Scene On The Strip

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WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN called the presidential nominating convention "a photograph of the nation."

In Ballots and Bandwagons, Ralph G. Martin saw it as "a glorified national town meeting, mixed with a sense of circus and a huge tremor of hope and history." To H. L. Mencken, it was "vulgar, ugly, stupid, tedious, hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus. And yet there suddenly comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."

For the Republican Party, that hour arrived this week in a supremely suitable setting. A ten-mile strip of sand reclaimed from the mangrove swamps and crocodiles a scant half century ago, Miami Beach easily matches anything the G.O.P. Convention can offer in the way of razzmatazz. The swamps have yielded to well-manicured palms and aquamarine swimming pools laid out almost end to end. The crocodiles have given way to a rather more rapacious species — sharks capable of picking an unwary tourist's wallet to the bone in no time. Along the shore, multistoried luxury hotels and condominium apartments march like see-through Stonehenge slabs from the strip's south end to Bal Harbour in the north, constituting what one appalled Northerner calls "our grossest national product."

The Yellow Submarine. Up and down the glittering beach front, there was hardly a hotel with closet space to rent. The Alaskan delegation was quartered in the South Seas Hotel; landlocked Kansas was assigned to the Sea Gull. Wisconsin's delegates made a felicitous choice in the Crown, whose Roaring 20s Club should make Milwaukeeans in particular feel right at home with its nickel beer. Unhappiest of all were the Pennsylvanians, who landed in the Diplomat, 14 miles up the beach and closer to Fort Lauderdale than to the hall. To spare himself the long trip, Pennsylvania's Governor Raymond Shafer set up shop aboard a $400,000 oceanography mother ship, the Undersea Hunter, moored in Indian Creek, directly across from the Fontainebleau. In addition to carrying a 22-ft.-long, four-man yellow submarine designed to probe the ocean floor, the mother ship boasts a news ticker, color TV, telephones, air conditioning and staterooms for ten.

The command posts of the major candidates were installed in the upper floors of the major hotels, surrounded by tons of electronic gear and cut off from unwanted intruders by suspicious guards. Richard Nixon's bunker is a 200-room spread (including penthouse) atop the new Hilton Plaza, a mile north of the Fontainebleau. The nerve center, a former men's sauna, will keep him and some 90 aides in instant touch with practically every delegate. Like the other candidates, Nixon is permitted a direct phone to ten delegations. He also has 125 cars at his command, as well as several speedboats—"Nixon's Navy" —that will dock in Indian Creek across from the hall to whisk VIPs to their hotels without fighting traffic on main-stem Collins Avenue.