The Scene On The Strip

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.

Toujours Paris. Nixon's is the fanciest of the communications setups, just as elaborate as Goldwater's four years ago, when his aides skillfully used it to blitz the convention. Ronald Reagan, at the Deauville, has a comparatively skeletal arrangement. Nelson Rockefeller and his staff, along with the New York delegation, occupy all 720 rooms of the Americana, whose lobby is bedecked with blowups of scantily clad French show girls appearing in a revue called Toujours Paris.

Rockefeller's setup may not be as technically impressive as the Nixon juggernaut, but the operation does have a certain charm. His personal physician, Dr. W. Kenneth Riland, is along as an unpaid volunteer, administering lozenges when Rocky's voice begins to gravel and "osteopathic manipulations" --elaborate massages--to unravel the candidate's corporeal kinks. Rocky's makeup girl for the past ten years, Mae Gould, is also on hand to ready him for the cameras.

In the waning days of the struggle for the nomination, Nixon was playing it cool--so cool that some Republicans were slightly miffed. By contrast, Rockefeller was planning to work the strip down to the last minute, calling on at least 20 delegations. Reagan, similarly, planned to address a dozen state units. Not Nixon. He announced that he would hold court at the Hilton Plaza for one morning, devoting precisely 30 minutes to each of six geographical regions. Sniffed a Rocky man: "You can bet the Governor isn't going to sit around his hotel and invite people to drop by."

In Stride. For all the excitement, Miami Beach was taking the convention in stride. The city has been host to as many as 550 conventions in a single year, takes in an annual $600 million from 2,500,000 tourists. The Republicans' influx of perhaps 30,000 people and $15 million in cash (minus $850,000 paid by the city and state to the G.O.P. National Committee to get the big show) is only the third biggest gathering the city has seen.

Nonetheless, preparations for the G.O.P. invasion were monumental. Convention Hall was revamped and expanded, and 1,800 tons of new air-conditioning equipment and ceiling exhaust fans were installed to carry off the hot air. Southern Bell Telephone summoned men from as far as Montana and Utah, installed enough equipment for a town of 15,000, and tore up 7 1/2 miles of Collins Avenue to lay a coaxial cable linking Convention Hall with all major hotels.

Naturally, there were elephants everywhere--on buttons, on direction signs, as balloons; one 50-ft.-long red pachyderm wafted above Convention Hall, paid for by the Florida Citrus Commission.

You Fuzz? Almost as ubiquitous as the elephants were the more than 1,400 security men. When a reporter hopped into a cab last week, the driver eyed him and asked: "You a politician or fuzz?" He allowed that he had seen more of the latter.

The Secret Service is fielding 100 agents, one-sixth of its total strength, nearly all of them assigned to the four candidates--Nixon, Reagan, Rockefeller and Stassen. Nine other federal in vestigative agencies, including the Border Patrol, military intelligence, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Narcotics, sent agents to Miami. Army demolition experts were assigned to cover every sensitive area in case of bomb threats. Some 200 Feds were quartered aboard a floating hotel near the MacArthur Causeway, the U.S.S. Fremont, an attack transport named for John C. Fremont, who in 1856 became the Republican Party's first presidential nominee and first loser.

Miami Beach's own 200-man force was augmented by police from the city of Miami, the Dade County public safety department, the highway patrol, the conservation patrol and even the state beverage department. Forty-five beverage agents were on hand to see that bartenders do not water their drinks, overcharge their customers or extend their 5 a.m. closing hour. Many residents are sporting big orange buttons reading I'M A FRIENDLY FLORIDIAN, but the agents also aim to crack down on the friendliest Floridians of the lot. They are particularly concerned about North Bay Village, whose prostitute population last winter (750 to 1,000) was reported to be the highest concentration in the nation outside Las Vegas. Not everybody takes the crackdown on camp followers too seriously, though. When one resident was asked if he expected an influx of doxies for the convention, he appeared puzzled. "Why? There are more than enough now to satisfy the demand."

There are also more than enough bars, bistros and brassy nightclubs. The Casablanca boasted a "Swinging Singles" club offering "relaxing, down-to-earth, pillow-talk comfort," a fact that may or may not be of interest to the Iowa delegates who are bunked at the hotel. A "Never-Empty-Glass" club at the Versailles promised to "keep your glass filled all night long" for $1. The bigger hotels offered Vegas-style extravaganzas featuring acres of flesh, spangles, bangles and ostrich plumes. The strip's comestibles run to hot-pastrami sandwiches, bagels and lox and cherry cheesecake. It is not necessarily a gourmet's delight.

Off Limits. Concerned that daylight hours might bring demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, police staked out two easily manageable areas, enclosed by 6-ft. cyclone fences.

As the convention opened, token protests were planned, one by some of the Miami area's 85,000 Cuban refugees, another by Miami Beach's elder citizens (the median age of the 75,000 residents is 59 years) who want higher retirement benefits. In case of real trouble, the police have contingency plans that call for raising drawbridges on the six causeways leading to Miami Beach and blocking off the one land route. The main object, said Miami Beach's 260-lb. Police Chief Rocky Pomerance, is "to provide maximum security with minimum visibility."

Even the air has been secured. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered a two-mile-wide corridor over the Beach off limits to all but specifically authorized craft--among them four Marine Corps helicopters to ferry candidates to the hall when traffic is heavy. Security on Miami-bound commercial flights has been tightened up too. When Dirksen flew in aboard National Air lines, clutching a collapsible fishing rod, a shotgun-carrying guard was riding behind the cockpit to dissuade would-be hijackers from forcing an unwanted detour to Havana.

Coordinating the G.O.P.'s own security setup is a retired Secret Service agent, Jack Sherwood, who spent 21 years on personal-protection details for every President from Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy. Sherwood, sporting socks embroidered with elephants, has devised an elaborate system of badges and multi-stubbed tickets treated with invisible ink to prevent gate crashing. And he has cut back sharply on the number of floor passes to prevent the kind of convulsions that repeatedly threw the 1964 convention into chaos.

Keeping Florida Green. Still, it will hardly be a staid show. Miami Beach is heavily Jewish and Democratic, but as hosts to the convention--any convention--its citizens pitched in happily to roll out the red carpet and KEEP FLORIDA GREEN, as the posters urge. The slogan does not apparently refer to shrubbery. Politics is an immediately divisive factor when cash is involved.

Thus, the cabbies along the strip have a hate on for Dick Nixon because his aides have festooned their cars with ads proclaiming: NIXON'S THE ONE. The message is getting across, say the drivers, perhaps too strongly. Every time the passenger is a Rockefeller or Reagan partisan, he seems somehow to forget the tip.

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