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<text> <title> (72 Elect) A New Majority for Four More Years? </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1972 Election </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> September 4, 1972 THE CAMPAIGN A New Majority for Four More Years? </hdr> <body> The Quota Issue... The Republican Convention revived an old code word in the American political lexicon: quota. The Democratic reforms this year employed a kind of quota system to require more representation among the delegates for women, blacks and young people. Many Democrats were themselves disturbed by the quotas; at Miami Beach, the President and other G.O.P. speakers damned them as anathema to the American system. The resonance of the issue may well carry through the campaign. Quotas can be justified in opening up closed enclaves to outsiders, in forcing the majority to make room in its ranks for others. One of the dilemmas of democracy is simply that the majority frequently discriminates; thus quotas often are an undemocratic means to a democratic end. In the past, however, quotas have been used more often to exclude than to include. They are inherently unfair in a nation based on majority rule and representative government. They suggest that a white cannot fairly represent a black, or a woman a man. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's delegation was thrown out of the Democratic Convention largely because it did not include a strict proportion of blacks, youths and women. Yet the Daley delegation was democratically elected. Moreover, it could be argued that the McGovern delegation seated in its place failed to include a just proportion of, say, Polish Americans, or senior citizens, or vegetarians. Rhetoric Rampant The convention produced some other notable uses and abuses of political rhetoric: -- In his acceptance speech, the President promised that he would "never stain the honor of the United States" in settling the Vietnam War. "Honor," of course, is one of those words that strike a patriotic gong in the citizen's mind, but the concept is sometimes more complex than Nixon suggested. In the case of Vietnam, most critics of the U.S. war policy insist that it is precisely the continuation of American involvement--especially the bombing--that threatens the national honor. But beyond that, one occasion's honor tends often to dissolve in next year's realism. In his own terms of a few years ago, for example, it surely would have been "dishonorable" for a U.S. President to bid farewell to Chiang Kai-shek and cultivate Mao. It is always risky to construct a cathedral of patriotism around the nation's necessities. -- Nixon also had a strained simile for explaining the difference between himself and George McGovern. America, said the President, was building the proudest, tallest building in the world. The opposition says, "`Because the windows are broken, tear it down and start again.' We say, `Replace the windows and keep building.'" George McGovern later compounded that rather precarious image with an even more dubious one. Nixon was trying to build "a palace for the privileged few," said McGovern. Rather than tear anything down, the Democrats want to "restore that temple to the ancient truths." They both sounded like a couple of metaphysical contractors. High time to take the wrecker's ball to that sort of thing. A Vote on Abortion This spring, George McGovern squirmed uncomfortably over the issue of abortion. After his opponents criticized him for favoring legalized abortions McGovern changed his stand and said that the issue should be left for the states to decide. Richard Nixon never had a doubt. He has resolutely opposed legalized abortion and defended "the sanctity of human life." It may be that both candidates--whatever their moral scruples--are miscalculating the issue's political reverberations. Last week a Gallup Poll found that 64% of all Americans are actually in favor of legalized abortions, with Republicans more in favor (68%) than independents (67%) or Democrats (59%). Even Catholics in the sample approved by 56%. Three years ago, only 40% of those polled favored legalized abortion. An even higher percentage (73%) of those polled said they would favor more birth control services and better dissemination of sex education. Abortion remains, of course, a crucial and politically dangerous issue, but last week there was another indication of wider acceptance. The U.S. Second Circuit Court ruled that, contrary to a 1971 directive by New York former Social Services Commissioner George Wyman, patients must be allowed to use the state's Medicaid funds to pay for their abortions, which are legal in New York. Wyman's order, said the court, "would deny indigent women the equal protection of the laws." A New Majority for Four More Years? Four more years! Four more years!" Shouted at rally after rally and in the convention hall, the Republican slogan was one that Democrats could handily turn into an ironic question: "Four more years?" Yet it neatly symbolized the certainty with which the Republican Party expects Richard Nixon, holding a commanding lead in voter preference over George McGovern, to win re-election. The margin is so great that the Republicans--especially the President, could well have treated their opponent with silence, as though he did not exist as a serious challenger. But as the Republicans renominated Richard Nixon in a precisely scripted convention and opened their re-election campaign, they paid McGovern the compliment of repeatedly blasting his policies as radical, naive or dangerous. This curious aggressive-defensiveness amid otherwise overwhelming confidence was the week's one surprise--and it suggested that the campaign may yet prove exciting, if not edifying. Certainly a convention that lacked inherent drama needed some theatrics. The professional actors reading polished lines on cue, the smoothly edited film tributes to Pat and Dick, the youth-led demonstrations timed to the minute, the taped endorsement of a teary Mamie Eisenhower--all provided tidier television fare than had the tedious early-morning roll calls of the Democratic Convention. The tardiest opening gavel was only 15 minutes late: with Missouri's vote, Nixon's renomination came only eight minutes late. However contrived and unspontaneous most of the time, the convention showed signs of genuine affection for the President, who had good reason to grin and enjoy one of his happier hours in a career of many political vicissitudes. Nixon shared some of the lighter moments with an ebullient Sammy Davis Jr. Davis playfully hugged Nixon at a youth rally, they snapped each other's photos, and Nixon noted that the support of a star like Sammy could not be bought with a dinner at the White House. Also acting it up for the President were John Wayne, James Stewart, Pat Boone and Charlton Heston. Although an incumbent President can readily command a surface loyalty, it was no small achievement for Nixon to hear himself praised from the rostrum in strikingly similar terms by Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan and Ed Brooke. The smiling faces of such onetime villains as China's Chou En-lai and Russia's Leonid Brezhnev flashed on the screen in happy toasts with Nixon, and there was not a hiss in the hall. Only Vote. The convention convincingly demonstrated that Nixon had effectively silenced most of his critics on the left by co-opting many of their ideas, such as improved relations with Communist countries, arms limitation, a guaranteed income, health insurance--although he has not really pushed the domestic programs hard in the Congress. He has appeased his critics on the right by his highly political treatment of the busing and Supreme Court issues. His flanks skillfully protected, he was in supreme control of his party. While the only vote against the renomination was cast for California's Paul McCloskey, the convention managers kept him far from any microphone that would broadcast his dissent on Nixon's Vietnam policies. The platform, carefully crafted in the White House to avoid controversy, was adopted by the committee with little discussion. Read to a bored convention, it was so innocuous that Reagan, presiding at the time, pleaded for attention to "one of the most important parts of the convention"--and confessed later that he had not read the document. The Doral Hotel, housing the President's political advisers, though neither Nixon nor Vice President Spiro Agnew, was turned into a security fortress. It was closed to the public, and its occupants were told where to find paper shredders and red trash bags for documents they wished to have burned. The one floor fight, over convention rules, satisfied the President's desire that there ought to be at least one floor fight to provide some sense of an open convention, but Nixon safely refrained from taking sides and thus could not be affected. Moments before Nixon proclaimed that the nation's Vietnam veterans should be given "the honor and respect they deserve and that they've earned," three such veterans in wheelchairs shouted "Stop the bombing!"--and were summarily escorted from the hall by convention security personnel. If closed against dissent from within, the convention flung its gates wide open to anyone who wished to join the campaign against McGovern. Apostate Democrats were admitted to the rostrum to confess their past political sins and to make their vows to Nixon. The President used his acceptance speech to "ask everyone listening to me tonight--Democrats, Republicans and independents--to join our new majority, not on the basis of the party label you wear in your lapel but on the basis of what you believe in your hearts." The speech was honed personally by the President throughout eight days of near solitude (he used twelve yellow pads, one each devoted to such subjects as peace, crime, etc.). The result was commendably free of grandiose statements, but curiously flat--a pastiche of earlier Nixon efforts. In his earnest, final appeal for world peace, he even once again evoked the little Russian girl Tanya, whose family had been killed by the invading Nazis. He had spoken of her in his televised Moscow speech last May, a portion of which had been shown to the convention only the night before. He offered nothing new of substance toward remedying the nation's domestic ills or ending the Vietnam War. He got one of his loudest cheers with an oft-repeated pledge: "We will never abandon our prisoners of war," even though McGovern has never proposed that. Another applauded promised was equally familiar: "I shall continue to appoint judges who share my philosophy that we must strengthen the peace forces as against the criminal forces." He said he hoped to ease the "unfair and heavy burden" of local property taxes, but did not say how. The speech hit McGovern hard without ever naming him. It did so by either overstating McGovern's already fairly far-out positions or tying him by implication to policies he has not actually advocated. Nixon urged Americans to "reject the policies of those who whine and whimper about our frustrations and call on us to turn inward." He suggested that McGovern was bent on making the U.S. "the second strongest nation in the world" through cuts in the defense budget. He claimed that McGovern welfare reforms would add 82 million people to the welfare rolls--a gross exaggeration. At the same time, Nixon assailed McGovern's guaranteed-income proposals with the claim that "every politician's promise has a price--the American taxpayer pays the bill." Oddly, it was Spiro Agnew who seemed to be taking the higher rhetorical road. He accepted his uncontested renomination with a speech he wrote himself that was admirably devoid of bombast and his normal narrowness. To be sure, he attacked McGovern's policies as "piecemeal, inconsistent and illusory" and claimed that the Democratic candidate would "retreat into isolationism, abandon our allies, and concentrate wholly on our internal affairs at the great expense of our national security." Yet he also called for an end to policies that would "divide this nation into partisan blocs, each fighting only for its own self-centered and limited ends." He deplored the practice of fastening "group labels on people" and thus turning "American against American." It was a laudable sentiment but ironic coming from a man whose past oratory has tended to do precisely what he now deplores. The Republican assault on McGovern and the attempt to isolate him from the rest of the Democratic Party continued as Nixon headed westward from Miami Beach on his opening campaign trip. Addressing the annual convention of the American Legion in Chicago, he invoked the names of such Democratic Presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as having spoken often "in eloquent terms of the need for a strong national defense." On the other hand, again without naming McGovern, Nixon warned against those who "gamble with the safety of the American people under a false banner of economy." Legionnaires rose, cheering, when he attacked those who try to make "moral heroes of the few hundreds who have deserted their country" instead of honoring "the real heroes who have served their country in Vietnam." Quiet Talk. Nixon flew on to a high school dedication in Utica, Mich., where he talked about what he had learned from his football coach at Whittier College when he felt like quitting the team. "What is wrong is when you lose, not getting up off that floor and coming back and fighting again," the coach had said. Urged Nixon: "Don't quit, don't ever quit. This country needs the very best of you, the young generation of Americans, can give to it." One way to play the game, he suggested, was to get out and vote. From Utica, Nixon flew on to San Diego and San Clemente. The visions of a G.O.P. landslide even embrace muted hopes of a Republican takeover of Congress, although experienced Republicans on Capitol Hill doubt that it will happen. They see some chance to gain the five seats in the Senate needed to control that chamber. But leaders of the House in both parties agree that the Republicans are likely to gain about 20 seats at most. They need 39 to take over. There was, however, quiet talk of a deal between deeply conservative Southern Democrats to switch parties if the House becomes closely contested--and if their seniority on committees is protected. Republicans would willingly strike such a bargain. But past elections belie the presidential coattails theory. Democrats gained only two Senate seats when Johnson swamped Goldwater in 1964; Republicans actually lost congressional strength when Eisenhower crushed Adlai Stevenson in 1956. The week's events may have moved Richard Nixon closer to enlisting the "new majority," cited so often in Miami Beach, at least in his own re-elections cause, although little was done to give the party a broader, more lasting base. The President must successfully isolate McGovern from the mainstream of the challenger's own party (which McGovern has already done to a great extent himself). Nixon also must resist the temptation to assail his opponent emotionally rather than logically. If he can do those things, it is very likely that he will win "four more years." The U.S. electorate may just decide that having done an outstanding job in international affairs during his first term, he deserves a chance to show what he can do domestically in his second. The Spiro of '76 The only excitement of the Republican Convention had nothing to do with this year's presidential campaign. It was an opening skirmish for the 1976 contests. Liberals clashed with conservatives in a classic Republican encounter; and as usual, the outnumbered, outmaneuvered liberals lost. The big winner appears to be Spiro Agnew, who has clearly begun to run for 1976. The issue is one of those complex numerical puzzles that tend to glaze the most attentive eye. But it is important because it concerns the allotment of delegates to the next convention. The conservatives were clearly in control of this convention and they want things kept that way four years hence. They were scarcely ruffled by a federal court decision last spring that ruled that the present delegate apportionment is unconstitutional. A conservative majority on the Rules Committee proceeded to modify the system a little, but the basic inequity remained. Each state, big or small, gets 4 1/2 bonus delegates if it goes for the G.O.P. presidential candidate in 1972; it is also awarded a number of delegates equal to 60% of its electoral vote. Since the smaller Southern and Western states are more likely to vote for the President than the larger industrial ones, the smaller states stand to gain the most. Less Clout. As a slight concession to the big states, the conservatives agreed to give a bonus delegate for each Republican Governor or Senator elected as well as another delegate if at least one-half of the state's congressional delegation is Republican. While the big states are unreliably Republican in presidential elections, they consistently put Republicans in lesser offices. Liberals were hardly satisfied with this arrangement and submitted a proposal of their own to enlarge the delegations from the big states. But they ran into opposition not only from small-state conservatives but also from big-sate conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and James Buckley, who do not want to jeopardize control even if it means less clout for their delegations. One of the liberal leaders, Illinois Senator Charles Percy, who is considered a presidential possibility, was able to persuade only eight members of his delegation to vote with him; 50 voted with the conservatives. The White House was keeping hands off. Its first priority--maybe its only priority--was to re-elect the President. That meant avoiding any significant fight. On liberal urging, Presidential Aide John Ehrlichman and Campaign Manager Clark MacGregor made last-minute attempts to work out a compromise, but the conservatives were too confident to budge. Nor was their confidence misplaced. After a brief floor debate, the liberal proposal lost by a margin of more than 2-1. By all accounts, the delegate system that was adopted leaves the conservatives in control of party machinery and boosts Agnew's chances of succeeding Nixon. He was clearly the favorite of the conservatives. A Miami Herald poll indicated that 36% of the delegates would support him for President in 1976, far more than would favor his nearest competitor, Reagan. Trying to broaden his constituency, Agnew made a pitch for moderate support in his acceptance speech, which was notably lacking in rancor. He suggested in so many words that he may be the heir to Nixon: "The office of Vice President has two important functions: to serve the President and to learn from the President." No less a figure than Pat Nixon agreed that he was a worthy replacement. "I'm for him," she said on the final day of the convention. "I think he's done a marvelous job as Vice President and that he would do the same job as President." In an amiable press conference, Agnew disclosed that when he had been on the attack he was merely serving as the President's surrogate and on the President's specific instructions. That point has been made by Agnew's aides for some time. The argument, while plausible enough, is somewhat impaired by the fact that on other occasions Agnew has insisted that his attacks on liberals, the press and some elements of youth represented his own deep convictions. Agnew also told the reporters that he was not too comfortable being the "cutting edge" in the 1970 campaign; such a role is superfluous in the current campaign since McGovern has "seized the razor from the wrong end." Announced Agnew: "It is my total intention to confine the campaign strictly to the issues." That would be a welcome reversal. YOUTH The Cheerleaders Of all the props in a meticulously stage-managed convention, none were more prominent, or as appealing in their nontheatrical freshness, than the 3,200 Young Voters for the President, whose rehearsed exuberance enlivened every public event. They were bused to VIP airport arrivals and accorded 1,500 tickets to pack the galleries of convention hall, as well as to give the floor area enough young faces to help television viewers forget the fact that only 3% of the voting delegates were under 25. The boys beardless, the girls firmly bra-ed, they gave the Grand Old Party a cosmetic new look of young vitality. However carefully coached, the youths responded with an enthusiasm that seemed contagious. Their shouts "We want Pat" kept a pleased Pat Nixon from acknowledging an overblown James Stewart-narrated tribute for twelve minutes. They repeatedly interrupted Barry Goldwater and waved such age-bridging signs as RON BABY, WE LOVE YOU at Ronald Reagan. They released even more of their lung power every time their unlikely hero, Richard Nixon, appeared in public. "Nixon now, more than ever! Nixon now, more than ever!" went the cry. The President unblushingly used his youth contingent to combat Democratic claims that most young new voters will side with George McGovern. On his arrival in Miami, he told the assembled youthful airport crowd: "Based on what I see and feel here today, we're going to win the young voters." Within minutes of his nomination, he assured some 6,000 young people at a rock and show business rally in Miami's Marine Stadium that the votes of their peers were not "in anyone's pocket." He aimed parts of his acceptance speech at the young, suggesting that a vote for him would make "your first vote one of the best votes you ever cast in your life." Beyond the televised happenings, members of the Young Voters group carried out quieter convention chores. They served as escorts to each of the 50 delegations, drove scores of cars to help party officials get around the city, held down about 35 clerical jobs, filled 40 posts as aides to Nixon Cabinet members. At the hall, 440 found jobs as messengers, pages and in other support roles. Even so, there were not enough duties to keep all of the youths fully occupied, and many felt underemployed. But for most, just being part of the convention scene was enough. The young people were recruited by the under-30 division of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, largely at the urging of Tennessee's Republican Senator Bill Brock. Now 41, Brock was elected a Congressman at the age of 31 and credits his youthful followers with his elevation to the Senate in 1970. Feeling at first that he was almost "the only living American who was confident of the youth vote going Republican this year," he says that he found a ready fellow believer in Nixon. Invited recently to brief the President for 20 minutes on their plans, key youth organizers were quizzed and encouraged by the President for an hour and a half. Two leaders of the Young Voters for the President, Ken Rietz, 30, and Tom Bell, 24, have served on Brock campaign staffs. Another, Jay Smith, 22, a former Hubert Humphrey worker from Boston, came to the realization that, "My God, Nixon has done some terrific things about the things the kids were complaining about." Nepotism. The volunteers were recruited mainly through some 1,000 invitations to college Republican clubs and to 1,700 active young party workers. Charter flights were arranged to reduce their transportation costs ($125 from Los Angeles), and they were paid $50 for five days of meals and $75 for five nights in hotels throughout the area. Most got help from parents, a few from local G.O.P. groups, but many worked at odd jobs to raise the money. "I had to borrow from aunts and uncles to come," said Richard Blair, 22, of Mobile, Ala. "I sold my electric typewriter and four of my textbooks." There was an element of Republican nepotism in the youth group: the children of such party officials as White House Aides H.R. Ehrlichman, Convention Chairman Gerald Ford and former Postmaster General Winton Blount held leadership posts. The Y.V.P. national chairman is Pam Powell, 24, daughter of the late Dick Powell and June Allyson. The tiny (5 ft.) blonde actress and publicist wielded a gavel almost as big as herself in opening one convention session. Most of the youths did not feel they were being unfairly used for image purposes, although some felt a bit silly. "We went to rallies, rallies, rallies, and sometimes we didn't know who we were greeting," complained Dedree Hoyt, 17, of Los Angeles. Added Anne Martin, 17, of Carrollton, Ga.: "We paint these signs, take them over to a hotel, put on red, white and blue hats, scream, shout and clap. Nothing has anything to do with politics: it's all cheerleading." A few were angry. "I just got fed up with it," said Butch Stein, 17, of Elkins Park, Pa. "I just couldn't stand up every five minutes and cheer, cheer and cheer." Why did most do it so willingly? Leaders of the group concede that it was not out of any intense adulation of Nixon as a personality. "They look at Nixon's record, not at him," said one young party pro. Repeatedly, they praised Nixon's foreign policy initiatives and the waning of high draft calls. "You can't laugh or scoff at the SALT agreement or the trip to Peking," conceded Boston's Jay Smith. They hope to return home and fire up other young people to work and vote for Nixon's reelection. Theirs is an unemotional appreciation of Nixon's record, contrasted with the more excited feelings that many youths have for the reformist promises of George McGovern. It is a lively and intriguing clash that undoubtedly will continue until Election Day. PROTEST The Last Jamboree The promise and rhetoric of the protesters had been almost as puffed up as those of the politicians. The Youth International Party had billed both conventions as "ten days to change the world." Rennie Davis, former S.D.S. leader and veteran of the Chicago '68 riots, foresaw hundreds of thousands of demonstrators descending on Miami Beach for the Republican National Convention. Later he pared his estimate to 5,000 to 10,000, but continued to hold out the promise of the "largest sit-in in history." To ensure tight organization, Davis and leaders of the other, disparate protest elements banded together to form The Miami Convention Coalition; they held numerous meetings with each other and the Miami Beach police, and promised that there would be no "trashing" and no violence. By the end of the convention, those promises and hopes had been toppled over as surely as some of the wooden police barricades near the convention center. Of the 4,000 or so demonstrators who did show up, only the Vietnam Veterans Against the War remained well disciplined throughout. The night of Nixon's nomination, instead of forming the announced "gauntlet of shame" for the delegates to pass through as they filed into the hall, protesters formed what must have seemed to many delegates gauntlets of terror, thumping the doors and trunks of the arriving cars and taxis, and spitting, swearing and screaming at the delegates themselves. The performance moved the Miami Beach police to tow old city buses into place to block off access to the convention site the following night. A Huff. Denied the possibility of throwing a wrench in the Republicans' clockwork organization by blocking all entrances to the hall, the demonstrators milled about in the streets, slashing tires, abusing more arriving delegates and breaking a few windows. Al Hubbard, a V.V.A.W. leader, walked off in a huff. "If trashing is the thing, then we will have no part of it." The Miami Beach county and state police forces who cracked scarcely a skull all the long week in a masterly display of restraint and cool, finally drove the protesters from the convention-center area with barrage after barrage of CS gas, whereupon the protesters marched peaceably back toward the beachfront hotels that were serving as Republican headquarters. By the end of the evening, the 4,000 had shrunk to 400 weary protesters sitting outside the Doral Hotel singing "All we are saying is give peace a chance," and waiting for the inevitable arrests (which went over 1,000 for the week). The height of the sporadic chaos, caused mostly by a few small "mobile affinity groups" of trashers, who in some cases came equipped with their own tear gas, occurred during Nixon's and Agnew's acceptance speeches, and therefore received almost no television coverage. But simultaneous logs of the police radio channel and the convention proceedings capture the yin and yang of the final evening: 9:50 P.M. Senator Robert Griffin introduces Agnew: "The magic hour is at hand." Police radio: "Did you read that message about gas? They're starting to feel the effect of gas in the north hall. Is there something you can do to reduce that gas on the outside?" 10 P.M. Vice President Agnew: "Mr. Chairman, members of the committee and my fellow Americans..." Police radio: "There's a big group down here at 20th and Collins putting trash cans and everything in the roadway." Agnew: "It is our mission to create a climate of dignity and security and peace and honor..." Police radio: "We just sent Miami police back north on Collins to quiet down the area up there." 10:26 P.M. President Nixon arrives on the podium, and the band strikes up The Stars and Stripes Forever. Police radio: "Get people in here on the double. We need help." Nixon: "Four years ago, standing in this very place, I proudly accepted the nomination for..." Police radio: "There's a large group throwing trash on the street. You got anyone up there you can move in from the south?" 10:41 P.M. Nixon: "The choice in this election is not between radical change and no change. The choice is between..." Police radio: "Be advised that a group of 200 just left Flamingo Park. Many of the group have clubs. There's a male Negro, striped shirt, striped pants, waving a revolver in the mall. Six feet, in his 20s." 11:05 P.M. Nixon finishes his speech: "Let us build a peace that our children and all the children of the world can enjoy for generations to come." Police radio: "There are 60 or 75 in the area of Pennsylvania and One-Six Street with iron bars and pipes." 11:07 P.M. The Republican assemblage rises to sing God Bless America. It was the end of the convention, and it may well have been the end of massive war protests in the U.S. To many of the antiwar leaders, Miami Beach had seemed the chance to reassemble the movement and kick off a national campaign against Nixon. More likely, it was, as Jeff Nightbyrd, a yippie leader, put it, "the last of the national jamborees." WOMEN How to De-Radicalize They wore knee-length linen dresses, white pumps and pearls instead of blue jeans, T-shirts and sandals. When upset, they exclaimed only "Oh, heavens!" or "Darn it!" They called themselves ladies as often as they said women, and they sometimes said hero when they meant heroine. They were, in short, Republicans, not Democrats. But for all their modesty of style and rhetoric, they had unexpected influence. "I'm a Democrat," said Betty Friedan, who was observing the proceedings for McCall's, "but the emergence of women at this convention may be more important than what the women did at the Democratic Convention." The woman who was most visible was the first woman ever to give a keynote address at a major national political convention: Anne Armstrong, co-chairman of the G.O.P. National Committee. Indefatigably amiable, perpetually smiling, cello-voiced, she was charged, appropriately, with winning over Democrats to the Republican ticket. Her speech was perhaps the best offer a Republican ever made a Democrat. She herself is a convert. Brought up in upper-crust Creole society in New Orleans, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar, she remained a Democrat until--it must be said--she married the very model of a Marlboro man, sandy-haired Tobin Armstrong, whose Texas ranch is measured in miles rather than acres. She has thoughts of running for public office when the last of her five children reaches college age. Less on display but working just as hard behind the scenes were other soft-spoken, steely, resolute women intent on hammering out a party platform that would recognize the women's rightful role in the G.O.P. The Republicans' answer to Gloria Steinem was Jill Ruckelshaus, wife of the director of the Environmental Protection Agency. "She has helped to de-radicalize the movement in the eyes of Republican women," says Kitty Clyde, a comely press aide to Anne Armstrong. De-radicalize? A phrase is born. A Roman Catholic mother of five with the clear-eyed look of a swimming instructor at a fashionable girls' camp, Jill made a determined plea for an abortion plank. It had no more chance with the Republicans than it did with the Democrats. But the plea's the thing. "You can't be abrasive and hostile in a convention like this," says Jill. "We had to come softly through the door to get women moving." The main mover was Congresswoman Peggy Heckler of Massachusetts, a peppery redhead who likes to talk and talk. And people listen. She was determined to include in the G.O.P. platform a plank on federally sponsored day-care centers for children, thereby challenging her own President, who had vetoed a child-care bill because, he felt, it would weaken the family. Refusing to take no for an answer, Peggy had a way of converting it to yes. "Language is a barrier," she says. "Words do not mean the same to men as to women." So she held a class for the men on the Platform Committee, who had probably not received such a lecture since they were caught filching apples from the orchard down the road. "I sure did learn a lot," sighed New Jersey Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen. Quality. While the White House offered stubborn but diminishing resistance, Peggy worked over a staggering total of 96 drafts on child care. For two hours she argued for the inclusion of a single word: quality. During the tedious wrangling, she left the impression that she was willing to walk out of the convention. "I think there should be a higher level of consciousness at the White House," she complained. But she raised it enough to get a strong endorsement of child care from Platform Chairman John Rhodes, a Representative from Arizona, to co-sponsor a child-care measure with her next year. Rather effortlessly, Republican women managed to combine play with work. Fashion shows were anathema to the more rigidly militant Democratic women, but the Republicans found a solution of sorts to this ideological dilemma: a fashion show with a Women's Lib theme. At a Tuesday brunch, prominent Republican women impersonated famous females of the past. First to appear was Shirley Temple Black, outfitted as the earliest American Women's Liberationist, Margaret Brent, a 17th century land speculator who bought up a large chunk of Maryland and demanded two seats for herself in the colonial assembly. Anne Richardson, wife of HEW Secretary Elliott Richardson, gave Mary Todd Lincoln a luster she never had in life. Lenore Romney dressed up as Lucretia Garfield, Anna Chennault appeared as Grace Coolidge. Clare Booth Luce came as herself. It really did not matter--and went largely unnoticed--that Lester Lanin's orchestra played Stout-Hearted Men, when the head table was introduced. Ever alert for ideological slippage, Betty Friedan decided that the Republicans needed some shoring up as the week waned. At a session of the Republican Women's Political Caucus, she seized the microphone and denounced the women for pussyfooting on abortion. Moderator Ruckelshaus made a genteel grab for the mike, but Betty hung on. Then rising magisterially, more formidable than Friedan, a black physicist named Natalie Moorman joined the fray. The associate director of the Center for Energy Information in New York, she exuded power. "It is vahstly unfair to take over this program," she boomed at Betty, who responded: "You took over the name of our organization." [The National Women's Political Caucus was founded in 1971 on a bipartisan basis to encourage women to take an active part in politics and to run for public office.] "Honey," said Mrs. Moorman, "these people are less sophisticated than you are. You want to be a dictator, but I'm more experienced at it than you are." Betty gave up, let go the mike and went outside the caucus room to continue the battle. A flashbulb popped. A camera-toting member of the Republican Host Committee asked her: "Are you Bella Abzug?" If the Republican women have fought both the White House and Betty Friedan to a standoff, it can safely be said that they are here to stay. "The System is Good" A veteran observer of political conventions, TIME Correspondent Hugh Sidey toured the convention floor at Miami beach and offered these reflections on 1972's breed of Republicans: They marched out of those ads that Henry Ford runs for his cars. They came from the families that Polaroid tells about at Christmas time, a little overweight and a little overhappy. They arrived in Hart, Schaffner & Marx, with burnt orange by Arrow. Their jaws seemed firmer, teeth bigger and whiter, complexions clearer, shoulders wider, backs straighter than the Democrats', and they had handshakes like vises. Wandering across the convention floor was like strolling down Main Street with some side excursions up its suburban companion, Elm Street. There was the clean fragrance of Mennen's Skin Bracer and the soft clucks of mothers with their glasses hanging from chains around their necks. Near midnight, after the deed had been done and Richard Nixon was the nominee and the programmed frenzy had died, a warm-faced woman in her 50s shuffled through the debris, turned to a stranger, and in a voice of housewifely distress, said: "My heavens, did you ever see such a mess in your life?" It was down home in Miami Beach with the folks who, it may be, really run America. If there was sometimes narrowness or prejudice among them, it came form their own hard work and the belief handed down from Jefferson that America was to belong to the doers. They had their quota of moneybags, maybe more than the Democrats, but not that many more. They were well off, yes, but mostly by their own hands. Senator Bill Brock figured that among his Tennesseans, no more than eight earned over $25,000 a year. These people were chips from the national foundation, the part of the country that goes on by itself no matter who is President. They don't dig ditches or conceive the New Economics. They run the firms that build industrial plants and houses; they sell refrigerators, play pianos, bury the dead and straighten teeth. Work was a theme in most conversations. It was, for these people, an answer to boredom, an elixir for unhappiness, a builder of slumping character and, of course, bank accounts. Surgeon John Sonneland left Spokane mulling over the double dilemma of reluctant kids and make-work jobs. Dr. Sonneland worked as a kid, worked in college, works now with great joy. Karl Weaner, of Defiance, Ohio, boomed out Faith of Our Fathers at the Sunday morning church service. Something new at political conventions. He is a lawyer with twinkly eyes and a few race horses on the side, a man unabashedly moved when Frank Borman read from the book of Genesis just like he had from the moon. Sameness was not an enemy in convention hall. Gilbert Carmichael, who sells Volkswagens in Meridian, Miss., bakes a potato and fries a steak out in the backyard under a big magnolia tree most Saturday nights "just like everybody else," and Alvin Berg, from McClusky, N. Dak., an undertaker, reads the daily newspapers (no books) and uses his spare time to pursue the walleyed pike in Brush Lake just like so many of his neighbors. They were no stars or heroes, but they like those kinds, and they liked to sit and gaze at Bart Starr and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. The homestead was still fundamental. A young student attached to the New Jersey delegation scratched his head and allowed as how he could not think of a single one of the 80 delegates and alternates who did not live in a house with a yard. The women seemed sharper than the men, quicker to comprehend, more sensitive, even tougher, and the kids seemed more like kids than some adolescent activists, having been granted a childhood of Little League and 4-H and a few more years in which to enjoy it. Silver-haired Carlos Cortes, a Kansas City contractor who builds factories, looked across the floor, a giant sunflower badge bursting on his chest. He told about his life, a Mexican American who had wandered from the West and found his niche in the prairies. In a few days he will get another silver antelope from the Boy Scouts, whom he has served for 27 years. "I want to see others achieve what I have," he said. "The opportunity is here. The system is good. I'm sold on it. But everybody has got to learn that they've got to give something in order to get something." Cortes' view still holds for most Americans. But there is as we near our 200th birthday a larger truth. Millions of citizens have been excluded from the system through no lack of desire or energy on their part. It might be well if all those Republicans down on the convention floor, who do so much to set the pattern of American life, were to find a deeper understanding of that human problem. </body> </article> </text>