Miami and the Siege of Chicago Read Online Free

was near, for cumulus clouds piled high on themselves, making towers, pyramids, turrets, and heavenly Miami Beach hotels two miles up in the air while dark horizontal tides of oncoming tropical storm washed through the sky, crossed the sun, gave gildings of gold and black to the towers of cumulus.
    The schedule for arrival was Rockefeller on Saturday, Reagan later that evening, and Nixon on Monday. They were all of course coming in on charter flights, and the Rockefeller plane, an American Airlines 727 jet which had carried the candidate 65,000 miles into forty-five states during the campaign, was landing, for security reasons, at the Coast Guard Airport, Opa Locka, out to the west of Miami, almost in red-neck country, the town of Opa Locka still another sad sweet real estate failure of Southern Florida for it had been built to recapitulate a piece of North Africa. Residential streets with names like Ali Baba Avenue, Sesame Street, Sharazad Boulevard, Arabia Avenue, Sultan Avenue, Caliph Street, and Salim Street wound around the center of Opa Locka in complicated ovals and ellipses all planned thirty-plus or forty years ago by a real estate genius, now a town all but deserted in the afternoon sun with the storm coming on, just occasional palmettoes and the crumbling white stucco center where a small old hotel and bar stood like the molderings of a Foreign Legion fort, holding the crossroads before the Coast Guard pushed onto the airport.
    Perhaps a hundred or a hundred-fifty newsmen, TV cameras, and still photographers were out at the main hangar with the Press bus, way out in the quiet empty reaches of the all but deserted airdrome, and overhead, light planes and helicopters patrolled the near sky, and four or five police cars were parked in uneasy relation to the crowd. The reporter had to show no identification to enter the gate, and needed none now; a potential assassin, tipped to Rockefeller’s entrance at Opa Locka, could have packed a piece to within a yard of him—of course, afterward, he could never have escaped. If he managed to shoot past the twenty-odd cops in the direct vicinity, the helicopters would have followed his car all the way to Miami, maybe nailed him on Arthur Godfrey Causeway from the sky. Like pieces of flesh fragmented from the explosion of a grenade, echoes of the horror of Kennedy’s assassination were thus everywhere: helicopters riding overhead like roller coasters, state troopers with magnums on their hip and crash helmets, squad cars, motorcycles, yet no real security, just powers of retaliation. It forced one to cherish major politicians—no matter how colorless, they all had hints of charisma now that they were obviously more vulnerable to sudden death than bullfighters, and so they were surrounded with a suggestion of the awe peasants reserve for the visit of the bishop—some rushed to touch them, others looked ready to drop to their knees. Thus, at least, for Rockefeller and the Press. He was surrounded almost immediately after he came down the landing ramp, and never left alone, surrounded by Press and cameramen five deep, the photographers by long practice holding their cameras and even their movie cameras up over their heads, aiming down by skillful guess, so that from a distance one could always tell exactly where the candidate was situated, for a semicircle of cameras crooned in from above like bulbs of seaweed breaking surface at high tide, or were they more like praying mantises on the heads of tall grass?—a bazaar of metaphor was obviously offered.
    Rocky had come off the plane with his entourage and his wife. She was surprisingly attractive, with a marvelous high color which made her vastly better-looking than her photographs, and Rocky looked like much less than his photographs, gray beyond gray in the flesh, gray as New York City pavements, gray as an old con—the sun could not have touched him in a month or else all the fighting blood of the heart