THOSE WERE THE DAYS

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Think of an old sea dog standing near the rotting docks of a big-city harbor, gazing out at the water, recalling the days of the great ocean liners, willing back just one more voyage on which plutocrats in white dinner jackets and women in evening gowns washed down caviar with champagne in dining rooms of paneled wood and stained glass.

Think of an aging musician stopping on a street corner where a great dance palace once stood, yearning for one more Big Band night, when men in white dinner jackets pressed golden horns to their lips while a woman in a red evening gown with a flower in her hair sang plaintively of love.

Now you know what it feels like to be a reporter at a national political convention today. It's not just that conventions no longer pick the nominee; the primaries have had that job for the better part of 30 years. It's just that most of us are old enough to remember conventions as barely organized tumult, where chaos was the disorder of the day.

We remember the splendid ventings of spleen: Taft-backer Everett Dirksen in 1952, thundering down from the podium at Ike-supporter Tom Dewey: "We followed you before, and you took us down the road to defeat!" And Senator Abe Ribicoff in 1968 denouncing "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!" as Mayor Richard Daley hurled back imprecations that amazed lip readers across the country.

Or we remember the chaos of picking a running mate at the very last minute: Adlai Stevenson in 1956 throwing the decision open to the convention, with the multiballot fight between John Kennedy, Estes Kefauver and Al Gore Sr. And the night in 1980 when we waited for Reagan to announce that he had chosen former President Ford, only to learn that the deal had collapsed at the last minute.

These are the stories we tell one another each campaign season, like elders sitting around the cold embers of a dead fire recalling the glories of hunts past. Every four years, we walk onto the convention floor with an irrational sense of excitement, looking at the state standards that delegates once waved back and forth to demand recognition from the chair, looking at the shiny microphones that delegates once used to raise crucial points of order.

Like the Main Street that guides customers into Disney's Magic Kingdom, the convention floor today is a construct, a shell, a dim, burnished reflection of what was once reality. They may even call the roll of the states to stir old memories of exciting summer nights from long ago, much as the first notes of Earth Angel or In the Still of the Night can set middle-aged hearts beating faster.

This year many of the journalists in Houston will find ourselves, as we did four years ago, lingering in our hotel rooms, watching C-SPAN replay footage from conventions past. We will watch the 1956 Kennedy-Kefauver vice-presidential race; we'll see Ronald Reagan moving the 1976 convention with a concession speech that foreshadowed his triumph four years later; we'll hear Harry Truman's 1948 promise to "win this election and make the Republicans like it!" Then we'll leave the gloriously colorful black-and-white past and head for the brightly colored convention hall, hoping for a floor fight, a delegate rebellion, something, anything, that might prove itself worthy of a rerun years from now.