The jostling G.O.P. hordes saw him, loved him, and made hilarious plans to assassinate him almost from the moment they got into bunting-draped Philadelphia.
He was moored by the feet atop the Broad Street marquee of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. He was a 15-ft. balloon-rubber elephant with an upraised trunk, a flapping lower lip and a silly smile.
The most disappointing early news concerned his hide: lighted cigarettes, dropped from upper windows, had no effect on him. But he obligingly developed a kind of reverse elephantiasis. His trunk took to sagging, and he had to be given repeated injections of air with...
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