Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968

by Norman Mailer

Miami, Summer 1968. The Vietnam War is raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy have just been assassinated. The Republican Party meets in Miami and picks Richard Nixon as its candidate, to little fanfare. But when the Democrats back Lyndon Johnson's ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the city of Chicago erupts. Antiwar protesters fill the streets and the police run amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike, all broadcast on live television, and captured in these pages by one of America's fiercest intellects.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Journalism, American History, Essays, American

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We call it hypocrisy, but it is [really] schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a black; a politics of principle, a politics of property; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers...[but] the society was able to stagger on like a 400-pound policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia- life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam."

Mailer's account of the two major party conventions in '68- one relatively unremarkable, one violent and terrible- is probably lesser-known than The Armies of the Night, his report from the march on the Pentagon in '67; but the events it describes are at least as dramatic, and reading the two books in tandem, in my humble opinion, offers an unforgettable portrait of the country in the late 60s. 

Granted, the first part of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (the Miami part, that is), a description of a few days at the Republican convention where Nixon's nomination was pretty much a fait accompli, might not sound like the most scintillating thing to read. But the Miami section is about more than the horse-race, of course- it's about how, in a year of assassinations, it seemed "there was no real security, just powers of retaliation", how even the grayest politicians had hints of charisma now that "death could come like the turn of a card", how the reality of the war in Vietnam seemed to be migrating back to its source in America - and Mailer's voice throughout, which is probably the thing that initially drew me back to this book, is for my money about as infectious and engaging and consistently surprising as it gets.

The Miami section, though, is ultimately a prelude for the second and longer section of the book, which takes place in Chicago. Brief recap of where things stood at the time (anyone who was around for all this should feel free to correct me): A couple of months after the Tet Offensive earlier that year, LBJ had announced that he wouldn't run for president again. Johnson's hand had been forced in part by Minnesota Democrat Gene McCarthy, who'd entered the race against Johnson on an anti-war platform, and had almost beaten him in the New Hampshire primary. And yes, instead of simply anointing a successor to Johnson, the Democrats went on with this strange process called a primary, in which the unwashed masses- people like you and me- actually voted on the nominee, and which eventually included George McGovern, Robert Kennedy, and Johnson's VP Hubert Humphrey. MLK was assassinated that April, RFK was assassinated that June after winning the California primary, and somehow the arcane combination of votes, bullets and convention wheeling-and-dealing at the end of the day spelled Hubert Humphrey. I wasn't around for any of these people, but nothing Humphrey had to say about Vietnam, as recorded here, sounded especially convincing or unequivocal to me*, and it would be an understatement to say that Mailer depicts him as extremely unimpressive, giving the reader a sense of what it must have been like for people to get behind Kennedy or McCarthy, to think for months that the war would soon be over, and to then end up being asked to settle for a candidate who had "...the shaky put-together look of a sales manager in a small corporation who takes a drink to get up in the morning, and another drink after he has made his intercom calls."

In conjunction with the DNC, protestors had gathered in the city to protest the war, leading first to isolated clashes and eventually to a violent attack on Michigan Avenue that one delegate describes at the convention, with an enraged Mayor Daley in attendance, "as Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago", and which serves as the centerpiece of the book, memorably described by Mailer, who watches the beginning from his hotel:

...there, right beneath the windows of the Hilton which looked down on Grant Park and Michigan Avenue, the stationary march was abruptly attacked. The police attacked with tear gas, with mace, and with clubs, they attacked like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc. Seen from overhead, from the nineteenth floor, it was like a wind blowing dust, or the edge of waves riding foam on the shore. The police cut through the crowd one way, then cut through them another. They chased people into the park, ran them down, beat them up. The action went on for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, with the absolute ferocity of a tropical storm.

Earlier in the book, Mailer talks about how the country is not exactly hypocritical, but more like schizophrenic; and you get the sense from this passage, as he both imagines the reactions of the hotel guests used to being shielded from the country's other personality and gauges his own reactions (I think he was shocked by the scale and brazenness of the police violence, but had known all along that something like it was a possibility), that he's describing a moment of radicalization, the kind that for those who witnessed it might have dissolved the schizophrenia for a long time to come.

A great stillness rose up from the street through all the small noise of clubbing and cries, small sirens, sigh of loaded arrest vans as off they pulled, shouts of police as they wheeled in larger circles...rose through the steel and stone of the hotel, congregating in the shocked centers of every room where delegates and wives and Press and campaign workers innocent until now of the intimate working of social force, looked down now into the murderous paradigm of Vietnam there beneath them at this huge intersection of this great city. Look- a boy was running through the park, and a cop was chasing. There he caught him on the back of the neck with his club! There!

I'd somehow forgotten the extent to which Mailer, writing in the third-person as "The Reporter", treats himself as a character here, and to which his outlook on everything he witnesses- for better and for worse- seems intimately connected to his own interests, neuroses and obsessions. For example, he sees boxing everywhere ("To surprise a skillful politician with a question is approximately equal in difficulty to hitting a professional boxer with a barroom hook"), and I wouldn't be surprised if the macho notion of politics as primal combat, and of politicians as larger-than-life Shakespearean figures, occasionally caused some modern readers to roll their eyes. But on the other hand, the comparison with boxing evokes as well the performative and schmaltzy and corrupt nature of it all; Mailer is also, in keeping with that theme, refreshingly sober-minded about these people who get up on stages and say that they want to lead us. "To the extent that a politician is his own man", he writes (it was the 60s, let's cut him some slack for non-inclusive language), "committed to his own search for spiritual truth, and willing to end in any unpalatable place to which that truth may lead him, he is ill-suited for the game of politics. Politics is property." Mailer doesn't exactly rage against this state of affairs- I would say that's not quite his temperament, or at least not in his book- but it's as if he's simply reminding us of a truism: let's not forget that 99% of these people are scoundrels who will do or say anything to get elected.

Mailer being Mailer, he furthermore has let's say some extremely idiosyncratic ways of assessing candidates and their voters, noting for instance that McCarthy's supporters in their monkish asceticism ("Get Clean for Gene", was apparently the slogan) tend to have small nostrils, correlating with their lesser capacities for greed (unlike the- apparently- cavernously-nostrilled residents of Chicago, whose faces are "carnal as blood, in love with honest plunder" and whose noses "...open wide to stench, stink, power, and the beauties of a dirty buck"); then again, this is the same writer who wondered aloud (in a book) whether Ali would have sex before his match against Foreman, or hold off on orgasm in order to harness his sexual energy for the fight. You don't really find sports analysis like that on ESPN these days. You've got to expect idiosyncrasy when you read Mailer, and I personally find him frequently hilarious; but even if you don't, you might end up admitting that his willingness to follow even his most outlandish-seeming thoughts almost always leads to a provocative idea, for instance the way his noting of nostril-size ties into his broader and more-or-less admiring characterization of McCarthy as the only one in the race who seems to refuse the notion of "politics as property" (ideological property that is- to be picked up or discarded depending on which way the wind is blowing), genuinely opposed to the war in Vietnam, both romantic and (in the non-political sense) conservative. McCarthy, or at least the way he's depicted here, who was also a poet by the way, seems to me the flip-side of Mailer's aforementioned formulation- a seeker of spiritual truth- and, despite how alien his seeming abstemiousness is to Mailer personally, "seeking spiritual truth" is in my view also a perfect encapsulation of what makes Mailer's style here so compelling: that rather than dragging you to some predetermined destination, he seems to be thinking as he goes, willing to end up in any unpalatable place his thoughts lead him. Maybe that's why he made a better writer than a politician himself.

I'm not sure what most people of my generation would assume about Mailer's general worldview, but probably nothing very charitable. Old chubby white guy fascinated by physical violence and antiquated rites of masculinity- must have been really conservative, right? And it's true that Mailer was fascinated by those things. But his outlook here is also kind of inspiring, humane in a very tough-minded and unsentimental way, and his sympathies are clearly with the Vietnam protestors- despite some reservations about their tactics and their thinking, he recognizes the nobility of their cause, and spends a good deal of time throughout the book wondering to what extent it should be his own. And wondering what that would mean, not just in words but in deeds. 

But Mailer was also in his mid-40s when he wrote this book; and now that I'm pretty close to the age of 40 myself, I see something broader and more resonant in Mailer's fixation on whether he has the courage to join the protestors and take beatings from the police than I did the first time I read it, something more than his anxiety over his dick size. I see that the book is in large part about the tension between revolution and comfort that comes with middle age (or, for those of us who haven't achieved any comfort, the tension between revolution and fatigue). Even though it's as true in '24 as it was in '68 that our tax dollars are being used every day in another part of the world to take people's lives and limbs, to visit on others a sadism and destruction that most of us can't even begin to conceive the reality of.

"He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on- not as it was going, not Vietnam- but what price was he really willing to pay?"

Mailer asks himself- and by extension, all of us- what we're really willing to risk to stop such things, yes, and contemplates the enormity of what setting yourself in opposition could mean. But he also asks to what degree choosing comfort means living with the schizophrenia that he describes earlier in the book. Compromising with it, accepting it. Whether we can be sure that that's not the most profound risk of all. 

(* actually, a little googling suggests that Humphrey's position on the war was more complex than I realized.)

[brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

his book is as lumpy and oversized as his heart and testes and ya just can’t ask for more. i mean, check this description of ‘professional republican’ meade alcorn:

‘Alcorn had a friendly freckled face and sandy hair, black horn-rims, a jaw which could probably crack a lobster claw in one bite, his voice drilled its authority. He was the kind of man who could look you in the eye while turning down your bid for a mortgage.’

hell yeah. i love ol' norm. i love him for his great books (executioner’s song, ancient evenings) and for his pieces of shit (american dream, barbary shore). i love him for the white negro and for stabbing his wife and for running for mayor and for head-butting gore vidal and for being an asshole and a provocateur and for inhabiting, more than anyone else, the marrow of his time.

i love him for playing the tough guy but getting past all that romanticized bullshit and fessin' up to what a coward he is by nature and how hard has been the internal struggle not to shrink away from adversaries, foes, women, ideas, etc… i love him for the complexity and contradiction of his political views, for his skepticism, for, in miami and the siege of chicago, admitting to being sick of ‘black superiority’ since civil rights, to admitting an admiration for hippies (whom he kind of loathes by nature) after watching the supreme courage they displayed when walking, night after night, directly into tear gas and blood-stained billyclubs.

& check this shit as mailer stands amongst the revolutionary youth of the siege of chicago… and doubts himself:

“And then with another fear, conservative was this fear, he looked into his reluctance to lose even the America he had had, this insane warmongering technology land with its smog, its superhighways, its experts and its profound dishonesty. Yet, it had allowed him to write – it had even not deprived him entirely of honors, certainly not of an income. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine. A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke…”

viva la mailer!

[Paul Haspel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miami Beach, in August of 1968, was the site of the Republican National Convention that nominated Richard Nixon for the office of President of the United States. Later that same month, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated Hubert Humphrey for the same office – but not until after anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the city had been brutally and violently put down by Chicago police officers acting on the orders of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Norman Mailer attended both conventions as a roving reporter for Harper’s magazine; and his observations of, and participation in, that tumultuous time are set forth in a vivid little 1968 book titled Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

Norman Mailer is widely regarded as one of the most important American writers of the mid- to late 20th century – and no one could ever accuse him of avoiding controversy. His debut novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), which drew from his World War II experiences fighting in the Philippine Campaign with the 112th Cavalry Regiment of Texas National Guardsmen, garnered attention for its curse words and sexual references. Such things are de rigueur for a war novel nowadays, but were definitely something new in 1948.

And Mailer kept on trying, throughout his career, to achieve something new through his literary work. The Armies of the Night (1968), with its attention-getting subtitle of History as a Novel/The Novel as History, won a Pulitzer Prize for the way in which Mailer chronicled the 1967 March on the Pentagon, an event at which 50,000 demonstrators convened at the Northern Virginia headquarters of the United States military to protest the Vietnam War. It was the time of what was then called the “New Journalism”; and The Armies of the Night, like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) before it, functions as a “non-fiction novel” – a genre in which the writer freely juxtaposes novelistic techniques and even fictional conversations with real-life events, acting on the belief that the mix of the fictional and non-fictional can help achieve a higher truth than what straightforward reportage could provide.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago, like The Armies of the Night, works within the conventions of the “non-fiction novel.” A clever conceit of this book is the way in which Mailer inserts himself into the story as a character, referred to simply as “the reporter”! By this means, Mailer can impart a greater sense of objectivity to his observations, recording them in the 3rd rather than the 1st person, while at the same time reminding the reader of the artificiality of this convention in a way that feels quite “meta.”

Miami and the Siege of Chicago is divided into two parts: “Nixon in Miami,” and “The Siege of Chicago.” “Nixon in Miami” is the shorter of the two parts – 82 out of the book’s total 223 pages – and perhaps that discrepancy is inevitable, considering that the Republicans’ convention at Miami Beach was not marred by the kind of large-scale violence that occurred outside the Democrats’ convention in Chicago.

So, what did “the reporter” see and experience at the Republican National Convention in Miami? Well, it’s complicated. One gets the sense that – as would be the case four years later with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who covered then-President Nixon’s re-election campaign for his book Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 (1973) – Mailer generally finds Richard Nixon to be a thoroughly despicable character.

Still, the old combat veteran Mailer seems to find that he cannot help respecting Nixon’s sheer tenacity as a campaigner who keeps coming back for one campaign after another, and setbacks be damned. One might recall how, after losing the presidential election of 1960 to John F. Kennedy, and then losing the California gubernatorial election of 1962 to incumbent governor Pat Brown, Nixon told a group of reporters that “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

And yet, six years later, there was Nixon again, at Miami Beach, on the verge of nomination as his party’s candidate for President of the United States, sounding “mild, firm, reasonable, highly disciplined” in his responses to press-conference questions. Mailer finds himself asking himself, “Had [Nixon] really improved? The reporter caught himself hoping that Nixon had….It might even be a measure of the not-entirely-dead promise of America if a man as opportunistic as the early Nixon could grow in reach and comprehension and stature to become a leader” (pp. 49-50).

I will leave it to the reader to decide how much Richard Nixon grew in reach and comprehension and stature, became a leader, between the Miami Beach RNC in 1968 and his resignation from the office of the Presidency in 1974.

Mailer begins “The Siege of Chicago,” the second and longer part of the book, by writing that “It may be time to attempt a summary of the forces at work upon the [Democratic] convention of 1968” (p. 101). Truly, 1968 was a year of tumultuous events:

• January-February: The Tet Offensive, a coordinated series of massed attacks by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces across South Vietnam, fails in its military objectives, but shocks Americans who have been told that the enemy is on the verge of collapse. Opposition to the Vietnam War increases.

• March 31: President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the face of persistently low approval ratings, announces that he “will not seek and shall not accept the nomination of my party as your President.”

• April 4: Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis. Rioting follows in several major U.S. cities.

• April 23: Protests at Columbia University close the university’s campus.

• June 4: Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president on an anti-war platform, is assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California primary.

Against that background of chaos and tragedy, the Democrats prepared to convene in Chicago. In political terms, the Democratic National Convention would be a contest between Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the inheritor of President Johnson’s mantle, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an anti-war platform. In cultural terms, however, a starker and much more violent contest was taking shape.

On one side was a loose coalition of far-left groups like the Youth International Party or “Yippies”; having planned to convene in Chicago to denounce President Johnson’s Vietnam War policies, they had no intention of cancelling their plans just because President Johnson was no longer running for re-election. On the other side was Chicago’s Mayor, Richard J. Daley. An old-style big-city boss who prided himself on his toughness, Mayor Daley wanted the 1968 convention to show the world how his urban-renewal policies had changed Chicago for the better (even though those policies had reinforced and exacerbated racial segregation in an already-segregated city). And he had no intention of letting a bunch of scruffy Yippies and hippies disrupt “his” convention.

Therefore, Mayor Daley – who had given Chicago police a “shoot to kill” order during the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King – told his police to crack down violently on anti-war protesters in the city. Accordingly, hundreds of protesters, the vast majority of whom were non-violent, were beaten and tear-gassed in locations like Lincoln Park and Grant Park, in what came to be called a “police riot.”

All of this came to a head, in a terribly public manner, in what Mailer calls “the Massacre of Michigan Avenue” (p. 159). A group of protesters made their way to the street in front of the Conrad Hilton hotel, the downtown headquarters hotel for the Democratic Party and the media, where Chicago police set upon them with the same sort of violent tactics they had used in Lincoln Park and Grant Park.

Mailer describes “watching in safety from the nineteenth floor” of the Conrad Hilton, as “children, and youths, and middle-aged men and women were being pounded and clubbed and gassed and beaten, hunted and driven, sent scattering in all directions by teams of policemen who had exploded out of their restraints like the bursting of a boil” (p. 172). It was this moment that was captured by television cameras and broadcast across the nation and around the world, as protesters (aptly enough) chanted, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

The violence even became a subject of conversation on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, with one DNC delegate denouncing the Chicago police’s “Gestapo tactics” and drawing an angry, profane rejoinder from Mayor Daley. Against that backdrop of civil strife, it seems almost an afterthought that the Democratic Party dutifully nominates Hubert Humphrey, a man whom Mailer describes as having “a face which was as dependent on cosmetics as the protagonist of a coffin” (p. 208). Still, the Democrats cheer for their man, as “part of their memory of genteel glamour at Washington parties,” even though “Everybody knew he would lose” (p. 209).

What brought me to Miami and the Siege of Chicago, here in this political season of the year 2024, was the eerie similarities that I saw between the election scene of 1968 and that of today. Consider:

The Republicans nominate a wildly controversial man whose political career has survived a number of seemingly insurmountable setbacks. While he has a history of playing fast and loose with the truth, he pleases older conservative voters, in a time of cultural change, with talk of “law and order” and a “silent majority.” Meanwhile, the Democrats meet in Chicago. The incumbent Democratic president, who had won the previous election with a healthy majority of the popular vote, has given up his quest for re-election after suffering a drastic loss in public approval ratings. He supports, for the nomination, his Vice President. The Vice President, who is understandably grateful to the President at having been chosen for the second highest office in the land, faces the delicate task of supporting the President while achieving some measure of distance from the President’s less popular policies. At the same time, there is concern that protests planned for the Democratic convention in Chicago could degenerate into violence and disrupt the convention.

Which year am I talking about? The year 1968, or the year 2024? Yes.

At the same time, there are differences. Richard Nixon refused in 1960 to litigate his close election loss to John F. Kennedy, on the belief that doing so would be bad for the country. Clearly, Donald Trump was bothered by no such scruples in the wake of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, faced no challenges to her nomination, and was nominated for the Presidency by a notably unified convention. And while there were protests in Chicago at the time of the 2024 DNC – chiefly protests relating to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza – the protests were not marred by violence from either protesters or Chicago police.

What is past is frequently prologue. Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago provides a potent illustration, for our times, of that principle, even as it takes us back to a turbulent moment in American political history.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Reporter Inside History

Norman Mailer dubbed this work “an informal history of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968”.

It’s effectively a non-fiction account with Mailer (“the Reporter”) inserted into the narrative, sometimes inside the action and sometimes 19 floors up in his hotel room or two suburbs away in a bar having a bourbon. Whatever, it makes explicit the author’s/reporter’s perspective or bias, and, to that extent, gets to the heart of the matter more honestly, even if we disagree with him.

Monsters of Opportunism

The shorter of the two sections deals with the Republican Convention, which nominated Richard Nixon (ahead of Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan). Nixon went on to win the Presidency in November, 1968, by defeating Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, who had succeeded John F. Kennedy on his assassination, didn’t stand for nomination by the Democratic Party.

Despite the different social, economic and political times, the first section reveals how little National Conventions have changed, particularly in relation to the Republican Party. Mailer’s account focuses on the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, as best he can. He also devotes a lot of attention to the (female) entertainment, the dancing girls and singers, whose bodies (and noses) he can’t resist assessing (“Six of the thirty-six had aquline curves, six were straight-nosed, and the other twenty-four had turned-up buttons at the tip.”)

Mailer is less sympathetic to the Republican delegates themselves:

“They were a chastened collocation these days. The high fire of hard Republican faith was more modest now, the vision of America had diminished. The claims on Empire had met limits...they were in the main not impressive, no, not by the hard eye of New York.”

He comments on Nixon’s “false smile”:

“As he spoke, he kept going in and out of focus, true one instant, phony the next, then quietly correcting the false step…

“While he was never in trouble with the questions, growing surer and surer of himself as he went on, the tension still persisted between his actual presence as a man not altogether alien to the abyss of a real problem, and the political practitioner of his youth, that snake oil salesman who was never back of any idea he sold, but always off to the side where he might observe its effect on the sucker.

“...he had become an absolute monster of opportunism…”

In his acceptance speech, Nixon refers to:

“...the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting...the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans - the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators...They give drive to the spirit of America...life to the American dream...steel to the backbone of America...Good people...decent people...work and save...pay their taxes…”

Carnality and Chaos

Mailer paints a more vivid portrait of the host city when he moves from Miami to Chicago for the Democratic Convention. He visits a slaughteryard, and draws inferences about the human condition:

“Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case - no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there. So be it. Chicago makes for hard minds...in Chicago, they did it straight, they cut the animals right out of their hearts - which is why it was the last of the great American cities, and people had great faces, carnal as blood, greedy, direct, too impatient for hypocrisy, in love with honest plunder.”

These observations resonate later, when we encounter Mayor Daley, the Chicago Police and the National Guard.

The Democratic Party was hopelessly divided in 1968. LBJ had conducted the Vietnam War and had decided not to contest the Presidential election. The candidates included his Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, the anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, and the liberal George McGovern. Bobby Kennedy had been a candidate, but was assassinated before the Convention.

Mailer says of the convention that it was “the wildest Democratic convention in decades, perhaps in more than forty years, and the bitterest, the most violent, the most disorderly, most painful, and in certain ways the most uncontrolled - beyond [the control of LBJ’s Administration] was absolute chaos...

“The event was a convention which took place during a continuing five-day battle in the streets and parks of Chicago between some of the minions of the high established, and some of the nihilistic of the young…”

Socialists and Existentialists

Mailer spends just as much time in the streets and parks as he does in the convention hall. This was where the real political action was occurring. But it also highlights Mailer’s own political philosophy and how it differed from the protesters.

“There were two groups to the army of young people who assembled in Chicago; one could divide them conveniently as socialists and existentialists.

“The socialists, you can be certain, believed in every variety of social and revolutionary idea but membership in the Socialist Party, which of course, being young people, they detested; for the most part they were students of the New Left who belonged to SDS, the Resistance (a movement of confirmed draft resisters) and a dozen or more peace organisations…

“The New Left was interested for the most part in altering society (and being conceivably altered themselves - they were nothing if not Romantic) by the activity of working for a new kind of life out in the ghettoes, the campuses, and the anti-war movement. If one could still refer to them generically as socialists, it is because the product of their labor was finally, one must fear, ideological: their experience would shape their ideas, and ideally these ideas would serve to clarify the experience of others and so bring them closer to the radical movement...A number, devoted to the memory of Che [Guevara], were elevated as well to militant ideals of revolution. A few had come to Chicago ready to fight the police…”

Mailer doesn’t discuss the existentialists with the same precision. I infer from this later description that he was referring to the Yippies:

“On one flank was the New Left, still generically socialist, believing in a politics of confrontation, intelligent programmatic warriors, Positivists in philosophy, educational in method, ideological in their focus - which is to say a man’s personality was less significant than his ideas; on the other flank, Yippies, devoted to the politics of ecstasy, programmatic about drug-taking, Dionysiacs, propagandists by example, mystical in focus.”

Whether or not this description of the Yippies is correct, it seems that they are what Mailer had in mind when he referred to existentialists:

“A tribal unity had passed through the youth of America (and half the nations of the world) a far-out vision of orgiastic revels stripped of violence or even the differentiation of sex…

“They made a community of sorts, for their principles were simple - everybody, obviously, must be allowed to do (no way around the next three words) his own thing, provided he hurt no one doing it…”



Crazy Gaiety and Horror

Soon after witnessing a concert in Lincoln Park (in which, he saw both crazy gaiety and horror), Mailer asks:

“Were these odd unkempt children the sort of troops with whom one wished to enter battle?”

Mailer acknowledges that he doesn’t have the courage to risk what the Yippies have:

“To protest being ejected from the park, to take tear gas in the face, have one’s head cracked…”

He has a fear. He’s a writer, if he’s injured or arrested, he won’t be able to write, he won’t be able to fulfil his assignment for Harper’s Magazine. He won’t get paid.

He retreats to his nineteenth floor hotel room, from which he watches the march:

“The police attacked with tear gas, with Mace, and with clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty or thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing. Seen from overhead, from the nineteenth floor, it was like a wind blowing dust, or the edge of waves riding foam on the shore.”

Even his metaphors suffer that high and far away from the action, though he adds that “the action went on for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, with the absolute ferocity of a tropical storm:”

“The guiltier the situation in which a policeman finds himself, the more will he attack the victim of his guilt.

“They might comport themselves in such a case not as a force of law and order, not even as a force of repression upon civil disorder, but as a true criminal force, chaotic, improvisational, undisciplined, and finally - sufficiently aroused - uncontrollable.

“So an air of outrage, hysteria, panic, wild rumour, unruly outburst, fury, madness, gallows humour, and gloom hung over nominating night at the convention…

“The night was in trouble and there was dread in the blood, the air of circus was also the air of the slaughter-house...The sense of riot would not calm…

“The disease was beneath the skin, the century was malignant with an illness so intricate that the Yippies, the Muslims, and the rednecks of George Wallace were all in attack upon it.”

The Old Left Embraces the Existentialists

When the Democrats nominate Humphrey by a huge majority, “the reporter discovered an impulse in himself to get drunk.

“[On the other hand,] these liberals who he had always scorned had the simple dedication tonight to walk through strange streets, unarmed, and with candles. Was it remotely possible that they possessed more courage than himself?...

“Had his courage eroded more than his knowledge of fear the last few days? He continued to drink.”

Then he rationalises:

“One simply could not accept the dangerous alternative every time: he would never do any other work. And then with another fear, conservative was this fear, he looked upon his reluctance to lose even the America he had had, that insane warmongering technology land with its smog, its superhighways, its experts and its profound dishonesty. Yet it had allowed him to write - it had even not deprived him entirely of honors, certainly not of an income...A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke; he belonged in England where one’s radicalism might never be tested…”

He turns to the Yippies:

“The Yippies might yet disrupt the land - or worse, since they would not really have the power to do that, might serve as a pretext to bring in totalitarian phalanxes of law and order.”

In the latter case, he “would have to throw his vote in with revolution - what a tedious perspective of prisons and law courts and worse; or stand by and watch as the best Americans white and Black would be picked off, expended, busted, burned and finally lost.

“He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on - not as it was going, not Vietnam - but what price was he really willing to pay? Was he ready to give up the pleasures of making his movies, writing his books? They were pleasures finally he did not want to lose.”

“Yet if he indulged his fear, found all the ways to avoid the oncoming ugly encounters, then his life was equally spoiled, and on the poorer side. He was simply not accustomed to living with a conscience as impure as the one with which he had watched from the nineteenth floor...Where was his true engagement? To be forty-five years old, and have lost a sense of where his loyalties belonged - to the revolution or to the stability of the country...was to bring upon himself the anguish of the European intellectual in the Thirties.

“And the most powerful irony for himself is that he had lived for a dozen empty hopeless years after the second world war with the bitterness, rage, and potential militancy of a real revolutionary,...but no revolution had arisen in the years when he was ready…”

Afraid of a Fray

So Mailer accepts an invitation to speak in the park. His recollection of his speech is self-indulgent and uninspiring, but he joined the fray, if not the subsequent march. He ceased thinking of the protesters as children and started thinking of them as “soldiers”, himself as a “demagogue”, no longer the “General of an army of one”.

Somebody in the crowd, perhaps by way of assessment of his speech, called out, “You’re right, baby, do the writing!”

Mailer returns to the Convention, where Humphrey is anointed:

“Everybody knew he would lose. The poor abstract bugger.

“...he was all the bad faith of twenty years of the Democratic Party’s promises and gravy and evasion and empty hollers. He was the hog caller of the mountain and the pigs had put him in - he would promise pig pie in the sky.”

Ironically, Mailer comes away from Chicago more sympathetic to the Yippies than the New Left. They had “a vision not void of beauty”, whereas the New Left represented “only a nightmare of smashing a brain with a brick”.

He is convinced there is a “new American axis. Put your fingers in V for victory and give a wink. We may yet win, the others are so stupid. Heaven help us when we do.”

Needless to say, Nixon won the 1968 election, not to mention the 1972 election.

On Revolutions

“Those who would make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

President John F. Kennedy

SOUNDTRACK:

Dino Valenti - "Let's Get Together"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xpH...

The Youngbloods - "Get Together"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fWN...

Jefferson Airplane - "Let's Get Together"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46up8...

1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iye1...

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine. A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke.

Some books grab you by the throat from the very beginning. This one didn't. The expereince was probably another instance of reading something for all the wrong reasons. My encounter with Prisoner of Love was similar, although that one was better. Genet is here as well, smug, small. Interesting that Mailer had that impression.

Mailer refers to himself in the third person as the reporter, occasionally the boxer. He revels in his cowardice and tumbles down spiral of his own philosophy. He links Nixon to Heidegger and continues his unchecked plummet. I thought The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History far superior. I read this as means to cotton disbelief at a time when presidential rhetoric exceeds outrage and an unelected entity decides that we don't need much of a government. We obviously need colonies in Gaza and on Mars, but not excessive government.
3.4 stars rounded up.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm late getting back to this. I really liked it. The "book" is basically two very different panels. One, the Republican National Convention of 1968, has a more traditional feel to it, though it's punctuated by Mailer's ("the reporter") deep imaginings, coupled with sharp observation, of various Republican camps (Nixon, Rockefeller, Reagan). Mailer really sets the stage on very first page (of the Library of American edition), in his overripe description of Miami:

The vegetal memories of that excised jungle haunted Miami Beach in a steam-pot of miasmas. Ghosts of expunged flora, the never-born groaning in vegetative chancery beneath the asphalt came up with a tropical curse, an equatorial leaden wet sweat of air which rose from the earth itself, rose right up through the baked asphalt and into the heated air like a hand slipping into a rubber glove.

That lush and reeking description is followed by Mailer's chilly air-conditioned accounts of the various Republican camps, and their followers. Beneath these mostly brittle and futile maneuverings (Nixon's going to win the nomination), you sense a brooding and inevitable savagery collecting itself. This was on-the-ground stuff, so Mailer's sense of what is getting ready to transpire in the upcoming election is impressive. Mailer's a really good writer. At his best, I was reminded of the gonzo imagination of Hunter Thompson, but with the tighter control of Joan Didion.

The second part of this (Siege of Chicago), is like a different, more personal book. Mailer is clearly sympathetic to the ant-war movement, but he's also confused or uncertain about some elements of the movement. At one point he calls himself a "Left-Conservative." At the time he wrote this, he was in his mid-forties. As a writer, he certainly had his finger on the pulse of times, but didn't quite feel a part of it. But that seems to change during the demonstrations. There are times Mailer castigates himself for being a coward for not taking a more active part, but he's nevertheless drawn to the demonstrations. Weirdly, at one point, in a real WTF moment, he reviews the troops of the National Guard, giving them, as if trying to connect in some way, the
Old-Soldier look. He then goes to a nearby gathering of protestors to give a speech. I was actually impressed by that, because Mailer himself doesn't seem to know what to make of his actions and reactions. It just seemed real and honest and of the moment. By the end of the Chicago section, Mailer has come away with a grudging admiration for the protesters. He still has some well-founded reservations, but he also admires their courage in the face of the savage assaults by Mayor Dailey's police force. Like the Miami portion of the book, the Siege of Chicago has some sharp and revealing observations, the best of which are on the reluctant priest-politician, Eugene McCarthy. Mailer's dislike of Humphrey, and the old-school Democratic Party that he represents, is as intense as anything you'll find in Hunter Thompson's writings. His love and remorse for the recently assassinated Robert Kennedy runs like sad thread through both sections. Highly recommended.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Men whose lives are built on the ego can die of any painful disease but one--they cannot endure the dissolution of their own ego, for then nothing is left with which to face emotion, nothing but the urge to grovel at the enemy's feet."
- Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago



It is closing in on the 2020 primaries and all to soon we will be watching at least ONE party conventions of 2020. Makes me look back on some crazy times in American politics. Perhaps, the only years within recent memory to rival 2016 and 2000 would be 1968. It was the middle of the Vietnam war, MLK was assassinated, Johnson had dropped out and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. American was bat shit. And nobody captures batshit better than Norman Mailer (well, maybe Hunter S. Thompson).

I've recently come back to Mailer after an intermission of 20 years. He is a writer you need to take in small doses, but as usually happens, I read over 1000 pages of Mailer and discover like alcohol he might just be no good for me, but maybe just one last book. I do tend to prefer his nonfiction writing to his fiction, so this book was a delight. One can still enjoy something that isn't healthy, right?

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, yah, baby, Norman Mailer scored a home run. Mailer may have been a misanthropic bastard, but Holy Toledo, the man could write. He was a chronicler, a first-rate observer, and a commentator the likes of which we may never see again. In his coverage of the Miami and Chicago conventions, he kowtowed to no one. Unlike the reporters on the national beat today, who seem to still be reeling from the punishments they received during the Bush administration, Mailer barreled his way though both conventions, demanding to be spoken to and demanding to be heard. His is a uniquely American voice, covering a uniquely American time period. I don't know if passions in this country will ever again run as high as they did in the summer of 1968. I, for one, am glad that Mailer was there to cover some of the most confrontational moments in our modern history.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why read this now? Why didn't I read it in the 60s? I think because the buzz was that it was as much about Mailer as about the conventions, and that is true. But at this historical distance, it has power, even with its occasionally turgid Faulknerian/Joycean heaps of clauses and sentence fragments. A new kind of journalism it was indeed, and welcome, but embarrassing in parts, especially in Chicago when Mailer begins to dissect his own cowardice that leads him to avoid being in the thick of the conflict. When he proposes to lead a march of "minimum 300 delegates" to the Amphitheater, on an impulse in mid-speech to demonstrators in Grant Park, we cover our faces in embarrassment for him, knowing how it will turn out. His intuitions are sometimes right on - "we will be fighting for forty years" - but when turned toward himself, often faulty.
And yet, and yet, it does convey the sweaty tear-gas-laden reality of the whole thing. Daley, Johnson, Humphrey become larger-than-life Beasts and that is over the top, but at the time and in the moment the police violence was unprecedented, at least its open use against whites. The seeds of today's partisan hatred can be found here, growing like a boa constrictor out of the slimy failure of Goldwater in 1964. Oops, Mailerian-simile-infestation...
I've lived in Miami and his description of the sulphuric 87 degree heat on the Beach will remain in my mind forever:
"Traveling for five miles up the broken-down, forever in-a-state-of-alteration and repair of Collins Avenue, crawling through 5 P.M. Miami Beach traffic in the pure miserable fortune of catching an old taxi without air conditioning, dressed in shirt and tie and jacket...the sensation of breathing, then living, was not unlike being obliged to make love to a 300-pound woman who has decided to get on top."
There is some true insight here into Nixon:
"Nixon had entered American life as half a man [as Eisenhower's veep], but his position had been so high, the power of the half man had been so enormous that he could never begin to recognize, until he fell, that he was incomplete."
"he had worked among the despised nuts and bolts of the delegates' hearts, and it showed up here in the skill and the pleasure with which he greeted each separate delegate"
"It might even be a measure of the not-entirely dead promise of America if a man as opportunistic as the early Nixon could grow in reach and comprehension and stature to become a leader."
Nixon and McCarthy have one thing in common, they are both enigmas, and as such are the most interesting people at these conventions. The dissection of McCarthy is good but not as much fun as that of Nixon.
A prophetic view of today's GOP:
"Denied the center of political power, the corporation and the small town had remained ideologically married for decades; only by wielding the power could they discover which concepts in conservative philosophy were viable, and what parts were mad. One could predict: their budgeting would prove insane, their righteousness would prove insane, their love for order and clear-thinking would be twisted through many a wry neck, the intellectual foundations of their anti-Communism would split into its separate parts. And the small-town faith in small free enterprise would run smash into the corporate juggernauts of technology land...their love of nature would have to take up arms against the despoiling foe, themselves, their own greed, their own big business." p. 63
And of the Left of that time:
"If the Left had to live through a species of political exile for four or eight or twelve good years, it might even be right. They might be forced to study what was alive in the conservative dream. For certain the world could not be saved by technology or government or genetics, and much of the Left had that still to learn."
We're still muddling through while both sides learn.
Interesting to remember that Mitt Romney's dad was passed over in favor of Spiro Agnew as Nixon's Vice President. Is Mitt driven by that mortification?
Worth reading.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book when it first came out in 1968, and I still love it. This country needs journalists like Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson, especially in the Era of Trumpf, but all we have is a lot of wee, timorous beasties employed by various large corporations.

In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, we see both the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968, in which Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were nominated by their political parties. The chapters on the Miami convention are better written, perhaps because of the distance that Mailer feels from the Republican cause; but then the Chicago convention turned into a general riot, and men's attentions were constantly being diverted between the convention hall and the streets.

Much of what Mailer wrote is still pertinent today:

From time to time, the reporter [Mailer] thought again of matters which did not balance him. He thought of the fear Bobby Kennedy must have known. This was a thought he had been trying to avoid all night -- it gave eyes to the darkness of his own fear -- that fear which came from knowing some of them were implacable. Them! All the bad cops, U.S. marshals, generals, corporation executives, high government bureaucrats, rednecks, insane Black militants, half-crazy provocateurs, Right-wing faggots, Right-wing high-strung geniuses, J. Edgar Hoover, and the worst of the rich surrounding every seat of Establishment in America.

We are still grievously affected today by the events of the 1968 convention and the spate of political assassinations that preceded it. And we have yet to come to terms with it!

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I was a Eugene McCarthy supporter and suspicious of Mailer's favorite, Robert F. Kennedy, I enjoyed reading his account of the 1968 election year and wish I'd read it earlier.

[Jen Crichton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brooklyn boy with the Harvard accent, Mailer was a huge public figure in my 60s childhood: egomaniacal, combative and fetishistic about his own belligerence, libertine and anti-feminist, funny and -- yes -- larger than life, relentlessly crafting a public persona of the swaggering Hemingwayesque man of letters. He managed to produce a huge amount of work that rarely/never seemed to reach the level of truly great of which everyone seemed to think he was capable.

I was too young to follow the events of the conventions of 1968 -- the Democratic convention thrown open by the RFK assassination (Mailer's description choked me up as I remembered my own family's grief and seeing my father cry for the first time) held in Mayor Daley's police state of a city (let us never romanticize that beast) -- but Mailer captures it beautifully. He's hard enough on himself to call out his own rationalizations for not becoming involved in the demonstrations, ultimately tapping into his shame to do the right thing, if only to support his own heroic self-image.

His description of the Republican convention in Miami brings back that pre-Disney Florida and that age of less mediated political access, laying bare the chasm between stodgy old America and the post-1960s world, with Nixon and his followers on the wrong side of history. Usually he does this by contrasting the kinds of musical groups and dancing girls and canapés found in the different candidates' parties but I can't pretend that is not fun to read.

This is real time reporting, though, so the keen close read of characters without greater context historically and culturally would render much of the narrative meaningless to someone who doesn't have this background. It's like listening to great gossip about people you've never met: interesting at first but ultimately boring because gossip requires a personal connection. As an old timer, I have that connection and know the historical context. Mailer's description of Hubert Humphrey as a small time bookie who is a hero to his barber but terrified of his higher-ups is just one of a thousand zingers composed of wit, malice, and perspicacity.

The book ends with Mailer almost getting mauled by the Daley police state. On escaping by means of his fame and press pass, he proceeds to a late night party at the Playboy mansion which, in those good old days, was still located in Hefner's hometown of Chicago. Good times for the Great American (Male) Writer. When I was a girl in the 1960s, I would have accepted that the Great American Writer had to be male. But those were different times and we got where we are now because of the pivotal year, 1968. Mailer IS that year personified, and this book brings it all back. The book moves beyond a “you had to be there” perspective to one that is more “you are here with me because I brought you with me.” In being so of its moment, maybe it becomes a book for the ages, after all.

[Tom]

Haven't read this yet, but the recent NYRB reissue prompted a quite interesting essay on Mailer and this particular book in last Sunday's NYT Book Review (8.24.08), by Paul Berman, who points out what he considers important flaws (which give B. "the willies")but also gives Mailer his due praise. Far from dampening my enthusiasm for the book, it made me want to buy it even more.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superior to its predecessor, Armies of the Night,-- Mailer's aesthetically similar account of the October 1967 march/demonstration at thr Pentagon-- mostly because the events it concerns are more historically significant, and must have been self-evidently so at the time. Mailer analyzes both the GOP and Democrat conventions of 1968, the former of which is almost aggressive in its lack of any sort of action or obvious intrigue, and the latter of which turns out to be a bloody, brutal disaster that plays out in front of the entire nation and world. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, though, to the modern reader, is how much continuity there is between the party Mailer describes as failing to meet its historical moment by not nominating the more popular of its candidates for president, and turning a mostly blind eye to the violence occurring at the hands of the Chicago Police Department right outside the convention hall's doors, and the contemporary Democrats who haven't had an honest primary since 2008, and whose checklist of recent failures is far longer and more heinous than I have the wherewithal to list here. Mailer's prose is, as ever, incredibly rich and evocative, and on this occasion his finger was right on the pulse of the nation and its politics, as was quite often the case. A great piece of narrative non-fiction with few chapters anything less than scintillating.

[Steve R]

I read this 1968 ‘novel’ just a year or two after its publication in the wake of that most tumultuous year in American political history. With the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy having occurred earlier that year, Mailer took his acerbic wit to the sites of the Republican and Democratic conventions that summer. His distaste for both parties and their leaders is visceral: he concludes that he will in all likelihood not vote at all, but should he do so, it would probably be for Eldridge Cleaver.

Subtitled ‘An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968’, it is supposedly representative of the ‘new journalism’ movement then developing that allowed subjective voices to intrude upon analysis of objective realities. Maybe, this was sort of a precursor of our present day no-holds-barred ‘opinion-as-reporting’ of Tucker Carlson? If so, it is much less nauseating and much more insightful.

Mailer writes very well, and his critical gaze never lacked a straight conduit into his acid-tipped pen.

Recommended.

[Jon Frankel · Rating 5 out of 5]

As relevant today as the day it was published in 1968, this is a great example of engaged journalism, written with literary style and a novelist's insight into character. Rockefeller, RFK, Eugene McCarthy, McGovern, Humphrey, Nixon, Reagan and Wallace, the whole kit and kaboodle, get the limousine treatment. Mailer writes as if Kerouac had control. Paragraphs a page long yield both the inner distress of a man in his forties who has been to war and been a part of the great rebellion against America, only to see it mutate in the mid to late sixties into forms he can barely comprehend. Funny, full of pathos and wise, read this book for where we've been and where we continue to go. He goes on long riffs and always returns to the tear gas of Chicago, to Daley's beefy face and the stench of the stockyards, braying like a pig with despair and grief when RFK is gunned down, with amazing takes on the Republican parade in Miami. He ends with the observation that the two party system in the USA was done for. He figured an extreme right wing lunatic party ruled by Ronald Reagan and George Wallace would emerge, and then gradates to the left, ending with Eldridge Cleaver! Oh well, it might be happening now, but, of course he lived to see that right wing lunatic become president. We've been suffering ever since the world changed for the worse in 1968. As Bob Mould put it, "No more hope and too much dope."

[Padraic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gosh - what a flippin' blowhard! Mailer is like an overly loud uncle who bathes less frequently than you would wish. He's in full plumage here. Interesting note: the Chicago section is far less interesting than the Miami section, with its focus on the rival personalities of Rockefeller and Nixon. I suppose this points the way toward his ultra fictional bios of Oswald etc. One gets the feeling he was a mite too stoned in Chicago to really focus.

Yes I know the man is dead and this was written in the 60's but, really, you know...

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

The awards and reputation of this book speak for themselves. What really fascinated me, were the descriptions of the protests and battles along Michigan Avenue and Grant Park. I couldn't help but juxtapose Mailer's Chicago with the Chicago of today-it was surreal. I tried to imagine that level of civil unrest today, that level of violence, but I could not.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you can get past Mailer's stupefying narcissism, you will find some beefy prose and technicolor imagery in this book. I particularly liked the description of Mayor Richard Daley, "looking like he had just been stuffed with a catfish." The political train wreck that was the Democratic convention in Chicago is mirrored in the psychic pileup that is Mailer.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Armies of the Night's little brother.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago was a five-star read for me. It is Mailer boots on the ground, in the trenches with his subjects.

He approaches the hippie movement with wry amusement and scepticism, shaped by the generational divide, yet by the end he is moved by their courage. Mailer captures 1968 America as a nation on the verge of civil war. His political portraits are vivid: Nixon sly and calculating, Humphrey largely harmless but chained to LBJ’s unpopular Vietnam war, McCarthy principled but bumbling, and Bobby Kennedy a figure of rare promise whose assassination he treats as a national tragedy without becoming overly syrupy.

Mailer’s sharp, witty, and fearless criticism of both parties ultimately shows a press unafraid to challenge power. Beneath the bustle and bravado lies a gruff patriotism, a belief in America’s better self even in its most fractured moments, and a relevance that still resonates today.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting read about the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968, a topic I knew nothing about. It was incredibly fascinating how Mailer's worries, especially about the rise of a police state and the military industrial complex, permeated a story written in 1968. I've never read a more evocative piece of journalism - you could see, taste and smell every bit of this small slice of American history, and there were some truly poetic descriptions. In 200 pages I felt like I had a grasp of the complex politics of this era, which I knew next to nothing about before starting.

I knocked off one star because sometimes the author gets lost in his own reveries which don't have much to do with the plot. This is woven in with a very dense text so that I would often have to go back to reread sentences which took some enjoyment out of it.

[Kevin Nolty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wished I were more engaged with this book. While there are moments I was, I found myself hoping the next page brought me more. For the subject matter, I was expecting to be completely engrossed in this book. But I found it dry. The Miami section was a complete bore. Chicago gave me more of what I wanted. But even then, I couldn’t quite find myself totally engaged. But it’s Mailer, so maybe I’m just not smart enough? I kind of want to find another book on this topic. Open to suggestions.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Politics is property”

Certainly a very interesting read about the two conventions of 1968 - the second half about the Democratic Convention in Chicago is particularly fascinating. Mailer’s informal journalistic style of writing really helps to convey the atmosphere and events of 1968 in such an impressive way.

Very good I must say.

[Abby Gardner · Rating 1 out of 5]

i didn’t like the writing style nor was the content itself super interesting. i’m not usually one to read about american politics and if this hadn’t been for class i wouldn’t have finished it

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ideally paired with Rick Perlstein's Nixonland (I wrote about his book on Goldwater here). That book is extremely detailed history, written decades after the fact and based on painstaking research. This is New Journalism: just a guy going around and giving his opinion, in a literary style. Of its moment, subjective, opinionated: Mailer thinks Republicans squares and most of the Democrats losers, but likes the Kennedy brothers - his earlier essay Superman Comes to the Supermarket was about Jack (who he called "the first hipster president"), and the death of Bobby in June elicits the book's only genuine, unironic moment of pathos. He shares his thoughts about the hippie protesters and heartland conservatives and the looks of all the women he sees; here he is on Pat Nixon

the tense forbidding face of her youth (where rectitude, ambition, and lack of charity had been etched like the grimace of an addict into every line of the ferocious clenched bite of her jaw) had eased now somewhat; she was almost attractive, as if the rigid muscle of the American woman’s mind at its worst had relaxed

The first section (Miami) covers the Republican convention, in which Nixon is chosen as candidate, his principle rival being Nelson Rockefeller (Rocky), representing the wealthy but dying faction of Rockefeller Republicans. I got the sense of why Nixon, though not overendowed with charisma, was one of the century's great political talents, when he gives an address on Vietnam that somehow stakes out every position and keeps everyone happy, while still representing his overall brand (toughness, law and order, continuity)

So he worked into the problem of Vietnam by starting at A and also by starting at Z which he called a “two-pronged approach.” He was for a negotiated settlement, he was for maintaining military strength because that would be the only way to “reach negotiated settlement of the war on an honorable basis.” Later he was to talk of negotiations with “the next superpower, Communist China.”

The game-theoretical dynamic of these events is that everyone wants to have backed the winner, so there's a sudden scramble at the end once someone emerges as the clear leader. "Politics is property", and the cardinal rule is not to pledge your vote without getting something in return.

The second part of the book covers the notorious Democratic convention in Chicago, where hippies and Yippies from all over the country protested and rioted in the streets, met by the police with unrestrained violence. Here is one manifesto Mailer finds in Lincoln Park:

YIPPIE!

Lincoln Park
VOTE PIG IN 68

Free Motel
"come sleep with us"
REVOLUTION TOWARDS A FREE SOCIETY: YIPPIE!

By A. Yippie

1. An immediate end to the War in Vietnam…
2. Immediate freedom for Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and all other black people. Adoption of the community control concept in our ghetto areas…
3. The legalization of marihuana and all other psychedelic drugs…
4. A prison system based on the concept of rehabilitation rather than punishment.
5. …abolition of all laws related to crimes without victims. That is, retention only of laws relating to crimes in which there is an unwilling injured party, i.e. murder, rape, assault.
6. The total disarmament of all the people beginning with the police. This includes not only guns, but such brutal devices as tear gas, MACE, electric prods, blackjacks, billy clubs, and the like.
7. The Abolition of Money. The abolition of pay housing, pay media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help, and pay toilets.
8. A society which works toward and actively promotes the concept of "full unemployment." A society in which people are free from the drudgery of work. Adoption of the concept "Let the Machines do it."
9. …elimination of pollution from our air and water.
10. …incentives for the decentralization of our crowded cities…encourage rural living.
11. …free birth control information…abortions when desired.
12. A restructured educational system which provides the student power to determine his course of study and allows for student participation in over-all policy planning…
13. Open and free use of media…cable television as a method of increasing the selection of channels available to the viewer.
14. An end to all censorship. We are sick of a society which has no hesitation about showing people committing violence and refuses to show a couple f**king.
15. We believe that people should f**k all the time, anytime, whomever they wish. This is not a program to demand but a simple recognition of the reality around us.
16. …a national referendum system conducted via television or a telephone voting system…a decentralization of power and authority with many varied tribal groups. Groups in which people exist in a state of basic trust and are free to choose their tribe.
17. A program that encourages and promotes the arts. However, we feel that if the Free Society we envision were to be fought for and achieved, all of us would actualize the creativity within us. In a very real sense we would have a society in which every man would be an artist.

…Political Pigs, your days are numbered. We are the Second American Revolution. We shall win. Yippie!

Inside, after LBJ's surprising exit the mild-mannered Midwesterner Hubert Humphrey (HHH) was chosen, as protesters urged the delegates to "Dump the Hump!" Eugene McCarthy led the anti-war faction, and Mailer sees him as sour and tired compared to the Boy Scout-like George McGovern, who would indeed be chosen in 1972 (and get absolutely steamrolled by Nixon).

I liked this insight from Humphrey:

"Lyndon, for instance, has never understood the problem. He thinks politicians are cattle, whereas in fact most politicians are pigs. Now, Norman, there’s a little difference between cattle and pigs which most people don’t know. Lyndon doesn’t know it. You see, to get cattle started, you make just a little noise, and then when they begin to run, you have to make more noise, and then you keep driving them with more and more noise. But pigs are different. You have to start pigs running with a great deal of noise, in fact the best way to start them is by reciting Latin, very loudly, that’ll get them running—then you have to quiet your voice bit by bit and they’ll keep moving. Lyndon has never understood this."

These gnomic remarks now concluded, the reporter had no idea precisely what the Senator was talking about.

The book, narrated in third person, ends with Mailer giving an impromptu speech to the young protesters and promising to march with them if a sizable chunk of the Democratic delegates join them. (They do not.) Disillusioned, he says he will not vote, "not unless it was for Eldridge Cleaver". On that nihilistic note, he heads for a party at the Playboy Mansion.

I thought most of the writing just ok, but liked most this piece about Chicago which opens Part 2. I will quote it at as much length as Goodreads' character limit allows.

Chicago is the great American city. New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

The reporter was sentimental about the town. Since he had grown up in Brooklyn, it took him no time to recognize, whenever he was in Chicago again, that the urbanites here were like the good people of Brooklyn—they were simple, strong, warm-spirited, sly, rough, compassionate, jostling, tricky and extraordinarily good-natured because they had sex in their pockets, muscles on their back, hot eats around the corner, neighborhoods which dripped with the sauce of local legend, and real city architecture, brownstones with different windows on every floor, vistas for miles of red-brick and two-family wood-frame houses with balconies and porches, runty stunted trees rich as farmland in their promise of tenderness the first city evenings of spring, streets where kids played stick-ball and roller-hockey, lots of smoke and iron twilight. The clangor of the late nineteenth century, the very hope of greed, was in these streets. London one hundred years ago could not have looked much better.

Brooklyn, however, beautiful Brooklyn, grew beneath the skyscrapers of Manhattan, so it never became a great city, merely an asphalt herbarium for talent destined to cross the river. Chicago did not have Manhattan to preempt top branches, so it grew up from the savory of its neighborhoods to some of the best high-rise architecture in the world, and because its people were Poles and Ukrainians and Czechs as well as Irish and the rest, the city had Byzantine corners worthy of Prague or Moscow, odd tortured attractive drawbridges over the Chicago River, huge Gothic spires like the skyscraper which held the Chicago Tribune, curves and abutments and balconies in cylindrical structures thirty stories high twisting in and out of the curves of the river, and fine balustrades in its parks. Chicago had a North Side on Lake Shore Drive where the most elegant apartment buildings in the world could be found - Sutton Place in New York betrayed the cost analyst in the eye of the architect next to these palaces of glass and charcoal colored steel. In superb back streets behind the towers on the lake were brownstones which spoke of ironies, cupidities and intricate ambition in the fists of the robber barons who commissioned them - substantiality, hard work, heavy drinking, carnal meats of pleasure, and a Midwestern sense of how to arrive at upper-class decorum were also in the American grandeur of these few streets. If there was a fine American aristocracy of deportment, it was probably in the clean tough keen-eyed ladies of Chicago one saw on the streets off Lake Shore Drive on the near North Side of Chicago.

Not here for a travelogue - no need then to detail the Loop, in death like the center of every other American city, but what a dying! Old department stores, old burlesque houses, avenues, dirty avenues, the El with its nineteenth-century dialogue of iron screeching against iron about a turn, and caverns of shadow on the pavement beneath, the grand hotels with their massive lobbies, baroque ceilings, resplendent as Roman bordellos, names like Sheraton-Blackstone, Palmer House, red fields of carpet, a golden cage for elevator, the unheard crash of giant mills stamping new shapes on large and obdurate materials is always pounding in one’s inner ear - Dreiser had not written about Chicago for nothing.

To the West of the Lake were factories and Ciceros, Mafia-lands and immigrant lands; to the North, the suburbs, the Evanstons; to the South were Negro ghettos of the South Side—belts of Black men amplifying each the resonance of the other’s cause—the Black belt had the Blackstone Rangers, the largest gang of juvenile delinquents on earth, 2,000 by some count - one could be certain the gang had leaders as large in potential as Hannibal or Attila the Hun - how else account for the strength and wit of a stud who would try to rise so high in the Blackstone Rangers?

Further South and West were enclaves for the University of Chicago, more factories, more neighborhoods for Poles, some measure of more good hotels on the lake, and endless neighborhoods - white neighborhoods which went for miles of ubiquitous dingy wood houses with back yards, neighborhoods to hint of Eastern Europe, Ireland, Tennessee, a gathering of all the clans of the Midwest, the Indians and Scotch-Irish, Swedes, some Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Finns, Slovaks, Slovenes - it was only the French who did not travel. In the Midwest, land spread out; not five miles from the Loop were areas as empty, deserted, enormous and mournful by night as the outer freight yards of Omaha. Some industrial desert or marsh would lie low on the horizon, an area squalling by day, deserted by night, except for the hulking Midwestern names of the boxcars and the low sheds, the warehouse buildings, the wire fences which went along the side of unpaved roads for thousands of yards.

The stockyards were like this, the famous stockyards of Chicago were at night as empty as the railroad sidings of the moon. Long before the Democratic Convention of 1968 came to the Chicago Amphitheatre, indeed eighteen years ago when the reporter had paid his only previous visit, the area was even then deserted at night, empty as the mudholes on a battlefield after a war has passed. West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon. Endless files of animals were led through pens to be stunned on the head by hammers, and then hind legs trussed, be hoisted up on hooks to hang head down, and ride along head down on an overhead trolley which brought them to Negroes or whites, usually huge, the whites most often Polish or Hunkies (hence the etymology of Honkie - a Chicago word) the Negroes up from the South, huge men built for the shock of the work, slash of a knife on the neck of the beast and gouts of blood to bathe their torso (stripped of necessity to the waist) and blood to splash their legs. The animals passed a psychic current back along the overhead trolley—each cut throat released its scream of death into the throat not yet cut and just behind, and that penultimate throat would push the voltage up, drive the current back and further back into the screams of every animal upside down and hanging from that clanking overhead trolley, bare electric bulbs screaming into the animal eye and brain, gurglings and awesome hollows of sound coming back from the open plumbing ahead of the cut jugular as if death were indeed a rapids along some underground river, and the fear and absolute anguish of beasts dying upside down further ahead passed back along the line, back all the way to the corrals and the pens, back even to the siding with the animals still in boxcars, back, who knew—so high might be the psychic voltage of the beast—back to the farm where first they were pushed into the truck which would take them into the train. What an awful odor the fear of absolute and unavoidable death gave to the stool and stuffing and pure vomitous s**t of the beasts waiting in the pens in the stockyard, what a sweat of hell-leather, and yet the odor, no, the titanic stench, which rose from the yards was not so simple as the collective diarrhetics of an hysterical army of beasts, no, for after the throats were cut and the blood ran in rich gutters, red light on the sweating back of the red throat-cutters, the dying and some just-dead animals clanked along the overhead, arterial blood spurting like the nip-ups of a little boy urinating in public, the red-hot carcass quickly encountered another Black or Hunkie with a long knife on a long stick who would cut the belly from chest to groin and a stew and a stink of two hundred pounds of stomach, lungs, intestines, mucosities, spleen, exploded cowflop and pigs**t, blood, silver lining, liver, mother-of-pearl tissue, and general gag-all would flop and slither over the floor, the man with the knife getting a good blood-splatting as he dug and twisted with his blade to liberate the roots of the organ, intestine and impedimenta still integrated into the meat and bone of the excavated existence he was working on.

Well, the smell of the entrails and that agonized blood electrified by all the outer neons of ultimate fear got right into the grit of the stockyard stench. Let us pass over into the carving and the slicing, the boiling and scraping, annealing and curing of the flesh in sugars and honeys and smoke, the cooking of the cow carcass, stamp of the inspector, singeing of the hair, boiling of hooves, grinding of gristle, the wax-papering and the packaging, the foiling and the canning, the burning of the residue, and the last slobber of the last unusable guts as it went into the stockyard furnace, and up as stockyard smoke, burnt blood and burnt bone and burnt hair to add their properties of specific stench to fresh blood, fresh entrails, fresh fecalities already all over the air. It is the smell of the stockyards, all of it taken together, a smell so bad one must go down to visit the killing of the animals or never eat meat again. Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case—no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there. So be it. Chicago makes for hard minds. On any given night, the smell may go anywhere—down to Gary to fight with the smog and the coke, out to Cicero to quiet the gangs with their dreams of gung ho and mop-up, North to Evanston to remind the polite that inter faeces et urinam are we born, and East on out to Lake Michigan where the super felicities in the stench of such earth-bound miseries and corruptions might cheer the fish with the clean spermy deep waters of their fate.

Yes, Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made...

[Harry Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lashes the Republican Party with a cat o’nine tails of which each braid is an impressionist grade simile

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

If modern politics are nothing but a shit-show, then the 1968 Republican and Democratic National Conventions for the presidential primaries were a constipation conference. Such is the impression left by Norman Mailer in his semi-classic account Miami and the Siege of Chicago. From Mailer’s point of view, the notorious riots and demonstrations that accompanied these conventions of caucuses and primary votes outshine anything that happened politically that year. Mailer’s personal point of view, in fact, tends to override anything else that actually happens in this work of literary journalism.

The tradition of journalism, like everything else in the 1960s, was changing at the time. Norman Mailer saw the profession as a form of psychosis, written by detached observers from a bird’s eye point of view with no emotional investment in their subject matter. This detachment was an illusion though, since true objectivity, especially involving human affairs, is impossible from a phenomenological perspective. In reaction to this stance of fake objectivity, the 1960s produced the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, with his gonzo journalism, and Norman Mailer who wrote from the point of view of a participant in the events described. Since pure objectivity is an impossibility, Mailer ran in the opposite direction and wrote journalistic works where his own subjectivity was front and center stage in the final literary product.

This book starts out with Mailer describing Miami, the location of the Republican National Convention of 1968, as being a place that once was covered with wild jungle and palm trees, sometime battered by hurricanes and subtropical humidity but this lush natural landscape, just a short swim across the sea from Cuba, has been paved over, transformed into an urban concrete armpit with bland, tacky hotels on the beach and clueless, happy-go-lucky tourists in bathing suits who have no concept of wildness to begin with. While the strangled jungle metaphor doesn’t get played out too much throughout the narrative, the feeling of being imprisoned and tamed inside an air-conditioned prison of kitsch is all-pervasive. The convention kicks off with Mailer watching a circus elephant flown in from California to perform tricks on the airport tarmac. The convention, with all its dull and droning speeches, moves on from there. Mailer himself roots for Nelson Rockefeller to win the primary but in the end it is Richard Nixon who takes the prize. He gets characterized as a smart but dark and sinister candidate who has to try hard and act like an attractive candidate. Mailer finds him captivating but not particularly charming. Then-candidate Ronald Reagan also puts in an appearance, looking slick and shellacked with his shoe-polished hair but also shallow and dim in a smarmy way, unable to answer questions after his speech because he doesn’t know anything about anything.

In fact, the entire convention is lackluster and devoid of spirit. The author compensates for his disinterest by boozing it up at hotel bards and waxing poetic in his descriptions of the crowds and the convention venues. When things gets too dull, Mailer’s subjectivity is given full vent with his Henry Miller-inspired prose, acting like a smokescreen to cover up the reality that nothing interesting is actually happening. There are a couple passages where this approach is taken too far and the author can be criticized for summoning up too much excitement over something that is inherently unexciting.

As the narrator moves on to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, the subject matter promises to take a turn in a darker but more interesting direction. Where the section on Miami begins with a description of untamed jungle, the Chicago section begins with the gruesome horrors of the stockyards and abattoirs, foreshadowing the brutality to come . Norman Mailer is a bit more enthused about this convention because his preferred candidate, Eugene McCarthy, is running for president on an anti-Vietnam War ticket. But as the speeches drone on, the issue of the Vietnam War is like the jungle vines struggling to grow under the pavement of Miami; the candidates skirt around the issue and make no deep dives into the subject as they squirm in the spotlight. McCarthy is slightly more bold in his oppositional stance while Hubert Humphrey blandly states that his policy on the war is the same as Lyndon Johnson’s. Mailer describes Humphrey as a mid-level Mafia boss who fears his superiors but has convinced his barber that he is a big shot. Mailer’s acerbic humor is often at its best when he describes American mediocrity, a national character trait that is on full display in Chicago politics 1968.

But the Democratic primary convention takes a turn towards the raucous due to the demonstrations and riots happening in the nearby parks and streets. A huge mix of New Left political activists, hippies, bikers, African-Americans, and other social odds and ends like high school kids, journalists, and Catholic priests turn out in angry droves to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, turning the convention’s focus away from bread and butter issues towards the one thing that was on everybody’s mind. The peaceful demonstrations turned into riots which were partially instigated by undercover police officers who wanted an excuse to bash in the heads of those attending while beating up a few innocent bystanders for good measure. A riot was what the police wanted and a riot was what they got. Mailer, at that time a middle-aged war veteran with a bad habit of getting into brawls, felt ambiguous about the demonstrators even though he had already taken a firm stance against the war. He observed the riots from a distance and he inserts quotes from other journalists to provide details of the violence. After seeing the police brutality and the demonstrators in their nearly fearless commitment to protesting the war, Mailer takes sides with the counter-culture and ends up joining in with them. The latter part of the book involves this transformative process and the narrator emerges more and more as a participating character and less of an observer lurking behind his own lens of subjectivity.

What Mailer succeeds in doing here is portraying America in the microcosm of the presidential primaries of 1968. He has a sharp and accurate sense of where America stands at that time and where it is going. His observation that the most mediocre candidates won the party nominations while the most dynamic and provocative candidates had little impact sets the tone for the grey decades ahead. His other significant observation, that the future of America is in the hands of the youth and the counter-culture, not the politicians, turned out to be somewhat true as well. In the end, his diagnosis of American society is one of disgust with the status quo and a rallying cry for the uprising of the young, even though he feels they are doomed to failure because of their naivety.

Some people have criticized Miami and the Siege of Chicago for being more about Norman Mailer than the presidential campaigns. It is true that all the usual Mailerisms are present: descriptions of smells, psychosis, witchcraft, existential crisis, combat, boxing and bullfighting metaphors, macho rampaging, Herclitean duality, and the incongruous references to anal sex. It is also true that the narrative subjectivity sometimes overshadows the events and even interferes with the story at times. But to say that this book is just about Norman Mailer can be considered a half truth at best. It is about the author but it is also about how the author perceives the events he has chosen to witness and those events are what really matters. If the author is more interesting than the politicians, that isn’t his fault. Instead of denying the journalistic bias, he indulges in it and opens up a new dimension in the way news and history are approached. Since history is witnesses and recorded by real humans, it would make sense to expand on that facet of writing instead of maintaining the false pretense of unbiased reporting.

If you are interested in the history of American politics this is one book about that era that can give some keen insight, but if you are interested in the history of journalism at a crucial turning point in its progression, Miami and the Siege of Chicago is a good place to go.

[Tom Choi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so much! So much riveting and overstuffed information about all aspects of the infamous 1968 national presidential political conventions, but also so many new multisyllabic words (even words that don't officially exist: "phumpher," which in Yiddish convention is commonly spelled as "fumfer," or "to mumble"). *Only the deranged, unhinged ego of Mailer would do the extra labor to render the lowly "fumfer" in to a more regal, Queen's English-worthy: "phumpher". So pretentious! So subtle and so clever!

I was blown away by Mailer's depictions of the two principal cities of the drama: Miami, distilled through the stifling prevalence of modern air conditioning and the countless hotels that are all unhappy in that they are all hideously furnished; and Chicago, which is brought into its modern age through the history of the stockyards, and more provocatively, in the blood and stench drama of the slaughterhouses. (Mailer describes in full gory detail the horrible experience of livestock, as carcasses being processed in the brutally efficient modern factory system.)

There's also a really fascinating analogy of modern American politics as akin to property ownership that warrants a review and analyses from better informed political scientists. But the dense political activity of the 2 conventions (and in the case of the DNC in Chicago, also out in the streets) as retold through the metaphor of crude economics (not the glamor of day trading, but merely the boring exchange of property!) has the effect of stripping the heavy-winded political actors and their minions of any pretense to nobility, higher intelligence, and beneficence.

Ultimately, Mailer's prose is wild, beautiful, funny, profane, and strange (like Mozart!?!) and the ending is something to behold: Mailer, as "the reporter" begins to unpack his feelings of guilt, futility, and shame as a middling, middle age man (the Norman Mailer of 1968 wasn't quite the NORMAN MAILER after 1968) who was prone to bursts of false bravado that were small in comparison to the larger scale of human conflict, and in the case of Chicago, real violence.

I'm still in awe of the closing words, which could have been Rick's closing remarks, after his closing remarks, in "Casablanca":

"Put your fingers in V for victory and give a wink. We may yet win, the other are so stupid. Heaven help us when we do."

The panache! the style! the casual allusion to something deeper and greater that lies just beyond our comprehension and grasp! the we/us...

This is great stuff.

[Jason Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

One can't help but see Miami and the Siege of Chicago as a kind of sequel to Armies of the Night. In both we find Mailer narrating his first person account of these two events, profound moments in our cultural history, from the distance of a self-analytical third person. But here we find not the same Mailer of Armies, that brash, powerful leader—unafraid to face beatings, arrest but in fact seeking them out. No, here we see a writer who avoids the scene of the tragedy. He is disillusioned with the young people he led on his march to the pentagon. And its fairly clear that they no longer have much use for him. Mailer's flaccid attempt at organizing a march on the Democratic convention, after taking great pains to avoid all previous scenes of Daley's manufactured violence, ends in a pathetic whimper. Most of the scenes of the chaos are witnessed from his hotel room high above Grant park and Michigan Avenue. The best descriptive passages of the violence come from the pages of the Village Voice and other reporters who suffered brutal police beatings in order to write their pieces. Mailer gives a litany of excuses for avoiding the violence, perhaps rationalizing an absence from the action he wouldn't dare have missed in his earlier years.

And yet, here is this book that puts the acrid taste of the defeat that was to come to the idealists. Their failure is there in these pages, riding write along side Mailer's. That magnificent self-awareness that allows him to see his diminished role in their cause was certainly capable at hinting the diminished role that his "soldiers" would play in the world to come. He was able to see the magnificent power that Nixon would be able to wield against them with the help of America's "silent majority." All the hope of change and the ego of the first book is gone, and a somber note of the dirge to come lingers...

I also want to put down one of the best descriptions of Hubert Humphrey, or just about anybody else, I have ever read:

"Humphrey had a had had a face which was dependent upon cosmetics as the protagonist of a coffin."

Read Armies of the Night as quickly as you can get your hands on it, then when you are finished, do yourself a favor and pick this one up.