Miami and the Siege of Chicago

As we are in between the national conventions of the two major political parties in the U.S., I figured it would be a good time to look back forty years, when literary lion Norman Mailer covered the conventions for Harper's and published the result as Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

Mailer was one of those writers, like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Truman Capote, who were part of "new" journalism, that is journalism that was written in a fiction style. He had tremendous success the year earlier with Armies of the Night, a chronicle of his participation at a rally at the Pentagon.

The first convention that year was in Miami for the Republican Party. There wasn't a lot of suspense--Richard Nixon, who had been left for dead in 1962 when he lost the race for California governor (and lied when he said "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore") had pulled off a political Lazarus act. He was dogged by Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan, but won the nomination in a staid, orderly gathering. The greatest attribute of this book is the way Mailer encapsulates the candidates in novelistic fashion, such as describing Nixon as "universally half-despised," and Rockefeller's unpleasant "catfish mouth."

You really get the sense that the Republican convention that year was about as exciting as a county fair. The only intrigue is who the Vice-Presidential nominee would be. Nixon, beholden to the South, named Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland.

The scene in Chicago was a lot different. The tumult in the Democratic Party was as a fever-pitch, even before Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for re-election in March. Then Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and Gene McCarthy, was left with the most primary wins. However, the rules for nomination were a lot different then. The sitting vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, entered zero primaries, but somehow ended up with the most delegates. No wonder protesters arrived in the city en masse.

Mailer's descriptions of the police brutality on Chicago's streets is vivid and horrifying, but interrupted by bouts of solipsism, as he is constantly questioning himself for not being in the middle of it (he uses several accounts by other journalists, notably from The Village Voice, or recounts his viewpoint from his hotel window). Perhaps due to this wondering about his own manhood, he ends up getting arrested for taking notes about a National Guard vehicle, and then has an amusing encounter with the Chicago cop at the precinct-house.

Running through this section of the book is also a moving elegy to Robert Kennedy, including how Mailer learned of his death. I was only seven years old that summer, so don't remember much of it, but it really must have been an amazing time, a time when serious people had to wonder if the entire experiment of America was unraveling. The choice come November--Nixon, Humphrey, or the third-party candidate, George Wallace, who was a segregationist, must have been profoundly dispiriting.

Even if there's too much Mailer here, the writing is often so virtuosic that it's like listening to music. I liked this passage in particular: "The deed was completed. The future storefront of the Mafia was now nominated to run against the probable prince of the corporation. In his hotel suite at the Hilton, Humphrey kissed Mrs. Fred R. Harris, wife of the Oklahoma Senator and co-chairman of his campaign; then as if to forestall all rumors, and reimpose propriety in its place, he rushed to the television screen and kissed the image of his own wife, which was then appearing on the tube. He was a politician; he could kiss babies, rouge, rubber, velvet, blubber and glass. God had not given him oral excellence for nothing."