Customer Reviews

Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (Primus Library of Contemporary Americana)

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This book is the essential companion to The Armies Of The Night--it tells about the conventions of 1968 in Miami & Chicago, & how the latter turned into a riot. Unlike Armies Of The Night, however, the writing isn't peaking, & Mailer isn't on the front. Instead, he's being a journalist (& a good one at that!)

For anybody interested in this side of American history, this book is a must. The part on Nixon being elected in Miami is the weakest part--read it quickly. The real beef lies in the second part on the Democrat convention in Chicago. You'll get shocks, laughs, everything you've come to expect from Norman Mailer.

In August 1968 Norman Mailer attended the Republican Convention in Miami, then the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The past 35 years allows retrospection on his reports. Agnew and Nixon resigned in disgrace, and much has changed since 1968. Reagan has come and gone, elected past his prime. ("I don't know." Chapter 15.) Mailer attended the meetings to give his impression of the candidates and their supporters. Mailer's description of the hot humid air of Miami shows his literary ability and style. I swam through the waves of purple prose until I got seasick. These relentless waves carried my exhausted mind onto the sands of countless words. Mailer's quotes from Nixon's speech shows what a rhetorician Nixon was. Nixon "gave one impression and acted upon another"; but "when his language was examined, one could not call him a liar" (Chapter 14). Hence the name "Tricky Dick".

"Chicago is the great American city"; Mailer explains why. His description of a slaughterhouse again shows his rich literary style. Mailer backed Kennedy; he admired the mixture of idealism and trafficking with the overlords of corruption. Politics is property, you never give away something for nothing. If a politician is his own man, then he is ill-equipped for the game of politics (Chapter 6). Mailer says LBJ controlled the convention via Mayor Daley. It was the bitterest, most violent, disorderly, and uncontrolled in decades. Mailer analyzes the behavior of the candidates: Humphrey, McCarthy, McGovern, and others. Mailer discusses the protesters that came to Chicago, and the many organizations behind them. How many of the protesters were undercover agents? Why was the Democratic Convention a target? Was there manipulation of the protest organizations? Chapter 12 ends by saying the police targeted new photographers to avoid future evidence. Chapter 16 tells of the one-sided battle at Michigan and Balbo Avenues. Chapter 26 tells how Mailer was punched and almost arrested.

Mailer's description of the Convention listed many names who have passed from politics into the history books. Mailer puts a lot of himself into these reports; this is like a magazine article, not a newspaper story.

Norman Mailer brings his descriptive style to the two Presidential nominating conventions of 1968. The author begins with modest coverage of the staid Republicans in Miami, where Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Nelson Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan held court. Then we read of the contentious gathering of Democrats in Chicago. Here the key figures were Hubert Humphrey, President Lyndon Johnson (in abstention), Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, the late Bobby Kennedy, plus thousands of anti-war protesters. At the convention pro and anti Vietnam delegates argued and caucused. But sensing the real story was in the streets and in Grant Park, Mailer describes the police and national guardsmen battling anti-war demonstrators in front of TV cameras. The televised result was an image of chaos that probably doomed Hubert Humprhey's chances in the fall campaign against Nixon. At one point the author himself was nearly arrested as Mayor Daley's police were too eager with the nightstick against yippies, hippies, and the media (beating several reporters). I liked Mailer's you-are-there eyewitness style, although his lengthy paragraphs were a bit thick for my taste. Still, most of his fans will not be disappointed.

Little-known facts: Mayor Daley was secretly anti-Vietnam (he had draft-age sons) and almost certainly would have supported peace candidate Bobby Kennedy had the latter not died. Ironically, Humphrey was one of the few in LBJ's White House who didn't like the military build up in Vietnam. Only one person died in the Chicago street mayhem, while several died in Miami ghetto rioting during the GOP convention - but the media never televised the Miami mayhem. Finally, the demonstrators in Chicago helped elect Nixon, thus getting a President far more pro-Vietnam than Humphrey.

Mailer is amazing. His hybrid novel/historical account method works spectacularly here. It seems he learned from his earlier foray into this style of work, "Armies of the Night," which, despite winning the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, was chunky and too focused on Mailer. Here, and with great acumen, Mailer personalizes the account where it bolsters, and no where else. The reader benefits from a retelling of the events by an observer as honed as Mailer, and for me personally - born nearly 20 years after the events contained therein - I can look to this book as a thorough resource for attempting to be "in the moment" at these conventions. I'd say this is an absolute must-read for political history buffs.

We've all heard the remark used too often to describe an egocentric's prerogative to
to be self-consumed and reticent to acknowledge the rights and opinions of fellow citizens: " It's his (her)world, we're just living in it..." There are infinite variations and elaborations , all headed for the same punchline no matter the navigation the teller chooses, with hardly an improvement on the insight. The phrase, in fact, is stale and in need of retirement.

The phase had been used recently in a chat I had recently with someone regarding the re-release of Norman Mailer's account of the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions, and the mention made me want reach for the imaginary lever for the equally imaginary trap door down which the utterer of petrified phrases would fall, the bottom chamber of which they would remain until they appreciate that cliches are no substitute for an original aside, a choice metaphor, a wild ride of associations that prove that one has been paying attention to the events about them.

Paying attention is precisely what the literary journalist in his nonfiction writings, and what Miami and the Seige of Chicago (blessedly reissued by NYR Books)shows is that for all his self-obsession, Mailer was no mere narcissistic punk considering the world his realm and its inhabitants his subjects. What gives the narrative its tension is Mailer's knack for addressing the world as he thinks it used to be what it ought to become and then confronting blunt facts that won't bend to his wishes, give in to his whims, follow a script he might have written.

Mailer is a counter puncher, to use his parlance, someone who reacts with a mind that brings details , thesis and counter thesis , call and response into spinning loops of image-saturated language. Miami/Seige , like a good amount of the nonfiction Mailer wrote during the sixties and seventies, is a richly nuanced , feverishly grandiloquent mid century reversal of Whitman's latter day desire to contain multitudes and find himself in each breath , phrase and circumstance of every American's story; Mailer, an early idealist who wanted to forge a revolution in the consciousness of the nation, as he announced in Advertisements for Myself, refuses bitterness and despair when his designs become moot and embraces ambivalence and irony instead.

This makes for a desireable place from which to wrestle with the things that irritate his senses and insult his intelligence.

What is striking about 1968 in that political sense is that Daley of Chicago, a Democrat, is the recipient of more wrath from liberal writers than Richard Nixon. You remember him: The guy who went on to win it all that year, expanded the war, and broke a myriad of laws in the scandals that come under one word, Watergate. Mailer, who writes with the talented journalist's eye, beats up on Daley more than Nixon. I guess you couldn't do anything about Nixon. It's like going to a football game and heckling the head coach of your favorite team: The guy who is giving the game away.

KEVIN FARRELL

There's something really disconcerting about reading the nonfiction of Tom Wolfe and John McPhee wherein they describe events at which they are clearly in attendance but write in the third person. Someone must be overhearing the conversation that Wolfe so brilliantly reproduces and when folks describe their jobs in a McPhee essay, one assumes they are describing them to McPhee. Their absence from the text then becomes more intrusive than their presence would be, but, what the hey, they're two of the best writers of non-fiction ever to come down the pike, so we cut them some slack. Infinitely more annoying is the way that every hack writer on Earth who is assigned to write a profile of someone for a magazine, begins the piece by describing his own first meeting with the subject of the story, as if we freakin' care that the author ordered the shitaki on melba toast and Demi was ten minutes late for the interview. But topping them all for the most aggravating technique ever created is Norman Mailer who decided to include himself in his nonfiction but to write about himself in the third person, as "the reporter." This is not only a distraction when you are reading, it also just smacks of egotism run amok. Of course, this is Norman Mailer, the biggest publicity whore this side of Madonna, so that's exactly what it is, the attention grabbing stunt of a completely self-absorbed horse's rump.

That said, he does make for an irreverent, even ribald, chronicler of the 1968 conventions. His celebrity opened doors for him and gave him access to the placid doings of the GOP conclave in Miami and to the Democratic melee in Chicago. He uses his own distinctive patois of street tough language, acerbic commentary and apocalyptic hyperbole to recreate the mood, if not the actual events of the two conventions. But his analysis of events is completely laughable, teetering between the merely absurd and the genuinely deluded. Naturally, he revels in both the counter culture demonstrations in Chicago and in the somewhat heavy-handed response of Mayor Daley's police and the National Guard. Like Charlie Manson believing that Helter Skelter would bring about the revolution, Mailer thought that this kind of confrontation and the reaction it provoked revealed something about the strength of the youth movement on the one hand and weakness of American institutions on the other. In fact, these were pretty much the death throes of '60s radicalism. Just a few months later the American people would go to the polls and elect Richard Nixon, largely on the understanding that he would restore law and order to American society. And though his margin of victory was quite thin, it must be recalled that George Wallace received 13.5% of the vote; and I think it's safe to say that his voters disagreed with the kids who tried shutting down Chicago. Even as Mailer was predicting a new and glorious phase in some kind of class struggle, the electorate, the "silent majority" of Nixon's acceptance speech, was preparing to repudiate the radical movement by a truly staggering margin.

Interestingly, Mailer accidentally offers intimations of what was going on in the rest of the country when he is too revealing about what was going on within himself. The two most honest moments in the book are when he expresses how sick he is of listening to the demands of Black leaders:

[T]he reporter became aware after a while of a curious emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before--it was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him--he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if even he felt this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself?

Note both the utter condescension to the unwashed masses and the visceral sense that things had gone far enough. Add in the fact that most Americans were also sick of listening to limousine liberals like Norman Mailer tell them what to do, when they knew perfectly well that he felt like this in his heart of hearts, and the rage is only compounded. Mailer's slip peeks out again during the violence in Chicago when he acknowledges an illicit thrill at watching the police hammer protesters into submission. These instances offer him a chance to understand what is truly going on in the country, but his knees jerk and he goes right back to singing a Dionysian song of praise to the scum in the streets.

A journalist who gets so involved in a story that he misjudges it by as much as Mailer did is hardly worthy of the title. Instead, the author was a partisan observer whose analytical skills appear to be nonexistent and whose judgment appears to have been clouded by emotion, but whose hands on approach to the story makes for a whiff of the atmospherics of the time and some mildly interesting moments.

GRADE: C

This book is a true curio of the times, of interest mostly to historians of the period. Mailer fails to describe the details of what went on at the conventions, although he does give the reader `a feel' for events, and some of the snapshots he provides are good, especially those of the violence and terror of Chicago. In the end, the reader will be disappointed, both because of the failure to completely describe what is happening and because of the writer's verbose style and intrusive narrative devices. The writing style definitely is distracting and confusing, Mailers tendency to use bizarre metaphors and long wordy descriptions provides confusion rather than clarity. Recommended only as a companion piece to books like `The Making Of The President 1968'by White and McGinnnis' `Selling Of The President 1968'.