Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York Review Books Classics)

"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.


Good For Historians Of The Period   March 25, 2002
 0 out of 5 found this review helpful

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'.


mildly interesting   November 22, 2000
 6 out of 14 found this review helpful

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


VINTAGE MAILER   July 18, 1998
 1 out of 5 found this review helpful

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