61.21c

“Mailer Slashes American Apathy.” Article-interview by Bill Hamilton. The Daily Texan (University of Texas-Austin), 8 December. Report on Mailer’s address, “What I Think Is Happening to American Minds,” at the University on 7 December. He spoke of “a very subtle deterioration” in the American idea of greatness. “There is general apathy, a lack of enthusiasm in politics, no desire, no hero,” he said, adding that the country needed a hero like Roosevelt, Churchill or De Gaulle. Eisenhower was a hero “only to those persons who were most proud of their lack of imagination.” Of the 1960 presidential race, he said that Nixon represented “psychic security,” and Kennedy “originality, thought, and glamour,” but he wondered if Kennedy’s narrow winning margin had hampered his boldness.