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{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer: ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">''The Mailer Review''/Volume 2, 2008/</span>Norman Mailer: ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''}} | ||
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{{byline|last=Hitchens|first=Christopher|note=Christopher Hitchens assesses Mailer’s masterful account of the tensions and turmoil that took place forty years ago when Republicans and Democrats met in Miami and Chicago to select their presidential nominees. ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' was first published in 1968 and reissued earlier this year by ''New York Review Books''. A version of this essay first appeared in the ''Atlantic''.|url=https://prmlr.us/ | {{byline|last=Hitchens|first=Christopher|note=Christopher Hitchens assesses Mailer’s masterful account of the tensions and turmoil that took place forty years ago when Republicans and Democrats met in Miami and Chicago to select their presidential nominees. ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' was first published in {{date|1968}} and reissued earlier this year by ''New York Review Books''. A version of this essay first appeared in the ''Atlantic''.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr02hit}} | ||
“I am a ‘left | {{dc|dc=“I| am a ‘left conservative.{{' "}}}} That was Norman Mailer’s jaunty but slightly defensive self-description when first I met him at the beginning of the {{date|1980}}s. At the time, I was inclined to attribute this glibness (as I thought of it) to the triumph of middle age and to the compromises perhaps necessary to negotiate the then-new ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. But, looking back over this extraordinary journal of a plague year, written forty years ago, I suddenly appreciate that Mailer in {{date|1968}} had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of places. | ||
Party conventions have been such dull spectacles of stage-management for so long that this year (I happen to be writing on the day after the closing Democratic primaries) it has been considered nothing less than shocking that delegates might arrive in Denver in August with any more than ceremonial or coronational duties ahead of them. The coverage of such media-events, now almost wholly annexed by the cameras and those who serve them, has undergone a similar declension into insipidity. Mailer could see this coming: having left the Republican gathering in Miami slightly too early “he realized he had missed the most exciting night of the convention, at least on the floor, and was able to console himself only with the sad knowledge that he could cover it better on television than if he had been there.” This wasn’t quite true yet: what we have here is the last of the great political-convention essayists, and the close of a tradition that crested with H. L. Mencken and was caught so deftly in Gore Vidal’s play ''The Best Man''. You will note the way in which Mailer decided to write about himself in the third person, using for a title the name “the reporter.” This isn’t invariably a good idea but it generally works in this instance, even when Mailer muses, of himself, that: “The Democratic Convention in 1960 in Los Angeles which nominated John F. Kennedy, and the Republican in San Francisco in 1964 which installed Barry Goldwater, had encouraged some of his very best writing.” | Party conventions have been such dull spectacles of stage-management for so long that this year (I happen to be writing on the day after the closing Democratic primaries) it has been considered nothing less than shocking that delegates might arrive in Denver in August with any more than ceremonial or coronational duties ahead of them. The coverage of such media-events, now almost wholly annexed by the cameras and those who serve them, has undergone a similar declension into insipidity. Mailer could see this coming: having left the Republican gathering in Miami slightly too early “he realized he had missed the most exciting night of the convention, at least on the floor, and was able to console himself only with the sad knowledge that he could cover it better on television than if he had been there.” This wasn’t quite true yet: what we have here is the last of the great political-convention essayists, and the close of a tradition that crested with H. L. Mencken and was caught so deftly in Gore Vidal’s play ''The Best Man''. You will note the way in which Mailer decided to write about himself in the third person, using for a title the name “the reporter.” This isn’t invariably a good idea but it generally works in this instance, even when Mailer muses, of himself, that: “The Democratic Convention in 1960 in Los Angeles which nominated John F. Kennedy, and the Republican in San Francisco in 1964 which installed Barry Goldwater, had encouraged some of his very best writing.” | ||
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