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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer: Miami and the Siege of Chicago: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer: Miami and the Siege of Chicago (view source)
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{{byline|last=Hitchens|first=Christopher | {{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/mr08hitc}} | ||
“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 1980s. 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 1968 had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of places. | “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 1980s. 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 1968 had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of places. | ||