65.14

From Project Mailer
Norman Mailer: Works and Days
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“Norman Mailer on LBJ.” Realist, no. 60 (June), 1, 10–15. Transcription of speech given on 21 May (Vietnam Day) on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. In an accompanying “Author’s Note,” Mailer states that portions of the speech were taken from “my article on the Republican Convention printed in Esquire in November 1964[1] . . . from a review I did in the New York Herald Tribune on Lyndon Johnson’s book My Hope for America[2] . . . [and] a fragment from a debate in Chicago with William Buckley.”[3] The final line of Why Are We in Vietnam? (67.15)—“Vietnam. Hot dam [sic]”—is used in the essay as a way of describing L.B.J.’s relief and excitement at finding an issue to shift the country’s attention from the civil rights movement, except that Mailer reverses the order: “Hot Damn. Viet Nam.”

Rpt: Peace News (London) no. 1522 (27 August), 5–8; with an additional introductory paragraph (in which he refers to himself as a “left conservative”) in We Accuse, edited by James Petras. Berkeley: Diablo Press, September; as “A Speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day” in 66.11 and 68.11; partial in 98.7. See 65.12, 65.18.



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