Miami and the Siege of Chicago

by Norman Mailer

  Kennedy dead, he was doubly in gloom, passionate gloom for the loss of that fine valuable light—like everyone else he loved Bobby Kennedy by five times more in death than life—a few lives have the value to illumine themselves in their death. But he was also dull in dejection at what he might have given away that other night. For he believed a universe in which at stricken moments one could speak quietly to whichever manifest of God or Devil was near, had to be as reasonable a philosophical proposition as any assumption that such dialogues were deluded. So it was possible he had given something away, and for nothing: the massive irreversible damage to the Senator’s brain had occurred before the spring of his own generosity had even been wet. Indeed! Who knew what in reality might have been granted if he had worked for the first impulse and dared offer confession on a connubial bed. A good could have come to another man and by another route.

  He never knew for certain if something had been given up—he was working too hard in too many ways to notice subtle change. (Although it seemed to him that a piece of magic had probably been relinquished.) Who cared but the reporter? He was, in general, depressed; then he met Senator McCarthy at a cocktail party in Cambridge not a week after the assassination. McCarthy was in depression as well.

  3

  At this party, McCarthy looked weary beyond belief, his skin a used-up yellow, his tall body serving for no more than to keep his head up above the crowd at the cocktail party. Like feeder fish, smaller people were nibbling on his reluctant hulk with questions, idiotic questions, petulant inquiries he had heard a thousand times. “Why?” asked a young woman, college instructor, horn-rimmed glasses, “Why don’t we get out of Vietnam?” her voice near hysterical, ringing with the harsh electronics of cancer gulch, and McCarthy looked near to flinching with the question and the liverish demand on him to answer. “Well,” he said in his determinedly mild and quiet voice, last drop of humor never voided—for if on occasion he might be surrounded by dolts, volts, and empty circuits, then nothing to do but send remarks up to the angel of laughter. “Well,” said Senator McCarthy, “there seem to be a few obstacles in the way.”

  But his pale green eyes had that look somewhere between humor and misery which the Creation might offer when faced with the bulldozers of boredom.

  Years ago, in 1960, the reporter had had two glimpses of Eugene McCarthy. At the Democratic convention in Los Angeles which nominated John F. Kennedy, McCarthy had made a speech for another candidate. It was the best nominating speech the reporter had ever heard. He had written about it with the metaphor of a bullfight:

  ‘... he held the crowd like a matador ... gathering their emotion, discharging it, creating new emotion on the wave of the last, driving his passes tighter and tighter as he readied for the kill. “Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be called Democrats, do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party.” McCarthy went on, his muleta furled for the naturales. “There was only one man who said let’s talk sense to the American people. He said, the promise of America is the promise of greatness. This was his call to greatness ... Do not forget this man ... Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you not the favorite son of one state, but the favorite son of the fifty states, the favorite son of every country he has visited, the favorite son of every country which has not seen him but is secretly thrilled by his name.” Bedlam. The kill. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Adlai Stevenson of Illinois.” Ears and tail. Hooves and bull. A roar went up like the roar one heard the day Bobby Thomson hit his home run at the Polo Grounds and the Giants won the pennant from the Dodgers in the third playoff game of the 1951 season. The demonstration cascaded onto the floor, the gallery came to its feet, the sports arena sounded like the inside of a marching drum.’

  Perhaps three months later, just after his piece on that convention had appeared, and election time was near, he had met Senator McCarthy at another cocktail party on Central Park West to raise money for the campaign of Mark Lane, then running for State Assemblyman in New York. The reporter had made a speech himself that day. Having decided, on the excitements of the Kennedy candidacy and other excitements (much marijuana for one) to run for Mayor of New York the following year, he gave his maiden address at that party, a curious, certainly a unique political speech, private, personal, tortured in metaphor, sublimely indifferent to issues, platform, or any recognizable paraphernalia of the political process, and delivered in much too rapid a voice to the assembled bewilderment of his audience, a collective (and by the end very numb) stiff clavicle of Jewish Central Park West matrons. The featured speaker, Senator McCarthy, was to follow, and climbing up on the makeshift dais as he stepped down, the Senator gave him a big genial wide-as-the-open-plains Midwestern grin.

  “Better learn how to breathe, boy,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, and proceeded to entertain the audience for the next few minutes with a mixture of urbanity, professional elegance, and political savvy. That was eight years ago.

  But now, near to eight years later, the hour was different, the audience at this cocktail party in Cambridge with their interminable questions and advice, their over-familiarity yet excessive reverence, their desire to touch McCarthy, prod him, galvanize him, seemed to do no more than drive him deeper into the insulations of his fatigue, his very disenchantment—so his pores seemed to speak—with the democratic process. He was not a mixer. Or if he had ever been a mixer, as he must have been years ago, he had had too much of it since, certainly too much since primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon, and California—he had become, or he had always been, too private a man for the damnable political mechanics of mixing, fixing, shaking the hands, answering the same questions which had already answered themselves by being asked. And now the threat of assassination over all, that too, that his death might come like the turn of a card, and could a man be ready? The gloomy, empty tomb-like reverberations of the last shot shaking rough waves doubtless through his own dreams, for his eyes, sensitive, friendly, and remote as the yellow eyes of an upper primate in a cage, spoke out of the weary, sagging face, up above the sagging pouches, seeming to say, “Yes, try to rescue me—but as you see, it’s not quite possible.” And the reporter, looking to perform the errand of rescue, went in to talk about the speech of 1960 in Los Angeles, and how it was the second best political speech he had ever heard.

  “Oh,” said McCarthy, “tell me, what was the best?”

  And another questioner jostled the circle about McCarthy to ask another question, the Secret Service man in the gray suit at McCarthy’s elbow stiffening at the impact. But McCarthy held the questioner at a distance by saying, “No, I’d like to listen for awhile.” It had obviously become his pleasure to listen to others. So the reporter told a story about Vito Marcantonio making a speech in Yankee Stadium in 1948, and the Senator listened carefully, almost sadly, as if remembering other hours of oratory.

  On the way out the door, in the press of guests and local party workers up to shake his hand before he was gone, a tall bearded fellow, massive chin, broad brow for broad horn-rimmed glasses, spoke out in a resonant voice marred only by the complacency of certain nasal intrigues. “Senator, I’m a graduate student in English, and I like your politics very much, but I must tell you, I think your poetry stinks.”

  McCarthy took it like a fighter being slapped by the referee across the forearms. “You see what it is, running for President,” said the laughter in his eyes. If he worshipped at a shrine, it was near the saint of good humor.

  “Give my regards to Robert Lowell,” said the reporter. “Say to him that I read ‘The Drunken Fisherman’ just the other day.”

  McCarthy looked like the victim in the snow when the St. Bernard comes up with the rum. His eyes came alight at the name of the poem ... “I will catch Christ with a greased worm,” might have been the line he remembered. He gave a little wave, was out the door.

  Yet the reporter was depressed after the meeting. McCarthy did not look nor feel like a President,
not that tall tired man with his bright subtle eyes which could sharpen the razor’s edge of a nuance, no, he seemed more like the dean of the finest English department in the land. There wasn’t that sense of a man with vast ambition and sufficient character to make it luminous, so there was not that charisma which leaves no argument about the nature of the attempt.

  4

  If that meeting had been in the beginning of June, there were differences now by the end of August. McCarthy, at Midway Airport to greet his followers, looked big in his Presidential candidate’s suit this sunny afternoon, no longer tired, happy apparently with the crowd and the air of his reception. He went down the aisle of friends and reporters who had managed to get ahead of the restraining rope for the crowd and shook hands, gave a confident wink or good twinkle there, “Whatever are you doing here, Norman?” he said with a grin, quick as a jab, and made his way up to the platform where a clump of microphones on spikes garnished the podium. But the microphones were dead. Which set McCarthy to laughing. Meanwhile posters waved out in the crowd: AMERICA’S PRIMARY HOPE; LUCIDITY, NOT LUNACY; MAKE MINE McCARTHY. He scanned the home-made posters, as if his sense of such language, after a decade and more, had become sufficiently encyclopedic to treasure every rare departure, and he laughed from time to time as he saw something he liked.

  Finally, he called out to the crowd, “They cut the power line. We’re trying to fix it.” Great college moans at the depravity of the opposition—wise laughter at the good cheer of the situation. “Let’s sing,” said Gene McCarthy; a shout from the crowd. His standard was theirs: good wit could always support small horror. So they sang, This land is your land, this land is my land, and McCarthy moved along to another mike, much shifting of position in his entourage to be near him, then gave up and came back to the first mike. Things were now fixed. He introduced Senator Yarborough from Texas who would in turn introduce him. Yarborough looked like a florid genial iron-ribbed barrel of a British Conservative M.P., and spoke with a modest Texas accent; he told the audience that McCarthy had “won this campaign in the hearts of the American people.” While he spoke, McCarthy sat next to his wife Abigail, a warm-colored woman with a pleasant face full of the arch curves of a most critical lady of the gentry. Something in her expression spoke of uncharitable wit, but she was elegant—one could see her as First Lady. Indeed! One could almost see him now as President. He had size, he had humor. He looked strong. When he got up to speak, he was in easy form. Having laughed at a poster which said, “Welcome to Fort Daley,” he began by paying his respects to the Mayor of Chicago who is “watching over all of us.”

  “Big Brother,” shouted a powerhouse in the crowd.

  McCarthy talked for six or seven minutes. The audience was looking for a bust-out-of-the-corrals speech but the Senator was not giving it. He talked mildly, with his throw-away wit, his almost diffident assertion—“We can build a new society and a new world,” said he at one point in the mildest tones of his mild register, and then added as if to take the curse off such intellectual presumption, “We’re not asking for too much—just a modest use of intelligence.”

  “Too much,” murmured a news-service man admiringly.

  A good yell came up. Even a modest use of intelligence would forbid Vietnam.

  McCarthy drew one more big cheer by declaring he was not interested in being Vice President. “I’m not here to compromise what we’ve all worked for,” he said to cheers, and shortly after, to the crowd’s disappointment, was done. The band played—Warren King’s Brass Impact, four trombones, two guitars, drums, six trumpets, one tenor sax, two Negroes not very black among the musicians.

  Yes, he had compromised nothing, not even the musicians. If he was at heart a conservative, and no great man for the Blacks, then damned if he would encourage harmoniums and avalanches of soul music. No, he had done it his way up to now, cutting out everyone from his councils who was interested in politicking at the old trough, no, his campaign had begun by being educational, and educational had he left it—he had not compromised an inch, nor played the demagogue for a moment, and it had given him strength, not strength enough perhaps to win, certainly not enough to win, but rectitude had laid the keel, and in that air of a campaign run at last for intelligent men, and give no alms to whores, he left.

  It was no great meeting, but excitement was there, some thin weal of hope that victory, impossible to spring aloft, might still find wings. Take a good look, for it is the last of such pleasant occasions. Later that day, Hubert Humphrey came into O’Hare, but there was no crowd to receive him, just a few of the Humphrey workers. Hubert Humphrey had two kinds of workers. Some, with crew cut or straight combed hair, could have gone with Ronald Reagan. Others were out of that restaurant where Mafia shakes hands with the union. Let no one say that Hubert was unfriendly to the real people. But there is more to see of all these men.

  5

  Here, my friends, on the prairies of Iilinois and the Middle West, we can see a long way in all directions ... here there are no barriers, no defenses to ideas and to aspirations. We want none. We want no shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid patterns of thought and no iron conformity. We want only the faith and the convictions of triumph and free and fair contest.

  (From an address by Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois,

  to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1952.)

  It may be time to attempt a summary of the forces at work upon the convention of 1968.

  A similar consideration of the Republican convention never seemed necessary. The preliminaries to Miami Beach were simple: Nixon, by dint of an historical vacuum whose presence he was the first to discern, and by the profit of much hard work, early occupied the Republican center—the rest of the history resides in Rockefeller’s attempts to clarify his own position to himself. Was he to respond only to a draft of Republicans desperate not to lose to Johnson, then to Kennedy, or was he to enter primaries, and divide the party? Since he was perfectly capable of winning the election with a divided Republican Party, because his presence as a nominee would divide the Democratic Party even further, the question was academic. But Rockefeller’s history can not be written, for it is to be found in the timing of his advisers and the advice of his intimates, and they are not ready, one would assume, to hang themselves yet.

  Where it is not to remain hidden, the Republican history was relatively simple and may be passed over. It is the Democratic which insists on presenting itself, for no convention ever had such events for prelude.

  On March 31, on a night when the latest Gallup Poll showed LBJ to be in favor with only 36% of the American public (while only 23% approved his handling of the war) Johnson announced on national television that he would not seek nor “accept the nomination of my party as your President.” On April 2, there was talk that Humphrey would run—McCarthy had taken the Wisconsin primary with 57% of the vote to Johnson’s 35% (and it was estimated that if Johnson had not resigned, the vote would have been more like 64% to 28%).

  On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a white man, and violence, fire and looting broke out in Memphis, Harlem, Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Newark over the next week. Mayor Daley gave his famous “shoot to kill” instruction to the Chicago police, and National Guard and U.S. troops were sent to some of these cities.

  On April 23 Columbia students barricaded the office of a Dean. By another day the campus was disrupted, then closed, and was never to be comfortably open again for the rest of the semester. On May 10, as if indicative of a spontaneous world-wide movement, the students of the Sorbonne battled the Paris police on barricades and in the streets. On the same day, Maryland was quietly pledging its delegates to Humphrey.

  On June 3, Andy Warhol was shot. On June 4, after winning the California primary 45% to 42% for McCarthy, and 12% for Humphrey, RFK was shot in the head and died next day. The cannibalistic war of the McCarthy and Kennedy peace forces was at an end. McCarthy had been all but finished
in Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota; Kennedy had been badly mauled by his defeat in Oregon. Meanwhile Humphrey had been picking up delegates in states like Missouri, which did not have primaries, and the delegates in states which did, like Pennsylvania, after it had given 90% of its vote to McCarthy.

  So went the month. Cleveland with its first Negro Mayor still had a riot. Spock, Goodman, Ferber and Coffin were sentenced to two years in jail. Kentucky with 46 delegates gave 41 to HH, and the McCarthy supporters walked out. There were stories every other day of Humphrey’s desire to have Teddy Kennedy for Vice President, and much comment in columns on the eagerness of the Democrats to move the convention from Chicago. Chicago had a telephone strike and the likelihood of a taxi strike and a bus strike. Chicago was to be unwilling host to a Yippie (Youth International Party) convention the week the Democrats would be there. Chicago had the massive bull temper of Mayor Daley for the Democratic Party to contend with—much work went on behind the scenes to move the convention to Miami where the telephone and television lines were in, and Daley would be out. But Daley was not about to let the convention leave his city. Daley promised he would enforce the peace and allow no outrageous demonstrations, Daley hinted that his wrath—if the convention were moved—might burn away whole corners of certain people’s support. Since Hubert Humphrey was the one who could most qualify for certain people, he was in no hurry to offend the Mayor. Lyndon Johnson, when beseeched by interested parties to encourage Daley to agree to the move, was rumored to have said, “Miami Beach is not an American city.”