Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

Vietnam: The country must never again “find itself with a commitment looking for a justification.... The war has been conducted without a coherent strategy or program for peace.” Of course he had been until recently a hawk with the hawks—like Nixon, he was now a dove of a hawk, a dove of a hawk like all the Republicans but Reagan.
    The ads had come with text in 20-point type, 30-point type, larger. “We must assure to all Americans two basic rights: the right to learn and the right to work.” (The right to learn would come in mega-universities with lectures pulled in on television and study halls with plastic bucket seats—the right to work? or was it the right to take pride in one’s work?)
    On Cities: “.... the confidence that we can rebuild our great cities—making slums of old despair into centers of new hope....”
    Or: “I see ... the welfare concept ... as a floor below which nobody will be allowed to fall, but with no ceiling to prevent anyone from rising as high as he wants to rise.”
    It was the best of potency-rhetoric for the thriving liberal center of America where most of the action was, building contracts, federal money for super-highways, youth programs for the slums, wars against poverty, bigotry, violence, and hate. (But how did one go to war with hate? “On your knees, mother-fucker!” said the saint.)
    Yes, Rockefeller had only to win the nomination and it might take an act of God to keep him from the Presidency. He was the dream candidate for all Democratic voters—they could repudiate Johnson and Humphrey and still have the New Deal, the Fair Deal, Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, and Folk Rock with Rocky. He would get three-quarters of the Democrats’ votes. Of course he would get only one-fourth of the Republicans’ votes (the rest would go to Humphrey or Wallace or stay at home) but he would be in, he could unite the country right down that liberal center which had given birth to a Great Society, a war in Vietnam, and a permanent state of police alert in the cities in the summer.
    He was like a general who had mounted the most massive offensive of a massive war but had neglected to observe that the enemy was not on his route, and the line of march led into a swamp. Rockefeller took out ads, pushed television, worked with hip musicians and groovy bands (Cannonball Adderley, Lionel Hampton) got out the young at every rally (the adolescents too young to vote) hob-nobbed with governors and senators, made the phone calls, hit the high pressure valve (Bill Miller and Meade Alcorn and Leonard Hall and Thruston Morton called in old debts from old friends) hit the hustings in his plane. “Hiya fellow,”—did everything but enter the campaign at the right time, fight it out in the primaries, or design his attack for the mollification of Republican fears. He did everything but exercise choice in serving up the best political greens and liver juice for the rehabilitation of Republican pride. In secret he may have detested the Average Republican—it was no secret that same Republican hated him: they had never forgiven each other for his divorce and his remarriage. A man married for thirty-two years should have known all marital misery by then—to smash such a scene spoke to the average Republican of massive instability, no fear of God, an obvious hankering for the orgiastic fats of the liberal center, and no saving secret gifts of hypocrisy—this latter being indispensable, reasons the conservative mind, to prudence and protection in government.
    Besides, the sort of passion for a late-entering candidate which can lead a delegate to make a last-minute switch in his choice must have roots in hysteria, and thereby be near to that incandescent condition of the soul when love and/or physical attraction is felt for three or four people at once. Hysteria is not in high demand among