Miami and the Siege of Chicago

by Norman Mailer

  So he had spoken at the bandshell. Standing there, seeing the crowd before him, feeling the predictable warmth of this power, all his courage was back, or so it felt—he was finally enough of an actor to face perils on a stage he would not meet as quickly other ways. And felt a surprising respect, even admiration, for the people on the benches and in the grass who had been tear-gassed day after day and were here now ready to march. He had even begun by saying to them, “You’re beautiful,” a show-biz vulgarity he detested to the root of his nerve, but he said it, and then made jokes about the smell of Mace on the microphone—the odor of stink bombs or Mace pervaded the charcoal-colored sponge over the microphone. Next, he went on to say that they were all at the beginning of a war which would continue for twenty years and this march today would be one battle in it. Then he explained that he would not be on this march because he had a deadline and could not take the chance, “but you will all know what I am full of, if you don’t see me on other marches,” he had added, and they cheered him, cheered him enthusiastically even before he said that he had come there merely to pay his respects and salute them. It affected him that they cheered him for even this relatively quietistic speech, and when he was done, they cried out, “Write good, baby,” and some young Negro from the Panthers or the Rangers or from where he did not know, serving as some kind of pro tem master of ceremonies now held his arm up high with his own, Black and white arms together in the air, he had been given a blessing by this Black, and felt rueful at unkind thoughts of late. And kept his word, and left soon after, and had a good early dinner with friends in order not to get to the convention too late. And had happened to be in his room washing up when the massacre on the march, three hours later, had come. Now, he was drinking in this bar across the street from Grant Park with a pleasant Californian who worked for McGovern. The reporter enjoyed his drinks. The bar was closing and he would go to bed. But the memory of his speech that afternoon was bothering him. It had been too easy. He knew it would have been better if he had been on the march, been in the massacre, even been on the vigil marching up from the Amphitheatre. Through the drinks, shame was warehousing in his liver.

  So it was that when he got up to go, and said good night to his new-found friend, he did not then enter and cross the lobby but stepped outside the hotel and went across Michigan Avenue.

  21

  The National Guard was out in force. On the side streets of the hotel, two-and-a-half-ton Army trucks were parked, jamming every space. Traffic was cut off. The Daley-dozers, named yesterday by a newspaper man, those Jeeps with barbed-wire grids in front of their bumpers, were lined in file across Michigan Avenue just south of the Hilton, and he crossed over to Grant Park with the sound of Army vehicles revving up, the low coughing urgency of carburetors flooded and goosed and jabbed and choked by nervous drivers, feet riding the accelerator and clutch while their truck waited in place. The huge searchlights near the Hilton were shining from a height of ten or fifteen feet, from a balcony or a truck, he could not see in the glare, but they lit up the debris and clangor of Michigan Avenue, the line of soldiers on the sidewalk of Michigan Avenue just off the edge of Grant Park, the huge pent crowd, thousands here, facing the line of troops. For some reason or other, a hydrant had been opened on Michigan Avenue in the hollow square formed by lines of National Guard and police barriers before the Hilton, and the lights of the searchlight reflecting from the wet street gave that dazzle of light and urgency and glamour unique to a movie company shooting in a city late at night, crowds dazzled themselves by their own good luck in being present.

  At that moment, he had a sign of what to do, which is to say, he had an impulse. His impulses, perhaps in compensation for his general regime of caution were usually sufficiently sensational to need four drinks for gasoline before they could even be felt. Now without questioning the impulse, he strode down the line of troops walking under their raised guns, not a foot away from their faces, looking (he supposed—perhaps he even did) like an inspecting officer, for he stared severely or thoughtfully or condescendingly into each separate soldier’s face with that official scrutiny of character which inspecting officers had once drilled into him. He was in fact fulfilling an old military dream. Since some of the soldiers did not like what he was doing, not altogether! and shifted their rifles abruptly with loud claps of their hand like stallions now nervous and therefore kicking the boards of their stall with abrupt and warning displeasure, he had the obverse pleasure of finding his nerve was firm again, he was sublimely indifferent to the possibility that any of these soldiers might give him a crack on the head with their rifle.

  In the middle of examining this line—it must have been two hundred soldiers long, some weary, some bored, some nervous, some curious or friendly, some charged with animosity; nearly all sloppy in their uniforms which he noticed with displeasure—he was indeed an inspecting officer—he passed by the speaker’s stand, a park table, or something of the sort, on which a dozen men were standing, one with a microphone attached by a wire to a big portable bullhorn held by another demonstrator. The speeches were going on, and a couple of guitarists appeared ready to perform next.

  A woman he knew, who worked on the McCarthy staff, approached him. “Will you speak?” she asked.

  He nodded. He felt more or less ready to speak and would have answered, “Yes, just as soon as I conclude this inspection,” if some saving wit in a corner of his brain had not recognized how absurd this would seem to her.

  So he concluded his inspection, taking the time to regard each soldier in that long line, and felt as if he had joined some private victory between one part of himself and another—just what, would have been tedious to consider at the moment, for he felt charged, ready, full of orator’s muscle.

  A Yippie wearing a dirty torn sweater, his hair long, curly, knotted, knuckled with coils and thrusting vertically into the air, hair quite the match of Bob Dylan’s, was running the program and whispered hello cordially, worked him to the center of this ridiculously small platform, perhaps the area of two large bathtubs put side by side, and told him he would speak as soon as the electric guitarists were done.

  He stood then in the center between two guitars who were singing a loud wild banging folk rock, somewhat corny, a patriotic song of the Left whose title eluded him. He did not like the song usually, but up on the platform, flanked by the singers, the bullhorn being held just back of his head turned out to the crowd, he felt insulated by the sound, blasted with it completely and so somehow safe with it, womb-safe with it, womb-cushioned—did the embryo live in such a waterfall of uproar each time the mother’s digestion turned over? His mind was agreeably empty as he waited, good sign generally that he was ready to deliver a real speech.

  When the song ended and he was given the mike after a generous introduction and a sweet surge of applause beefed up to its good point precisely by the introduction of the youth in the dirty sweater and the hair like Bob Dylan, he spoke out to the crowd just long enough to tell them he wanted to speak first to the soldiers. Then he turned his back, and the loudspeaker turned with him, and he talked to the line of troops he had not long ago passed, introducing himself as a novelist whose war novel some of them might possibly have read since it was famous in many barracks for its filthy passages and four-letter words, although not nearly so famous as another work, From Here to Eternity, with whose author he was often confused. He did not wish to disappoint the soldiers, he said, but he was not that fine author, Mr. James Jones, but the other, the one who had written the other book.

  These remarks given and enjoyed by him, he then talked to the soldiers as a man who had been a soldier once. “As I walked down your line, inspecting you, I realized that you are all about the kind of soldier I was nearly twenty-five years ago, that is to say, not a very good soldier, somewhat unhappy with the Army I found myself in.” But, he went on, the war in which he himself had fought had not bothered his sense of what might be right the way this war in Vietnam must bother them.
And he went on to talk about how American soldiers could take little pride in a war where they had the superiority and yet could not win, and he thought that was because they were ashamed of the war. Americans were conceivably the best fighting soldiers in the world if they could ever find a war which was the most honorable war in the world for them, but the war in Vietnam was the worst war for them, and so they could not fight with enthusiasm. At their best, Americans were honest; so they needed an honest war.

  It would have been a first rate talk to give to fighting troops. In the general excitement of this occasion he did not necessarily arrive at the central point—the soldiers before him had no wish to serve in Vietnam. That was why they were in the National Guard. Still, his speech to the troops pleased him, it warmed him for his next address which he was able to begin by turning around in place 180°, the loudspeaker doing the same, and now addressing his remarks to the crowd in the park. They were seated in a semicircle perhaps two hundred feet in diameter, a crowd of several thousand at least, with an attention he knew immediately was superb, for it was tender as the fatigue of shared experience and electric as the ringing of pain from a new bruise.

  He began once again by paying his respects, explaining how he had missed one fray and then another, not certain if for the best or worst of motives. They were polite even to this, as if a manifest of honesty in a speaker was all they had come to hear. But he had seen them, he explained, over these few days, taking beatings and going back, taking beatings, going back; so he now found himself in this park talking to them (although he had had no such intention earlier). They were fine troops, he declared, they were the sort of troops any general would be proud to have. They had had the courage to live at war for four days in a city which was run by a beast.

  A roar of delight came back from them. He felt the heights of the Hilton behind him, the searchlights, and the soldiers. Before him, these revolutionary youth—they were no longer the same young people who had gone to the Pentagon at all. They were soldiers.

  “Yes, this is a city run by a beast, and yet we may take no pleasure in it,” he said, “because the man is a giant who ended as a beast. And that is another part of the horror. For we have a President who was a giant and ended also as a beast. All over the world are leaders who have ended as beasts; there is a beastliness in the marrow of the century,” he said, or words like that and went on, “Let us even have a moment of sorrow for Mayor Daley for he is a fallen giant and that is tragic,” and they cheered Daley out of good spirit and some crazy good temper as if Mayor Daley was beautiful, he had given them all this—what a great king of the pigs! and somebody yelled, “Give us some of that good grass, Norman,” and he bellowed back, “I haven’t had pot in a month.” They all roared. “Four good bourbons is all you need,” said the demagogue, and the troops were in heaven.

  The exchange fired him into his next thought. He repeated again that he had not been ready to march, repeated his desire to avoid arrest or a blow on the head, and “Write! Write!” they yelled back, “You’re right, baby, do the writing!” But now, he went on, the time had come for Democratic delegates to march. He had not gone, he said, on the vigil and march from the stockyards to the hotel, because “that was in the wrong direction.” Demagogue’s metaphor, demagogue’s profit. They cheered him richly. No, tomorrow, he told them (the idea coming to his mind at just this instant) he was going to try to get three hundred delegates to march with them to the Amphitheatre. He would march along then! But he would not if there were less than three hundred delegates! Because if little more than a tenth of the Democratic Party was not ready to go out with their bodies as a warrant of safekeeping for all of them, then there was no sense in walking into still one more mauling. They had taken enough. If there was not real outrage in the Democratic Party, then it was time they knew that as well; they could then prepare to go underground. A roar came back again from the new soldiers seated on the grass.

  Were there delegates here, he asked? Candles waved in the dark—he was aware of them for the first time. “Spread the word,” he called out, “I’ll be here tomorrow.”

  Then he went on to speak of that underground. He would try to explain it. The other side had all the force, all the guns, all the power. They had everything but creative wit. So the underground would have to function on its wit, its creative sense of each new step. They must never repeat a tactic they had used before, no matter how successful. “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert,” he bawled out. And in the middle of the happy laughter which came back, he said, “Voltaire!” and they were happy again. It was as good a speech as he had ever made.

  For example, he continued, the march tomorrow with three hundred delegates would be a new tactic, and might offer a real chance of reaching the police barriers outside the Amphitheatre, where they could have a rally and quietly disband. That could make the point, for the Mayor had refused to let them even get near until now. Of course if the police chose to attack again tomorrow, well, three hundred Democratic delegates would also be in the crowd — so the nation would know that the authority was even determined to mop up its own. So he would march, he repeated, if the delegates would go, but he was damned, he told the crowd, if he was about to give cops the chance to maul him for nothing after he had made a point of here insulting the Mayor; no, he would not take that chance unless a tenth of the Democratic delegates were also willing to take a chance. On that note, he stepped down, and took a walk forward through the crowd, stopping to shake hands every step with the young men and women on the grass. Some were well-dressed, some were near to wearing rags, some looked as dusty and war-like as Roger’s Rangers, others were small and angelic. Everything from ghosts of Robin Hood’s band to the worst of the descendants of the worst Bolshevik clerks were here in the Grant Park grass at five in the morning and McCarthyites and McGovernites, and attractive girls, and college boys, and a number of Negroes, more now than any day or night before, and they were shaking hands with him, Black Power was revolving a hint in its profound emplacements. There were kooks and plainclothesmen and security and petty thieves and provocateurs with calculating faces and mouths just out of balance, eyes that glinted with a tell-tale flick; but there were also more attractive adolescents and under-twenties in this crowd than in any like crowd of New Left and Yippies he had seen before, as if the war had indeed been good for them. And he was modest in the warmth of their greeting, and not honored with himself, for they were giving him credit he did not possess—they were ready to forgive all manner of defection on the pleasure of a good speech.

  So he circulated, talking, came back to the platform to make one quick amendment. Delegates in the crowd had told him three hundred was too great a number to seek in so short a time. It would not be possible to reach them all. Two hundred was a better expectation. So he relayed that information to the crowd, and added that he would be back in this Park at noon.

  He returned to the hotel, pleased with his project, and aware of one whole new notion of himself. All courage was his and all determination, provided he could lead. There seemed no rank in any Army suitable for him below the level of General—extraordinary events deliver exceptional intuitions of oneself. No wonder he had spent so many years being General of an army of one. It was something to discover the secret source of the river of one’s own good guts or lack of them. And booze was no bad canoe. He went to bed prepared for heroic events on the morrow.

  22

  He was to receive instead a lesson in the alphabet of all good politick: which is, that a passion is nothing without a good horse to carry you in visit over your neighbor’s lands. He went to sleep at six a.m. prepared to visit different leaders as soon as he had finished his next speech at noon; by six in the evening he hoped they would be ready for the march, all delegates assembled.

  Be prepared for total failure.

  If this were essentially an account of the reporter’s actions, it would be interesting to follow him through the chutes on Thursday, but we are concerned
with his actions only as they illumine the event of the Republican Convention in Miami, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the war of the near streets. So his speech to the Yippies and children assembled was of value, since he learned for the record of his report that they were a generation with an appetite for the heroic, and an air not without beauty had arisen from their presence; they had been better than he thought, young, devoted, and actually ready to die—they were not like their counterparts ten years ago. Something had happened in America, some forging of the steel. He had known while speaking that if it came to civil war, there was a side he could join. At what a cost! At what a cost!

  But such discoveries are unsettling. He lay in bed not able to sleep; he lay in fact on the edge of a twilight slumber rich as Oriental harems in the happiness of their color, but he was thus celebrating too soon, because by nine o’clock in the morning, the last of his liquor now beautifully metabolized, he was in that kind of unhappy shape on which comedy is built. Quick calisthenics, a shower, a shave, and the urgency of his mission, did not quite give him a brain the equal of three hours in slumber. He would begin to think well for a minute, then lapse into himself like a mind become too weak for the concentration of consecutive thoughts.

  We can spare the day, and report the lesson. He made his speech in Grant Park at noon, talked then to reporters, then to delegates (who had been in the Park) at the Hilton, discussed problems, arranged to meet them again, and never was able to keep the meetings. He could never get to see McCarthy quite alone, nor McGovern, lost hours on the hope he might talk to the New York delegation, did not know how to reach Peterson of Wisconsin, could have wept at the absence of a secretary, or a walkie-talkie, since phones refused to function, or beginning to work, could reach no soul. He ran back and forth over Chicago, sent messages—by whomever he could find, to the Park; he would be back at three, he would be back at four, he saw Murray Kempton who was ready to march all alone if only to interpose himself between the police and the body of one demonstrator (Kempton was indeed to be arrested later in the day) he saw others, lost connection with delegates who had volunteered to help, was helpless himself in his lack of sleep, was too early or too late for each political figure he wished to find, he was always rushing or waiting in hallways—he learned the first lesson of a convention: nothing could be accomplished without the ability to communicate faster than your opponent. If politics was property, a convention was a massive auction, and your bid had to reach the floor in time.