Miami and the Siege of Chicago

by Norman Mailer

  Now they were paid up and on the street—ready to go to Hefner’s.

  There was an excess of good feeling in him, however, when they reached the street. (The artillery battle had been his first premium victory of the week.) Outside, the Jeeps and trucks were still gunning to be parked, the police barricades were up, the line of National Guard still stood on the far side of Michigan Boulevard. The crowd was small in Grant Park at this hour, the battle was coming to an end. But speakers were still talking, rock groups still played, sound still rose to Humphrey Headquarters on the twenty-fifth floor, and the searchlights from the Hilton still put high illumination on the scene.

  He had to take one last look. So the reporter and his two friends took a walk down the line of National Guard. “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.” Still, he was conducting an inspection again. Perhaps it was due to the reduction in the crowd, but the Guard looked meaner tonight.

  That was all right. He was now feeling mean himself. He came to a stop before a Jeep with a rectangle of barbed wire on its front. In the exhibition-hall glamour of the searchlight, it glistened like a hard-shell insect eight feet long with an unforgettable radar-like conception of a mouth. He thought it was the most degrading instrument of war he had ever seen; it spoke of a gulf between the people who would administer the law and the people who would be on the wrong side at the wrong minute. They would not necessarily have the rights accorded to cattle behind a fence. The reporter took out his notebook and stood in front of one of these Jeeps and took notes of the dimensions. On a grid by his estimate sixty inches wide and forty-eight inches high, there were thirty-two vertical strands of barbed wire. He made a point of counting each strand with his extended finger before the eyes of the soldiers by each side of the Jeep; he was careful however not to touch this altered Jeep, just to count with his finger a clear inch or two away. After the count, he took out his pencil, made an entry, put his pencil back, made a new estimate of specification. (The reporter had, after all, studied engineering at Harvard.) All the while, the Jeep’s motor was running, and the driver, now nervous, gunned it once or twice.

  A National Guard officer said, “You’ll have to step back.”

  “Why?”

  “Just step back.”

  “I’m a reporter for Harper’s Magazine, and I wish to be able to describe the barbed wire on this Jeep.”

  “I’m asking you to step back.” The officer had his name stenciled on a piece of one-inch tape across the breast pocket of his fatigues. HORWITZ, it said. If a Horwitz was an officer in the National Guard, as quickly ask for a Rasmussen! But the Jeep was—force majeure!—too offensive. “On days when you take it out,” the reporter asked, “what do you do to get the old flesh off?”

  “Don’t be wise-apple around me,” said the officer. “Step back.”

  “I’m doing a story.”

  “Step back.”

  Well, he could not step back. He really had no desire to be taken in, but the officer—he could hardly blame him—had forced the issue. Now one of them would have to lose face; or else Horwitz would have to arrest him.

  “It’s not quite possible to step back yet,” he said in his best Harvard voice.

  “All right, take him in!”

  “For what? Describing your Jeep?”

  He was seized. Three or four soldiers seized him. A complicated little scuffle on the arrest. No one wanted to get marked for life, or even for tomorrow.

  Then, victim secure, they all walked across Michigan Avenue in a stiff-armed body-locked routine, the soldiers on each arm trying to bend his arm, and his arms now turned as catatonic as he could make them—in this general grab and rush across the road, their collective limbs must have looked like some odd peripatetic unit of twelve or sixteen compressed sticks of absolute catatonic dynamite. If they had ever struck him, he was ready to go amok; if he struck them! they were equally ready. Stiff and tense and jostling like jockstrap mystics on a collective web of isometric exercises, they went in separate springing steps and yaws across the street, where he was promptly turned over to the cops, and as promptly felt the violence in the cops’ arms, more personal, less green, it was like a barroom brawl for maniacs but for the suspended fact that nobody was swinging—everybody holding everybody—and forth-with into the downstairs entrance of the Hilton where the cops delivered him to an officer, while all the while in his ear, he could hear his drinking companions following behind, loyal enough to stay near. He could hear them saying to the soldiers, then the cops, “Have you guys gone crazy? He’s a journalist.”

  At the terminus, in the low lobby of the Hilton, his police officer looked to be a man in his middle fifties, doubtless Irish, with a freckled face, light eyes, and a head of orange-red hair now turning yellow and gray. By the emoluments of his braid, he was obviously a high officer, and as obviously by his smile, he had a sense of humor! A sense of humor!

  “Well, what have you been doing?” he asked with a grin.

  The reporter had an inkling of how to talk to this officer; this was one officer who knew how to handle gentry—an old-fashioned cop with a wink—so the reporter looked for tag-ends of gentry in himself.

  “That’s an excellent question,” he said, “just ask what I was doing. I was making a report”—into his voice went a hint of genteel Irish “r”—“I’m a reporter for Harper’s Magazine and I was trying to describe ...”

  “He wouldn’t move back,” said Horwitz who had just come in.

  “I was not touching the equipment. I have a right to describe what I see. It’s generally considered the right of a journalist, whether Lieutenant Horwitz is aware of that or not.”

  “Well, there’s been so much trouble in the air,” said the police officer. He smiled at the disputants, then cooled them with a sigh. “He was just taking notes,” the friends of the reporter made a point of getting in rapidly.

  “He wouldn’t move back,” said Horwitz.

  “Are you ready to prefer charges?” the police officer asked the National Guard officer with deliberate sadness.

  “It’s up to you,” Horwitz answered stiffly.

  “You see you’ll have to bring in charges....”

  Horwitz nodded. In the pause, he deliberated, gave a look, went off.

  “What is your rank, Officer Lyons?” the reporter asked, for he had now had time to notice the nameplate.

  “Oh, I’m a Commander. Commander Tom Lyons.”

  “Commander, you ought to get more of your family on the force,” said one of his friends, also an Irishman.

  Lyons winked. “You fellows have given us a hell of a time. You don’t know what we been through.” But he was interested in the hero he had freed. “You write for Harper’s. Ohh! What sort of material do you write...?”

  “Officer,” said his friend, “this man wrote The Naked and the Dead.”

  “Brother, does that have bad language in it,” stated Commander Lyons with a happy face. In the pause, he inquired deftly, “Gentlemen, there won’t be any more trouble, will there?”

  “Remember that the trouble came because I was taking notes for a factual description of the Jeep!”

  “Say, we don’t have to go around and get into that again,” said Lyons with a hint of woe in his look: God save us from honest men, was the expression in his eye.

  So they left the lobby the way they had come in, through the front entrance.

  “Let’s go to Grant Park again,” said the reporter. The speaker in Grant Park had just made a telling point, and the crowd had cheered.

  “Norman, let’s get out of here,” said one of his friends.

  “I want to go over there for just a minute,” and then as if to make his point, he took a few quick steps, and was stopped by a man about his own height, an Italian with pop-eyes. He was wearing a delegate’s badge, and looked to be Petty Mafia. But there was something wrong about him. His credentials were false, or he was a police provocateur, or both—who knew what? Maybe he was even a delegate. The man
said, “I’d like to kill those cocksuckers across the street.”

  “Don’t call them cocksuckers,” the reporter said. “They’re my troops, and they’re great.” It was precisely that kind of conversation.

  “They’re no good,” said the man with pop-eyes. “They’re cocksuckers.”

  “What are you? A musician?” He meant by that: what are you: the kind of guy who plays saxophone at a cheap wedding? and the delegate, bona fide or false, immediately socked him in the eye. It was not much of a punch, but the reporter was just as immediately grabbed from behind by one or two cops—he never knew, because the guy with the pop-eyes hit him again fast enough for him to think the man had once worked in the ring, although not for long because the punches while fast had little enough back of them.

  His good friends—in lieu of the cops—now pulled the other guy off, more cops came running up, then the same gripping and grabbing, stiff-armed lurching, isometric dance of the limbs, it all started up once more, but the cops were bad, this time there was murder in their arms, murder with clubs and bats, he felt, as he was forced along between them like a traveller in the center of that universe the screech of a subway car will make in sounding around a rail—that electric sentiment of electric hatred, virile in its rage, it was madness, what in hell was going on? They went flying down some stairs in the hotel, past the men’s room in the basement lobby, now through strange doors into a large room, a squad room where a dozen police were standing about. His friends were now barred, he could hear them protesting outside—here there was nobody but cops, the man who had hit him, and Commander Lyons who looked significantly less friendly now.

  The delegate, real or false, surrounded by cops, was telling his story. He had to be a cop himself—his story was a point-by-point lie: “Then after the guy finishes using his foul language, he stands off, and for no reason at all, hits me,” he heard the pop-eyed saxophone say with passion.

  Meanwhile, they had left the reporter standing all alone. There were five cops eyeing him. He felt a complete program of violence in their cat walk, these athletic cops, with crew cuts like Marines. He had the idea that in about a minute they were going to come over and beat him up. He had been without sleep for almost two nights, he had half a bottle in him now, he had been hit and arrested, and the hatred of the cops’ hands on his arms had been a quiver of murderous starts, he had seen everything he had seen in this city, thought everything he had thought, and now it seemed probable to him the police had finally gone privately as well as publicly amok, and soon were going to gang him on this floor right out of the violent creativity of their paranoia—there was so much television for them to absorb in the long winters. And as he thought this, he realized suddenly that he was not really afraid, he did not feel weak—scared, he felt, and very awake, but he was ready, he was going to try to do his best when they started to work. He did not feel in a jelly or a bath—he felt as electric and crazy as the cops. The fact that he had this sentiment now, that he was ready to fight, made him feel close to some presence with a beatific grace (for he felt it, he felt with this readiness to fight as if the air were beautiful where it was near to him) and that left him happy, happier than he had been at any moment since he had heard the awful cry of the wounded pig in his throat at the news Bobby Kennedy was shot: so he stood there and glared at the policemen who were glaring at him and knew he could wait like this for an hour and not feel weak.

  And now Commander Lyons was talking to him. The Commander’s face was taking a wicked delight in the powers of his own cynicism, for the Commander’s face had succeeded in repressing the twinkle and was now moderately severe and composed. “It’s a serious matter, Mr. Mailer, for you to be hitting people for no reason at all, especially after I just let you go.”

  He liked Commander Lyons, liked him for the relish this officer took in the absolute wickedness of his occupation—a born actor enjoys his life in any station—and so he replied with a wild if internal merriment, for he liked himself again. Dirty he might be, but they were so much filthier. “You wouldn’t care to hear my side of it, would you, Commander?”

  “I don’t know. Look what happened to me the last time I listened to you.”

  The delegate was repeating his tale, word for word, and the cops on the prance, ten feet away, were pacing again up and back the floor of the room.

  “Everything he’s saying is a lie,” the reporter said huskily, “and you know it even better than me.”

  But the Commander’s eyes had lost their light. The bouncing little light in his look, like the white ball which used to bounce over the printed words of songs on a movie screen, was not bouncing now. “Why do you always get into trouble?” the Commander asked.

  Then the phone rang. Lyons went to answer it. He waited, looking at the cops, the cops looking at him.

  Some word must just have come down. When Lyons came back, he was smiling. “Tell me your story again,” he said. He was one of the few people in the world who could wink while looking at you with honest Irish orbs. Now it was obvious they were going to let him go.

  “Why,” asked the Commander, “do you always want to get arrested?”

  The reporter thought of his children, and for an instant tears nearly came. Not real tears so much as—the Victorians used to say—his eyes were wet with dew.

  “Commander, I don’t want to get arrested,” he said.

  “I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Mailer. But it’s your reputation that you like to get arrested.”

  “Newspapers lie all the time. Look what they say about you fellows.”

  Happiness came again into Lyon’s face. “I got,” he said, “to read one of your books.”

  In the next two minutes before they let him out to join his friends, even escorted him to a cab—for the trip was still on to Hefner’s—he talked with Lyons and a city official (who had suddenly appeared) about the beauties of architecture in Chicago. It was a great city, he made a point of telling them. They did not know from which direction he was putting them on.

  And yes, he thought, Chicago was a great city. Finally, it brought everyone into the sort of ratiocinated confrontation which could end a novel about a week in this big city. You could not say that of Miami.

  Of course, he never did find out if shortly before or shortly after his own curious double-bust, the police had charged the McCarthy Headquarters, arrested every kid in sight, beat up on a few, and generally created such consternation that the Senator himself remained in town until Friday afternoon for fear his children would be wasted.

  No, Norman Mailer went with his good drinking friends, Pete Hamill and Doug Kiker, to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion where they had a few last drinks and talked to friends and cheered the end of the week. On the last trip back to the Hilton, Mailer took a pass through Grant Park. It was all but empty. Fifty communicants sat on the grass, mountaineers, varlets, knaves, Hindu saints, musketeers, tank men, and wanly beautiful Yippie girls, while a priest in a violet satin chasuble recited the Mass over their bloody heads and an acolyte held the cross. The sight, by now, after all the sights, seemed perfectly conventional. Then he crossed the line of National Guard for the last time—Horwitz was not there on this sunny Friday morning, and went into the Hilton. On the steps he met Senator McCarthy’s daughter, a lovely and formidable young dark-haired lady, now in a quiet horror over the fury of the bust, and she asked him what he would do about it.

  “I’m going to catch a plane and see my family,” he told her, smiling into the proud disapproval of her eyes. “Dear Miss,” he could have told her, “we will be fighting for forty years.”

  27

  And had no second thoughts about anything all the while he was writing the piece—except for Spiro Agnew. The Greek was conducting himself like a Turk. There was a day when he accused Hubert Humphrey of being soft on Communism. Everyone knew that Communism was the only belief Hubert Humphrey had ever been hard on. Nixon had obviously gotten himself an ignoramus or a liar.

 
; So while the writer thought that the Republic might survive a little longer with old Tricky Dick and New Nixon than Triple Hips, Norman Mailer would probably not vote—not unless it was for Eldridge Cleaver.

  Eldridge at least was there to know that the barricades were building across the street from the camps of barbed wire where the conscience of the world might yet be canned. Poor all of us. The fat is in the fire, and the corn is being popped. Mayor Daley, looking suspiciously like a fat and aged version of tough Truman Capote on ugly pills, describe the shame outsiders visited on Chicago. He was a strong and protective mother of a man, but for his jowl which hung now beneath his neck in that lament of the bull frog which goes:

  I was born to run the world

  And here I am;

  KNEE-DEEP

  KNEE-DEEP

  Perhaps good Mayor Daley’s jowl was the soft underbelly of the new American axis. Put your fingers in V for victory and give a wink. We yet may win, the others are so stupid. Heaven help us when we do.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1968 by Norman Mailer

  Introduction copyright © 2008 by Frank Rich

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Chicago, August 28, 1968; © Bettmann/Corbis

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Mailer, Norman.

  Miami and the siege of Chicago: an informal history of the Republican and Democratic

  conventions of 1968/by Norman Mailer; introduction by Frank Rich.

  p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Reprint. Originally published: New York: D. I. Fine, © 1968. With new introd.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-296-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Republican National Convention (1968 : Miami, Fla.) 2. Democratic National