Master of Conventions

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And it was from Kempton that Mailer borrowed what eventually became the running theme and essential insight of his attendance at both events:

Politics is property … a delegate’s vote is his holding—he will give it up without return no more than a man will sign over his house entire to a worthy cause.

More self-evident, perhaps, among the Chamber of Commerce types in Miami (and Nelson Rockefeller, with his “catfish mouth”), this extended metaphor worked particularly well—and Mailer did his level best to extend it—in the gaunt, unsentimental world of Chicago-stockyard ward-heeling: that rugged inland coast on which the waves of ’60s idealism broke in vain. It wasn’t to be “new phalanxes of order” that were conjured. It was the bitter old phalanx of the Daley machine and the Chicago PD. Of necessity, the Illinois chapter was much longer and more intense than the Florida one, but before we shift the scene it is worth saluting Mailer, first for seeing clearly that Nixon would be “the one” and second for guessing that Ronald Reagan might well be the next one. His method in the second case was equally intuitive. He noticed the clever rebound from the Goldwater defeat while also understanding the purely showbiz aspect:

If [Reagan] didn’t get the girl, it was because he was too good a guy to be overwhelmingly attractive. That was all right. He would grit his teeth and get the girl next time out. Since this was conceivably the inner sex drama of half of respectable America, he was wildly popular with Republicans. For a party which prided itself on its common sense, they were curiously, even outrageously, sentimental.

If the aperçu in that last sentence was slightly stronger than the grammar in which it was expressed, it must be said in general that for deadline prose, this was written to an exceedingly high standard. It was a goodish year for the literary man as frontline magazine reporter: quitting Lincoln Park as he sensed violent confrontation that would go beyond his probable endurance, Mailer ran into Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, and Terry Southern on their way in. And one guesses a very slight problem of journalistic etiquette here, in that Mailer was the accredited correspondent of Harper’s magazine, while Burroughs and Genet had been retained by Esquire, and it would have made a rather better story if it had been Mailer arriving while the others were getting themselves discreetly out of the line of fire, instead of the other way about.

Could that gifted but gruesome twosome of Burroughs and Genet help to explain Mailer’s recurrence to the threat of nihilism? He hated the war and the police and had contempt for the mobbed-up big mayors and union men who constituted the muscle of the Democrats. But he found Eugene McCarthy brittle and dislikable, and McCarthy supporters addicted to defeat. Then there was this:

He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on—not as it was going, not Vietnam—but what price was he really willing to pay?

Mailer here was being plaintive but honest, as in the case of his admission of his Lincoln Park funk. It was becoming another of those moments where the best lacked all conviction while the worst … well, we know how that goes. Incidentally, one can’t be too careful about citing familiar poetry. Mailer quotes Edward Kennedy as saying of Bobby’s supporters that they had “followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eye,” and one suddenly realizes that he thinks he is quoting Teddy himself rather than Robert Browning’s famous lines from “The Lost Leader.” As Joan Didion once observed, there are those who say “No man is an island” who firmly believe that they are echoing Ernest Hemingway.

Our Democratic primaries are run the way they are now mainly because of the way they were run then. Mailer drily watched the roll call in Chicago and noted that the state that put Hubert Humphrey over the top (Pennsylvania) was the one where McCarthy had received 90 percent of the primary votes. To touch on another comparison with today’s politics, Mailer noticed in Miami that Nixon had won the nomination in such a way as to also win the election: in other words, without splitting or embittering his party. These and similar reflections are of interest and value in a year when the Democratic nominee is, in one of his many protean incarnations, a Chicago South Side operator with a wife whose father was a Daley precinct captain, while the Republican candidate is a repository of something in which almost nobody in 1968 would ever have believed: America’s residual pride about its own valor in Vietnam. The almost-closing line of the book is the prediction that Mailer wishes he had made to Eugene McCarthy’s daughter: “Dear Miss, we will be fighting for forty years.” He got that right, among many other things.

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