Word: mailer
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...often outright hostility-of many fellow liberals. Walter Lippmann endorsed Richard Nixon, arguing that the Republican is a "maturer and mellower man" than he used to be and that the Democrats need a period of "rest and recuperation." Murray Kempton wrote that the Democrats "deserve to lose." Novelist Norman Mailer concluded that Nixon might not be all that bad (see THE PRESS). Michigan's New Democratic Coalition refused to endorse the party ticket. California's Young Democrats voted not "to even begin to consider" supporting Humphrey unless he agrees to meet six demands, including a pledge of immediate...
...Norman Mailer, who has had his literary ups and downs, feels that the national political conventions have "encouraged some of his very best writing." This year's conventions are no exception - they may indeed have encouraged his best. With a minimum of the compulsive self-analysis that has characterized his other work, he re-creates in the November Harper's the events, personalities and mood of Miami Beach and Chicago. His reporting is, as always, intensely personal as it probes the darker, unexplored passageways of American political life. But Mailer - Eastern Seaboard exotic, alienated artist, New York practitioner...
Home of the Heave. Yet it is Mailer who most impressively comes to grips with the convention in passages of intuition and eloquence. With his customary sense of apocalyptic drama, he declares that "the country was in a throe, a species of eschatological heave." It may seem obvious, but Mailer's writing overcomes the triteness inherent in describing hog-butchering Chicago as the setting for confrontation; he succeeds in connecting the cries of the bloodied hippies to the eerie death wail of the gutted cattle. "Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made...
...Mailer is scarcely more sparing of other Democrats. He writes of Senator George McGovern: "A Christian sweetness came off him like a psychic aroma-he was a fine and pleasant candidate but for that sweetness. It was excessive. Not artificial, but excessive, as the smell of honeysuckle can be excessive." He describes Gene McCarthy's followers: "Their common denominator seemed to be in some blank area of the soul, a species of disinfected idealism which gave one the impression among them of living in a lobotomized ward of Upper Utopia...
...first Mailer was dismayed at McCarthy's failure to attack Humphrey in debate before the California delegation. Then he came to realize that the Senator was "proceeding on the logic of the saint, as if the first desire of the ONE devil might be to make you the instrument of your own will. God would judge the importance of the event, not man, and God would give the tongue to speak, if tongue was the organ to be manifested. Everything in McCarthy's manner, his quiet voice, his absolute refusal to etch his wit with any hint...