Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer

Author:Norman Mailer [Mailer, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics, Non-Fiction, Writing, War
ISBN: 9780297178088
Google: Ll-LeLqzd9YC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 13642100
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1968-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

8

Tuesday morning, the California delegation met in the Grand Ballroom of the LaSalle to hear an impromptu debate between Senator McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, and Senator McGovern. There had been another debate planned for television between Humphrey and McCarthy, but it had never taken place. When McGovern and Lester Maddox announced their candidacies, they insisted at the same time on joining the debate. In the confusion, Humphrey had withdrawn.

Now he was back, however. The onus of refusing to debate McCarthy would no longer be his—besides it was too late to gain or lose more than a few votes by this kind of activity, and indeed, McGovern who was to do very well this particular morning, probably did not gain a total of twenty extra delegates from his efforts. Politics is property, and to fall in love with a man’s voice sufficiently to vote for him next day is not to get much return for your holding—besides, the votes McGovern stole were in the main from McCarthy, who was not going to give much return either.

The Grand Ballroom of the LaSalle was on the nineteenth floor, and a noble room, perhaps fifty feet wide, three times as long, with an arched ceiling thirty feet high. Nearly a thousand delegates, guests and newspapermen were to crowd into its space, a hunger for confrontation feeding not only the crowds of students and Yippies in the streets below, but the delegates and the Press themselves, as if the frustration of listening to Johnson and Humphrey defend the war for more than four years had begun unconscious dialogues in many a man and woman not accustomed to muttering to themselves on the street—indeed with proper warning twenty thousand tickets could have been sold in a day for this meeting of the three men.

Yet, it proved curiously anti-climactic. If the atmosphere of the Ballroom was tense, theatrical, even historical, no great debate ensued. The technologies of television and convention politics were often curious, they seemed calculated to work to the deterrence of dramatic possibility, and nowhere was this more evident than in the format arrived at (perhaps hammered out by Humphreyites, for it benefited no one else) since it left each man to make a ten-minute opening statement, then threw the meeting open to questions from the delegates. Each candidate who was asked a question could reply for three minutes, his opponents could comment for two minutes. At the end a short summation was in order for each. It was a decorous format, designed precisely to inhibit the likelihood of a continuing confrontation between the principals, since any quarrel which started could hardly continue beyond the time allotted to each question. Politics is property, and Humphrey’s property here was twenty years of service in the Senate and the Administration—he wasn’t about to limit debate to a slug-fest on Vietnam, no, he would sit on his seat and let the format cover other subjects as well, legislative service, the Supreme Court, willingness to support Democratic candidates; they got to talk about Vietnam for a few minutes.

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