The Infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as Seen by Novelist Norman Mailer
Protesters standing in front of a row of National Guard soldiers, across the street from the Hilton Hotel at Grant Park, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 26, 1968.
Credit: Warren K. Leffler/Wikimedia Commons
The Infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as Seen by Novelist Norman Mailer
August 20, 2024
In Norman Mailer’s book, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, he writes of the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago, “The convention was the wildest Democratic convention in decades, perhaps in more than forty years, and the bitterest, the most violent, the most disorderly, most painful, and in certain ways the most uncontrolled…”
The famed writer had first won recognition for novels, and brought some of the techniques and first-person narrative of that fiction to his reporting on such events as the political conventions that nominated John F. Kennedy for president in 1960 and Barry Goldwater in 1964. (Previous conventions “had encouraged some of his very best writing,” he writes.) He won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Armies of the Night, his book on the 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon, in which he took part and during which he was arrested.
He was thus a fitting candidate to write for Harper’s about the political conventions in 1968, a year in which debates over the Vietnam War split the Democratic Party in two. His long pieces for Harper’s were then published in book form as Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
But, as anti-war protesters gathered in Lincoln and Grant Parks and were brutally attacked by the police while Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey locked up the nomination as a supporter of Johnson’s efforts in Vietnam, Mailer found himself adrift. His favored candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated several months earlier, and Mailer couldn’t find enthusiasm for Eugene McCarthy, who had proved Johnson’s weakness and helped lead him to suspend his campaign.
Despite taking part in anti-war protests before and even addressing some of the demonstrators in Chicago, Mailer also didn’t quite feel at home amongst the “Yippies” and other young protesters. He missed many of the big moments out on the streets, unlike his fellow reporters/novelists William Burroughs and Jean Genet, to his ambivalent regret. He ends the book by nearly provoking arrest twice and then slinking off to drink at the Playboy mansion.
Indeed, Mailer’s confused feelings about the country and his relation to its tumultuous politics are one of the main dramas of Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which is itself a psychodrama about the nation, its politicians, and its seemingly apocalyptic moment of reckoning. Here are some of Mailer’s observations, quips, and analyses of the 1968 political conventions, as the DNC once again returns to Chicago.
The Prelude to the Conventions
“No convention ever had such events for prelude,” Mailer writes. Lyndon B. Johnson had suspended his re-election bid in the face of opposition to the Vietnam War, among other things. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; riots swept Black neighborhoods of major cities. Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated, leaving anti-war Democrats with the much less popular Eugene McCarthy and late-entering George McGovern. Students disrupted campuses with anti-war protests, including at Columbia. “It was as if the historical temperature in America went up every month,” Mailer writes.
Mailer on the Republican National Convention in Miami
“The complaints [among journalists] were unanimous that this was the dullest convention anyone could remember,” Mailer writes. He even leaves before the end, despite his assignment to cover it as a journalist, watching Nixon’s acceptance speech on TV at home. He has “the sad knowledge that he could cover it better on television than if he had been there,” foreseeing the increasingly televised nature of politics. “Soon they would hold conventions in TV studios,” he writes.
He gets a look at Richard Nixon, whom he dislikes but comes to have a grudging admiration for. “There had never been anyone in American life so resolutely phony as Richard Nixon, nor anyone so transcendentally successful by such means…But he was less phony now, that was the miracle.”
He also makes an ominous prediction, in an election in which Nixon ran as a law and order candidate who nevertheless tried to moderate his platform with appeals to a “silent majority.” “Political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt. Torrents of energy would be loosed, yes, those same torrents which Hitler had freed in the Germans when he exploded their ten-year obsession with whether they had lost the war through betrayal or through material weakness,” Mailer writes.
Mailer on Chicago
Mailer does not like Miami. He loves Chicago, which reminds him of his native Brooklyn. “Chicago is the great American city,” he writes. “Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.” Chicagoans have “muscles on their back, hot eats around the corner, neighborhoods which dripped with the sauce of local legend, and real city architecture, brownstones with different windows on every floor, vistas for miles of red-brick and two-family wood-frame houses with balconies and porches, runty stunted trees rich as farmland in their promise of tenderness the first city evenings of spring…”
The convention took place near the stockyards, at the now-demolished International Amphitheatre. “The Amphitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention,” he writes. “Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club.” He sees in the brutality of the stockyards and their stench the existence of a hard city – with a powerful mayor to match, in Richard J. Daley.
“At his best, he looked respectable enough to be coach of the Chicago Bears,” Mailer writes of Daley, whom he depicts as being the enforcing arm of the absent Johnson in Chicago, keeping delegates in line to nominate Humphrey.
But the chaos of the country and convention overtake even this hard town: “the city was washed with the air of battle…So fear was in these empty streets, and the anger of the city at its own fear…”
Mailer on the Democratic National Convention
Despite his inability to warm to McCarthy, after the Minnesota senator has privately given up his bid for president by offering his delegates to an unwilling Ted Kennedy, Mailer writes that “Yes, the reporter had met many candidates, but McCarthy was the first who felt like a President, or at least felt like a President…”
“McGovern was the friendliest man in Chicago,” Mailer writes of the late-entering South Dakota senator who would become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972 and lose to Nixon. “There was nobody nicer or cleaner than George McGovern in the city of Chicago.”
Hubert Humphrey, the nominee, comes in mainly for disdain as “the candidate least popular and least qualified by strength, dignity, or imagination to lead.” While Humphrey gives his acceptance speech, Mailer avers that, “Everybody knew he would lose.”
The biggest cheers at a divisive and rowdy convention, according to Mailer, came when a film celebrating the assassinated Bobby Kennedy was shown. Otherwise, “an air of outrage, hysteria, panic, wild rumor, unruly outburst, fury, madness, gallows humor, and gloom hung over nominating night at the convention.”
By then, the police had violently attacked protesters, journalists, and even passers-by on Michigan Avenue in a notorious incident documented on cameras. “A political man could get killed in this town by a cop, was the general sentiment, and who would dare to look the Mayor in the eye?” Mailer writes of the atmosphere afterward at the convention. “To the most liberal of the legislators and delegates on the floor must have come the real panic of wondering: was this how it felt with the Nazis when first they came in…”
Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff nominates McGovern and denounces “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” in what Mailer describes as an otherwise “boring” speech. “His voice had quavered a hint with indignation and with fear, but he had said it, and Daley was on his feet, Daley was shaking his fist at the podium, Daley was mouthing words,” Mailer thinks telling Ribicoff to “go have carnal relations with himself.”
Mailer laments that, “On the greatest national issue any convention had faced since the second world war, [the war in Vietnam], debate would provide an hour of speech for each side.” After the chaos of the convention, he observes that, “the party system might finally be dead. For by brute fact there were six or seven parties in America now…”
Mailer on the protests in Chicago
“They were young men who were not going to Vietnam. So they would show every lover of war in Vietnam that the reason they did not go was not for lack of the courage to fight,” Mailer writes of the “odd unkempt children” protesting in Lincoln and Grant Parks in the face of easily stirred policemen. They “had had the courage to live at war for four days in a city which was run by a beast.”
Watching high above from the 30-floor “fort” of the Michigan Avenue Hilton where many Democratic delegates were staying, Mailer describes the notorious attack of police on protesters outside. “There, dammed by police on three sides, and cut off from the wagons of the Poor People’s March, there right beneath the windows of the Hilton which looked down on Grant Park and Michigan Avenue, the stationary march was abruptly attacked. The police attacked with tear gas, with Mace, and with clubs, they attacked like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing.”
He and others in the hotel “looked down now into the murderous paradigm of Vietnam there beneath them at this huge intersection of this great city.” He argues that it would be “more accurate to call it the massacre, since it was sudden, unprovoked and total” on the part of the police.
Astoundingly, no one was killed. But “the Democratic Party had here broken in two before the eyes of a nation like Melville’s whale charging right out of the sea.”
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