Read Online Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online

need of it,” he might have said if ever he had addressed a combined meeting of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association and the Mattachine Society.) So he worked into the problem of Vietnam by starting at A and also by starting at Z which he called a “two-pronged approach.” He was for a negotiated settlement, he was for maintaining military strength because that would be the only way to “reach negotiated settlement of the war on an honorable basis.” Later he was to talk of negotiations with “the next superpower, Communist China.” He spoke patiently, with clarity, gently, not badly but for an unfortunate half-smile pasted to his face. The question would come, and he would back-hand it with his glove or trap it; like all politicians he had a considered answer for every question, but he gave structure to his answers, even a certain relish for their dialectical complexity. Where once he had pretended to think in sentimentalities and slogans, now he held the question up, worked over it, deployed it, amplified it, corrected its tendency, offered an aside (usually an attempt to be humorous) revealed its contradiction, and then declared a statement. With it all, a sensitivity almost palpable to the reservations of the Press about his character, his motive, and his good intention. He still had no natural touch with them, his half-smile while he listened was unhappy, for it had nowhere to go but into a full smile and his full smile was as false as false teeth, a pure exercise of will. You could all but see the signal pass from his brain to his jaw. “SMILE,” said the signal, and so he flashed teeth in a painful kind of joyous grimace which spoke of some shrinkage in the liver, or the gut, which he would have to repair afterward by other medicine than good-fellowship. (By winning the Presidency, perhaps.) He had always had the ability to violate his own nature absolutely if that happened to be necessary to his will—there had never been anyone in American life so resolutely phony as Richard Nixon, nor anyone so transcendentally successful by such means—small wonder half the electorate had regarded him for years as equal to a disease. But he was less phony now, that was the miracle , he had moved from a position of total ambition and total alienation from his own person (at the time of Checkers, the dog speech) to a place now where he was halfway conciliated with his own self. As he spoke, he kept going in and out of focus, true one instant, phony the next, then quietly correcting the false step.
    Question from the Press: You emphasized the change in the country and abroad. Has this led you to change your thinking in any shape or form specifically?
    Answer: It certainly has . (But he was too eager. Old Nixon was always ready to please with good straight American boyhood enthusiasm. So he tacked back, his voice throttled down.) As the facts change, any intelligent man (firm but self-deprecatory, he is including the Press with himself) does change his approaches to the problems . (Now sharp awareness of the next Press attitude.) It does not mean that he is an opportunist . (Now modestly, reasonably.) It means only that he is a pragmatist, a realist, applying principles to the new situations . (Now he will deploy some of the resources of his answer.) For example ... in preparing the acceptance speech I hope to give next Thursday, I was reading over my acceptance speech in 1960, and I thought then it was, frankly, quite a good speech. But I realize how irrelevant much of what I said in 1960 in foreign affairs was to the problems of today . (The admission was startling. The Old Nixon was never wrong. Now, he exploited the shift in a move to his political left, pure New Nixon.) Then the Communist world was a monolithic world. Today it is a split world, schizophrenic, with ... great diversity ... in Eastern Europe (a wholesome admission for anyone who had labored in John Foster Dulles’