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

world.) ... after an era of confrontation ... we now enter an era of negotiations with the Soviet Union .
    While he was never in trouble with the questions, growing surer and surer of himself as he went on, the tension still persisted between his actual presence as a man not altogether alien to the abyss of a real problem, and the political practitioner of his youth, that snake-oil salesman who was never back of any idea he sold, but always off to the side where he might observe its effect on the sucker. The New Nixon groped and searched for the common touch he had once been able to slip into the old folks with the ease of an incubus on a spinster. Now he tried to use slang, put quotes around it with a touching, almost pathetic, reminder of Nice-Nellyism, the inhibition of the good clean church upbringing of his youth insisting on exhibiting itself, as if he were saying with a YMCA slick snicker, “After we break into slang, there’s always the danger of the party getting rough .” It was that fatal prissiness which must have driven him years ago into all the militaristic muscle-bending witch-hunting foam-rubber virilities of the young Senator and the young Vice President. So, now he talked self-consciously of how the members of his staff, counting delegates, were “playing what we call ‘the strong game.’ ” SMILE said his brain. FLASH went the teeth. But his voice seemed to give away that, whatever they called it, they probably didn’t call it “the strong game,” or if they did, he didn’t. So he framed little phrases. Like “a leg-up.” Or “my intuition, my ‘gut feelings,’ so to speak.” Deferential air followed by SMILE—FLASH. Was it possible that one of the secrets of Old Nixon was that his psyche had been trapped in rock-formations, nay, geological strata of Sunday school inhibitions? Was it even possible that he was a good man, not a bad man, a good man who had been trapped by an early milieu whose habits had left him with such innocence about three-quarters of the world’s experience that he had become an absolute monster of opportunism about the quarter he comprehended all too well? Listening to Nixon now, studying his new modesty, it was impossible to tell whether he was a serious man on the path of returning to his own true seriousness, out to unite the nation again as he promised with every remark: “Reconciliation of the races is a primary objective of the United States,” or whether the young devil had reconstituted himself into a more consummate devil, Old Scratch as a modern Abe Lincoln of modesty.
    Question from the Press: A little less than six years ago, after your defeat for the Governorship of California, you announced at the ensuing press conference that that was going to be your last news conference. Could you recall for us this morning two or three of the most important points in your own thinking which made you reverse that statement and now reach for political office on the highest level?
    Answer: Had there not been the division of the Republican Party in 1964 and had there not been the vacuum of leadership that was created by that division and by that defeat, I would not be here today .... I believe that my travels around the country and the world in this period of contemplation and this period of withdrawal from the political scene (some dark light of happiness now in his eye, as if withdrawal and contemplation had given him the first deep pleasures, or perhaps the first real religious pleasures of his life) in which I have had a chance to observe not only the United States but the world, has led me to the conclusion that returning to the arena was something that I should do (said almost as if he had heard a voice in some visitation of the night)— not that I consider myself to be an indispensable man . (Said agreeably in a relaxed tone as if he had thought indeed to the bottom of this and had found the