“It was as if the historical temperature in America went up every month.”

That’s Norman Mailer writing in 1968 about the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The New York Review of Books has just reissued Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago; this is a link to my review in Newsday. And here are some excerpts from the book:

Nelson Rockefeller’s mouth

He had only one flaw—an odd and unpleasant mouth, a catfish mouth, wide, unnaturally wide with very thin lips. In the center of the mouth there seemed almost another mouth which did the speaking, somewhat thicker lips which pursed, opened, deliberated—all the while the slit-thin corners of the mouth seemed off on their own, not really moving with the center.

Richard Nixon’s hair

Just a glimpse: he has a sunburn—his forehead is bright pink. Then he has made it into the hotel, pushed from behind, hands in hand-shakes from the front, hair recognizable—it is curlier than most and combed in roller coaster waves, not unreminiscent of the head of hair on Gore Vidal. (But where was Nixon’s Breckenridge?)

A barricade in Chicago

Twenty or thirty of the kids were building a barricade. They brought in park benches and picnic tables, and ran it a distance of fifty feet, then a hundred feet. A barricade perhaps six feet high. It made no sense. It stood in the middle of the field and there were no knolls nor defiles at the flanks to keep the barricade from being turned—the police cars would merely drive around it, or tear-gas trucks would push through it.

Peace in Vietnam

Then [Hubert Humphrey] called for Peace in Vietnam, and the crowd roared and the band played Dianas as if he had made a glorious pass. Peace in Vietnam was now the property of all politicians; Peace in Vietnam was the girl who had gone to bed with a thousand different guys, but always took a bath, and so was a virgin. Hubert felt like a virgin every time he talked of Peace in Vietnam.

A Jeep

He came to a stop before a Jeep with a rectangle of barbed wire on its front. In the exhibition-hall glamour of the searchlight, it glistened like a hard-shell insect eight feet long with an unforgettable radar-like conception of a mouth. He thought it the most degrading instrument of war he had ever seen; it spoke of a gulf between the people who would administer the law and the people who would be on the wrong side at the wrong minute.

Update: See Tom Sutpen’s Miniseries #10: Convention City for visuals.