A Great Writer at the 1968 Democratic Disaster / David Denby. In: The New Yorker August 26, 2018

Fifty years ago this week, the Democrats held their National Convention in Chicago (August 26th to 29th), an assembly torn apart by pro- and antiwar factions in the hall and violent clashes in the street. It was the convention that, in effect, turned the country over to Richard Nixon and led to six more years of war in Vietnam. From a contemporary point of view, the only element that redeems the event from complete sorrow is the scathing and poetic book that Norman Mailer wrote about it, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” one of the essential works of American reporting.
Mailer got going as a political reporter in 1960 when he covered the Democratic National Convention that summer—the Kennedy convention—for Esquire. His piece was called “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” and it caused a sensation. Here was this hipster intellectual and novelist from New York, immersed in the city’s literary life, in the Beats, in Dostoevsky and Hemingway and Faulkner, facing down the great American dullness of delegates and mediocre speeches and the booze-and-cigar fog of compromise and bargain. What was he doing among such fellows?
A convention is a gathering of established and occasionally insurgent people from big cities, suburbs, and small towns, and from all levels of income and power. For Mailer, it was fascinating—the faces, the bodies, the voices, the sound of crowds, the décor and smell of the gathering places, the backwash, the undertones, the unconscious of the event. The very ordinariness of convention politics was richly significant if you bothered to wonder what it all meant. Mailer unlocked his powers of evocation, and, by the time he was done, no one, not even the wrathfully witty H. L. Mencken, had ever written of political people—both hacks and powers—with such uproarious verve, with so tactile a command of surfaces and so great an interest in the national mysteries. Mailer had the richest sensibility in American prose (Gore Vidal, by contrast, seems dryly witty and ungenerous). In this report, Mailer functioned as a critic of souls.
At the center of the convention, there was John F. Kennedy, who was something of an enigma—an unknown who nevertheless gave hope:

Kennedy seemed at times like a young professor whose manner was adequate for the classroom, but whose mind was off in some intricacy of the Ph.D. thesis he was writing. Perhaps one can give a sense of the discrepancy by saying that he was like an actor who had been cast as the candidate, a good actor, but not a great one—you were aware all the time that the role was one thing and the man another—they did not coincide, the actor seemed a touch too aloof (as, let us say, Gregory Peck is usually too aloof) to become the part. Yet one had little sense of whether to value this elusiveness, or to beware of it. One could be witnessing the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself. .... [mehr] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-great-writer-at-the-1968-democratic-disaster