Norman Mailer Describes Why He Didn’t Join in the Protests Outside of the 1968 Democratic Convention or the Silent Vigil Afterward

Ever modest, Mailer seems to offer that he was too tough to risk a beating by police as well as too tough to risk joining the candlelight vigil afterward protesting the police beatings. The means by which he was able to attain the objectivity necessary to make such statements may have something to do with Mailer referring to himself in the third person as “the reporter”:

The Protests:

“The reporter had an aversion to this. Besides, he was afraid of his own violence. It was not that he was such a good fighter, but he was not altogether courteous either – he had broken a man’s jaw in a fight not so long before, and was not certain the end of that was yet heard…He was not afraid of his own violence because he necessarily thought it would be so heinous to break a policeman’s jaw, good law-abiding citizen that he was! It was more that he was a little concerned with what the policeman’s friends and associates might do to him immediately afterward.”

The Vigil:

“The reporter did not join them…He could see them attacked by gangs, and the thought of taking a terrible beating in this company of non-violent McCarthyites and McGovernites, shoulder to shoulder with Arthur Miller, Jules Fieffer, Theo Bikel and Jeremy Larner, no, if he was going to take a beating, it was best to take it alone or with people he felt close to, people who were not so comparatively innocent of how to fight.”

--Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Actual footage of the reporter's own violence

Favorite Quotes Explained: Part 241

Quote: "I think therefore I am." --Descartes


Explanation: N/A as it's now accepted that Descartes was misquoted and actually said "I think I'd like some ham."

This Day in the History of Crazy: Thomas Eagleton

Thomas Eagleton (September 4, 1929 – March 4, 2007) a United States Senator from Missouri serving from 1968-1987 is perhaps best known for briefly being the Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee, sharing the ticket with George McGovern in 1972. Between 1960 and 1966, Eagleton checked himself into the hospital three times for physical and nervous exhaustion, receiving electroconvulsive therapy twice. The hospitalizations, which were not widely publicized, had little effect on his political aspirations. George McGovern had asked several politicians to join him and run on his ticket including Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and Birch Bayh, all of whom refused. McGovern sought to ask then-ambassador to France and minor celebrity Sargent Shriver to run with him but Shriver was reportedly unreachable by phone on board a flight for Moscow. McGovern next asked Senator Gaylor Nelson who declined but suggested Eagleton. Perhaps frustrated, McGovern asked Eagleton with only minimal background check. Eagleton accepted with alacrity making a decision in the process not to inform McGovern of his history of serious mental health issues including a powerful course of anti-psychotics which allowed him to serve as Senator though they were issued in his wife’s name. The first whiff of Eagleton’s possible instability may have come when he made anonymous mention of McGovern’s fondness of Acid to journalist Robert Novak. It has since been speculated that Novak may have manipulated the overly-suggestible Eagleton. Eventually Eagleton admitted to McGovern some of his history of hospitalizations but admonished McGovern that if he tried to remove him from the ticket he would fight it with everything he had (left). Eventually Eagleton agreed to withdraw but only after McGovern read a statement that Eagleton had prepared which essentially said that Eagleton was not crazy and that it was those who suggested such that were actually crazy. McGovern went on to lose the 1972 presidential election in what was then the second largest landslide in U.S. history.