Free Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer

were possible in these bad years, then all was still possible, and the country not stripped of its blessing. New and marvelously complex improvement of a devil, or angel-in-chrysalis, or both—good and evil now at war in the man, Nixon was at least, beneath the near to hermetic boredom of his old presence, the most interesting figure at the convention, or at least so the reporter had decided by the end of the press conference that Tuesday in the morning. Complexities upon this vision were to follow.

11
    The next press conference to be noted was in the French Room of the Fontainebleau for 11:00 A.M. The Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, former assistant to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and leader of the Poor People’s March after King had been assassinated, was scheduled to read a statement and answer questions. While the assembly was nowhere near so large as Nixon’s, close to a hundred reporters must nonetheless have appeared, a considerable number of Negroes among them, and then proceeded to wait. Abernathy had not shown up. About fifteen minutes past the hour, another Negro came to the podium and said that the Reverend was on his way, and could be expected in a few minutes.
    The gossip was livelier. “We had to look for him in five hotels,” said a Black reporter to some other members of the Press, and there was a mental picture of the leader waking heavily, the woes of race, tension, unfulfilled commitment, skipped promises, and the need for militant effort in the day ahead all staring down into whatever kind of peace had been reached the night before in the stretch before sleep.
    Still it was unduly irritating to have to wait at a press conference, and as the minutes went by and annoyance mounted, the reporter became aware after a while of a curious emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before—it was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him—he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the Republican convention itself, this congregation of the clean, the brisk, the orderly, the efficient. A reporter who must attempt to do his job, he had perhaps committed himself too completely to the atmosphere as if better to comprehend the subterranean character of what he saw on the surface, but in any event having passed through such curious pilgrimage—able to look at Richard Nixon with eyes free of hatred!—it was almost as if he resented the presence of Abernathy now (or the missing Abernathy) as if the discomfort of his Black absence made him suddenly contemplate the rotting tooth and ulcerated gum of the white patient. What an obsession was the Negro to the average white American by now. Every time that American turned in his thoughts to the sweetest object of contemplation in his mind’s small town bower, nothing less than America the Beautiful herself—that angel of security at the end of every alley—then there was the face of an accusing rioting Black right in the middle of the dream—smack in the center of the alley—and the obsession was hung on the hook of how to divide the guilt, how much to the white man, how much to the dark? The guiltiest man alive would work around the clock if he could only assign proportions to his guilt; but not to know if one was partially innocent or very guilty had to establish an order of paralysis. Since obsessions dragoon our energy by endless repetitive contemplations of guilt we can neither measure nor forget, political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt. Torrents of energy would be loosed, yes, those same torrents which Hitler had freed in the Germans when he exploded their ten-year obsession with