WHEN THE MINERAL Dukakis and the vegetable Bush are nominated in Atlanta and New Orleans, I won’t be there. I haven’t been to a political convention since Chicago, 1968, which spoiled me forever for jihads and the circus. After Wagner’s Ring, who needs Gilbert and Sullivan? But there will be lots of other people looking on in 1988 who weren’t invited twenty years ago, and that’s terrific.
In Chicago in 1968 I was half of a two-person team from the New Statesman. My job was to report from the slaughterhouse floor. I’d sleep each night with the California delegation in the LaSalle Hotel. I’d wake each dawn to a phone call from a frantic editor who was positive—in London!—that Teddy Camelot was closing fast. I’d lurch each afternoon by chartered bus through barbed-wire checkpoints to a security frisk at the International Amphitheater, after which I’d find the press gallery already preempted by Mayor Daley’s municipal goons. That was the Old Politics.
The New Politics was on the streets, where the New Statesman sent Nora Sayre. On the streets were 12,000 paranoid Chicago cops, 6,000 National Guardsmen, 1,000 agents of the FBI, and another 7,000 federal troops, including units of the 101st Airborne. Against such law and order agitated fewer than 4,000 dissidents, one in six an undercover Fed. Sayre and I would rendezvous to telex at the Hilton, with tear gas in our eyes. My convention was merely literary, as in Marat/Sade: The Persecution and Assassination of the Democratic Party as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Chicago. Sayre—down there in the middle of the magic and the blood, the cop paranoia, the Yippie freak-out, and the Castroite delusional systems of the New Left Pugachevs—got all the history.
Her report of it was brilliant. It was also (almost) singular. Except for Sayre, and Mary McGrory from the Washington Star, and Jill Krementz taking combat photographs, women didn’t report Chicago. Without wanting to, I saw Norman Mailer for Harper’s, Brock Brower for Life, Jean Genet and William Burroughs for Esquire, and Teddy White for God. The New York Times sent Harrison Salisbury, Tony Lukas, and Tom Wicker. The Washington Post sent Nick von Hoffman. Wilfrid Sheed, Garry Wills, and Terry Southern scribbled madly. Dan Rather and Mike Wallace were roughed up on the convention floor, and John Chancellor was arrested, and Walter Cronkite told the nation, “I want to pack my bags and get out of this city.”
But it seems not to have occurred to a single important editor to solicit the opinion of a single female writer. The, ah, women’s magazines ignored the show. Ms. didn’t exist. Gloria Steinem was in Chicago, but working for McGovern. Betty Friedan was likewise there, but so was Ann Landers, neither on assignment. Elinor Langer was on the streets, but wouldn’t write about it until 1973 in Working Papers. Who might have been asked?
Well, in 1968, Joan Didion had already written about the Black Panthers; Francine du Plessix Gray, about the Catholic Left; and Elizabeth Hardwick, about the march on Selma and the murder of Martin Luther King. Susan Sontag had already been to Vietnam, and so had Mary McCarthy. If McCarthy, why not Lillian Hellman? And if Hellman, why not Diana Trilling? Or Grace Paley, a veteran peace groupie? For some old-fashioned radical politics, Jessica Mitford would have been fun, with Ayn Rand for a reactionary rebuttal. M.F.K. Fisher was already an expert on Nixon’s Whittier, and Pauline Kael had trafficked with Trotskyites in Berkeley, and Joyce Carol Oates was writing a novel about race riots in Detroit, and if any of this seems farfetched, ask yourself what Jean Genet was doing in Chicago?
It would have been easy, it didn’t happen, but never again. The left in 1968, in spite of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, was as male chauvinist as the rest of the nation. (See Stokely Carmichael’s infamous diktat, “The only position for women in the Movement is prone.”) But times changed with the Redstockings Manifesto and Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Damn” in 1969, and Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to All That” in a feminized Rat in 1970, after which came Ms.
In Atlanta and New Orleans, you’ll see Ellen Goodman for the Boston Globe and Molly Ivins for the Dallas Times Herald, as well as Sayre for Grand Street and Jane O’Reilly for Spy. For the New York Times expect Felicity Barringer, Maureen Dowd, Julie Johnson, Judith Miller, Joyce Purnick, Robin Toner, and, of course, their national editor, Soma Golden. CBS is sending Betsy Aaron, Diane Sawyer, Susan Spencer, Lesley Stahl, and Kathleen Sullivan. For ABC, watch for Cokie Roberts; for CNN, Mary Alice Williams…. We ought, for once, to be pleased with ourselves.