Norman Mailer: SEARCHING FOR DELIVERANCE

 Imagine a nation in which the Right and the Left unite to combat the unchecked power of corporate America and the craven accommodations of Bill Clinton’s Boutique Politics. That time could yet come, says the author, who finds Patrick J. Buchanan an authentic populist and a most unlikely soul mate in the pursuit of a radical new society.

AUGUST 11996 NORMAN MAILER

Source: Esquire Magazine, 1996

Imagine a nation in which the Right and the Left unite to combat the unchecked power of corporate America and the craven accommodations of Bill Clinton’s Boutique Politics. That time could yet come, says the author, who finds Patrick J. Buchanan an authentic populist and a most unlikely soul mate in the pursuit of a radical new society.

A Political Encounter

PERHAPS IT CAN BE SAID THAT CLOSE TO FIFTY YEARS OF the cold war had to go by before Patrick J. Buchanan and Norman Mailer could speak to each other through a long afternoon.

Since it was Norman Mailer who sought the interview, we may as well begin with the motive. He was approaching a conservative as far to the right as Pat Buchanan. Why? The answer, clear to hand, is that during the Republican primary in New Hampshire, Buchanan had spoken not as a conservative but as a left-conservative. Since Mailer had for years been assuming that he was the only left-conservative in the land, he now had the curious pleasure of discovering that he was half of a two-man band. Of course, the novelist, by his own measure, was two-thirds left and one-third conservative, whereas Buchanan had to be, at quick estimate, three quarters conservative. Nonetheless, some agreement might be found. Mailer had become so exercised, so infuriated, by what was happening in the country, the Congress, and the Clinton administration that he had been ready to run in the Democratic primary for president. He had actually seen himself traveling through New Hampshire in the fall of 1995 and the winter of 1996. He would campaign without money, without a staff. Perhaps a skeleton staff. Of course, he would have a name—of sorts—to attract some media attention, and he was not modest about the force of the ideas he would introduce while campaigning against Bill Clinton.

Nonetheless, he was no recognizable grade of presidential timber. His wife made it plain. In quiet tones he had come to know all too well—the steel in the voice of a soft spoken southern woman is as palpable as the cutting edge of a Damascene blade—his wife promised that she would leave him if he dared to declare. She was furious that he saw it as a conceivable effort. Worse!—as a breath of fresh air! For the nation! Considering that this was an age to uncover the darkest secrets in each candidate’s life, the author had pictured himself saying to the press: “I’ve been married six times. I committed a felonious assault against my second wife. I’ve been untrue to every woman I cared about. Gentlemen and ladies of the press: Do your worst! I’ve broken through the media barrier. There’s nothing to ransack in the closet.”

It was a speech he could utter in the lively if private amphitheater of his mind, but he knew his wife was not without reason. The glare generated by the feeding frenzy of the media would blind the public to every political insight he hoped to offer. The real substance of his thought, such as it was, could only be injured by a candidacy. It was the American presidency, after all. As soon could the Marquis de Sade have proposed himself for the papacy.

Besides, Mailer no longer had the simple strength to campaign. He was seventy-three years old, and running for office called for stamina. Even a mediocre politician who could bring off a successful candidacy was entitled to respect, as much respect as one would give a mediocre but nonetheless professional athlete. When he had run for mayor during the New York City primaries in the spring of 1969—and that was more than twenty-five years ago!—he had discovered by the middle of a three-month campaign that he had dwindled; he was, by that point, only half as good as when he’d commenced. The rest of him had been consumed by endless campaigning through eighteen-hour workdays. Whenever one took off even an hour in the course of an uphill campaign, one lost a few good votes. You had neglected to visit one more place. At the end of the day, you drank. Booze was equal to gasoline. The demands of a campaign were inexorable. As soon get into condition for a fifteen-round fight as for a three-month campaign. By 1995, twenty-six years later, he came to realize that he was, implacable verdict, too old. Too old to run uphill. So he would not try to install himself in the immortal shade of Eugene McCarthy’s surprise showing against Lyndon Johnson in 1968; he would not go up to New Hampshire to campaign against Clinton. His wife was right. The reputation was hopeless and the energies, by his own measure, too limited.

Yet it gnawed at his opinion of himself that Clinton’s nomination in 1996 would not be contested. Having belonged to the legion of enthusiasts for Bill and Hillary in ’92, he had been hopeful that the candidate and his wife would help to bring forth a new era for a nation addicted, by the end of the cold war, to a host of foul habits. Before long, he had been bitterly disappointed. Clinton soon demonstrated a resolute inability to draw a line in the sand. There had not been a single idea for which the new president seemed ready to suffer the risk of political death. At the start, he had squandered his presidential patrimony in a feeble and ill-conceived notion of bringing gay men openly into the military, a whole failure to comprehend that the military was the greatest institution known to humankind for developing rites of sacramental male bonding—the final defense, so to speak, against homosexuality itself.

From the outset, few were the male Americans, therefore, who did not know that we had a new leader who was psychically blind, or innocent, or egregiously vain! This attempt so injured Clinton’s reputation for good judgment that the Republicans were encouraged to recognize that they could defeat a universal-health-care bill of which the country was much in need, even if the corporate cohorts of the Republicans had found it inimical to their higher-level profits.

Clinton soon proceeded to become too many things to too many: pro-choice, pro-feminist, pro-black, pro-gay, pro-church-on-Sunday, pro-family-values, pro-Hollywood, even pro-corporate-business to the degree they would accept him; if it came to it, and it would, he would be promilitary, pro-combat. Wars were the first emolument of incumbency!

It certainly had to be said: Bill was, by now, bedded down with every special-interest group in the Democratic party and with a good fraction of the opposition—a species of political diddling that Mailer had come to call Boutique Politics. Clinton had not steered a navigable course. Instead, the vessel of the Democratic party was becalmed. Separate banks of oars, strained upon by separate echelons of galley slaves in the White House, pulled in opposite directions. Where were the gays to be found who would pool resources with blacks? Or vice versa? And everyone knew that the leader was not going to die for a political idea unless it was pro-choice. There, he had no choice. Female liberationists would dismember Bill Clinton if he wavered. Indeed, it may have been the only matter on which he had not compromised with the Republicans.

The Second Government

OF COURSE, THE INANITION OF CLINTON’S ADMINISTRATION was but in part his fault. With the end of the cold war, the United States had lost an essential paranoid fiction, precisely that dramatic myth that had supported the wellbeing of the American system for forty-five years. We had had an evil empire as our enemy, and it had been invaluable to us. What a shock for the system to discover by the end of the cold war that this evil empire was but a poor thing—a Third World country—that needed our economic support to prevent a descent into chaos.

The abrupt disappearance of this once-trustworthy fiction helped to produce a distrust of our government so profound that many a militia patriot was ready to fight the FBI down to the last man. Paranoia being a state of imbalance that lives on absolute answers, the militia, in company with some sizable number of Americans, had come to believe that the federal government was engaged in a worldwide plot to hand America over to international bankers. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund was giving $10 billion to the Russians.

Our erstwhile candidate suspected, however, that the militia was mistaking the American government for another force that might be dominating our lives more closely. The feds, after all, were a gaggle of highly separated institutions, bureaucratic mills, and grassroots extensions; we all know how they aid and certainly impede the average American in a thousand if not a million ways.

Yet on reflection, it is hard to conceive of the federal government as owning so purposeful a will that it controls an alien force that is able to come creeping into our beds. A more appropriate name for the source of the phenomenon— creepage!—has to be technology with its half-compatible parents, the U. S. government and the U. S. corporation. And of the two, it was the corporation (if you were seeking to detect an invisible force able to control your life despite yourself) that looked to be the likelier villain.

After all, the federal government was always under examination. Monitored by the cold and venal eye of Congress and by the opportunistic eye of the media, it was always under scrutiny, whereas the Corporation, which henceforth will be capitalized (for it is a Second Government!), could sequester itself from inquiry with echelons of lawyers and vaults of massive banks. Within its worldwide net, a horde of secrets worked like termites to generate money.

So for decades, with increasing skill, the Corporation had been successful in influencing, corrupting, motivating, stultifying, and overstimulating the youth of America. Indeed, the Communist party of the Soviet Union had never been remotely as successful at subverting its young. Any young Russian with wit or inner fire could ignore communist propaganda in his private life, mock it, repudiate it. Not only had Soviet attempts at brainwashing been heavy, absurdly heavy, but—fell omission!—insufficiently insidious.

The U. S. Corporation, however, had flooded American lives with plastic from the cradle to the grave; it had voided architecture of its art by building huge, faceless office buildings and/or high-rise condominiums that proceeded to destroy the faces of our cities. It had inundated all the nerve centers of the American psyche with television. It had helped to uproot our sense of the past. And the need of the Corporation to market what it made had long invaded our personal lives. Advertising permeated the clock of our days.

Mailer could even recognize that he hated this Second Government, the Corporation, with something like the same intensity that the militias brought to their passion against the U. S. government.

The Populist on the Hoof

ONTO THIS STAGE OF THE AUTHORS MIND ENTERS Buchanan in the Republican primaries of ’96. He wins early in Louisiana, comes in second in Iowa, and then proceeds to thrive in New Hampshire. Moreover, Buchanan is acting in much the way Mailer had expected to carry himself if he had run. Pat is being himself. He is saying, “Here am I with my quick wit and my caustic tongue, my offbeat laugh and my political passion and my gaffes. I haven’t been prepared in advance for you, freezebagged and microwaved by political technologues. I’m a brilliant boy with a lot of faults, but I’m here on the hoof, and you can take an honest look at me.”

Buchanan had scored in New Hampshire! There had been an energy in his campaign, an off-the-cuff virtuosity one had not seen in years. While what he said remained for the most part ultraconservative, right to life, pro-NRA, and he called for fences to keep out illegal immigrants, he also kept after the Corporation like an attack dog. Its loyalty, he told all who would listen, was no longer to America but to money.

His crowds loved him. There was a subtext to all he was saying, and it was ultrapopulist. “Wisdom,” declared this subtext, “is not to be found in the think tanks of the experts but in the experience of the people.”

Soon enough, Mailer began to play with the idea of doing an interview with Buchanan. It could prove costly, however, to the hard-earned equanimity of the author’s days. Buchanan had reverence for icons, and the first was Ronald Reagan.

Yet Buchanan’s raids on the sanctity of the Corporation might be a trumpet call to some kind of new politics. For years, Mailer, dreaming of a left-right coalition, had known it must start on the Right. People on the Right, oriented to the sacramental, were suspicious, stingy. Most of their ideas were fixed in Perma-bond, whereas people on the Left were more flexible, more—it could be said—more desperate in their political isolation. Ergo, they were more ready to take on a new idea. At the least, one could explore the possibilities. Would Buchanan, for example, be inclined to a serious reduction in military outlay? All the other concerns of Mailer’s good political day—medical support for the sick and the elderly, the restoration of the environment, workfare, some honest revision of welfare, a reduction of the deficit, even a reduction of the hatred between black and white—could be in part resolved by downsizing the Pentagon.

Of course, when it came to politics, Mailer knew that he was part of the ongoing naïveté of the majority of Americans. At the age of seventy-three, he was still looking for hope in outlandish places. To think that Buchanan, who had made this one startling move to the left, could be the harbinger, if not the protagonist, of a profound realignment in American politics was naïve indeed; yet Mailer was weary into the grinding grit of his soul with the tiresome, wholly condemnatory politics of the American Left and the American Right. Neither spoke of the other except to excoriate or misrepresent, and all the while, capitalizing on their mutual animadversion, the Corporation was enjoying lavas of greed while raking in avalanches of appropriation. So, too (via TV), had flourished Roman circuses of mind-leaching entertainment for the populace.

It was time to have a dialogue between Right and Left. Might there be some potential for agreement? If Mailer went to talk to Buchanan, however, it must not be with a set of preformed media stereotypes of the man. He would not be there to scold Buchanan for being loyal to Larry Pratt of the Gun Owners of America nor to assume he was antiSemitic; no, such routine media baggage would make their dialogue mutually fail-safe and sterile. On the contrary, if he wished to elicit a new point of view, he would have to take Buchanan on his own terms and assign as much purpose to the candidate as he gave to his own ideas.

MAILER’S FEELING IS THAT BUCHANAN’S FUTURE IS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Besides, Mailer was intrigued by the political possibilities. In the military sense—and where was any pleasure to be found in campaign analysis without a military analogy?— Buchanan had anchored his right flank on pro-life.

Abortion, he had made clear, could never be acceptable. His right-wing credentials impeccable, therefore, Buchanan was free to move as far as he wished to the left, the economic left; the Corporation could now be attacked from the left and the right. A crucial difference. No political force would ever prevail against the Corporation if it could move forward on only one flank or the other; it would soon be opposed by the other wing brought along quickly to join ranks with the center (exacdy what happened in the election crusades against Goldwater in ’64 and McGovern in 72). The Corporation, monarch of the center, could be deposed only if both ends attacked in combination. Left-conservatism! For forty-five years, it had been no more than an oxymoron. Now, with Buchanan, there was a gleam of possibility, call it no more than a wink, but the possibility was there. How far to the economic left was Buchanan willing to go?

The 45 Degree Angle

THREE WEEKS AFTER BUCHANAN’S LAST EFFORT AGAINST Dole in California, the interviewer’s taxicab, having proceeded westward along the verdant south bank of the Potomac for some four or five miles, came to the first exit at McLean. After a short search on a suburban road, the driver deposited him at five minutes to 1:00 P.M. in a driveway by the side of Buchanan’s home, a large two-story house painted white with high white columns in front of a long but narrow veranda.

The door was opened by a maid whom Mailer took to be Hispanic—her name, he learned, was Galle—and he was left alone for a few minutes in the library, a dark-paneled room with two facing sofas, a large square coffee table, and a fireplace. On the mantel were a small cast of an American eagle and a small cast of a tiger, nicely striped. Between them, on the wall, was an oil painting of two lions. The several hundred books on the shelves were political and/or historical. He noticed the works of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and William Manchester together with those of William Bennett and William Safire, which occasioned the random rumination that if one wished one’s son to be a literary fellow, one could do worse than to name him William. He would then share nomenclative ancestry with William Shakespeare, William Faulkner, William Styron, William Makepeace Thackeray, William Carlos Williams!

Enough of such felicities! Mailer decided to take a quick look at the adjacent living room, which was long and wide, had many windows, and looked to have been furnished either by Mrs. Buchanan or an interior

Buchanan came into the library shortly after this brief excursion. He was taller than he appeared to be on television, perhaps six feet, and his weight was trim. They shook hands, and, after a moment or two of mutual recollection of Chicago in the summer of 1968 (where they had both been in the same group of shocked and startled onlookers on the nineteenth floor of the Hilton, looking down on Michigan Avenue when Mayor Daley’s police proceeded to beat the demonstrators), they now sat down, tape recorder on the coffee table, not quite twenty-eight years later, and began to talk.

They had met again a few times in the intervening years, once in a Washington restaurant sometime in the eighties and again in a corridor of the Astrodome in Houston during the Republican convention of 1992. Man to man, face to face, Mailer liked Buchanan well enough. Given the fragmentary basis of these brief meetings, Buchanan looked to have humor; your heart would not sink if he turned out to be the passenger who sat next to you on a long flight.

All the same, Mailer was under no illusion that they would begin with a great deal in common. As part of his preparation for the interview, he had read Buchanan’s memoir of his youth and young manhood, Right from the Beginning. Published in 1988, the book portrayed Buchanan as much to the right of Richard Nixon and somewhat to the right of Ronald Reagan. He had certainly been filled with the dye-fast anticommunism of the most devout Catholics of the 1950s, that anticommunism whose roots had so penetrated into the faithful that there was joy in the thought that one was waging war for God, Church, America, and Freedom.

At least eight years had gone by, however, since Buchanan had finished writing that book. How much, then, had changed in the last decade? Not much, one could easily have thought at first. They both sat in high-backed upholstered chairs about six feet apart, and Buchanan set his body at a full 45 degree angle away from his interviewer; their eyes did not often meet. Mailer, who liked to lean forward in conversation, felt as if they were speaking to each other across a space of water.

On the other hand, Buchanan still had to be weary of the rigors of campaigning. Few defeats bite into one thoroughly as a final loss at the polls. To campaign with heart is to be deadened by defeat. One’s energies are decimated as by rejection in love. Sitting there, Buchanan was relaxed, but his brown eyes were somber. The hearty readiness to take on all comers that had been so much part of his presence while campaigning in New Hampshire was absent. Or such was true as they began.

Lock and Load

NORMAN MAILER: I followed your campaign in New Hampshire and enjoyed sheer hell out of it. Having had that small dip in the water myself, when I ran for mayor of New York in the primary back in 1969, I think I know a litde about a candidate’s inside feelings in the middle of a race. So I started following your ups and your downs. In New Hampshire, it was mostly ups, but afterward there were a few downs that I laughed at, because I had done worse things when I ran. I refer specifically to the time you were wearing a black cowboy hat and you held a rifle aloft out of sheer joy. That’s how I interpreted it:

This guy is happy now.

PATRICK BUCHANAN: We were in Arizona, right after New Hampshire. We were at a gun show.

NM: And you were on a roll.

PB: We were on a roll. There was a lot of exuberance after New Hampshire.

NM: Yes. How could there not be?

PB: We had started in Arizona in single digits, and we kept building in the polls. We did not go over the top; if we had, I think we might have won the nomination. But there’s three reasons we didn’t: One, absentee ballots. Forbes and Dole had thousands of absentee ballots already cast, where we had only a tiny percentage. Second, Forbes spent four million in Arizona, unanswered, which is forty dollars a vote. And third,

Dole put in half a million dollars in attack ads as we were surging.

I don’t know if we could have won it, but clearly, if we had, we would have gone much longer.

NM: I believe New Hampshire changed attitudes in the Republican establishment from “Buchanan is worrisome as hell” to “Buchanan must be stopped at all costs.”

PB: We were under savage attack.

This is why we felt confident afterward.

We felt they had thrown pretty much everything they were going to throw at us in those last five days in New Hampshire, and we had overcome it.

But I did say in my victory speech,

“We no longer have the element of surprise.” You know, don’t wait for the sound of their guns—they are coming.

NM: The feeling I had, watching from afar on TV, was that something happened behind the scenes. There’s a kind of closing of ranks in the establishment that I’ve witnessed many times in my life and never quite understood. I don’t really know how it works. I don’t know that anyone does, except the few who do it. But there came a point where Dole’s campaign, which had not been effective, became so after Arizona. That means a great many markers were being pulled in.

PB: I think you’re exactly right. People asked me, “Who is the greater danger, Lamar or Dole?” and I said, “It’s Dole. Dole has the establishment, and they’ll all move behind him.” And you’re right: I’m of the view it was orchestrated. The corporate establishment is threatened by what we’re doing.

NM: Well, there, precisely, is where I became interested. I thought you are certainly one of the more strong-willed and strong-opinioned conservatives in the country. Yet you uttered the most radical set of remarks that any political candidate for the Democratic or Republican parties has spoken in years. You were saying that a large part of our problem is the American corporation.

PB: The truth is, I used to believe Charlie Wilson when he would say, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” In the fifties, g8 percent of their employees were Americans; they were the highest-paid industrial workers in the world. But when General Motors figures it’s in its best interests to move its next factory to Mexico and take it out of Michigan, then what’s good for General Motors is no longer good for America.

When these corporations see that the advancement of their bottom line means getting rid of these costly American workers and moving to Singapore or Mexico or China, where they can cut their labor costs by 90 or 95 percent, then what’s good for corporate America is no longer good for America.

This could be the death of the Republican party if it continues to carry water for these corporations.

NM: All right. This is our area of agreement. But it seems to me—and maybe you won’t go along—that the Republican party is the Corporation, that is, the Republican party is the political arm of what I call the Second Government, the Corporation.

PB: Yes. At the national level, it remains that. But when we fought against NAFTA and GATT, the grassroots Republicans were against it. The Mexican bailout was opposed by 80 percent of the American people, including Republicans. Yet most of the Republicans voted for NAFTA and GATT.

Only one thing explains it: They got a phone call that said, “Look, we don’t care where you stand on right to life. But this is one we want. Vote for GATT. We’re calling in our IOUs. This is it. This is the bill we paid for when we bought the advertisements and the program for the dinner, when we made these contributions to your campaign; this is the one you have to vote for.” And all of them, Gingrich, Dole, Gramm, others, went right along with NAFTA, went right along with GATT, went right along with the Mexican bailout. Fifty billion dollars. And the only reason they did that is because the people pulling the strings told them to. I don’t see any other explanation.

The Republican party is going to have to cut those ties, or it’s never going to be the nation’s majority party.

NM: But the Republican party, I will say again, is the political arm of the Corporation. By this logic, you can no longer be a Republican.

PB: It’s the old question: Do we stay inside the country club and try to open up its admissions policy, or do we leave in protest and start our own club? That’s the decision before us.

NM: I have an ax to grind. My feeling is that your future is in the Democratic party. I do see it as the other political arm of the Corporation, the minor political arm, but all the same, the party is closer to that huge mass of Americans who don’t like greed.

PB: Let me tell you this, Norman. In Louisiana, I spoke at the library in a tiny town about fifty miles outside of Lake Charles, over near Texas. The mayor introduced me and gave me the key to the city, and they cut loose, they were cheering, yelling. And as I was leaving, because I had come there as a presidential candidate, the mayor said, “Why did you come here? There’s only two Republicans in the whole town.” They were

BUCHANAN: YOU’RE EXACTLY RIGHT. THE CORPORATIONS ARE NOT GOING TO LET GO OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

all Democrats, but they loved what we were saying about the corporations.

So our problem is this: A significant slice of our coalition is in the Democratic party. Where Democrats could vote in Republican primaries, we did best. A significant slice is Perot supporters; a significant slice is Republican. The best way to get that all together, we believe, was to capture the Republican nomination and then reach out to those Perot voters and those grassroots Democrats and say, “We are populist, conservative, traditionalist; we are against big government, big corporations. America first, and were running against the establishment.”

Our problem is, Republicans tend to be loyalists. When we ran against George Bush in 1992 in the primary in New Hampshire, 80 percent of the New Hampshire Republicans said they agreed with me, not with George Bush. But they would not go against the presumptive leader of the party. That’s what Richard Nixon had going for him. That’s what Dole has going for him. He’s our titular leader. And it’s very, very hard from a third-party standpoint to pull away those Republicans who are loyal to the party. They’re very good people. The party is strong. The problem is the establishment in Washington. Can you overcome and displace the establishment? Or is it just too strong, too determined?

NM: You are running into the stone wall of all time if you’re trying to separate the Republican party from the Corporation.

PB: Well, we could have if we’d gotten the nomination.

Let that part of the party go; let it walk away. Where is it going? Let them ride in the back of the bus.

You can get the grassroots of the party, the Perot people, these grassroots Democrats. Of course, it would be tough. The entire establishment—the media, the corporate establishment, and all the others—will try to stop you from the nomination. But once you could get the grassroots, I think it would be one of the great, glorious contests of all time.

NM: But the key problem—and you stated it clearly—is, if you leave the Republican party, many of those loyalists will not vote for you, no matter how sympathetic they are.

PB: Yep. And you have to take a look at the possibility that you’re not a third party but a fourth or fifth or sixth party. You’ve got the Libertarians there and Ralph Nader and Ross Perot.

NM: Becoming a Democrat opens up something extraordinary, however. One of the ironies besetting the Democratic party now is that this country is a Christian country—not a JudeoChristian country but a Christian country, first and foremost.

PB [laughing] : That puts you in trouble, Norman!

NM [laughing] : Being Jewish, I probably can afford to say it’s a Christian country. One small advantage to being Jewish!

But here’s my point: The average Democratic congressman who dares to invoke the name of Jesus Christ is doomed!

PB [laughing] : Go on....

NM: The president can be a practicing Christian—he can go to church and invoke the name of God—but the average urban white Democratic congressman certainly cannot. The result is that the Republicans have picked up a great many Democratic voters whose religious faith is more important to them, finally, than their politics. You have more or less said the same thing. The power that you would set loose in the Democratic party by saying, “We are for more economic justice and, at the same time, reinvigorating some senseof the spirit” would be enormous.

What you’re up against, and I will say this over and over, is, I can’t conceive of the Corporation ever letting go of the power they have in the Republican party.

PB: You’ re exactly right. The corporations are not going to let go. But we had almost taken over. Almost. Six points more in Arizona. If we had broken through there, it might have carried us over the top in Georgia. One week after Georgia came Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma. That’s Super Tuesday.

NM: You would have had a chance at Super Tuesday?

PB: Georgia was the key southern state. If we’d beaten Dole there, the whole South would have been up for grabs. All you needed after New Hampshire was to go over the top in Arizona and then in Georgia . . . but it didn’t happen.

NM: That’s the kind of thing that has guys standing at the bar rail twenty years later.

PB: I’m not that type. [Laughing] You think I shouldn’t have put the gun over the head?

NM: You had to; it’s part of your character. You believe in rejoicing after victory.

A Worn-out Palooka

THROUGH ALL OF THIS, THE CANDI-

date kept sitting at the same 45 degree angle away from his interviewer. Yet the more he spoke of what could have been, the more his mood seemed to improve. After a pause while Mailer turned the tape over, Buchanan agreed to change the seating. Now they faced each other across a chess table whose pieces were taken off to make way for the tape recorder. The chess set, Buchanan remarked, had been a gift from his wife. British redcoats faced Revolutionary minutemen on the board.

By now, Mailer had come to the conclusion that Buchanan said only what he wished to say. He was a seasoned pol, after all, he was a pro. Nor could you make too much of his body language. Buchanan could have agreed to this change in their seating as a reluctant courtesy or because he, too,

MAILER: GRENADA FOR GOD’S SAKE! BUCHANAN: YOU ARE MISTAKEN. IT WAS A FAMOUS VICTORY

felt more comfortable. Mailer, therefore, decided that he was not going to offer descriptions of each of the candidate’s moves. He did not wish to ascribe significance to body language that was probably well within Buchanan’s choice.

Mailer would, however, indicate when they laughed. In that sense, Buchanan’s sense of humor was like the gleam in the eye of a good boxer who will not only take pleasure in landing his shot but is also ready to gain from an unexpected blow.

One has just learned something. So Buchanan would laugh as heartily at points scored against him as at those in his favor.

Mailer, having something of the same disposition on this matter, laughed in the same way.

All the same, their shift in position had made it easier to talk. Mailer decided to risk a first radical premise.

NM: I don’t mind if some people make twenty or thirty times as much as others, but I don’t think the ratio should be five hundred to one. That breeds all sorts of social disease.

PB: If middle-class and working class folks were seeing a steady increase in their standard of living, as they did in the fifties and early sixties, I don’t think people would pay much attention to someone making a lot of money. But they do if they’re slipping themselves. You look at some of these corporate executives. When their companies do badly, their incomes remain astronomical. There’s a sense that an enormous amount of rip-off is going on. The return is in no way justified.

NM: And the products are not getting better.

PB: Right. The products are not getting better. I think it increases the national—almost contempt—of the capitalists. Eventually, this will translate into contempt of the system. We’re getting to the point where the big corporations are being seen as increasingly unpatriotic. It is a new era, but most of the Republican party at the national level is still very much a cold-war party. It can’t let go. It misses the Soviet empire, all the cold-war paraphernalia.

NM: Would you agree that the cold war gave a free ride? We had an enemy. That enemy was godless materialism.

PB: It made everything easy. It provided clarity.

NM: But at a huge cost. Because it was a drug. Absolutely a drug, that cold war. Here, you may disagree profoundly—but I think the cold war was over twenty years before it ended.

PB: People watched Jimmy Carter talk about, We’ve gotten over our “in-

ordinate fear of communism,” and all of a sudden Iran is gone, they’re holding Americans hostage; the Red army’s in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola; they’re in Grenada; they even have a beachhead in Nicaragua. I was in Ronald Reagan’s White House. We were doing our best to expel the Soviet beachhead in Nicaragua. It all collapsed—you’re right; I think it was hollow by then, and you probably anticipated that. ...

NM: Hollow! The Soviet Union was endlessly hollow, and I think there were certain people who knew it. But you guys bought it, that this was an expanding empire.

PB: Here’s the thing, here’s the thing: Why was everyone saying, “We have to watch Reagan; he will get us into a war with this mighty Soviet empire”? Reagan did not directly confront the Soviets. He challenged their empire around the periphery, where the Soviet empire would not feel its vital interests were threatened. He moved the Stingers into Afghanistan. Moved aid to the Angolan resistance and aid to the Nicaraguan resistance. Moved aid even into Mozambique. He bled the empire dry. It was a gradual and consistent pressure, and I think he built up America’s defense establishment until he finally broke them. And it collapsed.

NM: Well, I could put it another way entirely. The Soviets were a wornout palooka by 1970. They knew in their bones it wasn’t working anymore. The biggest cultural shock in my life was to go to Russia in 1984 for the first time. I came back to America as angry as I’ve ever been at this country. It’s one thing to win a war with an ideological foe. It’s another to injure yourself economically to the point where every Republican and every Democrat is now saying, “We have to take care of our children’s children; we have to reduce the debt.” That debt was tripled by Reagan in order to accomplish all this.

PB: At least the Soviet Union is no more. Two great expenditures are responsible for the national debt. One is the Great Society— which failed. And the other is the cold war— that succeeded. The cold war, we won.

NM: I’d say we didn’t win it. We were just a rich bank bankrupting a poor bank.

PB: In a way, we did. We bankrupted them.

NM: At huge cost to ourselves.

PB: Enormous cost to ourselves, there’s no doubt about it.

NM: And we’re paying for that cost now in a lack of faith in government, in a sense of outrage.

PB: You know, the one thing I think the American people do believe is that we did win. People ask me: Can you name one good thing that government has done? Yes. We won the cold war.

NM: Well, I try to take that away.

PB: Look, Norman, look, it seems to me—I was there with Nixon, remember, in 1972, ’73, ’74. The United States lost the Vietnam War, or at least, the West lost the Vietnam War. The demoralization of the United States in the seventies was incredible. I believed, generally, at the end of the 1970s that we were in danger of losing the cold war.

NM: There we disagree. The Soviets didn’t have it anymore. Under Stalin, it was a great threat. He, no question, was insane. An evil empire, if you will, back in the fifties. But I think Khrushchev alleviated the worst Soviet strictures to a considerable degree.

If America had gone through several revolutions and several overthrows of government, and had had a hideous system for over fifty years and an incredible war in which twenty million people were killed and another twenty million expired over several decades in prisons and camps, how much will to fight would be left? I’ve never been in a country where so many people were depressed as in Russia in 1984. You were there earlier than I was, and you saw the same thing: this prodigious depression. When you have a country where everyone is down that low, it is not about to wage a major war. They knew by then that they certainly didn’t have the stuff to conquer the world.

PB: Eurocommunism was a very big thing in the late 1970s. I think Ronald Reagan really provided the leadership, the philosophical offensive, the economic offensive, the Reagan Doctrine. The Soviet Union collapsed without firing a shot, and it was a phenomenal victory for the West.

Now, it could have been we overestimated, although I don’t think we overestimated how strong they were militarily.

NM: Well, that’s arguable. They couldn’t even win in Afghanistan.

PB: One of the reasons is we provided Spanish mortars and Stinger missiles. I think Reagan made the Soviet Union pay a hellish price for its empire.

NM: Would you agree that we, too, paid a great price for the cold war?

PB: Oh, we paid an enormous price.

NM: Not only economically. Spiritually. For four decades. We assumed that we had an enemy who was dangerous, lethal, godless, and evil. All our hatred—and a lot of hatred exists in this country—was focused on those Soviets. I’ve used this image before, and I’ll use it again. We were all like iron filings in the same magnetic field. With rare exceptions, we all pointed in the same direction. And when the war ended, when the cold war ended, it was like you threw a switch. The magnetic field no longer existed. The filings began to scatter. But the hatred was still there.

America has been more divided in the last four or five years than at any time I can recall. Everybody is hating everybody. Hating your enemy is no longer as comfortable as it used to be. For politicians, the Soviet Union had been invaluable. It was like having a dependable mother-in-law, the one you can blame for everything.

PB: I think there was a genuine feeling in this country, and it was valid, that we had a mortal enemy outside the gates, and it took a measure of unity and solidarity to face that enemy. Suddenly, the enemy is gone. So we go back into the house, and all the old disputes that existed before the threat have now come to the surface.

I think what happened in the conservative movement is that a lot of us have gone home to where we came from—the idea that America ought not to be an empire. That we ought to tend to our own business and stop meddling in other countries’ affairs. We see that the war is over. We ought to come home, retrench, repair, reorganize, and rebuild our own country, our own nation. All right. Some communists have been reelected in Eastern Europe. But I think this second-generation communism is not what the earlier one was. It doesn’t have the spiritual hold on anyone. It’s no longer, quite frankly, a threat to the United States of America. The United States ought to take a look at the world as it is. The potential threats and menaces to American security are very, very few, and they’re very far away. I think we ought to be a normal country in a normal time. Look, if Russia rises again, it’s not going to look around for an enemy halfway around the world. It’s mainly going to be a threat to its neighbors. I don’t think the United States ought to counterthreaten them with military force or hot war or blockade or all-out war. I would say to the Russians this: We know you can invade the Baltic republics and Poland. There’s nothing we can do about it militarily. You can overrun them in two days. But if you do, here’s what’s going to happen: You’ll be diplomatically isolated; you’ll be politically isolated; you’re probably going to force massive rearmament in Western Europe, which we will assist. You’re going to be alone in the world. You’re going to have problems with the Muslim countries, which we’re not going to help you with. You’ll have the hostility of Western Europe, which we’re not going to help you with. You’re probably going to have the hostility of China and Japan.

You will be friendless on the earth. Why are you going to do it? Why are you going to reestablish an empire that you people had to give up because it was bankrupt and the people hated you? Do you want to remain friends with the United States? There is no natural conflict between Russia and America or between the Russian people and the American people. Why create one?

But I wouldn’t threaten them with war. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous!

Yet a part of the Republican party and the conservative party still says, “We’ve got to go on a crusade for global democracy. The great enemy now is Islamic fundamentalism.” And a lot of us are saying, “Look, this time we don’t go. That’s not our war. Our war’s over.” Republican conservatives have to give up their global empire and all the security arrangements, all the treaties, all the troops in all the countries overseas.

NM: You’d be willing to reduce the size of the Pentagon?

PB: Surely. I think that’s right. I believe the United States should remain superior, on the seas, in the air, in technology, and we have to have the finest fighting men in the world, but you don’t need a hundred miles of American troops sitting in the middle of Germany, guarding a border that doesn’t exist against an enemy who went home six years ago. Eventually, the South Koreans, who are twice as populous and have six times the economy of North Korea, have to take full responsibility for their own defense. I think the United States should confine its treaty commitments to air and naval power. We’re not going to put another army on the ground in Southeast Asia.

NM: So you are saying that we don’t need a military organization which attempts to control the affairs of countries all over the world?

PB: Now that the cold war is over, Europe is as prosperous as we are. It has more people than we do. It is as technologically advanced. There is no reason why Europeans cannot handle the defense of Europe themselves. We aren’t the Romans protecting an empire. I think if we’re going to become normal, we should be coming home soon.

A Tiny, Tiny Victory

WELL, THERE WAS NO OTHER PRESIdential candidate who was ready to downsize the Pentagon. Considerably encouraged by this, Mailer set out to do what he had told himself in advance that he would not attempt—he tried to change Buchanan’s point of view on the real history of the cold war.

NM: I think Americans felt subtly betrayed by how the Soviet Union came to an end. Do you agree that part of the huge distrust of government is that people felt lied to? Systematically. Where were those terrible, terrible Russians? We’re suddenly taking care of them.

PB: I think there’s a lot of sense of, what in heaven’s name are we doing now, giving them foreign aid and loans?

NM: If they’re not evil now, why weren’t they not evil then?

PB: Well, speaking for the folks for whom I speak—we think we won the war—

NM: And I keep saying you bankrupted them.

PB [laughing] : Okay! We bankrupted them. Better we bankrupt them than we exchange weapons with them.

NM: Come on, you know and I know that if you beat a man in a poker game because you have more money, you can’t take the same kind of pride in it.

PB: All right, right, there’s something of a letdown, there’s no doubt about it. It didn’t end with a bang. It did end with a whimper. But I was glad that all those Eastern European countries broke free, virtually without firing a shot.

Look, the cold war is what brought me into active politics; it’s what activated my journalism in St. Louis; it’s the reason I supported Goldwater; it’s one reason I was with Nixon all the way, even though Nixon had his own vision. It’s why I was in Reagan’s White House. It was “Get the communists out of Nicaragua”—it was our whole life. And I feel now we’ve got a second life. The war’s over.

NM: Well, with all due respect—

PB: You don’t think the war existed.

NM: It never existed to the extent . . . you guys exaggerated.

PB: You re saying we exaggerated. I’m telling you—

NM: I’m not saying you didn’t believe. I don’t think you could have lived with it if you didn’t believe it. I’m not saying there was no sincerity in it. I’m saying it’s very easy to be sincere if you don’t think things through.

PB [laughs]: How can you not go through—look—how can you not?—I mean—the events in all those years, the Cuban missile crisis . ..

NM: Look at Grenada, for God’s sake. Come on!

PB: But the key about Grenada was not that it was small—but that Reagan reached out and grabbed a Soviet pawn off the table and said, “What are you going to do about it?” And they could do nothing. It was the first time a tiny piece of territory captured and occupied by the hostile empire was taken back; the Cubans were made to look ridiculous; the Soviet Union was made to look completely ineffectual. Suddenly, the West was on the offensive.

It’s a tiny, tiny victory. But it meant the tide had turned.

NM: My basic argument is that you fellows exaggerated the danger of the Soviet Union by at least one order of magnitude. You were calling to percent too percent. Nineteen hundred marines went into Grenada, and I don’t know if they knew it in advance or discovered it to their huge embarrassment, but they were up against a thousand construction workers. They kept it secret for three days, the embarrassment was so immense.

But it was used, it was used. The country celebrated.

PB: The country loved it.

NM: That’s a sign of disease!

PB [snorts] : It’s not a sign of disease! The country had seen KAL shot down. They had gone through this horrible year of the Iranian hostage crisis, and they had seen the Soviet empire on the move. The Soviets were in Afghanistan.

All of a sudden, we had a leader who said, “Knock that Soviet pawn off the table. Let’s take it back.” He used military force without apology; he overwhelmed them. He had six thousand troops, actually; he had Airborne and everything else in there. We went over there, took Grenada back. And what did you see? You saw Castro two or three days later, in a total panic, telling the Nicaraguans, “If the Americans come, I can’t help you.”

All of a sudden, what was revealed was the incapacity of the Soviet Union to defend the extremities of the empire. And I thought it was a tremendous signal for the United States. I know it was ridiculed, but—

NM: I’m one of the people who mocked it.

PB: Well, that’s all right. You were mistaken, Norman. [Both laugh.] It was a famous victory.

Mailer let it go. The argument, should he continue it, would be circular—each would repeat what had been said before. So he reminded himself: He was not here to try to revise Buchanan’s view of the past when, indeed, the candidate had as much vested interest as the novelist in protecting his old views. No, he was here to find out whether there might be some real, if small, potentiality in Buchanan to move to the left.

Jesse for VP!

NM: Let’s talk about what it would take for you to become president.

PB: Sure.

NM: One of the fundamental problems in America now is the gulf between blacks and whites. It seems to me that an economic sufficiency for the working people of America is tied into an economic sufficiency for blacks. Clinton does have a little showpiece here for black people and another little showpiece there, but nothing’s happened. He’s really changed nothing. There’s a huge dialogue still waiting to be held between blacks and whites. Half of the trouble in the Democratic party is their reliance these days on what I call Boutique Politics. Five or six unrelated political causes. For example, the problems women have in America, or gays, are minor compared to the gulf between blacks and whites. Unless we learn to live with each other, we may not survive as a country. Not in the form we know now. We could break down into race riots and ghettos with barbed wire around them. I mean, this country will hold so long as we don’t get into a depression. But the moment we do—what would keep us together then? There are certain families who lose their money and discover that they’re a good family. They stay together. Other families lose their money, and that’s it. The family flies apart. That second situation is the one I think we’re in.

PB: You’ 're talking about the major social problem of our time. We’ve got to start the income of working men and women rising again, especially those who work with their hands, tools, and machines, many of whom are black and Hispanic and rural white.

WE KILL EVERYTHING. WITH ABORTION AT LEAST YOU HAVE SOME KNOWLEDGE OF WHOM YOU ARE KILLING

Three ways to do this: One, stop forcing Americans to compete with folks who can work very hard and very well for a lot less—stop illegal immigration into this country cold. Two, I believe you should have a temporary halt to legal immigration. There are twenty million such people here, many of whom work very hard and undercut the wages of working men and women. Three, you have to get rid of these trade deals that force American working men and women into competition with Mexican folks who work for a buck an hour, a buck-fifty an hour, or Chinese who work for twenty-five cents an hour.

In other words, you have to return to the idea that the American market is for the American worker first and foremost. People deride this as protectionism, but it is economic nationalism, which has as its goal a plenitude of jobs where the wages of working men and women rise every year, as they used to do in the 1940s and 1950s and early ’60s. That is the precondition for social peace in America. It is not everything, but in the absence of that, we’re not going to get there.

NM: You were saying this in New Hampshire and other places—I kept listening. And I kept waiting for you to say a little more. I believe the only way your ideas will work here is to create more interest in production itself. I think some very bad habits formed in the American working class over the last thirty or forty years, a cynicism about the job that comes out of the very monotony of the work in manufacturing jobs. In addition, there’s not enough real self-interest for working well.

It seems to me that a good part of profit that goes to the top of the corporation has to be plowed back in the form of bonuses for workers.

PB: A stake in the profit margins.

NM: A large stake. A team with pride. This country certainly thrives on the idea of competitive teams. That has to be a basic part of it. The workers themselves have to benefit from the fact that they give better work.

PB: I’m not averse to that idea at all. If you go back to the Catholic encyclicals of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, the worker is required to give a full day’s work for a good day’s pay, and the employer is required to give a living wage.

The problem is, how do you mandate this from a government level? I don’t know how you do that.

NM: I have a thought on how to start.

PB: I’ll bet you do.

[They both laugh.]

NM: I think you can’t begin until the emphasis moves from marketing to production. What we have now is a huge amount of needless advertising.

PB: You sound like my old friend Earl Butz when he was secretary of agriculture. He’d show you a loaf of bread, take out all the pieces, and say, “How much of this goes to the farmer?” He would take one slice of bread and a half slice and say: “This is what goes to the farmer who produces everything that’s in here. And the people who put the package together and sit it in the supermarket, that’s where all the rest of this is going.” It was a very powerful message.

But how do you restructure the whole... ?

NM: What we’re really talking about is the mind of America. We all agree it is not what it used to be. Our kids have grown up with television in a way we never did. And while they are watching TV, they know they’re going to be interrupted every seven to twelve minutes by a commercial.

That has to injure your powers of concentration.

The interruption has nothing to do with the logic of what went before. So it increases what you might call subliminal anger. With violent kids, interruption intensifies their violence. After all, a violent kid is usually trying to put things together in his head. Some violent kids are mindless, but many of them suffer from too much mind. Their thoughts never stop. They’re trying to put together how to make a life that’s slightly better than it has been, and they can’t seem to. They’re thinking and they’re thinking. Then they are interrupted. They get very angry.

Yet why are there all these interruptions? Because the advertiser must have his or her minute, regardless of what went before, regardless of what comes after. The advertising has become a thing in itself. You’ll see a guy ride a ski board off a cliff. He’ll do a double somersault in the air and land in an icy pool. Then he leaps out of the pool, holding a can of beer. For the life of me—I’ve seen that commercial a hundred times—I can’t tell you the name of the beer. They don’t spend money on making better beer. They spend it on expensive advertisements.

Now, people will say, “How can you have TV if the advertiser isn’t paying for it?”

My argument is that you’re paying for it whether you know it or not. The prices on products are higher because of this excessive advertising. If five products are about equal, like any five automobiles out there, then don’t spend 10 or 15 percent of your budget on promotion in order to try to get some phony advantage over the others. Sell it for less. What’s needed is that we get back to making products we are proud of. Products with individuality.

Go back to the father of capitalism, Adam Smith. His idea was that if there is a free play of workers doing their jobs, the best products will win. And a healthy society will come out of that. We’ve gone far away from such a concept. By now, in marketing, the real pleasure is to sell something that’s crappy. Anyone can sell something that’s good. But to market a

mediocre product successfully, that shows skill.

PB: Aren’t you sort of just complaining? Television is here. We’re not going back.

NM: There are ways it could be changed.

PB: How?

NM: Suppose the deduction of advertising as an operations cost was no longer considered a legitimate business expense. At least not beyond a certain point. A company has the right to announce a product and describe its qualities, but beyond that, no tax deduction. That would certainly reduce the volume of unnecessary advertising.

PB: You could do that very easily. Instead of taxing profits, where, as you know, advertising costs become a deduction of profits, you simply tax the gross revenues of a company. You could eliminate all these deductions. Tax-simplification programs would solve a lot of these things.

NM: The simpler the better. Change the rules of the game. Then the American corporation can’t use this addiction they’ve gotten themselves into where they market, they advertise, they promote what they make rather than making it well.

PB: They put the emphasis on the wrong side.

NM: Let the American worker begin to take a little pride in what he or she is making.

PB: I think it’s crucial. Let me tell you, this is what I’ve talked about. There’s tens of millions of Americans who don’t get any satisfaction at all from what they do. The number of people who do good work with their hands and with tools is being reduced to a smaller and smaller share of the American labor force. I agree with you loo percent that you don’t want to have just the assembly-line job where people do the same thing hour after hour after hour.

Now, your thought of advertising is something I haven’t given a great deal of thought to, but there’s no doubt about it, there’s an enormous amount of the wealth, of the business budget, that is spent not on producing the finest product but producing the most effective ad to outsell the competition. Sure.

Where Buchanan’s mind was open, he was open indeed; the man was a study in movements from the fixed to the flexible and back.

NM: I’ve been suggesting that unless you make some major move to double your constituency, there’s no Buchanan presidency on the horizon. Suppose you had won the Republican nomination; could you have made such a move to Jesse Jackson?

PB: There was no doubt we were looking at some people outside the Republican party. We looked outside. You mentioned Jackson—if someone could bring you 20 percent of the black vote without losing you something, you’d win the election.

But I think if you went outside the Republican party, you probably would have exacerbated your basic problem, which is to put the party together.

NM: I vow on my nine children, I’m not here as an emissary—but what, for instance, if you and Jesse Jackson could do something together within the Democratic party?

PB: That would be exciting within the Republican party, too, Norman.

NM: Certainly would.

PB: No, I m saying that the differences between me and Jesse are so great on so many other issues that if you move into an alliance like that, you forfeit a significant part of our constituency.

NM: He’d forfeit a significant part of his constituency.

PB [laughs] : Let me say this: Jesse, I think, is on the right side of NAFTA for the right reasons. He sees these deals as putting working-class black folks in America into direct competition with people who have considerable skills and work for 10 percent of the wages that a black American gets paid in a factory.

Now, we could come together as we did on NAFTA and GATT—a noninterventionist foreign policy. But a considerable part of my base is with social and cultural conservatives and traditionalists. And Jesse has gone south on right to life.

The Live Nerve

ABORTION! THEY HAD COME TO THE crux of the interview. There would never be a left-right coalition without entering into a dialogue about abortion.

It was too soon for that. Abortion was the live nerve in the social conservatism of Patrick J. Buchanan, and Mailer’s instinct was to approach with some care. It would be better to take on first the lesser incompatibles, issues that most partisans of the Left found unpalatable if not repellent—such fine matters as the National Rifle Association, gay rights, restriction of immigration. Mailer, searching for agreement on this afternoon, knew that agreement here would be small if indeed it could exist at all. These were, after all, the ideas of Buchanan’s core constituency, and he would hardly be about to modify them on a given afternoon to please a strange interviewer.

NM: Where do you stand on gay liberation?

PB: I don’t think any special rights should attend to individuals because of what they do in their bedrooms, especially if what they engage in is homosexuality.

NM: You say “especially.”

PB: I think it’s wrong.

NM: It’s one thing to think something’s wrong; it’s another to be actively opposed to it, to, in effect, persecute it.

PB: Oh, I don’t believe the police should waste their time running down and harassing homosexuals at all. I think they have the same right to protection against criminal assaults as any of the rest of us. But I do believe society in its laws and statements should maintain the truth that homosexuality is wrong. It is not a moral lifestyle; it is not the equivalent of traditional marriage; and I think you’ve got to take that stand, and I do as a traditionalist conservative.

And what was Mailer’s reaction? Well, he did not know that society should maintain that homosexuality was wrong, but on the other hand, he saw no reason to say that it was right. Mailer could hardly believe in official marriages for gay people. He thought that people of any gender who lived together for years, married or not, should have financial rights underwritten by the law equal to the legal rights of married people. But not marriage itself. There were too many unhappy people out there who had been bound together for decades and couldn’t stand each other, but at least they had their marriage license. That was a comfort, a postage stamp for the letter they were writing to send to the Lord. If homosexuals, with their free and licentious and enjoyable lives—or so they would be seen by that silent majority who bore the drudgery of marriage—if homosexuals were to get the marriage license as well, the heterosexual marrieds would be more than embittered. And Mailer

was looking to reduce the amount of free-floating embitterment in American life.

NM: I confess I’m a little bewildered by some of the NRA arguments.

PB [laughs]: I know what you mean. I’m not going to get into an argument with you about it.

NM: I can understand people who want to keep their firearms. I can accept that they are sincere. But this idea that militiamen need assault arms to defend themselves against the government is not a real argument. We all know that the Army won’t care whether you’ve got a rifle or an assault gun when they go in with their tanks. To me, that’s where the National Rifle Association goes off the rails. It violates the notion that a citizen is entitled to small arms for personal defense.

PB: I think many of the people in the Second Amendment movement believe that the ultimate objective of the gun-control movement is to disarm the American people incrementally. Take what seem to be reasonable positions against unpopular weapons. Then use incidents to get the camel’s nose into the tent. The goal is the registration of all firearms.

NM: All right. That’s what the goal is. That doesn’t mean the goal can be achieved. I think the worst thing one can ever get into politically is to start defending a notion in which one does not really believe. I think the NRA lost their high ground by defending assault weapons. It’s analogous to the weakness of the pro-choice people when they will not admit that abortion is killing.

He had come back to the point of departure. Abortion.

The Abortion Wars

NM: Nothing on this matter comes easily to me, but I think I have some understanding of the pro-life position. You see, I have always felt that abortion is killing. As far as I’m concerned, the moment the sperm meets the ovum, the child is conceived. But the reason I’m not on the side of right to life is that we kill all the time; we kill everything in sight. There’s an argument—and maybe it’s a devil’s argument from your point of view—I would say the only thing to be said for abortion that ameliorates it is that at least you have some knowledge of whom you are killing. That to me is less ambiguous than when you are killing a stranger. Speak of God’s purpose—you don’t know what God’s purpose is when you kill a stranger. You may have some idea if you’re killing your own. And you probably are wrong, but at least there’s some connection, some immediate connection with what you’re doing. That isn’t there in broad-scale killing. By my logic, I would be totally opposed to abortion about the time we were totally opposed to killing everyone and everything.

PB: Let me tell you where my disagreement comes. You can never—in my judgment—deliberately take the life of an innocent human being. An unborn child is an innocent human being that is striving simply for life.

Now, in wartime, the soldier is an aggressor; he’s trying to take your life, and you have a right of self-defense to defend yourself; you have a right to defend your country; you have a right to destroy the factories that produce the weapons that kill your soldiers. What you do not have the right to do is engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent human beings, the wives and children of the enemy soldiers. And there’s a clear differentiation, I think, between innocent human beings and a guilty human being. The man who comes in to rob your house, you have a right to kill him. The man you’re having an argument with, you don’t.

I think it’s far worse to coldbloodedly kill someone who’s part of your own family than it is in an angry argument to kill a stranger.

NM: We have a serious difference: I do believe certain children are bom with goodness and others have more evil in them. Not all babes are equal. A woman has the deepest instincts, deeper than men, on the nature of what she’s carrying. And she has an intimate relation, after all, from the moment of conception, with what she’s conceived. If her feeling is—and she may be very close, after all, to what she’s conceived—but if her feeling is that it’s going to be an absolutely hideous life for that child and for her, then I don’t know that I, on the outside, have the right to tell the woman what she’s got to do and how she has to live, that she’s got to deliver her child and go through the secondary trauma of having it adopted, or, worse, bring it up when there’s no inner conviction to make the attempt.

This is where the great difficulty comes in for me.

PB: I think people know what they’re doing in an abortion. The idea that the woman can know this child is going to have a difficult or worse existence—you’re almost giving her the right to judge, to put someone to death because they have the greater potential for evil.

NM: We do that in war all the time.

PB: Suppose she waits until the child is born and then says, “I’m convinced this child is going to be dreadful; I’m going to put it to death.”

NM: Well, you know, not all the murders that occur take place in an instant. Some take thirty years. There are married people who take thirty years killing each other bit by bit. And they succeed. So pity the poor child whose mother decides at the age of one that this child is better off not living because, indeed, that child may not live long.

I once said to—what’s her name, Greer—isn’t that interesting? I can’t remember her first name....

PB: Germaine?

NM: Germaine. Fascinating I couldn’t remember it. I was on a TV show with Germaine Greer, and she’s trashed me many times over the years [PB laughs], and she said something about, “Oh, really, Norman, I do care about you,” and I answered, “My God, if I’d had a mother like you, I’d never have reached the age of six.” [PB laughs.] But the fundamental notion that you subscribe to with all of your religious beliefs is that the child is God’s gift to us and not to be tampered with. Is that a fair statement?

PB: Right. Under natural law, which I think you can reach by reason, the unborn child is a human being and alive, and you have no right to kill innocent human life ever. Innocent human life. It’s one thing if someone is coming up a walk and has a hostage in front of him and has a gun and intends some violence on you and your family—I think in that case you may have a right to fire at him right through the hostage to kill him. But the objective is to stop the aggressor. It is not deliberately designed to kill the innocent. That is a by-product of it. Just like in wartime, innocent people are killed as a by-product of military efforts designed to destroy valid targets. But the idea of going deliberately to kill an unborn child is to me a violation of the natural law and a violation of God’s law, and I do believe that unborn children, that spark of life, they have a soul in them, and they are creatures of God,

IT’S LIKE GETTING A MEDAL FOR AIDS. WE SHOULDN’T BE COZENED IF WE’VE BROUGHT A SITUATION ON OURSELVES

and we can’t play God. God alone has the right to take life.

NM: To me, the core of it is that it’s hideous when a woman has to have an abortion. Her suffering is immense. And if a law were passed that abortions were illegal, you know, of course, they’d go on. We’d return to the old, sordid business of going to some flyby-night doctor in some dirty alley and having it done there. Well, I won’t go so far as to say that that may be, in some odd way, less injurious to the woman—it may also bring the wrath of female liberation down on me forever—but for some women it could be less injurious to their spirit than to have it done in a hospital, where everything is sanitized, where it’s, “Sorry, darling, this is going to hurt a little bit,” and there are attentive people and one is treated with great care and dignity. It’s like getting a medal for AIDS. If we have done something that’s brought on an impossible situation for ourselves, we ought to know it. We shouldn’t be cozened.

PB: I don’t know what your bottom line is there.

NM: I don’t know it myself.

He didn’t. On which side of the question could he come down? Buchanan, of course, had no difficulty here. Mailer did. He knew all too well that a political idea could be effective only when it became a psychological reality for significantly large groups of people. Equality for Afro-Americans was a question that few Americans did not have to face pro or con. Whereas gay liberation, while it had brought a sense of worth to gay people, was legitimate only as a personal cause—you could not travel with it, you could not say, I am gay and I am for black people (or, I care for Indians) (or for lesbians) (or for the flat tax) (or for cleaning up welfare) (or for increasing the inheritance tax). Who would care? Politically, it did not travel, whereas the question of black rights vibrated everywhere.

Pro-life and pro-choice were also large psychological realities. Each, however, was profoundly contradictory to its own party philosophy. Conservatives wished to get government off the backs of the people, yet should pro-life prevail, government would certainly be on the backs of pregnant women. Liberals were opposed to the death penalty and indeed were opposed to killing humans of almost all varieties. Except unborn children. There they would claim that abortion was not killing.

The debate put both sides into intellectual irons. Yet no one could deny the spiritual intensity of each point of view.

Buchanan had asked, in effect, Where are you on this? Mailer knew that his private answer, given the moral solemnity of the issue, was not part of a higher ethic. He saw the question finally as a political matter. A dire one. If in these days he could be given the larger part of what he desired politically—a movement to downsize the power of the corporate leviathan—and if, to achieve that, prolife could serve as a bridge between Right and Left, then he could accept it even if he didn’t believe the government had the right to climb upon the backs of pregnant women. You tithed a tenth of your intellectual possessions on the altar of a larger vision.

You could do that, however, only if the fundamental agreement was there. In return for pro-life—an immense demand on the Left—what equally large concession could be offered? Buchanan had not let go of his basic belief that he could accomplish it all from the right: grassroots Republicans, Perotistas, and right-wing Democrats. It was not enough.

Further to the Left

AT YALE THAT WINTER, MAILER HAD given the Chubb Lecture, and he now proceeded to quote from it: “Will the time come,” he had written, “when we can cease concerning ourselves with the fiction that the rich need large profit incentives in order to keep our economy going? Just as a poor man does all he can to survive under the most wretched circumstances, so will the rich continue to be rich (although less so) if their profits are reduced by the recognition that a modem society cannot take an honest breath until it manages to provide for all its citizens. To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there’s more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of welfare. It’s time to stop judging the poor. Our real need is to judge ourselves.”

PB: On first reading, I don’t disagree with that. You don’t need a salary that’s 140 times the average worker’s when the boss used to have one that was 20 times. I don’t think you need those enormous, distorted profits or rewards to give people adequate incentive. But let me tell you, I don’t believe in policies to end that. People have to be able to reach for the stars. It doesn’t bother me that Bill Gates has his $12 billion or that Ted Turner has his $2 billion—as long as the person being rewarded is treating his people fairly and well and generously. So I don’t have a problem making sure there’s no roof over any man’s head as long as the floor of decency is under every man’s feet.

NM: How about the idea that a modem society cannot take an honest breath until it provides for all its citizens?

PB: An affluent society like the United States has a moral obligation to take care of the less fortunate among us now. There are differences over how that should be done. The welfare state

NOW MAILER WOULD HAVE TO ASK BUCHANAN IF HE WAS ANTI-SEMITIC. AND HE DIDN’T WANT TO

has become a total monstrosity. It’s loaded with so many traps. I think the American people are generous and good-hearted people. I don’t think the government approach works. There’s no doubt of our obligation to charity to those less fortunate.

NM: But then you end up with another kind of welfare. See, my point here is that welfare may be god-awful, but then look at all the rich who do not work a damned bit, who never produce anything. They consume and they’re filled with envy of those who are richer than themselves. Who are they to judge the poor? Yet they’re the ones always saying,

“Those welfare people don’t do a damned thing, and they’re living off the fat of the land.”

PB: Well, in that sense, they don’t have a moral standing to judge the poor, but a fundamental difference is that a lot of people think, Whatever the wealthy are doing or not doing, they’re doing it with their own money or their daddy’s money; they’re not doing it with mine. The objection of the middle class and their hostility to welfare is that while I am earning my own way, they are not. They’re living off me.

NM: You mean they don’t disapprove of those who were lucky enough to inherit money; they’re just disapproving of the bad luck of the poor?

PB: How you’re going to deal with that problem is you get into an inheritance tax on the superrich. A hundred percent over a million dollars, zero underneath.

It was frustrating. So near, so far away. Yet a few of Buchanan’s sentiments had actually traveled further to the left than Mailer had anticipated. All the more reason, then, to push the candidate further.

NM: I have to keep saying, unless you make a real connection to the Left, the center will manipulate the Left and stop you. Clinton and Company will yet be seen as Saints, Incorporated.

PB: Clinton and maybe Gore will become a hero of the Left and a hero of the corporate boardroom and a hero of the Hollywood elite. But you would have working-class America against the establishment. You would have the young people who are outsiders. Enormous numbers of young people. McGovern got them—all this stuff isn’t new—Goldwater got them. Young people are attracted to politics of ideals and politics with no compromise.

NM: You still have to be able to offer something concrete. On Medicare and health insurance, would you go further than Clinton went with his Medicare plan, which was finally a huge sop to the insurance companies? How I wish someone would say to America: “We’re a Judeo-Christian nation. So let’s make certain that no one is lying on a bed of pain simply because they can’t afford medical care. Why don’t we put our money where our mouth is?” You have to speak across the divide.

To Mailer’s surprise, Buchanan said, “Right,” but on reflection, listening to Pat’s voice on the tape, he realized that Buchanan had probably agreed to no more than “Okay. That’s where you’re coming from. Right.” Why was he trying so hard to reach Buchanan? By now, the more he attempted, the more perfunctory was Buchanan in his response.

Norman Mailer was finally beginning to comprehend the cost of real politics. In order to gain one desired end, you had to surrender a good many feelings in which you had long invested. And often they were your most generous feelings. To live the life of a congressman—or, even more excruciating, a statesman!—would, for a man with conscience, be equal to suffering the ardors of a wrestling match through every hour of one’s working existence. “I will sacrifice my shoulder socket in order to keep a hold on your neck.”

Yet if some inner peace did not come to America in the next few years, fascism would be pressing at the gates. The irony was that Buchanan, who had been named and feared by the media elite as a demagogue, a potential leader of fascists, was, more likely, an antidote, harsh to the taste, but, ultimately, a man of reason. It was only the Corporation that commanded enough to metamorphize us, step by step, into a totalitarian state.

Contemplating the specter of drugs, AIDS, crack, crime, welfare mothers, and the homeless, Mailer took it for granted that there were power centers in the Corporation that had come to the conclusion (and the freshman Republicans were certainly there to abet them) that the effective solution to their endangered interests was to keep applying heat to the downtrodden toes of the problem. With a little luck, riots would, in fact, commence. If white neighborhoods were invaded by the rioters, there would be martial law to ring every ghetto. If matters escalated, then free speech would be curtailed in a few newspapers, then in a great many. It would be totalitarianism without a name, and corporate capitalism would live happily in a new concept of democracy. A somewhat curtailed democracy. They would not call it fascism.

Given such a perspective, Mailer could even contemplate the temporary closure of immigration for which Buchanan had been calling. The American internal situation might be bad enough to require such an action as a palliative. It was an idea that would in other years have seemed outrageous to him, but there was almost a palpable need to stabilize the raw, outraged, bewildered, and furious nerves of the nation. For a time! All sedatives become poison if used for too long, and a protracted closure of immigration would certainly be destructive to all that was most noble about America. Could he really give assent, however, to a limited period without immigration? Was this another pill he must prepare himself to swallow for a left-right coalition?

Buchanan kept coming back to how he could win the Republican nomination. Mailer was obliged to recognize that his hope that Buchanan would move to the Democrats had certainly contracted by late afternoon. Nonetheless, he kept telling Buchanan that he could not win as a Republican.

NM: You present the Corporation with a huge problem. In effect, you have said that you are their enemy. You are never going to get the Republican nomination. They’ll change the rules before they’ll let you have it!

PB [laughs]: But we came close.

NM: You did and you didn’t. It’s true that you came so near—it was like watching a boxer who’s fighting beautifully for four rounds, and suddenly he’s counted out in the fifth round. And one never saw the punch. After it was over, I said to myself, “Why did he ever think he could win?” Because I knew if you did—I have a hundred disagreements with you, but I knew if you won, everything was going to be open again in American politics, all the questions that have been buried for decades under a blanket. The blanket of the cold war.

PB: It would have been a very exciting time right about now. [Laughs.]

NM: It would have. In our mayoralty campaign, I remember that every time we had a piece of good news— and we ran in the year after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy—Breslin would mutter, “We’re in trouble, real trouble.” I had the feeling, watching you one night on TV, that you knew there could be stormy times ahead if you kept winning. You had a sense, not of fatality exactly, but of high purpose, that high ozone—the heart gets a sense, really, of an altitude, that every step is meaningful and tragedy can lie ahead. I’m just not sure you could have gone all the way. There was too much to lose for too many people in your own party who were totally opposed to you.

PB: You mean physically they would stop me?

NM: Yeah.

PB: You know, many, many people told me that. They said, “You will never make it out there.”

NM: Not on their terms. In another party, maybe. But not by winning the nomination of their party. Because at that point, you would have been appropriating their wad.

Well, they were close to collegial again. So Mailer did not add, “Or they would appropriate your wad.”

Do You Like Jews?

THERE WAS, HOWEVER, ONE LAST

question. A stale question. Norman Mailer almost couldn’t bring himself to ask it. An interview can rarely be a friend to common courtesy, but just as certain checks ought not to be cashed (just a few!), so certain questions should not be posed. He had always disliked how feature reporters—and they were usually women—would ask: “Do you dislike women?” Mailer would groan. (The stomach is always distressed by the answers one contains that are considerably larger than the question.) The reply he could give and rarely did was: “No, I don’t dislike women. I hate them and I adore them. I love them and sometimes I can’t bear them. I honor them and I resent their dominance. I find them wonderful to write about, although most difficult to do well, as they are so complex, and yes, in answer to your question, there are even times I simply dislike them. Especially when they are narrow and political.” Yes, and he could even like women who were political (and who had imagination).

Now he would have to ask Buchanan if he was anti-Semitic. And he didn’t want to. The question had come to focus back in 1990, when Buchanan had been opposed to the war with Iraq and had made the comment: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums ... for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” Three weeks later, Abe Rosenthal, in his column in The New York Times, characterized Buchanan as an anti-Semite guilty of “blood libel,” and a nine-thousand-word piece by Joshua Muravchik was soon published in Commentary, analyzing every position taken by Buchanan over twenty years that could be seen as anti-Semitic. Buchanan’s defenders, Jewish and gentile, came forward then, and in whole concert. As William F. Buckley Jr. would write: “Everyone who has known and worked with him dismisses the charge that in his personal

behavior Buchanan has ever shown any animosity whatever toward Jews.” Dealing, however, with Muravchik’s indictment, Buckley concluded, “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.” Five years later, in a column in the New York Post, Buckley would add: “The antiSemitic pulsations of what Buchanan was then saying were prompted not by anti-Semitism, but by the allure of audience titillation/shock, the Lenny Bruce syndrome.”

Mailer, having studied a fair amount of the material, thought he might agree with Buckley for once. But, in any event, he did not wish to pursue the question. His interest in Buchanan had very little to do with getting to the bottom of such a matter; the question was not only immense but unanswerable. When did antiSemitism move from the place where it was still part of one’s freedom of opinion over into a hatred so virulent that it excited ethnic violence in others?

If Buchanan was anti-Semitic, he would, Mailer was certain, fall clearly into the first category. It was conceivable that Jews were not his favorite people. So be it. Mailer hated the question because it served the forces of political correctness.

NM: There’s just one more thing I want to clear up. I don’t believe you’re anti-Semitic in the way you’ve been accused. There have been times in my life when I didn’t like Italians as a group, didn’t like the Irish as a group, or Wasps. Being Jewish, there were a lot of times I didn’t like Jews. Where is the Jew who is fond of all the Jews he knows? But just for the record, I am correct in saying you are not at all anti-Semitic?

PB: You are correct.

NM: And I will write that you only blinked once.

[They both laugh.]

NM: Let me make a quick speech about my fellow Jews. We really come from two traditions, two absolutely opposed traditions—it’s analogous to the gap between devout Catholics and liberation theology. Among my people, there are those who are interested in justice and those interested in power, money, influence. It derives from our historic roots. The desire of certain Jews to have huge power and

BY NOW, NO WHITE MALE DEMOCRAT COULD MAKE A SPEECH WITHOUT CURTSYING TO FEMALE GENDER

influence is not an accident. Nor is our other and opposite desire for justice. There were all those centuries in the ghetto, when we had no power, when, by law, we couldn’t even be farmers, couldn’t be athletes, couldn’t be anything. The only way you could excel was to be the brightest guy in the local yeshiva. It put a genetic mark on us. We have huge divisions among ourselves.

The trouble is, Jews are very sensitive to being fingered. Look what happened to Marlon Brando. I mean, one day he’s the bravest guy in town for scolding the Jews of Hollywood; two days later, he’s crying like a baby. He loves Jews. I suppose I want to say that sooner or later, you are going to have to have a major dialogue with Jewish leaders.

PB: I’m not averse to dialogue. I look back over my record, the battles, and I look at my record of disagreements, and the difference is I don’t have anything to apologize for. I’m not in the apology business.

NM: I wouldn’t ask you . . .

PB: You haven’t asked me to do a thing about that. But, you know, I don’t mind discussing with anyone, but, as I say—I observed Mr. Brando in action. [Laughs.] He could’ve been a contender. [They both laugh.]

NM: All right. Listen, thank you.

PB: Okay. It’s been a pleasure.

Mailer could hardly tell himself, however, that he had put the question to rest for other Jews. Many would not forgive him for letting Buchanan off easy. He could only shrug. Fuck them, he thought. It was time to stop blowing the whistle on everyone who had a touch of anti-Semitism.

Yet he felt uneasy. He was a Jew. He understood.

Very few who were not Jewish could. How to explain the full dimension of the Holocaust on the Jewish psyche? Everyone learns to live with his or her own idea of death, even if it is only to pretend that death is for others, not for oneself. A modem Jew lives, however, with a double conception of death. You can always lose out on your own, your body a last testament to how you used and misused your life, but you can also be destroyed by the state, a death by decree that would have nothing to do with you. That was the enduring price of the Holocaust. Rare was the Jew of Mailer’s generation who did not carry a private burden of dread.

So the faintest hint of anti-Semitism produced outsize reactions in Jews. The ability to distinguish between people who disliked them and those who hated Jews to the point of slaying them was in danger of being lost. Engels had once written, “Quantity changes quality”—a useful three words!—and the difference between an everyday anti-Semite and a virulent one was immense; those Jews who could not distinguish between the two lost a valuable shield of the psyche. In a democracy, one had to respect the ultimate rights of all people; one also looked to retain the private right to dislike members of another ethnic group; so the author, as he remarked to Buchanan, had, at different periods, disliked Italians, Irish, Wasps, and his own fellow Jews. That was not unreasonable. Finally, that was even tonic—a nostmm to protect one’s spirit from the toxic ravages of political correctness. It was a species of mental health not to react with knee-jerk hatred at every minor anti-Semitic manifestation. To lose the ability to discriminate between someone who was not enthusiastic about Jews (and/or Israel) and an implacable bigot would end by encouraging greater anti-Semitism even as whites bridle at the voice of a black speaker who is all black, who sees nothing but black as the entire issue always, and so never suggests that a small part of us, blacks and whites together, is also struggling to stay afloat in the same human soup.

It was time for the Jews to recognize that they had become a powerful people in America and they might as well start comporting themselves like Wasps. For if there was one virtue the Wasps held above any other, it was that you could satirize them to the point of drawing blood and they would continue to do business with you and get the advantage and grow stronger. Of course, they had never had a Holocaust to root around in their bowels.

be removed, that there were more important reflexes for them now in American life than “Is this good for the Jews?” The country was in danger of pulling apart, and that was the real risk to all ethnic groups in America (including the Wasps). So it was also time to cease huddling in the shadow and the safety and the suffocating spirit of the Corporation.

In truth, or so he saw it, should the shackles not be broken and the terror remain intact, then that would be Hitler’s final revenge. He would have had his success after all. He would have blinded all too many Jews to the recognition of human complexity in their enemies. If, in the wake of the Holocaust, they had thereby been reduced to not much more than anti-anti-Semites, then they had become infected with Hitler’s endowment to us, a touch, itself, of the fascist plague, Hitler’s plague.

Still! Enough time had gone by. Perhaps the moment had come for the Jews of America to take the next large step and rise above the steaming terrors of their ancient and latter-day dread, even as had the Israelis in large part, under much greater duress. So he would give Buchanan the benefit of the doubt, and this not because he was feeling sentimental or foolish or careless or selfintoxicated but because the time was here for Jews to recognize that the spiritual manacles must

All the Awful Ways

IN THE FOUR YEARS THAT REMAINED before the millennium, startling dislocations in the body politic were bound to occur. It was not impossible he had planted one small seed in Patrick Buchanan’s presidential ambitions. Not likely, but not impossible. Indeed, if Buchanan ever came over to the Democrats, a fruitful chaos might result in party ranks. For the party was in need of a vast housecleaning.

By now, no white male Democrat running for office could make a speech without curtsying to female gender; political correctness had stultified political discourse. Mailer could accept a hegemony of women running the party, but only if they earned it by whole commitment in the ranks; too many of their gains had come from commitment to the concept that women were a species superior to men. And liberal men, suffused with guilt, had assented. The party could thrive again only when an essential war—call it a debate!—could take place again between socially left and socially conservative Democratic attitudes. In such a conflict, he did not know how much allegiance he could offer to social conservatism—certainly not so much as half—yet in company with a great many others with longrusted left attitudes, he might, at least, obtain some insight into his buried attitudes on many a question concerning women, gays, blacks, and the environment. From 1972 on, boilerplate answers to these questions had been jammed into the forefront of Democratic-party platforms at the fearful expense of ignoring the old and fundamental war between the unions and management. The Democrats now had a party that was strong on Boutique Politics but had, in return, given assent to the legitimacy of a society almost totally managed by the Corporation. Since 1972, the women had prevailed in the party, and they had welcomed the dominance of the Corporation, provided they obtained their growing share of executive rank. In the course of acquiring power, they had selected all the Democratic candidates by the power of their potential veto, and until Clinton came along, these presidential candidates had diminished each year, down from McGovern to Carter to Mondale to Dukakis—all loyal to the women and no one of them nearly as strong as he needed to be. Then had come Clinton, larger yet less than his predecessors, his prodigious charisma matched only by his prodigious lack of political conscience.

No, the time for a great debate in the Democratic party was approaching, and the title might be simple. Resolved: The liberation of labor is the first of the liberations.

Three cheers for the approach of the millennium. May it hasten all those confrontations that have been ignored for years in the hyperjudgmental infected ranks of the politically correct, wearing their designer suits, their laptops, their new corporate clout, our women having at last become the equal of men in all the awful ways.

Bombs Away

NOT TWO WEEKS LATER, MAILER CAME

across a feature in the Sunday Boston Globe Magazine on May 5, written by Edgar Allen Beem, concerning a writer named Carolyn Chute. He recognized the name; Carolyn Chute had written a very good novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine. She was now the leader of a group called the Second Maine Militia, and the piece by Beem described a meeting in North Parsonsfield, Maine:

“Not all of the people attending this February gathering fit the stereotype of the modem militia member as political conservative. There are tree-huggers as well as tax-cappers, Marxists as well as constitutionalists, peace activists as well as National Rifle Association members. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Greens, Ross Perot supporters, and avowed anarchists are in attendance.

“Indeed, the bumper stickers of the cars parked on the grounds of the Parsonsfield Seminary are testament to this broad range of political passions. LET CUBA LIVE, FREE TIBET, FREE LEONARD PELTIER, GRATEFUL DEAD, REPEAL NAFTA, NO CLINTON IN ’96, BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT. The Chutes’ own red pickup bears handlettered signs in the rear window reading CHOMSKY KNOWS, AGRIBUSINESS BUTCHERS PEOPLE, and STOP SPECIAL RIGHTS TO CORPORATIONS. ‘This is not about Left and Right,’ says Chute. ‘This is about up and down. This is for the people on the downside.’ ”

Mailer made a call to Buchanan and read him the paragraphs. Buchanan thought a moment, then gave his reaction: “Left and Right come together basically in opposition to big business, government, big corporations—against the oppressive weight of gigantic institutions upon the individual. You get a broad coalition of Left and Right. They feel they’re going to lose the country they grew up in. That is the underlying focus.”

Four years to the millennium! lí