Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2006 | Page 69

The New Journalism of the Sixties 65 Adopting an autobiographic approach to coverage of the 1967 March on the Pentagon in The Armies o f the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History, Mailer critiques the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War and the moral worth of dissent against those escalation policies. In fact, Mailer was one of the major participants in the March on the Pentagon, and decided only afterward to write about it (at the urging of Willie Morris, former editor of Harper’s).31 Since Mailer was a leading character in the event, his autobiographic perspective is a view from the inside, and his emotions and reactions help delineate the subjective reality of the demonstration.52 Mailer employs a third-person autobiographical form first popularized by Henry Adams in The Education o f Henry Adams. The main character becomes not "I” but "Mailer/’ According to Wolfe, this device only works when "the writer takes the trouble to describe and develop his own character with at least as much care as he would devote to any other main character/'33 In The Armies o f the Night, Mailer succeeds in fully developing the protagonist's emotions and psychic responses—a necessity for being able to impressionistically evaluate the moral limits of American policies in Vietnam and the ethical value of dissent. Pulling no punches in this exercise in selfexamination, Mailer observes: Still, Mailer had a complex mind of sorts. Like a later generation which was to bum holes in their brain on Speed, he had given his own head the texture of a fine Swiss cheese. Years ago he had made all sorts of erosions in his intellectual firmament by consuming modestly promiscuous amounts of whiskey, marijuana, seconal, and Benzedrine. It had given him the illusion he was a genius, as indeed an entire generation of children would come to see themselves a decade later out on celestial journeys of LSD.54 As the subtitle suggests, Mailer simultaneously serves as novelist and historian, with historical evidence offered in the form of personal observation and participation, and in the "evidence” of emotional and psychic reactions to events in the public sphere of society. Whereas conventional journalistic practice would have focused on the number of protesters arrested on the steps of the Pentagon and the level of force used by the U.S. Marshals to repel them, Mailer takes a "tower” perspective to recor BF