The New Journalism of the Sixties
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integrity (or the public impression of such) possessed by a politician is also
property, “since it brings power and/or emoluments to him.”59 Mailer adds:
Indeed a very high politician. . . has no political substance
unless he is the servant of ideological institutions or interests
and the available moral passions of the electorate, so serving,
he is the agent of the political power they bestow on him,
which power is certainly a property.60
Concerning the nature of dissent, Mailer likens the Chicago
demonstrators to soldiers risking life and limb to fight for what they believe in:
They were young men who were not going to Vietnam. So
they would show every lover of war in Vietnam that the
reason they did not go was not for lack of the courage to fight;
no, they would carry the fight over every street in Old Town
and the Loop where the opportunity presented itself. If they
had been gassed and beaten, their leaders arrested on fake
charges. . . they were going to demonstrate that they would
not give up, that they were the stuff out of which the very best
soldiers were made.61
Again employing a third-person autobiographic style (in Miami and the
Siege o f Chicago, Mailer refers to himself as “the reporter”), plus the novelist's
tower perspective and eye for nuance and detail, Mailer seeks a larger historical
truth that could not be obtained through the conventional techniques of
reportage.
Meanwhile, Michael Herr’s Dispatches impressionistically examines
the moral depths of American policy in Southeast Asia through the use of
autobiography (Herr served as Esquire's Vietnam correspondent in 1967-68)
and by chronicling the war from the point of view of the line troops themselves.
Herr’s narrative, altematingly gritty and lyrical, captures the feeling of
disorientation, which he claims was so much a part of the Vietnam experience.
As Herr told Tom Wolfe, “At first I didn’t feel like I was covering anything. I
just felt very lost.”62 For Herr, Vietnam was a war of misinformation, where
body counts were exaggerated, losses were downplayed, and atrocities were
covered up. Using both the third and first person, Herr attempts to penetrate the
psyches of the men in the rice paddies and the trenches. In so doing, he
chronicles in graphic det