Writer and cultural critic Norman Mailer wrote much of Miami and the Siege of Chicago in between early film shoots for his motion picture Maidstone (1970).
On assignment from Harper's magazine, Mailer arrived in Miami, Florida to cover the Republican Party's 1968 convention, August 3–9, including its candidates, along with their political entourages.
The following day, his rival, Nelson Rockefeller, arrived and held a street rally along the beach in order to officially launch his own convention bid to be the GOP standard-bearer.
Nixon's approach to make his speech more listener-friendly did not go over Mailer's had as he hinted at the subtle "Piece of the Action" to bridge the gaps of stand-up suit and tie and rural-area farmer or Black person.
"The Reporter" starts his days off in Chicago by paying homage to the beauty of the city not so much for its actually physical beauty but the place hit close to home because it reminded him of his hometown of Brooklyn New York“The Mafia loved Humphrey.” While the doves and left wing of the party were confined to the rear bleachers, Daley was down front, holding the floor for the preordained nominee, along with a crew of “hecklers, fixers, flunkies and musclemen.
This Mailer identifies less with the iconoclastic rebels and hipster protagonists featured so prominently in his earlier works and more with the purportedly conservative values of older, more establishment types such as Nixon.
"[3] Rich praises the book for capturing the zeitgeist of 1960's America, a period about which Mailer wrote, "...It was as if the historical temperature in America went up every month.” This was especially true in 1968, the year in which President Lyndon Johnson shocked many with his decision not to seek re-election; King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; and multiple American cities and campuses erupted in violent protests - "events ... just too explosive to be contained by the tidy columns of a newspaper’s front page.
Mailer sharply makes note of Ronald Reagan as a comer to watch as the inheritor of the Barry Goldwater acolytes; recognizes the rise and increasing influence of an angry contingent of southern whites who flee the Democrats for Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat bid who will ultimately be Republicans; and predicts political conventions will soon become little more than staged television shows.
Anger he feels while enduring the extreme tardiness of civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy allows some of Mailer's previously suppressed resentments about Blacks to flow to the front of his mind.
[9] The spontaneity engendered by documenting unfolding events at the conventions, however, encouraged Mailer to express his gifts in ways that Shaw found to be open, imaginative and instinctive.
Without unlimited time to ruminate on all of the issues and the scenes parading before him, or firmly set all his opinions of each character in advance, Mailer's writing was purer - the fresh initial takes and impressions of a gifted novelist, rather than the ponderous admonitions of a town crier.
Shaw even favorably compares Mailer's work in Miami and the Siege of Chicago to that of other prominent author-journalists, including Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway.