Discussed in this essay:
Four Books of the 1960s: “An American Dream,” “Why Are We in Vietnam?,” “The Armies of the Night,” and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” by Norman Mailer. Library of America. 950 pages. $45.
In the fall of 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, 70,000 protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington. Some 50,000 then marched across the Memorial Bridge to Arlington, Virginia, to “invest” the Pentagon—to surround it, shame it, disdain it. When they arrived at the American fortress, they saw that the building was being guarded by a mass of government forces. Norman Mailer, who was among the demonstrators, noticed a group of US Marshals, a collection of mainly white Southern men: