The Vietnam War was raging. President Lyndon Johnson, facing a challenge in his own Democratic Party from the maverick antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, announced that he wouldn't seek a 2nd term. In April, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated & riots broke out in inner cities throughout America. Robert Kennedy was killed after winning the California primary in June. In August, Republicans met in Miami, picking the little-loved Richard Nixon as their candidate, while in September, Democrats in Chicago backed the ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey. TVs across the country showed antiwar protesters filling the streets of Chicago & the police running amok, beating & arresting demonstrators & delegates alike. In Miami & the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer, America’s most protean & provocative writer, brings a novelist’s eye to bear on the events of 1968, a decisive year in modern American politics, from which today’s bitterly divided country arose.