There was entertainment at the Republican Gala on Sunday night. The
climax was a full marching band of bagpipers. They must have been hired
for the week since one kept hearing them on the following days, and at
all odd times, heard them even in my hotel room at four am for a few
were marching in the streets of San Francisco, sounding through the
night, giving off the barbaric evocation of the Scots, all valor, wrath,
firmitude, and treachery - the wild complete treachery of the Scots
finding its way into the sound of the pipes. They were a warning of the
fever in the heart of the Wasp.
In the summer of 1964, Esquire sent celebrated writer Norman Mailer to
San Francisco to cover the Republican National Convention, where
ultra-conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was expected to
take the Presidential nomination. Acerbic, unrelenting, and as sweeping
in scope as it is deep in examination, In the Red Light firmly
establishes Mailer as the leading literary social critic of his time -
and, perhaps, of any time.
In the Red Light was originally published in Esquire, November 1964.
