Chicago: Thoughts and Afterthoughts

...Mayor daley also talks about the "unspeakable" provocations that brought on the police action, and that "understandably" produced some "over-reaction" by Chicago's finest...

...That ovation was not surprising...

...The real target—Negro rioters, looters, etc.—was nowhere to be seen during the Democratic convention in Chicago...

...Dellinger, a gentle person who was a protege of the late pacifist leader A. J. Muste, clasped his hands before him in a somewhat forlorn manner, gazed up at the unpainted ceiling and said: "We just hope that before it's over people will know that there are protesters in Chicago...

...One of those clubbed on the side of the head was a young boy who tried to protest that he was peaceful...

...Frustrated, the protesters decided to march to the convention hall...

...Newsmen pressed mob leader David Dellinger to explain what these demonstrations were supposed to accomplish...

...So the image the Democrats might like to salvage from Chicago is a little soft and fuzzy...

...To prove his point, he dwells on that dramatic 20-minute battle between police and protesters in front of the Conrad Hilton the night Hubert Humphrey was nominated...

...The whole country was indeed watching, and the protesters had succeeded beyond their wildest hopes...

...Then there has emerged the interesting claim that every major political figure in Chicago was marked for assassination, accounting for the precautions and tension that marked "Stalag '68...

...Then a thousand members of the Youth International Party (Yip-pies) came to town and decided to camp in Lincoln Park, far north of the Loop center...

...Mayor Daley never gave them a chance...

...The mob people had hoped to focus their whole week of protest on a meeting in huge Soldier Field, but the Democrats rented the field for the week and never used it...

...Hardly...

...The demonstrators were clearly unarmed...

...In any case, the complaints of naivete and manipulation will bring dry laughs to those newsmen who were injured that week in Chicago, and to many others—the great majority of newsmen covering the story —who could hardly believe what they were seeing...

...As for the provocations, never in the six or seven major confrontations that I witnessed did a protester produce a gun, a knife or even a stick...

...Daley's police?technically enforcing a local ordinance—chased them out every night, mostly via charges and swinging clubs...

...On the basis of my observations, not one of these charges has any real substance...

...The ghettoes were unusually quiet...

...And everyone knows who won...

...According to Daley, the demonstrators provoked the riot by "surging forward" against police lines, and the police, naturally, had to surge back...

...That question the Mayor still has not answered...

...Provocation...

...Four days later, Chicago cops were staging a billy-club and gloved-fist assault in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, smashing away at protesters and bystanders alike, clubbing demonstrators already pros-strate on the street...

...Far from "surging" against police lines, the demonstrators began backing up as soon as they saw the police charge forming...

...Well, there is no doubt that the police over-reacted...

...Essentially, the Mayor's defense comes down to four points: the protesters were for the most part revolutionaries and provocateurs...

...Mayor Daley is still fighting the battle of Chicago...

...None of this, of course, would prevent Mayor Daley from being re-elected by a landslide if he were running today, and none of it can disguise the fact that mail in favor of the police and against the protesters is running about 20-1...

...But the demonstrators had congregated there because they weren't allowed to go anywhere else...

...The protesters were angry and militant, yes, but they were neither "terrorists" nor "revolutionaries...

...If there is one factor that will keep the memory of Chicago alive until election day—to Hubert Humphrey's detriment—it is Daley's near-frantic efforts to whitewash, explain and justify what happened outside the convention...

...The Mayor has called the dissenters "terrorists" spoiling for "hostile confrontations with the police...

...I not only witnessed the charge but was caught in one end of it—pinned to the wall of the hotel with many others—and saw for myself that police were indiscriminately, almost sadistically swinging their clubs at anyone in reach...

...But the battle is over...

...If there were such abnormal assassination fears—and the story has all the earmarks of an afterthought—how did police actions help security...

...The whole police operation was characterized by an overkill that left bleeding heads and cracked ribs in its wake, among newsmen and bystanders as well as protesters...

...The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (a Leftist catch-all protest group, soon dubbed mob) was trying to drum up interest in the series of leaflet handouts and picket lines it had scheduled for the week...

...Dave Dellinger had a dream?but it was only a daydream until Mayor Richard Daley and his Police Department turned it into reality...

...One wondered why the Yippies were not allowed to stay in the park, where it was easy to keep an eye on them...

...Perhaps...

...The police had the protesters in a constant state of agitation, they forced them to roam the city angrily, and they thus made sure that Humphrey, for one, was surrounded by agitated crowds every time he left the hotel...

...I also had long talks with many of the demonstrators and spent a good deal of time in the area where the candidates were staying...

...National Guard troops—now on the scene in full strength—had cordoned off most of the area around the hotel...

...Instead the march was blocked at its starting point, and the climactic riot in front of the Conrad Hilton ensued...

...every major political figure in Chicago was marked for assassination...

...Herbert Dorfman, aprevious contributor, is a producer at ABC News...

...The Mayor chose a one-sided film format that the television networks turned down but many individual stations used...

...But the police reaction to this quixotic flurry was a charge three deep in which people were beaten, kicked, stomped on and otherwise manhandled...

...the provocations suffered by the police were unspeakable...

...1 was present at almost every confrontation between police and protesters during that last week in August...

...It is true that tin cans, rocks and other objects were tossed during one rally when a police car intervened...

...The Whole World is Watching...

...the press was naive and misled...

...Daley's contention that the press and tv were "naive" and "misused" did not impel him to go on television as invited, and discuss the matter with newsmen...

...Chicago: Thoughts and Afterthoughts By Herbert Dorfman Two days before the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, the news media were called to a press conference in the back of an empty store near the Loop...

...Yet young white youths calling themselves Yippies are not the targets of the "law and order" campaign...

...Apart from the unresolved issue of why people could not use the sidewalks and streets of Chicago to go anywhere they wanted, it probably would have been wisest to let the marchers go a mile or two before slowing them down...

...It was a five-mile march...

...They didn't back up fast enough...

...Anyhow these things are better handled by George Wallace and Spiro Agnew...

...One night, however, they tear-gassed the entire park to empty it...

...But when McCarthy went on to tell these victims of police ferocity that they all still believed in the system, only they had to work harder to preserve it, the applause was deafening...

...Since the security arrangements around the Amphitheatre were like an urban Maginot Line, it is unlikely that the marchers would have succeeded in "invading" the hall in any event, if that was their intention...

...It may not be too much to say that Richard Daley is like a man possessed—in truth, he doth protest too much...

...The police charged because the busy and important intersection in front of the Hilton was packed from corner to corner with demonstrators, creating a massive traffic jam on Michigan Avenue...

...Excuse...

...His very appearance sparked an explosion of applause that shook windows at the Hilton...

...Regrettably, the various commissions that may investigate the Chicago disorders will never be able to fully determine whether the demonstrators were serious when they said that all they wanted was a place to rally...

...In statements to the press, in special reports issued by his Police Department, in programs prepared for television, the Mayor bangs away at this issue, inspiring arguments and colloquy every time he launches a new attack...

...In the morning Senator McCarthy came over to speak to them...

...From the be-leagured ranks of the beaten could be heard an almost triumphant cry: "The Whole World is Watching...

...The Yippies, many of them coughing and crying, broke a number of storefront windows in their anger...

...The last has encouraged some Democrats to see a silver lining—that is, that they have somehow dramatized their interest in "law and order" and won the support of the people...

...Revolutionaries...

...The Mayor is wrong...

...Few, in fact, seem to have caught the significance of something that happened the morning after the Hilton riot: The mob people, Yippies and others involved in the melee had been pushed into the park across the street from the hotel and allowed (finally) to spend the night there...