1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Playboy entrepreneur Hugh Hefner emerged from his Chicago mansion and received a smack from a club. He was so angered that he financed the publication of a book on police violence during the convention, Law and Disorder.

  The police later claimed that they had been provoked by the obscenities being shouted at them, though Chicago police are not likely to be taken aback by obscenities. They also said that as soon as they were blinded by television lights, the demonstrators started throwing objects at them. But most nonpolice eyewitnesses do not back this up. Twenty reporters needed hospital treatment that night. When Daley was questioned about this, he said that the police were unable to distinguish reporters from demonstrators. But Daley often attacked the press verbally, and now his police force was clearly and deliberately doing it physically. Local Chicago reporters were becoming increasingly frustrated. They were being beaten and their cameras were being smashed, but these important details were being deleted from their copy just as the fact that the police had singled out McCarthy cars was deleted. In response, a group of Chicago reporters started its own monthly, the Chicago Journalism Review, which has gone on to become a noted critical review of the news media. Its first issue was a critique of the coverage of the Chicago convention.

  The convention had to share the front page of newspapers with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and added to this, the fights within the convention had to compete with the fights on the street. Every night for the next four nights, the duration of the convention, the police cleared Lincoln Park and went on a clubbing rampage in the neighborhood. The demonstrators began to feel that they were doing something truly dangerous, that these Chicago police were methodically brutal and no one knew how far they would go. The odd thing was that they would pass beautiful summer days together in the park. The sky had turned clear and the temperature dropped to the seventies. The police would sometimes bring lawn chairs and park their blue riot helmets on the grass. They would read the pamphlets about free love and drugs and the antiwar movement and revolution with amusement, or bemusement. Sometimes they even threw around a softball and Yippies would join in the game of catch. But when they left, the cops would ominously say, “See you at eleven o’clock, kid.”

  Demonstrators in Grant Park, Chicago, during the August 1968 Democratic convention

  (Photo by Roger Malloch/Magnum Photos)

  By Tuesday McCarthy was saying that he would lose, which was an odd stance to take while Kennedy votes were still in play and while his young, dedicated campaigners were still working hard in their headquarters in the Hilton. He couldn’t possibly lose until Wednesday. Was McCarthy trying to make it clear that he wasn’t about to win because it had been demonstrated in California what happened to peace candidates who were about to win? Guessing was always an important part of trying to follow Senator McCarthy’s campaigning. On Wednesday downtown Chicago was full of demonstrators—hippies, Yippies, the Mobe, and a mule train of Poor People marchers, the foundering orphaned spring plan of the late Martin Luther King. David Dellinger was pleading with the demonstrators to stay nonviolent while pleading with the city for a permit to march to the Amphitheatre. The city did not understand why he was pursuing this already resolved issue. But the demonstrators were filling Grant Park opposite the Hilton and ready to march, and there was really no one in charge of them unless it was to lead them to the Amphitheatre. They were listening to the events on the convention floor on small transistor radios when the platform committee announced a prowar stance—meaning that the Democratic Party was not going to go into the campaign opposed to continuing the war. After everything that had happened this year, after Tet, Johnson’s resignation, McCarthy’s campaign, Martin Luther King’s death, Bobby Kennedy’s campaign and death, and four months of futile Paris peace talks—after all that, both parties were to have prowar stances.

  Johnson announced that he intended to go to Chicago and address the convention now that they had adopted his stand on the war. Daley had even arranged a celebration at the Stockyards Inn next to the Amphitheatre for the president’s sixtieth birthday. Back when he had assumed the convention would be his coronation, Johnson had insisted it take place the week of his birthday. Now some insiders still suspected he wanted to burst into town and use the birthday bash to announce his candidacy. Humphrey could be counted on to step aside, and Johnson would easily have the votes for a first ballot victory. But party leaders advised Johnson not to show up because the war plank was so unpopular among delegates that he might be booed on the convention floor, not to mention the streets, where Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies had already announced plans for their own Johnson birthday celebration.

  Ted Kennedy refused to run, and Humphrey at last got the endorsement of Daley, which came with the votes of the Illinois delegation. Humphrey was looking happy again at a convention where no one else was. “I feel like jumping!” he said when the Pennsylvania delegation’s votes clinched his first ballot victory. Humphrey, who had told Meet the Press the day he flew to Chicago, “I think the policies the president has pursued are basically sound,” was to be the nominee. The Democratic Party was going to offer a continuation of the Johnson presidency.

  Perhaps it was a bad omen that by Wednesday night, Allen Ginsberg—after omming, reciting mystical passages from Blake, and getting gassed in riots every night and then getting up to lead a Hindu sunrise service at the Lake Michigan beach—had little voice left for omming or even speaking.

  In Grant Park, facing the Hilton, leaders were struggling that evening to control the demonstrators, but no one was restraining the police. The police later claimed that demonstrators were filling balloons with urine and bags with excrement to throw at the police. Some demonstrators denied this, but it was clear that after four nights of being beaten up by the police, they were tired and losing patience. Rennie Davis tried to calm one group of demonstrators, but the police, recognizing Davis, began clubbing him, hitting him so soundly on the head that he had to be hospitalized.

  The police began clubbing everyone, and the demonstrators started fighting back in what turned into a pitched battle of hand-to-hand combat. City hospitals were warning demonstrators not to bring in injured demonstrators because the police were waiting outside and stuffing them into paddy wagons. Grant Park filled with tear gas and the wounded. A sit-in began in front of the Hilton and overflowed into the park. The white lights of television cameras were nearly blinding. The police said that objects were being thrown at them, but none of the numerous films of that evening’s events show this. They do show the police and National Guardsmen wading into the crowd with clubs and rifle butts, beating children and elderly people and those who watched behind police lines, beating even those who had fallen, where they lay on the ground. They dragged women through the streets. A crowd was pressed so hard against the windows of a hotel restaurant—middle-aged women and children, according to The New York Times—that the windows caved in and the crowd escaped inside. The police pursued them through the windows into the restaurant, clubbing anyone they could find, even in the hotel lobby. “Demonstrators, reporters, McCarthy workers, doctors, all began to stagger into the Hilton lobby, blood streaming from head and face wounds,” Mailer reported. The police had run amok in front of the hotel, and the television cameras that had been mounted on the entrance awning had caught all of it. Seventeen minutes of police mayhem could be bounced off a satellite called Telstar to show the world. The police smashed cameras, seemingly not realizing—or not caring—that other cameras were documenting the assault. They also went beyond the cameras’ range, pursuing the crowd into the streets of downtown Chicago, clubbing whomever they could find.

  It was one of those moments of 1968 television magic, something ordinary enough today but so new and startling at the time that no one who had their television sets on has ever forgotten. Rather than taking the time to edit, process, analyze, and package the film for tomorrow night’s news—what people were used to television doing—the networks just ran it. Dell
inger had urged the demonstrators not to fight back, saying that “the whole world could see” who was committing the violence. While the cameras recorded the police violence, they also picked up the crowd chanting—absolutely right—“The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

  In the Amphitheatre, the convention stopped to see what was happening. When Wisconsin was called for voting, the head of the delegation, Donald Peterson, said that young people by the thousands were being beaten in the streets and the convention should be adjourned and reconvened in another city. A priest then rose to lead the convention in prayer, and it seemed to Allen Ginsberg, who was in the convention hall, that the priest was blessing the proceedings and the system it represented. He jumped to his feet and, though no one had heard more than a raspy whisper from his tired voice that day, he blasted out an “omm” so loud that it drowned out the priest, and he continued without stopping for five minutes. According to Ginsberg, he did this to drive out hypocrisy.

  Daley was now glaring out at the convention floor, looking as if he were ready to call in his police and take care of these delegates. Then Abraham Ribicoff, senator and former governor of Connecticut, went to the podium to nominate George McGovern, a last-minute alternative peace candidate. “With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn’t have those Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”

  The convention seemed to freeze for only a second, but it was the most memorable second of the convention. Television cameras sought out and found the neckless, fleshy face of boss Richard Daley, and Daley, perhaps oblivious to the cameras but it seemed almost playing to them, shouted something across the hall to Ribicoff, something not picked up by the microphones. Millions of viewers tried their lip-reading skills. It seemed to involve a pejorative for Jewish people and a sexual relationship. According to most observers who studied the film, he said, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.” Many thought he also added, “You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” In 1968 even Abe Ribicoff was a motherfucker.

  Daley, however, insisted that he had said none of these things. George Dunne, president of the Cook County Board, explained that they were all yelling—the Chicago people surrounding Daley. They had all been shouting, “Faker!” Ribicoff was a faker. It was not their fault if it sounded like the other F-word.

  The violence continued Thursday into early Friday morning, when the police went to McCarthy headquarters on the fifteenth floor of the Hilton and dragged campaign workers out of bed to beat them. Senator McCarthy used his private plane to fly his workers safely out of Chicago.

  Chicago was, along with Tet, one of the seminal events in the coming of age of television, and the star was not Hubert Humphrey. It was the seventeen-minute film in front of the Hilton. The Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, and most of the other print media wrote about the historic significance of the television coverage. This was the Yippie dream, or Abbie Hoffman’s dream. Later he explained to the Walker Commission, the government-appointed task force to study the violence in Chicago, “We want to fuck up their image on TV. It’s all in terms of disrupting the image, the image of a democratic society being run very peacefully and orderly and everything according to business.”

  Hoffman and many of the journalists who covered the event believed that tens of millions of viewers seeing the Chicago police out of control and beating up kids would change the country and radicalize youth. Perhaps it did. A minority of the country cheered and said, “That’s how to treat those hippies,” and according to Mike Royko, Daley’s popularity in Chicago increased. In 1976, the day after Daley died, Royko wrote of the mayor’s anti-Semitic cursing at Ribicoff, “Tens of millions of TV viewers were shocked. But it didn’t offend most Chicagoans. That’s part of the Chicago style. . . .” Daley angrily insisted that the police had done a fine job and the fault lay in the “distorted and twisted” reporting. But it was a different age now; people saw unedited film, and most were appalled by what they saw. Bizarrely, Humphrey claimed he had never seen the film. “I was busy receiving guests,” he said.

  There was an irony waiting in the wings. If the events in Chicago were to produce disenchantment with the political establishment and a low voter turnout among Democrats, no one stood to gain more from this than Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate for president.

  When Humphrey started realizing this, he became angry at the television networks for airing the violence outside instead of the convention inside. “I’m going to be president someday,” the candidate said, already sounding uncertain when that day might be. “I’m going to appoint the FCC. We are going to look into all this.”

  Where did you stand on Chicago? It became another one of those 1968 divides. You were either on the side of Daley and the police, who were severely criticized even by the Walker Report, or you were on the side of the demonstrators, the hippies, the Yippies, the antiwar movement, the McCarthy workers. Humphrey, coming out of the convention as the new Democratic candidate, said, “Rioting, burning, sniping, mugging, traffic in narcotic, and disregard for the law are the advance guard of anarchy.” Whatever else that might mean, it meant that he was on the side of Daley and the police, on the side of “law and order,” which was the new code phrase for what others called “white backlash.” Humphrey was going after George Wallace and Richard Nixon voters. The Left, he assumed, would have no choice other than himself. Wallace had already said that the Chicago police had “probably used too much restraint.”

  Before leaving Chicago, Humphrey gave an interview to CBS’s Roger Mudd in which he backed off of “too busy receiving guests” and said:

  Goodness me, anybody who sees this sort of thing is sick at heart and I was. But I think the blame ought to be put where it belongs. I think we ought to quit pretending that Mayor Daley did anything wrong. He didn’t. . . .

  I know what caused these demonstrations. They were planned, premeditated by certain people in this country that feel that all they have to do is riot and they’ll get their way. They don’t want to work through the peaceful process. I have no time for them. The obscenity, the profanity, the filth that was uttered night after night in front of the hotels was an insult to every woman, every mother, every daughter, indeed, every human being, the kind of language that no one would tolerate at all. . . . Is it any wonder police had to take action?

  It seems a surprising degree of shock about obscene language for a man who had just spent several years working with Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson did not talk that way in front of women, which was the old code. It might have shocked Humphrey to know that a psychiatrist who taught at Columbia during the spring upheavals wrote that a Barnard woman was more likely than a Columbia man to “curse a cop” during a riot. “They were aware that cursing was a weapon, one of the few they had.” William Zinsser, writing about this in Life magazine, said, “Feminism finds its ultimate tool—the four letter word”—but then Zinsser referred in his article to “Barnard girls” and “Columbia men.”

  The majority of people on the other side of the generation gap from Humphrey were not likely to empathize with his horror of naughty words in front of the fairer sex. Why didn’t Daley’s anti-Semitism shock Humphrey, not to mention that trendy word about carnal relations with a female parent? In any event, he had probably lost most of those voters on “Goodness me.” By 1968 not many people were still saying “Goodness me.”

  In later hearings, Abbie Hoffman agreed with Mayor Daley that it was the television cameras that had brought the protesters to Chicago. In September Hoffman boasted, “Because of our actions in Chicago, Richard Nixon will be elected President.” Many were inclined to agree with that assessment. But it could still come down to the campaigns the two candidates would run. Strangely, for the first time in 1968, the war in Vietnam was not the deciding issue.

  Miraculously, the clubbings in Chicago killed no one, though one man was shot while fleeing. The police claimed he was armed. At the same time, Vietnam had its worst week of the summer, w
ith 308 Americans killed, 1,134 wounded, and an estimated 4,755 enemy soldiers killed.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE SORROW OF

  PRAGUE EAST

  I think that in the long run, our non-violent approach and the moral supremacy of the Czechoslovak people over the aggressor had, and still has moral significance. In retrospect it could be said that the peaceful approach may have contributed to the breakup of the “aggressive” bloc. . . . My conviction that moral considerations have their place in politics does not follow simply from the fact that small countries must be moral because they do not have the ability to strike back at bigger powers. Without morality it is not possible to speak of international law. To disregard moral principles in the realm of politics would be a return to the law of the jungle.

  —ALEXANDER DUBČEK, August 1990

  ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, Anton Tazky, a secretary of the Slovak Communist Party Central Committee and a personal friend of Dubek’s, was driving back to Bratislava from an outlying Slovak district. He saw odd, bright lights, and as he drove closer, realizing that these were the headlights of tanks and military trucks, and that these vehicles were accompanied by soldiers in foreign uniforms, he concluded that he had driven by a movie shoot. He went to bed.

  August 20 was a hazy summer day. Dubek’s wife, Anna, had been up much of the night before with intense pain from a gallbladder problem. On Tuesday morning Dubek took her to the hospital and explained to her that he had an afternoon presidium meeting that would run late and he might not be able to visit her until Wednesday morning. It was the last time the presidium would meet before the Fourteenth Party Congress three weeks later, and Dubek and his colleagues wanted to use the congress to solidify in law the achievements of the Prague Spring.