From the first major confrontation between police and demonstrators on Sunday night, August 25, 1968, self-serving assertions of what happened in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention have roiled over people’s memories like the tear gas rolling over Lincoln Park and the Loop.
Christopher Chandler, then a Chicago Sun-Times reporter directly familiar with the events of convention week, characterized the Walker Report in the Chicago Journalism Review as “the most amazing example of dodging the major issues that has been produced in the long history of middle-of-the-road committee studies.” Since then, authors involved in the radical movements of the 60s have occasionally asserted, albeit without mounting any decisive argument, that the police acted under Mayor Daley’s command. Hans Koning comments nicely in his book Nineteen Sixty-Eight: “I’d seen ‘police riots’ before, but they don’t repeat in the same way day after day.” But 20 years later, the police riot explanation and the early stances taken by the police and by the city’s “Strategy of Confrontation” are echoed again and again in retrospectives of the 60s; in some cases, the police riot theory is even presented as the radical view. It has now been perpetuated by author David Farber, in his recently issued Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press).
The city’s obstructionism continued up to Sunday, August 25. On Saturday the 24th, Abbie Hoffman, the media-anointed leader of the Yippies, and Tom Hayden of the Mobe (these were the two major groups behind the demonstrations) were quoted as saying: “My God, there’s no one here!”
A tall, slim Chicago actor and a taunting boy with a Vietcong flag–he was 14 years old, “big for my age” he told me–found each other in a film camera’s floodlights. The actor had been taunting the Yippies in various parts of the park for being cowards, and the boy had been in the main caucusing group yelling “Fuck the marshals! Up the marshals!” Now the marshals were trying to pull him down from someone’s shoulders, yelling “This is suicide!” The self-styled 14-year-old turned the marshals’ cautionary cry of “Back to the streets” into the more militant “Onto the streets.” The crowd, ambivalent in the darkness of the park, took up the cry and drifted toward the lighted streets on Clark, LaSalle, and North Avenue. One group of a few hundred headed through the Gold Coast to meet the police at the Michigan Avenue bridge, but the main part of the crowd piled up at the Clark-LaSalle border of Lincoln Park. The boy and the actor, joined by others, goaded the demonstrators until, coming to a pitch of enthusiasm, they spilled back into the park.
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I saw policemen violently club anyone within reach. When news photographers got pictures, the police smashed the cameras with their clubs. “He got my lens!” When other newsmen and I tried to get the name of a policeman who did a particularly awful beating, we saw he had no name tag or star, and more policemen without name tags crowded around their colleague and hustled him away. Police in white shirts, lieutenants or captains, were nearby. Throughout convention week, white-shirted commanders occasionally tried to pull away cops who were wildly beating demonstrators; in a well-known incident that occurred on Wednesday in front of the Hilton, Deputy Superintendent James Rochford did so, and was heard yelling to officers, “Stop it! For Christ’s sake, stop it!” But such actions did not suggest to me that the police force as a whole was rioting out of control; rather I was put in mind of officers in combat pulling enraged soldiers off an already subdued army. (In Rochford’s case, it may also be significant that TV cameras were nearby and he knew it.)
The next night, August 26, another key incident occurred. A police car came up behind a barricade hastily improvised by demonstrators in Lincoln Park; it attempted to push through the arrangement of picnic tables and trash cans, and was stoned.
After midnight Wednesday, up in Lincoln Park, police made attacks along Clark Street and LaSalle that are remembered by neither TV specials nor newspaper articles nor the Walker Report nor Chicago ’68 nor the city’s “Strategy of Confrontation” report. I stood at Clark and Wells with several newsmen and watched as lines of National Guardsmen, black against the glare of Fire Department light trucks behind them, swept a park made empty by rumors that a policeman had been killed downtown. Then I was driving south on Clark Street back to the Hilton, following a CTA bus packed with police and driving with its lights out. A rock banged on the side of the bus, and the cry of “Pig!” came from the sidewalk.
A couple of blocks south, at the corner of LaSalle and Eugenie, the bus stopped near a mass of young people, tourists, and Lincoln Park bystanders, some of them taunting the Guardsmen and the police. The police came out of that bus as if shot from a gun and swung their clubs haymaker-style. To be young was to be a target. They chased and beat a group of white-coated medics, and a blond girl whom I heard screaming, “I’m leaving, sir, I’m leaving!” All up and down Clark and LaSalle streets police were bursting out of buses and squad cars to attack any young person on the streets, telling them to get out of town, even though many of them were suburbanites come to gawk at the action, their cars bearing Illinois license plates. The police were apparently punishing the young people for the 17 minutes of Michigan-Balbo TV time that had begun showing to the nation at about 9:30 that night. The National Guardsmen stood along the east side of Clark Street and the west edge of Lincoln Park and watched. Was this a “police riot” or a concerted assault? Were these busloads of police acting without orders?
Testimony that the police were not merely overreacting to events, but were acting under the orders and encouragement of their superiors, became available in April 1969. The Walker Report had already been published, but this evidence has been available to all later writers and continues to be overlooked by advocates of the police riot concept. The documentation comes from the Confederation of Patrolmen, whose newsletter, in protesting the indictments brought against eight policemen in the spring of 1969 (they were all acquitted), stated: “Traditionally, we don’t pass the heat up in the ranks. However, the men WERE given DIRECT ORDERS in regard to the name tags and stars . . . they were GUARANTEED that NO MAN would be SUSPENDED for any action taken at the time of the riots . . . These suspensions are damn poor pay, for services rendered. We are greatly disappointed that NONE of the men who gave the orders . . . stepped forward to defend the patrolmen . . .” In addition, the COP newsletter advised patrolmen “to keep accurate notes of ‘controversial’ orders, such as date, time and content. Just in case you are suspended or indicted, you will be able to refresh your memory.”
On Thursday night, comedian-activist Dick Gregory led a march that was subjected to a massive gas attack from the National Guard. Chicago ’68 deals only summarily with it, thus avoiding some sticky matters of testimony concerning justification for the use of CS gas on so many thousands of white liberals (McCarthy, McGovern, Kennedy people) who just a few days before had regarded themselves as legitimate members of the Democratic party. Here the Walker Report again behaves oddly and characteristically; it speaks of “a group of 100” coming from the west on 18th Street and “pushing the Guards,” of objects “being thrown from the rooftops and windows of buildings,” and bottles and firecrackers being thrown. Then, “the Guardsmen put on gas masks and CS was hurled into the crowd.”
When I first read the Walker Report, I was pretty sure that the group of 100 coming from the west on 18th Street was a displacement in space and sequence, and an exaggeration of, a brief shower of rocks, bottles, pieces of board, and firecrackers that came from the narrow lot just north of 18th Street. I was standing there near the young men who threw those missiles, and I noted that their actions came in response to the gassing, not in advance of it; the Guardsmen on the east side of the street already had their gas masks on and were spraying gas. Here I saw a demonstrator lay a friendly hand on the arm of a would-be bottle thrower to restrain him, as often happened during convention week.
Early Friday, police attacked the McCarthy suite in the Hilton. David Farber splices one out-of-sequence sentence into his account of Wednesday’s Michigan-Balbo incident to deal with this attack, and the Walker Report carefully develops a reason for it: that objects–smoked fish among them–were dropped from a 15th-floor McCarthy room onto police on the sidewalks below. However, the police did not assault only the room singled out by binoculars as the source of the objects, but burst into rooms throughout the Hilton’s 15th floor and clubbed and manhandled the young McCarthy workers, telling them to get out of town. This suggests that the attack was political vengeance for the embarrassment inflicted by the liberals inside the Amphitheatre and by demonstrators on the streets of Chicago upon Mayor Daley and his city. One McCarthy worker I talked to was jerked out of bed and shoved onto the floor; he said he understood immediately and mumbled, “All right, all right, I’m going, I’m going, just let me get my bag.” On his way out, he saw a policeman in the lobby actually break his club over the head of another worker.
So let’s assume that Mayor Daley did give orders to clear the parks and streets by whatever means necessary. Why would he do such a thing? It is probable that the orders that were passed down from his office to the police never existed in any written form. The portion of the mayor’s white paper, “Strategy of Confrontation,” that was scorned as the most absurd at the time, veritably sweaty with Daley’s desperate need for justification, was a passage that reiterated assertions Daley had made in a TV interview he demanded from Walter Cronkite on Thursday of convention week. This passage set forth “the police intelligence of schemes to assassinate Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Vice President Humphrey, Mayor Daley” and the “plan to murder a young female supporter of Sen. McCarthy and blame it on the police.” The report explained that the police had not wanted to “publicize these plots and rumors of plots for fear of planting the idea in still other minds.”
Now, with the ongoing revelations of the Freedom of Information Act, it appears that Mayor Daley did have such reports on his desk and in his mind. Where did they come from? Under the Freedom of Information Act, Jerry Rubin received several boxes of FBI records concerning himself, his activities, and the ’68 convention. Stewart Albert (unindicted coconspirator in the conspiracy trial and coeditor with Judith Albert of The Sixties Papers) has examined this host of FBI memoranda and has found reports of assassination “schemes.” (In the week before the convention, leaders of the Blackstone Rangers testified before a federal grand jury about assassination plots allegedly originating in their organization. The Rangers denied any knowledge of such plots but were asked to leave town anyway during the convention. They did, but came back Monday, August 26, when it became obvious no violence would erupt in the black areas.)
Yet FBI reports of these schemes never surfaced in the conspiracy trial of seven demonstration leaders–a “show trial” that J. Edgar Hoover actively sought. The three major undercover agents who testified at the trial, Robert Pierson, William Frapolly, and Irwin Bock, as primed as they were, made no reference to having heard of assassination “schemes,” nor did any other official who testified, FBI or otherwise. So where did these reports come from?
The FBI’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence project) against the New Left–exposed in the mid-70s–was established in the spring of 1968 and used procedures previously tested against various other political groups, including the black civil rights movement in the south. COINTELPRO used illegal means to “disrupt and otherwise neutralize” suspect groups and persons; these means included anonymous letters, dissemination of derogatory information, break-ins, and the massive infiltration of targeted groups by COINTELPRO operators. “Be alert for opportunities to confuse and disrupt New Left activities by misinformation,” J. Edgar Hoover urged in a memo to subordinates.
Hoover wanted agents assigned to COINTELPRO who were familiar with the New Left. The program, he wrote, must be approached “with imagination and enthusiasm if it is to be successful.” (The quotes, from FBI memoranda, come from Spying on Americans by Athan Theoharis. As Theoharis observes, if Hoover had not required the written proposal and approval and the close monitoring of COINTELPRO programs, we would not know as much as we now know about them.)
Richard Elrod told the Tribune’s Jeff Lyon: “Soon after that [the west-side King riots] intelligence started coming in about what was going to happen during the convention. Some of it could be discounted, like poisoning the water, but if you wrote it all off, you’d be remiss. . . . [The mayor] got a skewed impression of what was going to happen.” David Stahl, deputy mayor, told Lyon that he’d found particularly “unnerving” an alleged plot to have an 18-year-old female McCarthy supporter murdered and to have the murder blamed on the police. This plot has not been found by Stewart Albert in the FBI memoranda.
COINTELPRO could well have been the source of the intelligence that “skewed” the mayor’s perceptions. Given the hundreds of agents in Chicago from Army Intelligence, FBI, the Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad,” and other agencies, two or more agents unbeknownst to each other were undoubtedly often present in the same antiwar meetings, which were notoriously open in any case. A COINTELPRO operator whose specific assignment was to disseminate “negative information” could be making violent proposals in a meeting that included an intelligence gatherer who would report the “negative” information as fact–the intelligence gatherers were often pressured by Hoover to come up with information that suited his aims. Or a COINTELPRO operator might have made wild statements on the sidewalk after meeting a broke up. The FBI disinformation was mixed with partially accurate information, such as the hyperbole published openly by the Yippies about dropping LSD into Chicago’s water supply. “There is no question,” says Stewart Albert, former Yippie, “that Yippie hyperbole was seized upon by disinformation operators.”
In The Sixties Papers, Judith Albert and Stewart Albert conjecture that because of false FBI reports, channeled from the Chicago office of the FBI through the Chicago Red Squad to the mayor’s office, “Mayor Daley remained adamant in his refusal to grant permits” for marches and assemblies and for the demonstrators to sleep in Lincoln or Grant Park. “His unyielding position may perhaps be explained by what appears to have been an FBI-directed counterintelligence disinformation project. FBI agents informed the mayor and his representatives of bizarre conspiracies in which Democratic candidates would be assassinated by leftists and the city’s water supply poisoned with hallucinogenic drugs.”
This scenario does not explain how or why the city expected concerted police attacks to prevent assassinations; it would seem, in fact, that the chaos produced by such attacks would make it easier for assassinations to be carried out, both on the streets of Chicago and in the Amphitheatre (which, incidentally, anybody could enter–literally–if he or she wore a “We Love Mayor Daley” sign). Indeed, the city claimed the demonstrators planned to create chaos in the streets for just such a purpose.
There is an anecdote that Morris Janowitz, University of Chicago sociologist, consultant to military and police, was called out of a party at 10:30 PM Sunday, August 25, and asked by Daley advisers his opinion on whether the demonstrators should be allowed to sleep in Lincoln Park. He said yes, let them do it. This tells us that debate within the Daley administration did indeed continue until the last minute. However, the mayor and his advisers were simply reinforced by the FBI disinformation in their contemptuous intransigence toward the demonstrators, whom they called “terrorists” and “revolutionaries.” J. Edgar Hoover called them “halfway citizens.”) The Daley of convention week was the Daley who’d said “shoot to kill” in April 1968, and the same Daley who’d presided over the police attack on the April 27 peace march. He thought the police attacks in Lincoln Park–consistently more vicious than the police behavior downtown–could be kept effectively distant from the major network media. He is even reputed to have manipulated the settlement of a summer electricians’ strike–allowing wiring to be done in the Amphitheatre and at the Hilton but not in Lincoln Park–in order to limit the presence of major networks in the streets of Chicago.
Of the many important questions unresolved about convention week, one of the most puzzling is how the most effective big-city politician in this country got himself ambushed, together with Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic party, at Michigan and Balbo on Wednesday evening on prime-time national TV. This is puzzling because Daley had followed Elrod’s and Janowitz’s advice on Tuesday night to let the demonstrators stay in Grant Park; apparently he wanted to avoid such mass violence in front of the Hilton, just as much as conversely he wanted the savage “law and order” intransigence of the police in Lincoln Park. Certainly he, Lyndon Johnson’s team member, recipient of federal funding favors, did not intend to cripple the Democratic party. So what happened? Did Daley, who prided himself on his overall control and attention to detail, simply make a colossal blunder? Was he ill-served by his representatives on the scene, who communicated with him on the convention floor by phone? Was he away from his phone at acrucial moment? Did he, intentionally or by accident, yield control to federal actors like the FBI and the Secret Service as demonstrators’ threatened to move toward the Amphitheatre?
In any case, the myth of a police riot, in place of the daily fact of a police offensive, deflected attention from the culpability of institutionalized political power and from the very serious political, human, and constitutional issues that invested the entire affair, in its powerful dramatic ambiguity and complexity, from beginning to end.
Why, 20 years later, is this concept of a generalized police riot, divorced from supervisory control, almost gratefully accepted, mouthed, and written about without a critical thought?
David Farber makes a telling statement, apparently without irony, when he says, “To challenge power is often to challenge reason, or, at the very least, reasonableness itself.” Despite urban cynicism about most politicians being thieves, it is hard to look at people we have elected to high political office and think of them as thugs. If police riot advocates were to develop the patterns that lead from Lincoln Park and Michigan-Balbo to the police commanders, to Mayor Daley, and to the national figures of the Democratic party, they would be questioning power, questioning reasonableness itself.
Nobody could know on any of those August nights, with their incredible pitch of tension and violence, that the city had established parameters that, reiterated in such a way as to be tougher than usual, forbade the police shooting to kill except in the clear case of a policeman defending his life, in order to avoid the murder of the corn-fed 18-year-old innocent from Iowa. In fact, the discipline of the police on its own terms was superb, as was the game played between the demonstrators and the police. No one was killed.
When asked if he would do over what he’d done in August 1968, Daley said: “You’re damn right I’d do the same thing, only with greater effort.” (Yet he grudgingly acknowledged the Walker Report, aware of its political usefulness.) The controversial parameters given to the police permitted nearly indiscriminate clubbing, arrests, harassment, gassing, and macing of just about anyone present in any particular scene of attack, far beyond the usual exercise of reasonable force. Reporters and photographers were targeted and the police allowed to lift their clubs above their shoulders in ax-chopping or haymaker fashion, hitting at heads and groins. Within these parameters, the police met those demonstrators who would not be pushed aside into the minor sidewalk role that the mayor wished to assign them, causing night after night of surreal intensity and one of the strangest events of that strange, historic year.
