THE assault from the left was furious, fluky and bizarre. Yet the Chicago police department responded in a way that could only be characterized as sanctioned mayhem. With billy clubs, tear gas and Mace, the blue-shirted, blue-helmeted cops violated the civil rights of countless innocent citizens and contravened every accepted code of professional police discipline.
No one could accuse the Chicago cops of discrimination. They savagely attacked hippies, yippies, New Leftists, revolutionaries, dissident Democrats, newsmen, photographers, passersby, clergymen and at least one cripple. Winston Churchill’s journalist grandson got roughed up. Playboy’s Hugh Hefner took a whack on the backside (see PRESS). The police even victimized a member of the British Parliament, Mrs. Anne Kerr, a vacationing Laborite who was Maced outside the Conrad Hilton and hustled off to the lockup.
Creative Warlord. “The force used was the force that was necessary,” insisted Police Superintendent James Conlisk Jr. He could point to the fortunate fact that no one was killed. He also pointed out—almost with pride—that the casualties included 152 cops. Yet the cops’ excesses during the Democratic Convention were not basically Conlisk’s doing. Chicago is Mayor Richard J. Daley’s satrapy.
Daley takes a fierce, eccentric pride in Chicago. For 13 years, he has ruled his province like a Chinese warlord. The last of America’s big-city bosses, the jowly, irascible mayor has on the whole been a creative autocrat, lacing his megalopolis with freeways, pulling in millions in federal spending.
Daley is also something of an original. In a city with as robust a tradition of political corruption as Boston or New York, he has maintained a pristine record of personal honesty. Yet, like any other expert monarch, he has always known where and how to tolerate corruption within his realm. The son of a sheet-metal worker, Daley grew up in the gritty district of Bridgeport, where he continues to live in a modest bungalow. After starting out as a secretary to the city council at 25, Daley scrambled upward through the party ranks. Hence his understanding of Chicago’s muscles and nerves is deeply intuitive. But it is growing archaic, as the mayor’s lines to the Negro community atrophy and he continues to rule in the personalistic style of a benevolent Irish despot of the wards.
Daley nonetheless retains formidable influence within the Democratic Party. Thanks to his control of the state government and delegation, King Richard is one of the most assiduously courted Democratic politicians in the country. As Robert Kennedy said last spring: “Dick Daley means the ball game.”
It was through such clout that he secured the Democratic convention for Chicago. However, Lyndon Johnson and other party leaders are equally to blame. They wanted the convention in Chicago this year in large part because they felt that it was the one city where the authorities could deal successfully with the planned disruptions. Daley thought so as well.
Bristling Camp. Some Democratic officials sensed disaster. First an electrical workers’ strike ruined prospects for adequate television coverage of the streets, which Daley may not have wanted anyway. The strike, called 14 weeks before the convention, also prevented the installation of telephones and seriously impeded the candidates’ operations. Then, nine days before the convention opened, drivers for the city’s two major cab companies struck. Racial violence, which mercifully never erupted, was a real prospect. So were angry demonstrations by the young.
But the mayor had his way with the party. “Law and order will be maintained,” he repeated ritualistically. He put his 11,900-man police force on twelve-hour shifts, called up more than 5,000 Illinois National Guard troops. In addition, some 6,500 federal troops were flown in. Daley turned Chicago into a bristling armed camp, with a posse of more than 23,000 at the ready. The convention hall was protected by barbed wire and packed with cops and security agents. WELCOME TO PRAGUE, said demonstrators’ signs.
No Amenities. Daley refused the protesters permission to sleep on the grass of Chicago’s Lincoln Park, a 1,185-acre expanse on the North Side. Critics of the cops pointed out that the site was ideal for the dissidents; it would also have been ideal for the police, who could have left the kids alone and stood guard on the fringes of the park until the soldiers of dissent got bored and left or until the convention was over. It might not have worked out that way, since many of the protesters were fiercely determined to find trouble, but at least the notion offered a better chance of avoiding violence. Had Daley been gifted with either humane imagination or a sense of humor, he would have arranged to welcome the demonstrators, cosset them with amenities like portable toilets, as the Government did during the Washington civil rights march of 1963. Instead, Daley virtually invited violence.
The police were not unhappy. Daley had prepared them last April, in the wake of the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination, when he ordered the cops to “shoot to kill” arsonists and to “shoot to maim or cripple” looters. Chicago police theoretically receive regular in-service riot training, but in fact the training consists largely of reading general departmental orders rather than intensive drilling.
Bloodletting. Fortunately, there was no shooting. The demonstrators constantly taunted the police and in some cases deliberately disobeyed reasonable orders. Most of the provocations were verbal—screams of “Pig!” and fouler epithets. Many cops seemed unruffled by the insults. Policeman John Gruber joked: “We kind of like the word pig. Some of us answer our officers ‘Oink, oink, sir,’ just to show it doesn’t bother us.” The police reacted more angrily when the demonstrators sang God Bless America or recited “I pledge allegiance to the flag.”
In some of the wilder fighting, the demonstrators hurled bricks, bottles and nail-studded golf balls at the police lines. During the first three days, the cops generally reacted only with tear gas and occasional beatings. But on Wednesday night, as the convention gathered to nominate Hubert Humphrey, the police had a cathartic bloodletting. Outraged when the protesters lowered a U.S. flag during a rally in Grant Park beside Lake Michigan, the cops hurled tear gas into the crowd.
The demonstrators, bent upon parading to the convention hall (Daley had refused a permit), regrouped in front of the Hilton, where they were surrounded by phalanxes of cops. Police warned the demonstrators to clear the streets, waited for five minutes for several busloads of reinforcements to arrive. And then the order was given.
Violent Orgy. Chicago cops are built like beer trucks. They flailed blindly into the crowd of some 3,000, then ranged onto the sidewalks to attack onlookers. In a pincer movement, they trapped some 150 people against the wall of the hotel. A window of the Hilton’s Haymarket lounge gave way, and about ten of the targets spilled into the lounge after the shards of glass. A squad of police pursued them inside and beat them. Two bunny-clad waitresses took one look and capsized in a dead faint. By now the breakdown of police discipline was complete. Bloodied men and women tried to make their way into the hotel lobby. Upstairs on the 15th floor, aides in the McCarthy headquarters set up a makeshift hospital.
The onslaught ended half an hour later, with about 200 arrested and hundreds injured. Elsewhere, the confrontation continued through the night. Then at 5 a.m. on Friday, with the convention ended, eleven policemen swarmed up to the McCarthy headquarters. They claimed that the volunteers had tossed smoked fish, ashtrays and beer cans at the helmeted cops below. With neither evidence nor search warrant, they clubbed McCarthy campaign workers. One cop actually broke his billy club on a volunteer’s skull. Daley stood by his angry defense of his cops’ conduct against the “terrorists,” who, he snarled, “use the foulest of language that you wouldn’t hear in a brothel house.”
The demonstrators had chanted the night before: “The whole world is watching!” And it was. Newspapers and television commentators from Moscow to Tokyo reacted with revulsion to the orgy of violence in America’s Second City. Thanks to Mayor Daley, not only Chicago but the rest of the U.S. as well was pictured as a police state. That impression may be unfair to a handsome and hospitable city, but it will linger long after Dick Daley’s reign.
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