A great stillness rose up from the street through all the small noise of clubbing and cries, small sirens, sigh of loaded arrest vans as off they pulled, shouts of police as they wheeled in larger circles, the intersection clearing further, then further, a stillness rose through the steel and stone of the hotel, congregating in the shocked centers of every room where delegates and wives and Press and campaign workers innocent until now of the intimate working of social force, looked down now into the murderous paradigm of Vietnam there beneath them at this huge intersection of this great city. Look—a boy was running through the park, and a cop was chasing. There he caught him on the back of the neck with his club! There! The cop is returning to his own! And the boy stumbling to his feet is helped off the ground by a girl who has come running up.
Yes, it could only have happened in a meeting of the Gods, that history for once should take place not on some back street, or some inaccessible grand room, not in some laboratory indistinguishable from others, or in the sly undiscoverable hypocrisies of a committee of experts, but rather on the center of the stage, as if each side had said, “Here we will have our battle. Here we will win.”
The demonstrators were afterward delighted to have been manhandled before the public eye, delighted to have pushed and prodded, antagonized and provoked the cops over these days with rocks and bottles and cries of “Pig” to the point where police had charged in a blind rage and made a stage at the one place in the city (besides the Amphitheatre) where audience, actors, and cameras could all convene, yes, the rebels thought they had had a great victory, and perhaps they did; but the reporter wondered, even as he saw it, if the police in that half hour of waiting had not had time to receive instructions from the power of the city, perhaps the power of the land, and the power had decided, “No, do not let them march another ten blocks and there disperse them on some quiet street, no, let it happen before all the land, let everybody see that their dissent will soon be equal to their own blood; let them realize that the power is implacable, and will beat and crush and imprison and yet kill before it will ever relinquish the power. So let them see before their own eyes what it will cost to continue to mock us, defy us, and resist. There are more millions behind us than behind them, more millions who wish to weed out, poison, gas, and obliterate every flower whose power they do not comprehend than heroes for their side who will view our brute determination and still be ready to resist. There are more cowards alive than the brave. Otherwise we would not be where we are,” said the Prince of Greed.
Who knew. One could thank the city of Chicago where drama was still a property of the open stage. It was quiet now, there was nothing to stare down on but the mules, and the police guarding them. The mules had not moved through the entire fray. Isolated from the battle, they had stood there in harness waiting to be told to go on. Only once in a while did they turn their heads. Their role as actors in the Poor People’s March was to wait and to serve. Finally they moved on. The night had come. It was dark. The intersection was now empty. Shoes, ladies’ handbags, and pieces of clothing lay on the street outside the hotel.
17
There have been few studies on the psychological differences between police and criminals, and the reason is not difficult to discover. The studies based on the usual psychological tests fail to detect a significant difference. Perhaps they are not sufficiently sensitive.
If civilization has made modern man a natural schizophrenic (since he does not know at the very center of his deliberations whether to trust his machines or the imperfect impressions still afforded him by his distorted senses and the more or less tortured messages passed along by polluted water, overfertilized ground, and poisonously irritating air) the average man is a suicide in relation to his schizophrenia. He will suppress his impulses and die eventually of cancer, overt madness, nicotine poisoning, heart attack, or the complications of a chest cold. It is that minority—cop and crook—which seeks issue for violence who now attract our attention. The criminal attempts to reduce the tension within himself by expressing in the direct language of action whatever is most violent and outraged in his depths; to the extent he is not a powerful man, his violence is merely antisocial, like self-exposure, embezzlement, or passing bad checks. The cop tries to solve his violence by blanketing it with a uniform. That is virtually a commonplace, but it explains why cops will put up with poor salary, public dislike, uncomfortable working conditions and a general sense of bad conscience. They know they are lucky; they know they are getting away with a successful solution to the criminality they can taste in their blood. This taste is practically in the forefront of a cop’s brain; he is in a stink of perspiration whenever he goes into action; he can tolerate little in the way of insult, and virtually no contradiction; he lies with a simplicity and quick confidence which will stifle the breath of any upright citizen who encounters it innocently for the first time. The difference between a good cop and a bad cop is that the good cop will at least do no more than give his own salted version of events— the bad cop will make up his version. That is why the police arrested the pedestrians they pushed through the window of the Haymarket Inn at the Conrad Hilton: the guiltier the situation in which a policeman finds himself, the more will he attack the victim of his guilt.
There are—it is another commonplace—decent policeman. A few are works of art. And some police, violent when they are young, mellow into modestly corrupt, humorous and decently efficient officials. Every public figure with power, every city official, high politician, or prominent government worker knows in his unspoken sentiments that the police are an essentially criminal force restrained by their guilt, their covert awareness that they are imposters, and by a sprinkling of career men whose education, rectitude, athletic ability, and religious dedication make them work for a balance between justice and authority. These men, who frighten the average corrupt cop as much as a priest frightens a choirboy, are the thin restraining edge of civilization for a police force. That, and the average corrupt cop’s sense that he is not wanted that much by anyone.
What staggered the delegates who witnessed the attack—more accurate to call it the massacre, since it was sudden, unprovoked and total—on Michigan Avenue, was that it opened the specter of what it might mean for the police to take over society. They might comport themselves in such a case not as a force of law and order, not even as a force of repression upon civil disorder, but as a true criminal force, chaotic, improvisational, undisciplined, and finally—sufficiently aroused—uncontrollable.
Society was held together by bonds no more powerful proportionately than spider’s silk; no one knew this better than the men who administered a society. So images of the massacre opened a nightmare. The more there was disorder in the future, the more there would be need for larger numbers of police and more the need to indulge them. Once indulged, however, it might not take long for their own criminality to dominate their relation to society. Which spoke then of martial law to replace them. But if the Army became the punitive force of society, then the Pentagon would become the only meaningful authority in the land.
So an air of outrage, hysteria, panic, wild rumor, unruly outburst, fury, madness, gallows humor, and gloom hung over nominating night at the convention.
18
The Amphitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention. Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club. The entrances to the gallery were narrow as hallway tunnels, and the balcony seemed to hang over each speaker. The colors were black and gray and red and white and blue, bright powerful colors in support of a ruddy beef-eating Democratic sea of faces. The standards in these cramped quarters were numerous enough to look like lances. The aisles were jammed. The carpets were red. The crowd had a blood in their vote which had traveled in unbroken line from the throng who cheered the blood of brave Christians and ferocious lions. It could have been a great convention, stench and all—politics in an abattoir was as appropriate as license in a boudoir. There was bottom
to this convention: some of the finest and some of the most corrupt faces in America were on the floor. Cancer jostled elbows with acromegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcoholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis players communicated with the estate holders, the Mob talked bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.
Yet the night was in trouble and there was dread in the blood, the air of circus was also the air of the slaughter-house. Word ripped through delegations of monstrosities unknown. Before the roll call was even begun, Peterson of Wisconsin, Donald Peterson, McCarthy man from the winning primary in Wisconsin, was on his feet, successful in obtaining the floor. (Since he was surrounded by TV, radio, and complements of the Press, the Chair knew it would be easier to accede than to ignore his demand for a voice.) Peterson wanted ... Peterson wanted to have the convention postponed for two weeks and moved to another hall in some city far away, because of the “surrounding violence” and the “pandemonium in the hall.” Before a mighty roar could even get off the ground, the Chair had passed to other business, and nominations were in order and so declared to a round of boos heavy as a swell of filthy oil. The sense of riot would not calm. Delegates kept leaving the floor to watch films on TV of the violence, McCarthy was reported to have witnessed the scene from his window and called it “very bad.” McGovern described the fighting he saw as a “blood bath” which “made me sick to my stomach.” He had “seen nothing like it since the films of Nazi Germany.”
But that was the mood which hung over the hall, a revel of banquetry, huzzah and horror, a breath of gluttony, a smell of blood. The party had always been established in the mansions and slaughterhouses of society; Hyde Park and the take from policy, social legislation and the lubricating jelly of whores had been at the respective ends of its Democratic consensus, the dreams and the nose for power of aristocrat and gentry were mixed with beatings in the alley, burials at sea in concrete boots, and the poll tax with the old poll-tax rhetoric. The most honorable and the most debauched had sat down at table for Democratic luncheons. Now, the party was losing its better half, and the gang in the gashouse couldn’t care less. They were about to roll up their sleeves and divide the pie, the local pie—who cared that the big election was dead? They had been pallbearers to moral idealism for too many years. Now they would shove it in the ground. The country was off its moorings and that was all right with them—let the ship of state drift into its own true berth: let patriotism and the fix cohabit in the comfort for which they were designed and stop these impossible collaborations.
So episodes popped up all over the place. The police dragged a delegate from the floor when a sergeant-at-arms told him to return to his seat and the delegate refused and exchanged words. Paul O’Dwyer, candidate for the Senate from New York, was pulled from the hall as he hung onto him. Mike Wallace of CBS was punched on the jaw when he asked some questions—they went out in a flurry of cops quickly summoned, and rumors raced into every corner. Clear confidence in the location of the seat of power was gone. A delegate had now to face the chimera of arrest by the police, then incarceration. Who would get him out? Did Daley have the power or Johnson? Would Humphrey ever be of use? Should one look for the U.S. Marines? A discomfiture of the fundamental cardinal points of all location was in the rumblings of the gut. A political man could get killed in this town by a cop, was the general sentiment, and who would dare to look the Mayor in the eye? If politics was property, somebody had tipped the plot: West was now up in the North! To the most liberal of the legislators and delegates on the floor must have come the real panic of wondering: was this how it felt with the Nazis when first they came in, the fat grin on the face of that cigar who had hitherto been odious but loyal? Hard suppressed guffaws of revelry rumbled among the delegates with the deepest greed and the most steaming bile. There was the sense of all centers relocated, of authority on a ride.
The nominations took place in muted form. The Democrats had declared there would be no demonstrations at their convention. The Democrats! Famous for their demonstrations. But they were afraid of maniacal outbursts for McCarthy, fist fights on the floor, whole platoons of political warriors grappling rivals by the neck. So each candidate would merely be put in nomination, his name then cheered, seconding speeches would follow, the roll would be called, the next nominated.
McCarthy was put in by Governor Harold Hughes of Iowa, Humphrey by Mayor Alioto of San Francisco. Let us listen to a little of each—they are not uncharacteristic of their men. Hughes said:
We are in the midst of what can only be called a revolution in our domestic affairs and in our foreign policy as well.
And as the late President Kennedy once said: “Those who would make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
... We must seek a leader who can arrest the polarization in our society, the alienation of the blacks from the whites, the haves from the have-nots and the old from the young.
We must choose a man with the wisdom and the courage to change the direction of our foreign policy before it commits us for an eternity to a maze of foreign involvements without clear purpose or moral justification.
But most of all the man we nominate must embody the aspirations of all those who seek to lift mankind to its highest potential. He must have that rare intangible quality that can lift up our hearts and cleanse the soul of this troubled country.
Gene McCarthy is such a man.
Mayor Alioto said:
I came here to talk to you about the man who has been for twenty years, right up to the present time, the articulate exponent of the aspirations of the human heart—for the young, for the old, and for those of us in between.
I’m not going to read to you, but I am going to ask you to project yourselves to Jan. 20, 1969, to project yourselves to the steps of the great Capitol of Washington, and in your mind’s eyes to picture a man standing on those steps with his hands raised pledging that he will execute the office of the President of the United States and that he will in accordance with his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help him God.
That man will look down on a country that is gripped in an earnest desire to find its way out of the confusion and the frustration that now infect this country. And the people at that moment will be looking for a decisive leader.
Let me put it directly to you—that man on Jan. 20 of 1969 is going to have to be an extraordinary man. And if he isn’t an extraordinary man, the burdens of that office will crack him and the turbulence of the times will overwhelm us.
McGovern was nominated by Ribicoff, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, formerly Governor, a Kennedy man for many years—his career had prospered with the Kennedys. He was not a powerful looking man. He had wings of silver gray hair, dark eyebrows, a weak mouth which spoke of the kind of calculation which does not take large chances. He had a slim frame with a hint of paunch. He was no heavyweight. He had gotten along by getting along, making the right friends. He was never famous as a speaker, but he began by saying, “Mr. Chairman ... as I look at the confusion in this hall and watch on television the turmoil and violence that is competing with this great convention for the attention of the American people, there is something else in my heart tonight, and not the speech that I am prepared to give.”
It was a curious beginning, but as he went on, the speech became boring despite the force of a few of the phrases: “500,000 Americans in the swamps of Vietnam.” Ribicoff droned, he had no flair, he was indeed about as boring as a Republican speaker. There were yawns as he said:
George McGovern is not satisfied that in this nation of ours, in this great nation of ours, our infant mortality rate
is so high that we rank twenty-first in all the nations of the world.
We need unity and we can only have unity with a new faith, new ideas, new ideals. The youth of America rally to the standards of men like George McGovern like they did to the standards of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
And with George McGovern as President of the United States we wouldn’t have those Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.
With George McGovern we wouldn’t have a National Guard.
Seconds had elapsed. People turned to each other. Did he say, “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago”? But he had. His voice had quavered a hint with indignation and with fear, but he had said it, and Daley was on his feet, Daley was shaking his fist at the podium, Daley was mouthing words. One could not hear the words, but his lips were clear. Daley seemed to be telling Ribicoff to go have carnal relations with himself.
There was a roundhouse of roars from the floor, a buzz from the gallery. Daley glowered at Ribicoff and Ribicoff stared back, his ordinary face now handsome, dignified with some possession above itself. Ribicoff leaned down from the podium, and said in a good patrician voice, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”
Perhaps it was Ribicoff’s finest moment. Later, backstage, in McGovern Headquarters, he looked less happy, and considerably less in possession of himself as people came up to congratulate him for his speech. Indeed, Ribicoff had the winded worried heart-fatigued expression of a lightweight fighter who had just dared five minutes ago in the gym to break off a jab which broke the nose of a middleweight champ who had been working out with him. Now the lightweight would wake up in the middle of the night, wondering how they were going to pay him in return. Let us think of the man rather in his glory.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago Page 20
