Grant Park was like a battlefield medical aid station. Mace and tear gas still seeped up from its grass. Like everyone else, I had trouble breathing and my eyes kept watering. All around me were people tending to their wounds, or to the wounds of others.
Finally I found Norma. There was a bandage around her head, but the wound wasn’t serious. The skin was broken and there was a lump from a policeman’s club, but compared to others she’d gotten off lightly. However, she was still dazed and disbelieving. It didn’t seem possible that this could have happened in the United States of America in the year 1969-and in the name of law and order, no less!
We sat down on the grass to rest. Nearby someone had a portable radio, and it was turned up full volume. We listened as a newscaster described how Amphitheatre guards had plucked one pro-McCarthy delegate from the floor of the convention and knocked down several South Dakota delegates just before the nominations for Presidential candidates began. We heard how Paul O’Dwyer was grabbed by the Secret Service and held incommunicado for twenty minutes. And then we heard a statement issued by Humphrey headquarters which praised the Democratic National Committee for holding a truly open convention. I decided that at the first opportunity I would reread Alice in Wonderland.
Around midnight Humphrey was nominated and the man with the radio turned it off and moved away. A Japanese reporter, his eyes still streaming from the effects of tear gas, sat down next to us. “American police are incredibly brutal,” he observed. “And I am sure that they all smoke Marlboro.” He also commented on the many “Draft Kennedy” signs he’d seen earlier in the day. “If other American boys are being called up to fight in Vietnam, then why not Teddy29 ?” he inquired. After a while he also moved away. I watched him as he crossed the street, giving a wide berth to a cop who was lighting up a Marlboro.
Later Norma and I also left Grant Park to get some coffee at the shop in the Hilton lobby. Our route took us past the balcony of McCarthy Headquarters, which over-looked the crowded lobby of the Hilton. We were caught in the throng for a few minutes.
Here, post-Huberty depression and the fear that the country faced a Hump-free future was being overcome. The McCarthy kids’ answer to the HHH “politics of joy” was to chant “Dump the Hump!” at the returning delegates. They were gleeful that Hubert had inadvertently gotten a whiff of tear gas during the police recreation period earlier. Humanitarianism has its limits, and no kleenex was to be found here to stem the Veep’s sneezes.
The coffee shop still smelled like decaying used diapers mixed with week-old vomit. Norma and I gave up on it and left the hotel by a side exit to seek sustenance elsewhere. Walking down the street we bumped into Yippie leader Abby Hoffman, whom Norma knew slightly. He was bleeding from the nose and ear and said he’d been given a going over in jail and had just been let out. We asked why he’d been arrested.
“Well, I’d printed this word on my forehead,” he told us.
“What word?”
He told us what word. Its four letters are the initials of the old English legal phrase “for unlawful carnal knowledge.”
Abby had covered the word with a crash helmet, but the cops had removed it and arrested him anyway. This puzzled him. He hadn’t figured they were that literate.
After coffee Norma and I went back to Grant Park and listened to more speeches and singing. Around three a.m. there was a candlelight procession of Convention delegates up Michigan Avenue to Grant Park. Their consciences stirred, the mostly middle-aged politicos were demonstrating their outrage at the police brutality which had taken place in the streets of Chicago.
Toward dawn I persuaded Norma to go back up to my room at the Hilton so that we might grab some shuteye. It was Thursday afternoon when she shook me awake. “What’s up?” I asked groggily.
“Come on. Wake up. Hurry. We’ve got to get over to the Bismarck Hotel.”
“What for?”
“The Wisconsin delegation is leading a march to the Amphitheatre and it’s starting from there.”
“I’m not involved,” I reminded Norma, turning back over on my stomach and burying my face in the pillow.
“If you want me for that harem, you’d better be involved. That’s my price. You’ve got to sacrifice your apathy!”
So I crawled out of bed and we made tracks for the Bismarck Hotel. But we arrived too late. The march to the Amphitheatre had already left.
“Excuse me.” I approached the doorman. “We seem to have lost our demonstration.”
“That way.” He waved vaguely. “They turned off up there.”
“Where?”
“By that sign that says ‘Mayor Richard I. Daley Welcomes You to Chicago.’ You can’t miss it.”
We missed it.
A couple of hours later, after wandering over half of Chicago, we met a couple of protestors that Norma knew. They told us that the march had been turned back by the National Guard and that the crowd was reassembling in Grant Park. Our route back there took us across Eighteenth Street to Michigan Avenue so that we ended up a few blocks down from the Hilton. I flashed the press credentials Austin had gotten me, and Norma and I were allowed to go through the barrier the National Guard had put up at the corner of Eighteenth and Michigan.
Our first view of Michigan Avenue stopped us m our tracks. It wasn’t to be believed. In front of us, going toward Grant Park, were line after line of National Guardsmen with rifles and tear-gas masks. In front of them were several ranks of policemen. We couldn’t see beyond their blue shirts. Behind us, stretching down Michigan Avenue, there seemed to be a thousand or more National Guardsmen held in readiness. As far as the eye could see were troops, tank carriers, jeeps with barbed-wire frames lashed to their fronts, machineguns, tear-gas canisters, troop trucks, even small cannons!
We were trapped in the middle of this military force, and even my press credentials couldn’t get us through the lines. The troops were under orders to let no one pass, and so we couldn’t reach the demonstrators. However, as the van of the small army, led by the police, marched up Michigan Avenue, we were able to follow in its wake.
When we reached Grant Park, there was some confusion between the police and troops already stationed there and those who had just arrived. Evidently there was some question as to whether the new men were to be considered replacements or reinforcements. While the point was being settled, Norma and I managed to cross the street and join the demonstrators in the park.
The crowd was packed quite densely, and about fifteen thousand strong. Judging by the way they were dressed, hippies and Yippies were in the minority. Also, in contrast to the last few evenings in Grant Park, there were many more over-thirty faces in the crowd.
Various personages were addressing it from a makeshift platform. We learned that we had just missed a speech by Senator McCarthy. Now Pierre Salinger30 was talking. He commented on the suppression of liberty by Mayor Daley in Chicago and at the convention. Then he pleaded for the necessity of continuing to express dissent within the existing political framework. He Was booed so loudly that he was unable to continue speaking. Daley had accomplished that which no demagogue of the Left had been able to do. He had radicalized these people, many of whom had worked within the Democratic Party for the nomination of McCarthy, to the point where they had to choose between Establishment demagoguery and the hard line of the New Left. With the middle ground washed out from under their feet in a sea of tear gas, temporarily at least they were lining up with the militant Left.