Miami and the Siege of Chicago

  Twenty or thirty of the kids were building a barricade. They brought in park benches and picnic tables, and ran it a distance of fifty feet, then a hundred feet. A barricade perhaps six feet high. It made no sense. It stood in the middle of a field and there were no knolls nor defiles at the flanks to keep the barricade from being turned—the police cars would merely drive around it, or tear-gas trucks would push through it.

  It was then the reporter decided to leave. The park was cool, it was after midnight, and if the police had not come yet, they might not come for hours, or perhaps not at all—perhaps there were new orders to let the kids sleep here—he simply did not know. He only knew he did not wish to spend hours in this park. For what was one to do when the attack came? Would one leave when asked—small honor there—why wait to offer that modest obedience. And to stay—to what end?—to protest being ejected from the park, to take tear gas in the face, have one’s head cracked? He could not make the essential connection between that and Vietnam. If the war were on already, if this piece of ground were essential to the support of other pieces of ground ... but this ridiculous barricade, this symbolic contest with real bloody heads—he simply did not know what he thought. And he had a legitimate excuse for leaving. One of his best friends was with him, a professional boxer, once a champion. If the police ever touched him, the boxer would probably be unable to keep himself from taking out six or eight men. The police would then come near to killing the boxer in return. It was a real possibility. He had the responsibility to his friend to get him out of there, and did, even encountering Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Richard Seaver and Terry Southern on the way in. They had the determined miserable look of infantrymen trudging to the front; and Ginsberg, who had no taste for the violence ahead, and no conception whatsoever of looking for a way to avoid it, gave him a friendly salute, free of prejudice, and shuffled on forward to the meadow while Genet, large as Mickey Rooney, angelic in appearance, glanced at him with that hauteur it takes French intellectuals at least two decades to acquire. Burroughs merely nodded. Nothing surprised him favorably or unfavorably.

  There was, of course, now every pressure to return but he would not—there was the real (if most fortuitous) danger of exposing the boxer; there was his own decision. He was either being sensible, militarily sensible, revolutionary in the hard way of facing into twenty years of a future like this, and the need for patience till the real battles came; or he was yellow. And he did not know. Fear was in him, but he had acted boldly in the past with much more fear than this. He could not decide whether he was in danger of deteriorating, or becoming sufficiently tough to be able to take a backward step.

  And enjoyed the party he went to after this, enjoyed himself until the morning when he discovered the attack by the police had been ferocious, and Ginsberg had been tear-gassed, his throat so injured he could hardly speak—and since the chanting of his Hindu hymns was a spiritual manna for Ginsberg, how the injury to his voice would hurt. And worse. Seventeen newsmen had been attacked by police, a photographer for the Washington Post, two reporters for the Chicago American, one for the Chicago Daily News, two photographers and a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, a reporter and a photographer for Life, cameramen for three television networks, and three reporters and a photographer for Newsweek magazine. But since the reporter was not there, let us quote from the Washington Post in a story by Nicholas von Hoffman:

  The attack began with a police car smashing the barricade. The kids threw whatever they had had the foresight to arm themselves with, rocks and bottles mostly. Then there was a period of police action before the full charge.

  Shrieks and screams all over the wooded encampment area while the experienced militants kept calling out, “Walk! Walk! For Chrissakes don’t run.” There is an adage among veteran kids that “panicky people incite cops to riot.”

  Rivulets of running people came out of the woods across the lawn area, the parking lots toward Clark Street. Next, the cops burst out of the woods in selective pursuit of news photographers. Pictures are unanswerable evidence in court. They’d taken off their badges, their name plates, even the unit patches on their shoulders to become a mob of identical, unidentifiable club swingers.

  ... There is the scene at Henrotin Hospital with editors coming in to claim their wounded. Roy Fischer of the Chicago Daily News, Hal Bruno of Newsweek. Television guys who took a special clobbering waiting in the anteroom describing what happened and looking angry-eyed at the cops hanging around with the air of guys putting in a routine night.

  The counterrevolution had begun. It was as if the police had declared that the newspapers no longer represented the true feelings of the people. The true feelings of the people, said the policemen’s clubs, were with the police.

  13

  Next day was Johnson’s birthday, which the President celebrated on the ranch. Three thousand youths went to the Chicago Coliseum, an old and crumbling convention hall to attend an anti-birthday party, sponsored by the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, and the Holocaust No-Dance Band played at total volume; speeches were made; a song called “Master of Hate” was dedicated to LBJ. It went:

  Suicide is an evil thing

  But at times it is good

  If you’ve been where the master lives

  I think you surely should.

  Phil Ochs sang: “It’s always the old who lead us to war; it’s always the young who fall,” and the crowd rose, held their hands high in a V for Victory sign, and chanted, “No, no, we won’t go.”

  Burroughs and Genet spoke of the police as mad dogs, statements were read for Terry Southern and Allen Ginsberg, and Dick Gregory gave the last speech. “I’ve just heard that Premier Kosygin has sent a telegram to Mayor Daley asking him to send 2,000 Chicago cops immediately.”

  The reporter was not present at the Coliseum. He had been covering the convention in the stockyards, expecting the debate to take place that night on the majority versus the minority plank on Vietnam, but the convention adjourned after midnight with the debate postponed for the next afternoon. Little had happened that night worth reporting. So he drove up to Lincoln Park about one-thirty in the morning, and everything seemed calm. A few police were still about, and one or two boys walked along holding wet handkerchiefs to their mouths. The streets were acrid with old tear gas. The reporter did not know that the worst battle of the week had taken place not an hour ago. Let us read a long account but an excellent one by Steve Lerner in the Village Voice:

  ... Around midnight on Tuesday some four hundred clergy, concerned local citizens, and other respectable gentry joined the Yippies, members of Students for a Democratic Society, and the National Mobilization Committee to fight for the privilege of remaining in the park. Sporting armbands decorated with a black cross and chanting pacifist hymns, the men of God exhorted their radical congregation to lay down their bricks and join in a nonviolent vigil.

  Having foreseen that they could only wage a symbolic war with “little caesar Daley,” several enterprising clergymen brought with them an enormous wooden cross which they erected in the midst of the demonstrators under a street lamp. Three of them assumed heroic poses around the cross, more reminiscent of the Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima than any Christ-like tableau they may have had in mind.

  During the half-hour interlude between the arrival of the clergy and the police attack, a fascinating debate over the relative merits of strict non-violence versus armed self-defense raged between the clergy and the militants. While the clergy was reminded that their members were “over thirty, the opiate of the people, and totally irrelevant,” the younger generation was warned that “by calling the police pigs and fighting with them you become as bad as they are.” Although the conflict was never resolved, everyone more or less decided to do his own thing. By then the demonstrators, some eight hundred strong, began to feel the phalanx of police which encircled the park moving in; even the most militant forgot his quibbles with “the liberal-religious
sellout” and began to huddle together around the cross.

  When the police announced that the demonstrators had five minutes to move out before the park was cleared, everyone went into his individual kind of panic. One boy sitting near me unwrapped a cheese sandwich and began to stuff it into his face without bothering to chew. A girl standing at the periphery of the circle who had been alone all evening walked up to a helmeted boy with a mustache and ground herself into him. People all over the park were shyly introducing themselves to each other as if they didn’t want to die alone. “My name is Mike Stevenson from Detroit; what got you into this?” I heard someone asking behind me. Others became increasingly involved in the details of survival: rubbing Vaseline on their face to keep the Mace from burning their skin, buttoning their jackets, wetting their handkerchief and tying it over their nose and mouth. “If it’s gas, remember, breathe through your mouth, don’t run, don’t pant, and for Christsake don’t rub your eyes,” someone thoughtfully announced over the speaker. A boy in the center of the circle got up, stepped over his seated friends, and made his way toward the woods. “Don’t leave now,” several voices called in panic. The boy explained that he was just going to take a leak.

  Sitting in a cluster near the main circle, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern were taking in the scene. Ginsberg was in his element. As during all moments of tension during the week, he was chanting OM in a hoarse whisper, occasionally punctuating the ritual with a tinkle from his finger cymbals. Burroughs, wearing a felt hat, stared vacantly at the cross, his thin lips twitching in a half smile. Genet, small, stocky, baldheaded, with the mug of a saintly convict rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his leather jacket. I asked him if he was afraid. “No, I know what this is,” he replied. “But doesn’t knowing make you more afraid?” I asked. He shook his head and started to speak when the sky fell on us.

  It happened all in an instant. The night which had been filled with darkness and whispers exploded in a fiery scream. Huge tear-gas canisters came crashing through the branches, snapping them, and bursting in the center of the gathering. From where I lay, groveling in the grass, I could see ministers retreating with the cross, carrying it like a fallen comrade. Another volley shook me to my feet. Gas was everywhere. People were running, screaming, tearing through the trees. Something hit the tree next to me, I was on the ground again, someone was pulling me to my feet, two boys were lifting a big branch off a girl who lay squirming hysterically. I couldn’t see. Someone grabbed onto me and asked me to lead them out of the park. We walked along, hands outstretched, bumping into people and trees, tears streaming from our eyes and mucus smeared across our faces. I flashed First World War doughboys caught in no-man’s-land during a mustard gas attack. I felt sure I was going to die. I heard others choking around me. And then everything cleared.

  Standing on the sidewalk at the edge of the park I looked back at a dozen little fires which lit up the woods, still fogged with gas. The police were advancing in a picket line, swatting at the stragglers and crumpled figures; huge trucks, usually used for cleaning the streets, swept toward us spraying more gas. Kids began ripping up the pavement and hurling snowball-size chunks at the truck windows. Then they flooded out into the streets, blocking traffic, fighting with plainclothesmen who awaited our exodus from the park, and bombarding hapless patrol cars which sped through the crowds.

  The ragged army split up into a series of mobs which roamed through the streets breaking windows, setting trash cans on fire, and demolishing at least a dozen patrol cars which happened to cruise down the wrong street at the wrong time. Smoke billowed from a house several blocks from me and the fire engines began arriving. A policeman ran from an angry brick-throwing mob, lost his cap, hesitated, and ran away without it. At the intersection of Clark and Division, four cop cars arrived simultaneously and policemen leapt out shooting in the air. From all four sides the demonstrators let them have it; most of the missiles were overthrown and hit their comrades or store windows on the other side of the street. Diving down into the subway, I found a large group of refugees who had escaped the same way. The tunnel looked like a busy bomb shelter; upstairs the shooting continued.

  14

  They were young men who were not going to Vietnam. So they would show every lover of war in Vietnam that the reason they did not go was not for lack of the courage to fight; no, they would carry the fight over every street in Old Town and the Loop where the opportunity presented itself. If they had been gassed and beaten, their leaders arrested on fake charges (Hayden, picked up while sitting under a tree in daylight in Lincoln Park, naturally protested; the resulting charge was “resisting arrest”) they were going to demonstrate that they would not give up, that they were the stuff out of which the very best soldiers were made. Sunday, they had been driven out of the park, Monday as well, now Tuesday. The centers where they slept in bedrolls on the floor near Lincoln Park had been broken into by the police, informers and provocateurs were everywhere; tonight tear-gas trucks had been used. They were still not ready to give up. Indeed their militancy may have increased. They took care of the worst of their injured and headed for the Loop, picking up fellow demonstrators as they went. Perhaps the tear gas was a kind of catharsis for some of them, a letting of tears, a purging of old middle-class weakness. Some were turning from college boys to revolutionaries. It seemed as if the more they were beaten and tear-gassed, the more they rallied back. Now, with the facility for underground communication which seemed so instinctive a tool in their generation’s equipment, they were on their way to Grant Park, en masse, a thousand of them, two thousand of them, there were conceivably as many as five thousand boys and girls massed in Grant Park at three in the morning, listening to speakers, cheering, chanting, calling across Michigan Avenue to the huge brooding facade of the Hilton, a block wide, over twenty-five stories high, with huge wings and deep courts (the better to multiply the number of windows with a view of the street and a view of Grant Park). The lights were on in hundreds of bedrooms in the Hilton, indeed people were sleeping and dreaming all over the hotel with the sound of young orators declaiming in the night below, voices rising twenty, twenty-five stories high, the voices clear in the spell of sound which hung over the Hilton. The Humphrey headquarters were here, and the McCarthy headquarters. Half the Press was quartered here, and Marvin Watson as well. Postmaster General and Presidential troubleshooter, he had come to bring some of Johnson’s messages to Humphrey. His suite had a view of the park. Indeed two-thirds of the principals at the convention must have had a view early this morning, two and three and four A.M. of this Tuesday night, no, this Wednesday morning, of Grant Park filled across the street with a revolutionary army of dissenters and demonstrators and college children and McCarthy workers and tourists ready to take a crack on the head, all night they could hear the demonstrators chanting, “Join us, join us,” and the college bellow of utter contempt, “Dump the Hump! Dump the Hump!” all the fury of the beatings and the tear-gassings, all the bitter disappointments of that recently elapsed bright spring when the only critcal problem was who would make a better President, Kennedy or McCarthy (now all the dread of a future with Humphrey or Nixon). There was also the sense that police had now entered their lives, become an element pervasive as drugs and books and sex and music and family. So they shouted up to the windows of the Hilton, to the delegates and the campaign workers who were sleeping, or shuddering by the side of their bed, or cheering by their open window; they called up through the night on a stage as vast and towering as one of Wagner’s visions and the screams of police cars joined them, pulling up, gliding away, blue lights revolving, lines of police hundreds long in their sky-blue shirts and sky-blue crash helmets, penning the demonstrators back of barriers across Michigan Avenue from the Hilton, and other lines of police and police fences on the Hilton’s side of the street. The police had obviously been given orders not to attack the demonstrators here, not in front of the Hilton with half the Democratic Party watch
ing them, not now at three in the morning—would anyone ever discover for certain what was to change their mind in sixteen hours?

  Now, a great cheer went up. The police were being relieved by the National Guard. The Guard was being brought in! It was like a certificate of merit for the demonstrators to see the police march off and new hundreds of Guardsmen in khaki uniforms, helmets, and rifles take up post in place, army trucks coughing and barking and filing back and forth on Michigan Avenue, and on the side streets now surrounding the Hilton, evil-looking jeeps with barbed-wire gratings in front of their bumpers drove forward in echelons, and parked behind the crowd. Portable barbed-wire fences were now riding on Jeeps.