American Pharaoh (80 page)

Not long after the race riots ended, a new group arrived on the scene to challenge Daley’s control over the city. The Chicago
Peace Council, gearing up for the Democratic National Convention, organized 6,000 anti-war protesters to march from Grant
Park to Civic Center Plaza on April 27. Stung by Daley’s rebuke that they had been insufficiently forceful during the April
riots, the police were intent this time on preserving order at all costs. The marchers were moving peacefully along their
route, straggling a bit more than police expected, when the trouble started. At the march’s midway point, policemen in riot
gear tried to disperse them, yelling, “Move, move, get out of the Loop, move, move, get out of the Loop.” In minutes, the
police began attacking. They clubbed some demonstrators and pushed others into the Civic Center fountain. Shoppers and other
bystanders who happened upon the scene were also beaten. The police arrested more than sixty demonstrators. Clark Kissinger,
coordinator of the march, complained that “by making a non-violent protest impossible, they made a violent one inevitable.”
⁵³

A citizens panel, headed by Dr. Edward J. Sparling, president emeritus of Roosevelt University, was appointed to investigate.
The Sparling Commission issued a sixty-two-page report, entitled “Dissent and Disorder,” on August 1 that placed full blame
on the police. Their treatment of the protesters, it found, had been “inept as well as hostile.” The commission also rejected
the notion that the clashes were the work of rogue officers. “The evidence seemed to indicate it could not have happened without
the collaboration of the Mayor’s office and the Superintendent of Police and his lieutenants,” Sparling said at a press conference
announcing the commission’s findings. Monsignor John Egan, pastor of Presentation Catholic Church, agreed: “Supt. Conlisk
was present, saw what happened, and allowed [the police] to continue to operate in that manner.” Years later, a former Chicago
policeman was quoted saying: “Each one of us was told that we had to make an arrest. I couldn’t believe it. There was nobody
bad there.”
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The April 27 clash could have saved Chicago from the violence and ignominy that were to come in August. The Sparling Commission
put the entire city on notice that the Chicago police had a propensity for attacking peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders.
If Daley had used the Sparling report to rein in his police and to train them in appropriate methods of dealing with demonstrators,
convention week would have gone differently, and much less blood would have been shed. Instead, Daley denounced the report
as “not true,” and placed the blame for the clashes squarely on “the constant efforts of [the peace marchers] to confront
the Police Department.” To Daley, it was the marchers’ missteps — including small deviations like failing to march in twos
on the sidewalk — that made the violence inevitable. “The Police Department is always being attacked on marches such as this
one,” he complained. “The police didn’t cause the problem. They only tried to enforce the law.”
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CHAPTER

13

Preserving Disorder

W
hat’s happening to our society?” Daley asked ruefully. He had just gotten word that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in
Los Angeles, at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the June 4, 1968, California primary. “This was a shocking and stunning
incident,” Daley told the City Hall press corps the following day, “and it proves again there is great hatred, violence and
bitterness in all the things that are happening in our country.” The previous two months, between the assassinations of Martin
Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, had dramatically illustrated Daley’s point. In addition to the rioting that swept through the
nation’s cities, university campuses were in turmoil. There were massive demonstrations, student strikes, and bitter face-offs
between undergraduates and administrators. The most widely noted of these showdowns occurred at Columbia University, where
students seized buildings to protest plans to build a university gymnasium in Morningside Park, which was primarily used by
blacks. There was no pretense of civility: before the occupation, student leader Mark Rudd sent a letter to university president
Grayson Kirk that ended with a quote from black radical LeRoi Jones: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”
Then the students, under the battle cry “Gym Crow Must Go,” occupied Kirk’s office, drinking his sherry and smoking his cigars.
After eight days of negotiating, university officials called the police, who beat and kicked students and threw some down
concrete stairwells, before arresting 692.
¹

Many of the same student anti-war groups that had taken over campus buildings that spring would be coming to Chicago for the
Democratic National Convention. The planning had been under way for months — anti-war leaders David Dellinger and Rennie Davis
talked about a convention protest as early as October 1967, during a march on the Pentagon. In January 1968, twenty-five anti-war
organizers met in a New York apartment to hammer out strategy. To the anti-war movement, the Democratic convention was a tempting
target. As the party of Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats seemed to be an appropriate focus of the movement’s rage over the Vietnam
War. Chicago was also the culmination of Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign: it was on the convention floor that his supporters
would make their final stand. And to a movement that was media savvy, if not media obsessed, the sheer number of television
cameras and reporters who would be on hand made the convention almost irresistible.

Another key factor attracting the protesters to Chicago was Daley himself. Nothing rallies a political movement like an appealing
enemy, and Daley seemed to be the perfect embodiment of the establishment that the anti-war movement was fighting. Though
Daley did not actually favor Johnson’s Vietnam policies, his unwillingness to break with the president over the war put him
on the wrong side of the issue they cared about most passionately. As boss of a machine that thrived on patronage, corruption,
and vote theft, he stood for everything they disdained about the old political order. And Daley’s authoritarianism was the
antithesis of the libertarian spirit that animated the anti-war movement. To young people who believed in all-night political
debates and free-wheeling “be-ins,” Daley’s penchant for telling his followers how to vote and punishing them when they stepped
out of line seemed antiquated and oppressive. Just as important, Daley was sixty-six at the time of the convention, which
seemed ancient to a movement whose rallying cry was “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

Rennie Davis, field director of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War — commonly known as MOBE — was calling
for a “massive confrontation” between anti-war demonstrators and Democratic leaders at the convention. But much of the press
attention focused on the more whimsical Youth International Party, or Yippies, who were making outlandish claims about what
they would do when they got to Chicago. The Yippies called themselves “revolutionary artists” and boasted that, in the words
of founder Abbie Hoffman, “our concept of revolution is that it’s fun.” They talked gleefully about dispatching an elite group
of 230 sexy male Yippies to seduce the delegates’ wives, daughters, and girlfriends. And they promised to drop LSD into the
Chicago water supply to “turn on” the entire city. The Yippies said they would disguise themselves as chefs and drug the delegates’
food, and paint their cars to look like taxis and drive delegates to Wisconsin. Abbie Hoffman said he was plotting to pull
down Hubert Humphrey’s pants on the podium. Much of it was ludicrous stuff, but Hoffman and fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin reveled
in the humorless reaction they got from Daley and the stodgy Chicago newspapers. When Hoffman goofily told city negotiators
he would call off all his plans for a payment of $100,000, an indignant
Chicago Tribune
reported: “Yippies Demand Cash from City.”
²

Daley was hard at work on his own convention plans. He had taken personal charge of the preparations, and was spending a half-million
dollars to get Chicago into shape. He created a Cook County version of a Potemkin Village by erecting a “redwood forest” of
wooden fences to obscure the blight that visitors would pass as they traveled by bus from the Loop to the International Amphitheatre.
³
On the expressway leading to the Amphitheatre, workmen painted a new coat of silver on the mud-spattered dividing rail. Streets
surrounding the hall — many of them barred to all but VIP traffic — were painted kelly green. No detail was too small to escape
Daley’s attention. Ten days before the convention was scheduled to begin, he led reporters on a fifteen-minute tour of the
International Amphitheatre. He asked Jack Reilly if the silver-blue metal folding chairs for the delegates would be fastened
together. Daley enlisted the ward organizations and machine politicians to help put on a good show. “If you have particular
points of interest in your wards, arrange for tours of those places,” Daley told a luncheon at Democratic headquarters at
the Sherman House. Reilly reminded the machine crowd “to impress on the delegates that they are not just visiting Chicago,
but Mayor Daley’s Chicago.”
⁴

There were a rash of labor problems on the eve of the convention that complicated preparations. For a time, it looked as if
Daley’s wellrun city was on the brink of falling apart. In early July, a group called Concerned Transit Workers had staged
a wildcat strike that snarled public transportation for four days. The dissident organization was now threatening to hold
another strike starting on August 25, the day before the convention began. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
had been striking against Illinois Bell for over one hundred days, and Daley was running out of time to convince them to put
down their picket signs and wire the convention for television service. Chicago was also in the midst of a taxi strike. Daley
scrambled to make it all work. He negotiated a temporary arrangement that allowed for 3,200 telephones and 200 teletypes to
be installed at the Amphitheatre. He tried his best to win over the taxi drivers by sympathizing with their demand for more
money. Prices were rising everywhere, Daley told them. Gesturing to the reporters at a press conference, he added that “I’d
like to see you fellows get a pay raise, too.” But he was not able to settle the taxi strike. The Democratic National Committee
rented buses to transport 5,244 delegates and alternates between the twenty-one hotels where they were housed and the Amphitheatre.
And three hundred cars donated by auto manufacturers and driven by young Democrats were made available to transport VIPs.
⁵

Daley’s most meticulous preparations involved security — turning the convention facilities into what the press dubbed “Fort
Daley.” A seven-foot-high chain-link fence, topped with more than two thousand feet of barbed wire, appeared suddenly around
the International Amphitheatre. Firemen stood by to deter bomb throwers, and a catwalk was built into the convention hall
so Secret Service and police could look down on the proceedings below. Manhole covers in the area were sealed with tar. Daley
put the city’s 11,900 police on twelve-hour shifts, with battle plans, command posts, and mobile tactical forces all carefully
plotted out on charts. Five schools were readied to house the thousands of Illinois National Guard who were waiting in reserve.
A thousand FBI and Secret Service agents were deployed from Washington, and 7,500 army troops trained in riot control were
airlifted from Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. Though the Water and Sewers Department dismissed the Yippies’ threat to dump
LSD into the water supply — they estimated five tons of LSD would be required — Daley deployed police to guard the city’s
water filtration plants. The measures were, he said, “an ounce of prevention.”
⁶
The Chicago police also assembled “Daley dozers,” jeeps with barbed wire attached to the front, to clear the streets of demonstrators.
A “macabre atmosphere pervades the convention” and “Daley’s chambered fortress,” Russell Baker of the
New York Times
reported.
⁷

Daley was also, it would be revealed years later, infiltrating anti-war groups. The Chicago Department of Investigation, Daley’s
personal investigative body, sent undercover agents to New York to disrupt an anti-war group that was making plans for the
convention. The activities were detailed in a thirty-eight-page statement, written by department member John Clarke after
the convention and released a decade later in response to a lawsuit. Daley’s agents sabotaged the Radical Organizing Committee’s
plans to charter buses and raise money. “As a result of our activities in New York, instead of 200 busloads of demonstrators
coming to Chicago, they ended up with eight carloads, totaling 60 people,” Clarke wrote. Other Department of Investigation
agents infiltrated peace groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland “in an attempt to sabotage the movement with great
success.” The department also sent an agent to pose as a volunteer in the MOBE headquarters in Chicago who, when no one was
listening, discouraged callers from coming to Chicago for the convention.
⁸