American Pharaoh (84 page)

The police attacks, like the convention itself, were winding down. The police arrested another eighty people on Thursday,
and police and National Guardsmen turned away two marches headed toward the International Amphitheatre. There was a brief
melee at 18th and Michigan, south of the Loop, where three thousand marchers were routed by three volleys of gas, but the
crowd dispersed without resisting. Further up Michigan Avenue, near the Hilton Hotel, more serious trouble was developing.
At 4:00 Friday morning, responding to reports that objects were being thrown out the windows onto Michigan Avenue, police
got passkeys from hotel management and raided the entire fifteenth floor, which was the headquarters of the Mc-Carthy campaign.
Sleeping McCarthy staffers and volunteers — on the Michigan Avenue side and on the opposite side — were roused from their
beds and beaten. One staff member who told police they had no authority to do what they were doing was beaten by three policemen.
An Irish businessman who came to Chicago as part of an “Irish for McCarthy” contingent recalled that when McCarthy’s young
supporters were heading out through the hotel hallways, the police began attacking again: “I saw a policeman’s club raised
high in the air among the McCarthy workers still in the hall,” he said. “For a long time it seemed to hang there. Then it
was descending in a gleaming arc with rapid and enormous force. I heard it hit a boy’s head. It was sharper and louder than
a door slamming. Like the sound of the first impact in an auto accident. It was followed by the distinctive
squish
of flesh and skin parting. And the boy had done nothing to provoke this. Then other clubs started to fall and girls began
screaming. . . .” Senator McCarthy, who was awoken by his staff, came out and complained to the police about their treatment
of his staff. “You can’t just come up here and knock heads,” he objected. In fact, that is just what the Chicago police had
done. The attack on the McCarthy staff did nothing to dampen Daley’s enthusiasm for his police. As the week drew to a close,
he sent a teletype message to police superintendent Conlisk stating that “The Democratic National Committee and the mayor
of Chicago express their heartfelt gratitude to the men and women of the Chicago Police Department for their devotion to duty
and a job well done.”
⁴⁰

When the convention was over, the majority of the national media were caustic in their assessment of Daley’s performance.
“The blame has to be taken at the top,” the
Washington Post
editorialized. “Brutes ought not to be put into police uniforms. Chicago has been disgraced by them — and even more by those
responsible for their barbarity.” The convention had been a “military nightmare, Richard J. Daley, host,” columnist Mary McGrory
wrote. “The truth was,” Tom Wicker wrote in the
New York Times,
“those were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up.” But Daley’s local reviews were more favorable.
The conservative
Chicago Tribune
strongly endorsed his law-and-order stand, and had little sympathy for the victims of the violence. In a front-page editorial,
the paper denounced the “bearded, dirty, lawless rabble” that used “every sort of provocation against police and National
Guardsmen — vile taunts, lye solutions, bricks and rubble.” It concluded that “Mayor Daley and the police deserve congratulations
rather than criticism.” The
Chicago Daily News,
in an August 31 editorial, said that while Daley bore “a large burden of blame,” there was another side of the story. The
paper agreed with Daley that radical groups and hard-core dissidents had instigated much of the violence. And they found grim
solace in Daley’s assessment of the week: what really mattered was that “no one was killed.” It was not only the newspapers
that took Daley’s side — many Chicagoans spoke out in support of Daley, and few dared to question his actions. “Knock on any
door. Any cab door. The response is Johnny-One-Note: ‘Daley’s OK,’” Chicago historian Studs Terkel observed dejectedly after
the convention. “And what of THE University, boasting more Nobel Prize winners than any other campus on earth, Doc? Their
silence is the silence of the dead.”
⁴¹

Daley began his September 9 press conference, his first after the convention, in a jovial mood. But it did not take long for
him to explode. A
Chicago Daily News
reporter suggested that when Daley shouted at Ribicoff he had used a “four letter word beginning with mother.” Daley shouted:
“You’re a liar. Don’t say that. I never used that kind of language in my life.” But Daley would not say what he had shouted
at Ribicoff. It was, he said, “immaterial.” Matt Danaher, sitting outside the press conference, backed up his boss’s story.
“I was sitting next to him,” Danaher said. “He’d never use a word like the one [the
Daily News
reporter] said. He doesn’t talk that way.... He’s a daily communicant.” Daley then summed up the Chicago police philosophy
in a quote that his critics would repeat endlessly. “Gentlemen, get this thing straight for once and for all,” he said. “The
policeman isn’t there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
⁴²

A few days earlier, Daley’s office had published an official report on the convention violence. “Strategy of Confrontation”
was an expansion of the points Daley outlined in his Walter Cronkite interview. It made now-familiar arguments about “revolutionaries”
who had come to Chicago determined to engage law enforcement in “hostile confrontation,” and policemen who did their best
to avoid being drawn in. “Strategy of Confrontation” talked archly of information obtained by the Intelligence Division of
the Chicago Police Department concerning “schemes to assassinate Senator Eugene McCarthy, Mayor Richard J. Daley and other
political and civic leaders.” The report indicated that among the threats to the social order that had occurred in Chicago,
unbeknownst to most of America, was a plan to murder a young female supporter of Eugene McCarthy and blame it on the police.
Naturally, the police did not want to mention these schemes and rumors at the time “for fear of planting the idea in still
other minds.” The document also contained an occasionally bizarre list of weapons used by the demonstrators, including items
like “aerosol can with contents which act like stink bomb,” and “paint.” Among the “battle” supplies listed were “revolutionary
literature” and “dangerous drugs.”
⁴³

Daley was also involved in a filmed version of “Strategy of Confrontation.” His staff worked on producing the video, while
he asked the networks for help in “balancing the one-sided portrayal” of the Chicago police during the convention. All three
networks turned Daley down. NBC responded with an invitation to discuss the events with a panel of reporters in a special
edition of
Meet the Press,
which Daley declined. Within a month, a private film company, working with city employees, had completed
What Trees Do They Plant?
The title was one of Daley’s favorite swipes at reformers, who sat back and criticized while men like Daley were getting
things done. Daley pursued independent stations, and found 140 in the U.S., Canada, and England who agreed to air it. The
film featured footage of police officers describing being attacked by peace protesters, and an assortment of weapons said
to have been confiscated from demonstrators, including a flattened beer can and broken park bench slats. The standout in the
arsenal was a Louisville Slugger with the words “Cops are Pigs” on one side, and “Love” on the other — though it was unclear
where exactly it had come from.
⁴⁴

For all the national criticism directed at Daley, his reputation in Chicago did not seem to have suffered. Even before his
propaganda efforts, he claimed that mail to City Hall was running 60,000 in support of him and the Chicago police and only
4,000 against. The numbers seemed improbably one-sided, but there were other indications that Daley’s stance had been popular
with average Chicagoans. Cars around the city began to sport bumper stickers saying “We Support Mayor Daley and His Chicago
Police.” Jack Mabley, a columnist with Chicago’s
American,
had written one of the most disturbing pieces of reportage to come out of the convention. It described a policeman who “went
animal when a crippled man couldn’t get away fast enough.” The policeman, angry that the man hopping along with the help of
a stick was not gone, shoved him in the back, hit him with a night stick, and threw him into a lamppost. Mabley got an overwhelming
response to his reporting — 80 percent to 85 percent of it supporting Daley and the police. “You can’t help that gnawing feeling
— can all these people be right and I be wrong?” Mabley said. In mid-September, Daley received praise from an unexpected quarter:
Georgia’s segregationist governor Lester Maddox announced that he was supporting an independent ticket of George Wallace for
president and Daley for vice president.
⁴⁵

The November elections did not go well for Daley and the Democrats. Humphrey won Chicago by 370,000 votes, which was not enough
to stop Nixon from carrying Illinois by 135,000 votes. Governor Samuel Shapiro, who had moved up to the job when Otto Kerner
was named to the federal bench in May, lost to Republican Richard Ogilvie. Though the Democrats lost the governorship, downstate
Democrat Paul Simon was elected lieutenant governor. Simon explained his win — the first time the two parties had split the
state’s top two offices — by saying that he was able to “convey an image of independence” Shapiro had not. But the election
was not without its bright spots for the machine. With Ogilvie out as chairman of the Cook County Board, the board — which
now had a 10–4 Democratic majority — would certainly choose a machine loyalist as his successor. That would allow Daley to
once again take control of Cook County government. And Daley protégé Edward Hanrahan was elected state’s attorney, keeping
that important prose-cutorial position in the machine’s hands. Daley had no easy explanation for the Democrats’ poor showing
statewide — he attributed Humphrey’s loss to the fact that “he didn’t get enough votes.” But he was emphatic that the November
elections were only a temporary setback. Asked by a reporter at a press conference if he was worried about Governor-elect
Ogilvie’s threat to “disassemble the Chicago Democratic machine,” Daley responded defiantly: “You try it!”
⁴⁶

On December 1, an investigative commission headed up by Daniel Walker, a corporate lawyer and president of the Chicago Crime
Commission, released its report on violence at the Democratic convention. Walker’s investigation, undertaken at the behest
of President Johnson’s National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, sifted through almost 3,437 eyewitness
accounts, 180 hours of film, and 20,000 still photographs, and relied on the work of 212 investigators. The Walker Report,
also known as
Rights in Conflict,
offered tepid criticism of the protesters but came down hard on the Chicago Police Department. The police were involved in
“enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that the
individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or
arrest,” the report stated. Its famous conclusion was that the Chicago police had engaged in a “police riot.” The Walker Report
traced the police misbehavior directly to Daley, and his shoot-to-kill comments after the April 1968 unrest. Daley’s remarks
were “widely reported both in Chicago and throughout the nation,” the report noted. “Undoubtedly it had some effect on the
attitude of Chicago policemen towards their role in riots and other disorders.” The report also criticized the city for not
publicly condemning the offending police officers after the convention violence. “If no action is taken against them, the
effect can only be to discourage the majority of policemen who acted responsibly, and further weaken the bond between police
and community,” the commission concluded. Daley, not troubled that this careful study had labeled his police officers rioters,
cautioned that the 345-page report “must be read in full.” He was gratified, he said, that the Walker Commission had concluded
that “the majority of policemen did act responsibly under extremely provocative circumstances.”
⁴⁷

CHAPTER

14

We Wore Suits and Ties

D
aley, who rarely got ill, began 1969 by staying home sick with the flu.
¹
His associates noticed that he was starting to slow down, and that he seemed to be losing his edge. There was talk that the
travails of 1968 — the West Side riots, the convention clashes, and the excoriation by the national press — had taken a physical
and psychological toll on him. Daley’s friend Dr. Eric Oldberg, president of the Chicago Board of Health, said the mayor “was
on the brink of something serious. ... He was in very bad shape.” It was unfortunate timing, because 1969 was a year in which
he would need all the strength he could muster.
²