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Spiro T. Agnew. He said he did this to unify the party, but the party could not conceal its unhappiness. The entire moderate half of the party had been ignored. The Republican Party had a ticket that would greatly appeal to white southerners who felt embattled by years of civil rights and to some northern reactionary “law and order” voters who had been angered by the rioting and disorder of the past two years, but to no one else. The Republicans were leaving most of the country to the Democrats. Alabama renegade Democrat George Wallace, an old-time segregationist running on his own ticket, could not only siphon off Democrats, he could also deny the Republicans enough votes to cost them southern states and their whole southern strategy. There was a move to try to force Nixon to pick someone else that was stopped only because Mayor Lindsay, the leading liberal candidate for the job, performed Nixon the service of seconding the Agnew nomination.

Nixon defensively said that Agnew was “one of the most underrated political men in America.” The following day, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, one of the most moderate black groups, denounced the ticket, which they termed “white backlash candidates.” Was that bad news for Nixon? Was that even news? Richard Nixon, with few people noticing, had reshaped the Republican Party.

Then on to Chicago—for a convention that would not be boring.

CHAPTER 16

PHANTOM FUZZ DOWN

BY THE STOCKYARDS

Jean Genet, who has considerable police experience, says he never saw such expressions before on allegedly human faces. And what is the phantom fuzz screaming from Chicago to Berlin, from Mexico City to Paris? “We are REAL REAL REAL!!! as this NIGHTSTICK!” As they feel, in their dim animal way, that reality is slipping away from them.

—WILLIAM BURROUGHS, “The Coming of the Purple Better One,” Esquire, November 1968

There’s nothing unreal about Chicago. It’s quite real. The mayor who runs the city is a real person. He’s an old time hack. I might chastise the Eastern establishment for romanticizing him. The whole “Last Hurrah” aspect. He’s a hack. A neighborhood bully. You have to see him to believe him.

—STUDS TERKEL, interviewed by The New York Times, August 18, 1968

People coming to Chicago should begin preparations for five days of energy-exchange.

—ABBIE HOFFMAN, Revolution for the Hell of It, 1968

EVERYTHING SEEMED inauspicious for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of August. The convention center had burned down, the most exciting candidate had been murdered, leaving mostly a void filled with anger, and the mayor had become notorious for his use of police violence.

Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center was what Studs Terkel might have a called “a real Chicago story.” It had been built a few years earlier at a cost of $35 million and named after the notorious right-wing publisher of the Chicago Tribune, one of the few backers of the project besides Mayor Daley. Environmentalists fought it as a degradation of the lakefront, and most Chicagoans regarded it as abysmally ugly. Then, mysteriously or, according to some, miraculously, it burned down in 1967, leaving the Democrats without a location and Chicagoans wondering exactly how the $35 million had been spent.

Mayor Richard Daley, who in his 1967 reelection faced what was close to a serious challenge because of the McCormick Place scandal, was not going to let fire or scandal rob his city of a major convention. By the old Union Stockyards, the beef center of America until it was closed down in 1957, stood the Amphitheatre. Miles from downtown, since the closing of the stockyards this had become an out-of-the-way part of Chicago where such events as wrestling and the occasional car or boat show took place. The convention could take place in the Chicago Amphitheatre once Daley had it wrapped in barbed wire and surrounded by armed guards. The delegates could stay, as planned, in the Conrad Hilton Hotel, about six miles away, by the handsomely landscaped