1968 - Mark Kurlansky [162]
The Yippies quickly found that there was so much media and they were so hungry that any put-on at all could get coverage. Their threat to put LSD in the Chicago water system and send the entire city on a “trip” was widely reported. Other threats included painting cars to look like independent taxis that would kidnap delegates and take them to Wisconsin, dressing up as Viet Cong and walking through town handing out rice, bombarding the Amphitheatre with mortar rounds from several miles away, having ten thousand naked bodies float on Lake Michigan. The city government seemed to understand that these threats were not real but followed through on them as though they were. Unfortunately, there is no record of the police response to Abbie Hoffman’s threat to pull down Hubert Humphrey’s pants. Each Yippie threat, no matter how bizarre, was reported to the press by the police. The Sun-Times and Daily News talked to the New Left leaders and knew the threats were put-ons, but the Tribune papers, after having spent years uncovering communist plots, reported each plan with menacing headlines that only scared the police. The Yippies were gleeful about the media attention that police precautions drew. In truth, of the few thousand demonstrators who were in town, with probably fewer than two thousand from outside the Chicago area, most were not affiliated with the Yippies or anyone else, so that the Yippie presence itself was somewhat mythical. The law enforcement presence, however, was not. Twelve thousand Chicago policemen were being backed up by five thousand soldiers from the army and six thousand National Guard. The military were closer in age to the demonstrators and many were black, and the demonstrators expected them to be more sympathetic. In fact, forty-three soldiers were court-martialed for refusing to be sent to Chicago for riot duty. Generally the military had a calming effect, as opposed to the Chicago police, who from the beginning were prepared for war. Had it not been for the police response, the Chicago demonstrations would have been noted as a failure, if noticed at all.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko wrote, “Never before had so many feared so much from so few.”
The convention had not yet begun, and already the talk and the reporting was of the clash, the violence, the showdown. This language was used to refer to the convention itself, where the Humphrey forces were meeting McCarthy and the peace delegates, but also to the thousands of demonstrators and police in downtown Chicago, kept miles away from the convention.
At 11:00 P.M. Tuesday night, August 20, Soviet tanks made their move across the Czech border. By Wednesday morning Czechoslovakia had been invaded. Television images of Soviet tanks in Czech towns were being broadcast.
In Chicago, the Soviet invasion was immediately seized as a metaphor. Abbie Hoffman gave a press conference in which he called Chicago “Czechago” and said that it was a police state. It looked like one, with police everywhere and the barbed-wire-ringed Amphitheatre awaiting the delegates. Hoffman invited the press to film the day’s “Czechoslovakian demonstrations.” John Connally of Texas argued that the Soviet invasion showed that the party should support the Vietnam War effort, but Senator Ralph Yarborough, also of Texas, argued to the credentials committee that political power should not be misused by them to crush “the idealism of the young” the way the Soviets were using military power. The demonstrators had started referring to Chicago as Prague