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By Root 911 0

Grant Park filled with tear gas and the wounded. A sit-in began in front of the Hilton and overflowed into the park. The white lights of television cameras were nearly blinding. The police said that objects were being thrown at them, but none of the numerous films of that evening’s events show this. They do show the police and National Guardsmen wading into the crowd with clubs and rifle butts, beating children and elderly people and those who watched behind police lines, beating even those who had fallen, where they lay on the ground. They dragged women through the streets. A crowd was pressed so hard against the windows of a hotel restaurant—middle-aged women and children, according to The New York Times—that the windows caved in and the crowd escaped inside. The police pursued them through the windows into the restaurant, clubbing anyone they could find, even in the hotel lobby. “Demonstrators, reporters, McCarthy workers, doctors, all began to stagger into the Hilton lobby, blood streaming from head and face wounds,” Mailer reported. The police had run amok in front of the hotel, and the television cameras that had been mounted on the entrance awning had caught all of it. Seventeen minutes of police mayhem could be bounced off a satellite called Telstar to show the world. The police smashed cameras, seemingly not realizing—or not caring—that other cameras were documenting the assault. They also went beyond the cameras’ range, pursuing the crowd into the streets of downtown Chicago, clubbing whomever they could find.

It was one of those moments of 1968 television magic, something ordinary enough today but so new and startling at the time that no one who had their television sets on has ever forgotten. Rather than taking the time to edit, process, analyze, and package the film for tomorrow night’s news—what people were used to television doing—the networks just ran it. Dellinger had urged the demonstrators not to fight back, saying that “the whole world could see” who was committing the violence. While the cameras recorded the police violence, they also picked up the crowd chanting—absolutely right—“The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

In the Amphitheatre, the convention stopped to see what was happening. When Wisconsin was called for voting, the head of the delegation, Donald Peterson, said that young people by the thousands were being beaten in the streets and the convention should be adjourned and reconvened in another city. A priest then rose to lead the convention in prayer, and it seemed to Allen Ginsberg, who was in the convention hall, that the priest was blessing the proceedings and the system it represented. He jumped to his feet and, though no one had heard more than a raspy whisper from his tired voice that day, he blasted out an “omm” so loud that it drowned out the priest, and he continued without stopping for five minutes. According to Ginsberg, he did this to drive out hypocrisy.

Daley was now glaring out at the convention floor, looking as if he were ready to call in his police and take care of these delegates. Then Abraham Ribicoff, senator and former governor of Connecticut, went to the podium to nominate George McGovern, a last-minute alternative peace candidate. “With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn’t have those Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”

The convention seemed to freeze for only a second, but it was the most memorable second of the convention. Television cameras sought out and found the neckless, fleshy face of boss Richard Daley, and Daley, perhaps oblivious to the cameras but it seemed almost playing to them, shouted something across the hall to Ribicoff, something not picked up by the microphones. Millions of viewers tried their lip-reading skills. It seemed to involve a pejorative for Jewish people and a sexual relationship. According to most observers who studied the film, he said, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.” Many thought he also added, “You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” In 1968 even Abe Ribicoff was a motherfucker.