1968 - Mark Kurlansky [167]
Daley, however, insisted that he had said none of these things. George Dunne, president of the Cook County Board, explained that they were all yelling—the Chicago people surrounding Daley. They had all been shouting, “Faker!” Ribicoff was a faker. It was not their fault if it sounded like the other F-word.
The violence continued Thursday into early Friday morning, when the police went to McCarthy headquarters on the fifteenth floor of the Hilton and dragged campaign workers out of bed to beat them. Senator McCarthy used his private plane to fly his workers safely out of Chicago.
Chicago was, along with Tet, one of the seminal events in the coming of age of television, and the star was not Hubert Humphrey. It was the seventeen-minute film in front of the Hilton. The Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, and most of the other print media wrote about the historic significance of the television coverage. This was the Yippie dream, or Abbie Hoffman’s dream. Later he explained to the Walker Commission, the government-appointed task force to study the violence in Chicago, “We want to fuck up their image on TV. It’s all in terms of disrupting the image, the image of a democratic society being run very peacefully and orderly and everything according to business.”
Hoffman and many of the journalists who covered the event believed that tens of millions of viewers seeing the Chicago police out of control and beating up kids would change the country and radicalize youth. Perhaps it did. A minority of the country cheered and said, “That’s how to treat those hippies,” and according to Mike Royko, Daley’s popularity in Chicago increased. In 1976, the day after Daley died, Royko wrote of the mayor’s anti-Semitic cursing at Ribicoff, “Tens of millions of TV viewers were shocked. But it didn’t offend most Chicagoans. That’s part of the Chicago style. . . .” Daley angrily insisted that the police had done a fine job and the fault lay in the “distorted and twisted” reporting. But it was a different age now; people saw unedited film, and most were appalled by what they saw. Bizarrely, Humphrey claimed he had never seen the film. “I was busy receiving guests,” he said.
There was an irony waiting in the wings. If the events in Chicago were to produce disenchantment with the political establishment and a low voter turnout among Democrats, no one stood to gain more from this than Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate for president.
When Humphrey started realizing this, he became angry at the television networks for airing the violence outside instead of the convention inside. “I’m going to be president someday,” the candidate said, already sounding uncertain when that day might be. “I’m going to appoint the FCC. We are going to look into all this.”
Where did you stand on Chicago? It became another one of those 1968 divides. You were either on the side of Daley and the police, who were severely criticized even by the Walker Report, or you were on the side of the demonstrators, the hippies, the Yippies, the antiwar movement, the McCarthy workers. Humphrey, coming out of the convention as the new Democratic candidate, said, “Rioting, burning, sniping, mugging, traffic in narcotic, and disregard for the law are the advance guard of anarchy.” Whatever else that might mean, it meant that he was on the side of Daley and the police, on the side of “law and order,” which was the new code phrase for what others called “white backlash.” Humphrey was going after George Wallace and Richard Nixon voters. The Left, he assumed, would have no choice other than himself. Wallace had already said that the Chicago police had “probably used too much restraint.”
Before leaving Chicago, Humphrey gave an interview to CBS’s Roger Mudd in which he backed off of “too busy receiving guests” and said:
Goodness me, anybody who sees this sort of thing is sick at heart and I was. But I think the blame ought to be put where it belongs. I think we ought to quit pretending that Mayor Daley did anything wrong. He didn’t. . . .
I know what caused these demonstrations.