<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/17/the-whole-world-was-watching-chicago-68-revisited/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/17/the-whole-world-was-watching-chicago-68-revisited/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Whole World Was Watching: Chicago
’68, Revisited</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">by Nancy Kurshan - August
17, 2018<br>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content line-height4" dir="ltr"
style="display: block;">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<p>On the 35th anniversary of the sentencing in the
Chicago Conspiracy Trial (February of 2005) I was
interviewed by a public television reporter for a
retrospective piece on the Chicago 8. As he and his
cameraman entered my house, he quipped, “I just
interviewed Richard Schultz (Assistant Prosecuting
Attorney). He insists that you came to Chicago to
overthrow the American government. He knows it sounds
silly but that’s what he believes to this day.” Without
missing a beat, I retorted, “It doesn’t sound silly at
all. That was in fact what we wanted to do.”</p>
<p>And in hindsight, it appears even more compelling today
then it did at the time. Who wouldn’t want to overthrow
a government that was in the process of murdering 2 to 3
million Vietnamese and 60,000 US troops? Who wouldn’t
want to overthrow a government that had launched a joint
FBI/police force campaign to destroy the Black
Liberation Movement which resulted in scores of dead
black revolutionaries and many others imprisoned for
life?”</p>
<p>To understand those events and what motivated us, you
have to know something about the extraordinary times
preceding them. In 1967 the U.S. pounded the
Vietnamese people from the air in what was called
Operation Rolling Thunder. In response the Vietnamese
people continued to down American planes with
anti-aircraft artillery. In fact it was during
Operation Rolling Thunder that John McCain was shot down
over North Vietnam.</p>
<p>Our small circle of New York friends, the Yippies, had
come together around the October 1967 anti-war
demonstration where we first successfully levitated the
Pentagon. That is, we encircled the building and with
drums, incense and incantations we caused it to rise,
allowing the evil spirits to flee. My friend Abbie
Hoffman, one of the original Yippies, would later
complain that we only managed to get it ten feet off the
ground. The levitation was followed by about 1000
arrests of people trying to shut it down altogether. It
was the first massive civil disobedience of the era. It
was also the first time I was arrested but far from the
last.</p>
<p>We came together to shut down the Pentagon in
particular but more generally in response to everything
that was going on around us. We had by then been
marching and demonstrating and participating in
teach-ins for several years and felt our efforts fell on
deaf ears.</p>
<p>New Years Eve 1967, while sitting around stoned with
this small circle of friends, we decided to form the
Youth International Party (known familiarly as Yippie!!)
to plan for a Festival of Life in contrast to the
Festival of Death of the Democratic Party that would
take place in Chicago in August. We imagined a massive
peace extravaganza of musicians, poets, actors, and
artists of all stripes that would unfold in the shadow
of the party waging the Vietnam War .</p>
<p>Who were the actors in that cast of characters on that
fateful New Years Eve?</p>
<p>— My boyfriend Jerry Rubin, son of a teamster, from
Cincinnati Ohio where he had been a journalist who
traveled to Cuba after the ’59 revolution and returned
to the U.S. transformed into a full-time political
agitator. He was a key leader of the Berkeley,
California Vietnam Day Committee. The VDC tried to
physically obstruct troop trains, held enormous
teach-ins and organized thousands of people to march
several times on the Oakland Army Terminal.</p>
<p>— Abbie Hoffman had studied with Abraham Maslow and
held a Masters Degree in Psychology. Active in the civil
rights movement, he went on to establish Liberty House,
an outlet for poor people in the south to sell their
crafts. Abbie was incredibly comical, charming and
intelligent with connections to a world of artists,
poets and musicians.</p>
<p>— Anita Hoffman had a Masters in Psychology. She became
politically involved when she met Abbie and they were
married in Central Park in a hippie wedding. She later
published several books, including a fictional account
of their early days together.</p>
<p>— Paul Krassner was a standup comedian in the spirit of
Lenny Bruce. He was an irreverent and raunchy satirist
and the founder and editor of <em>The Realist </em>magazine.
A little known fact is that early on he had also been
involved in attempts to set up networks that would
assist women in getting, safe albeit illegal abortions.</p>
<p>— Nancy Kurshan, that’s me, had been involved with
anti-nuclear, Northern civil rights organizations, and
Students for a Democratic Society. I was a graduate
student in psychology at Berkeley when I met Jerry
Rubin. We moved in together and then to New York to help
organized the Pentagon demonstration.</p>
<p>It’s possible others were there as well:</p>
<p>Perhaps Phil Ochs who was one of the best known
folksingers of the era. He was a media junkie and many
of his songs reflected actual events. His songs had
wide emotional range and included searing anti-war
themes like <em>“<a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv1KEF8Uw2k">I
Ain’t Marching Any More</a>” </em>and stories about
the civil rights struggle such as <em>“<a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkfgJG5kyQg">Too
Many Martyrs</a>.” </em>They were full of anger,
love and exquisite lyrics. At every political protest,
there was Phil was his guitar.</p>
<p>There would be no card-carrying yippies. We would be a
proud grouping whose boundaries were very blurry. Anyone
could declare herself or himself a yippie. For better or
for worse. But that was part of the beauty.</p>
<p>1968 turned out to be a roller coaster of a year. And
our nerve rose and fell along with events.</p>
<p>On January 30, 1968 the Vietnamese rang in their lunar
New Year by launching an enormous and completely
undetected popular uprising in South Vietnam known as
the Tet offensive. The whole world was amazed by their
ability to mobilize their entire nation right under the
noses of the American military. A small country
challenging Goliath, the most powerful military force in
the world. We were ready to do our bit as well.</p>
<p>With turmoil at home and abroad, the Dems had little to
offer. In April LBJ stunned the nation by suddenly
announcing to a nationwide TV audience that “I shall not
seek and will not accept the nomination of my party as
President.” He insisted that his decision was
“completely irrevocable” in the face of a “division in
the American house.”</p>
<p>Johnson had won by a landslide in ’64 but his approval
rating was now polling at 36% and his handling of the
war was further in the gutter. It was clear that he had
been hoisted, not exactly on his own petard, but on that
of Vietnam. Had he heeded the anti-war movement, he
might have had the resources to build his Great Society
and may well have gone down in history as one of the
greatest American Presidents — a peacemaker and a
reformer.</p>
<p>We were disappointed at LBJ’s announcement to withdraw
because he had become an excellent foil. Hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids did you kill today? So rang our most
popular chant. Without him, what would our protest look
like? What’s more we had the charismatic Bobby Kennedy
in the race. We felt the winds taken out of our sail and
were sure we’d lose the momentum. We were just about
ready to join LBJ and give up the fight.</p>
<p>Then the turmoil intensified. On April 4th the King of
Peace, Dr. Martin Luther King, was assassinated in
Memphis and urban centers around the U.S. went up in
flames. There had already been major rebellions in
Detroit, Newark, LA and Cleveland. It was at that time
that the “Rap Brown bill” became law. Rap Brown was the
fiery leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, a Civil Rights organization that was becoming
more militant in response to the times. It was now a
“crime to cross state lines with the intent to riot.”</p>
<p>In May French students triggered a national strike of
students and workers. In Mexico City a huge protest
ended with the murder by police of probably hundreds of
unarmed students. The world was in turmoil and it
seemed like people were resisting everywhere.</p>
<p>In response to the Black rebellion in Chicago that
followed King’s assassination, Mayor Daley had earlier
that year issued his famous “shoot to kill, maim or
cripple” order and those words were reiterated over and
over again in the months leading up to the Convention.
Then it was announced that 6000 National Guardsmen and
7500 members of the US Army would be there as well. The
Commander of the Guard warned that his men would “shoot
to kill. . . if there is not another way of preventing
the commission of a forcible felony. The troops will be
carrying . . . 30 caliber ball ammunition. This kind of
ammunition is made to kill.” Those of us who were not
planning on committing felonies did not feel comforted
by those words. Yet another good reason to stay home.</p>
<p>Then came another shock. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination
had contradictory implications for our work. Once again
it seemed the Democratic Party held out little hope.
Therefore, many people might again consider coming to
Chicago to protest. But his assassination also
contributed to the climate of fear and understandably
scared many anti-war people.</p>
<p>In addition, we had been negotiating for months for a
permit to sleep in the park. We knew that young people
would arrive from all over the country without money or
resources and would need a place to stay. The city
stalled and stalled. The Chicago Yippies, on the flower
power end of the continuum, encouraged us to keep
negotiating and assured us we’d get the permits in the
end. They were wrong. Mayor Richard Daley refused to
issue any permits to sleep in Lincoln Park and he waited
until the last minute to let us know with certainty.</p>
<p>The reasons to stay home were piling up. Many movement
people began to say it was crazy to go to Chicago.
Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate, warned people not
to come. Even our fragile Yippie cabal was fracturing.
The folks from the Chicago Seed, an alternative
newspaper, were our Yippie allies in Chicago, but they
became fearful of the consequences. They said,
reasonably enough, that they would have to live with the
aftermath of repression that Daley would rain down on
the locals after the rest of us left for home. Up until
the end, we were divided about whether we’d be allowed
to sleep in the park. With or without permits, we
thought that if enough of us arrived in Chicago, the
city would relent, preferring us to sleep in the park,
rather than be pushed into the streets and cause a major
confrontation. At least each of us thought that some of
the time. At other times we thought we might die in
Chicago.</p>
<p>Those were just some of the influences that were
fueling our anger and commitment.</p>
<p>So what was our original intent for the 68 Democratic
Convention? I know what my hopes were and also those of
Jerry because during those years we beat with the same
heart, politically at least. On New Years Day we
planned to organize an extravagant Festival of Life.
Yes, a Festival of Life would be good.</p>
<p>Yes, a Festival of Life would be great. But if that
were not possible, then a confrontation on a scale that
would capture the attention of the whole world would
also be great. If it could not be a Festival of Life,
so be it. But let it be. If the confrontation became
physical that too was okay. Any traces of pacifist
thinking were disappearing. After all, they were raining
terror and violence down on the whole Vietnamese nation,
and then the whole of Indochina. There was intense
repression on the Black Liberation Movement. Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Others had
been arrested, beaten, killed.</p>
<p>I am sure that thousands of yippies and other antiwar
people were frightened away. Of the scheduled Festival
of Life performers, in the end only Phil Ochs and the
MC5 (Motor City 5), a band out of the Ann Arbor/Detroit
area associated with the White Panthers, actually made
it to Chicago. It was rumored that Country Joe and the
Fish showed up but that Joe had been threatened by some
beefy Chicago police in an elevator, and headed out of
town ASAP. Musicians were especially reluctant to bring
all their expensive equipment to such an iffy scene.</p>
<p>But our small circle of friends knew we all had to go
no matter what. Otherwise we would be acquiescing in
the implementation of a police state. It would have been
a done deal and we were not ready to concede that kind
of defeat.</p>
<p>Jerry wrote in “<a
href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067120601X/counterpunchmaga"><em>Do
It!</em></a>”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Though I am a white middle class American who enjoys
a good meal and the luxury of comfort, I nevertheless
share the feelings of extreme revolutionaries. My
country had brutalized the red race and the black race
and now we were dropping bombs on brown and yellow
people. I felt my position was morally right.
Anything any of us could do to stop genocide was O.K.
As a child of America I had been taught that the Good
Germans who did nothing to stop Hitler were also
morally responsible for his crimes. I felt anger at
the gap between our ideals and the cold reality of our
power system.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those were my sentiments exactly. Still are.</p>
<p>On the opening days of the Convention, a few thousand
stalwarts arrived at Lincoln Park. The personal
experience left a lot to be desired. I am not talking
here of the police presence. Not yet. Although all us
hardcore Yippies were there, we weren’t speaking to each
other. Jerry and Abbie had been feuding for a while,
and although I can remember most political arguments for
years afterwards, I can’t for the life of me reconstruct
what they were fighting over. Through the years of
their collaboration, they were often fiercely
competitive with each other. Jerry always felt inferior
to Abbie. He wasn’t as funny. He wasn’t as clever. He
wasn’t as good a writer or as good a speaker. He wasn’t
as charming. And he always felt neglected by Abbie. He
obsessed over his approval. Abbie, for his part, was
extremely individualistic, almost in essence. He would
inadvertently slight or exclude Jerry. So there were
constant estrangements and reunions. This period was
one of estrangement.</p>
<p>When Jerry and Abbie were estranged, so were Anita and
I. We “stood by our men” in those days. Women’s
liberation was just beginning to invade my
consciousness. It would be over a year before Robin
Morgan would unleash her “<a
href="http://blog.fair-use.org/2007/09/29/goodbye-to-all-that-by-robin-morgan-1970/">Goodbye
to All That,</a>” declaring her break with the
male-dominated left, including of course the Yippies.
In it she would shout, “Free Anita Hoffman! Free Nancy
Kurshan! Free Gumbo!” And although it didn’t take the
sting out of it, she in all fairness included
herself–“Free Robin Morgan!” But that was 5 months
later and in this August of 1968 we lined up with our
men.</p>
<p>Other Yippies were pulled into the fight as well. No
matter how hard people tried to remain neutral, it was
generally Stew, Judy and Phil that were Jerry’s pals
with Krassner at Abbie’s side. Had it been different,
the whole personal experience would have been a lot
better. But we were a fractured bunch.</p>
<p>In addition, there were police everywhere. Not just in
uniform but also undercover. Everywhere we went we were
followed by tails, cops whose job was to stick with us
like glue. They made little attempt to camouflage their
task. They followed us as we walked down the street.
They followed us into restaurants. We entered into a
Lincoln Park cafe and three cops sat down at the
counter. We waited for them to order, and when their
meals arrived, we got up and walked out. They also got
up and walked out, leaving all their food behind,
uneaten. We got some satisfaction out of ruining their
lunch.</p>
<p>A tall, burly, dark-haired biker presented himself to
us shortly after we arrived in Lincoln Park. He said
he knew that Jerry would be a target and he was offering
his services as a bodyguard. Why not, we thought. We
were actually quite an open bunch since we didn’t feel
we had anything to hide. We said pretty much what we
believed and what we wanted to do. Anyway it never
occurred to us that he was a cop. What sense would that
make? We already had cops that followed us everywhere
we went. We would later find out differently, but even
though we were admirers of Che Guevara, we were still
naïve in so many ways.</p>
<p>From August 25th through 27th, Lincoln Park had one
character in the light of day and another at
night. During the day, the weather was hot and humid,
typical Chicago summer. I wore a short sundress and two
long pigtails to stay cool. The park was filled with a
few thousand people doing their own things. Some were
practicing a group activity that Japanese youth had been
using when faced with belligerent lines of police. It
involved rows of people, several deep, with arms linked,
moving forward together and shouting “Washoi.” Our
friend Wolfe Lowenthal was teaching people tai chi.
Jeff Shero, later known as Jeff Nightbyrd, the editor of
<em>The Rat, </em>one of New York’s underground
newspapers, was there publishing a daily rag. <em>Ramparts </em>magazine
was producing wall posters, newspapers that gave
information about what was going on and were pasted up
onto walls around the city.</p>
<p>Scores of activists from Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) were there as well. They had criticized
us (the Yippies) for various reasons—too frivolous, not
really organizing on a local level, etc.—but were now
full participants, even leaders, since the situation had
changed. They were disenchanted with the standard civil
disobedience of the peace movement and had formed small
groups to engage in the newly popular “mobile tactics”
that were springing up around the country. We were glad
to see them there. They seemed more prepared than we
were for the actual situation.</p>
<p>There were small groups of medics with white armbands,
carrying first aid supplies, on the ready. They were
associated with the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
There were legal observers with their armbands,
attorneys and law students from the National Lawyers
Guild. Some people were learning how to monitor police
radios. Others were riding around on bicycles bringing
news from one place to the next. Imagine that, no cell
phones! People were reading, sharing food, hanging out.
Both the days and the nights were free form in nature.
If you couldn’t “go with the flow,” it would be rough.</p>
<p>I ran around with Jerry most of the time, not quite
sure what to do with myself, moving at different moments
from exhilaration to fear to occasional boredom. I
can’t remember why I decided to drop THC, but I did do
that one of those days. It was bad enough to imbibe any
“controlled substances” in such a chaotic scene but the
stuff turned out to be really awful and I got quite sick
for a half a day or so. My 75-year old self things,
“what was I thinking?” But hey, I was 24 years old.</p>
<p>Although no permit for sleeping was granted, we thought
we had a permit for a concert. That turned out to be
irrelevant. As the MC 5 started playing, a conflict
with the police ensued over the flatbed stage, and the
performance ended in confusion as the cops cut the
power.</p>
<p>Well-known cultural figures who understood the
importance of this historical moment were
present. Celebrities like Norman Mailer, Jean Genet,
Terry Southern, and William Burroughs could be spotted
walking around, mingling with the crowd and sharing in
the anxious anticipation.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, the 27th, Bobby Seale, a national leader of
the Black Panther Party, addressed the crowd in Lincoln
Park. He had not been an organizer of the events but
was an invited speaker. Despite all the potential
violence and the actual repression the Panthers had been
experiencing, Bobby showed up, prepared to speak. For
bravely exercising his right to free speech for less
than an hour, he was later indicted on federal
conspiracy charges along with 7 others. His appearance
in the 1969/70 Chicago 7 trial would electrify the
world, as he did battle with the racist judge and
prosecutors in the courtroom who bound and gagged him in
an attempt to force silenceupon him.</p>
<p>Also during the day there were various political forays
out of the park. At the beginning of that week the
Russian Army had marched into Prague. In a theater of
solidarity, we marched on the Russian embassy with signs
that proclaimed the commonality between Czechoslovakia
and Czechago. Also in the prelude to the week,
17-year-old Dean Johnson, a Native American youth, was
killed while shoplifting in a food store. He had come
from out of town but he had drifted in to join us, and
we felt an affinity with him. So we marched for Dean
Johnson as well. We also marched to a bus depot over on
Clark and Division in support of the striking Black
Chicago Transit Authority workers. We were in Chicago
because of the war, but we were clearly not a
single-issue movement. We were concerned about
everything, locally and globally, and wanted a total
transformation.</p>
<p>Let me be perfectly clear. Yes our intentions were to
confront and disrupt. Yes our intentions were to
overthrow. But what took place in the streets and parks
of Chicago was a police riot and the responsibility for
the violence was clearly theirs, not ours.</p>
<p>As Norman Mailer penned in <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399588337/counterpunchmaga">Miami
and the Siege of Chicago</a>: “Children, and youths,
and middle-aged men were being pounded and gassed and
beaten, hunted and driven by teams of policemen who had
exploded out of their restraints like the bursting of a
boil.”</p>
<p>It was at night that the real contest took place, from
Sunday night August 25th through Tuesday night, the
27th. As evening began to fall, people started to build
barricades with anything we could find—picnic tables,
garbage cans, etc. Other people made bonfires and sat
around them playing on drums and other instruments.</p>
<p>There were only a few thousand of us in Lincoln Park
and we felt small and weak. Some people wanted to take
a stand and resist the police if they tried to force us
to leave the park. Most of us Yippies didn’t really
want to fight over sleeping in the park, but we wouldn’t
leave the park until the situation was resolved one way
or another. We felt responsible for all the people who
had come and would remain with them if possible.</p>
<p>A portent of what was to come at night, the first blood
to flow was that of Yippie Stew Albert. In broad
daylight on Sunday August 25th in the midst of the crowd
in Lincoln Park, Stew cried out. We turned around to
see blood dripping through his curly blond hair and down
his face. They had cracked open his head! He and Judy
Gumbo took off for an emergency room. Six stitches and
a couple hours later they returned.</p>
<p>Once the 11 pm curfew came, the police stomped into the
crowd and started clubbing people from behind. That
first night it was as if the cops thought they could
just come in and club a few of us and end this pathetic
gathering. A good head-banging and it would all be
over. If so, they seriously underestimated our
determination.</p>
<p>The whole time we were in Chicago it was like those
hours in front of the Pentagon a year earlier. There
were exhilarating moments. I’ll never forget the image
of Allen Ginsberg with a circle of people around him, in
the midst of tear gas and police clubbing, sitting
cross-legged for hours at a time “omming” in deep
sonorous tones, attempting to create calm and drive away
the evil spirits.</p>
<p>And there were moments of just waiting around, being
bored. And then there were so many moments when you
just had to “go with the flow” because you had no
control over the situation. There were just too many
factors that could not be known.</p>
<p>And yet we each felt we had to be there. In the back
of our minds were images of the Pentagon clubbings and
arrests, the Oakland 7 action and trial, the
assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and
Bobby Kennedy. The urban rebellions and police
retaliations. The Black Panthers. Vietnam.
Prague. Mexico. France. We were very aware of the
violent nature of the opposition, but we felt part of a
worldwide movement for change and we were willing to
risk our lives for that change.</p>
<p><em>Washington Post </em>reporter Nicholas von Hoffman
did a good job of capturing the Chicago nighttime scene:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The attack began with a police car smashing the
barricade. The kids threw whatever they had had the
foresight to arm themselves with, rocks and bottles
mostly. Then there was a period of police action
before the full charge.</p>
<p>Shrieks and screams all over the wooded encampment
area while the experienced militants kept calling out
‘Walk! Walk! For Chrissakes don’t run.’ There is an
adage among veteran kids that ‘panicky people incite
cops to riot.’</p>
<p>Rivulets of running people came out of the woods
across the lawn area, the parking lots toward Clark
Street. Next, the cops burst out of the woods in
selective pursuit of news photographers. Pictures are
unanswerable evidence in court. They’d taken off
their badges, their names plates, even the unit
patches on their shoulders to become a mob of
identical, unidentifiable club swingers.</p>
<p>. . There is the scene at Henrotin Hospital with
editors coming in to claim their wounded. Roy Fischer
of the Chicago Daily News, Hal Bruno of
Newsweek. Television guys who took a special
clobbering waiting in the anteroom describing what
happened and looking angry-eyed at the cops hanging
around with the air of guys putting in a routine
night.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The nights were characterized by crowds of young people
trying to figure out what to do, with continuous
sporadic violence and tear gas. We streamed out of the
park, along with the tear gas, and pursued by police
cars and cops on foot. Who could have imagined that
tear gas could be delivered in so many different
ways—from sanitation trucks, from flame-throwing
devices, from the usual canisters. We tried vaseline
and wet handkerchiefs to deal with the gas. Groups of
young people roamed through the streets, as a
consequence blocking traffic. The whole area was in
chaos17. There were helicopters flying close overhead
and on the ground there were cops with gas masks using
their rifle butts as clubs. Dragging.
Chasing. Slamming.</p>
<p>We were out on the streets until late every night, one
night making it all the way downtown to the Hilton,
which was the center of the Democratic Party. The tear
gas followed us and reportedly wafted into the hotel,
spreading its ugly fumes to the delegates lodged
inside. Each night when things died down in the early
morning hours, and we were bone-tired, we wound our way
back to a Lincoln Park apartment and fell into bed to
catch a few hours of deep, exhausted sleep.</p>
<h3>The Whole World Is Watching</h3>
<p>Wednesday, August 28th held the promise of something
different. After all, it was easy to marginalize the
Yippies. Just a bunch of scruffy longhairs who needed
showers. But this day was organized by the National
Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, better
known as The Mobe, and the Mobe was a respectable peace
organization.</p>
<p>In reality, those distinctions were blurred all the way
around, on our side and on the side of the police. The
dynamics that had been set in motion in Lincoln Park
with the cops and the yippies set the tone for the
entire week. There had been an interplay the last
several days between the yippies and the Mobe, between
Lincoln Park and Grant Park.</p>
<p>The Mobe was the sponsor of the rally that day at the
Grant Park band shell but by now we were all in this
boat together. Every yippie who had come to Chicago was
now part of the Mobe. Daley had given us a permit to
rally but not to march. I’ve read accounts of the rally
but I don’t remember a single speech. It was hard to
concentrate and I felt totally on edge, steeling myself
to deal with whatever would happen next. Fully armed
police were arriving in flying wedges, shoving and
pushing and clubbing people from behind. It felt like
we were sitting ducks. This time they got Mobe
organizer Rennie Davis, the All-American boy with blood
dripping down his face. Somehow the rally continued
despite the attacks, and then we tried to move into a
line of march, to head towards the amphitheater where
the Convention was taking place.</p>
<p>But Daley had no intention of letting us march and
blocked us so that there was no way to move. The crowd
was forced to disperse and spilled out of the park and
over to Michigan Avenue and the Hilton Hotel where all
the delegates were wining and dining. The Hilton was
surrounded by a huge phalanx of cops and military. But
people pressed forward and cops clubbed us back and
lobbed tear gas into the crowd. As night began to fall,
the crowd thickened. The police continued to beat and
club people, demonstrators and reporters and “innocent”
Chicagoans alike. The Battle of Michigan Avenue was
on. But the crowd seemed to actually grow, or at least
people held strong, chanting over and over “The Whole
World Is Watching.” At that point, we knew we were back
on the world stage and it was exhilarating. So this was
the Festival of Life after all. What had been happening
for days in Lincoln Park was now being repeated in front
of the Hilton; only this time it involved a broader
swath of citizenry and THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING!</p>
<p>After a while, Jerry and I, along with Stew, Judy and
others, left the Hilton Hotel and began running around
the Loop, Chicago’s downtown area, blocking traffic and
setting fires in garbage cans. That was the most
militant action I’d ever engaged in. As we were turning
the corner under the Elevator train, Jerry was
surrounded by cops who dragged him off and arrested
him. It was not a random arrest. It was a targeted
arrest of Jerry. He later told me that they brought him
into the station where he was confronted by Bob Pierson,
the biker bodyguard. Pierson revealed himself to be an
undercover cop, or a “pig,” as we were fond of calling
cops, always reminding ourselves that we were maligning
the real pigs in the process. That was not the last we
would see of Bob Pierson. He would later appear at the
House Unamerican Activities Committee and then as a key
witness in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. (So much for
the notion that because we had nothing to hide, we had
nothing to fear from an undercover agent.)</p>
<p>The journalist John Schultz reports that there were 668
arrests recorded that week. 52.6% of the people were
from the Windy City. The rest came from 36 states and
five countries. 550 had never been arrested before.
75% were 25 years of age or younger.</p>
<p>Later we would learn that inside the Convention Center,
Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Senator from Connecticut, had
condemned the “gestapo-like tactics” out on the street.
And Mayor Daley had been caught on mike responding, “You
motherfucker Jew bastard, get your ass out of Chicago.”</p>
<p>The Chicago Corporation Counsel’s Walker Report
concluded that there had indeed been a police riot in
Chicago that week, suggesting cops had gone amok. But
calling it a “police riot” is a whitewashing of the
situation and underestimated the cold-blooded
calculations of the establishment in this country. It
is hard to imagine that Richard Daley, the
shoot-to-maim-and-kill czar of Chicago, would have
allowed such spontaneity from his officers. No, the
Battle for Chicago was orchestrated from on high. The
clubbings, beatings, and gas were all conscious
decisions from at least as high as the Daley
administration. In fact, we later learned that there
were about one thousand federal agents sent to work in
Chicago that week, including FBI and military
intelligence. One can only wonder what exactly was the
role of the federal government in the events that
ensued.</p>
<p>The problem for them was that they underestimated us.
We were frightened but despite our fears we persisted.
They may have thought their threats before the
Convention would deter us. They were wrong. They may
have thought the first round of tear gas would deter
us. They were wrong. They may have thought the first
cracked head would stop us. They were wrong. We would
not be turned back.</p>
<p>It was an amazing few days and a yippie’s delight in
the sense that we were always out to capture the media’s
attention and in this case we did. The media reported
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
because they found themselves at the end of the same
billy clubs and tear gas as we. Even reporters as
respectable as Dan Rather were attacked by the cops.
They were not embedded journalists. For that moment in
time there seemed to actually be a free press! One
reporter is quoted as saying, “This whole thing has
moved me so far left, I can see the back of my head.”</p>
<p>The long-term impact of Chicago 68 has been much
debated. There are many layers to such an analysis and
that is not the subject of this piece. But there is no
doubt that Chicago 68 became an iconic moment in
American history.</p>
<p><em>This article is adapted from Nancy Kurshan’s
memoir, a work-in-progress.</em></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>