Chicago 1968
(excerpted from the novel, Ironies in the Fire)
By Uri Hertz
© 2022 by Uri Hertz. All rights reserved.
A Volkswagen camper was hurtling toward Chicago with passengers who needed to be there for the week of the Democratic National Convention in order to cover the convention for radio and television broadcast news. As the camper sped along the open highway in the morning light, Isaac looked out the window at the red earth of Arizona and immediately remarked to himself how different it was from the brown California soil he was used to seeing.
Then he turned and looked over at his cousin Roy who sat behind the wheel intently watching the road ahead. A radio journalist in his early twenties assigned to cover the convention for KRLA news in Los Angeles, Roy had recruited his cousin Isaac, nearly four years his junior, as his assistant. While Roy covered the nomination process on the convention floor, Isaac was tasked with covering protests in the parks and on the street, taping interviews with protestors on his portable tape recorder.
There was an obsessed look in Roy’s eye as he swiftly navigated a twisting, turning freeway interchange. Sleeping in the back were two video cameramen, stringers for network news with press credentials, who had taken the ride from Los Angeles to Chicago in exchange for gas money so they could shoot videotape at the convention. The cameramen mostly kept to themselves. By the end of the first day out on the highway, they were not getting along with Roy. They took Isaac aside when they were parked at a rest stop and asked what was the matter with his cousin. Isaac did not have a response because Roy seemed okay to him. He accepted his older cousin, whom he had known all his life, as Roy had always been: a guy on a mission who was capable of doing extraordinary and challenging things. But he always did it his way, wrapped in his own solitude.
Roy, seeing the discussion from a distance as he walked back to the camper, remarked to himself that he did not suffer fools gladly. The two cameramen did not appreciate his stubbornly relentless pace as the VW camper made a beeline for the state line, yet they were also glad to be making time to Chicago.
The next morning, the voice of disk jockey Wolfman Jack, broadcast from a powerful radio transmitter somewhere in Texas that covered the entire Southwestern United States with its signal, broke the silence, “Have mercy, hah!” The song on the radio, “The Weight,” sung by The Band, perfectly scored the arid, rolling landscape with tiny, desolate towns popping up now and then, like sets or locations for Bad Day at Black Rock but without Spencer Tracy or Robert Ryan to redeem them, mired, as they were, in mean-spirited mediocrity and resentment that had taken over sectors of American life, before disappearing in the swiftly receding distance.
The epic nature of this cross-country drive to Chicago as Roy’s assistant, gathering and transmitting coverage of the convention and the planned antiwar protest demonstrations, was becoming clearer to Isaac during the hours of silent driving. After having been through countercultural political and antiwar changes in Los Angeles and coastal California up to San Francisco, and steeped himself in publications of the local and national underground press, Isaac was ready when Roy asked him to put himself in the middle of the action and tape interviews with protestors. He knew he wanted to be in the thick of this historic moment, recording on-the-spot interviews with demonstrators, peace freaks and spokespeople for the international youth movement. Covering the antiwar demonstrations in Chicago was where these bold threads of his life had been taking him. It was exactly what he wanted to do.
They drove all day, stopping only to eat or tank up, and by nightfall they were looking out at an expanse of starry night sky over the limitless horizon of a desert with a jagged line of mountains off in the eastern horizon. Starry constellations were visible in the pulsating blackness that seemed to go on forever. Isaac was drifting in and out of a somnolent reverie as he gazed into the living black sky that seemed capable of engulfing the world…
By the summer, rapid shocks had been buffeting the American political and moral psyche one after another. The war in Vietnam was reaching a crescendo of death and destruction with mounting American and Vietnamese casualties announced each week. American jets were strafing rice paddies. Napalm, a flaming jelly that attached itself to whatever it hit, was being dropped on villages with grass huts, along with their inhabitants, setting them ablaze. A neurotoxin called Agent Orange, later used in a diluted form as an herbicide in public parks in the Pacific Northwest and other regions of the country when the war was brought home, was sprayed in high concentrations to wipe out patches of jungle where the enemy, The Vietcong was suspected of hiding.
There were massive demonstrations against the war on and off college campuses in several American cities as well as around the world. Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. Urban ghettos were erupting in chaotic, burning riots in the summer due to this blow to the momentum of progress in Civil Rights as well as incidents of police brutality and myriad other aggravating factors resulting from hundreds of years of institutionalized racism and oppression.
In 1968, this was understood to be the way the world revealed its seemingly chaotic developments from day to day. Viewed from the vantage point of over half a century later, it seemed that the changes were happening at a relentless pace. Not two months after King, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated after a campaign event at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. The vision of an RFK presidency, with his unique antiwar coalition in support of minority rights and social justice, had given hope to the young. To lose him brought home the state of emergency building in an inexorable yet unknown direction.
May 1968 had stunned Paris, France, and the Avignon Theatre Festival protests had just taken place in July. The Situationist program of revolt against both capitalist and communist ideological orthodoxies was being carried into the realm of action on many different levels simultaneously. Word had it that the French government had almost fallen to a coalition of university students and striking trade unionists. Speculation was that the young anarchists had been so caught up in the sexual revolution that they were too busy making love on the barricades to seize the moment and take power.
During the same week as the Democratic National Convention, Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague, putting a forceful end to the Prague Spring. In Mexico City, hundreds of protesting university students were massacred and their bodies shipped off in freight cars to be buried in mass graves, never to be identified.
President Lyndon Johnson, who had taken office after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in ‘64 and then continued to escalate the war in Vietnam in the face of mounting mass protest, had finally announced his intention not to run for a second term. The Johnson administration, made up of the “best and brightest” the Ivy League had to offer, lied about casualty figures in order to hide the truth about the asymmetrical war.
Senator Eugene McCarthy, leading antiwar candidate after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, was deadlocked with prowar Minnesota liberal Senator Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. Republican candidate Richard Nixon loomed in the background. Nixon would announce a bogus secret plan to end the war and later win the general election over Humphrey and a fractured Democratic Party, and then he would go on to escalate the war until he was eventually impeached over Watergate.
People were alarmed at the runaway breakdown of the system and believed that the fate of America’s soul was riding on the Democratic National Convention. Would the war machine, supplied with high-tech weaponry by the military-industrial complex and fed with the lives of young men, continue to dominate the national agenda, or would it be possible to bring this inexorable dance of death to a halt and channel resources in a progressive direction for peacetime purposes such as social and economic progress?
In Chicago, it came down to the question of whether a prowar or an antiwar candidate would emerge from the convention. Students and other youths from around the country were converging on Chicago to hold a counter-convention and demonstrate against the war in order to let politicians in the Democratic Party know that, in the view of the younger, draft-age generation, the war had to end. They understood the stakes in reality-based ways. Their generational peers, guys they knew from school, as well as themselves, were being conscripted into armed combat by order of state to kill or be killed on the other side of the world in an undeclared and unconstitutional war for which nobody could give a convincing reason.
The Domino Theory, an American propaganda device first used during the Cold War as reasoning for containment of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, was brought into play by President Eisenhower in the 50’s to justify U.S. troops taking on France’s colonial war in Vietnam. It was promoted by the Johnson administration a decade later to justify successive escalations of the war. Johnson’s iteration of The Domino Theory posited that the Chinese and Soviet communists were behind Ho Chi Minh’s communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam. If South Vietnam were to fall to the insurgent North Vietnamese Viet-Cong, Laos and Cambodia would be next to fall to the communists, then Burma (now Sri Lanka) and Thailand. The Domino Theory was illustrated on TV and in newspapers and magazines with dominoes falling one by one, knocking the next down. These falling dominoes seemed absurd and idiotic to many of the young men facing the prospect of being drafted into the military, becoming “fresh troops” to feed the war machine.
Isaac wasn’t sure what to make of the scene before his eyes at Grant Park, Chicago, on the night before the start of the Democratic Convention. He looked around at people slowly and randomly filling the park in small groups as if for a Love-in from the previous two summers at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, or a Be-in at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
This was not to be an afternoon in the park. A day earlier, Mayor Daley, head of the Chicago Democratic political machine, had refused to grant the Yippies (Youth International Party) a permit to demonstrate in the city. The Yippie leadership planned to stage an antiwar counter-convention in the park anyway.
An unlikely coalition of satirical anarchists and student activists, with their theater of provocation and outrage perfected on the streets of New York and other cities of the Northeast, were widely known for using aggressive tactics to tear the scab off of America’s sociopolitical wounds to reveal the authoritarian rot and hypocrisy at its core. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, two Yippie leaders, later put on trial as The Chicago Seven, had invented a fluid set of agitprop routines to run on law enforcement in order to provoke extreme reactions and, in so doing, generate press coverage and controversy, throwing a glaring light on their issues, further polarizing legislators and enforcers of authority from the youth and their demonstrations of protest against the war.
Now these activists/organizers in the politics of transgression, then in their mid-thirties, had a baby-boom generation of fresh-faced, longhaired college-age children of the Sixties, already tuned in to a throbbing countercultural underground expressing politico-cultural forces in confrontation. They were flocking to Chicago to protest against the war. Headlining the Yippie program was a plan to nominate a pig named Pigasus for president, which actually made an absurd kind of sense at the time.
The stage was set for confrontation. Mayor Daley had threatened dire consequences for anyone breaking the law. To add to the palpable tension, a local Puerto Rican boy had been shot and killed running from the police the night before in an unrelated incident covered in all the papers and on the news.
Isaac knew that a disturbing metamorphosis of crowd situations from peaceable to sinister was already a frequent occurrence in Los Angeles since before the disastrous second Brucemas. The first Brucemas, a public musical celebration of the late satirist Lenny Bruce’s birthday, was an overflowing countercultural communion staged by the Los Angeles Free Press, the city’s leading underground newspaper. At the first Brucemas, thousands of people danced ecstatically on the beach and in the water at the border of Ocean Park and Venice. Above them, top rock and blues bands played on risers set up outside the Aragon Ballroom on the rundown Ocean Park Pier facing hordes of hippies and other young freaks associated with sixties revolutionary culture who were dancing on the sand and in the surf below.
The second Brucemas, held at the same location the following summer, had barely begun when a couple of undercover officers from the LAPD stepped in and tried to arrest a guy who was smoking marijuana in the midst of a crowd. The crowd of dancers formed a circle around the arrestee and would not let him be taken away.
On this basis, riot police stormed the gathering, arresting people and loading them into paddy wagons, wreaking havoc on the massive crowd of beach revelers who had come from all over Southern California to ecstatically pay their respects to the standup comic/social critic known to have been hounded to death. For example, there was a county sheriff in West Hollywood who made a point of arresting Lenny Bruce every chance he got, posing for photos handcuffed to the persecuted standup comic, in what was later understood to be film noir verité, as they entered the station for booking.
Music performances in clubs and cafes had started to take on a disturbing edge when people who were extremely loaded started heckling the performer, getting kicks at the expense of everyone who was there to enjoy the artistry of the musical act on stage. Free concerts in the park, up to this time a venue where masses of peaceful hippies and other freaks of the day danced and gyrated amid clouds of incense and marijuana smoke, now had people on bad trips who were losing it on the spot or gaunt people turned inside out on meth with a tendency to violence if crossed or provoked in any way.
Isaac had felt the cold shudder of danger at antiwar demonstrations outside a Metro Squad-fortified high-rise Hilton Hotel where President Johnson was staying in Century City, once the back lot of 20th Century Fox motion picture studio. He recalled the rabble rouser who had exhorted demonstrators to cross the line and clash with police guarding the entrance to the hotel lobby when he saw him again later, this time in a confidential huddle with a police officer enforcing crowd control. It was a reminder that things were often not what they seemed. He recalled the chill on Haight Street when police started brutally clearing the streets after the Mobilization Against the War at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
The mood of the massive crowd now filling Chicago’s Grant Park beyond capacity was taking on a menacing tone when an ominous megaphone voice announced threateningly, “You are all an illegal assembly. You must leave the park immediately or be subject to arrest.”
There was no way to leave the park, no way out. The oppressively humid summer air was charged with an electric pulsation that boded ill for the safety of the raucous yet non-violent mass of demonstrators. Isaac had become familiar with the jolt of violence and panic when it spread through a crowd chafing under the coercive control of a riot squad, but this moment was on a Chicago scale building to a stockyard slaughterhouse intensity.
On top of all this, he knew he had to protect Caitlyn, the red-haired beauty of Welch descent who stood beside him. Caitlyn, along with several young women he knew who were her friends, including Isaac’s girlfriend, was a student at the most creatively progressive of the private schools nestled against the mountain in Ojai Valley. Since Caitlyn and Isaac were both in Chicago for the convention, they had decided over the phone to take a cab together and arrive a little early to the demonstration in Grant Park.
He had stopped to get her at a stately old four-star Chicago hotel near The Loop where she was staying with her grandmother. Caitlyn had matter-of-factly described her grandmother as “the grand-dame of the Democratic National Committee.” When Isaac met the kindly, classy old dowager who came down to greet him in the hotel lobby, he promised her that he would take good care of Caitlyn.
The irony wasn’t lost to Isaac there in the midst of gathering chaos as Caitlyn turned to him and smiled. She felt safe because she assumed that she could trust him to know what to do if things went haywire with the crowds and the police. She had come to Chicago with her grandmother, a Democratic Party fundraiser and socialite, to sit with her in a box for the nights of the Convention and learn about the world of Chicago’s ruling class and Democratic national and state politics.
Her grandmother’s real objective, Caitlyn had confided to Isaac, was to introduce her to and get her involved with one of the young Democratic Party attorneys at the Convention. Yet she was a free spirit who lived in a moment-to-moment reality. No one in her family would have ever imagined that she would be in Grant Park on the night before the Convention under the imminent threat of Authoritarian Violence.
As darkness fell, Isaac and Caitlyn heard the crackling police megaphone and looked around at the fires in trashcans surrounded by conga drummers beating out Africanized war tattoos to the accompaniment of screaming saxophones and pounding guitars, with frantic yet strangely rational people dancing and cavorting about, shouting, “Don’t let the Pig take the park!”
As the pulsation of crowd noises increased in volume and intensity, Isaac realized he did not know what to do. Yes, he had a press pass on his lapel and a cassette tape recorder hanging from his shoulder, but he knew he was in over his head. He looked down a hill and out over the restive crowd at the sea of blue helmets ringing the circumference of the park. Behind him, on the other side of the park, were the icy waters of Lake Michigan. It seemed there would be no exit when cordons of police in riot gear, blindingly illuminated by searchlights, started violently closing in. They beat at the outer edge of the crowd with batons amid sporadic explosions of tear gas cannisters sending clouds of bitter, burning smoke into the air.
Over the wail of sirens sounding too loud and close, the relentless battery of conga drums and the crackling authoritarian voice over a megaphone, Isaac thought he could hear someone chanting om from not far away. He immediately suggested to Caitlyn that they head in this direction. She agreed without hesitation. This sacred Sanskrit syllable, with its unique soundwaves which tune frequencies of the nervous system when sung in long tones, was the antithesis of the cacophonous noises and tear gas cannisters going off all around them. They both agreed that, under the circumstances, it was the only sane direction.
There was a circle of six or seven men and women gathered around Allen Ginsberg, the legendary Beat poet who was then at the crest of the wave of Sixties underground culture. The Depression-Era born Ginsberg, then in his mid-forties, was widely known in this era for reciting his poems against the war to riveted crowds both young and old at antiwar protests on college and university campuses across the country and worldwide.
Isaac had first learned of Ginsberg a few summers earlier when he started reading Jack Kerouac’s novels at the age of fifteen. Under fictitious names invented by the author, Allen Ginsberg made repeated appearances as one of the primary characters in Kerouac’s accounts of the bohemian literary countercultural rebellion of the 1940’s and 50’s known as The Beat Generation. Reading the already iconic City Lights edition of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, along with The Evergreen Review and other literary magazines and publications from the local and national underground press, Isaac further informed his comprehension of what was behind his role as a countercultural leader, public poet and antiwar activist helping give guidance and a very far-out kind of leadership to the youth rebellion in the year 1968.
To the young man, it was as if a character had emerged from the pages of a Kerouac novel and suddenly come to life. Looking with his wild, black beard and long hair like a holy prophet from the Old Testament of the Bible appearing in the present day, Ginsberg was leading the chant, intoning the sacred syllable in a way that carried force yet invited others to intone it with him. Isaac and Caitlyn joined in. Once a small group of about twenty people had gathered, a ring of peace was created, surrounded, as it were, by the building intensity of chaotic crowds reacting to police violence.
The poet started walking slowly as he continued chanting, and they walked along with him like disciples of Sri Ramakrishna in a sacred garden. The group entered a grove of trees and continued to chant as they walked until they suddenly emerged from the grove and found themselves at a silent intersection of deserted streets.
They were no longer trapped in the situation that had been closing in on them ten minutes earlier and had appeared to offer no way out. Strangely, nothing going on inside the park was audible from this spot. It felt as if they had passed from one dimension into a completely different zone of reality.
Now that the group was out of danger, the poet ceased chanting and broke up the convocation. People said goodbye to each other and walked off in twos and threes into the dark streets leading away from the park and into the surrounding city. When the young man with a cassette recorder hanging from a strap on his shoulder asked Ginsberg if he would do an interview for radio news in Los Angeles, the poet reluctantly agreed. The three of them, Ginsberg, Isaac and Caitlyn, sat down on a bench not far from a streetlamp casting a penumbra of light.
The bard was preoccupied with melancholy thoughts as he spoke into the portable tape recorder mic in somber tones. It was reflected in his mournful look as he expressed his tragic sense of the intensified police violence against young antiwar demonstrators we had just escaped from minutes before. He spoke with thoughtful concern, saying events in Chicago increased his anxiety about the troubling and dangerous polarizations which were taking shape.
Expressing some confidence that young people protesting the war were coming from a humane, clear-eyed perspective on the dangers and disasters of war, he said he feared that America, with its growing tide of social, racial and class resentment and violence, was under threat of losing any connection to Walt Whitman’s vision of America expressed in “Leaves of Grass.” He wondered what this experience they were having in Chicago portended for the future of America, what it told them about the direction in which the nation was spinning.
As the older Beat poet spoke in a New Jersey growl not unfamiliar to the youth from older men in his family born and raised in Bronx, New York, during the Great Depression, Isaac could hear the serious tones of Ginsberg’s voice and see the world-weariness in his eyes. The violent confrontation at Grant Park more than likely influenced the poet’s actions of the next day, when, at the opening of the Democratic National Convention, Ginsberg broke in and chanted loudly from his place in an elevated gallery to banish evil spirits, of which there were no doubt many, his voice filling the auditorium crowded with politicians and their delegates.
After an exchange of questions and answers in which Ginsberg gave his take on the turn for the worse that America was taking, with imperialistic wars in Southeast Asia and police authoritarianism acted out on young protestors at home, the interviewer became aware that the interview subject was looking at him in what he considered to be an odd way. The older poet sized up the lanky young man with long, curly brown hair cascading from under a workman’s cap cocked on his angelic head, illuminated by a streetlamp’s lurid glow. Ginsberg had been smoking weed with Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner and Jerry Rubin, among the founders of the Yippie movement and organizers of the counter-convention, a couple of hours earlier. He didn’t know how Caitlyn fit into the picture, but with her flaming hair and knowing green eyes, she, too, seemed to him a young Blakean image of innocence and experience.
Isaac had grown up in Hollywood and West Hollywood, and, though he was naïve and idealistic in certain ways at eighteen, it occurred to the young man conducting the interview that the Old Testament prophet before him, who had just serenely led them out of danger like Moses led the Hebrews across the Red Sea as the tides separated, suddenly had a not-so-subtle gleam in his eye letting Isaac know that there was more to the situation than met the eye.
The young journalist attempted to stay on the interview, acting like he didn’t know what was going on, asking relevant questions, but it did put him off balance. Nevertheless, he knew he had already captured good interview footage. Early the next morning, Isaac and Roy phoned his recording in to the newsroom in Pasadena from a public phonebooth at a street corner in The Loop. The newsroom recorded it on their end of the phone and edited parts of the interview into the newscast the following day.
When the interview ended, the poet walked off alone into the night. Isaac and Caitlyn caught a cab. As the taxi rolled through the streets of Chicago, which had taken on a more sinister aspect since the fall of darkness over Grant Park, they observed random teams of police executing paramilitary crowd-control maneuvers on several different streets. The taxi dropped them at The Planters Hotel in one end of The Loop where Isaac and Roy had a room.
Roy was still at the International Amphitheater where preparations for the Democratic Convention were continuing into the night, so they had the room to themselves. Still partly in a state of shock from the close call in the park and the inspiring yet somehow disturbing episode with Allen Ginsberg, they looked out the big window of the second-story room to the street below where police officers, in orderly formation, were clearing the street to enforce a curfew that had been declared by the mayor.
As they observed from a safe yet ironic distance what martial law could look like, Isaac started kissing Caitlyn and they fell into bed, where they made love to the sound of police sirens, megaphone voices and people yelling, the hard crack of police batons on protestor’s skulls, with the sound and smell of tear gas cannisters going off, making them close the window. Isaac realized that Caitlyn, with her green eyes, alabaster skin and long, thick red hair, was even more beautiful than he had previously thought. For her part, she viewed Isaac, with his sculpted features and long curly hair, as a handsome young man who did not appear too sure of himself yet who kept showing up. It was natural to abandon themselves to the magnetic forces drawing them together in this moment at the point of a constellation where time and place collided.
It was a thing of the moment that felt inevitable. Isaac’s girlfriend, who was back in Los Angeles in her father’s Benedict Canyon home, had been friends and classmates with Caitlyn for two schoolyears. Isaac knew Caitlyn had an older, long-term boyfriend back east with whom she lived on a commune in rural Vermont, and whom her family had sent her to an elite private prep school in California to get her away from. When Isaac mentioned back in Ojai that he was about to leave for Chicago, Caitlyn had given him the hotel and room number where she would be staying with her grandmother so that he could phone and the two of them go and participate in an antiwar demonstration together.
They had not anticipated a sexual encounter though they did sense something when they first saw each other earlier in the day. They made love with the energy of two young angels once again indulging in the sweet corruption of the flesh. With the world around them going violently insane, making love felt to them like a deeply intimate act of protest in the face of it. They intuitively comprehended the redemption in the phrase, “Make love, not war.”
Over the week’s round of protests broken up by violent police attacks, the festival atmosphere of the early days in Grant Park gave way to a state of shock that seemed to begin again every morning when Isaac hit the streets with his tape recorder and made his way to wherever it was all happening. It was so hot that summer around Lake Michigan that a minute after Isaac had showered, put on fresh clothes and stepped out of the air-conditioned hotel and into the humid street, he was already drenched in sweat.
As he taped on-the-spot interviews during the days of confrontation which followed, Isaac was struck by a common thread between what Allen Ginsberg had said concerning the situation in Chicago and views articulated by poet Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs, Realist editor Paul Krassner and sociologists Sam and Walli Leff, these bearers of countercultural tradition shared a wide historical perspective of the situation and its consequences. It was June 1968. Around the world, anarchistic coalitions of young, radical ideologues were pressing the limits placed by the State on political and personal expression. They were met with massive police violence and even massacre, as tragically did occur in Mexico City and in Istanbul. This was not limited to State suppression of the left. During the week of the Chicago Democratic Convention, Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and put an abrupt end to the democratic Prague Spring.
As the days progressed, the atmosphere in Chicago became more desperate and pathological. Many of the police were openly enjoying the license to brutalize demonstrators conferred upon them by Mayor Daley. Each day became a starker repetition of the preceding one, with demonstrations violently broken up by endless cordons of riot police with helmets and billy clubs. Nuns and priests were beaten and gassed. Isaac saw a teenage girl trip and fall as the crowd they were part of ran from the onrushing wall of police. An officer in riot gear was striking her with his baton. Immediately, a boy ran up and threw himself over her body to block the blows.
The most perilous confrontation took place across the street from the hotel where the Democratic Party members and their families were staying. The atmosphere had been getting uglier and more violent since the arrest that morning of two of the Yippie leaders. An impromptu protest march from Grant Park to the hotel which housed the Democratic Party Headquarters ended in a cloud of tear gas and a hail of police batons. Later in the afternoon, Isaac looked down to a road below and watched a crowd surround two policemen and gleefully smash their car.
With a press pass, he could cross police lines and enter the hotel. Early in the evening, I encountered a sight which revealed a strange contradiction to the chaos reigning outside. Well-dressed people strolled about the lobby and the reception rooms chatting congenially. Coffee, coca cola and snacks were set out on ubiquitous tables with white tablecloths. Youngsters in shorts with knee-socks, oxfords and cardboard hats colored red, white and blue sat on chairs watching both the convention on television and what was transpiring outside the hotel.
By dusk, the Chicago police had the mass of demonstrators cornered in a stretch of park across from the hotel and were sporadically rushing them. It was impossible to use my pass to get back across police lines to safety. After nightfall, a sense of panic ran electrically through the immense crowd as people wondered aloud if we were going to be slaughtered. Senators and Democratic Party officials appeared in the windows of hotel rooms across from the strip of park. As long as they stayed visible in the lit windows, the police contained the worst of their brutality. Television news trucks with cameras and spotlights also kept them in line. We chanted for the officials and the media to stay. The folksingers Peter, Paul and Mary got up on a truck bed and sang protest songs which rang in the streets, bringing temporary respite to the trapped demonstrators.
As the night and the standoff wore on, lights in the windows of the hotel were gradually extinguished one by one and the news trucks left the scene. A rumor ran feverishly through the crowd that an army of Blackstone Rangers, a notorious black gang with hundreds if not thousands of members, were on their way across town from the projects of Chicago's South Side to support the protesters against the police. As luck would have it, they never arrived. The police cordons gradually became porous enough to permit people to disperse. Somehow, everyone got out of there alive.
Isaac witnessed more disturbing sights on the last day of the convention while waiting at a street corner a couple of blocks from the hotel. He was killing time, waiting for Roy to drive up in his van so that they could get out of town and on the highway back to Los Angeles. They were starting out a day early, but after nearly a week of police violence and street confrontation, they were only too glad to leave Chicago behind. Yippies Isaac spoke with as he was getting ready, irreverent anarchists of the Youth International Party, who had been full of mirth when he taped brief interviews with them in the opening days of the protests, now wore bandages and looked war-torn and embittered. Isaac abandoned any semblance of journalistic objectivity that morning and spent hours with a group of radical priests and nuns who were giving first aid to the injured and passing out wet compresses to the numerous victims of tear gas who ran blindly down the street.
At the convention, the political conflict between the pro and anti-Vietnam War wings of the Democratic Party was resolved with the defeat of the antiwar plank and the nomination of Hubert Humphrey as presidential candidate. Isaac was standing outside of the Haymarket Tavern, through which demonstrators had been pushed only a few nights before, now fully repaired and replaced, was packed with men in business suits who sat in well-ordered rows attentively watching the one television over the bar as Humphrey gave his acceptance speech. He was going through the standard American politician's declamatory routine appropriate for the occasion, along with grandiloquent gestures.
Humphrey’s eloquent speech accepting the nomination was rendered darkly comic by the reality Isaac encountered when he turned away from the television and stepped out the door. There he saw a steady stream of antiwar protestors staggering from the field of blue helmets outside the hotel. Many were holding their bloodied heads and moaning. Isaac heard the menacing crackle of megaphones and the ominous wail of police sirens echoing in street-canyons between the high buildings. Sporadic explosions of teargas bombs were going off in the near distance. It felt like an urban war-zone.
During the long drive home, Isaac made a point of recording spontaneous interviews with ordinary people along the way to get their opinion of what had just occurred in Chicago. This was when he began to be aware of its impact on the rest of the country. An old man pumping gas at a rural service station in Missouri told Isaac in coldly even tones, "The police in Chicago should've killed all them damn kids!" Isaac tried to tape the opinions of people he encountered at a few locations in Boulder, Colorado, but nobody would talk to him. When he asked a longhaired man with a dour expression why everyone was giving him the cold shoulder, Isaac was surprised to learn that they suspected him and Roy of being FBI agents. No one even so much as cracked a smile.
From their arrival back to Los Angeles, they learned that the violence in Chicago was on everybody's lips. The entire nation had watched it night after night on television as the police assaulted throngs of overall peaceful protestors. Many found it hard to believe it could happen in America. Returning from Chicago put Isaac in the role of underground messenger. Over the next several months, people he encountered asked what it had really been like and listened closely to Isaac’s account.
Many people he spoke with upon his return from Chicago expressed their concern over the young people who had been out there getting tear-gassed and beaten by riot police, although this was not always the prevailing opinion. The other side was made clear to Isaac by his girlfriend's father, a brooding little man whose house, which he had designed himself, was built like a fortress. He insisted that Isaac’s recounting of events was mistaken. What this authoritarian little man had seen on television--well-intentioned police assigned to keep order being assaulted by mobs of violent and ruthless protesters--was what had really taken place. There was nothing Isaac could say to make him understand how real it had been.