Law and Order and Chicago, September 1968
The Nixon and Daley Campaigns
When the violence between police and protesters blew up at Balbo and Michigan on Wednesday, August 28, 1968, all kinds of people were in the crowd. The grandson of Winston Churchill. The half-brother of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. A member of British Parliament. Famous writers. A poet or two. Dozens of journalists and photojournalists. A few filmmakers. Lots of staff people from the Eugene McCarthy campaign and some who had served in the Robert Kennedy campaign. Hundreds of police officers. Hundreds of National Guard troops. And a few thousand people who were determined to assert their right to assemble and protest in the streets and parks of Chicago.
Also, oddly, sometimes mixing in the crowd and sometimes watching from above, the mass of people at Balbo and Michigan included a coterie of staffers from the Richard Nixon campaign.
“Set up an observation post at the Democratic convention,” Nixon had said to William Safire, who had recently joined his campaign as a speechwriter. Safire and a few other staffers were to be Nixon’s eyes and ears in Chicago. Twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Buchanan and a congressman from Illinois, Donald Rumsfeld, were among the observers. Early in the day, they took a look at the situation at street level, got a whiff of teargas, and decided to get above the action. Mostly they hung out in a suite on the nineteenth floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, overlooking the scene at Balbo and Michigan.
Journalists drifted in and out of the room; there was plenty of booze at hand. Norman Mailer came by, accompanied by the boxer Jose Torres, a former light heavyweight champion. There was a loud bang from outside the window and they looked out on the scene as the police marched east on Balbo and into the crowd at the intersection.
“The cops were in a phalanx,” Buchanan recalled later, “all marching like they were in the inaugural parade, but not as many. And they came right down Balbo, across Michigan, right in front of our hotel. And these guys [the police] poured into that park and they were whaling on these people left and right.” Torres was having none of it. “Sons of bitches! Sons of bitches!” he shouted at the cops.
The drinking, watching, and talking went on. Safire and Buchanan pretty quickly figured out that what was happening on the streets of Chicago would dovetail neatly with the most important issue that Nixon hammered on in the campaign, namely, that after four summers of violence in cities across the country, the nation had had enough, and it was time to restore law and order in America.
“The first civil right of every American,” Nixon had said three weeks earlier in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “is to be free from domestic violence.” Nixon promised to restore law and order on behalf of “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans — the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.”
Buchanan fired off a memo to Nixon urging him to visit Chicago and “stand with the great silent majority against the demonstrators.”
The traditional beginning of the fall campaign season is Labor Day, which fell on September 2 in 1968. On Wednesday, September 4, Nixon came to Chicago and officially kicked off his general election campaign. He flew into Midway Airport and brought his campaign into the heart of the city.
The motorcade started in front of the Board of Trade building at LaSalle and Jackson Streets. Nixon stood on a platform in an open car, flanked by Secret Service agents as the car slowly inched north through the Financial District. The motorcade began at noon, just as the office workers were streaming out of buildings for lunch. His wife, Pat, sat at her husband’s feet, atop the back seat of the car. Behind the Nixons, in another open car, were their daughters, Tricia and Julie, and sitting between them, David Eisenhower, grandson of the former president and Julie’s fiancé.
Two tons of confetti and ticker tape were dumped from the windows of the buildings lining the street, piling up ankle-deep and more on the street and sidewalks. Cheering crowds lined the sidewalks and hung out of windows. The ecstatic reception must have tasted like sweet revenge for Nixon, resounding in the city ruled by the Democratic boss he blamed for his loss of the Presidency in 1960.
At Monroe Street, the parade turned east, to State Street, where it turned north once more, through the heart of the Loop shopping district, passing the Carson Pirie Scott department store. At Washington, right before the magnificent hulk of the Marshall Field building, the motorcade turned east again to Michigan Avenue.
At Michigan the motorcade, now moving at a quicker pace as the crowds thinned out, turned south, passing below the facades of the Peoples Gas Building, the Art Institute, Orchestra Hall, the Santa Fe Building, the Fine Arts Building, the Congress Hotel, and finally ending at Balbo and Michigan, in the shadow of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. That endpoint for the parade was quite deliberate. It provided a “striking contrast with the grim and depressing disarray of the Democratic convention,” said William Rentschler, Illinois chair of the Nixon campaign.
Captain James Riordan, commander of Chicago’s First Police District, walked the entire route of the parade and estimated the crowd at 250,000. Nixon was pleased with the turnout.
That evening Nixon held an hourlong, televised, live town hall. A select panel of questioners quizzed Nixon before a studio audience of Republican supporters. The producer of this TV show — and nine more similar shows over the course of the campaign — was twenty-eight-year-old Roger Ailes.
The eight panelists included a Jewish attorney, the president of a Polish-Hungarian group, an African American, a housewife, someone from the white lower middle class, a businessman, and for authenticity, two newspaper reporters. Nixon didn’t know the questions in advance. That was a key part of the concept — Nixon looked much better on television when he was spontaneous. The cheering of the audience, and the way it rushed the stage at the end to congratulate Nixon on his fine performance, was, of course, not spontaneous.
In a couple of its ads, the Nixon campaign used images from inside the Democratic National Convention and the events in the streets of Chicago during the DNC. The ads were created by Eugene S. Jones, who before filming Nixon’s campaign ads had made the powerful documentary The Face of War in South Vietnam.
Almost all of the Jones ads used still photographs, which Jones zoomed and panned over, with a soundtrack of music plus Nixon’s voiceover. For the track of “Failure,” an ad that utilizes photographs from the Chicago events, Nixon asked, “How can a party that can’t unite itself unite the nation? How can a party that can’t keep order in its own backyard hope to keep order in our fifty states?”
Nixon was using the turbulence that unfolded in Chicago to excellent effect, casting the Chicago events as a microcosm of the disorders throughout the nation and around the world. It resonated. Democrats had not been able to keep order in Vietnam, in American cities, on the streets of Chicago, or even within the walls of their own nominating convention.
The violence in front of the Conrad Hilton on August 28, 1968, was not the only violence during the week of the Democratic convention, and perhaps it wasn’t even the worst of the violence. But it had been videotaped by television news crews and then shown to the 90 million strong TV audience, interrupting the coverage of the nominating speeches at the convention. Balbo and Michigan was the violence that the whole world had seen.
Some were blaming the violence on the Chicago police and on the mayor of Chicago. Balbo and Michigan was the episode of violence that needed to be explained away. In the eyes of the mayor, he and his city had been wronged, a nasty story had been told by the news media, and he needed to set things straight.
Therefore, Nixon wasn’t the only politician in Chicago in September 1968 to start a campaign. As Nixon opened his campaign in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley undertook a campaign of his own: to place the blame for the Chicago violence on someone other than his police force. Nixon and Daley were both law and order men, they both knew the salience of the issue with voters in 1968. If Daley was on his back foot due to the perceived lack of order in Chicago, he would try to get back in balance by a thorough use of the law.
Daley’s campaign to blame the protestors for the violence at Balbo and Michigan took three forms. The law department for the city put together a seventy-eight-page report on the events called The Strategy of Confrontation. The report was released on September 6, 1968. The report set out the case for criminalizing what had happened in Chicago. It characterized the protest events in Chicago as “a violent and revolutionary attack upon our institutions . . . under the guise of a protest against the war in Vietnam.” The protesters “ultimate goal . . . was to topple what they consider to be the corrupt institutions of our society.”
The report focused on five individuals, “the principals who were involved in confrontation with law enforcement authorities” and who were “nationally known agitators.” Rennie Davis was characterized as belonging to “radical leftwing” organizations. Tom Hayden was “considered among the ‘hip’ movement as a violent revolutionary.” Abbie Hoffman was said to be involved with a group “known as the PTA (Protesters, Terrorists, and Anarchists).” Jerry Rubin was “a member of the National Coordinating Committee to end the war in Vietnam, which is Communist infiltrated.” David Dellinger was “alleged to have admitted being a Communist.”
Daley’s second attempt to restore a sense of law and order in Chicago was a program for television. About a week after the printed report was published, his public relations office released What Trees Do They Plant?, an hourlong film for television broadcast on September 15, 1968, by 142 stations. The film attempted to show visually what the law department’s report had conveyed in text.
The film included a lot of footage of people milling around in the parks, marching in the streets, and the rally at the bandshell and the events in front of the Hilton on Wednesday, August 28, 1968. Edited and produced in just two weeks, the footage shot during the convention week events has a loose and random quality. Often the camera used for that footage was not close enough to the action to convey what is happening. The visuals included police charging into crowds, protesters throwing objects, and a few scenes of police swinging clubs, especially at Balbo and Michigan. But the addition of numerous statements by city officials before, during, and after the convention made the legal point of the film clear.
Chicago Police Officer Robert Pierson, who was undercover during the protest events as a bodyguard for Jerry Rubin, declared that protesters “want to take over the country. They want to completely stop our democratic system of government.”
Captain Thomas J. Lyons, the Director of Intelligence for the Chicago Police Department, cited “threats of disruption of the city . . . lootings, public fornication, mass sit-downs in the Loop area, the taking over of buildings.” “I regard these as battle plans,” he said. Rubin, Hayden, Dellinger, and Davis “have a history of being in the planning or in the organizing stage in major disruptions in organized society.”
Mayor Daley underlined who he would blame for any disruption: “We do not anticipate any difficulty or any violence from anyone from Chicago. It will only happen from people who come into our city with the main purpose of doing that.”
Daley’s third application of the law in the service of order was to get the ball rolling on an indictment of individuals for conspiracy to cross state lines to incite a riot in Chicago. In a phone call with President Johnson on September 7, 1968, Mayor Daley discussed prosecuting protesters under the new federal anti-riot law, which Johnson had signed in April 1968 as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
“I think we got the dope on them once and for all on conspiracy to riot,” said Daley. “If the attorney general goes along with us, I think we will expose” Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, the Mobe, “and we’ll also include some of McCarthy’s friends.”
Johnson cautioned that his attorney general, Ramsey Clark, “doesn’t see this the way you and I see it. . . . I just worked on him a long time last night.”
Daley was not to be deterred. On September 9, Chief Judge William J. Campbell of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois convened a grand jury to investigate whether the organizers of the demonstrations had violated federal law, whether any police officers had interfered with the civil rights of any protestors, and whether the television networks had violated any rules of the Federal Communications Commission.
On December 5, 1968, Daley spoke with President Johnson again about the indictments. That same day, US District Attorney Thomas Foran, from Chicago, was in Washington DC to try to persuade Attorney General Ramsey Clark to approve indictments of the individuals who had been singled out in the Strategy of Confrontation report.
“Clark is inclined not to want to indict for a conspiracy to riot,” Daley told Johnson, “Dellinger and Hayden and Davis and Hoffman. I wonder if you could try to bolster him up a little bit?”
Johnson asked, “Does the district attorney have the evidence that he thinks he needs on these?”
“Oh, he has the evidence,” replied Daley, “and he has to get the okay of the Attorney General. He’s got an ironclad case against them on a conspiracy to riot. He’s got all the evidence and everything else.”
“I don’t know what this Attorney General will do.” said Johnson. “We’ll talk to him.”
Whatever Johnson said to Attorney General Clark was not persuasive. Foran didn’t get the approval required by the anti-riot act.
Daley placed another call to the president on December 26, 1968, to convey best holiday wishes to the Johnson family. After the social chit chat, Johnson asked, “How’s your business coming out there? Have you heard anything lately?”
“No,” said Daley. “I don’t think your man down there wants to do it the way our fellow wants to. But, don’t say anything, we got a plan of our own. We got them this time. And we got a plan to get them over the door. Once we get them over the door, I think you’ll see the most sensational thing happen in this country.”
“You think that you can indict them?” asked Johnson.
“Oh, we’ve got to, sir,” replied Daley.
“What’ll you do? Just hold it up for the other fellow?”
“Hold it,” affirmed Daley, “and go ahead with it. Not with this guy, because we think this guy will take some steps to knock it out. But we don’t think the new man will. They’ll be afraid to.”
Daley was resigned to the fact that Ramsey Clark was not going to approve the indictments but was committed to pushing forward with the next administration. In January 1969, District Attorney Foran and Assistant US Attorney Richard Schultz went to DC to discuss the indictments with Attorney General John Mitchell. Mitchell approved the indictments and went a step further. The Justice Department worked with Foran and Schultz to rework and strengthen the indictments. Bobby Seale was probably added to the list of defendants in that reworking. The indictments were handed down on March 20, 1969.
Nixon won the presidency but Daley’s campaign to pin the disorders of August 1968 on eight individuals ultimately failed. Daley was right, though, the trial was the most sensational thing happening in the country. It lasted four-and-a-half months and there were numerous news stories that got national and international exposure. When Judge Julius Hoffman had Seale, the sole African American defendant, bound and gagged in the courtroom, there was sympathy and outrage around the world.
Theatrical spectacle was the order of the day, and the trial largely overshadowed the alleged crimes that had led to it. In the end, what the trial accomplished was to make certain that history would never forget the violence that erupted in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Daley might have had an inkling that his quest to confer the mantle of law and order on his police officers was misbegotten from the beginning. On September 9, 1968, in a press conference, Mayor Daley gave away the game with a slip of the tongue: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
Sources: Both William Safire and Patrick Buchanan wrote about the Hilton observation post over the years, see the account in Freak Kingdom by Timothy Denevi for references. Details of the Nixon motorcade in Chicago are from the Chicago Tribune. The staged town hall and the ads created by Eugene Jones are discussed in the excellent book by Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968. Video of the Jones ads can be found on the Living Room Candidate website from the Museum of the Moving Image. Both The Strategy of Confrontation and What Trees Do They Plant are pretty decent first drafts of the history from the City of Chicago’s point of view. Our perspective on the events of August 1968 has been so influenced by seeing it through the lens of the conspiracy trial that these early representations become valuable as ways to step away from the lens of the trial. For instance, Abbie Hoffman does not appear at all in What Trees Do They Plant?, which affords some insight into how his role was reshaped by the brilliance of his theatrics in the trial. The Daley-Johnson phone calls are found in the magnificent collection of presidential audio in the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
