Refighting Chicago

Like Gettysburg, El Alamein and other classic engagements, the Battle of Chicago seems destined to be endlessly refought. Unlike most textbook conflicts, however, no one can agree upon who won, let alone who the aggressors were or whether the battle need ever have occurred at all. When the President's commission on violence opened hearings in Washington last week, the nation's two top law officers, Attorney General Ramsey Clark and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, were firing from opposing sides.

Clark, of course, is technically Hoover's superior at the Justice Department. But after 44 years in charge of the FBI, Hoover is a law unto himself. For a man with experience in police work, he took an extraordinarily simplistic line about the Chicago cops' performance during the Democratic National Convention. "The police and the National Guard were faced with vicious attacking mobs who gave them no alternative but to use force to prevent these mobs from accomplishing their destructive purposes," Hoover told the commission.

Although he never mentioned Chicago directly, Clark gave a considerably cooler perspective. "Experience to date shows that such crowds [of demonstrators] can be controlled without denying rights of speech and assembly," he said. "Above all, such crowds can be controlled without excessive force and violence by police. Of all violence, police violence in excess of authority is the most dangerous. For who will protect the public when the police violate the law?"

Artful Whitewash. Public opinion, nonetheless, continued overwhelmingly to support Hoover's view, which in turn reflected precisely the thoughts of Chi cago Mayor Richard Daley. The Mayor last week kept up his own counterbarrage to the "distortions" of the news media by broadcasting an hour-long documentary over 150 television sta tions throughout the U.S.

Entitled "What Trees Do They Plant?" (meaning: "What constructive plans do protesters propose for the society of the future?"), the Daley defense was produced by Henry Ushijima, a California-born filmmaker who for five years has been paid by Chicago to turn out short documentaries celebrating the city. Actually, "Trees" was a surprisingly artful whitewash. In his handling of English, Daley is the Casey Stengel of American politics; he was wise enough to limit his physical participation in the film to two brief appearances. Ushijima waded through miles of television footage made during the convention week and spliced to gether scenes of New Leftist gatherings, of a police commander exhibiting the demonstrators' array of weapons, and of cops injured in the confrontation.

The documentary repeated details of the supposedly dangerous plots that hippies, yippies and "terrorists" were hatching to take over Chicago. The odd thing is that the Chicago police took so many of the demonstrators' boasts seriously. Even now, they fail to understand that if an army of 10,000 genuinely violent "revolutionaries" had descended on the city, many policemen and bystanders would have been killed.

Professional Collapse. Even so, the program was relatively understated, in tone and in the rhetoric of the policemen telling their version of the story. Here and there, the Daley show attempted to present both sides of the controversy. University of Chicago Historian Richard Wade was heard arguing that both demonstrators and police were guilty of excesses. Yet most of the footage chosen was shot from behind police lines. Not once did it suggest that dozens of police removed their badges and name tags to prevent identification and then assaulted demonstrators, newsmen and bystanders.

The mayor has fulminated repeatedly about the distorted coverage that press and television gave to the demonstrations. Obviously, some reporters and commentators grew highly emotional. But too many impartial Chicagoans and visitors, and too many editors, correspondents and writers, witnessed the confrontations to accept Daley's version. What they saw was a collapse of professional discipline within the police ranks.

One Administration official and longtime observer of police methods traces the debacle back to the riots in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination last spring. Said the official: "Daley went crazy. He couldn't believe that his city could do it to him." Daley publicly rebuked his police superintendent for being too soft on the rioters--even though most responsible law officers around the nation commended the Chicago police for their behavior. The mayor compounded his mistake by issuing his approval of shooting looters. The overall effect was to undermine the police department's chain of command and encourage the ranks to react violently at the later civil disturbances. That they did.

One of the battle's ironies is that Daley himself has done as much as anyone else to smear his own police department. At the confrontation in front of the Conrad Hilton, only a few dozen cops broke ranks to crack the head of any civilian they could lay a club on. But Daley defends those who violated discipline. In doing so, he damns the entire department.

Unwitting Ally. After Daley's television apologia, Illinois State Treasurer Adlai Stevenson III came forth with one of the most balanced and accurate assessments of the confrontation. He did so at some risk to his political career, since any Democratic politician in the state defies Daley at his own peril. Said Stevenson: "In the Democratic convention, there was dissent and in it new hope for real change. But in Chicago, and in the Democratic party of Illinois that week, there was little room for dissent. Some 'revolutionaries' appeared on the scene, bent on provoking disorder, unwashed and for the most part unarmed. A small number of people sought to expose 'the system' and 'the system' became their unwitting ally."

Yet, said Stevenson, "the city refused to accommodate dissent realistically. Doors to legitimate dissent and peaceable assembly were closed. They could have been welcomed to Chicago, the parks opened, the parade routes and television coverage arranged. And where would the agitators have been then--if Chicago had welcomed the kids instead of clubbing them? We would have had some violence, but much less."

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