Miami and the Siege of Chicago (23 page)

These restrictions having limited the outcome before they began, Rep. Philip Burton of California spoke first for the minority, then Senator Muskie of Maine for the majority. Burton asked that we “heed the voices of men and women of good will who across the land call for peace,” Muskie went through the differences in the majority and minority planks, and the similarities, and then concluded that the majority protected our soldiers, whereas the minority was too quick to desire peace at any price.

The speakers came on. They seemed careful to abstain from rich, extravagant, or passionate language. No one got up to say that one million men on our side could not dominate a quarter million men on the other, for that would have been unpatriotic (which for a politician is sacrilege equal to burning money or flooding property) no, the best of the majority roamed mean and keen over the legalities, the technicalities of commitment, the safety of American soldiers, the tempo for establishing representative government; they spoke in styles sometimes reminiscent of the eminent sanity of Dean Rusk; he was always a model of sanity on every detail but one: he had a delusion that the war was not bottomless in its lunacy. Of course, words like lunacy were not for the floor of the convention. Muskie; Sen. McGee of Wyoming; Governor Hearnes of Missouri; Mrs. Geri Joseph of Minnesota; David Pryor of Arkansas; Rep. Ed Edmondson of Oklahoma; Mayor Wilson Wyatt of Louisville; Rep Zablocki of Wisconsin, and Rep. Hale Boggs of Louisiana, Chairman of the Platform Committee, spoke for the majority long enough to put in nitpicking points and intone against Communism. The whine in one American's nasal passages obviously stimulated something in the inner canal of other American ears when Communism was given its licks. The hawks then extolled the dove-like nature of the majority plank. The doves, however, came back by way of Senator Morse to reply that the “majority report stripped of its semantics is nothing but a naked proposal to continue the failures of our policy in Vietnam.” Also speaking for the doves: Paul O'Dwyer of New York; Ken O'Donnell of Massachusetts; John Gilligan of Ohio; Senator Gore of Tennessee; Ted Sorensen of New York, and Pierre Salinger of California.

For those who are curious let us give excerpts of a few speeches.

The Administration was taking no chances on birds. A confidential White House briefing had been thrown into the shot-load for this debate, and by the time the last speaker had his word, the military were concluding the debate, that same military which had been giving expert guesses for years on just how many troops and just how many bombs would be necessary to guarantee victory in exactly so many weeks or exactly so many months; the party was still buying just such expert advice. “Scale, intensity, and duration of combat on the order of five times.” The Texas delegation up front cheered. Put a big man in a big uniform, let him recite big figures, and they would take the word of no priest or pope. In America the uniform always finished first, the production expert second, and Christ was welcome to come in third. So the vote came out as 1,567¾ to 1,041½—the majority plank was passed. Lyndon Johnson was vindicated by the same poor arguments which had originally implicated him. Politics was property, and the gravitational power of massive holdings was sufficient to pull you out of your own soup.

But the floor would not rest. The New York and California delegations began to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Quickly, the Platform was passed; still the New York delegation sang. Now Wisconsin stood on its seats. The rear of the floor booed the front of the floor. A few hundred posters, STOP THE WAR, quickly printed a couple of hours earlier for this occasion, were held up. Defeated delegates yelled, “Stop the War,” in the fierce frustration of knowing that the plank was Lyndon Johnson's and the party was still his. The convention recessed. Still the New York delegation sang, “We Shall Overcome,” standing on their seats. The convention band across the way tried to drown them out. It played in ever-increasing volume “We Got a Lot of Living to Do.”

The managers of the convention turned the New York microphones down, and amplified the public address system for the band. So on the floor of the convention, the doves were drowned in hostile sound, but on the television sets, the reception was opposite, for the networks had put their own microphones under the voices of the delegates, and they sang in force across the continent. Thus a few thousand people on the floor and the gallery heard little of the doves—all the rest of America heard them well. Politics-is-property had come to the point of fission. He who controlled the floor no longer controlled the power of public opinion. Small wonder the old party hands hated the networks—it was agitating to have mastered the locks and keys in the house of politics and discover that there was a new door they could not quite shut. In disgust the hawk delegations left the floor. The doves continued to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Now, the orchestra played “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The demonstrators chanted, “We want peace! We want peace!” “I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” the orchestra offered, then rejected, then switched over to “If You Knew Suzy,” then they gave up. The demonstrators began to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” New York, California, Oregon, Wisconsin, South Dakota and other delegations marched around the empty floor. It was half an hour after the convention had recessed. Still they sang. It had been a long war to lose.

Meanwhile, a mass meeting was taking place about the bandshell in Grant Park, perhaps a quarter of a mile east of Michigan Avenue and the Conrad Hilton. The meeting was under the auspices of the Mobilization, and a crowd of ten or fifteen thousand appeared. The Mayor had granted a permit to assemble, but had refused to allow a march. Since the Mobilization had announced that it would attempt, no matter how, the march to the Amphitheatre that was the first purpose of their visit to Chicago, the police were out in force to surround the meeting.

An episode occurred during the speeches. Three demonstrators climbed a flag pole to cut down the American flag and put up a rebel flag. A squad of police charged to beat them up, but got into trouble themselves, for when they threw tear gas, the demonstrators lobbed the canisters back, and the police, choking on their own gas, had to fight their way clear through a barrage of rocks. Then came a much larger force of police charging the area, overturning benches, busting up members of the audience, then heading for Rennie Davis at the bullhorn. He was one of the coordinators of the Mobilization, his face was known, he had been fingered and fingered again by plainclothesmen. Now urging the crowd to sit down and be calm, he was attacked from behind by the police, his head laid open in a three-inch cut, and he was unconscious for a period. Furious at the attack, Tom Hayden, who had been in disguise these last two days to avoid any more arrests for himself, spoke to the crowd, said he was leaving to perform certain special tasks, and suggested that others break up into small groups and go out into the streets of the Loop “to do what they have to do.” A few left with him; the majority remained. While it was a People's Army and therefore utterly unorganized by uniform or unity, it had a variety of special troops and regular troops; everything from a few qualified Kamikaze who were ready to charge police lines in a Japanese snake dance and dare on the consequence, some vicious beatings, to various kinds of small saboteurs, rock-throwers, gauntlet-runners—some of the speediest of the kids were adept at taunting cops while keeping barely out of range of their clubs—not altogether alien to running the bulls at Pamplona. Many of those who remained, however, were still nominally pacifists, protesters, Gandhians—they believed in non-violence, in the mystical interposition of their body to the attack, as if the violence of the enemy might be drained by the spiritual act of passive resistance over the years, over the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of beatings over the years. So Allen Ginsberg was speaking now to them.

The police looking through the plexiglass face shields they had flipped down from their helmets were then obliged to watch the poet with his bald head, soft eyes magnified by horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and massive dark beard, utter his words in a croaking speech. He had been gassed Monday night and Tuesday night, and had gone to the beach at dawn to read Hindu Tantras to some of the Yippies, the combination of the chants and the gassings had all but burned out his voice, his beautiful speaking voice, one of the most powerful and hypnotic instruments of the Western world was down to the scrapings of the throat now, raw as flesh after a curettage.

“The best strategy for you,” said Ginsberg, “in cases of hysteria, overexcitement or fear, is still to chant ‘OM' together. It helps to quell flutterings of butterflies in the belly. Join me now as I try to lead you.”

The crowd chanted with Ginsberg. They were of a generation which would try every idea, every drug, every action—it was even possible a few of them had made out with freaky kicks on tear gas these last few days—so they would chant OM. There were Hindu fanatics in the crowd, children who loved India and scorned everything in the West; there were cynics who thought the best thing to be said for a country which allowed its excess population to die by the millions in famine-ridden fields was that it would not be ready soon to try to dominate the rest of the world. There were also militants who were ready to march. And the police there to prevent them, busy now in communication with other detachments of police, by way of radios whose aerials were attached to their helmets, thereby giving them the look of giant insects.

A confused hour began. Lincoln Park was irregular in shape with curving foot walks; but Grant Park was indeed not so much a park as a set of belts of greenery cut into files by major parallel avenues between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan half a mile away. Since there were also cross streets cutting the belts of green perpendicularly, a variety of bridges and pedestrian overpasses gave egress to the city. The park was in this sense an alternation of lawn with superhighways. So the police were able to pen the crowd. But not completely. There were too many bridges, too many choices, in effect, for the police to anticipate. To this confusion was added the fact that every confrontation of demonstrators with police, now buttressed by the National Guard, attracted hundreds of newsmen, and hence began a set of attempted negotiations between spokesmen for the demonstrators and troops the demonstrators finally tried to force a bridge and get back to the city. Repelled by tear gas, they went to other bridges, still other bridges, finally found a bridge lightly guarded, broke through a passage and were loose in the city at six-thirty in the evening. They milled about in the Loop for a few minutes, only to encounter the mules and three wagons of the Poor People's Campaign. City officials, afraid of provoking the Negroes on the South Side, had given a permit to the Reverend Abernathy, and he was going to march the mules and wagons down Michigan Avenue and over to the convention. An impromptu march of the demonstrators formed behind the wagons immediately on encountering them and ranks of marchers, sixty, eighty, a hundred in line across the width of Michigan Avenue began to move forward in the gray early twilight of 7
P.M.
; Michigan Avenue was now suddenly jammed with people in the march, perhaps so many as four or five thousand people, including onlookers on the sidewalk who jumped in. The streets of the Loop were also reeking with tear gas—the wind had blown some of the gas west over Michigan Avenue from the drops on the bridges, some gas still was penetrated into the clothing of the marchers. In broken ranks, half a march, half a happy mob, eyes red from gas, faces excited by the tension of the afternoon, and the excitement of the escape from Grant Park, now pushing down Michigan Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel with dreams of a march on to the Amphitheatre four miles beyond, and in the full pleasure of being led by the wagons of the Poor People's March, the demonstrators shouted to everyone on the sidewalk, “Join us, join us, join us,” and the sidewalk kept disgorging more people ready to march.