I am looking at a photograph taken on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue a little after 8 on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, and wishing my father was still around to fill in a few details. It’s a dramatic image. Center foreground is a cop in a riot helmet who seems to be weighing whether to use his night-stick on the photographer, Michael Boyer of the Associated Press. Behind him, moving right to left, similarly accoutered colleagues are chasing people down the sidewalk outside the Conrad Hilton. That’s where Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, is headquartered along with his rival, Senator Eugene McCarthy, for the duration of the Democratic National Convention under way three miles south at the (since demolished) International Amphitheater. Wedged between the chase — perhaps mêlée is better — and the wall of the Hilton is an involuntary chorus of deeply uncomfortable spectators. Most would clearly rather be somewhere else if getting there didn’t entail being beaten bloody by Mayor Richard Daley’s enraged gendarmes on the way.
Among the pursued is Dad, dapper in Lob shoes and Savile Rowe suit with silk square billowing from breast pocket. Mother always insisted he be properly dressed. She would not have been amused to see the notebook peeking from his jacket’s side pocket. That’s how you spoiled a good suit’s cut. In his left hand are papers of some sort, in his right a handkerchief to provide rudimentary protection from teargas and the charnel house stench of the stink bombs the Yippies have been tossing about to make some sort of point. A cop a good deal larger than Dad, who was 5’ 3” in his socks, appears to be gaining on him with intent.
Is this the galoot who put my father’s arm in a cast?
I lucked into the photograph because, with the Democrats once again holding their convention in Chicago (rather more joyously this time), it seemed a good moment to dig into this episode of Dad’s life for the biography I’m working on — tentative title: Chronicler — in tandem with the one about my great aunt.
I was 12 when it happened. Dad was the London Sunday Telegraph’s Washington correspondent. My mother and I were holidaying in England at the time and heard about his getting injured from a BBC news bulletin. I was less concerned about his health than thrilled by his fame and derring-do. Mother may have taken a different view. Dad supplied further details in the story he filed for that Sunday’s editions and in person when he joined us, bandaged, the following week. He wrote of it again in his book, America in Retreat, which came out in 1970. For all that, and even though we visited the scene together in 1976 en route to covering that year’s Republican convention in Kansas City, I have been never entirely clear on what went down. So it was wonderful — thank you, Google — to run across a picture that put Dad slap in the thick of things to go with the one I have of him with Mussolini’s corpse in Milan’s Piazza Loreto in 1945.
Let’s take a step back to consider what was happening that day. Tens of thousands of mostly young protesters had descended on Chicago united in their understandable rage against the war in Vietnam and the possibility of being drafted to fight in it. They had arrived under a smorgasbord of overlapping aegises, among them Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Protest (Yippies), Dave Dellinger’s Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam (the Mobe), and Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society. Many had come to help McCarthy somehow wrest the nomination from Humphrey. “Dump the Hump!” was their battle cry. Others preached outright revolution and meant, quite openly, to cause mayhem. All, by the third day of the convention, were fully up the noses of Mayor Daley and his boys in blue at whom they had been throwing epithets (“Pigs!’ being a favorite and among the more polite) and a variety of missiles, ranging from bags of human waste to things that can cause serious injury.
At this point, a lot of them were in Grant Park. Daley, who didn’t want them anywhere near the convention proper, thought they should stay there. The main body of the park is bounded by Lake Michigan and Lakeshore Drive to the east and a railroad cutting to the west, on the other side of which, running parallel, is Michigan Avenue. Put riot police or National Guardsmen on the bridges across the cutting and you block access to Michigan Avenue and the rest of the city, at least in theory. By late afternoon, thousands of demonstrators had found their way around or through the various cordons and were seething south down Michigan Ave. towards the Hilton where the Hump was recovering from a collateral dose of teargas and getting ready for his acceptance speech the following night.
The Hilton occupies a full block on the west side of Michigan Ave. facing the park and the lake and is bounded by Balbo Drive to the north. Here the police decided to make a stand to keep the mob from the hotel’s main entrance. On of the corner of Balbo and Michigan was the Haymarket Lounge, to which Dad and other members of the fourth estate had, I believe, repaired for early evening refreshments. Its floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows afforded a congenial vantage point from which to observe developments on the street outside. As the action heated up, the more daring of the journos put down their drinks to take a closer look. They were greeted by a phalanx of police advancing toward them down Balbo.
Marino de Medici of Rome’s Il Tempo, writing 50 years later, remembered:
I saw it coming like the giant wave of a tsunami, mostly policemen swinging batons and hitting people with a ferocity that I could not expect from an arm of the law. Suddenly, I felt that I had become a target and I shared my fear with a colleague standing near me, Stephen Barber of London’s Sunday Telegraph. A few seconds later the arm of the law came crashing down on us, breaking the right arm of Stephen as he was trying to fend off the blow. I was lucky because at that very moment the large plate glass window of the travel agency office facing the street came crashing down. I quickly rushed into the empty space and escaped without injury.
Here’s Dad in his piece for the Sunday Telegraph:
I got beaten up on the pavement outside the Conrad Hilton hotel right after a bright, bearded lad in sandals with the Oxford Book of English Verse under his arm had informed me: “Now you people are going to feel police brutality. I can tell. Just you watch!“
He could read the signs, I gathered. A group of blue-clad men had materialized from a side street. They were pocketing their numbered badges. “That means they are going to get rough,“ the boy said.
Sure enough, it so happened.
The pavement was supposed to be sanctuary. But there were photographers at work. The police made them their prime targets all week. In this case, they suddenly exploded upon us, just as the poetry lover predicted.
I was lucky to fall in the first wave. People behind me – almost all onlookers rather than demonstrators, as it happened – were driven back in such a panic that the plate glass window of a hotel bar [The Haymarket] shattered. A middle-aged woman screamed. The police sailed on, through the window, still swinging their clubs. “They’ve gone mad,” someone said. It struck me as quite an understatement.
It is at this point that Winston Churchill, the statesman’s grandson, Louis Auchincloss, a Kennedy clan in-law, and a young woman, identified by Churchill as Anita Miller, enter the narrative. Churchill, 27, was covering the convention for the London Evening News, Auchincloss for NBC.
Dad’s take for the Sunday Telegraph:
Anyone was fair game – convention delegates included. And to interfere was to risk arrest or a beating or both. Winston Churchill and, Mrs Jaqueline Kennedy’s half-brother James Auchincloss – both reporters – were chased by three or four policeman on foot and another on a motorbike who rode straight over the curb to try and smash them against a railing, simply for intervening to rescue a young girl who was being brutally slugged by a plainclothes man armed with a cosh.
The eyes of these thugs…simply blazed with insanity. There is no other word for it. Hitler’s storm troopers were the same type.
And here’s Dominic Harrod, reporting for the Daily Telegraph:
A well-dressed 20-year-old Chicago girl who happened to be on the scene was run down from behind by a plainclothes policeman from whom she was running, obeying his yell to “move on“. As his baton hit her shoulder and she fell, Mr. Winston Churchill, reporting for the Evening news, and Mr. Auchincloss, working for the National Broadcasting Company, ran towards her.
As she rose, and I was moving towards the mêlée, the plainclothesman darted away across the avenue towards parked police vans. At that instant, a motorcycle policeman hurtled along the road, screeching to a noisy standstill a yard from us, one wheel against the curb, before turning and roaring off across the street again.
Within minutes, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Auchincloss, Mr. Stephen Barber, correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, and I were picking ourselves up after another charge this time on foot, and comparing baton bruises on heads, wrists and thighs.
Churchill’s version, as paraphrased by the United Press, went like this:
He said he was standing not far from the hotel with Mrs Kennedy’s half-brother when a young blonde girl ran past to escape police attacking demonstrators about 100 yards away.
Suddenly, he said, a plainclothes man dashed across the road, pulled a blackjack from his pocket, grabbed the girl and began beating her.
He said he and Mr Auchincloss went to help the girl. He said he asked the man his name.
“The only answer we got was be be attacked by him also,” Mr Churchill said. “Mr Auchincloss was hit a couple of times and I was knocked to the ground.
“As I picked myself up, a three-wheeled police motorcycle charged the two of us and pinioned us agains the wall near the pavement.”
Mr Churchill said he and Mr Auchincloss clambered over the wall and got away.
Writing America in Retreat a year or so later, my father recalled the scene thus:
I had my arm broken when a helmeted lunatic clubbed me as I watched Winston Churchill and Jamie Auchincloss — both reporters on the scene and scarcely militant radicals — rescuing a young girl from a plainclothes man who was lunging at her with a billy club at least 100 yards from the main mêlée. The girl, we discovered, was not even a McCarthy supporter — she was for Nixon — but that made no difference. As far as Daley’s boyos were concerned, it was open season on the young and any who might be presumed to sympathize with them.
In my own retelling over the years — and in spite of knowing better — I have, I confess, often made my father the hero of the piece, having him run to the rescue of both Churchill and Ms. Miller. Churchill died in 2010, the same year Auchincloss went to jail for possession of child pornography, so I have had little fear of contradiction. I now happily spike my version in favor a much better one I found in the memoirs of Connie Lawn, a redoubtable radio journalist and dear family friend we sadly lost in 2018.
At one point, as I walked through the crowds with press tags hanging clearly from my chest, I was the victim of an attack, and thvus temporarily became an unwilling participant in the news, as well as a reporter. The police charged, and one heavy officer slammed his billy club down on my head. His eyes widened with shock and disbelief when the club bounced back at him. Those were the days of the stiff, teased hairstyles and wigs. My own waist length hair was rolled up under such a wig, and it probably was the only thing standing between the billy club and a skull fracture.
One of my colleagues, Winston Churchill II, wasn’t so fortunate. As he and his fellow British journalist, Stephen Barber, strolled through the park that night, Churchill also found himself on the receiving end of the billy club treatment. Barber, desperately trying to rescue his friend from the battering, yelled at the cops, “You can’t hit him – he’s Winston Churchill!” “Right, buddy,” one of the cops sneered, “and we’re the tooth fairy.” They began hitting him even harder, breaking his wrist in the process.
