512. America in '68: The Chicago Riots (Part 5)

It's here! Hynac in Greenlight May by Incolidate Weekend, Dublin 35X 10 Indomit Venues Thursday April 30th Catch Madras Salah at Mary's Bar Friday May 1st Catch Tamora at the Butten Factory Saturday May 2nd Catch Mike Skinner and DJ Seinfeld at Wigwam Sunday May 3rd Catch Currency and Lil Skag at O'Reagan's Sunday May 3rd Catch Horstmey Disco at Street 66 Catch Tickets at Hynac in Greenlight Get the facts be drink aware of as a drink aware Dada Yee Come all ye rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truce seekers, peacock freaks, poets, barricade jumpers, dancers, lovers, artists, It is summer, it is the last week in August and the National Death Party meets the Blessed John Cern. We are there! There are 500,000 of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony. We are making love in the parks. We are reading, singing, laughing, printing newspapers, Groping and making a mock convention and celebrating the birth of free America. The life of the American spirit is being torn asunder by the forces of violence, decay, and the napalm cancer fiend. We demand the politics of ecstasy. We will create our own reality. We are free America and we will not accept the false theatre of the death convention. We will be in Chicago. Begin preparations now. Chicago is yours. Do it! So that Dominic, I mean you'll recognise this because these are very much your people, aren't they? These are the Yippies, the Youth International Party and that was their manifesto which was published in early 1968. And the National Death Party, that's the Democrats, the Yippies are preparing to go and make their case for how America should be run. On the very doorstep of the National Death Party is it meets for its convention in Chicago. Nothing better captures I think Tom, the tone of the late sixth is counterculture. And that very powerful and persuasive manifesto. I'm going to be honest, I love the Yippies. Do. So what's coming today is one of the most dramatic weeks in modern American political history. It's the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where as you say the Yippies are going to confront the war makers. The man. With the politics not a million protests but the politics of play as they would call it. And a massive spoiler alert for anybody who doesn't know what's coming. This will not end well at all for anybody. It all kicks off doesn't it? It does indeed kick off. So this is one of the most turbulent political set pieces in American history. They're televised pictures of riot police, the Chicago police, battling protesters right underneath the hotel where the Democratic bigwigs have their campaign headquarters. I mean it's an extraordinary, extraordinary moment. But we've got the Yippies to come Tom. So restrain yourself. Now you love the Yippies. By the way I will just say the one thing which is that everybody who's listening to the podcast, not watching it on YouTube, you merely heard that but I had to see, I mean you really performed that didn't you? There was a lot of gurning or something. There was a lot of gurning. Well I was entering into the fog. Yeah, the absolute spirit of it. And I think you know that you've missed your calling in many. I like to think that you can smell the justices as I was saying that. I think ultimately the dynamic of this podcast is basically on the one hand somebody who could well have been in the Yippies and on the other hand somebody who'd very much enjoyed being part of Mayor Dailies, Chicago police departments, the pigs. Yes. And there are more pigs to come. And I'll leave it to the listeners to work out which is which. So let's remind ourselves what we got to with the Democrats. President Lyndon Johnson had pulled out of the race on the 31st of March and that left three candidates. Eugene McCarthy, the giant killer who had kind of toppled him. This president Hubert Humphrey and the romantic celebrity part excellence Robert Kennedy. McCarthy and Kennedy, you remember fought out the primaries. Kennedy won narrowly in California on the 4th of June and was assassinated in his moment of victory. So you might think just picking up that story will does this leave McCarthy free unchallenged as the standard bearer of the anti-war movement against Hubert Humphrey. But that's not really. Most of all the Kennedy people still, you know, are very bitter about McCarthy. McCarthy himself spends the next two months in what I think was ultimately a kind of deep depression. Does he feel guilty then? I think he does feel guilty. So if you remember in the last episode he had made quite sardonic, you might say, insensitive remarks, immediately on hearing that Kennedy had been shot. But then I think he did feel guilty, you know, when I did my book on McCarthy, people I interviewed said he just seemed a stricken man in the next two months. He was disengaged from his campaign. Actually, there's a note in Hubert Humphrey's archives. McCarthy went to visit Humphrey. The day after Kennedy died and Hubert Humphrey made a secret note of the conversation. And he said he felt that McCarthy was just completely exhausted, lost heart, all of the final gone out a bit for him. And his campaign basically falls apart. There's a wonderful line. And I think it's an American melodrama where the British, it's a very, very beautiful British comparison. They say of McCarthy's campaign degenerated into a cross between a girl's boarding school in an oriental court. That is a very British comparison. So his marriage is kind of breaking down under the strain of the campaign. Things aren't good for McCarthy. So this leaves Humphrey really, it's very clear by mid-Summer that he's going to be nominated by the Democrats. And to remind ourselves who he is, because he's a kind of presence offstage throughout this story. He's the former mayor in Minneapolis. He was an absolute liberal titan in the Senate. He was key in passing loads of civil rights legislation. But he has been Lyndon Johnson's unix since 1964 and has sort of turned himself into a very implausible defender of the president's Vietnam War policy. Well, he hates it, doesn't he? Secretly. Yeah. He feels bound by loyalty to stand up for it. So it's a horrible position for him to be in. He's in a terrible position. And the thing is that makes it such a terrible thing is that in many ways, Humphrey is such a likable person. He's very optimistic. He's very cheerful. He's very earnest. He's quite uncool by late 60s. It's like the protagonist of a 1950s American sitcom, isn't he? Yeah, very much. Yeah. He's quite de-kenzy. And I think he could be like a Mr. Cheerable, or something. Big jolly man. His jolly, his kind hearted. He's a do-gooder. He's a philanthropist, kind of character, all of that kind of thing. It was later said of him that he was forced onto the party by the corrupt party bosses. That's not really true. He's the party favorite. The polls always show that most rank and file Democrats actually really like Humphrey. And he's very popular with the unions, isn't he? And he's very popular with the trade unions and the city bosses. Because he's been there for so long and he's great at kind of firing up a crowd. And he understands the kind of bread and butter issues that Democrats have always wanted. But unfortunately, in the climate of 1968, he's not groovy. He's not groovy at all. So he is probably going to be nominated in Chicago. Now, let's talk about Chicago. Chicago is, at this point, the second biggest city in the United States. It hasn't yet been overtaken by Los Angeles. It's the capital of the Midwest. And its reputation is the city that works. So it's always compared with New York. Chicago is a much more well-eurod machine than New York. Its finances are in better shape. It's not crippled by strikes all the time as New York is. It's a very inadvertent comment, ethnic, to use the terminology of the 60s and 70s. It's a very ethnic city. It's a Irish, Eastern European, Italian, and so on. And it does have a large black population. However, it's by far the most segregated city in the United States. Meaning there are black neighborhoods and there are white neighborhoods. And there's not really a huge amount of mixing. But obviously not legally. It's actually de facto rather than de jure. So when Martin Luther King had gone to Chicago in 1966 to try and urge kind of housing integration, he had been really shocked by the hostility in Chicago. And he has said this is worse than anything in the South. Now all of this is controlled by one man, Mayor Richard J. Daley. He's going to dominate this story in many ways. He is the Democratic Party in Chicago. He's from a working class south side, Irish neighborhood. His father was a sheet metal worker. His mother was a Catholic church volunteer. He'd worked his way at the Democratic Party ladder. He's a bright boy. He's very ambitious. He's a hard-nosed operator. And in 1955 he had become there. And he controlled everything in the city. He's one of the last of the great big city-american. He's a man for whom the word boss is basically made. Totally. Exactly. He is the quintessential boss daily. Boss daily, city boss. He controls every job, every elected official. Does he smoke fat cigars? Massive, I would imagine. Yeah. I mean, he basically looks like it's cigar. He's like a walking cigar. But he's the working man's friend. So ever since the new deal, when federal money has come into Chicago, it's Mayor Daley who basically dispenses it to working class neighborhoods. And presumably to organizations that are chiefly staffed by the government. working class people, including the police. Exactly. Exactly. And how to high-minded people, outsiders, they regard him, especially in the Climb into the late 60s, as an anachronistic and ultimately both sinister and comical person. So Norman Meiler in his book, Miami in the Sea to Chicago, which is a brilliant book about the conventions of that year, he says of daily, daily look like a vastly robust old peasant woman with a dirty grey silk wig. Good description. Which is not entirely untrue, it has to be said. So daily he had lobbied very hard for the conventions to come to Chicago, he wants it for prestige, he wanted it for their 30 million dollars that it would bring into the sort of Chicago tourist industry. And he's very close to Lyndon Johnson. So he has benefited from the great society and all the federal funds coming in. Like Johnson, he's a hawk on Vietnam. He talked to Lyndon Johnson's biography, Karl Orton, daily probably talked to Johnson 15 times in the first few months of 1968. Daily was horrified when Johnson withdrew. And daily is thinking that since the convention is in his city and he will have a lot of control over it, maybe he can use it to get Johnson to reconsider. Right. Right. And get the convention to draft Johnson in as a candidate, even though Johnson has supposedly withdrawn. And is that because there's a political alignment, or is it the kind of fact that they're quite temperamentally, quite similar political figures do you think? I think a bit of both, actually. I think they're both at this point on the kind of hawkish wing of the Democratic Party. But I think temperamentally they're both kind of, you know, cigar-chomping bullies, even though Johnson's given up smoking. They are big men, burly men. They like nothing better than sitting up late at night with a bottle of scotch and laughing at fake, foppish students on all this kind of need of them are really fans of hippies. Not at all. I think it's best they're not at all a fan of hippies. Right. Now, by early '68, it's obvious there are going to be protests at daily's convention. It's here. Hynac and Greenlight May, Bank holiday weekend, Dublin, 35 acts, 10 intimate venues. Thursday, April 30th, Catch Mardras Saloth at Mary's Bar, Friday May 1st, Catch Tamora at the Button Factory, Saturday May 2nd, Catch Mike Skinner and DJ Seinfeld at Wigwam. Sunday May 3rd, Catch Currency and Lil Skag at O'Reagan's. Sunday May 3rd, Catch Horusmeeth Disco at Street 66, Tickets at Hynac and Greenlight.ie. Get the facts, be drink aware of it's a drink aware of Dora Yee. So the most prominent peace group is a group called the National Mobilisation Committee to end the War of Vietnam, which is better known as the MOBE, a very late-sixters abbreviation. And the MOBE is really quite religious, kind of born out of Catholic and Quaker peace groups. I was going to say, I mean, it is a kind of late-sixies name, but the tone of it is kind of more earnest. It's almost the kind of stuff that George Orwell was mocking as prune juice drinkers and all that kind of thing. That's the guy who's its guiding spirit, Dave Dellinger. I mean, he's a very Orwell figure, isn't he? He actually, I think he'd drove an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War and he was a conscientious objector in the Second World War. Yeah. He brings a whiff of the 40s and 50s. He does indeed. He's from a Protestant background, pacifist background. As you say, conscientious objector in Second World War, being around peace groups, you know, all his life absolutely has that kind of mid-century earnest improving quality. So slightly out of kilter, I think, with the more ludic atmosphere of the late-sixters. And Dellinger wanted to get 100,000 people to Chicago, too, as he put it confront the war makers. The interesting thing here is, of course, there are two conventions that year. The Republicans meeting in Miami, but it never occurs to them to go to Miami because it's the Democrats who draw their eye. I think for two reasons, one, obviously, the Democrats are in power, but two is there is something more offensive about the people who are supposedly meant to be on your side. So it's very much, I think, reminiscent of the protests against Joe Biden, Kamala Harris this year about Gaza. About the Gaza, exactly. That the eye is directed at them and not at Donald Trump and the Republicans. Anyway, now the mobe have arrival. There's another group that are planning to go to Chicago and this is the group that produced that lovely manifesto that you began with. The Yippies. And these are the Yippies. So the two big guys in the Yippies are Abbey Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They're both activists from Jewish backgrounds. They had been to university. Hoffman had been a student activist and civil rights activist. Rubin had started a sociology PhD at Berkeley. I mean, the thing about Hoffman, particularly and why he's such a contrast to Dallinger, is that he absolutely gets the technology that is available to him. So he's always doing stunts like kind of burning money on TV and things, isn't he? Yes. And he has this famous line that a modern revolutionary should head for the television studio, not for the factory. And that's basically what he's all about. Happenings, sit-ins, all this kind of stuff. You need to get on the television. And of course, that is a lesson that he will have picked up from Martin Luther King. I guess so. Yeah. The civil rights movement was all about getting on TV to some degree. Yes. Staging public spectaculars in which you are the martyrs and the victims. Yes. The mobilized people behind your cause. I mean, that is the essence of Martin Luther King's strategy, I guess. Yeah. And because in '67, so the summer of love, it's Hoffman, basically, who invents the look of the hippie, doesn't he? Because he has this group called the Flower Brigade. And he's the one who says, you know, put on the flowered clothing and the bell bottom jeans and the headbands and the beads, the classic hippie look. And it's designed to aggravate the police, basically, kind of squares. Yes. It's designed to be a very stark contrast with the war makers, the pigs, the military industrial complex, all of that kind of thing. So the classic image of people putting flowers in the barrels of guns, in the barrels of guns is a very kind of Hoffman Rubin kind of image. These guys had worked together on the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. And they had led this huge protest in the center of Washington, DC. They had gone on this march to the Pentagon and they had chanted songs and tried to exercise it and to levitate the Pentagon. Now, obviously a lot of people read about this in the newspapers or saw it on TV and thought these people are demented. The Pentagon cannot, by definition, be levitated. But it's all part of their thing, which is about silliness. You know, don't engage with the military industrial complex on its own terms or the establishment politics, but challenge it through radical theatre, singing, making them look stupid. Yes. So these guys were smoking dope one day at Hoffman's apartment in the East Village. And Dominic, they loved dope. There's an awful lot of it. Yeah. Hoffman was high all the way through his wedding. It's been a whole time giggling. Well, I think he was high through a large proportion of his life, frankly. So they're sitting with their mates in the East Village in New York City and they come up with the idea of basically staging a fun youth festival at the Democratic Convention to show up the Democratic delegates, the politics of fun. And their friend Paul Krasner, who's sitting around with him on kind of bean bags or whatever they're doing, says, why don't we call it Yippee? We'll be the Yippies. And then Hoffman's wife Anita said we should think up a different name. So for the Straits, we'll say that the Yippies are actually a stands for the YIP, the Youth International Party. And the media will take that seriously, but the kids will know that this is all just a joke and that's where it's smoking. Exactly. So for the next few months, the early months of 1968, they are producing badges and posters and all the psychedelic logos. They've got a marijuana leaf, haven't they, on a kind of purple background, I think. Yeah, it's all pink and purple. Exactly. Exactly. They want to get the LSD guru Timothy Leary. They want to get the beat poet Alan Ginsburg. They want to get kind of focusing as like Phil Oaks. They want to get these kind of slightly counter cultural people to join him. Now, there is attention in the Yippie vision because Hoffman is all about having fun. And he says, you know, what we're going to do is we will basically have the model of the alternative society on the Democrats doorstep. We'll be all reading poetry and making love and stuff. They'll feel terrible because they'll realize their lives are worthless. Rubin is much more confrontational. And he told a meeting in New York, he said, basically, we're going to bring half a million people to Chicago, we'll camp out, we'll smoke parts, we'll dance, we'll burn our draft cards. And I quote, raw like wild bands through the streets, forcing the president to bring troops home from Vietnam to keep order in the city while he is nominated under the protection of tear gas and bayonets. Because he wants to provoke, he does mass violence. He does. He's asked about this and he says, a movement cannot grow without repression. And some people are like, really do we want all the bayonets and stuff. So Alan Ginsberg, the poet says, I see bloody visions of the apocalypse. The trouble is he always says that. So we love Blake, doesn't he? He's quoting people. Don't listen. However, I think right from the start, there is a slight sense that if you keep talking about all this, if you say you're going to go roaring through the streets, it's unrealistic to expect the authorities not to take you seriously into make the appropriate preparations, which is of course what happens. And especially when you've got a mayor of who loved to have a cracker, a yippee. - Exactly, exactly. So their project runs into trouble really when Johnson pulls out because they needed the big, they've lost their enemy. - They've lost their enemy. Then all goes quiet, maybe it's not gonna happen. Then Robert Kennedy is shot, they say, oh, well that proves, you know, we were right. Rubin said rather tastelessly, Saharan, Saharan is a yippee. And they said, brilliant, we're back on. So they resuscitate their plan, all the poetry and all this stuff. And they're gonna have this big march to confront the Democrats. The big problem they have is they need permits. To stage a big demonstration, you need a degree of cooperation. You have to be allowed to sleep in the park. You have to be allowed to put up your stage. You know, all of these kind of mundane things. And they are trying to do that, but it's very clear to them that the Soutiv Chicago has no interest whatsoever in cooperating, that daily's people keep putting off the meetings or putting off a decision. - But also, I mean, certificates and stuff. I mean, they're a bit square, aren't they? - They are square, but there are people in this movement in the underground who know that you do need the permits, right? So the people actually in Chicago, Yippee's in Chicago become quite worried about this. At the beginning of August, one of the leading lights of the kind of Chicago counterculture, who's a journalist called Abe Peck, sent out a public letter called a letter from Chicago. And he says, guys, the organization for this is a complete shambles. It's going to be really heavy. It's going to be very heavy. The authorities have been freaked out by the talk of violence. And he says, you know, I love a protest as much as anybody, but I quote, it is a black piece of action it involves masquerading as the pious piper of peace. And he says, I'm just saying, if you're going to come to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair. Very good. Now, the thing is nobody listens to him, and they should have done. Because Hoffman and Rubin, the New Yorkers, say, are these Chicago people are absolutely wimps and weeds? What do you expect from these provincial hicks? You know, we know better. So there's a bit of a rift between the Chicago people and the New York people. The New York people then do something, I think, very foolish. They are hoping to mobilize the African-American population of Chicago. And their strategy for doing this is to try to make contact with the largest gang in the city with the black stone rangers. Now, they don't obviously have any joy. The black stone rangers have no interest in having reading poems and stuff. However, as we will see, word of this reaches the Chicago police and it completely freaks them out. Because obviously they say, what's going on? These hitties are in alliance with these bad guys from the streets. Anyway, the convention approaches August 1968. The Chicago underground are now very concerned about what's going to happen. And they issue another statement begging people not to come. The word is out. The cops will riot. Chicago may host a festival of blood. But Hoffman, he's not put off his e. Not at all. He's saying he wants five days of energy exchange, which is kind of what he's going to get. Well, the New York people are all there by about the 20th of August. Which I think isn't that also the date that the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia, which is kind of grumbling away in the background to all this. And so that provides more escape for them to prepare Chicago to Prague or whatever. There's definitely an element of role playing in this, right? That the Chicago convention is unfolding at exactly the same point as the Prague Spring. And so a lot of people are saying, oh, these are two sides at the same point. People are confronting the war makers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Soviet tanks, Chicago pigs. Exactly right. On the 22nd of August, Hoffman holds a press conference in Chicago and he says, here are our demands, the Yippee's demands. They are not unpredictably legalized marijuana. That's a full employment. Turn all the mass media over to the people. End imperialism, abolish money, make love, not war. And the last one is blank. He says so people can fill in whatever they want. And the manifesto ends. Political pigs, your days are numbered. We are the second American revolution. We shall win Yippee. It's not Yippee. I suppose it's not prevalent, isn't it? Yeah. You're thinking Yippee in the sort of a slide to children's party. Are you? Yippee. See, I think of it as more Yippee. Slightly downbeat. Yeah, like a bit more stoned, I guess. I don't know. Now, the mainstream people, the mobe, are very anxious about Yippee's being there. They see them as irresponsible and narcissistic. But the mobe also are conscious of the potential for violence. So violence, you could say, is built into their protest model, too. Their slogan confronts the war makers. Has the kind of implicit suggestion that stuff might kick off. And their poster is a kind of a very aggressive poster. It shows a pig, a literally a pig holding a club wearing a police helmet, sort of dancing or stamping on a map of Chicago. And I guess that brings us to the other great actors in this drama, which is the Chicago Police. You might have the stereotypical vision of the Chicago Police. Or they're just enormous, burly men eating donuts. Yeah, who never smile and love cracking heads. And actually, that would be a little bit harsh. There's a really good book on this by a guy called David Farber. And I can remember he published it, I think, in the late '80s or early '90s. I read many accounts of this convention, but I've never read one in which it had ever occurred to the author to give the story from the point of view of the Chicagoans of the Chicago Police. So he points out, the Chicago Police are not enormously backward. They had been modernized in the previous 10 years by the most innovative police superintendents in the country who was a guy who could O. W. Wilson. And he had promoted and aggressively recruited black officers. So actually, one in four of the Chicago Police are black, a better proportion than most other American cities. Yeah, that's not part of the image you have of the events, is it? Never part of the image. But it's important to have that in mind. The morale of the Chicago Police's rock bottom. Crime had been growing five times faster than population had. And the threats to policemen's health, life, so on are greater than ever before. However, they feel, if you ask a cop, they feel unsupported by the courts, by the political system, and indeed by the public. They feel that they're hands tied behind their back or this kind of thing. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with them. But that's their take. That's their take. They're conscious. Their pay has fallen behind. Far better points out. They're paid less than plumbers, less than glaziers, and a lot of other what he calls low status workers. So they're not the elite of the working class by any means. And they feel what they hate more than anything. I quote, ill-mannered, self-righteous college kids, whom they believed came from privileged backgrounds, protesting in the streets and mixing with and supporting Negroes about whom they knew nothing. They resented the middle class demonstrators who talked about equality and freedom, but showed no respect for authority or understanding of those who just wanted to keep the simple things they had worked for so hard. So that is their mindset. OK, there is class-based tension. Definitely this class-based tension. Right from the beginning. Huge amounts of class tension. Also, the Chicago police have come in for severe criticism in '68, not for being too harsh, but for being too weak. So after Martin Luther King's assassination in April, there had been days of rioting in Chicago. 11 people had been killed and 500 injured, and there'd been thousands of arrests. Now, the civil rights leaders in the city laid into the police and said, you know, shouldn't have gone in so hard all of this. Mayor Daly came out and said, I was disappointed the police was so weak. He said, we should be a city of order. Their police chiefs should have told their men that with arsonists, he's horrified by the arson. And he says, arsonists, we should shoot to kill. When people are looting, we shoot to maim. That was his expression. And so with that robust approach to law and order, what is Daly's response to the hippies turning up and Hoffman suggesting that they're planning to put LSD into the Chicago City water supply? Well, you see, this is the thing. Let's go down well. It doesn't go down well at all. Because remember, the hippies are saying all this publicly. They're not just saying it among themselves. They are saying, for example, we will block all the express ways. We will, as you said, Tom, I mean, this is the story that's repeated in every newspaper. Dose the water supply with LSD. We will storm the amphitheater. We will invade the hotels. And they wanted to paint cars to look like taxis. All of this stuff. And kidnap delegates and dump them. But, I mean, you'd have to be a square who's not familiar with Antonin Arto to take it literally, right? I mean, only a square would do that. I think in a country which has seen years of urban rioting. And also has seen a president shot dead five years earlier. The leading civil rights leader, one of the most famous men in the world, shot dead that April. And a presidential candidate shot dead in June. It is implausible to imagine the city authorities not taking these threats seriously. But, Dominic, they are not real threats, are they? I mean, they are ludic threats. They are street theater. They are. I suppose so. I mean, if your car is painted to look like a taxi, you'd probably find it enormously annoying. Wouldn't you? Yeah, they're not really planning to do it. They're not really planning to do any of this stuff. I think they are planning to do some of this, actually. They're planning to do stuff. Because they talk about setting up mortars and aiming it at the Democrat. Yeah, they're not going to do that. I mean, it's obviously exaggerated. But it's easy for you and me, right? Of course. All these years after the event, to sit back and say, "Well, they are going to do this, they're not going to do that." How can daily in his police? But it's another manifestation of this class based tension, because if you're kind of hip, you know, you've been to an arts college, you've studied theatre, you know that this is obviously a joke. But if you're, as you say, a harassed police chief, of course, you're not going to think it's a joke. Of course. So as August approaches, right? The Yippee supporters are kind of tooling up with flowers and books of poetry and joysticks or whatever. But daily is police. They are all issued with riot helmets. They're all given personal tear gas sprays. They're given a shotgun in every car, lunchons, all the stuff. They are actually expecting an armed rebellion. One of daily's officials says, "We are looking forward to the battle of the century." Goodness. I think we should take a break there. And when we come back, we'll find out if he's right. If we really are facing the battle of the century. The Great Stillness rose up from the street through all the small noise of clubbing and cries, small sirens. Sigh of loaded arrest fans as off they pulled. Shouts of police as they wheeled in larger circles. The intersection clearing further, then further, a stillness rose through the steel and stone of the hotel, congregating in the shocked centers of every room, where delegates and their wives and press and campaign workers innocent until now of the intimate working of social force. Look down now into the murderous paradigm of Vietnam there beneath them at this huge intersection of this great city. That was an all-in-mailer in Mami and the siege of Chicago. And he's writing about the climax of this battle of the century that one of daily's officials had promised, taking place in the streets of Chicago. So Dominic, before we get to that climax, how does it all play out? How does it begin? So, to give people a sense of the geography. The downtown area of Chicago is called the Loop. And the main hotels and office blocks are along Michigan Avenue, which runs north to south. So you've got that. A joining the Loop next to Lake Michigan is Grant Park. Now further to the north, you have another park, which is called Lincoln Park. And then to the south, there are the great stockyards on which Chicago was built, the biggest in the world. So, Norma Mali, in his book, he starts the section about Chicago with a brilliant, brilliant sort of portrait of these stockyards of the blood and the work and all this. And this is quite a distance from the center, right from the downtown. Yes, about six miles or something. And next to the stockyards is the amphitheater, where the convention will take place. The hotel's are in the centre, but the amphitheater is to the south. And the amphitheater's ringed by a huge barbed wire fence. There are road blocks, there are armed, police thousands of them on patrolers, and no fly zone above. There is maximum security. So the Yipis have set up shop in Lincoln Park quite a long way away. On the Friday before the convention week, they are handing out maps and flyers to people. There are only a few hundred of them. No where near the thousands they had hoped for. I have to say Tom, their flyers do not suggest a terribly progressive attitude towards gender relations. Or chicks who can type and spell cats who have wheels and want to do a digger trip to feed the masses. Yeah, if you are a chick who can type, I think you might feel a little bit triggered, I believe, is the word by that Tom. Or indeed, if you're a chick at all, whether you can type or not. So they are handing out maps of the democratic hotels and saying, written on them, "Break in, break in, break in, security precautions taken by the convention bigwigs are a fast." Again, they think this is very funny. If you're a police agent or something, you read this with a sense of horror. Oh my god, they're going to break into the hotels. Right? And so do you find it funny that they're also staging their own nomination battle to elect a president? Yeah. And this president is going to be called Piggasus. And he's a pig. Yes. And Hoffman, he's brought along a pretty pig, an attractive pig, sweet little pig. And Rubin has brought along an ugly pig. Yeah. And Rubin's ugly pig gets the nomination. And he then gives a big kind of nomination speech for Piggasus, doesn't he? Yes. And he gets arrested and charged with disturbing the police. But he then gets released. And then the next day, they've got another pig. So there's more pig-based, the hippie humor. Yeah. And they set him loose and then can park. And this apparently is the female pig. And this is going to be the candidate's wife. So it's going to be what the first pig lady and the police are kind of rushing around trying to catch this pig. And the hippies are all shouting, "Pig, pig." Because, you know, is it the pig or is it the police? It's all very funny. Yeah. And then when the police finally get the pig, they all shout out, "Be careful with the next first lady." Do you find that funny? I don't have as fun as funny as some people do. To be brutally honest, I think it's quite funny. So in the break, Theo complained and said, "You're being very kind to the police, explaining their world for you, and you're not being kind enough to the hippies." I feel that this isn't tremendous behavior from the hippies, to be honest. The last couple of moments we've had from them. I feel they've let themselves down a little bit with the pig and with the chicks, I think, all that. I think more with the chicks than with the pigs. Well, animal rights people will pronounce on that term. You'd rather be nominated for president than be kind of chopped up into slaughterton. In the stockyard. In the stockyard, wouldn't it be? Maybe. Maybe. Well, I suspect that a lot of those pigs had both those experiences to be seen. I guess. All right. So the Saturday night, the 24th of August, there's the first little confrontation with the police, really. Police wanted the hippies to clear out of Lincoln Park by 11 o'clock, but they basically hate doing that being told to clear out. Of course, they don't have a permit sleeping in the park, which is a big problem. And this confrontation is diffused by Alan Giddensburg, who sits down and chants, "Oh, oh, oh." For 20 minutes. And this works. He calms the crowd down, and he leads them, like kind of, a pipe, pipe, a figure out of the park. But on the Sunday, it's a different story. So the Sunday, the 25th of August, the convention is going to meet the next day. First of all, this sort of mainstream peace movement, the MOBE. They organized a march into the downtown area to the Hilton Hotel, the Hilton, where a lot of this action is going to take place. It's right in the center of Chicago, on Michigan Avenue. All the big wigs are staying there, and the campaigns have their headquarters there. And they are down below the hotel, some of them waving "Viet Kong flags" and chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" They're traditional kind of chant. But the real confrontation comes back in Lincoln Park to the north. This is where the hippies were going to have their festival of life. And there were all these bands going to come, and it was going to be brilliant. And actually, it's like one of those festivals that people organized these days for Instagrammers in the Caribbean or something, where they all end up stranded on a desert island with no food. Or like those Christmas festivals that turn out to be a sheep with an antler on it. That's right, exactly. So only one band turns out, it's a local band called the MC5. They expected 100,000 people to come. They get about three or four thousand. There's a big dispute with the police about electricity and if they can use a stage. And there's a lot of tension between the crowd and the police. A lot of shouting with senators and the police kind of cracking heads and stuff. And as darkness falls, there is a very tense atmosphere. There's a change over in the police shift. So new load of police arrive and they are told by their departing comrades. It's all going to kick off this evening. You know, you've got to be ready to crack some heads. Alan Ginsburg starts chanting, "Om!" And he does this. I mean, I find this extraordinary. He does it for seven hours. Yeah, he ends up with a very sore throat. Yeah, frankly, I sometimes have a sore throat after a restless history live show. Like the ones for which there are still tickets available in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Because we don't want to look at the Yippee's, do we? Am I right? Alone in an empty park. Oh, if it's like that and matching, it'd be terrible. I'd be all right with it. I'd just sit there and do an O. Would you? Yeah. No, no, no, no. I'd like to be like a presidential candidate. Doing that pointing thing to do with the crowd. The thumbs up, exactly. That's what happens if we will be like. So, 11 o'clock, we're on the Sunday night here. The police are trying to clear the park. The crowd are chanting, "Hell no, we won't go." A lot of shout about pigs. And at about midnight, for the first time really in this story, the police discipline breaks. And they just start clubbing people, beating them to the ground. And this continues for some considerable time. And ultimately, it descends into total and utter chaos. Is this the point where Hugh Heffner comes out of his mansion and gets hit on the head by a pig? Oh, I didn't know that. With a club. And he's so cross about it that he then pays for the publication of a book on police brutality. I think it is around this time. Surely he's been cancelled. Well, he's got a big mansion in Chicago. As he, okay. I think it's around this time. So, now things really do kick off in the small hours of Sunday to Monday. The police go berserk. They're attacking reporters, photographers, medical volunteers from the peace movement. They are spraying their mace. They are hurling, kind of tear gas grenades everywhere. Some of them take off their badges at this point. The first time they've done this in the story. And they're hitting people with clubs. They're helicopters buzzing overhead. There are people shouting, "Clarular sprux, it's total kind of Gotham city." "Grarary Gotham city." Now, Jerry Rubin is watching this. And he says to a friend, "This is fantastic. This is fantastic." And it's only Sunday night. they might declare martial law in this town. wanted. He likes the thoughts of a lot of this. So about a thousand people managed to get out of the park. They kind of run down towards the loop to downtown area and they're chanting, "Oh, ho, ho, she min." And they're jumping on cars. They are throwing bottles and stuff like this. They're police waiting for them at one of the bridges and they managed to kind of beat them back. And this dies down at about two o'clock in the morning. This is before the convention has even opened. So a lot of people think that it's basically one night of action. It isn't. It's night after night after night. So the next day the convention opens, daily opens it. He has prepared signs reading "We love LBJ." He still really is hoping to get LBJ nominated as president. His fallback position is if necessary, except Humphrey, but he really would like LBJ. And he says to the convention, that morning, "We will not tolerate," and I quote, "people who seek to destroy instead of to build who would make a mockery of our institutions and values." But actually that very evening, there is yet more fighting in Lincoln Park because after the previous night, everybody now is expecting it. So the police now come wearing gas masks. They've got gas and smoke grenades and they don't wait before wading into the crowd this time. Again, they tear off their badges. And again, there is a sense that all the rules have been suspended, that they are beating people, especially women. They target women a lot. Why is that? Well, women don't, are less likely to fight back. So they're easier targets. But also, perhaps there is a sense of frankly sexual aggression to it. They will target a girl in a very short skirt. They'll beat her to the ground and they get a sort of kick out of doing it. I guess groups of policemen. And there are lots of stories about smashing people's cameras and all of this kind of thing. And then at the end of that confrontation, there are stories about police having ripped off their badges, going through the streets, and they slash their tires and smash the windows of cars with McCarthy for president. Bumpers, stickers. In their minds, right? The McCarthy campaign, civil rights, beat nicks, peace protesters. Actually, I think this is when they beat up Hugh Heffner. Right. Okay. In addressing gown. Yeah. In a crack. Oh, definitely. If the man in addressing gown, looking for a fob fish came out to his nice townhouse. It's funny girls. Yeah. Wack him. I mean, he'd been mad not to. So Tuesday, the 27th August is Lyndon Johnson's birthday. He's celebrating it in Texas, but I think there's a part of him. I consider a part of him that is hoping to get a call from Mayor Daley saying, they've come to their senses. They're going to nominate you. And of course, they're not. Would he have accepted? Do you think? I think Johnson is an enormous egotist. I think he would have found out hard to resist, actually. If they came back crawling to him and said, please, Mr. President, will you? Yeah, I think you might well have done. But it's not going to happen because actually what's happening is the convention has degenerated into a massive argument about Vietnam policy between the kind of anti-war delegates of Kennedy and McCarthy and the kind of Humphrey loyalists. And there's also a big argument, actually, which we won't go into, which is very kind of Labour Party in Britain, circa 1981, about the party's internal procedures, which takes an enormous amount of time and effort, but I don't want to drive away all our listeners. So by this point, all the major news organisations have already complained to Daley that their men are being beaten up. Their reporters are being beaten up. And that enrages him, and it makes him even more determined not to give in and to keep to a hard line in the streets. But what also probably contributes to the hard line is that evening, a new face arrives in Lincoln Park to address the Yippews and Co. And this is the National Chairman of the Black Panthers, a guy called Bobby Seale. So that's the militant black organisation. Exactly. And Bobby Seale stands up and he says, "If a pig comes up to you and starts swinging a Billy Club and you check around and you got your peace, you got to down that pig in defence of yourself." He says, "If you pull out your peace, you're gum, and you shoot it well, what I'm going to do is pat you on the back and say, keep shooting." Now again, some people listen to this would say, "This is clearly not really meant to be taken seriously. This is exaggerated sensationalist. It's part of the rhetoric of the late sixters." On the other hand, there are quite a lot of guns in America. And again, an FBI informant or a police agent listening to this will go back and say, "There are people there who are telling the crowd to shoot us." So you can see how it contributes to the sort of sense of tension. But actually, that evening is not quite so bad. The police have now brought out a special tear gas dispensing machine powered by garbage truck, which basically pours out tear gas in the streets of Chicago. So this tear gas generally drifting through the streets. And actually a lot of people are knackered and bruised after the previous evening. So Tuesday is a bit quieter. But also everybody knows the real climax is coming on the Wednesday. Because that's the day that the Democrats are nominating their candidate for president. Exactly. So let's turn to Wednesday. Nine o'clock that morning, Abbey Hoffman has arrested having breakfast at his hotel. The police have clearly been keeping tabs on him. They arrest and charge him with disorderly conduct because he has an Anglo-Saxon word printed on his forehead. They want to make sure, basically, he is off the streets. They see him as one of the masterminds of this conspiracy. However, they don't arrest the mainstream peace movement leaders, the MOBE. And they're going to have a rally in Grant Park, which is directly opposite the loop, which is across Michigan Avenue from the big hotels, like the Hilton. So about three o'clock that afternoon, there are about 15,000 people in Grant Park. And they are Yippies, MOBE peace campaigners, general kind of pacifists and people of that ilk and McCarthy campaign volunteers. So a real mix bag. And there are hundreds of police. And it really starts to turn ugly when a boy, a teenage boy climbs a flagpole by the band standing Grant Park and he lowers the American flag, starts to lower it. And at that, some of the police go mental. They push through the crowd. They grab this boy and they start to beat him up. And then the crowd intervenes and attacks the police. And there's a bit of fighting. More teenagers climb the flagpole and they bring down the flag and they hoist a red t-shirt. And at that, the police go berserk. They wade in again. And for the first time now, they explicitly target some of the organizers. So there's a MOBE organizer, a guy called Rennie Davis. They target him. They get him down on the ground. A huge group of them beat him senseless. There's blood everywhere. And he has to be rushed to hospital. And at that point, his friend, who's a guy called Tom Hayden, who was one of the most, probably the most best known student leader in America had been. He gets up and he gives this incredibly impassioned speech. And he says to the crowd, let's turn this overheated military machine against itself. Let's make sure that if blood is going to flow, let it flow all over this city. If the police are going to run wild, let them run wild all over this city and not over us. If we're going to be disrupted and violated, let this whole stinking city be disrupted and violated. Find your way out of here. I will see you in the streets. So quite French Revolution. Very French Revolution. Very Camille Damoulin. Isn't it? At the Palais Réal. So at that point, the rally breaks up. It's unclear what they're going to do. There are different plans. There's about 6,000 people blocked in Grand Park. And some of them sit down and start singing protests songs. The police start bringing up arrest fans and some of the crowd become very frightened. And they want to get away into the streets, into the loop. They sort of start to head towards the bridges. There are railroad bridges that connect the park to the loop to the downtown area. But as they get to the bridges, they find that most of them are blocked by lines of national guardsmen with machine guns. So they're trapped. They're trapped. I mean, it's a bit like for the sake of argument, the Battle of Late Trazamine, where the Romans were trapped by Hannibal. Well, Tom, what did you say? Just, I mean, clutching at a historical analogy. Yeah. But I know and you know that you're not the first person to have made that analogy. You know, come to the person who makes that analogy later. As darkness falls, the police start to wade into this trapped ground with the clubs and stuff, but also firing tear gas grenades. So now you have people who are vomiting on the ground, crying, being blinded, whatever. And the police just whacking them over the heads and atmosphere total panic. And now you have tear gas drifting west from the park over the bridges towards the democratic hotels on Michigan Avenue. Eventually, the crowd finds warm bridge that has been left unguarded. Jackson Drive, so for people in Chicago, it's between the Art Institute and the Symphony Center. So it is right in the heart of kind of institutional Chicago. The crowd floods over the bridge onto Michigan Avenue. And here they find a very bizarre site. In front of them is a three wagon mule train that is being sort of shepherded along the street by Martin Luther King's friend Ralph Abanathi. So people who listen to the Martin Luther King podcast or remember the poor people's campaign. Oh yeah. You know King's great project. Right. Abanathi has brought this mule train to symbolize poverty with his wagons with mules. He's brought them to the centre of Michigan Avenue. - And then, in the center of Chicago, a very bizarre and incongruous science. - Yeah, 'cause it must have come as quite a surprise to hippies and police alike, I would imagine. - Yeah, you've been shouting about like pigs and stuff. - Suddenly it's a little house on the prairie. You've been tear-gassed, and then suddenly, exactly, run over the bridge, and there it is. And they do have a permit to go all the way down to the amphitheater as a reminder to the delegates of poverty in the heart of America, right? And they're moving very slowly under police guard. So you have now this incredibly weird scene. There's about six to 7,000 people packed into the center of Chicago in the intersection of Balbo Drive and Michigan Avenue, literally underneath the multi-story, Hilton Hotel, kind of a huge high-rise building. And they're chanting dump the hump. There's these mules, they're surrounded by police, tear gas, tear gas. Eventually, the police commanders agreed to let the mule train through, but only the mule train. So they're lines part, and the mule train kind of proceeds off the stage towards the amphitheater. - Point successfully made, you'd say. That's guess so, but they haven't quite got to the amphitheater yet. But the police lines then reform, and now the demonstrators are effectively surrounded again. And basically, it's about eight o'clock, whether there's a signal that is given, or whether it is an improvised moment, it's impossible to be sure, but the police just go for it. They pile in as worn into the crowd, screaming at abuse at the protesters. They've got their clubs. Some of them are just using their fists, their spring mace and their faces. Some protesters fight back, they brought sticks and rocks in the park, but that only inflames the cops further. More cops are being unloaded from buses of reinforcements, as they get off their buses, people see them, and they're chanting, kill, kill, kill. And they pile into the demonstrators. They push a hole over them back against the glass windows of these office blocks. The windows shatter, and the demonstrators fall back towards into the buildings, and then the police are in on top of them among the shards of glass, kind of total and utter carnage. And this is the same time as Prague is being. Yes, of course. Soviet tanks are coming in. So I think the protesters call it Chicago, Czech-Argo. Right. Kind of drawing the parallels. And I suppose one of the ways in which that comparison, which seems, I mean, on the face of it, the British military task is the fact that the TV cameras are in Chicago for the convention, and can cover all this, whereas in Prague, obviously, there isn't the kind of live TV for this. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So because this is under the Humphrey and McCarthy headquarters, the cameras are already there. There are huge floodlights. So if you go onto YouTube to see the scenes, you will see, it's very bright, right? Because it's lit up by TV arc lights, and the cameraman are there filming it, the police are attacking the cameraman as well, and press photographers and things, as part of this general chaos. Norma Mailer is watching this from his hotel. He's there to cover the convention. The police attack like a chainsaw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw, the edge of their clubs. They attack like a sithe through grass, lines of 20 and 30 policemen, striking out in an arc, their clubs beating demonstrators, fleeing. And this goes on and on and on. And are any of the presidential candidates watching? I'm thinking specifically of Eugene McCarthy. And if so, they're all watching. Yeah. Does an incident from the Second Punit War strike him? As it has struck me? So McCarthy is up on the 23rd floor, and he's looking out of his window, and he says at first, it's incredible. It looks like a broigle. And then he says to his aides, reminds me of the Battle of Lake Trasomy. There you go. Which he'll actually later amends, Tom. To the Battle of Cany, doesn't he? To the Battle of Cany, exactly. Which even worse, slaughter. Now, the thing is that you think this is tremendous, but actually his campaign staff were horrified by this. They thought it showed his detachment and his aloofness that he was too busy thinking about Punit War parallels. And actually he should have been weeping or-- Right, that reflects badly on them. You're clearly, despite all your talk, you're not at one with the temperament of the late six years, are you? You're more Eugene McCarthy-like. No, I think that when a parallel from the Punit War hits you, it hits you. You know, you go with it. Well, maybe. There are times that people don't want to hear a parallel from the Punit War's, clearly. Well, for them. His volunteer headquarters, which was down on the 15th floor, was later turned into a makeshift hospital for the wounded. They brought up protesters. And McCarthy did go down to visit the wounded. And later on, his volunteers went to sing songs with the demonstrators and express solidarity with him. He would hum for any other hand. His hire up is on the 25th floor. And he's not watching these scenes, actually, because he has been affected by the tear gas, which has come up through the air conditioning. Unbelievable, isn't it? And he has had to retire to the shower to basically try to wash out the sort of tear gas and stuff. And that's why the story of 1968 is such an amazing one to tell that throughout it, there are these unbelievably vivid metaphorical scenes that combine color with the grotesque. Yeah, completely. Because, right? This has been happening on the very night their delegates are nominating their candidate for president. So the campaign, this incredibly dramatic campaign, is reaching his climax at this moment. So at the amphitheater, there are no three candidates. There is Humphrey. There is Eugene McCarthy. And there's also another senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, a former historian, who has basically stepped forward to inherit candidates' delegates, so the frontman for the Kennedy campaign. And the first footage of the fighting appears on Network TV at about 9.30 that evening and the delegates can't believe it. I mean, they're watching the cops in riot helmets just beating the living daylights out of defenseless people on the ground. And Senator Abraham Ribbicoff is from Connecticut has got up to the platform to nominate George McGovern for president. He's seen the scenes. He's heard the news. And it's an incredible moment if you watch the footage. He looks directly at Mayor Daly. And he says, with George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago. And Daly and the Illinois delegation at that go completely berserk. At first, if you watch the footage, Daly's clearly laughs contemptuously. And then it's as someone has flicked a switch. And Daly loses it. And he shouts, you son of a-- you lousy mother-- go home. And there is total bedlam, right? And Ribbicoff standing up there, cool, contemptuous. He stares at Daly in the face. And he says, how hard it is to accept the truth, how hard it is. I mean, an amazing scene. You have to be playing out on national television. And you can imagine, I guess, that the Democrats spin doctors. I'm thinking this could be going better. Yes, it's not ideal for the Democrats of parts, is it? So Humphrey wins on the first ballot, massive margin. And Humphrey's come out of the show and how he's in his hotel suite at the Hilton. So he can see. He can see he's watching the television surrounded by photographers to mark the moment. And because he's Mr. Cheerable, he just completely fails to grasp the mood. So his wife's face appears on the screen. She's down at the convention at the moment that he wins. And he says, oh, how pretty you are. I wish you were here with me now. And he kneels down and kisses the television screen with her face on it. And photographers take pictures of this. Now, it's a very sweet moment, in one sense. But for him to be doing that, well, down below, there's this police riot, glass, tear gas. You could say that he is conjuring up the warmth of the traditional American way. Well, you could, yeah. Apple pie, all that kind of thing. Of course you could. Which I guess it will be his pitch when it comes to actually running for the presidency. Yeah, but that pitch is totally dry. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I'm just trying to stick up for him. I quite like him. I like him. I feel sorry for him. The next morning, you know, the breakfast news, everybody watches NBC, led with it in a montage and the intercut scenes of Humphries, delegates, Humphries supporters cheering and laughing and singing. They intercut it with footage of demonstrates it's being gassed and being beaten up on Michigan Avenue. The two things that not actually happen simultaneously, their beatings had happened much earlier. But the TV networks gave the impression they had happened at the same time. And that was unbelievably bad publicity for Humphries. Mayor Daley went ballistic. He went on CBS and he said to Walter Cronkite, we were fighting terrorists. He says, I had intelligence that they were planning to assassinate the Democratic candidates. We've had three people shot in the last few years. No, it's not true. He'd made that up. The trouble is the Yippies have said so many incendiary stuff, lurid and sensationalist things. It's hard for anybody to be certain who doesn't understand. It's easy for us. Yeah. The Yippies are all about dope and about talking nonsense. And they had been lots of assassinations. So they have been assassinations. Yeah. McCarthy that afternoon went and talked to the demonstrations in the park. He said, you're the government in exile. He read them a nice poem. That's quite Yippie, isn't it? Well, it was a poem by his friend Robert Lowell, who was kind of very kind of New England Harvard kind of poet. Of course, tweed. Yeah, very tweed. Very tweed. Not the vibe. Not quite the vibe. But I think, you know, if you like poetry, Nice to have some on the show. That evening is here by the way. Humphreys moment, so he finally gets to make his speech. You could not imagine work circumstances to make your speech him. He starts his speech by talking about his sadness at the violence. He doesn't really do sadness, so when he first announced his candidacy, he had said he was going to bring back the politics of happiness and the politics of joy. But obviously he can't play that card now, right? He has to look sad and somber. He actually, I hadn't realized this until a couple of days ago, he does a Margaret Thatcher. He reads the, where there is discord, may we bring harmony? He reads that so called St. Francis of a CC prayer, which St. Francis of a CC never said. But he doesn't use a good translation, so it's not as powerful. And also he doesn't do a good Margaret Thatcher impersonation as I do. So a further disappointment for the Democrat delegates. Yeah, that's the real disappointment for the Democrats, this read. But anyway, it's been a complete and utter nightmare for the Democrats. It confirms every suspicion that they are the party of chaos, the party of disorder. They are disunited. The images that all Americans take from this convention are of violence and people screaming and sobbing in the streets and so on and so forth. The interesting thing though, Tom, I know you'll say this is a San Brauc Bingo point. Yeah, I do. I know exactly what you're going to say. The public sighed overwhelmingly with the police, not with the demonstrators. So daily had 100,000 letters of support and 5,000 letters of criticism. And the polls showed that only 10% of the public thought the police were too harsh. And more than double that thought they weren't harsh enough, which is kind of unsurprising, I guess. Well, I mean, so just to ask, to what extent were the public aware of where the EPs were coming from? I mean, had any of this kind of joyous, ludic riot banter? Yeah. And it filtered through at all? Probably not massively. In their minds, I think, if you're not somebody who massively follows the news, you're certainly on your TV and you see-- And there's a bloke with long hair like a girl, right? Or that? Yeah. But having the living daylight beason out of him by the Chicago police and you're shocked by the violence, but probably there are a lot of people, well, we know there are a lot of people who say, yeah, I don't like to see it, but what do they expect? But why? Because the violence is so extreme. You don't see what it is about the EPs or the protesters or whatever. That is so offensive that people would say, oh, well, they had it coming. I think because it comes in a climate of a year that is-- there are a lot of people very frightening and very disorderly, right? Assassinations, urban riots. So there's a backlash mood. There is a law and order mood. So like the people pulling down the American flag or dressing up as the vehicle or whatever, is this cutting through? I mean, are they being seen as completely unpatriotic? Undoubtedly. OK. So that does cut through. Absolutely. That has cut through. So there is a sense, certainly, from 1967, I would say onwards, that the peace protesters are people who burn American flags, that they are long-haired, that they take drugs. A lot of this may be very unfair. And there are people in the peace movement who are very conscious of this and say, this is media distortion. And actually, there are parts of our movement that don't do our movement a great deal of good because the levitating the Pentagon and chanting songs and stuff. So there are still quakers and stuff. Yeah. There are still people who say, come on, the point is to win over middle America and we are not doing that. But the mood of the moment is wave of vehicle on flag. Chart ho ho ho, cheer me in. So here's the thing, right? Imagine you are from a middle America community in Iowa or somewhere. And you know boys who've gone off to fight in the Vietnam War. And then you turn on your telly, long-haired college kids, chanting the names of the opposition of the. I get it. I think that's the problem. I mean, this is actually a moment you could argue from which all subsequent protest movements either have learned or should have learned. Yeah. I mean, it's a founding moment, isn't it? Yeah. Absolutely. It's what you do. It's a moment earlier in the decade where they wear suits. They work really hard and it's not an accident. They do it self-consciously. You know, Martin Luther King and his allies think really carefully about how to appeal to, as it were, the silent majority, you know, the broad mass of the American people. I don't think Abbey Hoffman and Jerry Rubin gave the broad mass of the American people any thought whatsoever because they despise them. I guess so. Yeah. I mean, the civil rights movement shares, you know, they share Christianity with the vast mass of the American people. Yeah. But the peace protestors, I mean, despise all of that. They want to burn it all down. Yeah. Let's tie up the story. Seven people were charged by a grand jury in the US District Court for Illinois with using interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot. And these were the so-called Chicago Seven. So Abbey Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seerler, the Black Panthers, though he was later, he was declared a mistrial, Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rene Davis and so on and so forth. And they turned the trials in 1969 to kind of political showpieces, denouncing the judge sort of this kind of thing. They were acquitted of the conspiracy charge but then convicted of other offences. They did spend time in prison, but those convictions were eventually reversed on appeal. So that is the story of the Chicago Seven. Yeah. The kind of Netflix or something? No, it's a film. Yeah. Good film. Theo must have seen it because he was absolutely bleeding-hearted by half-time shocked that we were given the police's point of view. But back to the story of the politics of '68. Hubert Humphrey now nominated leaves Chicago in absolute despair. I mean, he said later he felt that politics had become polluted and destroyed in the course of the year. He'd been very offended, hadn't he, by the bad language used in front of ladies? Yes. I think rightly. I don't agree with using bad language in front of ladies myself. So he is trapped. He is totally trapped, poor at Humphrey, by his fealty to Johnson and to the war. He feels he can't break with the president and he can't break with the administration's policy. But how else can he possibly bring his party together? However, the one thing I should say about Humphrey, all his life he has been a fighter, you know, he's a hardened campaigner and the one thing that can possibly bring his party together, I guess, is that they are facing their ultimate bogeyman, the one politician who most Democrats despise more than any other. And that's the man we'll be discussing in the final episode this series as we turn to the great winner of this epic story, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Okay, Dominic. And if you want to hear it straight away, you can do that, you know, the routine by going to therestonthestory.com and signing up to the club there. But either way, we will be back very soon with the climax of America 1968. Goodbye. Bye-bye. One of the darkest scandals of the modern era, a billionaire financier. And the most powerful friends. Hidden networks and questions that refuse to go away. Was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? I'm Gordon Carrera and I'm David Buklowski. And we're the hosts of The Rest Is Classified, the Intelligence and National Security Podcast from Gohanger. And we've just released a gripping new series investigating whether Epstein was linked to any spy agencies. And asking what those agencies might have known about him. Listen or watch now on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.