By Joel Thurtell
It makes me sad when I think about those two classmates, Tom “Tex” Ford and Lloyd Slack, who were killed in Vietnam. Around the second grade, Tom Ford’s family moved to Texas. When they came back to Lowell, we gave him his nickname. Tex was a funny guy, had a very ironic sense of humor. Lloyd Slack was the only black kid in our whole high school, which meant he took a lot of shit from some kids and more dads. Only one girl in the whole school would go on a date with him.
They were good guys. Both had tried college, but left. Under the conscription system of the time, had they stayed in college as I did, they would have kept their 2-S deferments and avoided the draft at least while they were in college. I had a 2-S through four years at Kalamazoo College and into my first year of grad school at the University of Michigan.
But the war wasn’t going well and for the generals to see the light at the end of the tunnel, more soldiers were needed. In late 1967 or early 1968, I forget exactly when, General Lewis Hershey, head of the draft, announced there would be no more student deferments for people in my age group and younger. Friends at UM who were a year or more older than I could keep on pursuing their graduate degrees. People like me had to figure out what to do.
One friend had what turned out to be a very successful way of avoiding the draft. He practiced stressing himself out to drive his blood pressure into the danger zone. The thought he used to make himself worried was what it would be like to be drafted. It really drove his blood pressure up. He went down to Fort Wayne in Detroit and worried his way through a draft physical, which he flunked with high blood pressure.
In my case, it was the braces. I learned of this gambit on an earlier trip to Chicago, when a University of Chicago medical student and roommate of my friend Barry took one look at my smile and said, “Got trouble with your draft board?”
“I sure do,” I said.
“Stop worrying. With that metal smile, you’re golden.”
I knew my orthodontist was getting ready to remove my braces, so I hustled to the Army office in Grand Rapids.
With my freshly-minted 1-Y, I felt relieved. But I also felt guilty. I’d managed to dodge a bullet — perhaps literally — that had taken the lives of two buddies. I’d been opposed to the war in college, but with a student deferment, it had seemed far away, abstract. Suddenly I was pulled into the same draft system that consumed my friends, and the war became more real.
Now that I was exempt for a year, I felt like I needed to do something. If I was opposed to the war, it wasn’t enough to argue against it. I needed to take action. Working for McCarthy had seemed like a step towards action. Going to the Democratic convention seemed like another small action I could take as an individual.
Note to the FBI agents who later hassled me at work and home: We didn’t go to Chicago to burn or loot or throw rocks. Some people did that, true, but we didn’t. It can be argued that the people who did it were provoked by the cops, who were just plain crazy. Nor did we have destruction in mind when we left Ann Arbor for Chicago. The idea was actually constructive — to let our numbers express our opposition to a terrible war. It was a variation on the theme of voting — street citizenship.
I repeat this, because some of the journalism that came out of the 1968 Democratic Convention and the events surrounding it in Chicago has been distorted. I’m thinking of Norman Mailer’s quickie book on the GOP and Democratic 1968 conventions, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968.”
I didn’t read Mailer’s book at the time. It came out in October 1968, less than two months after the Democratic convention. At the time, I was busy A) studying for my history classes at the University of Michigan and B) going to trial in a municipal courtroom in Chicago, where Judge Richard Samuels convicted Barry of reckless driving and me of aiding and abetting reckless driving after three cops who were not present at our arrest failed to identify us and gave wildly different accounts of what we supposedly did to justify them arresting us which, of course, they did not do.
In other words, the cops lied.
I had better things to do than read some novelist’s attempt at writing history. But recently a friend, aware that I’d been arrested in Chicago in ’68, gave me a paperback copy of Mailer’s book. I started reading it on a trip to Canada, thinking Mailer might enlighten me on some of the goings-on that I wasn’t aware of after I went hors de combat following the Battle of the Art Institute.
I soon realized that Mailer didn’t know any more about those things than I did. Worse, he trotted out condescending stereotypes about us “kids” who were protesting without giving any sense that he understood why people like me went there.
While Mailer’s book was billed as “an informal history,” I’ve always heard it referred to as a new kind of personal journalism. Although Mailer was neither a historian nor a journalist by training, he was a salesman. It’s clear from his book that he persuaded a publisher, The New American Library, that he could write an account of the two national political conventions in a personalized way. Quickly. Actually, he’d done it for previous conventions.
According to Wikipedia, Mailer practiced something called “New Journalism,” and he was “considered an innovator of narrative nonfiction.” Maybe. It’s also clear to me that he wrote parts of the book before the conventions. I conclude this because his publisher notes that some of the material ran in Harper’s, which means it must have been published pre-convention. And there is internal evidence for pre-fabbing that I’ll discuss shortly.
I don’t care for reporters who compose ledes and even whole stories before the events they’re assigned to write about. I know it’s done. That Mailer did it at all makes his work suspect. What condemns him, for me, is his failure to be present at some of the most important doings in Chicago, and then to report on them by generality or through other reporters’ accounts. And then to excuse himself with some of the lamest pleadings I’ve ever read.
Mailer made an impression on me at Chicago. I was in Grant Park on Wednesday, August 28, in a large crowd of war protesters listening to various speakers and singers. I think we heard Phil Ochs perform, but at one point Mailer was introduced and took the mike. I remember this, because up to that point I thought Mailer was hot stuff. I had great respect for him. I was impressed that he came to speak.
He was dressed in a three-piece suit. Norman Mailer, author of the famous novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” was a cult figure with many liberal, anti-war people. Some months before, he’d been arrested in an anti-war protest at the Pentagon. He seemed to agree with much of what we believed.
That day in Grant Park, Mailer told us he wished he could be with us in the streets, but his job was to cover the convention and report what the Democratic pols were up to. He suggested that was very important work, too.
It was not clear to me what his role was at the convention. I was not aware of his book contract. He just sounded like a fatuous cop-out in his dark suit making excuses that sounded like his presence on the floor of the convention was more important than people demonstrating against the war.
If this sounds harsh, let me paint a bit more detail into the picture: As Mailer spoke, blue-shirted cops in riot helmets were swinging billy clubs and bashing heads of unwary people standing on the fringe of his audience. The people being clubbed were not provoking cops, except insofar as they existed as protesters whose presence displeased the cops’ boss, Mayor Daley.
The mayor had refused to issue a permit for a peaceful demonstration in Chicago, thus in his mind justifying his cops’ brutal treatment of protesters. In Daley’s mind, we had no legal right to be in Chicago. The Mobilization people had not told their people to keep away from Chicago, but rather encouraged us to come on despite the lack of a permit. So, while performances and speeches went on in Grant Park, cops waded into the crowd and banged heads. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. Mailer had to have seen what was happening.
Mailer seemed to view the job as a daily newspaper city desk reporter assigned to cover City Hall might look at covering a meeting of the council. Meetings — the people who attend them and the things they talk about — are a prime focus of such reporters. I know. I’ve done it myself. Mailer seems to have made gathering quotations and impressions from convention conflabs as the larger part of his assignment. He was blindsided by the events that happened on the streets of Chicago.
I knew Mailer was in trouble when I read this line from the second page of his essay, “The Siege of Chicago”:
“Not here for a travelogue — no need then to detail the Loop,…”
Oops. Remember where he gave his talk — Grant Park? That’s close enough to the Loop if not part of it.
Remember where the cops attacked Barry and me, in front of the Art Institute at Michigan Avenue and Adams Street?
The Loop.
I can only assume Mailer wrote that line before he went to the convention in Chicago and was in such a hurry to finish the book that he failed to notice that refusing to describe the place where much of the violence happened makes him look like a dope.
In “The Siege of Chicago,” Mailer waits till the very end to mention giving a speech in Grant Park. Isn’t that odd? It may have been the one time when he was actually present during police violence, yet he doesn’t report the violence directly. He is totally focused on himself, his own feelings, and what’s more, he is drunk.
What he does report, and this is quite amazing, are the justifications he used for not sticking around when things got rough at Lincoln Park.
It makes me wonder, “Where were you, Norman?”
Norman was busy staying out of the action. His Wikipedia biography says he was drafted into the Army in 1943 and saw little combat in World War II, ending as a cook. He parlayed his minimal war experience into a major war novel and movie. His deft writing came in handy after Chicago, too, when he needed to fill blanks left by his absence at the scenes where other reporters were busy, and in some cases busy being clubbed and gassed by Chicago’s finest.
In “The Siege of Chicago,” he wrote: “Twenty or thirty of the kids were building a barricade, They brought in park benches and picnic tables, and ran it a distance of fifty feet, then a hundred feet. A barricade perhaps six feet high. It made no sense. It stood in the middle of a field and there were no knolls nor defiles at the flanks to keep the barricade from being turned — the police cars would merely drive around it, or tear gas trucks would push through it.
“It was then the reporter decided to leave. The park was cool, it was after midnight, and if the police had not come yet, they might not come for hours, or perhaps not at all — perhaps there were new orders to let the kids sleep here — he simply did not know. He only knew he did not wish to spend hours in this park. For what was one to do when the attack came? Would one leave when asked — small honor there — why wait to offer that modest obedience. And to stay — to what end? — to protest being ejected from the park, to take tear gas in the face, have one’s head cracked? He could not make the essential connection between that and Vietnam. If the war were on already, if this piece of ground were essential to the support of other pieces of ground…but this ridiculous barricade, this symbolic contest with real bloody heads — he simply did not know what he thought. And he had a legitimate excuse for leaving. One of his best friends was with him, a professional boxer, once a champion. If the police ever touched him, the boxer would probably be unable to keep himself from taking out six or eight men, The police would then come near to killing the boxer in return. It was a real possibility. He had the responsibility to his friend to get him out of there, and did, …”
This is an amazing piece of self-rationalization. Was Mailer truly a “reporter,” as he claimed, or was he part of the action? He doesn’t seem to know the difference between observing and reporting and defending a “defile.”
He had no patience for waiting. Mailer left Lincoln Park and went to a party. Next morning, he learned that many people, including his friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, were gassed by cops. Seventeen journalists were assaulted by cops. These were real reporters who knew where the story would be and had sense enough not to desert it for a party. They knew that if something were going to happen, it would be here, and it would be worth waiting for. And they knew whatever happened here would overshadow any pale institutional news from the convention floor.
But I know how Mailer felt. Remember, I wasn’t there as a reporter. I was there because I wanted to express my opposition to a war that was killing people every day without reason. I didn’t go to Chicago to be arrested. When things got violent, we walked away. The streets were crazy. As we walked up Michigan Avenue, we could see hundreds, maybe thousands, of protesters milling around the business area. They were watched and now and then attacked by cops. Lots of cops.
This was right in the Loop, the area Mailer didn’t think worth describing.
I was not thinking of any kind of strategy. Unlike Mailer, it didn’t matter to me if some protesters were able to hold a “defile.” I was there to express my opinion through my presence alone. I had no further point to make. I sure didn’t want to be attacked by a cop. But from the looks of things, that could happen if we didn’t leave.
So Barry and I found his car, a white Chevy Nova, where he’d parked it on a side street. Like Mailer, we had something better to do. Not a party, though. Just a film. We’d been invited to go to a movie, a Jean-Luc Godard movie called “La Chinoise” that entailed a drive north on Michigan Avenue to some place known to Barry, though not to me.
Barry was driving the Nova slowly up Michigan Avenue. You couldn’t go fast because of all the people roaming the street. We were in front of the Art Institute and its two big lions, at Michigan and Adams, when we saw a big group of riot-outfitted cops on our left. They were crossing the street in front of us, so Barry stopped. Suddenly, the group split, with some cops walking in front of us and others going behind.
This is where we could have used Mailer’s boxer. Somebody with a hair-trigger temper and the will to waste cops.
All we could think to do was yell. Some of the cops were banging on the top of Barry’s car with their billy clubs. I should have mentioned we both had mustaches and sideburns. In 1968, mustaches and sideburns were the last step towards beards. Whooee — hippies, radicals, Reds, anti-war freaks, beatniks. Definitely not the kind of people Mayor Daley wanted as tourists in the Windy City.
As the cops banged on the car, Barry yelled at them. So did I.
The Nova’s doors were yanked open. We were pulled out onto the street.
To be continued.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
