From "Introduction to Confrontation," page 1

Past fright, past exhilaration, past terror, past awe, past exhaustion, everything that happened that week in Chicago had a rightness about it. It came and went so fast and hard that we who shared and witnessed may lose that sense of it.

Every night when I went to sleep, I saw lines and lines of sky blue helmets and sky blue shirts, and, later in the week, Guardsmen in fatigue uniforms with gas masks and M-1s at the ready. They were just standing there in my head, and they turned slowly and looked at me, facing me as I went to sleep. They were not clubbing, not charging, not tear-gassing, not wildly beating anyone, not jerking the wounded out of hospitals and shoving them into paddy wagons, not breaking into private homes and dragging kids into the street for beating. They were just standing there, blocking the startling and vivid rush of imagery that begins when the waking mind lets go and I am not yet fully asleep.

From "Sunday: Overthrow," pages 82-83

He had really been working the Park, and now his taunts were digging home. Bravery. He was the sort of man who would destroy himself before your eyes, in order to make some bizarre point known only to the littlest angel in Heaven.

He lost his balance, dancing to the drums, and fell into the Lagoon, and then swam out to the island, where he taunted the Yippies about starting the revolution on the island and staying in the Park by holding the island against the cops. None of these groups in the Park at this point were much aware of each other. The caucusing group with a portable speaker was on the eastern slope of the Park under trees. They discussed different alternatives all night long, and could agree on nothing except that of doing your own thing. There were those who advocated simple avoidance of suicidal conflict; those who advocated resistance and stay in the Park; those who advocated hitting the streets in demonstrations; and those who advocated dispersal in small groups, a fancy concept of retreat that we discussed earlier, sanctified because it was borrowed from North Vietnam. None of these tactics and yet all of them in fresh and spontaneous combination finally happened. One boy in the middle of the caucusing group was yelling, "Fuck the marshals! Up the marshals! Bullshit!" He meant the "leaders" were too cautious! A few agreed with him. Soon he and the Chicago actor were going to meet. No decision was made and at a quarter to eleven the caucusing group and everyone else began drifting out of the Park the way they had drifted out every night.

Then in the group on the central sidewalk, the drums stopped, then began again. There were cries of "Stay in the Park!" I was about 50 yards away. Suddenly a floodlight was turned on, a lane of light springing through the trees and then swinging as the man holding the light walked backwards into the Park. At first, people thought it was a police light, and there was a static moment of being drawn toward it then away from it. Without that media light nobody would have known what was happening. The cameras were hungry for news, and they could even help the news to happen. In the lane of light, a tall boy was astride the shoulders of a friend, with the Viet Cong flag raised high and striding beside him on the ground was the Chicago actor, and they were chanting, "Stay in the Park! Parks belong to people!" The actor was crying, "Revolution, now!" They turned the drifting retreat back into the Park and the people massed by the park building near the baseball diamond. At this point, the leaders and the Mobe marshals, whom the Chicago cops in their wisdom arrested and beat in vans and stations, began yelling, "This is suicide! Suicide!" They were trying to pull the boy, who later told me he was only fourteen, down off the shoulders of his friend, and they were trying to pull down the Viet Cong flag, and they were yelling to get back to Clark Street, while people keeping track of time, watching their wrist watches in the media light, were saying it was five minutes to eleven; and the crowd, in its fear of the cops at curfew, responded to the leaders and began heading back to Clark Street. Now the boy with the Viet Cong flag, seeing what was happening, turned the cry of back to the streets into the cry of "Onto the streets! Onto the streets!" And he hit the ground running with the flag.

From "Wednesday: War," pages 185-186

The marchers came over this bridge, where exit was granted, with eyes stinging, coughing; some doubled up in nauseous agony, and not knowing what would happen next, in hopelessness and up-for-grabs confusion. Then--in an accident that could not have been timed better by God--down there, stopped at the traffic lights at Jackson Boulevard and Michigan, were three pitiful mule-drawn wagons of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference Poor People’s March. It was a token march, but of course it had a permit and the impression was that it was going to the Amphitheatre. The situation was recognized and the cry went up. The stream of people coming across the bridge straightened out and they ran cheering down to mass behind the mule-drawn wagons. SCLC blacks, including the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, stood on the wagons and waved for the demonstrators to come on, and both kids and SCLC blacks were yelling, "Join us! Join us!" and the people coming off the bridge suddenly were not feeling the tear-gas so much. The mules shied and reared with all the noise and excitement, but they were calmed and the SCLC leaders welcomed the marchers. It is said that the SCLC wagon-train had a permit to march around the Hilton and down Michigan, but not to the Amphitheatre. I was standing beside the lead wagon, and that was not the impression derived from the quick conferences that occurred between the kids with the portable speaker and the SCLC leaders. You join our march, we’ll join yours, brother, brother, brother, brother. The feeling of everyone was that they were now participants in a march with a permit that could not be denied.

In a few minutes, the three mule-drawn wagons were at the head of thousands moving down Michigan toward the Hilton, chanting with incredible energy, "Dump the Hump," "Peace, now," convinced that they were going all the way to the Amphitheatre. McCarthy workers, wearing black armbands in mourning for the defeated peace plank, were coming off the sidewalks to join the march. And, because this march had a permit, the cops were leading it.

From "Thursday: Exile," pages 262-265

At 18^th and Michigan, the "assassins" were lining up to be arrested. On the northwest corner of the intersection, people were afraid they would not know the moment when Gregory was arrested on the other side of the street. Then the kids standing on the first-floor windowsills began to tell people below what was happening. Finally, at last, Gregory was arrested, and all over the crowded intersection men held cameras at arm’s length above their heads, aiming at what they hoped was the point of arrest, to take a picture of what they could not see with their eyes. Gregory was guided to a police van. Then a man in a wheelchair went through the hole in the Guard line, and was lifted by the police, chair and all, into the van. The arrests continued until 79 delegates and notables were removed; then the arrests stopped. It is said that the arrests stopped because there was no more room in the vans. There were several of the huge vans, and one of them looked capable of containing 79 people by itself. The police were noted for packing paddy-wagons with arrested people, and there were other ways to continue arrests all night long. But imagine what a statement it would be to the world if 3,000 or 4,000 people were arrested that night.

No, there was a more efficient and less visible way to handle the mass of the demonstrators once the notables were safely out of the way. Suddenly the Guardsmen facing us were wearing gas masks, and I whipped out my trusty wet handkerchief tying it across my face, Lone Ranger style. The crowd rumbled back and forth nervously, but with readiness, and apparently the readiness impressed the Guard Officers; they countermanded the order for gas. On the east side of the street demonstrators who realized they were not going to be honored with arrest and that they could not "walk to Dick’s house"--as they put it - pressed sharply against the Guard line, trying to break through it. They were beaten back by clubbing with rifle butts. Then the mass of marchers, further north of the intersection were caught by the ripple of awareness that the arrests had stopped and they surged forward, crying "Take us, too!" Oh pitiful plea! No, they would not be permitted such an easy exit and entrance to glory. The marchers were assassins in the imaginations of some and cattle to others, and we were going to get an inkling of what we would have to do to begin being human. The ex-McCarthy workers - refugees from the 15^th floor of the Hilton - were confronted with a theater that was changing, swiftly, toward educational cruelty.

War Games

The Guard was shifting. Energy everywhere was rising. "They’re not going to make me wait here all night" a demonstrator said, and picked up a bottle to throw it at the Guard. A fellow demonstrator grabbed his arm from behind and stopped him. Demonstrators were pushing at the Guardsmen and cursing them, in rage and frustration.

Then the Guardsmen put on their gas masks again. I looked across the street and saw that one Guardsman, with the converted flame-thrower tanks on his back, was already hosing gas along the east sidewalk. The cameramen on top of the media trucks were now wearing gas masks, bless them. But things were not moving fast enough to suit the demonstrators on the west sidewalk by the vacant lot. To my eye, the final order for gas on this side coincided with the shower of rocks, pieces of board, bottles, firecrackers that these students lofted upon the Guard. The Guard was already gassing, the students only made sure that the scale and intensity would be sufficient for the game. The stubby tear-gas guns went pomp, pomp, and the canisters sailed up turning end over end in the air, falling around us, spewing out stuff that was the strongest tear-gas I’d yet encountered. Day by day it seemed to get stronger. The Jiminy Crickets, with the converted flamethrowers, poured gas into the street. The Guardsmen began moving forward in formation, bayonets on their rifles. The hardest thing for some liberal minds to understand, at their distance, is that provocation is a human necessity in the face of the humiliation of being utterly blocked. What were the demonstrators to do: Sit there all night, with no effect? Bore the media? Bore everyone? Why, the nation itself is at stake. Personal danger is much to be preferred. A man without love of country is, as the politicians observe, nothing. Ask not what you can do for your country, but what you can make your country do to you.

Once again The Walker Report [Rights In Conflict], at a trigger point in the action, behaves oddly: "A group of 100 came from the west on 18^th Street and began pushing the Guards, who were ordered to push them west into an alley. Objects were being thrown from the rooftops and windows of buildings. Bottles were thrown at the Guard lines by demonstrators. Firecrackers were tossed. The glaring lights of the TV vans heightened the tumult. Marchers as far back as 14^th Street were now in the street, trying to find out what was happening ahead. The Guardsmen put on gas masks and CS was hurled into the crowd." The Walker Report description at this point is a mixture of a few facts, a few fantasies on somebody’s part, an exaggeration and a misplacement of one small action in both space and time, and the misplacement of another action in time sequence, giving a totally false impression.