Nation: CHICAGO EXAMINED: ANATOMY OF A POLICE RIOT'

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Who were the enemy? The report finds that they were a very mixed bag, running the gamut from pacifists, assorted peace groups, Communists, socialists, anarchists and New Left students, all the way to the yippies, who seem to have been the most baffling to Chicago authorities. The yippies appeared to be, in Norman Mailer's approving term, largely "existential," meaning that they lacked any clear-cut ideology or program. Yippies accept no leaders, not even their own, and Daley and his men could scarcely make much sense of yippie manifestos like that of Abbie Hoffman, who saw the movement as "new phenomena, a new thing on the American scene. Why? That's our question. Our slogan is Why? You know as long as we can make up a story about it that's exciting, mystical, magical, you have to accuse us of going to Chicago to perform magic."

The demonstrators had high hopes of reinforcing their ranks with the disappointed young who had followed Senator Eugene McCarthy—but McCarthy told his followers to stay away. They also hoped for a united front with the nation's black dissidents, but they were markedly unsuccessful in the Chicago slums, where many black organizations urged their members to "stay cool" and uninvolved. Several leaders of such gangs as the Blackstone Rangers left Chicago during convention week. But fear of a united front kept the Chicago police on edge.

Dangers Real and Rumored. The police found foes on every side, from naive demonstrators to wiseacre news men. The cops claimed that the bright TV lights blinded them and charged that the ubiquitous peering cameras emboldened demonstrators. Cameramen and reporters believed that the cops deliberately slugged them and wrecked their equipment in an effort to thwart coverage of police brutality. Fully 60 of the 300 newsmen assigned to cover Chicago's streets and parks "were involved in incidents resulting in injury to themselves, damage to their equipment, or their arrest."

The police themselves were prone to rumors, sometimes spread by their own intelligence reports. Before clearing Lincoln Park on Tuesday night, the cops heard that the demonstrators were armed with sharpened spears and at least one shotgun, and that they had strung piano wire from tree to tree at neck height in order to discourage the advancing police. None of these threats materialized, but they must have aggravated the officers' tense mood as they moved to the attack.

Sometimes the demonstrators were armed by inadvertence—as when sanitation men, approached by hippies who offered to help clean up Grant Park, innocently gave them sticks with pointed nails to skewer wastepaper. Some of these sticks were later used as weapons. The most severe police injuries seem to have resulted from accidental ambush. At least a dozen assaults occurred when demonstrators, desperately fleeing a line of advancing police, ducked down one street and up another and unexpectedly encountered either a solitary policeman or a lone squad car.