Nation: CHICAGO EXAMINED: ANATOMY OF A POLICE RIOT'

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The report amply supports a fact long known to lawyers: witnesses of the same event seldom describe it the same way. A Grant Park clash between police and demonstrators began when half a dozen burly young men lowered the American flag and hoisted another object to the top of the pole. "Object" is used advisedly: though it was seen by hundreds of people and police and examined on film by the Walker staff, no one can yet say what it was. It has been described as a "black flag of anarchy," a "red flag" and a "Viet Cong flag." Some witnesses state it was a suit of red underwear or a red armband or a rag. On films of the incident, it appears to be "a knotted red cloth or a girl's bright red slip." Police, after a hard fight, pulled down the object, but not even the cops know what it was or what happened to it.

The report makes it very evident that the well-known "fog of war" hung heavily over Chicago. The violent struggle in front of the Hilton Hotel, which was televised around the world, apparently resulted from lack of communications.

While police were pushing the crowd against the hotel front, another body of police in a side street, alerted by a radio call of "policeman in trouble," charged into the flank of the already jam-packed crowd, ultimately forcing a score of people through a plate-glass window.

Provocative Obscenity. Words had such great force in the Chicago confrontation that the report must be the first in U.S. Government history to print "the actual obscenities used by the participants—demonstrators and police alike." The Walker study explains that the "extremely obscene language was a contributing factor to the violence" and "its frequency and intensity were such that to omit it would inevitably understate the effect it had." Since the report is otherwise couched largely in the turgid prose common to bureaucracy, the insertion of so many pungent Anglo-Saxon expletives relating to or synonymous with copulation creates a surrealistic effect.

Police are not normally apt to be shocked by four-letter words. But, as in the Columbia University uprising last spring, they were outraged to see obscenities printed on placards or hear them shouted by apparently well-educated, middle-class young men and women. The barrage of epithets helped convince some policemen that their opponents were scarcely human—and they all too often shed their own humanity. Witnesses frequently noted that if a demonstrator being chased by police got away, the cops would simply club whoever else was handy. A Chicago doctor drove up to one officer to report that protesters were dumping trash baskets into the street. The officer snapped: "Listen, you goddam — —, get this — car out of here." When the doctor tried to explain, the cop shouted: "Listen, you son of a bitch, didn't you hear me the first time?" and pounded a dent in the doctor's car with his nightstick.