Investigations: Refighting Chicago

Like Gettysburg, El Alamein and other classic engagements, the Battle of Chicago seems destined to be endlessly refought. Unlike most textbook conflicts, however, no one can agree upon who won, let alone who the aggressors were or whether the battle need ever have occurred at all. When the President's commission on violence opened hearings in Washington last week, the nation's two top law officers, Attorney General Ramsey Clark and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, were firing from opposing sides.

Clark, of course, is technically Hoover's superior at the Justice Department. But after 44 years in charge of the FBI, Hoover is a law unto himself. For a man with experience in police work, he took an extraordinarily simplistic line about the Chicago cops' performance during the Democratic National Convention. "The police and the National Guard were faced with vicious attacking mobs who gave them no alternative but to use force to prevent these mobs from accomplishing their destructive purposes," Hoover told the commission.

Although he never mentioned Chicago directly, Clark gave a considerably cooler perspective. "Experience to date shows that such crowds [of demonstrators] can be controlled without denying rights of speech and assembly," he said. "Above all, such crowds can be controlled without excessive force and violence by police. Of all violence, police violence in excess of authority is the most dangerous. For who will protect the public when the police violate the law?"

Artful Whitewash. Public opinion, nonetheless, continued overwhelmingly to support Hoover's view, which in turn reflected precisely the thoughts of Chi cago Mayor Richard Daley. The Mayor last week kept up his own counterbarrage to the "distortions" of the news media by broadcasting an hour-long documentary over 150 television sta tions throughout the U.S.

Entitled "What Trees Do They Plant?" (meaning: "What constructive plans do protesters propose for the society of the future?"), the Daley defense was produced by Henry Ushijima, a California-born filmmaker who for five years has been paid by Chicago to turn out short documentaries celebrating the city. Actually, "Trees" was a surprisingly artful whitewash. In his handling of English, Daley is the Casey Stengel of American politics; he was wise enough to limit his physical participation in the film to two brief appearances. Ushijima waded through miles of television footage made during the convention week and spliced to gether scenes of New Leftist gatherings, of a police commander exhibiting the demonstrators' array of weapons, and of cops injured in the confrontation.

The documentary repeated details of the supposedly dangerous plots that hippies, yippies and "terrorists" were hatching to take over Chicago. The odd thing is that the Chicago police took so many of the demonstrators' boasts seriously. Even now, they fail to understand that if an army of 10,000 genuinely violent "revolutionaries" had descended on the city, many policemen and bystanders would have been killed.