The Nix(187)

27


OLD CRONKITE LISTING to his right, leaning on his desk in a manner that plays on TV as serious contemplation and the strong-willed constitution of a man whose job it is to deliver bad news to the country, leaning like this and cocking his head and staring into the camera with a pained look on his face, a kind of father’s this-is-going-to-hurt-me-more-than-it’s-going-to-hurt-you look, and saying, “The Democratic convention is about to begin”—then a long dramatic pause here for this next part to really sink in—“in a police state.”

Then adding “There just doesn’t seem to be any other way to say it” for the benefit of his producers, who he can imagine are right now shaking their heads in the control van at his blatant editorializing, again.

But something needs to be said for the benefit of the viewers who are at home and plainly not getting it. The CBS switchboard has been going nuts all day. The most calls they’d gotten since King was shot. Well sure, Cronkite said, people are mad, the police are out of control.

Yes, people are mad, his producers told him, but not mad at the police. They’re mad at the kids, they said. They’re blaming the kids. They’re saying the kids are getting what they deserve.

And it’s true that certain protestors are not entirely, let’s say, easy to like. They try to offend your sensibilities. They try to push your buttons. They are unkempt, unclean. But they are only a tiny part of the mass gathered right now outside the Hilton. Most of the kids out there look like normal kids, anybody’s kids. Maybe they’d gotten themselves into something they didn’t understand, swept up in something larger. But they aren’t criminals. They aren’t deviants. They aren’t radicals or hippies. They probably just don’t want to be drafted. They are probably just sincerely against the Vietnam War. And, by the way, who isn’t these days?

But it turns out that for every poor kid shown getting his head drubbed by a nightstick, CBS gets ten phone calls in support of the cop who held the stick. Reporters got gassed in the street and then came back to HQ to find a telegram from a thousand miles away saying the reporters didn’t understand what was really happening in Chicago. As soon as he heard this, old Cronkite knew he’d failed. They’d been covering the radicals and the hippies so much that now his viewers couldn’t see past them. The gray areas had ceased to exist. And old Cronkite had two thoughts about this. First, anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is suffering a great delusion. And second, Nixon is definitely going to win this thing.





28


IT IS BAD PLANNING on the part of the police to demand that protestors leave the park but give them no obvious way to do so. It is no longer legal to assemble in the park, but it is also illegal to cross a police barricade, and the park is barricaded on all sides. So it’s your classic double bind. Actually, the only place not barricaded is a spot on the eastern edge of the park, by the lake, exactly where the tear gas landed, stupidly. So here they come, the protestors, because they have no other choice; there’s nowhere else to go. The first of them flow onto Michigan Avenue and into the walls of the Conrad Hilton like runaway waves. They splash onto the concrete and brick and they’re pinned there as the police recognize that something has shifted in the rhetoric of the day. The stakes have changed. The protestors—with their numbers and their new desperation—now have the upper hand. And so the police push back, crush them into the walls of the hotel, and swing away.

Sebastian and Faye are in there somewhere. He’s squeezing her hand so hard it hurts, but she doesn’t dare let go. She feels herself caught in this moving human river and pressed at all sides and sometimes even lifted off her feet for a moment and carried, a sensation like swimming or floating, before being dropped again, and the thing she’s thinking about most right now is keeping her balance, staying on her feet, because these people are panicked and this is what ten thousand panicked people look like: like wild animals, huge and insensate. If she falls she’ll be trampled. The terror she feels about this goes way beyond terror and into a kind of calm clarity. This is life or death. She squeezes Sebastian’s hand harder.

People run with handkerchiefs on their faces, or with their shirts wrapped around their mouths. They cannot stand the gas. They cannot stay in the park. And yet it’s becoming clear to them now that this was a mistake too, going this way, because as they get closer to the safety of the dark city beyond Michigan Avenue, the spaces they can fill are getting smaller and smaller. They are being funneled by heavy equipment and fencing and barbed wire and lines of cops and National Guardsmen thirty deep. And Sebastian tries to get to the Hilton’s front doors but the crowd is too thick, the current too strong, and so they end up off target, carried to the side of the building instead, and up against the plate-glass windows of the Haymarket Bar.

That’s where Officer Brown sees them.

He’s been watching the crowd, looking for Alice. He’s standing atop the back bumper of a U.S. Army troop carrier, several feet above everyone else, looking at the crowd, the baby-blue helmets of the Chicago PD, en masse, like a colony of agitated poisonous mushrooms, it looks like, from up here. And then suddenly a face pops out of the crowd, over by the bar, a woman’s face, and he feels a surge of optimism that it’s Alice, because it’s the first time all day he’s had any flash of familiarity, and the film that’s been running in his head—that Alice sees him clubbing hippies and thus recognizes him for the brutal man she’s always wanted him to be—starts running again until the face resolves itself and he realizes with crashing disappointment that it’s not Alice he’s seeing, it’s Faye.