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In some of the wilder fighting, the demonstrators hurled bricks, bottles and nail-studded golf balls at the police lines. During the first three days, the cops generally reacted only with tear gas and occasional beatings. But on Wednesday night, as the convention gathered to nominate Hubert Humphrey, the police had a cathartic bloodletting. Outraged when the protesters lowered a U.S. flag during a rally in Grant Park beside Lake Michigan, the cops hurled tear gas into the crowd.
The demonstrators, bent upon parading to the convention hall (Daley had refused a permit), regrouped in front of the Hilton, where they were surrounded by phalanxes of cops. Police warned the demonstrators to clear the streets, waited for five minutes for several busloads of reinforcements to arrive. And then the order was given.
Violent Orgy. Chicago cops are built like beer trucks. They flailed blindly into the crowd of some 3,000, then ranged onto the sidewalks to attack onlookers. In a pincer movement, they trapped some 150 people against the wall of the hotel. A window of the Hilton's Haymarket lounge gave way, and about ten of the targets spilled into the lounge after the shards of glass. A squad of police pursued them inside and beat them. Two bunny-clad waitresses took one look and capsized in a dead faint. By now the breakdown of police discipline was complete. Bloodied men and women tried to make their way into the hotel lobby. Upstairs on the 15th floor, aides in the McCarthy headquarters set up a makeshift hospital.
The onslaught ended half an hour later, with about 200 arrested and hundreds injured. Elsewhere, the confrontation continued through the night. Then at 5 a.m. on Friday, with the convention ended, eleven policemen swarmed up to the McCarthy headquarters. They claimed that the volunteers had tossed smoked fish, ashtrays and beer cans at the helmeted cops below. With neither evidence nor search warrant, they clubbed McCarthy campaign workers. One cop actually broke his billy club on a volunteer's skull. Daley stood by his angry defense of his cops' conduct against the "terrorists," who, he snarled, "use the foulest of language that you wouldn't hear in a brothel house."
The demonstrators had chanted the night before: "The whole world is watching!" And it was. Newspapers and television commentators from Moscow to Tokyo reacted with revulsion to the orgy of violence in America's Second City. Thanks to Mayor Daley, not only Chicago but the rest of the U.S. as well was pictured as a police state. That impression may be unfair to a handsome and hospitable city, but it will linger long after Dick Daley's reign.