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Ironic Fate. Most of the protest leaders stayed in the background. Mobilization Chairman David Tyre Dellinger, 53, the shy editor-publisher of Liberation, who led last fall's Pentagon March, studiously avoided the main confrontation before the Hilton. His chief aide, Tom Hayden, 28, a New Left author who visited Hanoi three years ago, was so closely tailed by plainclothesmen that he finally donned a yippie-style wig to escape their attentions. Nonetheless, he was arrested. Rennie Davis, 28, the clean-cut son of a Truman Administration economic adviser, took a more active part as one of the Chicago organizers: his aim, he said, was "to force the police state to become more and more visible, yet somehow survive in it." At Grant Park on Wednesday afternoon, he both succeeded and failed. The police action against the demonstrators triggered the Hilton march, but Rennie—despite his short hair, scholarly spectacles and button-down collar—was literally busted, and later took nine stitches in his split scalp. Yippie Guru Abbie Hoffman, 32, cadged dinner from his four police tails, yipped up a storm in Lincoln Park (where he passed out phone numbers of cops and city officials for telephonic harassment), and was ultimately arrested for wearing a four-letter word on his forehead.
The most ironic fate of all befell Brillo-bearded Jerry Rubin, 30, a former Berkeley free-speecher and now a yippie leader. To protect himself from police strong-arm tactics, Rubin hired a husky, sledge-fisted Chicagoan known as "Big Bob Lavin," whose beard and bellicosity were matched by his ability at bottle-throwing in confrontations with the cops. Big Bob was gassed by the police, fought them valiantly, but was finally clubbed into submission—carrying with him into jail Rubin's tactical diary. Only then was it revealed that Big Bob was really an undercover cop, Robert Pierson, 35. Chicago police pointed ominously to such entries in Rubin's diary as a hand-drawn map of the Hilton Hotel area and a reflection that "we really should attend McCarthy rallies and recruit pro-McCarthys for our marches. This lends us the respectability of a pro-establishment group." Big Bob's duplicity did not faze Rubin, who said, when released on $2,500 bail: "Well, at least he was a good bodyguard."
Wider Division? Chicago was not the end of the road for the militants. Scott Lash, 22, a psychology dropout from the University of Michigan and a McCarthy worker, observed that the Chicago scene left most of the marchers more frustrated and embittered. Scuffing his hiking boots and twiddling his granny glasses, Lash lamented at week's end: "There's going to be a wider division in the country than ever. There's going to be more violence, both by whites and blacks, and I'm willing to be part of it. I wouldn't have thought this before the convention."