Kingdom of Fear (12 page)

The sheriff panicked at that point and blew Bromley’s cover by instructing the city cops to give his illegal weapon back to him because he was a “federal agent.” This was done. But instead of leaving town, Bromley came back to our headquarters—unaware that a friendly city cop had already tipped us off—and hung around offering to run the mimeograph machine or anything else we needed done. Meanwhile,
we were trying to compel the assistant D.A. to have the bastard arrested on charges ranging from felony conspiracy to threatening the life of a political candidate to carrying an illegal weapon—and offering to wreak violence on innocent people—but the assistant D.A. refused to act, denying all knowledge of the man or his motives, until the sheriff unexpectedly admitted that Bromley was actually working for him.

Meanwhile, Bromley had once again lost his sawed-off shotgun—this time to a city cop who went out to his motel room at the Applejack Inn to seize the weapon for the second time in 36 hours, after a desk clerk we’d assigned to get a photo of Bromley called us to say that one of the maids had found a “vicious-looking gun” in his room. . . . But even then the D.A.’s office refused to move, not even to pick up the shotgun again. So we had to send a cop out on our own—Rick Crabtree, a dropout English major from Columbia—and even after Crabtree seized the weapon, the D.A.’s office snarled petulantly at our demands that Bromley be picked up and booked. He’d returned to the Applejack with a girl, they said, and they didn’t want to disturb him until morning.

This was too much for the frustrated crew of Left-bikers, Black Belts, White Panthers, and assorted local heavies who’d been calling for open season on Bromley ever since he showed up. They wanted to soak him down with Mace, then beat him to jelly with baseball bats . . . and they didn’t give a flying fuck if he was a federal agent or not. I was still on the phone with the assistant D.A. when I noticed the room emptying around me. “We’re on our way to the Applejack,” somebody yelled from the doorway. “You can tell that chickenshit pig of a district attorney that we decided to make a citizen’s arrest . . . and we’ll dump his fink at the jail in about thirty minutes, in a plastic bag.”

I translated this to the D.A. . . . and thirty minutes later Bromley was moving down the highway in a rented car. He left so fast that we couldn’t even get a good snapshot of him, so the next morning we called the “White Panther photo agency” in Denver, and they assigned a young, harmless-looking Black Belt to go out to Bromley’s suburban home with a camera. Paul Davidson got the picture we needed by knocking on the agent’s door and saying that he was so impressed with the wonderful chopper outside that he just had to get a shot of it—along with the proud owner. So Bromley—ever alert—posed for the
photo, which ran a day later in the
Aspen Times
along with a detailed exposé of his brief but hyperactive flirtation with the local Freak Power movement. We sent Bromley a copy of the published photo/story . . . and he responded almost instantly by mailing me a threatening letter and another, very personal, photo of himself that he said was a hell of a lot better than the one our “funny little photographer” had conned him out of. Even the CBI man was stunned at this evidence of total lunacy on the part of a veteran undercover agent. “This is hard to believe,” he kept saying. “He actually signed his name: He even signed the photograph! How could they hire a person like this?”

How indeed?

(Paul Harris)

. . .

The story began in 1968, when Random House gave me $5,000 and my editor there said, “Go out and write about ’The Death of the American Dream.’” I had agreed without thinking, because all I really cared about, back then, was the money. And along with the $5K in front money came a $7,500 “expenses budget”—against royalties, which meant I’d be paying my own expenses, but I didn’t give a fuck about that either. It was a nice gig to get into: Random House had agreed, more or less, to finance my education. I could go just about anywhere I wanted to just as long as I could somehow tie it in with “The Death of the American Dream.”

It looked easy, a straight-out boondoggle, and for a long time I treated it that way. It was like being given a credit card that you eventually have to pay off, but not now. I remember thinking that Jim Silberman, the editor, was not only crazy but severely irresponsible. Why else would he make that kind of deal?

I went a few places for reasons that I can’t even recall now, and then I went to Chicago in August of 1968, on my Random House tab with a packet of the finest, blue-chip press credentials—issued by the Democratic National Committee—for the purpose of covering the Convention.

I had no real reason for going—not even a magazine assignment; I just wanted to
be there
and get the feel of things. The town was so full of journalists that I felt like a tourist . . . and the fact that I had heavier credentials than most of the working writers & reporters I met left me vaguely embarrassed. But it never occurred to me to seek an assignment—although if anybody had asked me, I’d have done the whole story for nothing.

Now, years later, I still have trouble when I think about Chicago. That week at the Convention changed everything I’d ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it. I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally Hysteria—which lasted for nearly a month. Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why.

I wasn’t beaten; I spent no time in jail. But neither of these things would have had much effect on me, anyway. It takes a real expert (or experts) to beat a person badly without putting him into a state of
shock that makes the beating meaningless until later . . . and getting dragged into jail with a bunch of friends is more a strange high than a trauma; indeed, there is something vaguely dishonorable in having lived through the Sixties without having spent time in jail.

Chicago was the end of the Sixties, for me. I remember going back to my room at the Blackstone, across the street from the Hilton, and sitting cross-legged on my bed for hours at a time. Trembling, unable to make any notes, staring at the TV set while my head kept whirling out of focus from the things I’d seen happen all around me . . . and I could watch it all happening again, on TV; see myself running in stark terror across Michigan Drive, on camera, always two steps ahead of the nearest club-swinging cop and knowing that at any instant my lungs would be shredded by some bullet that would hit me before I could even hear the shot fired.

I was standing at the corner of Michigan and Balboa on Wednesday night when the cops attacked . . . and I remember thinking: No. This can’t be happening. I flattened myself back against a wall of the Black-stone and fished a motorcycle helmet out of my friendly blue L.L. Bean kit bag . . . and also the yellow ski goggles, thinking there would probably be Mace, or at least gas . . . but that was the only time they didn’t use any.

On Wednesday evening they used clubs, and it was a king-hell bitch of a show. I stood against the wall, trying to put my helmet on while people ran past me like a cattle stampede. The ones who weren’t screaming were bleeding, and some were being dragged. I have never been caught in an earthquake, but I’m sure the feeling would be just about the same. Total panic and disbelief—with no escape. The first wave of cops came down Balboa at a trot and hit the crowd in the form of a flying wedge, scattering people in all directions like fire on an anthill . . . but no matter which way they ran, there were more cops. The second wave came across Grant Park like a big threshing machine, a wave of long black truncheons meeting people fleeing hysterically from the big bash at the intersection.

Others tried to flee down Balboa, toward State Street, but there was no escape in that direction, either—just another wave of cops closing off the whole street in a nicely planned pincer movement and beating the mortal shit out of anybody they could reach. The protesters tried
to hold their lines, calling back and forth to one another as they ran away: “Stay together! Stay together!”

I found myself in the middle of the pincers, with no place to run except back into the Blackstone. But the two cops at the door refused to let me in. They were holding their clubs out in front of them with both hands, keeping everybody away from the door.

By this time I could see people getting brutalized within six feet of me on both sides. It was only a matter of seconds before I went under . . . so I finally just ran between the truncheons, screaming, “I live here, goddamnit! I’m paying fifty dollars a day!” By the time they whacked me against the door I was out of range of what was happening on the sidewalk . . . and by some kind of wild accidental luck I happened to have my room key in my pocket. Normally I would have left it at the desk before going out, but on this tense night I forgot, and that key was salvation—that, and the mad righteousness that must have vibrated like the screeching of Jesus in everything I said. Because I
did
live there. I was a goddamn
paying guest!
And there was never any doubt in my mind that the stinking blue-uniformed punks had no RIGHT to keep me out.

I believed that, and I was big enough to neutralize one of the truncheons long enough to plunge into the lobby . . . and it was not until several days or even weeks later that I understood that those cops had actually
planned
to have me beaten. Not me, personally, but Me as a member of “The Enemy,” that crowd of “outside agitators” made up of people who had come to Chicago on some mission that the cops couldn’t grasp except in fear and hatred.

This is what caused me to tremble when I finally sat down behind the locked & chained door of my hotel room. It was not a fear of being beaten or jailed, but the slow-rising shock of suddenly understanding that it was no longer a matter of Explaining my Position. These bastards knew my position, and they wanted to beat me anyway. They didn’t give a fuck if the Democratic National Committee had issued me special press credentials; it made no difference to them that I’d come to Chicago as a paying guest—at viciously inflated rates—with no intention of causing the slightest kind of trouble for anybody.

That was the point. My very innocence made me guilty—or at least a potential troublemaker in the eyes of the rotten sold-out scumbags
who were running that Convention: Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, Lyndon Baines Johnson, then President of the United States. These pigs didn’t care what was Right. All they knew was what they wanted, and they were powerful enough to break anybody who even thought about getting in their way.

Right here, before I forget, I want to make what I think is a critical point about the whole protest action of the 1960s. It seems to me that the underlying assumption of any public protest—any public disagreement with the government, “the system,” or “the establishment,” by any name—is that the men in charge of whatever you’re protesting against are actually listening, whether they later admit it or not, and that if you run your protest Right, it will likely make a difference. Norman Mailer made this point a long time ago when he said that the election of JFK gave him a sense, for the first time in his life, that he could actually communicate with the White House. Even with people like Johnson and Mac Bundy—or even Pat Brown or Bull Connor—the unspoken rationale behind all those heavy public protests was that our noise was getting through and that somebody in power was listening and hearing and at least weighing our protest against their own political realities . . . even if these people refused to talk to us. So in the end the very act of public protest, even violent protest, was essentially optimistic and actually a demonstration of faith (mainly subconscious, I think) in the father figures who had the power to change things—once they could be made to see the light of reason, or even political reality.

This is what the bastards never understood—that the “Movement” was essentially an expression of deep faith in the American Dream: that the people they were “fighting” were not the cruel and cynical beasts they seemed to be, and that in fact they were just a bunch of men like everybody’s crusty middle-class fathers who only needed to be shaken a bit, jolted out of their bad habits and away from their lazy, short-term, profit-oriented life stances . . . and that once they understood, they would surely do the right thing.

A Willingness to Argue, however violently, implies a faith of some basic kind in the antagonist, an assumption that he is still open to argument and reason and, if all else fails, then finely orchestrated persuasion in the form of political embarrassment. The 1960s were full of
examples of good, powerful men changing their minds on heavy issues: John Kennedy on Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam, Gene McCarthy on “working behind the scenes and within the Senate Club,” Robert F. Kennedy on grass and long hair and what eventually came to be Freak Power, Ted Kennedy on Francis X. Morrissey, and Senator Sam Ervin on wiretaps and preventive detention.

Anyway, the general political drift of the 1960s was one of the Good Guys winning, slowly but surely (and even clumsily sometimes), over the Bad Guys . . . and the highest example of this was Johnson’s incredible abdication on April Fool’s Day of 1968. So nobody was ready for what began to happen that summer: first in Chicago, when Johnson ran his Convention like a replay of the Reichstag fire . . . and then with Agnew and Nixon and Mitchell coming into power so full of congenital hostility and so completely deaf to everything we’d been talking about for ten years that it took a while to realize that there was simply no point in yelling at the fuckers. They were born deaf and stupid.