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64 7 My Mouth Runneth Over Mid-August is a steamy, sweaty time in Chicago. In 1968 the city is further sizzled by the hot air of politics—the Democratic National Convention! President Lyndon Johnson says he’s not a candidate for the nomination. The war in Vietnam has worn him down. He wants out and gets out, and some ten thousand agitating activists are here to make sure he stays out. This leaves the party with poor Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who passionately wants in and has declared his intention to win the nomination, but doesn’t know how to harvest the votes. If he forsakes the president on Vietnam, he’ll be abandoned by the party establishment and much of its rank and file. If he supports the president on Vietnam, he’ll invite the damnation of a boisterous national movement set to storm the convention. We in the reporting pools can see it coming. Flames are being stoked to a blaze by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, and Black Panther Bobby Seale. These firebrands are being followed by our cameras and offered our microphones, as are Mayor Daley and the Chicago police, more than twenty-thousand strong. “As long as I am mayor of this city,” the Boss warns, “there is going to be law and order in Chicago!” Under the circumstances, not a wise thing to say, and that’s how I describe it, standing outside the amphitheatre. My commentary is that Mayor Daley is provoking the protestors, revving them up for a war in Chicago (as Mayor Rahm Emanuel will do forty-four years later when planning NATO summits in Chicago). If Daley wants to impose law and order, then impose it. Why announce it? He has to know that television will deliver his challenge to the hotheads roaming Grant Park, which will cause him, his city, and his legacy unimaginable harm—a strong way to conclude my observation. The mayor is acting unwisely in other ways: refusing the protestors a permit to parade near the amphitheatre, showing off his police in boots and helmets, armed with billy clubs and tear gas. His plain-clothed cops on the convention M Y M O U T H R U N N E T H O V E R 65 floor are roughing up television reporters, including Dan Rather, Ed Bradley, and Mike Wallace. And there’s his bluster, all being broadcast by television into millions of homes. The whole world is watching. How can the usually astute Mayor Daley be so utterly blind to the realities of mass communication and the potential consequences of being portrayed as a bully? His biggest blunder is his uncontrolled, red-faced outburst erupting like a volcano from the Illinois delegation seated directly in front of the podium in the amphitheatre. He’s listening to US senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut lecturing him on the chaos outside the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, and in Grant Park and Lincoln Park. “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” snarls Ribicoff. “Fuck you, you lousy motherfucker,” Daley snarls back. Or, that’s what some delegates say he snarled. And that’s what it looks like on television. Other delegates , closer to the mayor, including his son (the future mayor) and his pack of politicians, insist he did not snarl “fucker,” but “faker.” The mayor is not near a microphone, and the media’s subsequent, repeated efforts to read his lips yield no proof. Watching him on tape gets us nowhere. But news about it spreads, and the bottom line is that after three terms, thirteen years in office, he ought to know better than to snarl anything that anybody can hear. How can Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, brilliant strategist and kingmaker of the Democratic Party, wizard of local and national politics, do things or say something, or appear to say something, so harmful to himself? That’s not an unfair question, and I’m not the only reporter asking it. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley of NBC are asking it. So is CBS’s Walter Cronkite and the columnists and editorial pages of the most-read, most influential newspapers. Was it “fucker” or “faker”? It depends on what you know about the mayor. I don’t say this on the air (even with bleeps), but I believe it was “fucker,” for two reasons—one, he’s fluent in that particular language; and two, he is so angry he can’t...

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