The Drifters (38 page)

She realized that this possibility was closed. On her twenty-first birthday she would have control of the allowance; until then she was a minor, subject to her father’s supervision, and it was understood within the family that she would accept this. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘will you give me five hundred dollars?’

‘Yes,’ Cole said. He was a Nixon man himself and disliked Senator McCarthy almost as much as he did Governor Rockefeller, but like many parents, he sensed the good that might result from his daughter’s commitment to ideas, misdirected though they might be at the moment. He gave her the money, and with it she went to Chicago with her committee of enthusiasts.

Her experience there was the kind of thing that Dante drew upon in his later years when reflecting upon his
travels out of Florence. She spent her money to rent rooms at the Hilton Hotel on the floor above the McCarthy headquarters, and here she provided sleeping quarters for the college students who had worked with her in New Hampshire, Wisconsin and California. They were an attractive lot, clean in appearance and dedicated in manner. With the collapse of the Teddy Kennedy balloon on the Democratic side and the nomination of Richard Nixon on the Republican, it seemed so apparent to the McCarthy people that their man had to be nominated in order to provide the voters with a choice, that young people like Gretchen convinced themselves McCarthy stood a real chance of winning the nomination and, after that, the Presidency.

‘Look at it straight,’ a law student from Duke University reasoned. Gretchen liked him better than the others because he not only had a keen mind but also a guitar on which he played Kentucky versions of the ballads she had learned from the English sources. He had grown up in eastern Tennessee and had won a scholarship to Davidson, then a graduate grant from Duke law school. He seemed the best type of southerner, prudent yet excitable when fine ideas were in the air. ‘Nixon will be a formidable opponent. He’s a top campaigner, but he’s stuck with the Johnson attitude on Vietnam and will never get us out. The voters will see this, and what they’ll want is a clear-cut choice, and the only one with guts enough to present this is McCarthy.’

On the Friday and Saturday prior to the convention, the McCarthy people were filled with hope, but when the committee reports started coming out and the disposition of the delegates became clear, a sense of panic began to infect the rooms occupied by the college students, and when the parade of violence, indifference and old-line political thuggery filled the screens of the rented television sets, the young people were assailed by a feeling of tragic disbelief. It couldn’t happen … the gallant senator who had led the fight for more than a year … he couldn’t be coldly thrust aside … the votes he had won in Pennsylvania couldn’t be stolen from him.

On Wednesday night, blocked off from the convention by cordons of police and impotent to accomplish anything in a cause that was swirling around in eddies like the refuse in a toilet bowl, Gretchen and the law student from Duke
left their hotel and crossed Michigan Boulevard to mingle with the demonstrators in Grant Park, facing the lake. What they had in mind when they did so, neither could have explained, but they moved inside the police barricades to be where the action was.

In the pale light provided by park lights, flares and headlights from police cars, they saw thousands of other aimless young people, most of them less properly dressed than they, and through the crowd there seemed to move a visible sense of frustration and anger. Bitter phrases were being hurled, and Gretchen was not surprised when some helmeted police broke line to swing at some especially obstreperous students. ‘They probably deserved it,’ she said to her escort.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, pausing beside a hydrant to watch the scuffle. ‘I’m constitutionally opposed to police action. You see a lot of it in the south, and it’s always wrong.’

This particular disturbance was quickly settled. The students retreated and the policemen re-formed their lines, with no damage done to either side, but across a large open space Gretchen saw the shadowy outlines of another confrontation that didn’t seem to be ending so simply. She and the law student ran across the grass to see what was happening, but some National Guardsmen in helmets and with rifles at the ready—boys not yet twenty brandishing heavy rifles—ordered them back, so that they were able to catch only spasmodic glimpses of what must have been something more than a mere scuffle.

‘What’s going on?’ the law student asked one of the Guard officers.

‘I don’t know, but you better be glad you’re over here.’

‘Any shooting?’

‘No. Just some head-banging.’ He had no sooner said this than a group of policemen began running away from the melee and toward the National Guardsmen, who drew back to let them through. They were carrying the inert body of a policeman whose face was smeared with blood.

‘Get back, goddammit,’ they shouted as they tried to break a path through the spectators that had formed behind Gretchen. She saw one agitated policeman swing his club, not viciously but rather like a conductor’s baton, clearing the way before him. He struck one young man slightly, and the fellow snarled, ‘Pigs,’ whereupon a policeman
behind the first gave the protester a sharp crack across the head. ‘Pigs, pigs!’ others shouted, but by now the policemen had reached an ambulance and were off. The young man who had been struck leaned against a tree, rubbing his head, and Gretchen asked him, ‘You hurt?’ and he said, ‘No. Just them pigs comin’ through like they owned the place.’

Gretchen and the Duke law student left that part of the park and joined a large crowd surrounding six young men and a girl whose faces were quite bloodied, but no one could explain how it had happened. No ambulance came, but a young doctor who had been in the crowd asked for handkerchiefs—clean ones only—and he was staunching the flow of blood and telling the crowd, ‘You ought to get this one to a hospital.’ The girl had a big gash across her forehead.

‘She was hit by the butt of a gun,’ an older woman said. ‘She wasn’t doin’ nothin’, but the soldiers came through.’

‘Was there any firing?’ the Duke man asked.

‘No. No. In fairness you’d have to say it was an accident. She just happened to be in the way.’

Wherever they moved, something had happened some minutes before, but they saw nothing. A lot of bodies were laid out upon the grass, but no one was dead, and as soon as ambulances were able to penetrate the crowd the wounded were hauled away. Among the wounded there were no police, but one newspaper cameraman sat on a curb, his equipment smashed and his head laid open, and he told Gretchen, ‘The swine. The swine.’ She asked who, and he simply repeated, ‘The swine.’ He looked as if he were going to faint, so she stayed with him while the law student tried to flag down an ambulance, but soldiers guarding it mistook him for a rioter and jabbed at him with their gun butts. Fortunately, he was able to leap backward and avoid damage, but when he returned to Gretchen he said, ‘We better get out of here. They’re playing for keeps.’ She said they couldn’t leave the cameraman, who was now unconscious, so the law student tried again to attract attention, and this time a squad of policemen came over to the fallen man.

‘Goddamned newspaperman,’ one of them snarled, but the officer in charge said, ‘Get him to a hospital. And take his camera along.’ He blew his whistle several times until a patrol car came screaming up, but the two policemen
detailed to lift the unconscious man into the car included the one who had cursed, and he grabbed the photographer’s shoulders and pitched the inert body headfirst into the wagon.

‘What are you doing?’ Gretchen cried, running up to the patrol car.

Suddenly the policeman whirled about, his nerves frazzled by this night, and grabbed Gretchen by her dress, jerking her to him. ‘You keep your fucking mouth shut if you don’t want to lose all your teeth.’ He looked about to see whose girl she was, then shoved her with great force at the Duke man. ‘Get her to hell out of here,’ he stormed, jumping aboard the patrol car and waving his club as it made its way through the crowd.

‘I think that’s good advice,’ the young man said, and he led a startled Gretchen out of the park and back to her hotel room.

What happened next is difficult to say. Police reports, submitted later, insisted that from the floor of the Hilton Hotel where Gretchen and her college students had rooms, some men had dropped paper bags containing human excrement on the heads of police standing guard below. Gretchen’s committee denied this. What is certain is that a cadre of inflamed police stormed through the floor, kicking open doors, hauling kids out of bed, and thrashing them unmercifully with clubs, brass knuckles and bare fists.

Without speaking a word, four policemen rushed into Gretchen’s room, upended her bed, and began beating her with clubs as she lay on the floor. One kicked at her but struck only her pillow; another beat her about the head with his fists. She saw none of them, too startled to appreciate what was happening, but as they rushed from her room to assault another, she heard one of them mutter in a voice of black rage and frustration, ‘Next time stay in college, you smart shits.’

Gretchen was not hurt, not even bruised, for the police clubs had become entangled in her bedclothes, and the man who had tried to punch her in the head had been highly inefficient, but when she ran into the hall she saw something she would never forget. The law student from Duke had been dragged out of his room and under the hall lights, which had aided his assailants, and been clubbed until his head and face were masses of clotted blood. His
jaw was broken and hung at an ugly angle, and he had been beaten so viciously across his left shoulder that his collarbone was broken too. He took four steps toward Gretchen, and collapsed.

As Gretchen knelt to cradle his battered head, she looked into the room from which he had been dragged. The police had kicked in the television tube, so that the picture was no longer visible, but the radio part was still functioning and a voice from the convention hall was announcing: ‘We can now say with certainty that the lonely crusade led by Senator Eugene McCarthy has come to nothing. He could buck President Johnson in New Hampshire and the late Senator Kennedy in California, but in Chicago he was powerless against the machine.’

The battered Duke law student did Gretchen an unwitting disservice which radically changed her life. When she stopped by the hospital to check on his injuries, lingering to commiserate with him over the disaster of the Democratic party, she compared him to herself, and laughed: ‘We’re like two medieval Crusaders who set forth in polished armor to accomplish wonders in the Holy Land. Thieves set upon us before we got to our ship. We’re a pair of fools.’

‘This battle’s lost,’ he said through his wired jaws. ‘But they’ll have to come back to us. Because we were right.’

‘Do you have enough money to get home?’

‘Yes. But there’s one thing you could do for me. Did you look in my room today?’

‘A shambles.’

He groaned, shrugged his painful shoulders and said, ‘I suppose they wrecked the guitar.’

‘I didn’t see one.’

‘Those pigs.’

‘Don’t use that word. That’s for children.’

‘After what they did last night?’

‘Don’t use it.’

‘There’s a chance they missed the guitar. It was in the closet. On top. If it’s there, take it home with you and you can send it to me later. It’s a real Kentucky swinger.’

When she got back to the hotel she went to his disheveled room, which the hotel was having photographed for the
insurance company, and looked in the closet, and there, safely tucked away, was the rather large, carefully polished old-style guitar. She struck a few chords and was pleased with the sound.

Gretchen had never traveled with a guitar, for she thought it needlessly conspicuous, the sort of thing that girls on the make liked to do. She was therefore not happy at the commission the Duke student had given her, but when she thought of his painful condition, she deemed it a small favor that he had asked.

But her intuition was correct. When she and her friends reached the town of Patrick Henry, east of Chicago, two policemen stopped them and forced their car onto the shoulder of the highway, then muttered with satisfaction when they saw the guitar. ‘This has got to be one of them,’ they said. ‘You come with us.’

They yanked Gretchen out and threw her into their patrol car. One of the men strode back and grabbed the offending guitar, slamming it into the back seat of their car. ‘You,’ they growled at the boy who was driving, ‘get this crowd the hell out of here.’

‘What are you doing with her?’ the driver shouted.

The older of the policemen whipped about, rushed over to the car and said in tones of frustration and overflowing anger, ‘Look, you snot-nosed kids, we’ve taken all we can from you. One more crack … just one … and I’m gonna tear you apart. Now you drive the hell out of here … fast.’

The driver, an honors student in English literature from Yale, had also had as much as he could take, so he calmly reached into the glove compartment, took out a pad of paper and proceeded to write down the policemen’s badge numbers and the license of the prowl car. Then, with studied care, he shifted the gears lever on the floor of his car and pulled away.

The policeman, red-faced because he had not thought of something dramatic with which to startle the young punks, returned to his car in a rage, slammed it into gear, and tore through the streets to police headquarters, where he yanked Gretchen onto the sidewalk and into a red-brick building. Thrusting her before an overweight desk sergeant, he growled, ‘Book her,’ and when this perfunctory job was completed he hauled her along a corridor and threw her into an empty room, tossing the guitar in behind
her. Within a few minutes the room was filled with four policemen and one plain-clothes detective.

‘She’s the one who hit the policeman in the face with a brick,’ the arresting officer said, reading from a teletype message. ‘Braids, guitar, good-looking clothes. That’s her. We’ll ship her back to Chicago.’