Nixon Protest, Fall 1971, Tim Roberts
From MemoryArchive
Who: Tim Roberts What: Anti-Nixon Protest When: Fall 1971 Where: Chicago, Illinois
The Night We Didn’t See Richard Nixon
One of the last anti-Viet Nam War demonstrations in which I participated back in the early ‘70s ended up being, for me personally, the most memorable and frightening of all. That particular demonstration in Chicago wasn’t as noteworthy or historical as some that I had previously attended. Several years earlier the demonstrations surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention in my hometown of Chicago helped bring the anti-war efforts into living rooms across the country. In 1969 the massive Moratorium March in Washington D.C. brought upwards of half a million demonstrators into the streets of the nation’s capital. The next spring, after the U.S. “incursion” into Cambodia, the nation-wide student strike roiled campuses across the country, including mine in Chicago. When students were shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, it seemed like a revolution was at hand.
But only a few years after that, the days of massive demonstrations seemed to be on the wane. It wasn’t that people like me weren’t still opposed to the war, which still raged (albeit in “Vietnamized” form) but as Richard Nixon moved inexorably toward re-election (to our great dismay), the popularity- if you can call it that- of large scale demonstrations and marches had peaked. My friends and I in Chicago, though certainly not hard-core radicals, were still committed to the peace movement, and to making our voices heard. If those voices had become a bit more shrill and a bit less popular by then, we thought, then so be it. The announcement of a Republican fund-raising dinner at the Conrad Hilton Hotel (site of the famous “Battle of Michigan Avenue” during the Democratic Convention) to be headlined by no less than President Nixon himself was an obvious venue for a demonstration, and so we went.
The crowd of demonstrators behind police barricades across the street from the hotel numbered no more than a thousand or so. By now the demonstrators were no longer merely chanting “peace now!” and “bring the troops home!” As the limousines pulled up to the hotel entrance across Michigan Avenue, the demonstrators were also shouting out epithets and obscenities directed not at the government or the war, but directly and personally at the fund-raiser attendees. The tuxedoed and gowned dignitaries paid little attention to the scruffy lot across the street, and the police and their barricades assured that there would be no contact between the two groups. On our side of the street, all awaited the arrival of the President, the prime object of our derision. My two friends and I had struck up conversations with fellow-demonstrators around us, who seemed mostly to be, like us, students from across the Chicago area. After a couple of hours, it became clear that Nixon would not be entering the hotel through the front entrance, and the demonstration petered-out. As the three of us walked north on Michigan Avenue toward Congress Street, where we had parked our car, we were joined by one of the guys we had been standing with at the demonstration. The disappointment of not seeing Nixon was tempered by the camaraderie and some sense of having done our duty nonetheless.
As we turned left onto Congress Street our role as demonstrators disappeared and we became just four guys walking down the street in downtown Chicago. Suddenly, a car screeched to a stop right next to us and three men jumped out shouting “Hey you motherfuckers!” We stopped in our tracks, stunned and confused. Then one of my friends and the guy we had just met started running. My other friend and I were still too stunned to know what to do. Who were these guys? What did they want? As the other two bolted into the night, the three men from the car pounced upon us. “Police!” they shouted, grabbing us and shoving us around. I don’t believe any of them ever showed us a badge or any kind of identification, but the car they were driving appeared to be an unmarked Chicago Police Department vehicle, and they themselves fit the description of Chicago cops- white, middle-aged (at least they were older than we) and hostile. “You guys were at that demonstration?” they asked. Uh, uh, yeah… yeah, we were… “Get in the car!” It wasn’t an invitation. They shoved us forcefully into the back seat, and two of the cops jumped into the front seat, the third joined us in the backseat, and the car drove off.
No longer stunned, but still confused, we were now mostly scared. The cops harangued us from the front seat, and the one in the back leaned on us heavily. “Why did those guys run off? Who were they?”
We pleaded ignorance, saying they were just a couple of guys we met at the rally. That was clearly not a good enough answer for them, and they persisted in that line of questioning. After a few minutes we became aware that they were not taking us anywhere in particular, and were merely driving around. They continued to yell at us and threaten us, becoming increasingly agitated that we couldn’t or wouldn’t identify the other guys. We asked them, meekly, to take us to the station and book us, fearing that if they didn’t they’d end up beating us to a pulp, or worse. They didn’t respond to that entreaty, and kept driving around. Eventually (maybe 5 minutes, maybe more or maybe less) they pulled into an alley that ran under the el tracks somewhere on the near south side and then stopped the car. The guy in the front passenger seat turned around and pointed to my friend and said, “Get out.” My friend said no, that we were going to stay together. The cop in the back with us re-iterated, obscenely, “Get out!” and reached over and opened the back door. My friend, bless him, still resisted, and we exchanged a look as if this might be the last time we ever saw other. The cop in the back shoved him out the door and pulled it closed, and the car roared off. I turned to look out the back window and saw my friend running after us, and it was a chilling sight. As we sped up he disappeared into the distance. I now very much feared for my safety, if not my life.
The cops continued their harangue, eventually saying that one of the guys we were with who had run away might have been involved in a plot against the president. They indicated it was our other friend, whom I knew, of course, was not. They kept driving around and I tried reasoning with them: I’m just a student, I grew up here in Chicago, I’m sure neither of the guys who ran was looking to make any trouble and was only scared. A few minutes later we were driving north on State Street, and they pulled the car over in front of a subway stop. The cop in the front passenger seat turned around again and told me to get out. By now it was apparent that they had lost interest in me, and since we were on a busy street, I no longer feared for my safety and life. I got out of the car and started walking toward the subway entrance, and they drove away. I got on the subway and went home.
When I got home, I called my friend to see if he had gotten home safely after being left under the el tracks. He had indeed, and we talked for a while trying to make some sense of what had happened. If the cops had really thought our other friend, or even the guy we didn’t know, had been involved in some kind of plot they certainly wouldn’t have just let us go as they did. It seemed a matter of the cops taking a couple of hippies for a joy ride- their joy, not ours. In those days such things were not unusual. The post-script on this story is that a couple of years later, during the Watergate hearings, it was revealed that there had been a deliberate campaign of intimidation against protesters, and some of the incidents described at that time bore a striking resemblance to what had happened to us. Whether we had been a part of that or merely been harassed by Chicago cops we never knew, but we never did forget the night we didn’t see Richard Nixon.
Tim Roberts
