Uncertainty surrounds GOP gathering
THE UPCOMING GOP CONVENTION IS SURROUNDED BY A FEELING OF WILD UNCERTAINTY
There is a dangerous electricity to a Donald Trump event, a loose-wire sense that comes from the power of the unknown. It is, in its own queasy way, exciting to be around. And it makes Trump, in that limited sense, the perfect man for his times.
Beginning Monday, in Cleveland, Ohio, Republican delegates will gather to nominate Trump as their candidate for president of the United States. No one really knows what to expect from the week. But few imagine it will be good.
The convention comes when America is ragged and frayed. During the last five weeks alone, the country has lived through two high-profile police shootings, the murder of five police officers and a savage, lone-wolf terrorist attack in Orlando, Fla.
Abroad, new terrorist strikes seem to come almost every week, including an attack Thursday on a Bastille Day celebration that killed at least 84 in Nice, France. At home, meanwhile, Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police violence have swirled, most recently in Baton Rouge, La., and Minnesota, running headlong at times into an overwhelming police response.
The national and global turmoil, combined with everything that is Donald Trump, has led some to compare this year to 1968 and the late 1960s more generally. But as new books about that era show, the connections between then and now are less literal and more of mood.
Trump’s nomination has unleashed a feeling — echoing the ’60s — of wild uncertainty. There’s a sense that the U.S. is somehow on the brink of somehow being off. No one’s quite sure what that next thing might be. But in Cleveland, next week, they are preparing for the worst.
The local police have spent millions of dollars on new riot gear ahead of the convention, including steel batons, tactical armour and tear gas, according to The Washington Post. Some jails have been emptied in anticipation of mass arrests. One local college was closed to make way for soldiers from the National Guard.
A survey of Republican insiders published in Politico found that almost half of them think violence is likely at the convention. “I say this with no joy whatsoever,” one told the magazine “but the far-left agitators in Cleveland will make the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago look like a fourth-grade slap fight.”
It is likely no coincidence that Random House chose this month to reissue Norman Mailer’s account of that convention, first published in book form in 1968 as Miami and the Siege of Chicago. The book is a curious artifact — Mailer at his wordiest, perviest extreme. But there are chunks that hold up. “The country was in a throe,” he wrote at one point while watching the oddly placid Republican convention in Miami, “a species of eschatological heave.”
But the Democratic convention is the one everyone remembers for the chaos in the streets.
The Democrats went to Chicago in 1968 — much as the Republicans are going to Cleveland — in the wake of serial tragedy and turmoil. In the months before the convention, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were murdered. Andy Warhol was shot.
“No convention,” Mailer wrote at the time, “ever had such events for a prelude.”
Mailer actually missed the worst of what happened in Chicago. He was either at his hotel or the convention hall for the most brutal nights of what became known as a “police riot.” Over the four nights of the convention, thousands of antiwar protesters, as well as reporters and innocent bystanders, were badly beaten by Chicago police.
Mailer did watch some of it — from his hotel room on the 19th floor. “The police attacked with tear gas, with Mace, and with clubs,” he wrote of what he saw. “(T) hey attacked like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing.”
In the book, Mailer reprinted a long Village Voice account of one famous episode from that week, when a crowd of officers charged a group of “women, reporters and young McCarthy supporters” hanging around outside the restaurant at the Hilton Haymarket Hotel.
“The terrified people began to go down under the unexpected police charge when the plate glass (at the restaurant) shattered, and the people tumbled through the glass,” wrote the Voice’s Jack Newfield. “The police then climbed through the broken window and began to beat people, some of whom had been drinking quietly in the hotel bar.”
It’s hard to imagine that level of police violence in Cleveland next week, no matter what happens with the protests. That’s not because the Cleveland police are known for their restraint. The entire department is operating under a consent agreement with the U.S. Justice Department signed following serial allegations of excessive force.
But the officers will be acutely aware that today, unlike in 1968, anything that happens will be recorded and transmitted instantly, not just by reporters, but by demonstrators and civilians armed with smartphones and prepared to live-stream whatever they see.
On the other hand, five police officers were murdered just weeks ago in Dallas, at a demonstration. And while tennis balls, backpacks and water guns will be banned from the protest zones in Cleveland, actual guns, up to and including military-style assault rifles, will not. So if anything does go wrong in Cleveland, it’s not hard to picture everything spinning quickly out of control.
That feeling — that any one thing could spark chaos — is captured over and over again in Witness to the Revolution, veteran reporter Clara Bingham’s new, lengthy oral history of the late 1960s and early 1970s in America.
Bingham presents an era of anxiety and uncertainty not altogether different from our own. Her book deals with the ‘68 convention in Chicago and then spreads out to the election that followed and everything that came in the two years afterward, from the Pentagon Papers to the Weather Underground, Woodstock and the Mai Lai massacre.
In one chapter, Bingham recounts the notorious killings at Kent State University.
The Kent State campus is not far outside Cleveland, in a commuter town maybe an hour’s drive from where Trump is expected to be crowned. In May 1970, National Guardsmen shot 13 unarmed students on campus, killing four of them, following four days of protest over the Vietnam War.
What comes across in Bingham’s account is how shocking, despite the chaos and the protests, the shootings seemed to those involved, how quickly something that seemed within the bounds of normal American life descended beyond those bounds.
Dean Kahler was a 19-year-old farm boy in his freshman year when it happened. He didn’t look like much of a radical. He had short hair and horn-rimmed glasses and wore dress shirts to school.
On May 4, Kahler watched the protests in the morning, and even joined in, from a distance. At about 12:30, he decided to get some coffee and go to class, so he followed a group of National Guardsmen heading up a hill and away from the crowds.
“I walked up a bit towards the student union, which was just across the street from my next class,” Kahler said in the book. “I was on the practice football field when they turned, and lowered their weapons. I thought, Oh my God, they’re going to shoot.”
Kahler dove to the ground. “I could hear bullets hitting the ground around me,” he said. “And then, at that about that time, I got hit, and it felt like a bee sting.”
The bullet hit Kahler between the shoulder blades. It severed his spine. He never walked again.
Joe Lewis, another student, was shot in the abdomen. He was sure, up until the bullet hit him, that the guardsmen weren’t using real bullets. “I thought, How ridiculous would that be?” he said in the book.
Lewis makes a point of stressing how light the atmosphere was that day, even with the tear gas and the National Guard, before the shooting started. “(I)t didn’t feel like there was a sense of impending disaster or doom,” he said. “It was a fairly typical nice spring day in Ohio.”
The Kent State killings were one of the signal moments of the Vietnam War era in America. A similar event would be shocking today, but it’s worth wondering how long it would stay in the news.
The Orlando massacre, in which a lone fundamentalist with an assault rifle killed 49 people in a gay bar, was barely a month ago. But who’s talking about it now? The assault on Nice, France, Thursday may end with more than 100 dead, a good number of them children, but it already feels less a moment on its own than one in a series.
It makes one wonder how high the bar is set for next week. What exactly would have to happen to truly shock?
Bingham’s book focuses mostly on the radical protest movement. She doesn’t delve deeply into civil rights and the black experience of the era. A better, though very different, look at those issues comes in Jackson, 1964, a new collection of Calvin Trillin’s writing on race in America.
It’s impossible to separate Trump, and this larger moment in U.S. politics from race. Trump has run the closest thing to an explicitly racist winning campaign by a major party candidate since at least Ronald Reagan in 1980, and possibly earlier.
His rise has also coincided with the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, launched in response to the repeated killings of black people by police. In Cleveland, it’s very possible the two threads — Trump and Black Lives Matter — will collide, with unpredictable results.
Most of the reporting in Jackson, 1964, happened between 1964 and 1977. The book includes stories that seem both completely of their time and entirely present in this one. There’s a piece, from 1970, about Lee Otis Johnson, a black activist in Houston sentenced to 30 years in prison for “giving away a marijuana cigarette.” There’s another from Seattle, in 1975, about a black man shot to death by a white policeman after a stop-andfrisk.
The book serves as a reminder that for all the ugly novelty of the Trump campaign, all the barely veiled racism and the rest, many of his tactics are nothing new. Race has always played a dark and central role in American life. In that way, Jackson, 1964, provides an odd comfort. Cleveland will be lit by all the wild uncertainty that Trump brings. But whatever comes won’t be fatal, not for the United States. The country, after all, has seen almost everything before.
I COULD HEAR BULLETS HITTING THE GROUND AROUND ME. AND THEN ... I GOT HIT, AND IT FELT LIKE A BEE STING. — DEAN KAHLER, KENT STATE SURVIVOR