Returning from the airport, Whitney decided to watch the eve of the Chicago convention on NBC, worried that the confrontation of protestors and police would—as Eugene McCarthy had predicted—explode into violence.
The first film clip seemed peaceable enough, a crowd of McCarthy backers greeting their candidate as he arrived at Midway Airport. Though they looked subtly different from the Nixon delegates, they had this much in common—all were white. Watching their restrained enthusiasm, a reflection of McCarthy’s own, Whitney recalled Ben saying, “All someone has to do is abolish the draft, and they’ll go back to screwing and driving Volkswagens and watching films with subtitles. Their ‘crusade’ won’t have been about much of anything, and they’ll disappear like ether.” She was about to switch channels when the coverage changed to Grant Park.
Shaken, Whitney sat. The scenes unfolding on the screen were wholly unlike the America she knew—police beating a crowd of demonstrators with clubs to keep them from marching on the convention center. From their midst someone thrust a sign aloft—WELCOME TO PRAGUE! Then, amoeba-like, the throng shrunk back from a wave of tear gas, police with gas masks and billy clubs flailing at long-haired youths. Transfixed, Whitney belatedly realized that Charles was standing beside her.
Silent, they watched fresh images of conflict filling the screen—kids burning draft cards in front of cops; radicals stoning police cars; protesters bloodied from beatings, or incapacitated by tear gas. Softly, Charles said, “So this is how it ends, where dissent becomes contempt for law, the prelude to social disintegration. It’s why we need Richard Nixon.”
“Nixon,” Whitney repeated with instinctive disdain.
He looked at her closely, then continued with weary certainty. “I know that, to some, all this upheaval seems terribly romantic—youth in rebellion, throwing off the shackles to remake the world in your own deeply admired self-image, convinced that no other generations’ experiences have any value. But eventually, these people will have to find jobs.
“After that they can begin the quiet but equally destructive work of the self-indulgent: changing partners at will, spending money without regard to their children’s futures, reading books that assure them that they—the sacred individual—is the person they should love first and best. They won’t build anything, because they don’t think they owe anything to anyone else. I pity their children and grandchildren.” He turned to Whitney. “I don’t mean you and Peter, or Janine. But I’m afraid your peer group will make mine look far better than it should. And God knows there’s a lot of you.”
In some ways, Whitney realized, he sounded like Ben commenting on the beach party. “And that’s reason enough for the cops to beat them? These people hate the war, but have no power to stop it. Protest is the only way that they can be seen or heard . . .”
“It’s not the only way,” her father objected. “They’re like blacks who ‘protest’ by destroying their own neighborhoods. Now the police are giving them what they want—a bloody shirt to wave.”
“And Nixon will step in to save us?”
Charles shook his head. “Let’s not quarrel, Whitney. I’ve said my piece, and you’ve indulged me. It’s probably good I’m going back to New York tomorrow morning.”
Touching her gently on the shoulder, Charles left.
Suddenly Whitney felt alone. She went to her bedroom and called Clarice.
“She’s gone to Boston,” Jane Barkley reported dryly, “or so I understand. It seems she has important business—seeing friends from college, certainly. Perhaps even finding a job.”
“Wherever she is,” Whitney responded, “have her call me.”
“Of course,” Jane promised. “As soon as we reestablish contact.”
Returning to the living room, Whitney watched new images of violence, hoping that Ben was not in Chicago but safe, at least for the moment, a few hundred yards away.
For the next three nights, Whitney watched the convention. Her mother refused to join her, drinking a little more wine at dinner, then retreating to her bedroom to call Janine or Charles whenever she could find them. But she said nothing about Janine, and Whitney wondered again at her sister’s elusiveness. More often she thought of Ben, wishing that Ted Kennedy—the last hope to defeat Humphrey—would allow his name to be placed in nomination, yet fearing what could happen if he did.
Instead, each night brought its own repellent images and stunted hopes. After Mayor Daley proclaimed to the delegates on Monday that “as long as I’m mayor in this city, there’s going to be law and order in Chicago,” police moved on a throng of demonstrators in Lincoln Park, and a few rogue cops pulled black residents off their own porches to beat them with leather truncheons. On Tuesday, as more police in combat gear cleared out Lincoln Park, Edward Kennedy, still devastated by his brother’s assassination, asked his supporters to cease trying to draft him. Wednesday brought a police riot.
Bent on marching to the convention hall, the protestors regrouped in front of the Chicago Hilton and were confronted by another phalanx in uniform. Blindly, the cops flailed at the demonstrators closest to them, trapping some against the wall of the hotel. Sickened, Whitney watched the jumbled film clips—protestors crashing through first-floor windows amidst shards of glass; bloodied men and women desperately pushing into the lobby; blue-helmeted police beating others fallen to the concrete; demonstrators trampling their comrades as they retreated in terror to a cacophony of sounds—clubs striking bone, police shouting, victims crying out, the screech of police sirens. In the convention hall, Senator Abe Ribicoff decried “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago”; Richard Daley’s supporters rose in derisive outrage, shaking their fists, and the screen filled with Daley’s face as he mouthed obscenities at the speaker. On the first ballot, the delegates nominated Hubert Humphrey. Whitney felt like the world had gone insane.
On Thursday morning, she took her journal to Dogfish Bar, struggling to find words for what she felt.
She could write little. Closing the leather volume, she lingered in the hope that Ben would appear, relieving her of the vow she had taken—for Peter and herself—to avoid him. She saw no one.
That night she turned on the television yet again. An ominous climax was building—the triumphant appearance of Humphrey as protestors marched on the convention. When the police confronted them with a shower of tear gas, Whitney went to call Peter. “Are you watching this?” she asked.
“The convention? No. It all seems so stupid and pointless—I don’t know what these people think that they’re accomplishing.”
“They’re getting maimed and teargassed, Peter.”
“It’s bad, okay? I know that. But this is what they wanted.” His voice softened. “So how are you, sweetheart? Is everything okay over there?”
Whitney thought of her mother: in the last few hours, she had repeatedly called Janine, clearly agitated that she could not find her. “Fine,” Whitney said reflexively, and realized that this is what Anne would say. “So how is work?”
“Really good,” Peter said. “We’ve got a new underwriting, a public offering for a big chain of nursing homes. After we get back from the honeymoon, your dad’s putting me on the due diligence team.”
This was a plum assignment, Whitney knew. Facilitating sale of stock to the public was a lucrative part of Padgett Dane’s business, and an inquiry into a company’s prospects was an indispensable prerequisite. “That’s great,” she heard herself saying. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Whitney. So don’t worry too much, okay? The country will straighten itself out.”
Returning to the living room, Whitney felt lonelier than before.
It was not Peter’s fault, she reminded herself: he was striving to succeed in her father’s world, a few scant weeks from the only world they had ever known—where everyone was their age, and what absorbed them most was classes and activities and dating and late night conversations about the quandaries of life in this halfway house between adolescence and adulthood. She felt for him now, compelled to become a man on the great conveyor belt of life, which had a schedule all its own.
On the screen, Robert Kennedy appeared.
It was a convention film offered to pacify all those who loved him. But even on celluloid Bobby seemed more real than anyone else at the convention—alive again, passionate and wry and funny and melancholy. Whitney wondered if Ben, too, watched alone, painfully reliving his time with the man for whom he had sacrificed so much. Or whether he was among the demonstrators, choking on tear gas and despair.
Unable to stop herself, she stepped outside, pausing but briefly, then hurried to Ben’s place, dreading yet hoping to find him.