And then there is the police riot in Chicago, at the Democratic Convention at which one of the two vice presidents who would run for president, Hubert Humphrey, accepts the nomination behind coils of barbed wire while society howls for change outside the International Amphitheater. It is one of those crime stories where the crimes are committed by police and the crimes of omission are committed by the nominee for president. It begins with Humphrey, then goes to Mayor Richard Daley, the boss of Chicago, and then takes us to the streets. Humphrey makes one phone call during the week, to get one demonstrator released: the delegate for George McGovern, who has been handcuffed by police. After that, he sits on his hands and when it is time to ask Daley to tell his cops to ease up, the task falls to an aide. And nothing changes.
Breslin writes afterward:
In Chicago, he left us with the police who were everywhere. Full bellies pushing against the blue short-sleeved shirts, round faces bulging under the helmets, the eyes wide open and burning.
“They don’t represent my kids,” an Inspector says in a voice that is high in emotion. . . .
“They don’t represent my kids,” he says again. . . . “They don’t represent my kids, my kids are clean.”
“They represent somebody,” he was told.
“They shouldn’t be in this town,” he shouts. “The bastards.”
“It’s a political convention,” he was told.
“They don’t represent my kids.”
The cops had one thing on their mind. Club and then gas, club and then gas, club and then gas. In the afternoon, three of them, two in the back seat and one in the front, sat in a squad car . . . It was a hot, muggy afternoon but the three of them wore black leather gloves. The gloves were not thin gloves. There was something inside the gloves. The boxing people would call it a gimmick. Probably the gloves were lined with lead. . . .
Late that night, very late, Katy Schefflien, 18, was standing in the hallway outside the 11th floor night court in the Chicago Police Headquarters building. . . . Her right eye was half closed. The discoloring ran down to her cheek. A sheet of blood covered most of the surface of her eye. . . .
“What did they hit you with?” she was asked.
“I don’t know, I guess a fist,” she said.
Most cops, and most men anyplace, don’t have the coordination and leverage to punch hard enough with their fists to do this to a person’s eye. . . . To make the blood come out into the eye . . . and the blood will be there for weeks if I know my black eyes, to do this, you have to be an extraordinary puncher. Or you have to punch with a fist that is covered with black gloves that are gimmicked.
These kinds of people, Breslin says, are pigs in police uniforms. An alternate delegate was detained five hours after she was strip searched twice for guns, knives, and narcotics. Next time, Katy Schefflien said, she’s going to wear a dress that buttons down the front; that way, she wouldn’t have to completely strip. She felt sorry for Humphrey, who went under the shower when the tear gas came in through the open window to his suite. It’s a long, detailed piece. And it would be easy to read it, as some read Breslin in general, and say, this man doesn’t like cops.
It just isn’t that simple. He had a cousin killed in the line of duty; he reminds us. He grew up with an uncle in the house who drank a lot and was a police officer who was almost killed in the line of duty, he tells us, when the car he was riding in with his mistress was launched by the car his tailing wife rammed into it. Across his career, among his closest confidants there were always cops. When we listen closely to what he has to say, we can realize that he knows, better than most, that police officers are unfairly asked to be the point on the spear for a failure of the political class to improve conditions, especially in the nation’s cities which he understands deeply. He was an Irish Catholic living in New York, the Church and the Police were simply facts of life and part of what made a deeply flawed man a deeply insightful reporter and writer.
In Chicago, it was about the cops. As a reporter whose main event was the coverage of news, local and national through the 77-some-odd police precincts across the five distinctly different boroughs, with dozens of distinctly different cultures, it was often about the cops. And for a celebrity journalist about to launch a political career, it was, as it is for anyone who wants to get elected in New York: always about the cops.
“In Chicago,” Breslin said, “a demonstration that should have been handled as if it weren’t even there was turned into an international incident because police rioted.”
In closing what is a careful analysis of the city’s leadership, the use of the violence by Humphrey in an effort to carve out a law-and-order plank for his platform that could compete with Nixon’s, there is an indictment that still holds true of just how political leadership uses cops:
Actually, it is a crime that they are expected to handle a social or political matter at all. It is the job of the political leaders. But the political leaders do nothing and in the end they hedge off all the trouble to a cop who makes $8,500 a year and has a wife and three kids at home. It is unfair to the cops.
Mailer of course wrote Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his nonfiction novel based on his own reporting and sharp insights at both the Republican Convention in Miami and the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The book was lauded by many and seen as his significant contribution to the New Journalism. His significant contribution to the City of New York soon followed, beginning at the end of March 1969.
That was when Mailer and Breslin would launch their campaign: Mailer for mayor and Breslin for president of New York’s city council.
It was seven glorious weeks long.
It began in Norman Mailer’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights. The writer’s domicile had those fabulous sweeping views of Manhattan across a wide, cobbled promenade that only those blessed by great talent or good fortune at birth could afford. Bisecting these two parts of the Imperial City were the East River waters, shimmering with light as that estuary widened and made its way to the sea.
It was March 31. Conditions in New York were bad and seemed to be tottering on the verge of worse.
In attendance were Gloria Steinem; Peter Maas, whose book The Valachi Papers had appeared to acclaim less than a year earlier; Jack Newfield, excellent if occasionally very biased dirt digger for The Village Voice; light heavyweight champion Jose Torres; Yippie leader Jerry Rubin; John Scanlon, young and not yet having achieved wide fame as a bare-knuckled PR guru; and sitting on a stool in the back of the room, James Breslin, columnist, whose presence on the ticket, Steinem said, would give it street cred Mailer lacked.
The campaign was quixotic but Breslin, Mailer, and Steinem, who seemed to have a good deal of skill as a boiler room political fixer, fundraiser, and tactician, were serious about the ideas. There were plenty. One good one would have been more than the rest of the field could deliver. Winning, for Jimmy Breslin and for Gloria Steinem, and initially for Norman Mailer, one of the most financially successful writers in America, was not the goal. The goal was to bring fresh ideas to a city whose leadership was divorced from the needs of its citizens.
“The trouble is everywhere,” said Breslin. “There are 1.1 million students in the New York City school system. . . . White people borrow to get children into private schools.” And it could not be fixed, he explained when the decisions as to how to do so “Come from such as Perry Duryea (‘a lobster peddler’ and politician), who lives in Montauk Point, Earl Brydges of Niagara Falls (whose name is lost to most of us); and John Marchi, (whose name ought be lost) who is a product of the times when Staten Island was farther away from New York than Niagara. And the major lobby (the United Federation of Teachers) is led by Albert Shanker, who lives in Pearl River. They meet in Albany and discuss their own interests.”
“How is one to speak of the illness of a city,” said Mailer, who loved his words, and seemed intent throughout the campaign on pointing out he was every Jewish mother’s dream, a Harvard-educated success story. (And this got worse after he was awarded the Pulitzer during the campaign.) “A clear day can come, a morning in early May like the pride of June. The streets are cool.” Etc. “Yet by afternoon the city is incarcerated once more. . . . By the time work is done, New Yorkers push through the acrid, lung-rotting air and work their way home, avoiding each other’s eyes in the subway. Later, near midnight . . . in the darkness a sense of dread returns, the streets are not quite safe, the sense of waiting for some apocalyptic fire, some night of long knives hangs over the city. . . .”
This prose, with statistical backing, appeared on May 18. The campaign was in high gear.
There is no suspense in the ending.
They lost. Were shellacked. Were beat upon by Breslin’s old home, the Post. But if Mailer and Breslin could hardly be said to have had a sober breath between them while campaigning, their ideas were sobering: on education they called out the failure of the white-dominated, self-interested teachers’ union to care about the Black students. They cited Benjamin Franklin High School, in East Harlem, as having a enrollment that would net from a starting field of 1,000 students 75 with an academic degree. They felt they could do better. Even Tony Salerno, the Genovese family mafioso who ran his successful illegal numbers lottery and bookmaking operation from the Palma Boys Club just across Pleasant Avenue and up the street from the school, could do better, without books. He could teach math.
The city was ill. It was a sharecropper for the state. It needed to be a state. A great city-state, with these curly haired doges for a short time at the helm. That was a core element of their campaign of ideas. The city would be better served using all the taxes levied locally rather than tithing a portion to a state whose residents for the most part seemed happy to take the money and turn their backs. They intended to bring power down to the neighborhood level. In New York City many of them are bigger than many towns but they had no power of self-governance, whether on schools, policing, sanitation—and they needed it. (Running Against The Machine, which was paid for by campaign funds and edited by Peter Manso, collects position papers, panels and appearances and many speeches in which these items were addressed.) And of course, the candidates had a position on policing. One of their public appearances was held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“Though Breslin had written columns about the cops, scolding them for their opposition to the civilian review board and the way they handled peace demonstrations, he also had been one of the few writers,” Joe Flaherty writes in his book, Managing Mailer, “who had the insight neither to pronounce them pigs nor to plasticize them as saints, but to allow them a working-class dignity.”
Breslin knew how to begin:
“I’d like the record to state that I’m here without a lawyer.”
It was, according to Flaherty, to be the best speech Breslin delivered during the campaign.
“Though it dealt in part with race, it was essentially a class speech that united the white cop (substitute longshoreman, machinist, cabbie . . .) with the Black who is getting screwed equally by government institutions.”
“I don’t come here as a genius,” Breslin modestly said soon after. “That’s been well established early in my life. But I also have some views on policemen in this city which I’d like to express here. And before I decided to express them, I did look down to see that the chairs were bolted to the floor, and that’s going to help. Because the way I see the city, and the way Mr. Mailer sees the city, is that there will be no more New York Police Department as we now know it.”
“Our idea is to have the city become a state, have the various sections of this city become cities right inside the state, and let them run their own police. Let’s get the wisdom of the neighborhoods.”
He was as plainspoken as Mailer was rhapsodic. Fitting, probably, for a City Council president.
Steinem, closing an interview many years later, said, “One other errant brain cell rose up. I remember Jimmy speaking at Harvard atypically and, I don’t think I was physically there, the first thing he said to the audience was ‘How many of you have names that end in vowels? Hold up your hands.’ There was hardly anybody and he said, ‘No wonder you don’t understand anything at Harvard.’ ”
Jimmy could talk to cops. And he could take it when cops talked back to him. But he certainly grabbed their attention this day with this statement: “I say the plan is far better, from a police viewpoint, than the way we’re going, because in my estimation policemen today are being used. The police get blamed for all the mistakes of all the people who are supposed to be more important and smarter than us.”
“Than us.” He speaks like a column. And he brings himself to the cops. “You’re asked to go out and take care of and patch up holes made in forty years of history by Congressmen from New York who sat still while federal housing bills were passed that didn’t benefit us. . . . You’re being asked to pay for the actions of union leaders who didn’t do a thing for ghetto areas of this city and who have kept people jobless. And when they’re jobless, they look to do things. . . . Now they created the problems. Now they turn to you, the policemen of the city of New York, and say: ‘You go out and handle them.’ In my estimation it’s a disgrace. As usual it comes down to us—give it to the fellow on the bottom. Let him handle the problem.
“Now this city is in trouble, and the main thing we need is respect for law and its officers. But Black people never again will respect law under the present conditions.”
It is a speech, if nothing else, about injustice. Breslin, like all great crime writers, knows that the greatest crimes are crimes of injustice. And just as in Chicago he talked about crimes by police, today he is talking about a grave crime against police.
And Breslin is a good speaker. “With that,” he closes, “I think I’m going to step down, except for one thing—you had a class about bookmaking here first. I could bring in a guest lecturer for that anytime you want.”
The campaign had plans, it had something of an ideology, it had smart people all over it who intended to wake up a city’s body politic. That is what Breslin thought he was doing. Then one day he woke up, thought of Mailer, and said “This fuggin guy is serious.” He tried and failed to quit and wound up riding it out to the end, when he has been famously quoted as saying he was ashamed to have had anything to do with an enterprise that required the closing of bars.
“People were taking it seriously,” Steinem said. “I can’t remember if it was Bill Buckley or us who first said—when asked ‘what will you do if elected?’—‘Demand a recount.’ I don’t know who gets credit for that line, but we were certainly saying it.
“Probably the book about the campaign by Joe Flaherty details this better but there was a profound difference between Mailer and Breslin and their working together and being in this campaign together was interesting in and of itself. Jimmy had much more grasp of street life. Some of the early meetings took place in my living room. Again, you should check all this but in my memory one of the problems with the campaign I thought was that it was pretty much all white. I invited some of the young honchos, political guys from Harlem. Not a lot, maybe four or five or six, I don’t know. Mailer was astounded. He kept saying, ‘Where did you find these people?’ Jimmy of course knew them. It was like two different universes.”
Another problem with the campaign was the marginalizing of women. Flo Kennedy, the radical feminist who was at the first convening of the campaign, was almost ignored, as was her suggestion to bring in the Black vote. Books on the campaign described Steinem as a “girl” from Toledo with honey-colored hair and willowy legs who had found the golden slipper in New York and become one of its glitterati. Those legs certainly served her well in 1963, when she went undercover for a month in Manhattan’s Playboy Club and wrote a two-part series for Show that detailed the objectification and demeaning conditions a bunny had to suffer.
Now, as the first campaign conclave was being held, her groundbreaking article, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” would be featured in a banner on the cover of New York. She shared the banner with Tom Wolfe on the etiquette of streetlights and Adam Smith on the creation of a supercurrency. The cover itself? Breslin’s “Namath All Night Long,” a bullseye design treatment with Namath’s handsome, mustachioed, smiling face surrounded by six loungewear-clad, adoringly posed women.
That such a campaign was needed, that so many intellects across a broad spectrum embraced it, captured the boil under society’s skin that needed to be lanced.
Steinem again: “In my memory. You know when you’re in the middle of something you don’t have a contrast. The dirt, pollution, crime didn’t seem more than any other time. It just was a level of concern to ordinary people waiting to get their garbage picked up or worrying about getting to work while it was still dark in the morning. That kind of melded with the 60s movement atmosphere so there was a ‘politics shouldn’t be left to the politicians’ aura. Why not just have a campaign that’s not about getting elected but is about ideas?”
Mailer and his ticket received five percent of the vote in the general election. Incumbent John Lindsay, running as the Liberal Party candidate and with the independent ballot line as well, beat both the Democratic and Republican candidates. Breslin’s later writing would reflect that at least Lindsay tried to give the city a fighting chance.
On a national level, since November 5, we had Richard Nixon.