CHICAGO -- For those who served on Chicago's police force during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention that spilled into the streets, the pain has never left.
This summer's many TV and print stories about the convention only sharpened the hurt felt by the police, who were jeered by anti-Vietnam War demonstrators as 'pigs' and roundly condemned for what was termed a 'police riot.'
Many officers who figured prominently in the events of August 1968 still will not talk about them.
One who will is Frank Sullivan. The police department's spokesman then, he remembers calling a news conference to respond to an NBC 'Today Show' broadcast. 'Here was Hugh Downs, on 'NBC Today,' saying, 'There is no other way to describe the Chicago police other than pigs.''
Sullivan recalls that there were strikingly different perceptions of who the protesters were and 'what they were about.'
'We viewed them as people who were here to disrupt the convention and make a political point, that point being that the U.S. government and its sub-governments, such as the city of Chicago, are oppressors,' Sullivan said.
'This group decided to make their point in the streets of Chicago.'
The world rebuked the police for their widely televised clubbing of demonstrators and confrontations with reporters and photographers. Those actions were compared with that summer's Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
A U.S. senator addressing the convention roared about 'Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.' There even was a half-hearted motion to recess the convention and reconvene in another city.
Sullivan, now a public relations executive, concedes the city has not been the site of a major party convention since then because of memories of 1968.
When convention week ended, there had been 677 arrests, all but 13 for misdemeanors. Authorities counted 390 convictions for everything from public nudity to battery. Charges were dropped against 118 defendants while another 48 were acquitted. A year later, 15 cases involving mob action and disorderly conduct remained stalled in court.
Eight demonstration leaders -- including Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden -- were indicted by a federal grand jury for violating an anti-riot law that also became controversial.
The case of Bobby G. Seale later was separated from that of the others. Convictions on charges of conspiracy against Rubin and other Chicago Seven defendants were overturned on appeal.
Eight police officers also were indicted. Although none was convicted, at least 37 were disciplined for their conduct.
Police morale plummeted amid allegations that some officers had removed their badges and nameplates and attacked demonstrators and journalists.
A commission appointed by President Johnson to investigate the disorders charged there had been 'unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence,' and that the conduct of police amounted, on two occasions, to what 'can only be called a police riot.'
To the cop on the street, those words stung.
Capt. Joe Grubisic, now an explosives expert in the police bomb and arson unit, had a ringside view of the infamous 19-minute melee at Michigan Avenue and Balbo Drive, televised live on the third night of the convention.
'Sure, there may have been some overreaction. I got hit by a brick out there. I don't know what I would have done if I'd have gotten a hold of whoever threw it,' said Grubisic, then a 32-year-old sergeant in the Intelligence Division's Subversive Unit, also known as the 'Red Squad.'
'You know, police did not conspire to go bust heads,' said Grubisic, who arrested Rubin that week. 'The people that came here, some of them, not all of them, were here to confront the police.'
Grubisic blamed protest leaders for the violence. He said that weeks before the convention the Seed, a fashionably radical newspaper of that era, heralded the planned protests and added inflammatory rhetoric.
'The Seed issued a call for 200,000 to 300,000 people to come to Chicago and they told them not to come here for a good time. They told them to expect bloodshed,' he said.
Estimates put the actual number of demonstrators at between 5,000 and 10,000 people, he said. Sullivan put the figure at less than 5,000.
In the years since the convention, the Red Squad has been disbanded; the Seed folded during the 1970s. Its fiery editor, Abe Peck, once Grubisic's political nemesis, now teaches at Northwestern University.
Grubisic has come to regard those days with a mixture of wry humor and dismay.
'Those were just very bad times. You had Martin Luther King get killed, (and Robert) Kennedy,' he observed.
Spotting a mailing on his desk about a reunion of 1960s-era activists on the anniversary of the Chicago convention, Grubisic chuckled that he had not been invited. He spoke to Grubisic on the telephone later that day.
'He said we should get together and have a beer,' a delighted Grubisic said. 'Hey, we're on opposite sides. He has his views, I have mine.'
As for the battles of 1968, Grubisic deplored what he still believes was a senseless confrontation.
'Nothing was achieved by all that. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The war went on for another seven years. They gained nothing.'
