Movies

An Interview with John Schultz about Chicago 10

John Schultz, a professor emeritus of creative writing at Columbia College, covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention for the Evergreen Review and later wrote No One Was Killed (1969), a memoir of his experience during the convention, and Motion Will Be Denied (1972), later republished as The Chicago Conspiracy Trial. –J.R. Jones

February 28, 2008

Is the Chicago conspiracy trial still relevant today?

Yes, because it’s a pattern for political/criminal trials. . . . It was the model show trial of the late 60s and early 70s, and it became the model for both the prosecution and the defense for dozens of the gang trials [the Gainesville Eight, the Milwaukee 14, etc]. . . . It was the political motive behind these gang trials to take many of these organizers off the street, get them out of what they were doing and what they were so passionate about, which was organizing against the war and organizing for many other issues that beset the country, including civil rights, poverty, and so forth, some of which tends to get lost in the media hullaballoo about the big show trials.

Originally J. Edgar Hoover wanted 20 people in the line-up. And when the Justice Department got down to it, they wouldn’t go along with the 20; they found all sorts of problems in that some of them were actually reporters, and they thought that whatever they said would be entangled with the First Amendment immediately. So they reduced it finally and deliberately to a kind of cross-section of the whole antiwar movement. You have John Froines and Lee Weiner, for instance, representing the academic part of the antiwar movement, you have Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis representing the younger side of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, and [David] Dellinger, who represents the older Christian pacifist protest. And then you have the two Yippies, the newer version which was very attractive to an awful lot of young people at the time, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

The other part of the model is, how does the defense dispose itself? What kind of action does the defense take, particularly if you have a judge whose favorite phrases are “Motion will be denied” and “Objection sustained”? The pattern in favor of the prosecution is noted by the appeals panel itself, three judges from the appeals court. . . . So what is the defense to do if it’s being asked to sit quietly while this is being done to itself? For the conspiracy trial defendants, they couldn’t agree on almost any strategy. The only thing they could finally agree on was that they would accept whatever any one of them felt he had to do. And that meant that the Yippies sometimes did actions which the others completely and utterly disapproved of. And sometimes the Yippies themselves felt the people from the Mobe were not doing what they should do.

I interviewed Abbie Hoffman three times in the month before he died, the last time two and a half days before he died, and the first time I saw him was in August in Lincoln Park. Underneath all this he was a pretty serious guy, and he had a pretty serious estimation of what was being accomplished, historically speaking--what they were really up against, how people were going to react, why they were reacting, and so on. It was not just fun and games for him.

Was the leadership of Hoffman and Rubin helpful to the antiwar movement, or detrimental?

Their emphasis on getting the attention of the media was very helpful. But they were actually following up on what had already been discovered in the civil rights movement in the south. As the organizers have said, if you could get just a couple of reporters out to an event, or particularly if you could get a television camera out to an event, you could considerably modify the kind of pressure, reaction, violence, action that the authorities were going to take against these demonstrations. It made it somewhat safer. And it frequently modified the possibility of there being lethal violence. That doesn’t mean lethal violence didn’t occur; it occurred usually, as Mark Twain put it, in the old-fashioned way, at the back end of a country road on a dark night. But then, what happens when the media turn away? Which did happen in the early 70s, and for the antiwar movement and some of the other movements of the time, that was something of a disaster.

There’s only about 30 minutes in the movie covering scenes in the courtroom, yet the trial went on for five months. What got left out?

You have to see the film in two different ways, I think. Brett Morgen succeeds in what he set out to do, which was to deal with the myth of ’68, and to do it in a layered form—or as you call it, a mash-up. And that becomes an efficient way to give an impression of what was going on. But he scrambles the sequences of actions during convention week: you have Tuesday night and Wednesday night mixed up, and actually all the nights sometimes get mixed up in very rapid sequence as if they were happening at the same time. And certain National Guard actions, with the jeeps and the barbed-wire frameworks in front of them, seem to be pushing against the demonstrators at the same time that the police are attacking them at Michigan and Balboa on August the 28th; that just didn’t happen. Then late in the sequence he brings in the Bobby Seale drama, which actually occurred right at the beginning of the trial.

So it’s perhaps effective in giving a generalized mythic impression of what happened for people who have, frankly, not read very much or been given very much about what actually happened and how it happened and what was at issue in 1968. I get caught between, in some ways, admiring the technique of the film and wondering, What does this do to people’s sense of the history? What does this do to their sense of what was actually at stake in that year, which was as close as we’ve come to civil war since the Civil War itself? What does that do to their understanding? Do they end up misplacing dates by a century or so in terms of historical events? If it draws people’s attention to finding out more about 1968, which I think is part of Brett Morgen’s intention, then it could be very useful. It’s not an uninteresting film to watch.

How does it compare to other dramatizations of the trial?

There’ve been theatrical dramatizations, there were actually films of some sort made directly after the trial came to an end. They were shown in Canada, not here; it must be possible to get copies somewhere. [Chicago 10 is] better than some of the dramatizations I’ve seen which give all the power, all the rightness and power, to the defense. They make the prosecution sound utterly silly, and the defense sound totally noble, and mythic in its proportions, and in fact it was a deadly drama from beginning to end. The government was doing a pretty effective job in engaging these people in a drama that was going to have a very serious outcome. So it does better than that, by far. W hether it’s going to do better than the Spielberg film, I don’t know. Some of the best things have been things that were made at the time, videos that somehow have escaped people’s attention. But you see, one of the things missing from Brett Morgen’s film are the scenes in Lincoln Park, which were far more violent than the scenes downtown and came much closer to massacres.

But during those, film was confiscated and cameras were smashed.

I was standing right at the major confrontation on Sunday night, right where it happened, where the lines of police came through the park and the lines of the protesters, that were actually in great fear of their lives, stood up to meet the line of the police, and there was a kind of 19th-century formality about it. And the strobe lights were turned on, the media lights were turned on. It was like a night scene where they’re making a movie, you know? . . . I was standing right beside this [Sun-Times] photographer, and suddenly this club just came out of nowhere: bam! And he just looked down astonished at his camera, and turned to me and said, “He got my lens!” Well, that happened again and again that night. Whenever there was any scene of extraordinary police violence up on Lincoln Park, a club came out of somewhere and smashed a camera. Are we to believe that this kind of pattern is not in some way permitted, even encouraged? Some cops have told me that it was actually talked about before the convention and encouraged.

At the preview screening on Tuesday, Tom Hayden said the trial was about a black man being bound and gagged. Would you agree with that assessment?

No, not entirely. . . . [Bobby] Seale was tacked on at the last minute, basically by Hoover, and the grand jury finally went along with Hoover in bringing Seale into the indictment. That was a part of getting the spectrum of the various protest movements at the time, to make sure there was at least one from the Black Panthers. . . . The trial itself was about speech, it was about everything that goes into speech. You can’t say the defendants were innocent, necessarily, or fully innocent. Or as Abbie Hoffman said, “After a while you begin to wonder, am I guilty?” Jerry Rubin did say about four, five, six years after the trial, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty as charged!” And Abbie Hoffman said, “That’s nonsense.” We talked about it. Rubin had a desire to be seen in that way. It was almost a Dostoyevskian type of thing. Lee Weiner said, “That’s Jerry seeing himself in a latter-day perspective.”

This trial, the fact that the defense took an aggressive attitude toward saving itself, was very important. It changed the attitude of how people who were on trial basically for political reasons should defend themselves. In the 50s they defended themselves by trying to be super formal and polite and courteous and so forth in the courtoom. That became seen as a way of inviting a kind of career and even possibly personal destruction. In the late 60s and early 70s, the conspiracy trial was the one that set forth the model of aggressive defense on the part of the attorneys and the defendants, and it worked in one trial after another. One middle-class mainstream American jury after another found guys like this not guilty. I mean, there were hundreds of such trials, if you get down to draft board trials and things like that.

How did the trial verdict influence public opinion?

The trial was very successful from the Justice Department’s point of view. Even though [President] Johnson himself wanted the trial, the major figures in the Justice Department, including obviously Ramsey Clark and others, did not think that there was the basis for a trial. The evidence didn’t show them that. So for the Nixon Justice Department, it was enormously successful. By the end of trial you could find--well, 70 percent of Americans thought the prosecution was correct, and the government was correct. That percentage of people backing the government started to rise from the convention onward. It had been considerably going down before that.

And then [after] the first impact of the televised violence from Michigan and Balboa, Americans went in very confused directions. It was a fairly incredible event. But the television had the most powerful impact. You have to remember, 59 million people saw that on television. Forty million people watched the 2004 convention. Something happened in this country. The point is that even from the position of the government’s case, every one of these gang trials was effective politically. But mainstream middle-class juries who managed to hear all of the evidence--which very seldom gets into any media portrayal, it’s very difficult to do--but whenever they heard all the evidence they would find not guilty.

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