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Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, by Frank Kusch. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. 206 pp. $44.95 cloth. ISBN: 027598138X.
The behavior of the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention was branded a "police riot" by the authors of the 1968 Walker Report (to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence), rhetorically placing the responsibility for their individual and collective actions squarely on the rank and file officers themselves. And there is no question that many officers went into those seven days of confrontation with great animosity toward the anti-war demonstrators who had assembled in Chicago, nor is there any doubt that many of them also engaged in indiscriminant violence toward the demonstrators. Nonetheless, Frank Kusch's interviews with eighty of those officers more than thirty years later casts considerable doubt on the utility of the conceptual lens of "police riot" for understanding the origin and dynamics of police behavior during the 1968 Convention.
Battleground Chicago presents a detailed account of events leading up to the Convention, the week of often violent confrontations between police and demonstrators during the Convention and the recriminations that followed. Drawing upon extensive and diverse sources supplemented by his rich interviews with police officers, Kusch does a masterful job of nesting the events within the tumultuous American social and political context of that year. A flourishing counter culture, a rapidly expanding anti-war movement, the assassination of both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the subsequent urban disorders dominated the imaginations...