A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein Page B

excitement of a party convention. She shared a room with four other young women volunteers for Rockefeller at the opulent Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, where she placed her first-ever room service order (cereal and a fresh peach), shook hands with Frank Sinatra, and rode in an elevator with John Wayne. She had spent her summer in Republican politics while being a Eugene McCarthy Democrat, the kind of fence-straddling she accomplished in high school as well, when she was a member of Don Jones’s youth group and her history teacher’s anti-communist society simultaneously. It was a noteworthy pattern.
    The Democratic convention, scheduled for August in Chicago, was certain to be far uglier than the GOP’s meeting in Miami. With Robert Kennedy’s death, McCarthy’s candidacy was the only alternative to Hubert Humphrey’s nomination. Humphrey was almost certain to win, but tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators were heading to the convention, including followers of the band of neo-anarchists led by Abbie Hoffman and others who called themselves Yippies and were promising to disrupt the convention proceedings. Antiwar demonstrations had already turned unprecedentedly violent and virulent that spring. Police and military personnel in uniform were routinely subjected to hateful scorn. Many campuses remained shut down. In this atmosphere, Hillary returned to Chicago to stay with her family for the few weeks remaining before she was due back at Wellesley for her senior year.
    With war in the streets between demonstrators and police erupting even before the convention was called to order, the nation’s attention became fixed on Chicago. Hillary and Betsy Ebeling were adamant that they see for themselves what was happening downtown. On the first night of the convention, Betsy took her parents’ car and the two of them, unbeknownst to Hugh and Dorothy, drove from Park Ridge to the barricades on the edge of Grant Park, where the carnage, tear gas, and fighting were the heaviest. As they drew nearer on foot, working their way through police lines and past emergency first-aid stations, they were struck incredulous at what they were seeing: Chicago’s police, given full authority by Mayor Richard Daley to assault and arrest indiscriminately, were out of control, their fury as demonstrable as the demonstrators’. “It was kids our age with their heads being split open,” said Ebeling. To Hillary and Betsy, the scene seemed horribly reminiscent of television pictures of the war in Vietnam itself—a battlefield, with blood, bandages, fires burning, and tear gas. Except in Chicago, people were throwing toilets out of the Hilton, and the police seemed to harbor special rage for young women in the crowd who taunted them.
    The two young women returned to Grant Park the second and third nights of the convention as the battles grew more intense. As opposed to the war as they both had been, and as often as they had watched filmed scenes on television from Vietnam, the violence in Chicago somehow underscored the horror and reality of young Americans their own age dying in Southeast Asia; some were classmates from Maine South. (A friend from Park Ridge, Jeannie Snodgrass, was nursing the wounded in Grant Park.) The lesson Hillary and Betsy drew from what they had seen was recognition “that our government would do this to our own people”—both in Chicago and Southeast Asia, said Ebeling.
    Though Hillary had turned twenty-one on October 26, she was ineligible to vote in the presidential election because of a thirty-day registration cut-off requirement in Illinois. Later she said she would have voted for Humphrey.
    Hillary returned to Wellesley for her senior year determined to bring the campus more actively into the antiwar movement. As president of the student body, she did not want to see her college and classmates passively ignore the struggles—becoming more inflamed each