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For well-known reasons the Republican convention starts in New York next
week. The Republicans have never come here before. In the past they took notice
of the fact that the mayor was a Democrat, the City Council was Democratic,
the Congressmen were Democrats, the city always turned out a huge majority for
the Demos in every election, etc., etc., so they made the logical conclusion
that New York was a hopeless case and they’d be better off going to Barren
Island or some other resort. Even though New York State often voted Republican,
you simply couldn’t hold a convention there except in one of its secondary
cities, thereby advertising the fact that you were afraid to go to its leading
city.
All that doesn’t really matter in view of the changed status of the city
since 9/11/01. Coming here after that was an inevitability. New York is the
focal point of the War on Terror and it was no more possible to avoid it than it
was to avoid the Normandy landing in World War II. Neither location could be
abandoned to the enemy.
As for the hostile reception awaited here, that’s unimportant. The anti-Bush
forces would have shown up anywhere the President went. If they become
disorderly, at least they won’t be able to overwhelm the city as they overwhelmed
Seattle.
Looking at the pictures of the police that I see in the media, I see no
possibility of them being overcome by any force less than Hurricane Charley
multiplied. What they have to worry about is that Bush might see them and decide they
’re too well armed for New York and maybe he could put through some emergency
legislation to send them all to Iraq immediately. Men are needed there.
The last New York event to require security precautions on this scale was the
United Nations General Assembly meeting in October 1960. All the
international bandits active at the time were there in full fig: Khrushchev of Russia,
Castro, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkrumah of Ghana, Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India,
and a cast of thousands. Every one of them had a price on his head, put
there by their opposition and waiting to be collected.
In terms of numbers, the police mobilization that took place then outweighed
the present one by a factor of ten to one. The secret? New York paid no
overtime in those days. It was straight time only. Manpower was cheap and it
could be assembled on a Chinese scale. No wonder the newspapers kept writing
about a “blanket of blue”. It was true enough.
All this was an over-reaction to the perceived threat and resulted in a loss
of control over the teeming masses of cops assembled from all over the city.
Discipline didn’t break down and no one was actually lost -- for long --
but there were some mysterious disappearances and some unexplained absences,
from which the absentees returned with flushed faces and cheerful expressions.
We found that a lot of people in the neighborhood, the best one in the city,
thought we were doing a great job -- most of us were doing very little --
and they wanted to extend hospitality. A sergeant named Hughy O’Neill told me
of one party to which he was invited in a local mansion, where he was greeted
at the door by the hostesses, Gregg Sherwood Dodge and Bobo Rockefeller, who
offered him a drink and asked him his name. He took the drink and gave them a
name, but it wasn’t his. It looked like that kind of party.
It should be different this time. There won’t be so many cops around that
the supervisors lose track of their whereabouts, there will be more actual work
for them to do, seeing that demonstrators are a lot more experienced than they
were in 1960, and besides that, who would have the nerve to offer a drink to
a man outfitted for front-line combat in the way the Republican Guard is? A
man carrying a machine gun in full-automatic mode is simply not a party
possibility.
In 1960 we didn’t have to worry about this kind of thing. I was at the U.N.
myself, but I wasn’t weighed down with a machine gun, a helmet, a gas mask, a
bulletproof vest, a two-way radio, or any other of the equipment items which
are necessary to the well-dressed cop today. We carried nightsticks and the
men amused themselves by tapping these in rhythm on the wooden barriers so it
sounded like a Sioux Indian attack was coming, but that didn’t last long since
we superiors had to stop it. It was funny while it was going on, though. I
think nightsticks were cancelled after that because it was giving the
demonstrators a bad impression of what might happen to them if they fell into our hands.
So we kept going in our more or less unarmed condition and when we were
finished the U.N. was still standing, but an iron resolve had entered into the cops’
souls -- that the future would bring us time and a half pay for overtime
if it brought us nothing else. It did, so that today the Republicans will find
themselves protected well enough, but without the smothering overkill of
forty-four years ago.
Demonstrations were in their infancy then and all I remember is a group of
Cuban patriots parading on First Ave. chanting “Kooba s?, Rusia no”, who were
opposed a block away by a group looking like retired tailors, who were
chanting something pro-Communist which I don’t remember. Neither group looked
capable of inflicting much damage on the other, and there were enough cops there to
prevent even a dirty look being exchanged. As we know, the Sixties heated up
a good deal after that and in later years cops got badly hurt at places like
Columbia University, but in 1960 only the Hungarians presented a real problem
in crowd control. They were still fired up at Khrushchev for his suppression
of their revolt in 1956 and they had every intention of tearing him limb from
limb if only we would give them the chance. A Hungarian sergeant of ours,
Frank Magyar, was kept busy explaining to them that this really couldn’t be
allowed. It was a tough job, he said.
Khrushchev of course called the demonstrators a gang of Fascist hyenas
enslaved to the capitalist reactionaries and demanded that his sleep not be
disturbed by their howling. He didn’t bother with any capitalistic claptrap about
their right to their own opinion and free speech and all those weird notions, but
made it clear that such people would be made short work of in Russia. I saw
one of his colleagues, Mikoyan, on Meet the Press in those years and heard him
being asked about dissent in Russia. “There isn’t any”, he said irritably,
and that was that.
I only mention these communist expressions because they have stuck in my mind
from those days, not because I secretly envy the people who gave vent to
them. I am a good American democrat and I strongly believe that the anti-Bush
demonstrators should have complete freedom to express themselves and enjoy their
right to free speech. Still, it was fun when the boys did drum rolls on the
barriers. I can hear it now. DUM, DUM, DUMDUMDUM, DUM, DUM...
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