RUSH: Chuck in Brandon, Florida. Hello, Chuck.
CALLER: Yes, hello, Rush. To begin with, I’ve been listening to you for 19 years and my wife and I strongly admire what you do.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: However, I’m one of those so-called thugs that you referred to. A Chicago policeman from ’68 that was one of Daley’s so-called henchmen — which we weren’t, by the way, Rush. The media then was no different than it is today. They didn’t show everything that these rabble-rousers were doing under the direction of Eugene McCarthy.
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait just a second. You know, I understand why you called. You don’t understand. I was proud of the cops. It was a term — Daley’s goons, Daley’s thugs — the point to me was that Daley had sent you guys out to beat up on his own people.
CALLER: Absolutely not. These were all… This was a put-up job by Eugene McCarthy, if you remember, going back that far.
RUSH: You mean Daley had nothing to do with it?
CALLER: Well, yes, he did. Let me tell you. We had to stand there for three or four days while they were throwing bags of urine, excrement, bags of lye on people. We had several policemen that got hurt, and they wouldn’t let us do anything. We had to stand there. Now, I’m sorry I’m not the only policeman that was there that listens to you, Rush. A lot of us were very, very conservative. And finally, when Daley went wild at the convention where he got up and said, ‘I’m not going to put…’ then they allowed us to arrest these people and lock them up.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: You know?
RUSH: Well?
CALLER: But we weren’t thugs, Rush.
RUSH: No, no, no. It was a term of endearment. Look it, when you go back to 1968, I remember (garbled) —
CALLER: Throw them in the wagon and take them and lock them up and these same rabble-rousers, I think Abbie Hoffman was one of them, I know you’ll further remember, when they (garbled) Judge Hoffman’s court —
RUSH: Yeah, absolutely.
CALLER: You know. But, again —
RUSH: What was Judge Hoffman’s first name?
CALLER: Julius.
RUSH: That’s right, Julius Hoffman.
CALLER: And I’m not mad at you now. Don’t get me wrong, because it’s taken me 19 years to get in on this line to call you up.
RUSH: (laughs)
CALLER: But a lot of people — the media, see, they took little selective pieces. They showed us whacking a few of them that resisted and were fighting with us. They didn’t show the other things that were going on prior to — and that’s my point. And I’m sure that like I said, I know there must be a lot of people policeman — I’m 76, and I’m sure there are a lot of policemen today — that listen to you and, you know, they know where I’m coming from, you know? But we were not thugs. We put up with a lot. However, it only took us one day to get rid of them, all of them riots and all that rabble-rousing going on.
RUSH: Yeah, that’s right, but how many days had you had to sit there and stand there and take that stuff?
CALLER: Well, three or four days.
RUSH: Three or four days — and you’re right, the media didn’t show that. They showed some of the standoff, they showed these people protesting, finally got in gear and you ended this thing. But, remember, the Democrats lost that election in a landslide to Richard Nixon.
CALLER: I understand that.
RUSH: That was because what the country saw was Democrats rioting, and they saw — in a Democrat city, defined by the mayor’s power and Richard Daley and the police force. The better way to have said it would have been: The Democrat mayor orders his police force to go in and finally quell these riots, and that was on television. There were some fires that were set and so forth. And so what the people of the country saw was total anarchy among the Democrat Party, in a huge Democrat machine city.
CALLER: See, right across the street from both of those hotels you had the Blackstone and the Stevens. That’s what they called the Hilton at that time. They had Grant Park, which is just a huge park; and that’s where they were all camping out and getting their meetings together and deciding what they were going to do and climbing poles, et cetera, et cetera, and we couldn’t do anything. We were told we could not. We could not do anything. Finally, they turned us loose where they said, ‘Lock these people up,’ and that’s exactly what we did. But it was a selective showing on television.
RUSH: But you know why they finally gave you permission to act? They were content for these Democrat protesters to do what they did with no violence about it, because that was their voting bloc. This is the anti-war convention in 1968. But finally couldn’t take it anymore because it was starting to cause more harm than good because people were more interested in what was going on outside the convention hall than what was going on inside.
CALLER: You’re exactly right.
RUSH: So Daley gives you guys, finally, the-go-ahead to quell this stuff. That was the year that Richard Nixon ran on a law-and-order platform —
CALLER: Uh-huh.
RUSH: — and the Democrats had a cow because they called it a code word for racism!
CALLER: I remember it well. I remember it just like yesterday, and it’s something embedded in my mind, and basically of the other policemen that were down there in that general area. And, you know, that’s the way it was. But again, the people that I really got mad at were the media because they only took their little selective bits out.
RUSH: Well, welcome to the real world.
CALLER: I know that, you know, and we knew it at the time. And most of the policemen, believe it or not at that time, they were not Democrats. They were Republicans. At that time, we were the lowest paid, largest police department in the United States. That’s true. New York and Chicago was well ahead of us. New York and LA, rather.
RUSH: Let me ask you a question. You may not know this. It’s not a trick question, and I — but I want to see if you can tell me, why — because a lot of people around the country, at the time this was happening, 1968, this is 20 years ago — 40 years ago. I’m sorry, 40 years ago. A lot of people were trying — just average Americans — to figure out, ‘What the hell are these anti-war people doing protesting in a Democrat convention? Why aren’t they protesting Nixon?’ Why were they protesting in Chicago at the Democrat convention? Why were they protesting against their own party, essentially?
CALLER: Well, if you remember going back, you had McCarthy. Yeah, Eugene McCarthy. He was the senator from, I want to say, Minnesota. I could be wrong. I can’t remember that well. But he was primarily, everything stemmed from the Stevens Hotel. That was their headquarters where all the rabble-rousers like Abbie Hoffman and, oh, God a couple of others —
RUSH: No, you had Tom Hayden running around out there!
CALLER: Yes, exactly right. He was one of the seven.
RUSH: Rennie Davis! You had Rennie Davis running around. He was one of the guys, by the way, that really gave Judge Hoffman the trouble.
CALLER: Absolutely. They were just disgusting what they did, and Hoffman didn’t know what —
RUSH: They were all Democrats.
CALLER: Huh?
RUSH: They were all Democrats.
CALLER: Absolutely! Absolutely.
CALLER: And Hoffman, he couldn’t control the courtroom. It was total chaos in his courtroom. But anyway that’s why I called up. But anyway you’re doing a great job — and like I said I’ve been listening to you, my friend, for 19 years, at least, since you’ve been on. My wife and I admire you.
RUSH: Chuck, I actually want to apologize to you, because, you’re right. The use of the word ‘thug’ to describe you guys is totally inappropriate. The criticism was not aimed at you. It actually wasn’t any criticism. It was just, you had a Democrat city, Democrat mayor, Democrat convention. Finally it was a Democrat mayor ordered his police force to start cracking heads against Democrats.
CALLER: You know, all my life I’ve heard that, you know, from different people. Not necessarily you. This is the first time I heard you really say anything about it today. But all my life, about what brutes Chicago policemen were. We really weren’t. We had a great police department, and I’m very proud that I was a member. And, by the way, all those people that were down there, you didn’t go down there on your own. You had to be there, and we put in long hours, 12, 14 hours, you know, and at that time we didn’t get compensated for it. We didn’t get extra time off for it.
RUSH: Not only that, you had to take bags of excrement being thrown at you —
CALLER: You betcha!
RUSH: — and sit there and smile about it because you were ordered to stand down. The memories now are coming back vividly. Chuck, thanks for the call. I really, really, really do appreciate it. Thanks so much.