Mabley's Martyrs

Perhaps it could only happen in the strange land of Chicago journalism, but there it was. One of the city's top editors was leading a drive to raise money to defend Chicago cops against charges that they had beaten up reporters during the Democratic National Convention. Although some Chicago editors had treated the police violence gingerly all along, the stand by Jack Mabley, associate editor of Chicago's American, disregarded any sympathy for the abused newsmen and started another caustic press controversy.

When the Chicago police department began to discipline some of its patrol men for their part in the convention dis orders, Mabley took up the cops' cause in his well read daily column. A 30-year veteran of writing sports, television and freewheeling general commentary for Chicago newspapers, Mabley wrote :

"So they've started putting the hooks into the policemen. The brass are getting their scapegoats so they can save their own hides." That seemed reasonable enough, but Mabley ignored the possibility that the officers might be guilty and portrayed them as martyrs. "They are under a cloud of suspicion that will dog their entire police careers, even if they are vindicated," he complained. He pleaded with his readers to help find jobs for the suspended men.

Mabley was more outraged when eight officers were indicted by a federal grand jury, five of them for attacking newsmen. He complained that "the enormous power of the Federal Government is being wheeled out against them, and their employer, the government of the City of Chicago, has turned its back on them." By contrast, he predicted, "tens of thousands of radicals will rally behind" the eight demonstrators also indicted. After the radicals stage "huge demonstrations, go on television with their attacks on the government and the courts," Mabley said, they may raise as much as $200,000. He pleaded for $80,000 in donations to the police defense fund. "The time has come for the people of Chicago to stand up and be counted," he declared.

Blurred Vision. In the Daily News, Columnist Mike Royko gently needled Mabley's pitch for big money. "I don't want to feel completely left out," Royko wrote. "That's why I am starting a noninflationary, low-cost fund drive of my very own. About $600 or $700 will do the trick." It is needed, he said, by Roy Ries Jr., a Presbyterian seminarian who had tried to avoid violence by standing with other clergymen between police and demonstrators. Ries, Royko claims, received a fractured skull and still has blurred vision from a rifle-butt blow on the head inflicted by a cop. The police-fund drive should be bigger, Royko conceded, because "Seminarian Ries contributed much less to the convention drama than did the city's policemen. He just lay there and bled, while they went on to even greater deeds." The American struck back in an editorial, calling Royko "an overworked humorist" who apparently believes that "demanding fair trials for policemen just shows you're prejudiced."

Meanwhile, Chicago cops and out-of-town journalists also were still clashing in a month-long trial of 13 demonstrators charged with disorderly conduct for failure to obey police orders to stop their march toward convention hall. Among them was New York Post Columnist Murray Kempton, who testified that he considered the march "a peaceful revolt--a withdrawal for the evening from the Government." Patricia Saltonstall, a former Washington Star columnist and cousin of retired Senator Leverett Saltonstall, told the court that police had struck her in the face with a rifle barrel. She said she would seek an injunction against "Chicago's practice of subjecting women booked on even minor charges to repeated strippings and searching of the body."

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