Fear and Loathing at the '68 Democratic National Convention

Editor's Note: A weird craigslist posting a few weeks ago purporting to offer for sale the 1968 ticket stub used by late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to cover the Democratic National Convention in Chicago led Fort Collins Now to a Denver suburb and a long, rambling interview with the seller. He claims to have been on the front lines of the protest zone when police and rioters ran amok. Out of fear that he remains a target of the government for a checkered history—involving long-standing political activism and drug charges—the man insisted on using the pseudonym “Mad Jack.”

Although Mad Jack said that he had been involved civil rights protests long before the Democrats held their convention in Chicago in 1968, his involvement in that infamous chapter of American history was little more than a drug-induced blunder, the unexpected result of a trip to score acid from an old college buddy.

"This was probably late afternoon on Friday, Aug. 23, 1968," he said. "I went down there to pick up eight hits of purple haze acid."

Mad Jack took one hit and stashed the rest in his jacket pocket before heading down to Rush Street to check out the pre-convention festivities.

The sounds of singing and dancing punctuated by drums banging in the distance floated through the air. Hippie shops and underground movie theaters lined the street.

Jack's wife Judy Dunlop, who at the time had yet to meet her future husband, grew up in Chicago and recalled that the opening festivities were a joyous affair.

"I went down with a friend on Friday night," she said. "At that point it was just so warm and friendly and the yippies were coming in and they had positive messages and of course everyone wanted Eugene McCarthy to be the candidate. People were excited about it."

The feel-good atmosphere was quickly snuffed when throngs of hardened protesters mixed with unfortunate bystanders and tangled with police. There was tear gas and blows from baton-wielding policeman. Mad Jack recalled seeing the crowds explode into pandemonium as he strolled along Rush Street, just after the initial hit of purple haze began to take effect.

"I was walking and I heard all this noise going on. I was standing up on this concrete step that had some columns and down below was a pond about 200, maybe 300, yards away," he said. "There were 120,000 people down there. All of a sudden the cops pulled two police cars up, got out and left the doors wide open and next thing I know they're both on fire. That's when the tear gas, the beatings and the clubbing started. All of a sudden those people were running right at me."

The sight of thousands of frenzied protesters and cops running like bulls through a spreading cloud of tear gas sent Mad Jack into a panic. Not wanting to be caught with drugs by berserk cops or risk losing them should he be trampled by the hysterical crowd, he snatched the other seven hits of acid from his pocket and swallowed the lot before bolting in the opposite direction of the mayhem …

But to no avail … the peaceful setting had degenerated on all sides and there was nowhere to run.

“All hell broke loose. I'm tripping out of my mind," he recalled. "People are running everywhere. You'd try to run away from it and a bus would pull up at one block and a cop car at the other and they'd sort of try and squeeze us in the middle.

"I remember when one of the cops fired one of those old Thompsons and I could see it hitting the wall behind me. I spent a lot of time hiding behind a garden shack ..."

***

In many ways, the showdown between cops and protesters had been inevitable. Mayor Richard M. Daley had promised a no-tolerance-attitude toward anyone looking to stir up trouble, and protesters had promised they wouldn't give any ground either. Both parties had honored their word in a horrific clash of will and blood on the streets.

"Mayor Daley wanted to put it down. He was acting like Hitler," Mad Jack said.

What began as a burst of mayhem devolved into a humanitarian crisis over the weekend, as efforts by police to squash protesters into submission only ramped up the fervor.

Between Friday and Saturday, Mad Jack fell in as a recruit for a small army of hippie medics, led by what he said was an ex-lieutenant fresh from Vietnam out of Lincoln Park. The ragtag medics appointed themselves in charge of protecting and treating wounded civilians.

"I became a hippie medic sometime in the middle of the night or early morning. We were located in this fenced-in area of the park," he said. "I was putting together a kit for myself."

He headed down to Rush Street wearing a World War I pith helmet that someone had handed him and compiled an emergency kit from what supplies he could find from stores. He fashioned a scarf and dampened it with distilled water to keep out the gas.

"I was gassed over 40 times over the period of that week," he said.

Mad Jack recalled the weekend treating people as something of a fog, literally and figuratively; a persistent haze of gas hung in the air, and then there was still the dangerous amount of purple haze he had ingested in one fell swoop, leaving him "high until Monday morning."

"We just did what we could. We called for an ambulance if things were too bad and made our recommendations and sent them down to our temporary layout there in the corner (of the park)," he said. "Rumor was spreading that the Black Panthers were going to attack us but it never happened."

On Sunday night, Mad Jack said he was able to break free of the riot scene and retreat back home about an hour outside of Chicago.

“We lived right off the lake, on the bay. I took a shower, gobbled down some food and cleaned up—I was a mess—and finally calmed down enough so I could drive. I picked up some extra stuff and changed my clothes and went back to it," he said. "I wasn't gone a matter of hours. At that time it was only about an hour drive. I knew all the back roads and that Pontiac really went, so I had no trouble and knew right where to park."

It had been as though he'd never left. Tensions had failed to break. The situation was getting desperate. And unlike Friday evening, this time Mad Jack knew he was walking into the belly of the beast. The ex-lieutenant from Vietnam said Jack was needed down in Grant Park. He embarked Monday afternoon through the streets with a girl that he had met in the fray. For better or worse, they stuck together.

"This chick that was sort of hanging with me hung with me through the whole thing—it's not like we were doing anything, we were really too busy," he said. "Every little store we went by, grocery stores and drug stores, people were giving us oranges and apples and bread. They were all behind us. My pith helmet was chock full. They were all giving iodine, bandages, gauze, distilled water, you name it. The people were really behind us."

Walking into Grant Park was like walking into a war zone, he said. Wave after wave of riots bombarded the area. He painted red stripes on his pith helmet and jacket in hopes that police might recognize him as a medic and spare him the billy club.

"I still got my fair share of bonks. But I was able to keep myself from being arrested or surrounded and sealed out and beaten like so many people," he said.

While avoiding blows, Mad Jack said he spent his time "dragging people away from all the action" to treat them. He said he had to take many people down with flying tackles while they were running scared and bleeding, after which he'd take them to a tree or safe area to dress wounds.

"It was just one gassing after another."

It stayed that way throughout the week, with one vignette blending into another. One encounter, however, stood out clearly in Mad Jack’s mind.

At the height of Tuesday’s madness, when it seemed things couldn’t get worse or stranger, Mad Jack said that he came face to face with a rambling Hunter S. Thompson. At the time, Thompson was still years away from writing his epochal book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but was in Chicago for the convention to conduct research. He later wrote that the events there had a profound effect on his political views and he later made his journalistic career out of exposing the underbelly of American politics.

"I was dressing a wound after a gassing and a beating and I was bandaging somebody and helping a few other people," Mad Jack said. "He (Thompson) came up to me, dressed in this outlandish outfit. I don't think he had a pith helmet on, I think he had on one of those soft golfer hats and a fishing vest and shorts, tan shorts and, of course, a cigarette holder in his mouth and long white socks that came up almost all the way to his knees, and black shoes.

"He was talking very rapidly and almost incoherently. This guy definitely stood out of the crowd. He was just chattering at me saying all kinds of weird things like Hunter Thompson does, calling them 'bastards' and 'f***heads' and 'gross pigs with their buttons breaking off their uniforms from too much fat.' He was just going off at the mouth."

Mad Jack didn't know at the time who Thompson was, but said he has no doubts that it was the man. In the middle of his rant, Thompson thrust a magnetic press pass into Mad Jack’s hands.

"Here, take this, the real convention is out here,” he remembered Thompson telling him. “Go in and get a shower and get something to eat and clean up and take a breath." Then Thompson was gone.

He didn’t take Thompson up on his suggestion. He wasn't about to leave his work, he didn't know where the building was, he couldn't get around the police to make it and lastly, had no idea who the weirdo was who gave him the pass in the first place. There was too much happening for him to think about it.

***

The days passed in a mad, violent blur.

"Then Thursday rolled around and that was the last day for me."

Thursday was shaping up to be something of a party for the hippies; Mad Jack said that Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and prime minister of the Black Panther Party, was planning a barbecue at his house on the south side of Chicago.

"He invited 120,000 of his friends," Mad Jack said.

He said that Abbie Hoffman and other protest organizers worked out a route with the city to Carmichael's house. He recalled jumping into a white van to drive down Thursday evening. The van never made it to Carmichael's house and the barbecue never happened.

"We got down the street and lo and behold, there is the National Guard with jeeps with barbed wire on the front," he said. "It was the National Guard and the Chicago police and they let people down this basically closed-in street. I mean there was no way out. They picked this particular place for the ambush.

"That's where I was Thursday at six, at the ambush spot. Right there."

He said that news crews swarmed the area and that he stopped just short of going into the enclosed area, afraid of what might lie in wait. Like a bad dream, the riot machine wound back into full speed.

"This 80-year-old black woman, who was a maid for somebody, obviously, who lived there, had been gassed and thumped so hard that her skull was cracked,” he said. "I was wrapping her head up as best as I could."

Things were getting worse and there was no controlling it. Mad Jack felt too in over his head to stay around.

"One of the last things I remember was the girl that had been with me all that week was on the other side of the street helping somebody right next to this alley—an older person," he said. "And I looked over in time to see this gas bomb hit her square in the face and explode. And even the CBS people freaked out at that point and left me to my own devices. So I ran down an alley and just got the hell out of there and somehow got away from this area and back to Rush St. where I had my car parked and left.”

It was only years later that he surmised who the strange figure was who offered him his press pass into the convention hall. Since then, he has devoured everything Thompson ever wrote and watched any film based on or about the renowned journalist. In his opinion, comedian Bill Murray did a better impersonation of Thompson in Where The Buffalo Roam compared to Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He said he has journals full of his own writing inspired by Thompson's style.

In February 1991, Mad Jack had a chance to meet his hero under less jangled circumstances, at Thompson’s old haunt, the Woody Creek Tavern on the outskirts of Aspen. He asked him whether he remembered the day. Thompson said he remembered at least being there, and offered to sign the press pass, but Mad Jack had left it at home. Nevertheless, he didn't walk away empty-handed; he had a copy of Thompson’s book Songs of the Doomed and Thompson signed that instead, although it’s suspiciously made out to “Skip,” which is not Mad Jack’s real name.

Both items are for sale to the highest bidder on Denver’s craigslist. Are they real? Did Mad Jack come about them as he claims?

There’s no way to know for sure. But it might be worth the price in any event, if only for the tales that they come with.