The Trial of The Chicago 7

by Pa Rock
Student of History

A couple of nights ago I watched the new Netflix production of "The Trial of The Chicago 7,"  a fierce and provocative examination of a significant chapter of the 1960's counterculture movement in America.  The film, which was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, told the story of the courtroom trial of eight individuals who were accused by the United States government of  plotting riots and mayhem at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Various reviews of this new production suggest that Mr. Sorkin may have embellished the facts or arranged them in a particular manner in order to add drama to his version of events, but speaking as someone who lived through those turbulent and newsworthy times, the story told by Aaron Sorkin has a strong ring of truth to it.

When the Democrats met in Chicago in August of 1968 to officially select their presidential candidate, the party's leader, President Lyndon Johnson, had withdrawn his name from consideration the previous spring, and one other major candidate, Senator Bobby Kennedy, had been assassinated during the summer.  Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, had also been assassinated that spring.  Senator Eugene McCarthy remained in the running representing the party's left flank and was openly outspoken against our country's on-going involvement in the Vietnam War.    Most people assumed that when the the political turmoil settled, the party would give its nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey - which it did.  (LBJ may have removed himself from the race, but he still had a firm control on the party machinery and the delegates.)

Very few within the mainstream of the Democratic Party wanted to see turmoil at the convention because they feared that would help the election chances of the GOP candidate for president, Richard Nixon.  Richard J. Daley, the Democratic political boss of Illinois as well as the Mayor of Chicago, made it a matter of personal pride to keep dissent and war protesters away from the convention site.  Daley's city bureaucrats denied permits for groups to use Chicago public parks for rallying points or to be out on the streets conducting parades or protests.  When war protesters showed up despite not having any valid permits, Daley's police met them with strident and sometimes deadly force.

That August as Democrats tried to meet and nominate Humphrey, there were massive demonstrations and protests in the streets of Chicago - much of which degenerated into rioting.  The war in Vietnam was the focus of most of the protesting.

President Johnson had his administration look into the rioting that occurred, and his attorney general, Ramsey Clark, eventually determined that the "riots" had been precipitated by activities of the Chicago Police Department, and Johnson's government declined to take further action.

But Richard Nixon won the election that fall, and a new national government came to power in January.  Nixon's in-coming attorney general, John Mitchell, was an arch-conservative and a polar opposite to the liberal Ramsey Clark, and Mitchell was determined to have a show trial in Chicago, a trial in which young student activists and war protesters would be pummeled in the press as anti-American while being tightly linked to elements of the Democratic Party.

And it was at that point when the story crafted by Aaron Sorkin basically began - with Mitchell interviewing a couple of young government prosecutors whom he had selected to manage the government's case.

Eight young men were originally brought to trial in Federal Court in Chicago:  Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis of the national college group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the more outspoken and outlandish Yippee movement, David Dellinger, John Froines, and Lee Weiner.  The group also contained Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party.  Seale claimed to have had  no connection to the other seven and said that he had only been on the ground in Chicago a total of four hours during the tumultuous week of the convention.  Seale, at least according to the film, said that the government had included him in the group in order to provide an angry young black man for the jury to focus on.  

Nationally known defense attorney William Kunstler represented the seven white defendants, and Bobby Seale, who said that his attorney could not be present in the courtroom due to illness, dismissed his court-appointed attorney and tried repeatedly to represent himself, something that the judge, an old conservative reprobate named Julius Hoffman, refused to permit.   Bobby Seale's case was eventually declared a mistrial after Judge Hoffman had him bound, gagged, and chained to his chair for several days while in court.  The judge insisted that Bobby Seale serve prison time for numerous contempt citations related to the trial, but the prison sentence was later dismissed.

In the end, the federal government was not able to prove the conspiracy charges against the remaining seven defendants, but five (everyone except Froines and Weiner) were convicted of crossing state lines in order to incite rioting.  Those convictions were later overturned on appeal and the government declined to try the defendants again.

It took several months to bring the actual trial to a close, and Aaron Sorkin reportedly worked on bringing his version of the trial to fruition for nearly a decade.  The final film product involved a cast and crew numbering in the hundreds - and there were an astounding 38 producers (of various ranks) listed on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) page for the film!

Several actors in the film deserve special mention.   Sacha Baron Cohen was Abbie Hoffman to his very core, an absolute perfect casting.   When Cohen's Hoffman wasn't needling Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abby) in court, he was entertaining the press and local pols around Chicago in the evenings doing stand-up comedy routines about the trial.  And while Cohen captured the essence of the purposefully outrageous Abby Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne also seemed to ground his charcter, SDS leader Tom Hayden, in the reality of what was happening at that pivotal point in history.  Hoffman was playing to the cameras, while Hayden was playing to the court.

Michael Keaton gave a strong performance as Ramsey Clark - and another actor that I thought turned in an exceptional performance was Joseph Gordon-Levitt who portrayed Richard Schultz, the chief government prosecutor.   Throughout the ordeal of the trial, Gordon-Levitt was able to show a streak of humanity, one that was repulsed by the way in which his case was being rigged by agents of the government against the defense.

For those who would like to learn about life in 1960's America, "The Trial of The Chicago 7" does a good job of capturing the rage and the spirit of the time.  And while Aaron Sorkin's version of events may not be a word-for-word accurate retelling of those times, overall the film manages to transport us back to Nixon's America and Daley's Chicago and let us feel what life was like as the most turbulent decade in American history was closing out.

It also provides a bit of foreshadowing to Trump's America in 2020.

This film is well worth experiencing, if for no other reason than it shows how quickly darkness begins to creep in when the torch of freedom is lowered.