30th Anniversary of ‘Chicago 8’ Trial Celebrated

If there was any repentance lurking in the souls of Bobby Seale and Tom Hayden, it wasn’t showing when they came here Friday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the trial of the “Chicago 8,” one of the most bizarre courtroom spectacles in U.S. history.

Nor was there any sign of regret on the part of Jerry Lefcourt and Dennis Roberts, two of the radical lawyers who defended the Chicago 8 against charges of conspiring to incite a riot for their roles in turning the 1968 Democratic National Convention into one of the country’s most embarrassing political farces.

“We were right,” said Lefcourt, 57.

No regrets for bringing street theater into a federal courtroom, for unfurling a Viet Cong flag at the defense table, for Seale calling the 74-year-old judge a “bald-headed fascist dog,” or for other defendants parading in the courtroom in judicial robes and then stomping on them.

Lefcourt is a past president of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which brought anti-war and civil rights activists Seale and Hayden to Chicago to commemorate the trial that turned U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom into a circus of outrageous antics, shouted obscenities, and praise of sex, drugs and rock music.

Roberts, who practices law in Oakland, Calif., said, “You know, there was a conspiracy, but it was a conspiracy by the government to destroy the anti-war and civil rights movements, and we fell right into it.”

When offered an opportunity in an interview to admit that they had been guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot, California state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) and Seale said they didn’t care whether the statute of limitations had long since passed. They weren’t going to bite.

“Me? No, but I certainly told people to hold their ground,” said Hayden with a smile. It was Hayden who told anti-Vietnam War protesters in Grant Park on the eve of the convention, “If we’re going to be disrupted and violated, let the whole stinking city be disrupted. I’ll see you in the streets!”

“Not me,” said Seale, 63, former chairman of the Black Panther Party who now runs the Philadelphia-based community organizing group REACH.

Seale recalled with more than a trace of bitterness in his voice, it was 30 years ago Friday that Judge Hoffman, now dead, ordered his case severed from those of the other seven defendants and had him--still manacled and gagged because of his courtroom outbursts--dragged from the court. Seale never was tried, and the defendants then became the Chicago 7.

A jury acquitted John Froines and Lee Weiner but returned guilty verdicts against Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis and Hayden, all of whose convictions and five-year sentences were overturned on appeal.

Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, and Rubin was fatally injured when a car struck him in 1994 while he was jaywalking on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. Dellinger, at the time of the trial a 54-year-old evangelical Christian socialist, lives quietly in Vermont. And Davis, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, lives in Colorado.

About 150 criminal defense lawyers gave several standing ovations to the Chicago 8 defendants and their attorneys at a luncheon held by the association and then watched scenes from an upcoming documentary film by director Robert Greenwald about the life and times of Abbie Hoffman. It is called “Steal This Movie,” a play on Hoffman’s best-selling manual for radicals, “Steal This Book.”

One of the trial’s other key figures, then-U.S. Atty. Thomas Foran, who was not invited to the luncheon, had a different take.

“Those were goofy times in our country’s history,” said Foran, now 75.

“They were a bunch of creeps . . . . What did they accomplish? They gave us Richard Nixon, they gave us five more years of war and a lot more young men killed.”