On December 4, while Hanrahan was giving his press conference, members of his office were drawing up felony charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons against each of the survivors. The raiding officers prepared sworn complaints that each of the occupants had fired at them. Bonds were set at one hundred thousand dollars each.
Following his interview with the Daily News, Bobby Rush was interviewed on camera. He declared that Fred had been “murdered in his bed” and called the raid an “assassination” ordered by J. Edgar Hoover. Although the press quoted Rush, much of the public dismissed Rush’s charges as Panther rhetoric.
Donald Stang went to Cook County Hospital later on December 4 to check on the four wounded survivors. When he returned to PLO, he reported Doc Satchel—nicknamed for his role in organizing the Panther health clinic—had the most serious injuries. He had four bullets in him, including two in his abdomen. He was just coming out of surgery.
“He’ll probably survive, but it’s not clear in what condition,” Don said.
Doc was no more than five feet six inches tall and weighed maybe one hundred and forty pounds. It was hard to imagine him being hearty enough to survive two bullets in his abdomen.
Verlina Brewer, a student from Ann Arbor, Michigan, was shot in her left buttock and left knee. Don said she was doing OK, but the knee wound could give her some trouble. Blair Anderson, a young guy who was a former Blackstone Ranger whom they call BJ, was hit in both thighs and his penis. Don said the other person was a student from Champaign, Illinois, Brenda Harris, whom he described as a tiny woman with a big Afro known as China Doll. She was shot two times in the thigh and in her hand.
Doc was the only one I knew. He was always so positive and enthusiastic.
“They’re all handcuffed to their hospital beds, and I don’t think they’re going to bring them to court until they’ve improved,” Don added.
Later that day someone talked to Fannie Clark, the mother of Mark. She told us Mark had been one of many black children mistreated in the Peoria schools. He had started a Panther chapter and breakfast program in Peoria the previous summer and came up to Chicago at Fred’s urging to find out how the Panthers there ran their chapter and program. Mark had been traveling around the state attempting to organize more Panther chapters. He was one of eighteen children. Now his mother was contacting the coroner to take his body back to Peoria for burial.
On the afternoon of December 4, Brian Boyer, a young reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times reported to work at about four o’clock. Boyer asked for permission to visit the apartment. His editors said it was too dangerous for a white reporter to go there and that no black reporters were available. Boyer went anyway.
“I guess my first reaction was to check the walls again to see if they’d plastered anything over,” he said. “Then I called in and said they weren’t going to believe it, but it looked like murder to me. I asked for editors and other reporters to come down and go through the apartment, but they weren’t interested.” Boyer returned to the paper and reported what he had seen.
One of his editors responded, “If we run that story and the West Side burns down, we’ll be responsible.” Jim Hoge, the Sun-Times chief editor ordered the story to run, but in the next day’s edition it was buried on page thirty-two.
Brian Boyer responded, “I quit.”
On December 5, Deborah Johnson, Harold Bell, and Louis Truelock were brought to preliminary hearing court on Twenty-Sixth Street. The press sat in the front row, and Panthers and their supporters filled the rest of the wooden spectator benches. Skip, Don, and I stood up as the defendants were led out from the holding cell into the courtroom. Shouts of “Power to the people” came from the rear, and Harold Bell raised his fist in the defiant Black Power gesture.
Skip, Don, and I handed up written appearance forms, and when our clients names were called we answered, “Ready for trial.” We had chosen this strategy because we wanted to show the world and the press that our clients were eager and prepared to confront the state’s so-called evidence. By answering “ready,” we also began the 120-day term for the prosecutor to bring our clients to trial.
“The State is not ready and is seeking a continuance,” Nick Motherway, one of Hanrahan’s subordinates, replied. In a political case like this, the prosecutor generally does not want his witnesses, the police officers, subjected to cross-examination at a preliminary hearing. By continuing the case he’d be given time to get a direct indictment from the grand jury. In that circumstance he would be allowed to present testimony of the police officers with no cross-examination. The indictment would then supersede the need for a preliminary hearing.
“Continuance granted for two weeks until December 19,” the judge responded.
“Then we move that our clients bonds be lowered,” Skip said. “Deborah Johnson is eight months pregnant, Your Honor.”
“Denied,” Judge Epton answered again. “Bond will remain at one hundred thousand dollars.” There was hissing from the back. “I will order that Deborah be seen by a doctor at Cermak Hospital. Next case.”
Skip was interviewed in front of the TV cameras just outside the courtroom. I was a couple feet away as he stood in front of the cameras and declared, “Hanrahan is guilty of murder.” A day of looking at the blood and bullet holes in the apartment had shocked and outraged Skip. “Let’s tell it like it is,” he said afterward. I congratulated him.
Our office took responsibility for defending the survivors. As we heard their accounts and saw the apartment, we knew the truth had to be told. We lost our innocence on December 4.
When I lived in Chicago, in the middle of the cold, gray winters people would ask me why I stayed. Over time I had an answer: “I was bitten by Chicago and in particular the murder of Fred Hampton. I have been trying to bite back ever since.”
Bobby Rush was not home early in the morning on December 5 when the police raided his apartment in the projects at 2040 South State. The police claimed they found marijuana and put out an arrest warrant for Rush. It’s doubtful that was true, both because Rush didn’t use marijuana and because I had warned him the police were coming.
We wanted to devise a way for Rush to surrender himself safely and publicly so that the police would not use his arrest as an opportunity to harm him. One of the Panthers suggested we ask Jesse Jackson to accompany Rush when he turned himself in. We reasoned that if Rush turned himself in with a public figure and in front of the media that Jackson would attract, the police could not say he resisted.
I didn’t understand why PLO was selected to make the liaison with Jesse Jackson, but I made the contact more than willingly. I wanted to meet this great orator. I phoned Jackson, told him Flint and I were Panther attorneys and needed to meet with him. He invited us to come to his Hyde Park apartment early the next day.
Jackson’s apartment was on the second floor of a three-story Victorian building. A very large and muscular black man, whom we took to be a bodyguard, opened the door and let us in. The apartment was modest in size but well furnished. We sat down on the couch in the small living room and waited. Jackson came out in silk pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers. Flint and I introduced ourselves and stood to greet him. He asked why we had come.
“We represent the Panthers and the reason we’re here is that Bobby Rush has an arrest warrant for marijuana. He’s hiding out, and we’re afraid if the police find him they might kill him. We would like you to be with him when he turns himself in,” I said.
“So now the Panthers are coming to me,” Jackson said. “When Fred was alive, the Panthers spent a lot of time attacking me; some of them even called me a sissy. Are they going to keep that up?”
I knew Fred had accused Jackson and Operation Breadbasket of developing programs focused primarily on helping black businessmen rather than poor and working-class people, but I was surprised by Jackson’s response. Fred criticized many black organizations, although the criticisms I heard had been on political, not personal, grounds.
“I’m sure the Panthers would be very grateful if you helped to protect Rush, and I certainly doubt if any personal attacks would continue,” I answered.
Jackson walked back and forth in the small open space in the living room, pondering our proposal. Then he stopped.
“You know what? Rush should come to Breadbasket and turn himself in when the Saturday morning service at the Drexel [Avenue] church is televised at eleven o’clock.” He looked pleased with his suggestion and continued, “I’ll make an introduction and then welcome Rush as he comes onstage.”
“Sounds like a good scenario to me,” Flint said.
“Thank you, and I’m sure the Panthers will appreciate your gesture. We’ll make sure he’s there tomorrow morning,” I added.
Renault Robinson, president of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, was more than willing to assist us. He agreed to accompany Rush to the Operation Breadbasket meeting. The black police commander from the district nearest the Drexel Church also assured us he would accept Rush into his custody and vouch for Rush’s personal safety. He acceded to our plan, no questions asked.
On Saturday morning Kermit Coleman, the ACLU lawyer who had worked with us on Fred’s appeal, picked up Rush in his red two-seater sports car. They then picked up Renault Robinson, who carried Rush on his lap as they headed for Operation Breadbasket.
There were more than five hundred people in the Drexel Church when Flint and I arrived at ten o’clock. We were among the few whites, and we sat in the third or fourth row, with a good view of the stage. We waited, listening to the glorious sound of the choir singing hymns from the balcony in the rear of the church.
At 10:30 A.M. Reverend Jackson came out to the pulpit area as the singing ended. The program was being broadcast live on WVON radio, and the next hour segment would be televised. Jesse spoke with his usual dramatic flair, giving an earlier version of his “I am somebody” speech, and the audience responded enthusiastically. At 11:00 A.M. a group of police officers from the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, all in uniform, came up on the dais with Renault Robinson. Shortly afterward Rush came from the side, accompanied by Kermit Coleman.
Jesse put his arms around Rush. “You belong to the community,” he said, and he warned the police not to harm him. The audience stood and applauded. Jesse preached that the attack on the Panthers was an attack on all blacks, and he expressed the sentiment I had heard from many black people: “If it happened to Fred, it could happen to us.” Most whites didn’t see it that way.
Jackson praised Fred as a courageous and inspiring young leader who had been taken away from the people he served by Hanrahan’s murderous raid. Again, the audience clapped as Jackson and Rush stood together. The police commander, who had joined them, repeated his vow to protect his new prisoner. Rush surrendered himself, his fist in a Black Power salute. “Power to the people,” he shouted as he was led away.
Jackson’s public pronouncements condemning the raid were echoed by virtually all civil rights organizations in Chicago. Hanrahan had counted on the black community denouncing the Panthers after the raid. Instead, like the people in this enormous church, they condemned Hanrahan and the raiders. For many, Hampton was seen as yet another young black leader who, like Malcolm X and Dr. King, had fought against injustice and was assassinated because of what he stood for. Only this time, the government’s connection to the murder was more apparent. The fatal bullets had come from the police under the command of the local white prosecutor. The fact that Fred was killed in his bed at four o’clock in the morning continued to horrify the majority of black people in Chicago. To them it was a political assassination.
One of the strongest reactions to Fred and Mark’s deaths came from Maywood mayor Cabala and the Maywood Village trustees. They visited the site of the raid and called for Illinois attorney general Scott to seek indictments against the officers for “a blatant act of legitimized murder.” The national NAACP called for an inquiry, which led to a large-scale investigation cochaired by former attorney general Ramsey Clark and Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP. Former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg joined several black congressman, aldermen, and state senators calling for an independent inquiry. Many community leaders came to Chicago on December 20 to participate in a public forum. They heard testimony from elected officials, civil rights leaders, businesspeople, and Panthers who reiterated their demand for an independent investigation. The steady pressure from civil rights groups kept the question of how Fred died in the public eye in Chicago.
The police never explained why they departed from police procedure and vacated the apartment rather than sealing it, at least until the evidence was gathered. The raiders claimed Richard Jalovec, Hanrahan’s assistant, ordered them to leave, although he does not recall this. Later Jalovec said the police feared retaliation. Like the thousands of people who walked past Emmett Till’s casket at the Rayner Funeral Home in 1955 and remember his swollen, beaten face as a stark symbol of white Southern violence, the people who filed through 2337 fourteen years later saw the large number of bullet holes and the bloodstained mattress as symbols of Chicago police violence.
Chicago political analyst and campaign strategist Don Rose was interviewed twenty years later in the Medill School of Journalism’s student paper, the Monitor. In the article (part of a Fred Hampton commemoration issue), entitled “After Raid, Blacks Leave Democrats’ Machine,” he described the political fallout after December 4:
The raid and the cover-up were probably pivotal in galvanizing the black community. They had not, for years and years, had an issue this offensive stir this many people. A fury built up as events unfolded. The unveiling of the assassination and the cover-up turned the black community around. There was a lot of anger against the machine and against Daley in particular.
Mayor Daley supported the police after the raid, as he did in all their confrontations with civilians, and condemned the Panthers, but he didn’t go out of his way to publicly stand up for Hanrahan. Chicago’s black aldermen, state representatives, and congressman Ralph Metcalfe—all loyal to and dependent upon the Democratic machine in the past—bolted, openly condemning Hanrahan. This was the same machine that in November 1968, a year earlier, had made electing Hanrahan state’s attorney a higher priority than getting Democrat Hubert Humphrey elected president. Hanrahan won, and Nixon carried Illinois and the election.
West Side alderman Danny Davis described, in the above-mentioned Monitor article, how the raid impacted the black community: “[The raid] instilled a sense of militancy and resistance, that certain things would not be tolerated. It sparked a determination that had not existed before.” The only black person in Chicago with an official position who publicly supported the police action was United States district judge William Parsons, who was contacted by the FBI to be its mouthpiece.
In law we have a term, res ipse loquitur, “things speak for themselves.” This was true of 2337. TV and newspaper reporters viewed the premises and came away disbelieving Hanrahan’s claims that there had been an extended shootout. Black reporter Lu Palmer of the Chicago Daily News, one of the few black writers with his own column, visited the scene on the day of the raid. His job was to comment on the news from a black perspective, and he had written several columns before December that were sympathetic to the Panthers. Fred warmly called him “the Panther with the pen.” In his column the day following the raid—entitled “Is There a Drive to Get Panthers?”—Palmer answered his question with an emphatic yes. He wrote that when he visited the apartment, “it was immediately clear that this was murder.”
John Kifner, the Chicago correspondent for the New York Times, also described going to the apartment:
The crowds were a cross section of the black community: workmen in paint-stained clothes, angry young men and women, elderly people, middle-aged women in flowered hats, people in coats and ties and others in Army jackets, a smattering of whites. In the late afternoon there would be lines of small children in their bright school clothes. “Right here is where the first brother Mark Clark was murdered,” a young man in the Panthers black leather jacket would say just inside the front door, gesturing with a thin pointer. “The pigs say that a girl fired a shotgun at them and they started shooting. Now you can see, ain’t no bullet holes around the door.” He would go on, “no shooting coming out; all the shooting coming in.” The reaction was particularly strong when people gathered around the bloodstained mattress in the back bedroom where Hampton died. “They killed him when he was asleep, he never had a chance,” was the response of a middle-aged woman.
On December 8, Hanrahan held another press conference to counter the snowballing criticism. He again portrayed the Panthers as the aggressors, responding to the officers’ calls for cease-fires with continuous firing. He said a “more detailed statement would be improper in view of the criminal charges pending against the survivors.” He added, “We were then and are still convinced that our officers used good judgment, considerable restraint, and professional discipline.”
Shortly thereafter, reputed Daily News columnist Mike Royko, an iconoclastic reporter but no friend of the Panthers, went to the premises and responded to Hanrahan’s claims:
State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan says it was only through the “grace of God” that his men escaped with scratches in their predawn raid on a Black Panther flat. Indeed, it does appear that miracles occurred. The Panthers’ bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction-namely, at themselves.
Years later I learned that the Panthers had considered retaliation against the police, but they decided against it when they saw so much of the public and media condemning the raid.
After the private autopsy on Saturday, December 6, Fred’s body was laid out for public viewing for two days at Rayner Funeral Home. Thousands of people walked past. He was dressed in a dark suit with a pale blue turtleneck shirt, not the way he would have dressed a week earlier. His wounds had been hidden by the mortician’s impressive skills. Unlike Mamie Till, Iberia and Francis Hampton did not tell Sammy Rayner to show the wounds. Panthers in leather jackets stood at each end of the coffin, and there were bouquets of flowers, some dyed black. A ribbon on one said YOU CAN KILLA FREEDOM FIGHTER, BUTYOU CAN’T KILLTHE FIGHT. On Fred’s chest were political buttons, rosary beads, even class rings people had dropped into the coffin.
Many of Chicago’s top criminal defense lawyers volunteered to represent the survivors. James Montgomery, who defended Fred’s codefendant in the Maywood Mob Action case, agreed to represent Deborah; and Eugene Pincham, probably Chicago’s most prominent criminal defense lawyer, became counsel for Verlina Brewer. Warren and Jo-Anne Wolfson filed appearances for Brenda Harris and Blair Anderson. Warren wore a crew cut, was very calm, and was known for his precise, stilettolike cross-examination, while his red-haired, flamboyant wife Jo-Anne added fire to the defense. Kermit Coleman from the ACLU’s prison project became Doc’s attorney, and we continued as counsel for Truelock and Harold Bell.
Standard defense strategy was to wait for trial to present your defense. “We don’t tell them a damn thing until they finish putting on their evidence,” one of the lawyers said at a hastily called meeting with the Panthers to discuss strategy.
“You haven’t seen the horror on the faces of people coming through the apartment,” one of the Panthers responded.
We were faced with the seeming contradiction between the need to tell the public what happened, and thus provide support for the growing tide of opposition to Hanrahan or, alternatively, to provide what some considered the best legal defense for the survivors. Our group decision was to take the offensive, to tell the press what happened as recounted by the survivors and as demonstrated by the physical evidence. This public approach became critical in determining how PLO would represent the movement and victims of police and official misconduct in the future. We presented the case in a political, not a criminal, framework. “Putting the state on trial” is the way we came to characterize this strategy. We learned it was the best strategy to expose government wrongdoing and educate the public. It was also the best strategy to win.
Following the meeting Dennis talked to Chicago Daily News reporter Hank Di Sutter and told him the survivors’ version of the raid. Di Sutter reiterated the Panther accounts in detail in the Daily News the next day, on December 10, under the headline “Panther Story of Killings.”
Hanrahan went into a rage, a state even his friends say was common. He called the Daily News story “an obvious effort by the counsel of the Black Panthers to try their case in the press. It is outrageous.” Hanrahan felt he had the exclusive right to present his case publicly, but we were in a duel with Hanrahan to win public support.
That afternoon, responding to what he termed “an orgy of sensationalism in the press and on TV that has severely damaged law enforcement and the administration of justice,” Hanrahan and his top assistants Jalovec and Boyle called the Chicago Tribune editors. They offered to make the police raiders available for exclusive interviews with their reporters. They also provided photos that they said “conclusively proved the Panthers opened the gun battle by firing a shotgun blast through the front door.” The Tribune accepted.
The next morning, December 11, the Tribune’s front page contained headlines, one and one half inches high, labeled EXCLUSIVE. In the police version printed in the Tribune exclusive, Sergeant Daniel Groth and many of the officers gave their detailed stories of what transpired at 2337. The article went for several pages.
Sergeant Groth said that he picked the early morning hour for the raid to catch the occupants by surprise, after an informant told him there was a cache of weapons in the apartment. He knocked on the door and announced they were police and said they had a search warrant. He heard movement inside and called out, “Police! Open up!” After a person responded, “Just a minute,” Groth ordered Davis to kick the door open. Groth claimed that as they entered the anteroom he heard a shotgun blast that was fired through the closed living room door, just missing Officer Davis and himself. After Davis crashed through the living room door ahead of him, Sergeant Groth saw a woman on the couch fire a second shotgun blast at him as he was standing in the doorway, just missing him. “The flash of her weapon illuminated her face,” he said. Groth fired two shots at the woman.
Gloves Davis told the Tribune reporters the light from Sergeant Groth’s shot allowed him to see both the woman on the couch, whom he shot with his .30 carbine, and a man in a chair with a shotgun in his hands ready to fire. “I don’t know for sure if he ever got a shot in at me or not. I fired twice and hit him. He stood up and I jumped up too, struggling with him until he fell. Then I fell across his body.” The person on the ground was Mark Clark.
Sergeant Groth said the first time he called for a cease-fire, “the words were barely out of my mouth before there was the whomp of a shotgun blast from the front bedroom that slammed into the bathroom door almost directly across the hall.” Hanrahan gave the Tribune reporters photos of the bathroom door to show where the shotgun pellets struck the wood.
In his account, Officer Carmody said Panther fire was directed at him from the rear bedroom as he entered the back of the apartment. He returned the fire with his .38-caliber snub-nosed pistol. During one of the cease-fires, Carmody heard someone in the back bedroom yell, “We’re coming out, don’t shoot. We’ve got an injured man back here.” Carmody said Truelock and Bell came out of the back bedroom. He then said he ran into the back bedroom and found a man later identified as Hampton lying face down on the bed with his head facing the bedroom door.
He was lying with his arms hanging over the foot of the bed. On the floor at his right hand was a .45-caliber automatic and at his left a shotgun. I could see he’s been hit but I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. All I know was that room was full of shotguns and rifles and ammo. So I grabbed him by a wrist and dragged him into the dining room away from all those guns.
Officer Joe Gorman’s account in the exclusive followed Groth’s. He described shooting each of the three people in the front bedroom just as they were rising to shoot him. To back up the raiders’ accounts, Hanrahan and Jalovec gave the Tribune three police photos. One depicted the living room door with one rather large hole circled on it. The photo was offered to prove the Panthers fired the first shot. The second photo, mentioned earlier, was represented as being the bathroom door. It had numerous bullet holes in it and in the exclusive was captioned “Hail of lead tore thru bathroom door in fire from opposite bedroom, according to police.” The third photo was the inside of the kitchen door. Carefully circled on the photo were two black dots to highlight that they were bullet holes from shots Fred had supposedly fired.
The same night as the Tribune exclusive ran, Hanrahan offered each of the major TV stations the unprecedented opportunity to come to his office in the Daley Center and film the officers staging a reenactment of the raid. Hanrahan’s office had hired carpenters who used two-by-fours to construct a mock up of the apartment. Hanrahan required the TV stations that participated to air the entire police version without interruption. Only WBBM, the local CBS affiliate, accepted Hanrahan’s conditions.
Despite a careful rehearsal, the raiders had to do several takes to get the version they wanted. Fortunately for us the outtakes were kept and became valuable sources for cross-examination of the raiders. The final twenty-eight-minute version, gleaned from more than five hours of filming, aired on WBBM-TV the same day the Tribune “Exclusive” was published.
The TV reenactment was much like the story theater staged by Paul Sills of the nearby Second City, where each character tells his story as he acts it out. “I took my handgun and knocked loudly against the front door,” Groth began, and then struck the wooden mockup with a real automatic. “I took my machine gun and I put it on automatic fire,” Gorman later continued, moving the mock machine gun across the pretend living room wall. The officers’ descriptions of a plethora of Panther shots were almost amusing. They were lies, and we could prove it by the absence of bullet holes lining up with the supposed shots.
Careful readings of the Tribune exclusive and the transcript of the reenactment have Brenda Harris firing two shotgun blasts at the police while sitting on the living room couch; enough shotgun blasts and other fire emanating from inside the front bedroom to break the cease-fire “on three separate occasions”; at least one shot at the police from Panthers running down the hallway; and several shotgun blasts and handgun fire from the rear bedroom and from Hampton himself as the police entered from the kitchen door.
Angered at being scooped by the Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times reporters came to the apartment the next morning, December 12, to compare the police photos displayed in the Tribune with the actual scene. Skip and the Panther guides demonstrated that the Tribune photo of the two black spots on the kitchen door, supposedly proof of Panther firing, were actually the dark heads of nails near the doorknob. There were no bullet holes near the kitchen door where the raiders had entered. Skip also stood in the kitchen and demonstrated to the reporters that Carmody could not have seen Hampton or any Panther firing from the back bedroom because the kitchen wall blocked the entire line of vision between where Carmody had entered and the back bedroom.
At the front of the apartment Skip sat on the couch exactly where the raiders placed Brenda Harris in their staged reenactment. “Come sit here and you can see Brenda could not have fired a shotgun at the officers from here without striking one of them or the walls behind them. Yet look, there are no bullet holes there.” Skip pointed to the entranceway and living room walls around the front door, which had no impact points. “As for the front door, if you look carefully in this photo, you can see there are two bullet holes, one made by Groth’s revolver firing into the living room.”
One of the Panther guides led the reporters to the door Hanrahan had represented as the bathroom door to prove the Panthers fired out of the front bedroom across the hall into that door. “Hanrahan’s photo is not the bathroom door he claimed. It’s this door to the north bedroom,” the guide showed. “It was flush against the living room wall and those holes line up with the police firing from the living room.”
The reporters saw that he was right. “This is the real bathroom door and you can see there isn’t a single bullet hole in it,” the Panther continued. When Skip told me the Sun-Times photographer took a snapshot of the nail heads and the real bathroom door with no impact points, I couldn’t wait to see the article.
Sure enough, there was a gleeful tone in the Sun-Times headlines that same day: “Bullet Holes Were Nail Heads.” The article, complete with photos, showed not only Hanrahan’s misrepresentations but that the raiders’ stories about the Panthers’ firing from the two bedrooms and Brenda’s firing from the couch had to be lies. Other newspaper reporters came to see for themselves and echoed the Sun-Times accusations that Hanrahan and the raiders were lying. The account of the raid offered by the police officers became the Tribune‘s most infamous front-page story since their misinformed headlines in November 1948: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Hanrahan’s rapid decline in credibility vindicated our decision three days earlier to force his hand by going on the offensive. The UPI was sending out a “mandatory kill” order on transmission of the photos Hanrahan had provided the Tribune. He called another press conference to denounce “trial by the press.” We went to Glascott’s to watch.
Hanrahan was in the library where he first displayed the Panther weapons. He told the now cynical TV and newspaper reporters, “I have made no evaluations of the pictures other than to say they portrayed the scene accurately. We have made no characterization of the pictures.” Hanrahan disclaimed any responsibility for the captions, snapping back at one questioner, “We are not editors.”
With the TV camera going, another reporter asked, “Do you intend to resign?”
Hanrahan stopped. He glared at the questioner who dared ask such an impertinent question. Then he calmed himself and looked away with an air of disgust, before refocusing on the reporters in front. “Are there any serious questions?”
“That one sounded pretty serious to me,” I said to Flint.
Enraged that he was being challenged, Hanrahan continued indignantly, “I would have thought our office is entitled to expect to be believed by the public. Our officers wouldn’t lie about the act. I’m talking about the credibility of our officers here and myself.” Then, in the middle of his own press conference, Hanrahan stomped out.