Every so often the entertainment world tries to put on a newspaper drama that grabs peoples’ attention. Those efforts almost always fail. The stories reporters write may be fascinating, but the process of producing them is not. Interviews are usually dull affairs unless you’re a participant. And how do you dramatize the thinking process as a story is written or edited?
Then there are days like Thursday, December 4, 1969.
At 5 o’clock that morning, Bill Harsh is awakened by a call from the graveyard editor at the Sun-Times. Its presses had just finished the final run of the night, but someone is always there. Bill is six months out of college and covers the Cook County criminal courts and the office of state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan. He’s told that 14 policemen assigned to Hanrahan had just raided the apartment of Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton on West Monroe Street with a warrant to seize illegal weapons and that a furious gunfight ensued. In minutes, Bill is on his way there.
He arrives to find the place swarming with cops but can walk around as he pleases. He stands over the bodies of Hampton and another Black Panther leader, Mark Clark, lying on the floor. Ambulances had taken away four other injured occupants of the apartment and a wounded policeman. Bill notices that the walls of the apartment are riddled with bullet holes—and that strangely, almost all the holes appear to have been made by bullets coming from outside the apartment rather than from its interior. When he’s seen all he can, Bill goes to the newsroom, types his notes, and turns them in for others to use in their stories.
At 6, Brian Boyer’s radio alarm turns itself on, and news of the killings brings him instantly awake. Brian worked nights at the Sun-Times and had gotten off work just a few hours earlier. He’d never met or written about Fred Hampton, but his instincts yell at him to get to the scene at once, and he does.
By then the bodies had been carted away and police had left. Nothing prevents Brian from inspecting the rooms and blood-stained floors. He sees the same bullet holes that Bill Harsh had, and comes to the same conclusion that almost all the bullets appeared to have come from the guns of police outside the apartment.
If Bill was surprised by this, Brian is stunned. Why, it looked like a gangland assassination! But who would believe him if he said this?
Brian decides to do something either nutty or shrewd—it was hard to know which at the time. He phones Alice Hoge, wife of his boss, Jim Hoge, then the editor in chief. They knew each other from their shared interest in art. Brian asks if Alice would witness what he had seen. He also asks Marshall Rosenthal, editor of the new Chicago Journalism Review, to join them. Back Boyer goes to West Monroe Street. Brian told me later he wanted an ally to affirm the bullet-hole evidence he had seen. Later that day, incredulous, Hoge himself goes to the apartment and brings with him both Brian and a Sun-Times photographer, who documents the bullet hole evidence.
Early that Thursday evening, Brian writes a story describing what he had seen that day on West Monroe. It begins:
It is 12 hours after two Black Panthers died and four others were wounded in a 5 a.m. raid in an apartment at 2337 W. Monroe, and the signs of death are everywhere.
In the back bedroom where Illinois Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton was killed, blood had still not completely dried at the head and foot of the bullet-punctured double mattress.
A deep, 4-foot-long puddle of his blood still coagulates on the floor where the bedroom door opens into the dining room—perhaps the spot where 21-year-old Hampton collapsed and died.
Just inside the front door is another puddle where 22-year-old Mark Clark of Peoria is believed to have died. There are powder burns on the outside of the door where a bullet had passed through.
Only then does Brian begin to describe the critical bullet-hole evidence that suggests the gunfight was largely a one-way affair. I asked him recently why he didn’t address the real issue head-on, by starting his story like this: “Evidence uncovered by The Sun-Times at the apartment where Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by police gunfire in a predawn raid Thursday appears to starkly contradict the account given by state’s attorney police.” Brian replied that he wrote the story before he knew that Hanrahan’s people claimed they were under intense gunfire.
But as the evening begins, it becomes apparent the newspaper is unwilling to seriously challenge the account of Hanrahan’s policemen. Hoge alerts vice president and editorial director (and former editor) Emmett Dedmon about the trajectories of those bullet holes. Dedmon, possessor of a volcanic temper, refuses to believe that the police would give a dishonest version of events. Says Tom Stites, night city editor and witness to the unfolding drama: “[Editorial cartoonist] Bill Mauldin came into the newsroom and threatened to beat the shit out of Dedmon if he wouldn’t allow the story to be printed, and there was a big standoff with lots of shouting.”
Finally, Dedmon relents, slightly. Brian’s story is put on page 32—which is to say, buried. The lead story on page 3 hues to the official police account of what happened, and to the newspaper’s credit it labels it just that way in the page 3 headline (“How 2 Panther Leaders Died Is Told by Sergeant”).
Brian Boyer goes out for supper after the 9:30 p.m. home-edition deadline. He returns at 11 to see his story relegated to the rear of the news section and resigns on the spot. For decades, he and Hoge never speak.
In due course, no thanks to Emmett Dedmon and other Chicago newspaper editors, those bullet holes do raise a public outcry, and matters quickly go downhill for State’s Attorney Hanrahan. By Saturday New York Times correspondent John Kifner is writing about the one-way bullet holes, and ultimately only a single shot of at least 72 fired is determined to have come from a Panther. To counter what he called sensationalism, Hanrahan gives an exclusive account of the raid to the Chicago Tribune. A photo that accompanied the piece purports to show a bullet hole from a weapon fired inside the apartment. One of my Sun-Times colleagues quickly proves that the “bullet hole” is a nail head.
Two months after the shootings, the uproar had not subsided. I covered the taping of a weekend TV show on which Hanrahan appeared, still on the defensive. Again and again, I noticed, Hanrahan decried the press “sensationalism.” And he seemed to say, I wrote, that he had given the Tribune its exclusive account in exchange for not having his words edited. In any event, the raid ended his political career. Republican Bernard Carey defeated Hanrahan in the 1970 election for state’s attorney.
I felt then and I believe now that whatever their intent, the police who descended on that apartment almost half a century ago effectively murdered Hampton and Clark. Maybe they were too much on edge, too scared, to react any other way when Sergeant Daniel Groth smashed through the front door. But put police motives aside. Chicago Sun-Times reporters Harsh and Boyer held the truth in their hands about the gunfight, and their newspaper couldn’t gather the courage that night to stand behind them. What should have been the birth of a Pulitzer Prize for Reporting became a newsroom tragedy.
Brian Boyer went on to a sterling career at the Detroit Free Press, WBBM-TV in Chicago, and ABC’s 20-20, among other places. He would win three Emmys (and write a series of detective novels). Bill Harsh held down several other beats at the Sun-Times, including that of labor writer when I left. Like me, he had a thing for railroads, and for decades worked as a consultant to that industry for the firm Oliver Wyman & Company.
Bill and I talked about those turbulent days recently while we sat on a picnic bench in Georgia and enjoyed smoked brisket. “One thing I’ll never forget,” he said. “In the midst of all this, Hanrahan pulls me aside at the criminal courts one day and says, ‘I don’t care if I ever see you alive again.’”