Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977, 603 pp., 1968
Chapter 24 Politics in Flux
2. The Resurrection: Richard Nixon
" . . . in the turbulent days of 1968. Vietnam, the campuses, the riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy . . . appeared to be on the brink of a massive social confrontation.
"Just ten weeks after Bobby Kennedy's death, the Democrats gathered in Chicago to select their Presidential candidate . . . Antiwar demonstrators had arrived by the thousands. They, and the antiwar convention delegates inside the amphitheater, felt under siege in Daley's Chicago and Lyndon Johnson's Democratic party.
"As the convention got under way, the Chicago police broke up the protest activities. Demonstrators were gassed and clubbed, and several journalists were among the injured . . . "police-state terror.""
"A Paul Conrad cartoon depicted a policeman, labeled "Chicago Police," writing on a pad marked "Body Count," while another policeman waded into a crowd of sprawled bodied, some identified as "Press." The caption read, " Law and Order." p. 403
Chapter 26
The Odyssey of Ruben Salazar
"When his one year tour of duty in Vietnam was completed, Salazar was assigned to head the Mexico City bureau, covering Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean. When the Castro government extended invitations to several U.S. news organizations to cover two international gatherings in Havana, Salazar jumped at the chance. "Castro," Salazar confided in his journalist friends, "was the manifestation of the Latin American resistance to American domination."
"Despite his attitudes about Castro and American policy in Vietnam, Salazar still kept aloof from politics. But more and more, Ruben Salazar was forced to face political issues. In the tumultuous period in Mexico before the 1968 Olympics, Salazar covered the student demonstrations. He was in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, when police opened fire, killing several hundred Mexican students protesting the government's policy of spending money on the Games amid conditions of economic scarcity." pp. 423-424