More "I, Pig"

Jack Muller was a Chicago cop and detective from 1946 until his retirement in the 1980's. I already wrote about his take on the 1968 Democratic Convention riots here.  He worked the 1952 Republican and Democratic Conventions (both were in Chicago that year) and was assigned to Douglas MacArthur at the former.  Muller describes the General as grim earnest and his Party as overly serious if anything. He ascribed it to their having been out of power for so many years.

Muller goes on to describe some debauchery at the subsequent Democratic Convention in August, 1952 and then concludes:

Of course, there was so much of this at the Democratic Convention, I could make a whole book out of it alone. And I'm not against men having their fun. It's just that you'd think nominating a candidate for President would be a little more serious, without being the gun-to-the-head affair it was with the Republicans. What a lot of kids are doing these days against the Establishment bugs me, but if they'd known the kind of 'pigs' who were running and trying to run the country in '52, they'd have started twenty years earlier. I know--it's the cops the kids call pigs. But we only do what we're told--by the Establishment, an Establishment whose rule of thumb is: 'No matter what the laws are, we're above them.' It really shows when they nominate a President.

My dad passed through Chicago almost 60 years ago and saw a parade for Robert Taft, a Republican nominee that year. link  He must have gotten within a few blocks of Muller. It's funny how real-life people and their stories can intersect in the past. But I digress.