The problem with The Trial of the Chicago 7 begins with the title. The eponym of the court case that charged several antiwar activists with causing a riot during the 1968 Democratic convention implies seven coequal protagonists, an obvious impediment to the tidy storytelling expected of a 130 minute movie. By necessity, such an adaptation will leave a lot on the cutting room floor. If the viewer accepts this artistic license, however, they must still reckon with what writer/director Aaron Sorkin added and what he omitted, and why. Overwhelmingly, his narrative decisions were made to tamp down partisan conflict, and to declaw a group of people whose radicalism would both offend and shame the film’s target audience of modern liberals.
Many wings of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 70s, especially the Yippie strand led by Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman, forwarded an explicit goal of “heightening the contradictions” between activists and the violent repression exacted against them by the government. At every conceivable turn of The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin does the opposite, jumping through hoops to reduce the distance between radicals like Hoffman and the prosecutors who sought to put him in prison for a decade. It appears Sorkin’s main objective was to make all the defendants acceptable to viewers whose ideal mode of activism is a BLM mural sponsored by Shell Oil.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the larger Sorkin-verse and its smothering brand of centrism (or to anyone who knows Sorkin took on the job of chronicling the Chicago Seven before he’d even heard of them). There is, however, an important distinction between forwarding a worldview through the vehicle of fictional characters and forwarding that worldview through history. If one could argue the bipartisan utopia of Sorkin’s presidential drama The West Wing rendered liberals completely unprepared for the blunt savagery of the GOP in the twenty-first century, the inciting media was still a fantasy, one that proclaimed This is how politics should be. Whereas The Trial of the Chicago 7 purports to tell us how politics were, and are. This is why a corrective is desperately needed.
Sorkin’s muting of the contradictions begins with his characterization of federal prosecutor Richard Schultz. By casting the perpetually boyish Joseph Gordon Levitt in the role, the viewer is cued that he is young and idealistic, and therefore more believable when he expresses doubts about the legitimacy of the case. Schultz is shown telling attorney general John Mitchell that the “Rap Brown amendment” used to bring charges against the Chicago Seven was a racist bone thrown to southern lawmakers in exchange for passage of a civil rights bill (true, though a point unlikely to be made by a federal prosecutor in 1969). He also expresses horror when Black Panther Bobby Seale is bound and gagged in the courtroom for the temerity of demanding representation. During a chance meeting with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, he seems to agree with Hoffman’s contention that they’re “all on the same side”—presumably, that they share a loathing for the Vietnam War and only differ on the tactics needed to stop it. In this scene, Schultz appears to blame Hoffman’s antics for handing the presidency to Richard Nixon, even though, as a federal prosecutor, Richard Nixon is his boss.
In truth, Richard Schultz held no sympathy for the men he was trying to put in federal prison, and their provocations left him cold. In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein describes the prosecutor as “so ploddingly literal-minded that he could call the most obvious Yippie put-ons devious incitements to riot.” When Tom Hayden entered the court on the first day of trial with a raised-fist salute, Schultz was incensed at his impudence, to the point of demanding the jury be cleared from the room. And if Schultz had any objections to the court’s savage treatment of Bobby Seale, he has failed to express them, then or since. (He seems to believe defense lawyer William Kunstler “pushed” the court into physically restraining and gagging Seale.) Unlike the Levitt version of himself, who closes the movie displaying a nauseating bit of solidarity with the men he was prosecuting (more on that later), real-life Schultz as yet has no regrets about his role in history, calling the Chicago Seven “violent revolutionaries” who “wanted to destroy our federal government.”
In this last contention, Schultz is not entirely wrong. With the exception of pacifist David Dellinger, the Chicago Seven defendants certainly did not condemn violence across the board, and all sought “revolution” in one form or another. By 1968, the various movements of the New Left viewed the increasingly violent repression of both antiwar and civil rights protests as harbingers of an imminent fascist police state. To them, a government engaged in the twin obscenities of the Vietnam War and the stifling of dissent was not to be reformed, but overthrown. By the time the Chicago Seven trial began, Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society had largely dissolved, replaced by former members calling themselves the Weather Underground, who openly called for armed revolt and urban guerrilla warfare.
We are given some glimpses of this attitude in the film (mostly in the opening minutes, when Bobby Seale makes a brief plea for armed resistance; moments later, Jerry Rubin demonstrates how to make a molotov cocktail). But for the most part, as with Schultz, the Chicago Seven defendants are shunted toward the center, away from the fascist fears of the era and closer to a modern liberal’s idea of How To Protest Correctly. The film’s portrayal of Tom Hayden, presented as the Chicago Seven’s first among equals, is the prime example.
In the hands of Eddie Redmayne, Hayden is played as a sentient I VOTED sticker that can mumble, slouch, and judge. His primary role is to act as the practical superego to Abbie Hoffman’s kooky id, deriding his PR stunts as infantile and counterproductive. Hayden is perpetually annoyed that his superior reasonable tactics must be explained to lesser destructive minds.
This does a large disservice to the actual Tom Hayden, whose own activism was often every bit as revolutionary and confrontational as Hoffman’s. See: his role in founding Students for a Democratic Society and the drafting of the Port Huron Statement, which explicitly rejected the McCarthyite anti-communism that had kneecapped American leftist organizations since the end of World War II. Or his trip to North Vietnam in 1965 to witness the destruction wrought by American bombs firsthand, a trip he went on at the invitation of the Hanoi government and despite the objections of fellow SDS leaders. Or his community organizing work in Newark, New Jersey, before and during the infamous riots of 1967, when the local police provided a preview of Chicago by carrying out extrajudicial executions to terrorize the city’s black population. (This landed him on an FBI “rabble rouser” list for his trouble.)
The movie continually shows Hayden advocating for a practical, respectable defense as a means of drawing the public and the court to their side. This does not jive with the real Tom Hayden who, during the trial, addressed a Days of Rage rally in Chicago and insisted all seven defendants stood in solidarity with protesters that had already blown up a police memorial in Haymarket Square and planned to mobilize the city’s youth to incite further mayhem. (In truth, the Chicago Seven were divided on their support for the Days of Rage actions; as with most things outside this movie, the reality was complicated.)
Nearly every character in the film receives the same treatment: wherever some aspect of their life or personality intrudes beyond the bounds of what Sorkin deems unacceptable, it is sanded down. According to what we see onscreen, Hayden’s fellow SDSer Rennie Davis’s primary contribution to the revolution is quietly copying names of dead American soldiers into a notebook and worrying about what his girlfriend’s parents will think about his activism (Davis was 28 years old at the time). This is a far cry from the real-life Rennie Davis who, after his conviction, publicly declared his goal to “turn the sons and daughters of the ruling class into Vietcong”. David Dellinger’s pacifism was so profound he conscientiously objected to World War II. Monastic dedication to one’s ideals was not centrist enough for Sorkin, however, so he contrived a scene in which Dellinger punched a court marshal.
Few of the characters are done a larger disservice than Abbie Hoffman. For most of the film, Sacha Baron Cohen’s portrayal is more or less in line with the genuine article: a committed activist who was also an unapologetic smart-ass, Che Guevara by way of Groucho Marx, someone who felt the revolution would need to be televised and that he should be the MC for that production. (Though Cohen’s performance is commendable, the fact that Hoffman is played by the man behind Borat does half the work of this interpretation.) Hoffman is the first to realize the Chicago Seven are being railroaded, and does his best to make a spectacle of it while also shaming Hayden for his blinkered practicality in the face of the government’s terrible power to persecute them.
About halfway through the proceedings, however, the characterization takes a hard right turn. Hoffman is seen complementing Schultz, who is charged with sending him to prison, as “a good man” while also reining in his more hotheaded Yippie compatriot, Jerry Rubin. He later delivers a speech on the witness stand in which he calls his practical rival Hayden a “badass”—which might be true in real life but is not in way demonstrated in the movie—and proclaims “the institutions of our democracy are wonderful things that are right now populated by some terrible people.”
This sentiment is extremely difficult to square with the Abbie Hoffman who referred to his country as “Amerika” and “the Pig Empire,” who once proclaimed “in order to get rid of the establishment, you should kill the pigs, kill your parents, and destroy your schools.” Whether intended literally or metaphorically, the choice of words indicates how little he cared for “the institutions of democracy” as they stood in 1968. (Go check out Hoffman’s FBI files, which remain heavily redacted, if you want to know how much of a threat he posed to those institutions at the time.) A real reckoning of Abbie Hoffman includes a reckoning with his belief that an America that spent billions to bomb Vietnam while children went hungry was beyond reform, and would require more than the removal of a few “terrible people.”
None of this makes it to the screen. Instead, Abbie Hoffman, goofball provocateur, accepts Hayden’s practical, acceptable ways and mouths them into the court record with Lisa Simpson earnestness. In Sorkin’s world, even the author of Steal This Book must be drawn toward the center.
This brings us to the film’s conclusion, which contains a Platonic ideal of Sorkinism. Called on to make a brief statement in his defense prior to sentencing, Tom Hayden instead begins reciting the names of American soldiers killed in Vietnam since the beginning of the trial. Judge Julius Hoffman’s mighty gavel is powerless to stop him. The court gallery resounds with righteous cheers. Prosecutor Schultz stands in solidarity, out of “respect for the fallen.” John Williams-esque strings swell and weep at the sight.
As you no doubt could guess, this never happened. (David Dellinger made one attempt to read such a list and was slapped with six months for contempt of court.) However, it’s less important to point out that this is a lie than to determine what purpose the lie serves. Again, we return to the idea of making the story palatable to a modern, practical, respectable liberal.
There were a multitude of reasons why people opposed the Vietnam War. To prevent the senseless killing of young American soldiers, many of whom were drafted into that war before they could even vote, was one. But so was the fact that we were bombing a preindustrial agrarian society with more tonnage than was dropped during all of World War II. So was the fact that the war had begun on a lie, the contrived Gulf of Tonkin resolution. So was the fact that this lie rested on an earlier lie, the one that divided Vietnam into a North and South, with a promised election to unite them that was forever delayed because the U.S. knew that “our” side would lose any such election. So was the fact that the guarding of American “interests” in Southeast Asia was done largely at the behest of corporations who stood to lose billions if the Vietnamese people were given any real say with what was done with the wealth of their nation.
These reasons include an inherent critique of American imperialism, of colonialism, and of capitalism. Many people thought as much when they began protesting; their protests were not a struggle merely against the war, but against all these things.
But a funny thing happened once the actual goal of ending the war was achieved: liberals were made to feel bad about it. They’d disrespected the brave men and women who fought that war, conservatives maintained, and made it impossible for what Nixon said he aimed for: peace with honor. Then Ronald Reagan was swept into office in 1980, in large part by an electorate that—post-Watergate, post-CIA investigations, post-everything—had tired of an apologetic America. The liberal wing of America’s landscape decided that they too, loved America. In fact, they loved America even better than conservatives did, believed in it even harder than conservatives did. They too would believe in the institutions, even the ones—especially the ones—that put “terrible people” in positions of power.
This is why Sorkin’s view, and the view of the modern liberal, has no room for the multifacted Vietnam War protest. They believe some “terrible people” in America may do bad things, but America itself cannot. Bad eggs in the FBI may wiretap protesters, but the upstanding character of Richard Schultz assures us he disapproves of such chicanery (even though he works for the same Justice Department that includes the FBI). The brief appearance of Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton, great and gone too soon), Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general who refused to bring charges against the Chicago protesters, assures us that even if there is a bad man as attorney general currently, a righteous one will remain to help out the good guys (even if the real life Ramsey Clark prosecuted the Boston Five for encouraging people to avoid the draft). Chicago police may have infiltrated the antiwar movement with agents from its infamous Red Squad, but even some of those are decent people, like the cute undercover cop who beguiled Jerry Rubin and tried to rein in the more violent elements of the protests. (In real life, undercover cops almost invariably egged the protesters on, providing their uniformed compatriots with ample excuse to crack heads.)
To such minds, American power is a good thing and cannot be misused. Therefore, the only basis on which a war may be protested is that it disrespects The Troops. In The Trial of the Chicago 7, only time the rapid-fire Sorkin dialogue comes to a halt is when the latest litany of war dead is shown during a newscast, the sight of which causes all assembled, even the irreverent Abbie Hoffman, to stand at attention as if for the Pledge of Allegiance. The film mentions the fact that Vietnamese people also died in the Vietnam War only twice, glancingly each time.
As America’s involvement in Vietnam wound down in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon blunted criticism of the war (and himself) by shifting the focus to “bringing back” prisoners of war. POW’s became a sticking point in peace talks, their “honor” a reason why Nixon couldn’t end the war any sooner than he did. A contemporary New Yorker writer marveled at how the rationale for the war had turned on a dime, saying it was “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them”. Sorkin’s take on the Chicago Seven is of a piece with this, as it boils down to a belief that the defendants had been put on trial for just loving the troops too damn much.
“Become an internationalist,” Abbie Hoffman wrote at the time, “and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.” No hint of this in Sorkin’s film. In its place, an American exceptionalism that is essentially indistinguishable from that of Ronald Reagan, apart from being housed in an NPR tote bag.