Frank Kusch's Battleground Chicago is an attempt to give the "other side" of the 1968 Democratic National Convention by seeking to interview a group of participants that have been largely ignored in previous studies, the Chicago Police Department, whom he interviewed during the period of 1999 to 2003. The results of the interviews are not particularly surprising, they reveal that many members of the Chicago Police Department feared the antiwar protestors and the Civil Rights movement, a fact that resulted in the willingness of large numbers of the Chicago Police Department to use considerable force to suppress dissent during the week of the convention. A number of factors contributed to this use of force--the riots in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Mayor Richard Daley's personal hatred of the protestors, and pressure from the local government and the Democrats to appear strong and "control" the protests.

Rather than provide an honest appraisal of the actions of the police, Kusch largely sanctions their actions, arguing that they were motivated by their perceptions of the protestors--as indeed all actions are--and uses the officers' feelings as a means of absolving them of responsibility for what happened. Battleground Chicago explains how the Chicago Police Department was made up of officers from the ethnically homogenous neighborhoods of Chicago, primarily Irish and Polish, where the officers, both on duty and off, cultivated a form of "traditional" life and values which they felt were threatened by the growing social movements of the 1960s. Amidst stories of traditional, family-oriented lives, Kusch intersperses quotes from various police officers about their hatred of the Civil Rights movement and their attitude that African Americans brought crime to the community, as well as the officers' hatred of hippies and their opinion that "the youth" had no respect for authority. Kusch portrays these communities as under attack from the social movements of the sixties and projects the opinions of the police onto the greater Chicago community--frequently extending police officers' comments that the community viewed them as a line of defense from outside "turbulence" without questioning it or consulting additional sources.

When Kusch discusses the events of the convention week, his analysis shifts somewhat. Whereas the police are portrayed as a misunderstood entity that are not given the opportunity to tell their side of the story, Kusch's accounts provide numerous examples of a police force that acted with excessive and, by most evaluations, unjustifiable brutality. While the Chicago Police Department was faced with a considerable amount of abuse during the protests, most of the verbal variety--the sensationalized accounts of protestor violence, coming from both the underground left press and the corporate press, were not an omnipresent feature of the protests. For the most part, poor orders and decisions to provoke confrontations radicalized protests and contributed to the "street battles" that the police and protestors so vividly remember. However, Kusch does his best to absolve the police of responsibility for their actions (and echoes the opinions of the police), and charges that they were under attack from protestors and journalists. Kusch gives considerable space to the police interviewees to describe how the journalists sought to provoke fights and were allies of the movement, but Kusch rarely points out the errors of these assertions nor does he seek to analyze the attitudes of the officers.

While Kusch succeeds in interviewing a number of different police officers and conveying their viewpoints, thereby making some contribution to scholarship on the Convention, the interviews cannot mask glaring problems with Kusch's book. While Kusch did indeed interview a seemingly large number of police, he gives no account of the exact numbers nor does he provide the format used--it is unclear whether he used a set questionnaire, a freewheeling conversation, or asked questions in order to elicit a specific response. Too often, the attitudes of former police officers--echoing the stereotypical denunciations of the sixties' so-called "excesses"--are projected onto the residents of Chicago. Kusch uses the police officers' opinions to conclude that most Chicago residents supported the police and welcomed their efforts to protect the city, and backs his assertion with a tally of "pro-police" letters in the Chicago newspapers. Finally, Kusch himself seems to be biased in favor of the police, accepting the premise that the protestors were "dangerous" as indicated by his repeated assertions that the protestors did not seek a legitimate form of dissent but rather were anarchists who sought only chaos. These conclusions are backed up by citing various corporate media reports of protestors carrying weapons, an imperfect means of supporting arguments as the corporate press has long distorted facts pertaining to protests. Notably absent in the book are differing opinions--no protestors were interviewed--and Kusch instead chooses to piece together their perspective the various books that have been published, and quite frequently, from only a limited bibliography of works with their own anti-radical bias, especially Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.

In the end, it is fitting that Kusch cites David Horowitz and Peter Collier's Destructive Generation, as Horowitz, Collier, and Kusch share a similar goal in rethinking the sixties and reinterpreting the ways in which the history has been presented. While it is important to rethink the history of the sixties, and indeed there is a great opportunity to do so with the growing amount of scholarship coming from authors who were not a part of the sixties movements, Kusch falls into the same trap that critics often attribute to those on the left--he creates a narrow book that reinforces a preconceived position in a frequently dubious manner. Rather than presenting new insights, Kusch's book simply rehashes the tired old positions of critics of "the sixties," and consequently, contributes little to scholarship on the period.