By the time the Sun-Times brought me to Chicago in 1970 and I learned the names of CJR‘s defiant founders, Dorfman had resigned from Chicago’s American to run the monthly Review full-time. He and I have just gone back over this distant history, and he’s explained to me that it wasn’t the convention-week coverage itself that was so troubling, but what was published a week later, “when the papers backtracked on everything.” For instance, during the convention, his American carried headlines such as these: “Editors Protest Police Beatings of 15 Newsmen”; “Who Controls the Cops?” (an editorial); and “A Horrifying View of the Police State” (a column by Jack Mabley). But the next week brought these stories: “Daley Bares Assassin Plot”; “Police Blame TV for Role in Hippie Riots”; and “American Warned City on Radicals” (a Mabley column); while an editorial made the point that “experienced agitators know how to trigger a police attack, and TV watchers should be aware of their methods. But the networks so far have not shown great interest in informing them.” Then the American published “What Really Happened,” a 12-page special report on the “Battle of Chicago,” in which Mabley explained, “The one common goal of those in the Movement is to bring down the present form of government in the United States.”
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Dorfman quit Chicago in 1978 as a matter of principle—the magazine had spiked an investigative piece he was deeply invested in (the Reader published it instead, along with Dorfman’s account of why Chicago wouldn’t)—and after working in Beijing a year, teaching Western journalistic principles to Chinese journalists, he became editor of the Quill, the monthly magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists. Later he wrote a syndicated column and was director of publications for the Field Museum. He resigned in the mid-90s because he believed he was about to die.
“Ron and Ken have been in a long-term, committed relationship for 20 years and were registered as domestic partners in Cook County in 2004,” said the Lambda Legal brief. “They met in Chicago in 1994 at an AIDS Foundation dinner, where they sat at the same table. They immediately had a connection, and after a first date at an Italian restaurant on Western Avenue, began a relationship. They moved in together within months and have been together ever since.
Seeing as the Lambda Legal brief made a florid case for marriage as a public declaration of love and commitment, I asked for Dorfman’s view of the spiritual dimension the ceremony has added to his life. “Ken and I have been together 20 years,” he told me. “We were married, married, married, married. There was nothing we hadn’t been through together.” What legal marriage brings them, he said, is peace of mind: the mundane assurance that if Dorfman dies—he tells me a bypass operation scheduled for late January is eight times as risky as the usual bypass surgery—Ilio won’t get screwed when such matters as social security benefits and inheritance taxes are dealt with. In the eyes of the state, he and Dorfman are newlyweds, but they know better. They’ve been married forever.
