The Lessons of Chicago

Forty years ago, the Democrats met in Chicago, their most disastrous convention ever. Denver obviously won't be a repeat, but Democrats face some similar dangers if they don't pull the party together. I know this from personal, if youthful, experience.

In 1968, I was a 10-year-old Chicagoan, fascinated by politics, determined to hang out at the convention. My mother was working for Vice President Hubert Humphrey and my father for Sen. Eugene McCarthy, both of whom had their convention headquarters at the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, not far down the street from where Barack Obama's headquarters is today. It was late August, only a couple of months after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and even before Chicago police started clubbing reporters and demonstrators outside the hotel, the mood was tense.

Humphrey, the presumptive nominee and soon-to-be Senate tutor of a 30-year-old freshman named Joe Biden, had entered no primaries, but he had the support of President Johnson, as well as the urban bosses who still ran the party. His slogan, "the politics of joy," was especially off-key that year, as a bitter struggle over the Vietnam War swept the country. Humphrey had started out as a Minnesota pharmacist, so someone got the dumb idea of having part of his headquarters decked out like an old-fashioned pharmacy. My mother, who knew Humphrey, volunteered there, running the pharmacy that sold Humphrey buttons, posters, scarves and other memorabilia. Business wasn't brisk.

Over on the east side of the hotel, my father, working in delegate outreach, was surrounded in McCarthy HQ with longhaired staffers and hand-scrawled peace signs. The volunteers there knew McCarthy wasn't going to win the nomination but wanted approval of an antiwar plank in the party platform. When they lost this fight, some McCarthy supporters crossed Michigan Avenue and joined the hippie and Yippie protesters gathered in Grant Park. McCarthy's press secretary that year was Seymour Hersh, soon to be a legendary investigative reporter.

My parents and I would often eat at the Conrad Hilton's Haymarket restaurant, which may not have been named for the site of the famous 19th-century Chicago terrorist bombing (and gross police overreaction, which led to the execution of innocent immigrants), but should have been. The place already meant something to me because a week before the convention opened, the bus bringing me from summer camp had deposited me coincidentally at the Hilton. At lunch in the Haymarket, my parents told me my dog had died. For me, this would be only the first of that summer's traumatic experiences associated with the hotel.

Early in the week, my father, then in his 40s, returned from the Haymarket restaurant to McCarthy headquarters and was summoned by an icy staffer. "We understand you've been spotted having lunch with a Humphrey operative." When my father told him that was his wife, the aide was not amused.