The Lessons of Chicago

I roamed the Hilton lobby freely, though my parents wouldn't let me go in the park with the demonstrators. Rumors circulated that Ted Kennedy would arrive from Hyannis to accept a "draft" and be nominated. When the rumors proved false, a boomlet for George McGovern began. So as not to side with one parent over the other, I sported a McGovern button.

On the second or third day of the convention, someone threw a stink bomb into the lobby of the hotel. I can still smell the ether. I never felt fear, but I'll never forget riding up Michigan Avenue as tense National Guardsmen lined the streets, with angry demonstrators just behind them. My parents didn't want me to be around at night when the violence erupted, so I saw the beatings on TV. The scene just outside the hotel descended into what an official report later described as a "police riot." A Chicago newspaperman, Don Rose, still connected to everyone in the Obama orbit, coined the phrase "The whole world is watching."

The next day, I was shocked to see the plate-glass windows of the Haymarket restaurant shattered. People walked around the lobby and the now-deserted Humphrey HQ, dazed over what had happened the night before. There was more to come that evening, but my own baptism in the fire of American politics was complete. I watched the rest at home on TV—including Mayor Daley shouting obscenities at the podium, where Sen. Abraham Ribicoff denounced the "Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago."

As Rick Pearlstein recounts in his new book, "Nixonland," Humphrey left the convention trailing Richard Nixon badly in the polls. It was the worst "reverse-bounce" in history. But after he broke with LBJ on the war in a speech in Salt Lake City, Humphrey began quickly closing the gap. He lost in November by a hair.

One of the reasons for Humphrey's loss was that many McCarthy supporters (not my father) refused to close party ranks and support him. They were so angry over the war and their personal bitterness over the way McCarthy was treated that they sniped at Humphrey publicly and stayed home in November.

Some of these people—then in their mid-20s or 30s, and now in their mid-60s or 70s—are the same liberal Democrats who say they cannot vote for Obama. Their long hair is gray or gone and they certainly aren't sleeping in the park, but the anger they feel resonates of 1968. They might want to consider what happened to the United States after Nixon was elected. It wasn't pretty.

© 2008