A Look Back at Chicago Convention Riots, 25 Years Later

It was the summer of 1968. The nation was in the thick of a futile war in Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson already had announced he would not seek the presidency again. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated that spring, touching off riots in big cities across the country. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was murdered.

The nation was still reeling in August when the spotlight turned to Chicago.

A divided Democratic Party had come to town to pick a presidential nominee. So had hippies and Yippies, pacifists and anti-war protesters, and many, many more, all with their own agendas, all ready to take center stage.

Mayor Richard J. Daley, the iron-fisted, short-tempered boss of Chicago, issued a warning: “Nobody,” he said, “is going to take over this city.”

But on those hot August nights 25 years ago, thousands of protesters, many of them kids, clashed with the police in a brutal confrontation broadcast on television. Many in the crowd chanted: “The whole world is watching.”

Four miles away at the convention site, Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff decried the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” As he was speaking, Daley drew a finger across his neck in a signal to cut the microphone.

But the damage already was done. August, 1968, became a part of history. And Chicago hasn’t had a national political convention since.

In side-by-side profiles, two men who participated in the Chicago convention recall those days. The decades have softened them, but looking back all these years later, the veteran police officer and the anti-war protester would not have done things differently.