Chicago--Revisiting the Trauma of ’68

It has all changed. The LaSalle Hotel, where California delegates cheered and booed and sometimes wept 28 years ago, now is an old office building in a marginal neighborhood of pizzerias and pawnshops.

The Greek restaurant across the street, where delegates and reporters--including TV anchor David Brinkley--nightly closed the bar at 4 a.m., has vanished.

So has the Stockyards Inn, which served up the greatest steaks I’d ever eaten. Burned to the ground years ago.

The nearby International Amphitheater, where California delegate and actress Shirley MacLaine torched her credential on the convention floor and rebel seatmates routinely jeered Mayor Richard J. Daley and the establishment forces of LBJ, now is rarely used.

Look around. There’s Lake Michigan and the wall of skyscrapers. But, nonetheless, the place is different.

The Haymarket Lounge at the Hilton, where antiwar protester Tom Hayden got shoved through a shattered window as the lobby floor became a bloody battleground, now has a trendy new name, Lakeside Green. A bar TV set shows Jerry Brown being interviewed in San Francisco. The sound is off. Nobody seems to care.

On the mezzanine above, delegate Hayden is being interviewed by a Utah TV reporter. This week should not be about nostalgia, he’s saying. It should be about rekindling the progressive spirit, about moving forward to bring peace to the cities and drive money out of politics. But that won’t get reported. For regardless of what Hayden says, the first story here is about the Democrats returning to Chicago.

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It is a compelling, dramatic story. But there is a mental annoyance about returning to the city of cracked heads, tear gas clouds and Democratic debacle. The events of ’68 long ago were tucked neatly back into a corner of the mind, there for quick, handy reflection, but not requiring much time or thought. Now, this tidy package of fixed memories has to be taken apart and reexamined, then reassembled inevitably in a new shape. That process will take awhile.

We know the cops beat the kids; a “police riot,” according to a national commission. We also know that all the kids were not innocent. Their cause was just, Hayden has written, “even if all our methods were not.”

The Chicago convention was but one hellish skirmish in a years-long battle over America’s commitment to a ludicrous war, and none were more combative politically than California’s delegates.

Their candidate, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, had been slain on primary election night and they were still grieving and bitter. Making things more tense, they had become divided into camps supporting Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, Sen. George S. McGovern and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

Old animosities flared between the delegation chairman, Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh--trying to draft Sen. Edward M. Kennedy as a candidate--and two staunch Humphrey backers, San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto and former Gov. Edmund G. Brown.

Unruh managed a convention coup by arranging the only joint appearance of the three major contenders, at a California caucus in the LaSalle ballroom. McGovern was cheered, Humphrey hissed. The next night on the convention floor, an unknown black minister from Washington, D.C., the Rev. Channing Phillips, received more California votes than did Humphrey. McCarthy received the most.

Californians left Chicago with a “don’t give a damn” attitude. That November, Democrats coughed up their majority in the Assembly--and Unruh his speakership--and Humphrey narrowly lost California to native son Richard Nixon.

This year, the contrast couldn’t be more stark. “Today the party is more diverse and it’s unified,” notes state Senate leader Bill Lockyer of Hayward, a delegate both then and now.

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Truth is, few of us--California delegates and reporters--saw much street combat except on television. We smelled whiffs of tear gas around the convention hall. We saw thousands of bivouacked troops. We constantly heard warnings and rumors. One night, rioters did surround our delegation bus. We survived.

From the other side, families loyal to Daley would stand in the frontyards of their modest homes and flip off any buses bearing “California Delegation” banners.

Once, writing a story in a cramped work space inside the convention hall, a curtain and its metal post crashed into my lap, followed by a demonstrator with some flak-jacketed cop’s hands around his neck.

The party’s proud anthem, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” never has sounded the same to me since.