“Mr. Mayor, what do you think is the chief lesson of Chicago ’68?” the reporter wanted to know.
Richard Daley paused only a second before replying, “War is evil.”
I nodded, finding myself moved.
It was summer 1996. This Mayor Daley was the son of the mayor whose police I had confronted half a lifetime ago.
When I return this summer as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, the streets of Chicago will hold eerie memories. In my gaze, for example, the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balbo Drive is not a traffic intersection but a historic crossroads of protest. The Conrad Hilton is not an ordinary hotel in my memory, but an armed fortress from which I was banned.
I remember one night in 1968 when I was asked to meet in the Hilton with Geoff Cowan and Paul Gorman, two leaders of the Eugene McCarthy campaign. It was a night of sirens, arrests, tear-gas clouds. Disillusioned delegates had begun blinking room lights in support of the street protesters.
As I approached the Hilton entrance with Geoff and Paul, a grim doorman backed by police officers blocked my way. While Geoff and Paul argued with him, I shrugged and turned back. A burly undercover officer who had been tailing me jumped on my back, knocked me to the pavement and arrested me. In the paddy wagon, my police assailants laid out the future. They already knew I was going to be indicted with the others for conspiracy and sent to prison.
Incredible? It happened.
In May 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had signed a secret order that I be “neutralized.” That cryptic code word has different meanings, none of them pleasant for the target. In Hoover’s mind, it meant that the young rebels coming to Chicago were to be demonized as conspirators, indicted and imprisoned.
So far as I can tell, that was the only Chicago conspiracy that was planned and carried out. And it backfired. Geoff Cowan later became director of President Clinton’s Voice of America, and Paul Gorman heads a national religious partnership on the environment. I’m a state senator from California, I’ll be staying at the Hilton (now the Chicago Hilton and Towers) during the convention, and I’d vote for Mayor Daley if I were a Chicagoan.
So what do these turnarounds mean? It is too easy and cynical to conclude that young rebels always settle down to become the future Establishment. The ledger of history is complicated. There have been welcome changes since 1968, some of which I did not then expect.
In the ’60s, a young man could get drafted to kill or be killed in Vietnam but could not vote out of office the politician who sent him there. Today 18-year-olds can vote. Presidential nominees are chosen in primaries, not in back rooms. The presidency has been cut down to democratic size. Another Vietnam is unlikely.
I didn’t get “neutralized” (as some others did). The FBI dismantled its illegal counterintelligence program.
If most Americans today agree that Vietnam was wrong, what caused the overreaction in Chicago ’68? It was a time when most public officials believed whatever military intelligence or the FBI said. For example, that LSD would be slipped into the water supply, turning Chicagoans into zombies. Or that enforcing the Lincoln Park curfew with CS gas and club-swinging police would preserve law and order.
In Chicago, democracy was overridden to preserve the the status quo and its unpopular war in Vietnam. Demonstrators were to be swept off the streets, like parents throwing their children out of the house.
My father, a World War II Marine, agreed with Daley. In the view of his generation, America was a land of freedom whose troubles were instigated by enemies abroad. Since our government wouldn’t lie, if you were against its Vietnam policy you were a dupe of foreigners.
He stopped talking to me for 15 years.
Our generational mentalities were at war. I felt that American ideals were contradicted by racism, poverty and paternalism at home. I rejected conformity to authority. And when the Democrats, the party of my early hope, chose to bomb and kill in Vietnam, my choice was resistance instead of silence.
In the end, my father and I reconciled. It seemed that my father’s connection to me, his only son, couldn’t be severed, especially as his disillusionment with government grew. I came to understand how much he had invested in the American Dream for me, and how hard it is for any authority figure to admit and say they are wrong. If the ’60s were a time when too many Americans abandoned their children instead of listening to them, can it happen again?
Look around. We’ve come a long way, but I see signs of a new abandonment:
The corporate “downsizing” of middle-class opportunity, now officially accepted as inevitable, abandons our children to a meaner future. Too many Americans have abandoned the challenge of the inner city.
What of our democratic promise to the next generation? I see a new machinery of power consisting of special interests who spend millions on campaign contributions and lobbyists for their short-term advantage. As a result, millions of Americans are denied the full value of their franchise. They are apathetic or alienated, and voting has fallen to all-time lows. People take out their pent-up resentments on each other or themselves.
This isn’t what the ’60s were about. I am proud to be a senator and a delegate to another convention in Chicago, but I haven’t come this far just to sleep in the Hilton and wear a plastic tag. While I am sleeping in the Hilton there are too many sleeping in the streets. While I am on the inside, there are too many on the outside.
As I look out the Hilton window, I’ll be blinking the lights, hoping the idealism that launched the ’60s will be born again.
