So many things died in 1968. One of them was the Democratic Party of Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson and Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy.
The obituaries of 1968 alone would fill most small libraries. There were people who died: Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and 347 villagers in a place called My Lai. There was the death of the extraordinarily prosperous, comfortable postwar period with its seemingly endless progression of upward mobility and technological luxury. It died in a collision of cultures and a lasting dissolution of American trust in the institutions that nurtured them: the White House, the campus, the family, City Hall, the corporations, the courts, the church.
It was payback time in America. The civil rights explosion of fervor and frustration left whole sections of cities in ashes, but for many black Americans the promise of equal opportunity remained only a promise for another 30 years. And the anger that smoldered in the ashes created a backlash of white anxiety that caused a permanent political drift between old habits and new realities. The Democratic convention turned Chicago into a stage for a drama of betrayal and dissent, anger and force, immovable power and irresistible change. Chicago became a bad taste in the nation’s mouth, and in a year that had so many tragedies and so many villains, Richard J. Daley and the city he loved so much found themselves the scapegoat for all of it.
The revolution that took place in Chicago the last week of August occurred not on the streets and in the parks, but inside the convention hall.
The White House-to-courthouse control the Democrats had enforced for 150 years was personified at its worst by the bosses whom the delegates of 1968 wanted to exterminate. The most visible, most powerful of them was Richard J. Daley.
Not that Daley was a hapless innocent. But the Democrats were marching toward a cliff long before they arrived in Chicago.
Daley wanted the 1968 convention in Chicago. President Lyndon Johnson wanted the convention in Chicago. Johnson, weathering three years of urban rioting, rejected pleas from Miami, Philadelphia and Houston because he didn’t trust local Democratic officials to provide the security he thought would be needed to prevent more burning or the disruptive protests against his war in Vietnam. Each morning the president had to listen to chants outside the White House gates. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh.”
On Sunday, March 31, Daley was at home waiting to watch Johnson address the nation on his conduct of the war. His youngest son, William, recently recalled the night.
“Jack Watson (White House aide) called right before Johnson was going on television and my dad took the call upstairs where he had a private line. We were all sitting down in the den where he had his office. He came downstairs and said, `The president’s going to announce he’s not running.’ “
At 9:01 p.m. EST, with Daley sitting in his family room on Lowe Avenue, Johnson stunned the nation:
“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
After his speech, the first telephone call he accepted was from Chicago.
“We’re going to draft you,” Daley began. Johnson told him he would not accept it.
A moratorium on campaigning that Daley suggested “to let the president negotiate a just peace” began on April 4, but it wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis. In Chicago on the first night of rioting, nine people, all black, were killed. On Saturday, Daley called in the Army. When the fires died out, 162 buildings had been destroyed, 12 people killed, 3,000 arrested. Damage estimates ranged from $12 million to $15 million.
On April 16, Daley delivered one of his patented angry, defiant and threatening harangues that had seemed so popular the previous year when tough Talk seemed to have shielded Chicago from the rioting that burned Newark and Detroit.
He said that he had thought police had orders to shoot arsonists and looters and that when he found out they didn’t he had immediately told Supt. James Conlisk to issue orders “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with Molotov cocktails in their hand to fire a building because they are potential murderers and to also order police to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in the city.”
Only minutes after Daley stalked back into his office, he was fending off a national barrage of criticism. There were rumors throughout the month that the Democrats would reconsider Chicago as the site of the convention, but there was no way Daley would let that happen.
On April 26, Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the presidential contest, mostly as a stand-in for Johnson, whose name already was printed on ballots. In May, Bobby Kennedy won the Indiana primary, right under Daley’s nose, and he won in Nebraska. Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota came in first in Oregon, stalling Kennedy but leaving Humphrey listless.
Johnson did not want the nomination to go to Kennedy and was trying to keep everyone in line for Hubert. At the president’s request, Daley was calling his fellow mayors in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Detroit, urging them to delay any endorsements.
Shortly after midnight June 5, Kennedy stormed back into the Democratic lead by winning California. He claimed victory in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and shouted, “On to Chicago, and let’s win there.” A moment later he was shot in the head by Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. PDT June 6.
As the 1968 Democratic National Convention began, Dick Daley’s partnership with labor, which had contributed to his many elections and their many sweetheart contracts, was collapsing. He had the telephone workers on strike, which angered the television networks. He had the taxi drivers on strike, which angered the delegates. The CTA bus drivers were ready to go on strike. He had to wonder if anybody was working in the city that worked. He had built redwood fences all around the vacant lots between Michigan Avenue and the International Amphitheatre at 43rd and Halsted Streets, so none of the delegates would see anything but tidy homes and clean streets as they drove through his neighborhood.
They would also see the 5,000 federal troops who surrounded the Amphitheatre and the hundreds of secret service agents and Chicago police.
After his brother’s death, Edward Kennedy on the ticket seemed just what the Democrats needed to overtake the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, and clinch the election. Kennedy had several telephone conversations with Daley and issued a statement: “I will not be able to accept the vice presidential nomination.”
That didn’t deter Daley, who wasn’t alone in his quest. Sen. Philip Hart of Michigan was trying to get some kind of commitment that would lock up his state’s delegates for Kennedy. Jesse Unruh, the speaker of the California assembly, had 174 delegates, most of whom had been for Bobby and were ready to switch to a new Kennedy. As Daley waited at home on the Saturday before the convention, his youngest son, Bill, a member of the host committee, was at O’Hare to greet the California delegation. When Unruh arrived, he said, “Where is your father? I’ve got to speak to him.”
“When I got home that night I was planning to go out,” Bill Daley said. “There were lots of parties. My dad said, `Why don’t you stick around?’ I asked, `Why?’ He said, `I think we’re going to endorse Teddy Kennedy tomorrow morning.’ “
The Kennedy boomlet would not become public until Tuesday, but on Sunday night Daley knew it was over. But he still wasn’t sure Humphrey was a certainty. The Southern delegations were furious with Humphrey over his refusal to support unit rule (all of a state’s delegates went to the candidate with a majority) and ready to bolt with their 600 delegates. If California, New York, Michigan and Illinois joined them, Humphrey would be stopped.
The 1968 convention delegates were not the same as in the past. For one thing, there were 6,000 delegates and alternates, twice as many as had been in Los Angeles eight years earlier. Convinced that increasing participation would strengthen the party, John Kennedy had agreed to doubling the number of delegates.
The war and the McCarthy-Kennedy campaigns had brought many new kinds of Democrats to Chicago. There were college professors and elementary school teachers, clergymen and students; poets and actors. There were nearly 400 black delegates and alternates, almost four times the number who had gathered in 1964 and 10 times as many as had been in Los Angeles to nominate John Kennedy.
And most delegates were angry. They were angry over the platform battles, they were angry at the electronic checkpoints they had to go through at the Amphitheatre, and they were crowded. There wasn’t room to move around. They didn’t like where they were located. Daley and Johnson had decided the rebellious delegations like New York and California should be separated from their customary places near each other and moved to the rear.
The first night of the convention was a mess. There were 17 credentials challenges against the seating of delegations, most of them based on racial imbalance.
On Tuesday night, Aug. 27, the new breed voted down the unit rule, not only for the national convention but all the way down to the state and national levels. It was the end of the Southern Democrats’ century-long battle to maintain racial supremacy in the party and to exert a bloc of influence at national conventions that assured them of a nominee who would appreciate their view of civil rights.
After the historic ouster of the unit rule, the fight began over the Vietnam plank.
The debate over Vietnam led by the McCarthy delegates went beyond midnight, and Daley was getting furious. The timetable of the convention was being thrown into chaos.
At the rate it was going, the nomination would not take place until Friday. Speaker Carl Albert, the permanent chairman, was getting frazzled. He refused to hear an adjournment motion at 1:12 a.m. Anti-war delegates began to chant, “Let’s go home.”
Albert recognized Daley, who showed the nation that famous scowl all Chicago knew. “This convention is held for the delegates of the great Democratic Party, not for people in the balconies trying to take over this meeting.” Daley demanded that the galleries be silent. “And if they don’t . . . we’ll turn them out. Mr. Chairman, they’re guests of the Democratic Party and let them conduct themselves accordingly or we’ll clear the gallery.”
The television cameras were not kind. A moment later, he was shown as he angrily drew a finger across his throat in a “cut it off” sign.
The convention adjourned until noon Aug. 28. The debate on Vietnam resumed Wednesday. A massive demonstration began, especially in the New York and California delegations. People stood on chairs chanting, “Stop the war! Stop the war!” When the roll call ended, the minority plank had been defeated.
Some New York delegates put on black armbands. Others began to sing “We Shall Overcome,” trying to drown out the band’s “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Lyndon Johnson was spared the humiliation of his party renouncing his war policy, but his party was hopelessly divided.
As the debate on the Vietnam plank filled the Amphitheatre, about 8,000 people filled the Grant Park bandshell area. There were McCarthy supporters wearing shirts and ties, hippies in Levis and sneakers; red flags for revolution, black flags for anarchy, Viet Cong flags.
One young man climbed a flagpole to pull down the American flag. Police stopped him. Bottles and rocks flew. Police charged a small group.
David Dellinger spoke to the crowd and said it was time to march to the Amphitheatre.
They moved a block before police stopped them. National Guardsmen blocked the southern and eastern exits from the park. The demonstrators moved north, turned onto Michigan Avenue and wheeled south toward the Conrad Hilton.
At Balbo Drive and Michigan Avenue, the street belonged to the police. They had formed a double line, curb to curb. The lights of the hotels and of television cameras, mounted on trucks and hotel eaves, lit the scene as daylight moved toward dusk.
Inside the convention, the roll call for presidential nominations had started.
At the Hilton, the swelling crowd faced off against the police. Someone threw a beer can. The police charged, and the shrill cry of hundreds of young women filled the avenue. Nightsticks thudded on bones. Dozens of persons were shoved or dragged into patrol wagons. The television cameras were turned on as the violence spread along the sidewalks, and police went into the hotel lobbies, chasing demonstrators, journalists, spectators, anyone who stumbled in their path.
It was over in 18 minutes.
Inside the convention, delegates hearing the reports began jeering Daley. Gov. Harold Hughes of Iowa nominated McCarthy as more reports of the Hilton violence filtered through the convention.
Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco nominated Humphrey, who was watching from his 25th-floor room in the Hilton. Amid the ceremony about to give him the highest honor a political party can bestow, Hubert Humphrey was forced to watch television replays of the battle that took place beneath him. He was terribly disappointed when the networks replayed the tape of the confrontation during a seconding speech for him by Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, a black who would recall for America, particularly black America, that once the now-suspect Humphrey had stood before a Democratic convention and bravely led the charge for civil rights.
At the Amphitheatre, the chairman of Colorado’s delegation asked if there was any way “Mayor Daley can be compelled to suspend the police-state tactics.” Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, an old ally of Daley from the 1960 Kennedy convention, rose to nominate McGovern. Ribicoff had been at the Sherman House earlier that day pleading with Daley to try once more to enlist Ted Kennedy onto the ticket, making it clear that only Daley might be able to persuade the reluctant savior.
Now he taunted Daley: “With George McGovern, we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” The entire Illinois delegation rose and booed and jeered, Daley in the middle, laughing in scorn and derision at what he saw was the worst kind of betrayal: one political leader attacking another in public, one Democrat attacking another in public. As the Illinoisans booed louder, Ribicoff pointed at Daley and said, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”
The nation saw the image that many Americans automatically recall at the mention of Richard J. Daley. A low-angle camera showed him red-faced, veins in his neck bulging, his lower lip curled down. He was shouting. It did not matter whether he uttered profanities, which he always denied. It that brief moment, for those who sympathized with the demonstrators, Daley conveyed raw power. He was cast in a role he never imagined: an icon of the corrupt, selfish, ineffective boss era that voters everywhere else in America had long since abolished. Nearly an hour later the speeches concluded, the roll call of states began. Humphrey was nominated on the first ballot.
The battle of Michigan Avenue may have scarred Chicago’s image briefly, but the convention had far greater significance to the future of American politics. The transition from postwar complacency to rebellion against traditional authority was forged in the debate over the war. Those much younger than Dick Daley who could not grasp in their soul the faith in authority that was part of his birthright would be further shattered by Watergate.
George McGovern accurately predicted the future at the end of the 1968 convention, taking one last swipe at Daley. “There is something almost obscene about presidential candidates going to one man about what 100 delegates are going to do. . . . We ought to scrap the entire convention system and go entirely over to the more democratic system of primary elections in every state.”
McGovern’s suggestion became reality four years later and with it a whole new group of Democrats, one that prized special interests more than party loyalty. The new Democrats would never again be united in a common quest to capture every office on the ballot, from highway commissioner to the presidency.
The ideological ties that bound millions to the Democratic Party of Wilson and Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, were splintered by religious, racial and economic issues, spurring the growth of independent voters, spawning the rebirth of the Republican Party in the South, and chasing the blue-collar worker into the Nixon and Reagan columns. The Democratic presidential successes of 1976 and 1992 were built more on Republican failures than on the coalition of rural, Southern, urban and labor forces that had been the party’s backbone since the turn of the century.
With the exception of a few emotional issues, and the traditional wooing of defeated opponents, the future political conventions would yield no surprises and even less substance. There would be no more bartering of Cabinet offices or the vice presidency to ensure a nomination. The uniquely American, remarkably successful era of decisive political conventions was over. It was never perfect, but it was always fascinating.
THE SERIES
SUNDAY: 1860
Favorite son Abraham Lincoln becomes the man to save the Union.
MONDAY: 1896/1920
Passionate speeches and smoke-filled rooms.
TUESDAY: 1932
Franklin Roosevelt displays a mastery of convention tactics.
WEDNESDAY: 1952
Television puts voters in the middle of the action.
THURSDAY: 1968
A tumultuous convention marks the end of political machine power.
FRIDAY: 1996
Powerbrokers give way to media spinmeisters.
PHOTO: Behind wire and a huge police contingent showed Chicago was ready for trouble at the International Amphitheatre in 1968, and it got it.
PHOTO: Above: Mayor Richard J. Daley gives the ”cut” sign to the convention Chairman Carl Albert as the debate on the Vietnam escalates out of his control.
PHOTO: Right: Daley’s soldiers stand at attention with the Illinois delegation.
PHOTO: (color): (Hubert Humphrey/Edmund Muskie campaign button.)
PHOTO: (Hubert Humphrey.)
PHOTO: (Martin Luther King Jr.) Tribune File Photos.
GRAPHIC: THE CONVENTION OF 1968.
(DEMOCRATS)
NOMINEE:
Hubert Humphrey
The vice president had the nomination more or less secured before he came to Chicago. The convention was remarkable not for the ascension of Humphrey, but as the last ”old style” presidential convention.
CONVENTION DATE: August 26-29
LOCATION: Stockyards International Amphitheatre, 4300 S. Halsted St.
OTHER CANDIDATES: Edward Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy
NUMBER OF BALLOTS: 1
VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Edmund Muskie
CHICAGO IN 1968
Political frustration has taken root in Chicago. While riots have broken out on the West Side, ”hippies” are staging regular protests on the north side.
POPULATION (1970): 3,322,855
MAYOR: Richard J. Daley (D)
A YEAR OF VIOLENCE, TRAGEDY
For months before the Democratic convention, assassinations, race riots and Vietnam war protests already were making 1968 one of the ugliest years in U.S. history.
JANUARY 31 50,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces strike in South Vietnam on what is supposed to be the first day of the Tet, or lunar new year, truce. The attack has a huge psychological impact on the U.S public, which had believed an end to the war was near.
MARCH 31 Amid pressure over his Vietnam war policy and setbacks in early primaries results, President Johnson announces he won’t run for re-election.
APRIL 4 Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (above) is assassinated in Memphis by a white sniper. In the following week, reaction to King’s death sparks race riots in 125 cities, with Chicago’s West Side one of the hardest hit areas.
APRIL 23 A student protest at Columbia University grows into a bloody clash with police that lasts for two weeks. Similar conflicts on other American campuses are sparked by such issues as black-student housing, CIA recruiting and Vietnam.
JUNE 5 Sen. Robert F. Kennedy is killed in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian angered by Kennedy’s stand on the Arab-Israeli war. Kennedy had just won the California and South Dakota primaries in his bid for the Democratic nomination.
Sources: ”Inside the Wigwam: Chicago Presidential Conventions 1860-1996” by R. Craig Sautter and Edward M. Burke, Congressional Quarterly, City of Chicago, World Book Encyclopedia, World Almanac.
MAP: (Chicago; Downtown, International Amphitheatre.)
