CHICAGO—The news footage has become grainy with age but is no less vivid: Helmeted Chicago police in a haze of tear gas flailing with billy clubs at demonstrators, while inside a hall politicians hold ugly shouting matches over the bloody battles both on the streets outside and half a world away in Vietnam.
The Democratic National Convention in Denver this week comes exactly 40 years after that jolting episode that became a milestone in American politics.
While another unpopular war, this one in Iraq, will take center stage at the 2008 convention—in which Barack Obama is expected to be nominated in what amounts to a party group hug—it will look nothing like the one in 1968 marked by violence and deep party dissension.
Thousands of protesters are expected in Denver, including a group called Re-create 68 that leaves no doubt where its inspiration lies. One group even says it will use mental energy to shake the Denver Mint and shake the money out. But while there are plans for scores of demonstrations and anti-war rallies, and members of an anti-abortion group will try to be arrested, the incendiary rhetoric has been toned down and no repeat is expected of the violence that plagued the 1968 convention.
Much of what will happen—and won’t—starting Monday is a direct result of what unfolded four decades ago.
After the embarrassment of the 1968 convention, Democrats changed the way delegates were selected, taking much of the power to select them away from political bosses like the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and giving it to voters in state primaries and caucuses.
“The last primary season is a direct result of 1968,” said former Sen. George McGovern, who finished a distant third at the convention and helped lead the effort to establish a new process of selecting delegates.
That system enabled Obama to build enough momentum to become the nominee just four years removed from being an obscure Illinois state senator.
“Had there been party leaders who had a major role in choosing the nominee this year it is probably much more likely it would have been a Hillary Clinton rather than a young Barack Obama,” said presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
The year 1968 was unique in American history. There was widespread anger over the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson had announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy were murdered.
Those events came together as thousands of protesters poured into Chicago, many shouting “The whole world is watching.” Hundreds of civilians and police were injured in televised clashes and hundreds of demonstrators were arrested.
Tensions also erupted inside the convention hall, most famously when the enraged Daley screamed at U.S. Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut as Ribicoff criticized the “Gestapo tactics” of the police outside.
When it was over, the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, lost to Republican Richard Nixon—a defeat attributed in large part to what Americans had seen on television.
“I think people figured if these guys can’t run a convention without battling each other in the street and on the floor of the convention hall, how the hell can they run the country?” McGovern said.
That many protesters were young was not lost on anyone, the country’s leaders included.
“As representatives and senators saw the way students were taking to the streets, (they thought) we’d be better off if we channeled this into regular participation and not street politics,” said Ken Janda, a professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University.
One result was a change that could help Obama, who’s especially popular among younger voters: A constitutional amendment lowering the voting age from 21 to 18.
The post-convention changes also came at a cost to Daley.
The mayor was described by author Haynes Johnson, who covered the 1968 convention for the Washington Star, as “second only to LBJ in political influence.”
Like other state party leaders, much of Daley’s power came from his ability to deliver delegates. But just four years later, Daley’s hand-picked delegates weren’t allowed to even be seated at the convention.
Immediately after the convention, some people praised police for their battles with the anti-war activists.
“I got home and the neighbors were clapping,” said Jim Maurer, a young patrolman at the time who retired in 2005 as chief of patrol.
But others were horrified by what a presidential commission report labeled a “police riot” in a city where stories of corruption and brutality dated to before the violent days of Al Capone.
Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who has studied the police department extensively, said the convention images damaged the department in the public’s eye the way the videotaped 1991 Rodney King beating damaged the Los Angeles Police Department.
“It became one of those images that has lasted and stuck with us,” he said.
Officers who were at the convention say the department is better than it was in 1968, starting with extensive training in crowd control. They point to the 1996 Democratic National Convention, when the city under Mayor Richard M. Daley hosted the peaceful convention his father had hoped for.
However, some former cops remain angry over 1968 and bristle at any suggestion they lost control and rioted.
Retired officer Harold Brown recalled that demonstrators threw bricks and bags of excrement, and even thought to bring Styrofoam balls with nails stuck in them to flatten police car tires.
“They came here to agitate and they did a fantastic job,” he said.
Five of seven defendants in the notorious “Chicago Seven” trial were convicted of crossing state lines with intent to start a riot, although an appeals court later wiped out the convictions.
Today, conventions are as carefully scripted as infomercials and no longer include rigorous and loud debates.
“The cautionary note of that convention to the party was to avoid at all costs the kind of open warfare on a platform issue and a large dispute that could take place in prime time,” said Kearns Goodwin.
