A Chicago reporter's memories covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention
So much remembered. So much better forgotten.
My career as a journalist began 56 years ago at the City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary, but now defunct, cooperative city wire service and training ground for young reporters.
I was a street reporter for City News in late August 1968, when Chicago began to really sweat.
Soon “the whole world” would find out what Chicago had been sweating about.
Battalions of anti-Vietnam War protesters were marching on our city streets, and blood was flowing.
America’s faraway conflict in Vietnam had drawn thousands upon thousands of protesters to Chicago hoping to hammer an anti-war plank onto the floor of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Delegates were meeting Aug. 26-29 at the city’s International Amphitheatre in the Back of the Yards neighborhood to choose a presidential candidate.
Some of us watched in real time as the marching of hippies, yippies, Students for a Democratic Society, women’s libbers, Marxists and anti-Vietnam War vets morph into mayhem. Some demonstrators were bloodied by Chicago policemen’s batons. Others used the water from Buckingham Fountain as an eye balm oasis from the tear gas lobbed at them by the cops they called “pigs.”
You almost imagined you could smell a whiff of Napalm.
It was showtime for Chicago’s “Second City” media.
Covering a circus in the park
Words don’t come as easy when you are running as fast as you can with a pencil in your hand — or sprinting to find an elusive payphone to feed a ravenous news desk. No cell phones back then.
I remember heading to the amphitheater at 42nd and Halsted. I don’t remember how I got there — or having the coveted “Star End” ticket to slide into the small machine that would allow entry to the bowels of the Dem Convention.
But I remember what it was like inside. The noise. Mayor Richard J. Daley gabbing and yukking with powerful Cook County Board President George Dunne as well as then powerful Ald. Roman Pucinski, a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter who loved talking to me about his old newsie days.
But mostly, I was on the street sifting for news. I hung out at Lincoln Park, soaking up the wild circus atmosphere while watching a kaleidoscope of anti-war protesters screaming at the police shagging them out of the park at night to sleep.
It was easy to bump into counterculture beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who spent time in Lincoln Park “divining” peace by chanting the word “Om.” I can still picture crazy, crafty anti-war genius Abbie Hoffman decked out in a daily change of goofy head gear as he practiced his monologue to introduce his own presidential candidate, a pig named “Pigasus.”
He would hand out a “Vote Pig in ‘68” hand sign. I wish I had saved it.
It was all a carnival until it turned bloody.
Scribes in squadrols
Much of the mayhem was televised by a small crew not far from what was then called the Conrad Hilton Hotel across from Grant Park. That was where Vice President Hubert Humphrey, outgoing President Lyndon Johnson’s chosen successor, was staying — and where it was reported Humphrey could smell tear gas wafting outside his window.
It was hard to access the hotel’s phone bank because there was a telecommunications problem with the phone company, then called Illinois Bell, during the convention. Nonetheless, a friend of mine overheard Studs Terkel calling then Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko.
Like mushrooms after rain, the police were everywhere in Lincoln and Grant parks, gearing up for trouble.
Retired Chicago Tribune political journalist Dorothy Collin was out wandering without specific assignment near Lincoln Park, where there had been protests the night before the convention opened. A longtime sidekick of mine, Collin was a reporter for the old Chicago American back then.
“I was with my friend, UPI reporter Larry Hatfield, when all of a sudden I started talking to someone else and lost him,” she told me. “He had disappeared!
“So, I walked up to a nearby policeman and found out Larry had been arrested.”
“And when I complained, the police also arrested me.”
The two journos both wound up in a police squadrol, carted off to police headquarters, then at 11th and State streets, Collin said.
They sat in the squadrol.
“Suddenly, the door opened, and there was [assistant] City Corporation Counsel Richard J. Elrod ushering us out and apologizing profusely,” she added. “We were eventually told CBS-TV reporter Leslie Stahl had been instrumental in our release.
“I think she had seen Larry getting arrested and reported it to Elrod’s office.”
The following year, Elrod suffered spinal damage trying to detain a protester during the violent “Days of Rage” anti-war protests in late 1969. He would later become Cook County sheriff in the 1970’s.
So, is history about to repeat itself?
From Aug. 19-22, the city will host the 2024 Democratic National Convention at the United Center, where delegates will celebrate their new presidential pick, veep Kamala Harris, who has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
Police have issued a zero tolerance policy for any demonstrators who cross the line from protest to civil disobedience.
I think it’s going to be a mess. We will have to wait and see.
Sneedlings …
Saturday birthdays: actor Antonio Banderas, 64; Rosanna Arquette, 65 … Sunday birthdays: Hulk Hogan, 71; singer Joe Jackson, 70; actress Viola Davis, 59; actor Chris Hemsworth, 41.