    I was still too young to vote. But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer.
The convening of the Democratic National Convention last night in Chicago takes me back more than five decades, to that other Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was August 1968, and I was 18 years old that summer before my sophomore year in college. I was just coming of age politically.
By that August, 1968 had already been a very rough year for the nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., the country’s civil rights and moral trailblazer, had been assassinated on April 4, shocking the conscience of the country. Two months later, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, just a day after he had seized the momentum in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.1 The country–and the Democratic Party–were splintered by nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality. More than 100 cities had erupted into riots and arson after the King assassination.
I was a high school freshman when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, an unimaginable event. Perhaps I was too young then–13–to feel the full effect of that national trauma. But the events of the spring and summer of 1968 had landed more heavily against my idealistic self.
I was still too young to vote.2Â But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer.
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Besides wanting to reverse the malaise I felt from the horrors of the Spring’s assassinations, I had another reason to become involved in Chicago. With the loss of Kennedy, the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination were both from my state, Minnesota: Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy.
Humphrey was the sitting Vice President of the United States. Just as Kamala Harris is now doing upon the recent decision of President Joe Biden not to seek a second term, the “Happy Warrior” (as he was often called) was running in place of his president, Lyndon Johnson, who had also decided not to seek a second term because of the growing political opposition to his expansion of the war in Vietnam. Before becoming vice president, Humphrey had been the mayor of Minneapolis and a two-term U.S. Senator from Minnesota.
McCarthy, meanwhile, was then a sitting U.S. senator from Minnesota. Like Humphrey, he had earned a degree from the University of Minnesota and had become a college professor teaching the social sciences.3 He had joined the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), the state’s Democratic Party affiliate, which Humphrey had helped to establish in 1944. He had entered the race as an opponent of the war in Vietnam, and his close second place finish to President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary helped to convince Johnson to drop out of the race.
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Rick and I, close teenage friends from our high school years just outside of Minneapolis, were sons of the DFL. Our mothers were actively involved in the state organization, and his mother had good connections with the Minnesota Delegation to the 1968 Democratic Convention. One weekend day that summer, probably while sitting on one of the beaches at Lake Calhoun4 in the city, watching girls and throwing a frisbee, we decided that we should go to Chicago to help out.
We were not going to join the thousands of young people who would descend on the city to protest at the Convention. The Yippies, college students, McCarthy supporters, Students for a Democratic Society, members of the Black Panthers the Poor People’s Campaign, and others opposed to the war and racism. No, we were going to work for the contenders for the nomination, Rick for Humphrey and me for McCarthy. We were clean-cut Midwestern boys, neither bearded nor tie-died. We were going to Chicago to color between the lines.
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We arrived at Chicago by plane just after the Convention had begun. We bunked at night in an empty dorm room in the now defunct George Williams College in Downers Grove, a western suburb of Chicago from which we rode the commuter train into the city every day. My memory is that the room was free, made available on an agreement the DNC must have had made with the college to house young supporters. It pretty much had to be free, because Rick and I were living at the fast-diminishing end of our small budgets in paying for our airfare, for food in the city, and for the commuter train.
Indeed, we spent most of our time in the city. Rick ran errands for the Humphrey campaign, delivering documents and other materials from one of the various working groups to others, all located on or near Michigan Avenue, while I did the same for the McCarthy campaign. Both campaigns had their headquarters in the famous Conrad Hilton Hotel on South Michigan Avenue. Minnesota’s state DFL delegation was roomed at the Blackstone Hotel just a block north of the Hilton on Michigan. Both hotels were located across the street from Grant Park, from which thousands of young demonstrators faced off against a phalanx of Chicago police officers on the hotels’ side of the street, armed head to foot in black military-like gear, including riot helmets.
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It was an awesome and fearful tableau. The police stood shoulder to shoulder for a number of blocks up and down Michigan Avenue, quiet but with their batons at the ready, while the protesters shouted antiwar chants, vilified then Chicago Mayor Richard Daley–who had ordered an aggressive police response to protest before the Convention began–and lobbed epithets (and occasional items) at the police from across the Avenue. It was a human bomb awaiting only a match to light it.
Rick and I had been generally unaware of the violence that had occurred in other places between the police and protestors, especially the violent police assault on protestors that occurred on August 25th at Lincoln Park, four miles north of Grant Park on the city’s long shoreline at Lake Michigan. But the standoff in front of the Convention Hotels had remained mostly calm, if increasingly tense, while we passed by and through both sides on our errands.
While walking alone near Grant Park on a mission back to the Hilton Hotel on Tuesday, I was given a flyer by a lone protestor passing them out on a quiet sidewalk. It said that the head of Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden, had been dragged into an alley and beaten up by a team of Chicago Police officers. Knowing that the rhetoric among the protestors had reached a high boil by then, I did not know whether to believe this report. But neither could I rule it out. Thinking about it, I continued on my way to the hotel and through the lines of protestors and police in Grant Park to get my next assignment.5
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That’s when I walked into my one direct experience with the increasingly explosive tension in Chicago. I walked up the front steps to the hotel’s impressive front entrance, as always, but this time I was stopped at the door by plainclothes Chicago police detectives who had been newly appointed to stand there. One of them said simply but sharply, “You can’t go in.” Very surprised and somewhat agitated, I replied, “I am working for the McCarthy Campaign and need to get to its headquarters.” He repeated his comment, and when I started to continue the discussion–such as it was–he interrupted by saying, “Go around to the side entrance.”
Now I was starting to boil. There I stood, in my nice pants, sweater, tie, and sports jacket, short hair in place, trying only to play a tiny part in the country’s democratic project. He had not beat or maced me, but I felt the abuse of police power in that moment, and I was angry.
The feeling only grew as I walked around the corner to the side entrance. No law enforcement was posted at that door, and I walked in, only to see immediately a very large police officer standing 10 feet away in his full riot gear, including helmet, scanning the lobby, awaiting trouble. In that instant my anger spotted its outlet, and on mere impulse I walked hard up to the cop and shoved the Hayden poster in his face, having to reach up to get it there. “Is this true,” I accused. He glanced at the handout–not at me–and quietly replied, “I don’t know anything about that.”
The brief interaction immediately doused my hot head. Not because I was happy at his reply. Not because I thought, “Well, maybe the flyer is just propaganda.” But because I was relieved. To my surprise I had assertively taken sides in a very turbulent environment. I had taken a swing, and he did not swing back, saving us both from a potential escalation and no good outcomes.
I simply turned from him, exhaled, and continued on my way.
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And Rick and I continued our work for our candidates. Meanwhile we took as much assistance from the Minnesota Delegation as we could get. Rick used his mother’s connections with the DFL delegation to try to wheedle impossible-to-get tickets to the Convention floor for that night’s speeches. He succeeded, up to a point: we were only able to get one ticket. So rather than have one of us go and the other drift around that night, neither of us went to that historic Convention. We were loyal to the end to each other, if not to the same candidates.
A night earlier, we had worked so late that we absent-mindedly missed the last commuter train back to our dorm room in Downers Grove. Having no money for a cab or a hotel room, we simply walked the streets of Chicago for hours, racking up miles in our shoes. The streets were empty and quiet, a sharp contrast to what was unfolding during the day miles away at the Convention and its hotels. But the lights were as dim as the Democratic Party’s presidential ambitions were becoming.
We walked until about 4 a.m., when–exhausted–we came upon the city’s bus terminal and decided to try to sleep in its hard seats among a scattering of travelers and Chicago’s much more seriously homeless. We reasoned that the overnight staff at the terminal did not kick sleepers out in the middle of the night. But that plan led only to restlessness and more fatigue, so at about 6 a.m. we left for another long walk, this time back to the Blackstone Hotel where we took the elevator to the floor on which the Minnesota Delegation was staying and lay down on the short couches in the elevator lobby.
There we slept for two hours, with none of the DFLers disturbing us as they quietly went to breakfast that morning.
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By no small measure of luck, our round-trip airline tickets had us returning to Minneapolis on Wednesday afternoon, August 28. What we could not know then was that that night the political bomb on Michigan Avenue would explode into a massive police assault on the protestors at whom they had long been staring. Â
The subsequent investigation commissioned by the federal government into that night’s events described it as a “police riot” in which the Chicago police had used “unrestrained and indiscriminate” violence against “persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat.”6
Though provoked throughout the day by objects occasionally thrown at them by protesters, that night, over 17 minutes, the police protecting the Hilton Hotel suddenly physically assaulted the crowd of several thousand protestors with billy clubs and tear gas. The police pushed some of the protestors through the hotel’s plate glass windows, then followed them inside and continued to beat them while they lay on broken glass. The tear gas even reached Vice President Humphrey in his hotel suite, shortly before he won the Democratic Party nomination for president later that same evening at the Convention. The assault also victimized bystanders, passersby and journalists in the area, the later of whom had also been targeted by the police in the streets of Chicago earlier in the week.
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Rick and I arrived at our homes in the Twin Cities in time to watch these horrifying events live on television as they played out on the streets, sidewalks and park we had been regularly using only hours before.
I recall initially feeling more numbed than scandalized or even angered by the bloody scenes. My internal sensemaking was foggy.  I didn’t know whether to feel that I was simply a bystander to what I realized was a history-defining series of events that week, or that I was somehow involved in them. But I did hurt at seeing so many young people, many college students like myself, being badly beaten by police simply for trying to express their dissent against the nation’s violence overseas.
Though a political novice, I knew that nonviolent protest and civil disobedience were important to the pursuit of justice and equality.
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Epilogue: With the disaster of the Democratic National Convention that year, and the party still split by sharp divisions over the war in Vietnam, the Republican Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey to win the presidency that November. Humphrey remained stained by his association with President Johnson’s hawkish approach to the war, while Nixon spread the idea in meetings with liberal journalists during the ’68 campaign that he had a “secret plan” to end the war (he didn’t), hoping at least to persuade them not to describe him as a hawk on the matter.
Meanwhile, there is historical evidence that in order to keep Johnson and Humphrey from claiming advances toward the war’s end just before the election, Nixon’s people were simultaneously working to undermine the ongoing peace talks in Paris by sending signals to the South Vietnamese government that Nixon would get them a better deal if they held back until after he was elected president. In the end, the Paris talks ended the war more than four years later, in early 1973, just as Nixon was beginning his second, ill-fated term in the White House.
Likely more impactful for that election, however, was Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy.” The Republican Party that year made a determined effort to woo working class white votes in the South from the Democrats by investing in white southerners’ racial fears following the major civil rights legislation signed into law by President Johnson. Fanning racial fears has been a GOP campaign policy ever since.
All of these campaign tactics of the 1968 Nixon campaign have sharp reflections in the 2024 Trump campaign, and so bring the memories of that traumatic year back into focus for so many of us, now elderly, Americans. Whether we were in Chicago then or not.
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- On June 4 Kennedy, who had announced his campaign only that March, won the Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota.[↩]
- The 26th Amendment to the Constitution changed the legal voting age from 21 to 18 when it was ratified in 1971.[↩]
- As I also later did.[↩]
- In 2018, upon objections to having the lake named after John C. Calhoun, the southern politician who had owned slaves and defended slavery, the lake was renamed Bde Maka Ska, the original name given to it by the Dakota Sioux Native American tribe.[↩]
- Hayden was a long-time political activist on the American left, and later served in the California legislature. After the Convention he and other leaders on the left were prosecuted for their roles in the violence in Chicago in what became known as the Trial of the Chicago Eight (eventually the Chicago Seven after codefendant Bobby Seale’s case was declared a mistrial). He and four others were convicted in federal court of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, but Hayden’s and the others’ convictions were overturned on appeal. Decades later I briefly ran into Hayden at an academic conference, as I was entering the hotel ballroom where he was giving a talk one afternoon. I was a couple of minutes late for his talk, but I discovered while entering the room that the guy behind me, for whom I had turned to hold open the door, was the speaker himself. As he was also late, I did not ask him whether the 1968 Chicago flyer had been true.[↩]
- See Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago During the Week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968. / A report submitted by Daniel Walker, director of the Chicago Study Team, to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Special introduction by Max Frankel.[↩]
