1968 was one of the worst years in American history. In the middle of that year was the worst Democratic National Convention in history. In Chicago. When the Democrats convene in the same place this month, their convention will be the opposite of 1968 thanks to the lesson learned the hard way then: Never again.
1968 was a year of death. The death of soldiers. The death of leaders. The death of dreams.
1968 was the deadliest year of the Vietnam War for American soldiers and the families who lost them. 16,899 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam that year, more than double the number of Americans killed in all wars since then. I went to my first military funeral in 1968 and watched a general cry burying his son, my cousin Johnny, a recent West Point graduate who led troops in combat for four months before winning the Silver Star on the day he was killed in action. Everyone knew someone who lost a loved one in Vietnam. We were living in a national death gloom on a scale unknown since then, including the fear of death in the millions of young men who were at or, in my case, approaching the age of eligibility for the draft — with no end of the war in sight. Thousands of those young men with draft cards in their wallets, alongside some of their girlfriends and sisters and peace advocates of all ages, went to Chicago in 1968 to demand an end to the Vietnam War. For them, the stakes at the convention were nothing less than life and death.
By the time the anti-war protesters arrived at the convention, one of their candidates was dead.
By the time the anti-war protesters arrived at the convention, one of their candidates was dead. Heroes were hard to come by then, but the peace movement had a few. America’s most inspirational public speaker, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., broke with the president who signed the Civil Rights Act and eloquently opposed Lyndon Johnson’s war. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Sen. Robert Kennedy ran against the war in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries five years after the assassination of his older brother, President John F. Kennedy. On June 5, 1968, immediately after delivering his California primary victory speech, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. So ended the dream of another Kennedy presidency.
The peace candidate left standing at the convention was the first candidate with the audacity to challenge the incumbent president in primaries, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who shocked American politics with a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary against Johnson. Only 12 states had primaries in 1968, so the nomination had to be won at the convention. McCarthy won the most states and the most votes which earned him nothing at the convention.
Every night of the convention was increasingly chaotic and violent outside the hall and inside the hall. Protesters were being beaten in the streets by what an investigative commission would later call a “police riot.” Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley was disgracing himself inside the hall by using his army of convention floor operatives to try to silence, sometimes with fists, any dissent about delivering the nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a supporter of LBJ’s war, who didn’t run in a single primary. CBS’s Dan Rather was shoved to the floor as startled TV viewers watched. Walter Cronkite told the country, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, if I may be permitted to say so.”
The next night, CBS reporter Mike Wallace took a punch to the jaw on the convention floor. When Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, a polished speaker and former Kennedy cabinet member, departed from his prepared remarks at the podium to condemn the “Gestapo tactics” of the Chicago police, we could all read Mayor Daley’s lips on TV shouting, “F--- you, you Jew son of a b----!” The networks turned to lip readers to confirm for us that the mayor said exactly what we thought he said. That night the Chicago police used so much tear gas Humphrey could smell it through the air vents of his hotel suite. The networks cut from live riot coverage to the moment on the convention floor when Humphrey won the nomination at 11:47 p.m. in what became the least important news of the night. So ended the dream of voters being able to stop the war on Election Day with an anti-war candidate.
Richard Nixon watched the Democratic convention on TV knowing that no moment at the Republican convention would help him win the presidency more than every moment at the Democratic convention. Nixon, never a popular politician, won in November by less than one percent of the vote.
The Democrats changed their rules so that the nomination would be awarded by voters in presidential primaries and they never had a contested convention again. This year, as concerns mounted about President Joe Biden’s position at the top of the ticket, suggestions popped up everywhere for how to find a new nominee if Biden stepped down. Virtually every suggestion included an open convention where, after the candidates campaigned against each other politely on talk shows or something such, the nomination would be decided by a dramatic vote of the delegates with the promise that it would be exciting TV. But every time I came upon the word “exciting” I saw the word “chaos” instead. Betting on reporters who’ve never seen an open convention to describe it as exciting instead of chaos seemed naïve. What if it took as many ballots to get a nominee as it now takes to get a speaker of the House? How weakened would the eventual nominee be by all the angry speeches against them? There wouldn’t have to be violence inside or outside the hall for today’s reporters to quickly reach for the word chaos.
Professional Democrats, including convention delegates, can still feel the scar tissue of the 1968 Chicago convention. And they delivered a different outcome this year when, once again, the president dropped out of the race and tried to hand the nomination to his vice president: instant unity, no arguments, no punches thrown. Lesson learned.