ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 26, 1996 TAG: 9608260133
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
NOTE: Below
THE YOUNG KNEW of the protests to come before the last time the Democratic National Convention visited the Windy City. But, as a longtime political reporter recalls, few knew of the violence to come.
Mayor Richard Daley has invited the press to festivities in Chicago this week. His dad contributed to excitement at the 1968 Democratic Convention. It began for me in an airport limousine, riding into Chicago, as I talked to a Harvard sophomore, 18, a political science buff.
``You're going to watch the convention, then?'' I asked.
``No,'' he said, ``I'm going to take part in the demonstration outside.''
``You think there'll be one?''
``I know there will. People will be coming from everywhere.''
He had never seen a demonstration. He spoke as if it were a part of growing up, like joining the Boy Scouts.
About 2 a.m. Thursday, after the convention had adjourned, the park across Michigan Avenue from the Hotel Conrad Hilton was dense with a shouting throng. Facing that upheaval was an impassive line of police in helmets of baby-rattle blue. Across the street they lined the front of the cliff-like Hilton.
Youths huddled in blankets around fires. Others curled, gorilla-like, in trees. The air was aromatic with marijuana. Searchlights fell on a wide patch where they sat, sang, and yelled ``Pig!'' at police.
Their leader called with a bullhorn to the hotel windows: ``Blink your lights if you're for us!''
A dozen lights flashed across the massive surface. He urged the occupants to come down and speak.
Each delegate declared his name, state and sympathy to cheers. But one said he had been with Eugene McCarthy, their hero, in New Hampshire, where 3,000 youths had showed what could be done with reasonable election laws.
``Go back to your homes and change your laws,'' he pleaded.
A girl, cursing, shrieked: ``This is it! NOW!'' Others took it up and hooted him down. National Guardsmen arrived to relieve the police.
``You're going to be gassed, baby,'' a stringy-haired, middle-aged woman advised me. The youths tied handkerchiefs over their mouths. ``Sit!'' their leaders said. They began barking ``Sieg! Sieg! Sieg!'' To soldiers they sang: ``Join us! Join us!''
The police, once moving, ran amok and clubbed anything in their path as heartily as children knocking over dandelion puff balls.
I joined those running headlong to put distance between us and them. The police riot spread as they moved ``to sweep the streets.''
A well-dressed crowd, issuing from a movie, faced a wall of police advancing at a trot, nightsticks held out belt-high. The theatergoers broke and ran.
A reporter for Ridder Publications, wearing a vinyl jacket, had joined the demonstrators for three days. An aggressive fraction of the police was at fault, he said, but among the demonstrators were a motley lot of provocateurs, directed by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, who were skilled in rock-throwing, name-calling and hoisting the Vietcong flag.
The police were focusing on newsmen taking names of victims. Just then one pointed to the Ridder reporter and shouted to two others, ``There's the one!''
He ran and got away because he was young, nimble and hurdled two automobiles.
The Hilton's lobby was a makeshift hospital as McCarthy and his physician brother moved among the fallen. Years later, McCarthy told me that he stayed until he was sure the youths were safe.
In the convention hall at the stockyards, where Hubert Humphrey struggled to save his crumbling party, the action had been as tense as the theater on the streets.
Afterward, as delegates stumbled from early morning dark into the uncut glare of TV klieg lights, youths packing the Hilton's twin staircases chanted: ``You killed the party! You killed the party!''
At a news conference, saying he was ``captain of the team,'' Humphrey pledged to end the Vietnam War; but Coach Lyndon Johnson reined him in until near the end, too late, and Republicans used riot scenes to narrowly defeat him.
As the convention hall emptied, I spied a knot of two dozen people high in the farthest reach of the balconies. I climbed to them. They were young men and women, working on regulations to run the party in accordance with one man, one vote, admitting minorities and reducing the powers of the bosses.
Employing those rules four years later, the Democrats nominated George McGovern. He lost in a landslide that carried away a host of Democrats, including Sen. William Spong of Virginia.
I wonder what happened to that Harvard sophomore.
Guy Friddell, a columnist for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, has covered every national political convention since 1952.
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP File. Many delegates to the 1968 Democratic Nationalby CNBConvention ran against the grain of the party hierarchy, including
Eddie Anderson of Los Angeles, shown here burning his delegate
credentials. KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENT