July 16, 1988 By Andrew Cassel, Inquirer Staff Writer Dateline: CHICAGO

These days, the mobs in Grant Park come to guzzle beer at one of the endless city-sponsored summer festivals. The cops keep a low profile.
These days, the lobby of the Hilton hotel is more high-toned than ever. The scents of cologne and leather dominate where stink bombs and tear gas once wafted.
These days, the mayor worries about stopping the White Sox from leaving, and keeping his job. Ozone, not revolution, is in the air.
These days, Chicago is just a city, not a metaphor for America split and angry. The whole world is watching somebody else.
But say “Chicago” next week in Atlanta, and everyone will know what you mean – especially the Democratic Party chieftains trying to put to rest, at last, the demons that were let loose here 20 summers ago.
“It haunts them,” says Larry Berg, a California political scientist who served as an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention here in 1968.
“It was a total disaster,” adds Paul Green, a teacher of politics in a Chicago suburb. “That was an election the Democrats should have won, and they lost it because of the convention.”
Then, the streets and parks along the Windy City’s lakefront were battlegrounds, and outrage flowed with the blood from cracked heads. The radicals of the New Left who came to protest the Vietnam War set the city’s police off on a rampage. Demonstrators, bystanders and reporters were indiscriminately clubbed and beaten, often in view of television cameras.
The scenes became part of Sixties mythology: middle-class kids facing lines of armed National Guard troops behind barbed wire; beefy, blue-shirted Chicago cops chasing hippies through Lincoln Park; demonstration leaders shouting through megaphones amid clouds of tear gas.
The turmoil reached inside the convention itself, held in a South Side amphitheater eight miles from the main demonstration sites. There was Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley shouting what he later denied were obscenities at Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff; CBS newsman Dan Rather on the convention floor, telling anchor Walter Cronkite he had just been punched in the stomach; disillusioned supporters of peace candidate Eugene McCarthy shouted down by a gallery packed with city workers brandishing “We Love Mayor Daley” signs.
“Daley never recovered from that convention,” says Green. “Before, he was viewed as a progressive, modern mayor. Afterward he was a repressor, a thug.”
The mayor dismissed the demonstrators with the contemptuous question, ”What trees do they plant?” And polls taken afterward showed that most Americans approved of his hard-knuckled handling of the protests. But liberals in the party were appalled. “These were our children, and the police were beating them,” New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote.
Don Rose, then the press spokesman for one of the leading protest groups, says there is still “a genuine question as to the degree to which the police were either told they could do what they wanted, which was my view, or . . . were literally ordered to riot.”
Rose was coaching protest leader Rennie Davis at a news conference on Tuesday, Aug. 27, the morning after police had run demonstrators out of Lincoln Park. According to Rose, Davis was exhausted and wondering what to say to the barrage of reporters and cameramen. “Tell them they’ll never get away with it because the whole world’s watching,” Rose suggested. The line became a chant.
The police, who vastly outnumbered the protesters, didn’t seem to care who was watching. On Wednesday night in front of the Hilton, where all three television networks had mounted their only remote cameras, nearly 20 minutes of head-knocking was captured on videotape and later broadcast coast to coast.
James Rochford, who commanded the police on the streets that night, today admits the television coverage looked bad. “That 20 minutes that was shown over and over on television, in the minds of some people it caused problems with the Police Department. . . . On the other hand, the majority of people in the United States supported Daley and the police,” he says.
The confrontation had been months in the making. Opponents of the Vietnam War wanted a forum to dramatically confront President Lyndon B. Johnson over the escalating conflict. Johnson, even after his surprise decision not to run again, was just as determined not to bend.
The protesters’ goals were stratospheric. “We had to destroy the train,” Rose says. “We sought the end of the Democratic Party as a Cold War vehicle, or if it could not be reformed, the end of the Democratic Party, period.”
It was a year of revolt, not just in the United States but practically worldwide. Students in Paris threw barricades up in the streets. Czechs confronted Soviet tanks sent to crush their fledgling liberal government during “Prague spring.”
Violence was in the air that year, from the bloody Tet offensive in Vietnam itself to Memphis, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, to Chicago, where blacks on the west side reacted to the news with the bloodiest rioting in the city’s recent history. Daley responded by publicly telling police to “shoot to kill” looters.
Some local peace activists interpreted it as a message from Daley, perhaps the most powerful mayor Chicago had ever had, about how future demonstrations would be handled.
The dissenters were split all over the political map. There were supporters of peace candidate McCarthy – some of them ex-long hairs who had gone “clean for Gene”; longtime pacifists such as David Dellinger; New Left radicals who preached the overhaul of electoral politics entirely, such as Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden; and hippie-radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who made up a new political organization – Yippie, for the Youth International Party – just for the convention.
Through the summer, all the groups squabbled with each other and among themselves over what to do in Chicago, if anything. Abe Peck, then editor of a Chicago underground newspaper, recalls endless arguments with Hoffman and Rubin over the ethics of inviting thousands of flower children to what Peck suspected might become a bloodbath.
“Don’t come to Chicago if you expect a five-day Festival of Life, music and love,” he wrote in a wall-poster-size edition of the Seed. “The word is out. . . . The Man is into confrontation . . . cars and buildings will burn. Chicago may host a Festival of Blood.”
Given the massive police and FBI intelligence operation that infiltrated and monitored the leading protest groups for most of that year, the divisions and confusion should have been apparent to Chicago officials. But the city nonetheless took the radicals’ self-inflated rhetoric seriously, leaking to the local papers Yippie plans to spike Chicago’s water supply with LSD, to seduce delegates’ wives, to kidnap or assassinate Democratic Party leaders.
By convention week, most of the liberals and peaceniks who might have been inclined to come to Chicago had been frightened away by predictions of violence. Estimates still vary, but certainly no more than 10,000 people participated in the main rallies, and a sizable number of those were young people from Chicago or the suburbs.
“It was a lot of fun, it was. It was like the most fun, I think, that we ever had in a lot of ways,” says Mike James, then a national officer with Students for a Democratic Society and now the owner of the Heartland Cafe, a popular New Age-style restaurant in Chicago.
“We believed it was happening. We believed we were gonna change stuff. We believed we were right.”
So did the cops.
“Every reporter who ever conducted an interview (with me) from Aug. 29, 1968, has always hoped they would hear the answer that we saw the light, that we recognized the error of our ways,” says Frank Sullivan, then spokesman for the Chicago police. “Not at all. We thought we were right in not turning over the streets of a major city to a mob.”
The Democrats were caught in the middle, with candidate Hubert H. Humphrey torn between angering Daley if he denounced the violence, and alienating the party’s liberal wing if he didn’t. Illinois Sen. Paul Simon, then a Humphrey protege who was allied with Daley as a candidate for lieutenant governor, remembers Humphrey’s relationship with both sides deteriorating shortly afterward.
“I remember going to Lake Forest College and listening to a fellow say there wasn’t any difference between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. To have to fight to try and persuade people that there was a difference between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey seems kind of strange today,” Simon says.
But Simon, who ran his own unsuccessful campaign for the presidency this year, believes the specter of 1968 will finally be removed when the Democrats meet again next week in Atlanta.
Party leaders, he says, “don’t want a repetition of a deeply divided party. And I think we’re going to have the most unified convention we’ve had since 1964.”