It was a building of tension. By the time the party convened that summer, it was really
set up to be the perfect storm. Everybody expected the worst and they got what they expected.
A new deal for the American people
Extremism in the defense of liberty
There is no substitute for victory
The United States of America
1968, was just a horrible year.
The reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the
leader of the non-violent civil rights movement in the United States was assassinated in Memphis tonight.
Oh my god, Senator Kennedy has been shot!
Murder, murder, murder most foul. Was that on our minds? Of course it was deeply on
our minds. Deeper than our minds. It was the agony of our generation.
Death and destruction in Vietnam. Urban rioting and rebellion. Most people have an image of
the time that was about sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. Let me tell you, it was not a joke.
Good evening from Chicago, the Democratic Convention begins in this International Amphitheater.
We went into Chicago with a great deal of trepidation. There were going to be huge anti-war
protests and demonstrations and we thought there'd be great overreaction on the part
of the Chicago Police. We tried to change the location to Miami where the Republicans
would have already held their convention and it wouldn't take much new preparation.
Your average Chicago cop during that era was somebody who grew up working class. Their
fathers and grandfathers often were police officers. They didn’t have a lot of time
for what they would call nonsense.
We’d had big demonstrations outside the government before. They always seemed to go
nowhere, to no avail. The convention presented an opportunity to put on a lobbying effort
aimed at the delegates to see if there could be a peace plank passed on the convention floor.
The police were given pretty strict marching orders by Mayor Daley to keep the peace, and
they were going to do that however they needed to do it.
We were really roughed up by the police no matter what we did.
The city administration refused permits for any expression.
The counter-culture people could not have a concert.
The anti-war people could not march towards the visual sightline of the convention itself.
There’s quite a bit of symmetry between what was happening on the streets and what
was happening inside the amphitheater.
All these guards in civilian clothes have linked hands.
You had private security forces, Daley’s cops in plain clothes manhandling delegates,
pushing them around, deciding on who was going to be able to speak, who was going to be ushered
out when they said the wrong thing.
Take your hands off of me unless you plan to arrest me.
At one point, Dan Rather is trying to interview delegates.
He gets grabbed and roughed up by a security guard.
“We got, uh, bodily pushed out of the way. This is the kind of thing that’s been going
on outside the hall; this is the first time we’ve had it happen inside the hall.”
That really speaks to the mood in that hall.
“I think we got a bunch of thugs here”
When President Lyndon Johnson had announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection we had
a promise from Vice President Humphrey that he would make a speech prior to the Convention
against the Vietnam War and for a halt to the war. He did not do that. Also we had Humphrey's
commitment that we'd have an anti-war plank at the Convention itself. That didn't happen either.
Thousands of people were allowed to gather in a park and then the permit was removed
because some kid pulled down an American flag. And then the police waded in and beat everybody up.
Gas was everywhere. There were many head injuries and bleeding. It's hard to imagine.
Police officers found they were having bags of excrement, bags of urine thrown at them.
It was chaos, multiple directions, terrible communication on what streets there were to
clear, where they’re moving the protesters through. Nothing was very coherent.
The police looked bad and at times they deserved to be viewed poorly,
and other times they did whatever they thought they could.
Sitting in his hotel room last night, Hubert Humphrey said, “I don’t feel very good
with what’s going on down there.”
I came out of that Convention terribly depressed about the failure to adopt an anti-war plank,
about what had happened in the streets and I was very bothered by the fact that the Democrat
Party was undemocratic. People felt the anti-war movement represented the majority of Democrats
in the country but that was not reflected in the selection of the delegates to that convention.
They were establishment people. Big part of whom were what we now call super delegates.
Outside the convention hall, the protesters nominated a pig called Pigasus as the President of the United States.
Sir, why did you decide to become a candidate?
Pretty good move.
I was elected the Chair of the Party in 1969. I appointed a reform commission to be sure
that there’d be democracy in the selection of delegates. The main thing we wanted was
that they’d be elected. But then in 1984, another commission
decided to go back again to some super delegates.
Conventions like Chicago show the very thin line between citizens getting along, feeling
that they share common ideals, and seeing each other as aliens, as people that they
don’t recognize. The convention put a spotlight on those divisions that are always there just
underneath the surface. The lesson of 1968 is protesters need room to protest.
In a Democratic society, you can’t manage the people all the time.
You have to give them space to say their peace
or you don’t have peace.