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Yesterday evening I was watching the news, wanting to see what the President was going to say, although I had low expectations. When the mounted police and other lines of law enforcement began to push people away with horses, rubber bullets and tear gas, my mind went back to 1968. All of you over 60 will have some recollection of that time. They certainly were the darkest days for America I ever passed through. In 1967, America went through a “long, hot, summer,” in which “race riots” occurred in over 159 American cities. The worst of these was in Detroit where Governor George Romney ordered the Michigan Army National Guard into Detroit to help end the disturbance. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the United States Army’s’ 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. The result was 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed.
In 1968, the country was riven by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. I went to New Hampshire, shaved my beard, and went from house to house trying to get people to vote for Gene McCarthy to put an end to this horrible war, which was being shown on our televisions daily. The attempt to defeat LBJ coincided with North Vietnam launching the Tet Offensive, which cost them dearly, but made it clear that the war was not going to end any time soon. By the end of February, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man on television, declared that we were mired in a stalemate (it was still a time when some journalists were trusted).
In March, McCarthy got 42% of the votes in New Hampshire, which was shocking, even though he lost. A few days later Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race, and Johnson looked vulnerable. On March 31, Johnson announced he was not running for a second term. And then came the cataclysm. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Unrest followed throughout the country, marked by major riots in Washington, where 1,280 buildings were burned, Chicago, where 11 were killed and 200 buildings damaged, Baltimore (6 deaths and $12 million in property damage), and a hundred other cities. The sight of smoke billowing blocks from the White House was shocking. Over the next week, riots in more than 100 cities nationwide left 39 people dead, more than 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested.
Then in June, in the midst of winning the California primary, Robert F Kennedy, perhaps the person best equipped to lead America out of its dark night of the soul, is shot and killed, But what I remember most vividly is the Democratic Convention at the end of August, 1968. In the words of journalist Haynes Johnson, “The 1968 Chicago convention became a lacerating event, a distillation of a year of heartbreak, assassinations, riots and a breakdown in law and order that made it seem as if the country were coming apart. In its psychic impact, and its long-term political consequences, it eclipsed any other such convention in American history, destroying faith in politicians, in the political system, in the country and in its institutions. No one who was there, or who watched it on television, could escape the memory of what took place before their eyes.”
David Denby, wrote in 2018, “From a contemporary point of view, the only element that redeems the event from complete sorrow is the scathing and poetic book that Norman Mailer wrote about it, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, one of the essential works of American reporting.”
As the Washington Post reported, “… the scene in Chicago was particularly apocalyptic. As the convention prepared to launch, thousands of antiwar protesters flocked to the Windy City, where thousands of authorities — Chicago police, Army soldiers, National Guardsmen and Secret Service — were braced and waiting. The two sides clashed with mounting violence, culminating in the so-called Battle of Michigan Avenue on Aug. 28. As the protesters marched toward the convention site, the police set out to stop them, wielding tear gas, rifles and clubs. Onlookers and innocent bystanders — including reporters covering the scene and doctors attempting to offer medical help — were brutally beaten by the police, according to archival news accounts.”
According to Mary McGrory, “A young man was spread-eagled across the hood of a car while four policemen beat him with their billy-clubs. What made the scene most hair-raising was that the presence of the press — our credentials were plain to see — had not the slightest deterrent effect. The cops wanted us to see them beating an unarmed and defenseless man and felt no need to explain themselves. They were making a statement. In Chicago, in 1968, it was a crime to be young. The streets literally ran with blood. The police pushed a crowd of Democrats through the plate-glass windows of the Hilton Bar.
By night and by day in Grant Park, the police hammered the demonstrators, who had no weapons but their tongues. An emergency hospital was established in Eugene McCarthy’s suite. The candidate and the poet Robert Lowell visited the patients. Tear gas was everywhere. There was violence in the convention hall as well. Dozens of delegates were arrested, apparently for dissenting from the pro-war platform.”
Abraham Ribicoff, Senator from Connecticut, accused the Chicago police of engaging in a riot, and is seen here in an ugly argument with Chicago Mayor William Daley.
Last night brought back all the memories I had of 1968, the violence, the anger, the police brutality, the assassinations, the destruction of liberty, the oppression of peaceful protesters. Somehow, we survived those tumultuous days, when divisions about war and race and age seemed ready to tear us apart. I pray we will survive these days as well. 2020 is not 1968. Today there is no war in Asia and no war between the generations. However, the issues of racism have not gone away.
My next post will discuss what needs to be done by each of us and by the society as a whole to heal this land.