Remembering the Really Hot Summer in Chicago, 1968

I wrote the article below for the August 28, 1968, edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer. Brady Black, executive editor, assigned me as one of a team of five reporters to cover the convention. The protests, police brutality, stink bombs, threats, and mobs represented a new low for America. 

America Converges on Delegates At Chicago

By JAMES OTT

CHICAGO-Democrats from the farm, small town and big city got a first hand look at the United States Tuesday, in all of its bizarre expression, and suddenly the mood of the national convention changed from excitement to sober duty.

Perhaps the convention excitement never could reach proportions of earlier conventions, with the deadening effect of the predictions of street warfare. But delegates, many on vacation, trouped into this nation’s third largest metropolitan area with a festive air. They drank and saw Chicago’s nightlife for two days, and then, convention ’68 changed radically.

The holiday atmosphere broke late Sunday night and early Monday morning when groups of 500 to 1,000 Hippies, chased by police, charged down Michigan Avenue. The howling mob, with hair flying in the breeze and a few waving Viet Cong and North Vietnamese flags, scattered over the full breadth of the boulevard.

Seven hours of speeches and credentials fights, lasting until 2:43 a.m. Tuesday, took a heavy toll among delegates. Already their “neck muscles” were beginning to weaken, according to presidential contender Eugene McCarthy’s analogy of the nomination process and the bullfight. He said it would be “a trial by ordeal”, and he was right.

Other experiences led to the shocking realization of the U.S. today

Every day now, on rented buses, delegates leave their hotels on Michigan Avenue’s “million dollar mile,” riding through Southside’s Black ghetto. The buses rumble over the streets through the bleak stretch of onetime mudflats to the convention amphitheater.

There they see that Carl Sandburg’s city of big shoulders wears epaulets. The omnipresence of police, wearing riot helmets and holstered billy clubs, has a stupefying effect on the delegates and the press. Nowhere, except in the armed fores, do people see that many armed men, upwards of 50 policemen can be found congregating at many of the key locations around the amphitheater.

All the influences–the milling and demonstrating “hippies” the threat of black rebellion, the police and nearby presence of the National Guard and the Federal troops, the endless checks for credentials, the normal political push and pull, the lack of sleep–these influences are coming to bear on the delegates.

As one might expect they are getting skittish like so many thoroughbred horses who know that a fire is heading their way. Some observers said it had the effect of opening up the convention, the delegates rethinking their earlier commitments with a mood of possible change.

Here in Chicago the delegates are prisoners who are deluged with personal contacts and by the media who present the views of the major candidates. At no other time in the campaign have the delegates been forced into positions of a full hearing of all sides. The thinking is that it can have a radical effect.