All Eyes Were (Are) On Chicago

I don’t remember all that happened when I camped with other young antiwar protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

I do remember — as the nation is remembering now on the eve of next week’s Democratic National Convention — that young antiwar protesters assembled there to try to stop an unjust war, and ended up being attacked by rioting police officers on national television, while the Democratic Party tried unsuccessfully to rally around a last-minute change in who ran for president.

I do remember sleeping in Grant Park on the hard ground, maybe on a blanket someone provided. Everybody was sharing blankets, food, music, grass. I had been kicked out of Columbia University for participating in a building takeover to protest the Vietnam War. Chicago was now the next flash point.

I remember trying to be nice to the Chicago cops. I would object if people deliberately antagonized them as they made their way through the park. I never liked it when people called them pigs — although many were big and scary and, on orders from Mayor Daley, always brandishing those serious truncheons.

I remember that when some tear gas had been unleashed (I don’t remember smelling it), someone in the crowd said that it was rising high enough in the air so that the delegates in the hotel across the street could smell it. That was good; that was very good.

I remember a kid climbing a flagpole in Grant Park and removing the stars and stripes. I remember realizing I would never have done such a thing. Good, bad, ugly, the flag and messing with it — which many did then — was always distasteful to me.

I remember passionate debates in every knot of people gathered, beside every tree: Should we march to the convention site now? Should we confront the cops or be non-violent? I remember shouting, ​“The whole world is watching.”

What I remember most is running. The park was being cleared — the mayor was sick of cameras on the protesters and making his city look bad — and suddenly I was sprinting.

I remember I was tearing down some side streets away from the park as officers beat up any protesters they could catch.

I remember how the police sent cruisers down the street I was on. One cop was chasing me from behind. Suddenly another officer hopped out of the cruiser ahead to block my continuing running escape.

I remember the adrenalin pumping.

I remember a cop who had more or less cornered me and we were dancing around a parked car. The car was, like the cop, large and blue.

And the best thing I remember is that suddenly, as I broke away and began a mad dash for my life down the middle of the street, someone motioned from across the way. Gesturing for me to come down the garden steps. It was a basement entrance to a church building. A yellow light beckoned inside. So I chanced it, I ran towards the steps, and in.

I remember whoever opened the door asking me: Is there anyone else out there who needs to come in?

I remember being breathless and shaking my head, I didn’t know.

The saving angel person then closed the door, and I was safe. I remember thinking to myself then: This was no game. This was a narrow escape.

Soon after, I was back in New York driving my yellow Checker to keep body and soul together. Writing what I thought was poetry but turned out to have a long prose line. Trying to find myself.

The voters elected Republican Richard Nixon to the presidency. The Vietnam War continued (and would go on for five more years). The world was the same, and yet everything had also changed.

For a few months around that Democratic convention in Chicago, we believed a true departure in policy might be possible if Eugene McCarthy, the true antiwar candidate, could build more momentum. Or if the Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who stepped in as the presidential candidate after LBJ’s surprise announcement to end his reelection campaign, might be persuaded to undercut Johnson’s pro-war stance and go a little more dove-ish.

That’s why I ended up there, in Grant Park — to show how much that mattered personally to us potential future soldiers and morally because we were dropping huge amounts of bombs on fairly innocent people and 16,000 Americans soldiers were already dead in the pointless process.

And I haven’t even mentioned the assassination of Martin Luther King in April and the killing of Bobby Kennedy, also a serious contender for the nomination, in June, just two months before the convention was to begin.

A cascading urgency was in the air.

If you smoked a little Acapulco Gold your sense of urgency might become a morally-infused conviction that now was the time even for us well-behaved middle class kids to take chances. There was an exhilarating mixture of one’s own life-and-death personal interest as well as a moral clarity about the war that was palpable and combustible.

If there’s an issue today that generates a comparable urgency of tone and feeling to 1968, it is the protesters of the Israel-Hamas War, who plan to show up in force this week in Chicago.

How their turn outside the convention turns out remains to be seen. Will the whole world again be watching?