Opinion: Democrats' 2024 Chicago convention nothing like 1968

I’ve heard a lot of speculation lately about whether Democrats are tempting fate by holding their 2024 nominating convention in Chicago after the riots that marred the 1968 one.

Even the moderate The Hill political news website posted an opinion piece on the opening day of the convention headlined, “ The 1968 DNC protests gave us Nixon. We don’t need a 2024 repeat .”

At the risk of sounding like the aging Baby Boomer that I am, 2024 does not compare to 1968. Yes, there has been a lot of political turmoil this year, but nothing like the events 56 years ago.

I remember them well because my parents were delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, but that is only part of the story.

I was 15 at the start of 1968. I was keenly aware of politics because my father, James A. Redden Jr., was a Democratic state representative from Southern Oregon, where I grew up.

He was also a Kennedy-style liberal, having been born and raised in Massachusetts before graduating from law school and relocating the family to Medford to join a law firm, then getting active in the local Democratic Party and pursuing his political career. My mother, Joan, shared his politics, and worked on all his campaigns.

But more than that, the Vietnam War was raging and I was likely to reach draft age before the conflict ended.

The war made no sense to me, so naturally I opposed it, as did my parents, who also supported the budding Civil Rights and women’s movements. Protests fueled by those issues were already spreading across the county, sometimes splitting families and communities along liberal and conservative lines, much like today.

Although Israel’s reaction to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack has created divisions within the Democratic Party, they are well short of what happened in 1968, when the power brokers could not suppress a presidential primary fight. Liberal U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy came within 230 votes of defeating incumbent Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire on March 12.

U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy announced for president four days later, and my father, who was the Oregon House minority leader by then, soon joined his campaign.

Johnson withdrew from the race on March 31 and Vice President Hubert Humphrey jumped in, although he was too late to enter many primaries.

But then the unthinkable happened. Martin Luther King Jr., the leading Black civil rights activists in the country, was assassinated on April 4 while in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers.

Riots broke out in dozens of American cities that were even more violent that those after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020.

Student-fueled protests against the Vietnam War escalated in the following months, sweeping off college campuses and into the streets.

National Guard troops fired into a protest at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, killing four and wounding nine others. Nothing like that has happened this year.

McCarthy won the May 28 Oregon presidential primary with 44.7% of the vote, edging out Kennedy who received 38.8%, much to my parents’ disappointment. Both were elected convention delegates, however.

Then Kennedy rebounded in California, beating McCarthy by 46% to 44% on June 4 before he was assassinated mere minutes after declaring victory.

I still remember finding my parents sitting in silence in front of the TV in the living room late at night and into the morning. They had also worked on John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and followed all the media coverage of his assassination. I didn’t fully understand their grief at the time and still can’t.

So, when my parents and the other Democrat delegates gathered in Chicago on Aug. 26 for the start of the convention, no one knew for certain what was going to happen.

Other candidates had jumped in, including liberal U.S. Sen. George McGovern. That’s a stark contrast to now, where Vice President Kamala Harris was already nominated by an online vote after President Joe Biden was pushed out of the race at practically the last minute. That’s not going to change now, no matter what happens in the streets of Chicago this year.

But by the time the 1968 convention started, my parents had switched their support to Humphrey. Although McCarthy had won the Oregon primary, they were convinced he was too liberal to win the general election — something U.S. Sen. George McGovern confirmed four years later.

Naturally, my brother, Bill, and I watched the entire 1968 convention. We were shocked by scenes of Chicago police beating protesters at a gathering on the first night. When my parents called home, they said the delegates weren’t even aware of the clash at the time. That was many years before cell phones and the internet, of course.

Protests escalated throughout the convention and overshadowed Humphrey’s eventual nomination. The Republican nominee, former Vice President Richard Nixon, surged on a law-and-order platform after the chaos at the Democratic convention.

Humphrey closed the gap after finally breaking with Johnson and supporting an end to the U.S. Air Force bombing of Vietnam. But it was too little too late, and Nixon won the election by 301 to 191 Electoral College votes, with third-party candidate George Wallace getting 46.

Despite Biden being pushed out of the presidential race just a few weeks ago, Democrats are in a much stronger position now than they were in 1968. Almost all are united behind Harris, who had already been nominated.

As serious as the situation in Gaza is, it doesn’t compare to national ramifications of the war in Vietnam, which split the entire country. As shocking as it was, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt — Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy did not. The National Guard shot and killed peace protesters. That’s unlikely to happen in Chicago or anywhere else this year.

The winner of the 2024 presidential election cannot yet be predicted. But it is unlikely whatever happens in the streets of Chicago this year will decide the race — unlike what happened in 1968.

Jim Redden is a longtime Portland journalist and writes for the Portland Tribune.