As NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving puts it , "Chicago ‘68 has been repeatedly conjured as the epitome of disaster like the sinking of the Titanic, or the stock market crash of ‘29."
At the time , President Lyndon Johnson had announced he was not running for reelection, and Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was then left to battle it out for the nomination with anti-war Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
Huge crowds of demonstrators came to Chicago in 1968 for the DNC, protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, pushing for racial equality and an end to poverty.
But beyond the convention location, there have been a number of echoes of 1968 playing out in 2024. (And not just in the political world: Both years also saw new Planet of the Apes movies, Summer Olympics and U.S. moon missions, as NPR's Rachel Treisman notes .)
"I mean ok, Columbia has unrest and there's widespread anti-war activism, that might be coincidence. But there is a guy named Robert Kennedy running for president and the [Democratic National Convention] is in Chicago. Like is this a bit?"
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