Title: Echoes of 1968 at the DNC in Chicago

Katya Rogers: Hi, everyone. It's Katya Rogers, executive producer of On The Media. We're busy watching the DNC and working on the show for this weekend, so in lieu of a brand new OTM midweek podcast, we offer an episode of Today, Explained. The host, Noel King, spoke with OTM regular guest Rick Perlstein. As a historian of us politics, Perlstein is often called upon to draw comparisons between today's events and those of the past.

This year in particular, the echoes with 1968 are unavoidable. The DNC is once again in Chicago, and there are protests outside. This time it's about Gaza. Then it was about the Vietnam War. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Tune in this weekend for the big show, and we'll see you then.

Noel King: It's Today, Explained. I'm Noel King with historian and journalist Rick Perlstein, who has spent much of his adult life chronicling American conservatives and examining the role that the '60s played in bringing them to power.

Rick Perlstein: Growing up in the 1980s, Reaganland was boring for me, and the melodrama of the '60s was absolutely galvanizing. I couldn't believe how every day seemed to bring a new revolution. Certainly, I was fascinated by this idea of these kids sitting down in the streets and getting beaten within an inch of their lives by the cops and the whole pageant.

Noel: All right. Let's go back to the summer of '68. What was the backdrop to the convention in August of that year?

Rick: The backdrop nationally was that the Democratic Party was divided down the middle on the issue of the Vietnam war.

Speaker 4: The whole question is, I mean, what happens if you do win in North Vietnam? What happens if you do win in South Vietnam, what then? You're faced with the same problem. How are you going to find a popular government that's going to run the place?

Speaker 5: And have it turn into eventually a communist government? Is that your idea?

Speaker 4: Well, that doesn't terrify me quite as much as it seems to terrify some other people.

Rick: Of course, it had been escalated by a democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who believed he was continuing the wishes of the martyred president, John F. Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson: I have today ordered to Vietnam the air mobile division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately.

Rick: A lot of people who were democrats saw it as part of this great anti-communist crusade, and a lot of people saw it as imperialism, that basically, we were interfering in another country's civil war.

Speaker 7: My own personal position is that the war in Vietnam is unjust, unnecessary, and immoral, and I feel immoral participating in it.

Rick: The idea that we had to get out was very, very prevalent on the left wing of the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson decided he wasn't going to run for president.

Lyndon Johnson: I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.

Rick: By the time delegates arrived at the convention, Lyndon Johnson's loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was the nominee apparent, and he had been coerced almost into loyally supporting the war, even though he had grave reservations about it.

Hubert Humphrey: I think that for the Democratic Party and convention to try to draw up military strategy and tactics is just a little bit beyond what the American people would expect of a political party and beyond its capacity or ability to do. These are matters that must be left up to our commander in chief, to the officer.

Rick: The question of whether he would be nominated or Eugene McCarthy was nominated was live in the air, and it looked like Humphrey had it wired, but there was a proxy fight in the form of a platform proposal that the Democratic Party go on the record to end the Vietnam War.

Speaker 9: My feeling is that should he accept it, it would go a long way towards assuring both his nomination and his election. If he should decide to oppose the inclusion of a specific peace plank in the democratic platform, I think it would conceivably turn it into a real battle royal.

Rick: Of course, at the same time, protesters from all over the country flooded in.

Speaker 10: Members of the Youth International Party, yippies they called themselves, converged on Chicago. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social ills. Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation, to draw attention from the convention to the streets.

Rick: There's a separate Chicago context. Several months earlier that spring, there had been terrible riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Speaker 11: Good evening. Doctor Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

Rick: There was dread and anticipation not only within the convention hall, so it seemed for the democratic party, and then outside the convention hall, what would happen when the city hosted, very reluctantly, thousands of protesters who were much more radical than the kind of protesters we see now. They would talk about, we want to overthrow society, we want to overthrow capitalism.

Protester: We are a people. We are all together. We are all under attack. America has decided to devour its youth. We will resist. We will not participate in America's children for breakfast program. Fuck 'em.

Rick: Here, everyone arrives, the city, which is run by this almost oligarch, Mayor Richard J. Daley, who intended no disorder in his city, that he was putting on display for the entire world.

Mayor Richard J. Daley: They have no right to come in the city and tell us what they're going to do. We don't permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why would anybody would come out of the city to sleep in the park? We don't permit our own people to march at night, so why would permit a lot of people doing snake dances at night?

Noel: Disorder came anyway. Tell me two things. What did Daley do to try to prevent disorder, and how did it go so very wrong?

Rick: One of the things he did to try to prevent disorder was to string along these two groups of protesters who wanted to come to the city by not granting them official permission to, A, sleep in the park, which was Lincoln Park. That was the intention of a group who identified themselves as hippies. They were led by a guy named Abbie Hoffman, the guy who had, a year before, promised to levitate the Pentagon during a protest.

Abbie Hoffman: When it gets about 300 feet in the air, it's going to start to vibrate, slowly at first, and then a little quicker, and all the evil spirits are going to pour out.

Rick: These were the people who wanted to-- they would talk about fornicating in the park. They wanted to have a rock festival. The idea was they represented this new youth identity that was revolutionary and was going to completely overthrow bourgeois propriety. Another group of people wanted to parade to the convention hall, and they were much more conventionally political, but a lot of them were radical revolutionaries and the kind of people who would hoist flags of the enemy in Vietnam, the Viet Cong.

Protester: We say that if the government of the United States does not stop the war, we intend to stop the government of the United States.

Rick: Daley put his foot down and said, these long-haired miscreants are going to get the time of day in our city, which only ratcheted up the tensions and made them even more determined. "We'll sleep in the park even if you don't want us to. We'll march the convention hall even if you don't want us to. We'll put our bodies on the line in both cases."

Protester: It'll be like a football game, cops versus the yippies or the National Guard or whoever. People will be watching that on TV, and they'll say, "We don't want to watch that boring speech stuff. We want to watch the Rose Bowl out there."

Noel: When did the violence begin?

Rick: Immediately.

Reporter: Now, moving off down Balboa Street. The crowd is running, and the police are chasing them into Jackson, into Grant Park. There is an odor of tear gas still left in the air here from tear gas shells that have been going off periodically for the last hours.

Rick: You basically had this enveloping dread leading up to the last day of convention. Even as the debates over the platform are leading to actual violence inside the convention hall.

Reporter: What is your name, sir?

Reporter: Take your hands off of me unless you intend to arrest me. Don't push me, please. Walter, as you can see, we got bodily pushed out of the way. This is the kind of thing that's been going on outside the hall. This is the first time we've had it happen inside the hall. I'm sorry to be out of breath that somebody belted me in his stomach doing that. What happened--

Rick: You had these miniature civil wars breaking out inside among the actual credential delegates, and outside among protesters and police.

Noel: What was going on inside the convention, and how rowdy did it actually get?

Rick: The most dramatic thing that happened inside the convention hall to increase the tension is that that Thursday night when students who were denied the right to march to the convention hall, sat down right in front of that famous hotel, and police just started wading into the crowd and just bashing people on the head.

Protester: Go ahead. Come on. Do it, Officer.

Rick: Word got into the convention hall that that was what was happening. They were doing the final vote for who would get nominated as president. There was a third candidate who was running almost as like a symbolic run. It was a guy named George McGovern, who later won the nomination in 1972. He was really the most anti-war of all the candidates.

George McGovern: We ought to try to work out a coalition government now. If the South Vietnamese continue to veto it, we ought to put them on notice that we're going to limit our commitment, that we're going to reduce it.

Rick: He was nominated by a liberal senator from Connecticut named Abraham Ribicoff. Ribicoff said, "If George McGovern was the president of the United States--"

Abraham Ribicoff: We wouldn't have to have Gestapo's tactics in the streets of Chicago.

Rick: When he said that, this corpulent cigar-chomping political boss, Mayor Daley, shouted something that you could not hear. Later, lip readers famously said that he had said something about how Senator Ribicoff was a no-good jew bastard. That was it, the battle was on.

Abraham Ribicoff: I choose not simply to run for president. I seek--

Rick: Today, Explained.

Noel: Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and Reaganland. When we left off, you said, on Thursday night at the 68th convention, there was fighting inside the hall. Some slurs were thrown about. What was going on outside the convention center?

Rick: Michigan Avenue is the most famous street in Chicago, the magnificent mile. On the east side of the street is Grant Park, which is this gorgeous 19th century Paris-style park. The marchers mass for their march several miles down in the convention hall. The police are standing in the street in their way, so what they do is the protesters do a military flanking maneuver. They walk into the park and try and walk around the policemen, and the policemen chase them back across the street.

Reporter: Vice President Humphrey, at his 29th floor room, got some of the gas which came up there. He choked and sneezed a bit, said it itched and took a shower and made a statement saying that he was dismayed by the outbreak.

Rick: What happens next is the students sat down, did a sit in strike, basically, blocking the street right in front of the TV cameras. Hundreds of white helmeted Chicago police just methodically started taking their nightsticks and beating these seated protesters.

Reporter: The interesting thing about this is that, almost universally, the bystanders have been horror-stricken apparently by this action of the police.

Rick: Police wagons lined up and they would grab young people by the scruff of their neck, throw them into police wagons.

Reporter: These are scenes similar to those we saw earlier on videotape of the demonstrators being hustled, which is the kindest word for it, into the police wagons.

Rick: Then when there were enough of them to be full, they would throw a tear gas canister inside, and then they would smack the door closed. This was all on TV. It was on all three channels. There was this terrible backlash. The majority of the country very much believed that the Chicago police were on the right, the protesters were in the wrong, and that was the very backlash against the forces of civil rights and anti-war activism and cultural shifts and all that stuff, that Richard Nixon was running for president on as the Republican candidate.

Richard Nixon: It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change, but in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.

Noel: Could a person say that Richard Nixon, who ended up winning, ended up winning that year because of the way the events of the 1968 DNC played out in Chicago?

Rick: I don't think so. I think the main reason Richard Nixon won was because Hubert Humphrey, who had been manipulated into supporting the Vietnam War that he had grave reservations about from Lyndon Johnson, who just demanded the most intense obeisance and loyalty on the part of his underlings, that he refused to denounce the Vietnam War.

Hubert Humphrey: The American people are not going to stand for any kind of a peace arrangement or any kind of a tactical arrangement relating to the peace discussion that leaves our men in South Vietnam at the mercy of the enemy.

Rick: I think that was the biggest cause for the Democrat's loss, that the protesters-- It was like not listening to the protesters. The big message that he took to the country in his TV commercials was that the first "civil right of all Americans" was to be safe in their own homes. He was campaigning against skyrocketing violent crime rates. He was campaigning with commercials that showed these violent protests, and, of course, were blaming the protesters for them. Generally speaking, that if he was elected president, he would bring law and order to the White House, as opposed to the Democrats, who couldn't even control their convention.

Noel: We decided to do this episode about the 68th convention months ago, even before this year's convention seemed exciting because people kept saying, you keep reading op-eds, oh, the DNC is in Chicago. 2024 is like 1968. How much do you believe that to be true, and what is causing people to make that comparison?

Rick: It's so interesting. I know a ton about the 1968 convention. In my book, I documented hour by hour and sometimes minute by minute. I'm, of course, fascinated by what will happen in politics in 2024. Until I started getting these calls from folks like you, it never occurred to me to understand that the 2024 convention in my city, Chicago, by going back to what I studied and wrote in 1968, to me, everything from how presidents get chosen now compared to then, how protests in the street work now compared to then, how politicians respond to protests, how the entire apparatus of law enforcement and security work compared to then, how Chicago works compared to then are just so different.

Reporter: Right now, the biggest priority on the agenda is the build-out of the DNC security perimeter. Once the perimeter is in place, no cars or foot traffic will be allowed inside without proper clearance.

Rick: You've been to conventions. You know that a quarter mile away from the arena, there's going to be iron fences, and you can't get anywhere past those iron fences without going through metal detectors. Protests themselves, one of the things that made 1968 so shocking and so galvanizing to the public was this was a new thing. People hadn't seen it before. The idea that you could go into a convention and you didn't know whether the presidential candidate was going to be Hubert Humphrey or Eugene McCarthy, maybe there was a glimmer of possibility that might have happened before the Democratic Party lined up behind Kamala Harris.

Part of what the protesters were trying to do was influence how the convention would come out. After 1968, they completely changed how presidential candidates were chosen. They went to a primary system where they used to have these backroom caucus systems. Finally, no one really cares about these conventions. I mean, there's just this they show up for a night on TV, and people watch the speeches.

The idea that this could be this cataclysmic, galvanizing event that-- don't forget the slogan of the protesters is, they were getting beat up. Their chant was, the whole world is watching. Well, the whole world won't be watching. I'm always saying, history is a process, it's not parallels. We can't have 1968 again because we already had 1968. It completely shaped the politics we have now and the way the Republican Party does business.

Because we're that farther down the road, a lot of the things that happened in 1968 are inconceivable in 2024. It doesn't mean that interesting and even melodramatic and even possibly violent things might not happen in 2024, but those will happen for 2024 reasons. Those won't happen for 1968 reasons.

Noel: Historian Rick Perlstein. All right. The comparison between today and '68 isn't exactly one-to-one, but the echoes of that year are certainly alive here in Chicago. In fact, two young activists I talked to even mirrored the language of '68. They told me the whole world is watching.

Husam Marajda: The United States is usually on the news everywhere in the world, but this is a big deal. It's a Democratic national convention, going to nominate their presidential candidate. There's a lot of momentum, of course, with the Kamala Harris announcement to challenge Trump and to defeat Trump so that the world is all affected by the policies of the United States. The world looks to the United States to put a stop to the genocide. People want a stop to this.

The United States have derailed it. They've slowed it down. "Oh, we're gonna achieve a ceasefire. We're gonna achieve a ceasefire." Ten months of saying the same thing. We don't want no more talks. We want action. How many more need to die for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put an end to this? They can put an end to this in one phone call.

Noel: What these activists are not expecting is a repeat of the violence.

Nazek Sankari: Our marshals have been preparing for this. Our communities keep us safe. We keep each other safe. We're going to continue to be out here all day rallying in sight and sound of the DNC to make the demands heard, that we need to end US aid to Israel immediately, and that humanitarian aid needs to go into Gaza. We are going to continue fighting for the liberation of Palestine until all of historic Palestine is liberated.

Noel: That was Husam Marajda and Nazek Sankari of the US Palestinian Community Network, the Chicago Chapter. Today's show was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and edited by Miranda Kennedy. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea, Kristen's daughter. Thanks to Amina Al-Sadi in Washington. I'm Noel King in Chicago. Today, Explained will be reporting from the DNC all this week.

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