1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention remembered; Grant Park 'free for all'

A polarized nation is heading toward one of the most consequential presidential elections in years.

A conflict overseas is driving protests across the country.

And a sitting president is backing his vice president after being pushed out by his own party heading into a Democratic National Convention hosted in Chicago.

The DNC that kicks off later this month at the United Center shares some striking similarities to the infamous 1968 version. But the 2024 edition will have a hard time becoming etched in memory and history the way those violent few days 56 years ago have, leaving a stain on Chicago’s reputation.

Mayor Richard J. Daley unleashed the Chicago Police Department on anti-war protesters to demonstrate his version of law and order — a decision that backfired, hurting the Democratic Party and his own political machine. Republican Richard Nixon was elected president that November.

But the 1968 convention did help change public opinion of the Vietnam War and the military draft, spotlighted the need for police reform, prompted journalists to rethink their trust in government sources and ushered in a new era in social and political activism.

Here are some stories from the 1968 convention from people who were there.

‘It opened eyes’

Don Johnson, a young reporter for Newsweek, was covering the second night of protests downtown when a Chicago police officer walked up to him and whacked him in the kneecap a couple of times with a baton. The night before, he remembers seeing a colleague get sent to the hospital after being struck in the ribs by a nightstick-wielding cop.

“He just drilled him,” Johnson says. “This was not police-like behavior.”

As a national TV audience watched the mostly young, largely white protesters beaten by officers, views on police brutality began to change, even though Black activists had sounded an alarm on violence by police long before, Johnson says.

“These were white, middle-class kids — the sons and daughters of suburbia,” says Johnson, 84. “It opened eyes.”

He says it also led journalists to be more skeptical of what government officials were telling them, such as Daley denying that he'd ordered police to attack protesters.

How police saw it

Eyes were opened on both sides of the protest lines.

Pulled from his South Side tactical beat to help patrol protests in Lincoln Park, then-Chicago police officer Bob Angone, 84, says it immediately was clear how unprepared the police were for a week of demonstrations.

“Nobody knew who was who. It was just a tangled mess with very little leadership. It was cops on their own, breaking ranks, a free-for-all,” Angone says of seeing fellow officers cracking skulls of protesters, some who rained rocks, dirt and balloons filled with urine on cops.

The chaos surfaced at 11 p.m. on the first night of protests, Angone remembers.

“The parks close at 11, and now we have thousands of people who came to Chicago with nowhere to go," says Angone, who retired as a police lieutenant and now lives in Austin, Texas. “There’s no superintendent out there. It was us against 10,000 to 15,000 people. We weren’t safe, and neither were they.”

The violence dragged on till sunrise every day, with police chasing and beating protesters throughout the Loop.

“They were battered leaving and battered trying to stay,” says Angone, who was then in his third year as a cop.

He says he'd head back to his parents’ South Side home for a few hours of sleep, then return to the skirmish lines for 16-hour shifts with little to eat other than the bologna sandwiches provided by Daley’s 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization.

The National Guard — mostly troops with no knowledge of policing — didn’t help, nor did Daley’s infamous directives from earlier in the year to “shoot to kill arsonists” and “shoot to maim looters” during riots sparked by the assassination that year of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I saw a 10-year-old kid run by me carrying a gumball machine. I was supposed to shoot him, so that shows you what kind of leadership we had,” says Angone, who didn’t follow that directive. “Chicago would’ve ended up with its own Nuremberg trials if cops had followed Daley’s orders, shooting and killing people.”

Fresh skepticism

In Chicago, a deep, newfound suspicion the convention fueled gave rise to the creation of the Chicago Journalism Review and a new focus on reporting on government corruption, misinformation and racial and social justice issues.

A little more than a year later, the raid and shooting death of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton at his home by law enforcement officers in Chicago raised many questions of the official account of the incident.

Don Rose, an activist and journalist, says the scenes that played out on national TV and were reported in newspapers across the nation swayed opinions on police conduct, government and the Vietnam War. A lifelong Chicagoan and former adviser to King, Rose, 93, coined the phrase “the whole world is watching,” which can be heard chanted numerous times during police crackdowns in Chicago.

“Complaints from the Black community were often ignored,” says Rose, who advised King during his housing desegregation efforts in Chicago. “It helped the white world learn that, yes, police brutality was a real thing.”

The images of police violence changed minds about not only the war and police but also about Daley's political machine.

“When they cleared the park, they beat the hell out of a lot of people,” Rose says.

The antiwar message resonated with a national audience after the convention, Rose says:
“It certainly helped end the draft."

He says the convention also spurred the emergence of “Lakefront liberals,” voters who elected the likes of William Singer and Dick Simpson, Chicago City Council members who challenged and began to chip away at the power of Chicago Machine politics, and helped elect Mayor Harold Washington in 1983 and 1987.

An unprepared National Guard

Gordon Quinn, now 82, a University of Chicago graduate and filmmaker who opposed the war, remembers tear gas wafting onto Lake Shore Drive as he was heading to his Lincoln Park apartment. When he got there, he saw members of the National Guard stationed on the rooftop of his building.

Downtown, he says he saw Guard members point rifles at a mother who drove near barricades in hopes of trying to pick up her teenage children from one of the protests to take them home.

“You have the National Guard there, and they are not trained in these kinds of events,” Quinn says.

Two years before, Quinn founded Kartemquin Films, now known for social justice-themed movies it's produced over the decades that include the 1994 documentary “Hoop Dreams.”

Quinn looks back at 1968 and says what happened then supercharged activism: “It radicalized a lot of people and helped them to understand that they can’t just take the government’s lying."

Janet Klos had recently graduated from Northeastern Illinois University when she and a few friends ventured downtown from the West Side to take in the spectacle.

“That was my first experience being in a serious, large-scale protest," says Klos, now 77, a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher. "I was deliberately way in the back because I didn’t want my parents to see me on TV.

Tear gas hung in the air over Grant Park, where “people were just being beaten and thrown in wagons,” she says. “We were mainly protesting the Vietnam War, and it was like we were in one."

Klos says she and her friends stayed downtown for just a few hours as tensions rose.

“It just kept building," she says. "The more police didn’t know what to do, the more frustrated they got, and they just thought, ‘Well, if we knock people out, we’ll lessen the number.’ ”

That only underscored the importance of the protests, according to Klos, who says the way she saw things, “If this is happening here, what the hell is happening to the people over there?”

Michael Klonsky, 81, who was national secretary for the activist group Students for a Democratic Society, sees the events around the convention as “a defining moment for the protest movement.”

Klonsky says he believes the activism surrounding this year's gathering of Democrats will look similar in many ways.

He points to the college campus protests over the Israel-Hamas War, saying elite schools around the country have seen protests much like those during the years of the Vietnam War.

“I’m not protesting anymore," Klonsky says. "I’m too old and too slow. But I understand these students, who are sacrificing their privilege.”

Nixon ended the military draft, thinking that doing so might curb some of the protests against the war.

“The draft made foreign policy and war-making policy personal,” says Bill Ayers, a former activist with Students for a Democratic Society. “Politicians and the Pentagon learned something: Don’t have a draft. It’s very good that we did away with the draft, but it was a cynical move.”

The events of 1968 were the undoing of the Democrats. Nixon was elected president and then re-elected before resigning over the Watergate scandal.

“Myself and others got blamed for electing Nixon,” Klonsky says. “That certainly wasn’t our intention.”