Older, Wiser and Still Hoping for Peace

It was a dark and stormy year.

The exact dates of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago were Aug. 26-29, 1968, and electricity was in the air. That whole windy town was ready to blow.

Vietnam was the lightning rod. Lyndon Johnson had begun curbing the bombing of the North on the last day of March. The peace talks in Paris began on May 10. But soldiers were still getting slaughtered.

So were civilians, at home as well as abroad. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis on April 4. Bobby Kennedy’s shooting in L.A. came on June 5.

By the time August rolled around, Chicago was hot, humid and in no mood to throw Hubert H. Humphrey a happy, for-he’s-a-jolly-good-fellow party.

The vice president of the United States was coming to the nation’s second-largest city (at that time) to accept the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and to speak about peace and prosperity.

Outside the convention hall, none of us wanted to hear it.

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We were young and overzealous, bright and immature, political and angry and eager to make the world a better place by doing something more than just flashing a peace symbol with our fingers.

We dressed funny, in paisley shirts and thick-ribbed corduroy pants and shoes with platform heels that made 6-footers out of 5-10ers.

Many of the demonstrators--some of us independent, others from organized activist groups such as the SDS, “Students for a Democratic Society”--sang slogans and carried signs. Others just mingled out of curiosity, or meandered into a protest mob aimlessly like a gaggle of Forrest Gumps.

What most of us wanted was for delegates to the Chicago Democratic Convention to pay attention before blowing in and out of town. We didn’t wish to harass or physically intimidate anybody. We just didn’t want to be ignored.

As usual, though, there were rotten apples who spoiled things for everybody else.

On one side was the police force, following orders from Richard J. Daley, our martinet of a mayor, to quell any disturbance by any means necessary.

On the other side were the troublemakers, who had come for the express purpose of being heard by any means necessary. Most of us were caught in between.

Some got teargassed. We ran coughing while being chased by cops on horseback, swinging nightsticks. Officers on foot used water hoses to drive back crowds.

Above us were open windows in hotels and apartment buildings, from which hooligans dropped bags of water (or worse) atop the cops.

At a protest in a park, demonstrators were beaten by officers who had neither the time nor inclination to sort out who was doing what. Those of us present saw photographers whacked across the skulls, their cameras yanked away and smashed to the ground. A reporter from the Chicago Daily News was beaten bloody.

It took years to recover from that convention. A federal jury tried the so-called “Chicago 7,” plus Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, and in 1970 convicted five of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.

Arguments raged as to who was more at fault, the demonstrators or the city. By the time the Democratic Convention returned to Chicago in 1996, however, times had changed so much that Dick Daley’s son was mayor and a former SDS organizer from the ‘60s, Marilyn Katz, had become one of his top political consultants.

“Anybody who wants to protest,” announced Debra DeLee, the 1996 convention’s chief planning officer, “will be within sight and sound of the delegates. Anyone who wants to be heard will be.”

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Now it’s 2000, the vice president is coming to what is now the nation’s second-largest city to be nominated and demonstrators want to demonstrate.

And once again, anyone who wants to be heard will be. Teachers, librarians, hotel workers, welfare eligibility workers, they’re among the groups planning protests for the Aug. 14-17 convention.

They have gone to court for this right, indignant over a scheme to seal off the convention neighborhood and keep protesters as far away as possible. A federal judge Wednesday sided with the protesters, demanding “an accommodation to allow [them] to reach their intended audience.”

Don’t worry, the protesters say--it’ll be fine, we just want to talk, a little talking can’t hurt anybody.

We wish them peace, for that is exactly what we were naive enough to think in 1968.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com