The sky above Chicago is bright and blue as Democrats gather this week to pitch their vision for America on live TV over the next four nights.
But no matter how high the hopes of the faithful, there are clouds hanging over this particular Democratic National Convention that have been there for more than 50 years. Ghosts from the last time the Democrats convened for a DNC in Chicago were evident Sunday as delegates and other attendees arrived in the Windy City.
The events in and around the 1968 DNC in Chicago have endured as a landmark moment of political chaos and social change for America. Inside the convention hall, Democrats struggled mightily to coalesce around a consensus nominee after the upheaval of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection and the assassination of his most likely Democratic successor, Robert F. Kennedy. Those two events happened in the span of a week (LBJ bowed out March 31: RFK was shot dead in Los Angeles on June 6.)
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Outside the venue, Chicago police were merciless in cracking the skulls of college students and other demonstrators over the war in Vietnam. Law enforcement’s heavy handed tactics sparked nights of rioting at the Democratic fete (see Haskell Wexler’s incredible 1969 docu-drama “Medium Cool” for more detail) that cast a soft-on-crime/soft-on-defense pall on the party for decades to come.
Every boisterous national political convention is compared to the 1968 DNC. But the parallels between that year and this go-round are particularly eerie given that the Democratic Party gamely picked Chicago as their convention site more than a year ago.
A quick review of some of the parallels:
- Incumbent president pulls out of the race unexpectedly? Check.
- Top candidate faces assassination attempt/actual assassination? Check.
- Anti-war protestors gather by the thousands to pressure Democrats to disavow war overseas? Check.
It’s still unclear how the exterior influence of the protestors against the war in Gaza and U.S. support for Israel will impact the Democratic Party this time around. On Sunday, a group of several hundred pro-Palestinian protesters marched on downtown Chicago’s Michigan Avenue without incident.
One big difference, of course, is the remarkable party unity that has lined up behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the weeks since President Joe Biden bowed out.
One big reason the mayhem at the 1968 Democratic National Convention resonated across the country was because of another theme that resonates today: the intersection of television and technology. In 1968, broadcast TV networks were making big strides in their ability to do live remote coverage on a national basis.
For the DNC, broadcast teams were still grabbing film reels to be quickly developed and hustled back to New York for use the next day on the nightly newscasts. Although it’s hard to believe by today’s standards, that lent an immediacy to the coverage. It was a chaotic year that had already been a roller coaster of assassinations (including Martin Luther King Jr on April 12), escalating war in Vietnam, riots in major cities and political instability across the country.
In that turbulent year, President Johnson caught the news media flat-footed when he disclosed during a Sunday night live TV address on the war in Vietnam that he would not run for re-election. The next day, Johnson traveled to Chicago to give an address to the National Association of Broadcasters. Many jokes were made about Johnson “attending the wrong convention in Chicago,” according to PvNew‘s coverage from the time.
Perhaps inspired by his lame-duck status, Johnson shared his candid thoughts with the NAB crowd about how television affects the occupant of the Oval Office.
“The electronic media have added immeasurably to man’s power. You have within your hands the means to make our nation as eminent and as forward as a New England town meeting. Yet, the use of broadcasting has not cleared away all the problems that we still have of communication,” Johnson said. “In some ways, I think sometimes that it has complicated it because it tends to put the leader in a time capsule. It requires him to abbreviate what he has to say. Too often, it may catch a random phrase from his rather lengthy discourse and project it as a whole story.”
Johnson was known for his plain-spoken eloquence. His warning to broadcasters in the moment when TV news began to supplant print as the dominant source of information for Americans, was prescient.
“Your commentary carries an added element of uncertainty. Unlike the print media, television is written on the wind. There is no accumulated record which the historican can examine later with a 20-20 vision of hindsight, asking this question. ‘How fair was he tonight?’ ‘How impartial was he today?’ ‘How honest was he all along.’… So you are keepers of the public trust and you must be just. You must guard and you must defend our media against a spirit of action, against the works of divisiveness, bigotry, against the corrupting evils of partisanship in any guise. For America’s press, as for the American presidency, the integrity and the responsiblity and the freedom — the freedom to know the truth and let the truth make us free, must never be compromised, or diluted or destroyed.”
