Fifty years ago this week, Hunter S. Thompson, a 30-year-old journalist working on his second book, traveled to Chicago to cover the 1968 Democratic Convention. On Wednesday, August 28, after witnessing from the press gallery the defeat of the party’s anti-war platform by its establishment forces, he returned to his hotel, the Sheraton Blackstone, where a major protest was developing. He was standing at the corner of Michigan and Balbo when Mayor Daley ordered his police force to attack the thousands of unarmed demonstrators. His press pass was clearly displayed, but he was beaten and tear-gassed; along with the other journalists at his side he was forced against the Hilton’s plate-glass window, which shattered.
Afterward—after fighting his way back to his hotel room—he headed back to the Convention hall, where, from the press gallery, he watched the culmination of the conflict between the party’s anti-war faction and its establishment base: an uproarious floor vote for the party’s presidential nominee.
In 1968 the Chicago International Amphitheatre was like an old Roman grandstand that for millennia had somehow managed to escape the fire. Its balconies hung right over the floor. Its lower gallery could only be accessed through a maze of narrow tunnels. Its carpets were red. Its speaker’s podium employed the same sky-blue theme as the Chicago Police Department. "promises kept," the façade read. Here, for an entire week, the Democrats had sat on top of one another arguing over the nature of their shipwrecked fate, and now, on Wednesday night, nominating night, they were ready for an all-out fight.
In retrospect, one of Mayor Daley’s most effective tactics had been preemptive: before the convention he’d helped orchestrate an electrical-workers strike, which had the cumulative effect of preventing the networks from broadcasting live at any Chicago locations other than the amphitheater. As a result, the cameras on hand for the police riot at Michigan and Balbo all contained film, which meant they still needed to be developed and cut—a time-intensive process—and for an hour and a half, the footage remained unseen. At nine thirty David Brinkley interrupted the nominating process to say: “The tape you’re about to see was made thirty or forty minutes ago.” Throughout the floor, many of the delegates and aides and congressional leaders who’d been at the amphitheater all evening were learning about the violence for the first time.
By this point Hunter S. Thompson had made his way to the press balcony, its precipitous apron, where, wild-eyed and stinking—the tear gas still in his skin—he watched the proceedings. When the Alabama delegation, led by infamous seventy-one-year-old Birmingham segregationist Bull Connor, nominated the football coach Bear Bryant for president, Thompson started bellowing down at them, “MARTIN BORMANN!”—the name of Adolf Hitler’s personal secretary and Nazi Party Obergruppenführer who for years had been rumored to have escaped to Argentina. “MARTIN BORMANN! MARTIN BORMANN! MARTIN BORMANN!MARTIN BORMANN!” he screamed at the delegates—many of them close enough to hear. In a letter a few weeks later he’d describe the moment: “The Jesuit priest sitting next to me kept me from hurling my binoculars . . . and Daley’s thugs, sitting all around me, luckily didn’t know who Martin Bormann is/was.”
Down on the floor the convention chair, Carl Albert—an old little Oklahoman with a very big gavel—kept trying to move things along. But by now word of the Battle of Michigan Avenue had spread through the delegates.
A few rows back, Mayor Richard Daley was sitting with the Illinois delegation. He was approaching seventy, balding and fleshy, his purple lips locked tightly together: a man who’d spent his entire adult life in politics; who in 1960 had helped Jack Kennedy take Illinois and with it the presidency; who’d opened the convention on Monday by saying, “As long as I am mayor of this city, there is going to be law and order in Chicago”; who’d supported Hubert Humphrey since the spring over the likes of Bobby Kennedy because, Vietnam aside, this year it was the vice president’s turn. He was the last unquestioned party boss the Democrats would see: powerful enough, under the current allocation system, to swing the delegates loyal to him in such a way as to determine the future of the country itself. That night, as news of the violence spread, Lyndon Johnson, watching from the White House, got in touch with Daley: if the current president were to board Air Force One and fly to Chicago at that instant, would there be enough support to give him the nomination he’d declined to pursue four months earlier? Daley said yes; he promised Johnson he could get the delegates. But just as the president was considering such a dramatic turn of events, his Secret Service detail told him it wouldn’t be possible: there was no way they could ensure his safe passage to the amphitheater. In the end Johnson decided against it. The possibility of yet another disastrous assassination—his own—would be too much for the country to handle.
At around 10:00 p.m. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the former governor of Connecticut, approached the podium. He was fifty- seven years old. He wore a slim black tie and dark suit; when he spoke, the pointer finger of his right hand chopped down at the air in front of him. That week he’d written a nominating speech for George McGovern—the South Dakotan had been a late, antiwar entry into the race—but after what had happened at the Hilton he couldn’t stay silent. “As I look to the confusion in this hall,” he said, “and watch on television the turmoil and violence that is competing with this great convention for the attention of the American people, there is something else in my heart tonight, and not the speech that I prepared to give.”
Daley watched in disbelief—a lidless, fish-eye glare.
“And with George McGovern as president of the United States,” Ribicoff continued, “We wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago . . .With George McGovern we wouldn’t have the National Guard.”
The crowd erupted. Chairman Albert smacked his gavel. Richard Daley, standing up straight now, cupped his hand to his mouth like a megaphone. “Fuck you!” he screamed toward the podium. “You Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!”
Everyone in the vicinity could hear, including Ribicoff, who nodded slowly. “How hard it is,” he said. “How hard it is . . . How hard it is to accept the truth.”
Thompson watched from the balcony. When the convention was over he’d write in a letter to Ribicoff (whom he’d never met): “Everything you did that night seemed to rest on a bedrock of human decency . . .There was an awesome dignity in your han- dling of Daley and his thugs, and for a moment that whole evil scene was redeemed—but only for a moment.”
It was unprecedented: a senator had just accused the head of his party’s elaborate machine, on national television, of using government-directed violence to silence dissent, punish rivals, and prevent the press from publicizing what was really going on. Ribicoff had called out Daley’s tactics for what they were. During the convention you had a hodgepodge of local and federal authorities loosely associated around a single issue, the country’s militaristic campaign in Vietnam, and when one of these factions had turned out to be willing to go so far as to beat the antiwar opponents they at the time all shared, the others—including the current president of the United States, his chosen successor, and the recently nominated Republican rival—justified this violence by explaining it away with hollow catchalls like nationalism and patriotism and weakness, as in: these protestors were really just a bunch of plotting communist outsiders who deserved what they got because they were too contemptibly weak to back up their chants and speeches in the street fight they’d brought on themselves. “The city of Chicago and the people of Chicago didn’t do a thing that was wrong,” Hubert Humphrey said afterward. “There are certain people in the United States who feel that all you have to do is riot and you can get your way. I have not time for that.”
That night, just after 11:00 p.m., it became official. With Pennsylvania, Humphrey’s delegate count finally broke the threshold. The nomination was his on the first ballot. He’d represent the Democratic Party against Richard Nixon in the general election. The next day, during his acceptance speech, he’d find it appropriate to quote Saint Francis of Assisi: “Where there is hatred let me sow love.”
Afterward—now it was Thursday afternoon, the last of the convention—Hunter Thompson was kicked out of the amphitheater by Mayor Daley’s security agents, who appeared to be escorting away any and all members of the press, regardless of their behavior or political bent, without explanation. He spent the rest of the night wandering the city, drinking and writing, unable to sleep; whenever he tried to explain what he’d seen he broke down crying. At sunrise on Friday morning, on his way back from a Ramparts magazine party, he was crossing to his hotel from Grant Park when out in front of the Hilton he came upon Blair Clark, Senator Gene McCarthy’s campaign manager (and the former vice president of CBS News). Clark was pacing up and down the sidewalk. His eyes, Thompson noticed, were shining with tears.
Inside the lobby, people were running and screaming and holding on to one another. Some appeared to be bleeding profusely. Thompson tried to find out what had happened.
Only a few minutes earlier, dozens of police, accompanied by members of the National Guard, had stormed the operations suite of the McCarthy campaign on the fifteenth floor, and with their billy clubs they’d beat the young staffers who’d been volunteering for the campaign since New Hampshire. The police would later claim they were pelted by debris thrown from McCarthy’s headquarters, but that was impossible; the windows to the suite had been shut and locked for hours. Richard Goodwin happened to be in the room when the violence broke out—he’d stopped to say goodbye—and as everyone was being herded downstairs in the lobby for arrest, he sent a message to McCarthy to gather up his Secret Service detail and come immediately. The senator promptly arrived with his suit-wearing agents and demanded to know who was in charge. But the cops and guardsmen shrugged; together they melted away, back out onto the street. “Just what I thought!” McCarthy called out after them. “Nobody’s in charge.”
By now the sun was coming up over the lake. It was Friday morning, August 30: the tail end of the very worst political convention in American history. Hunter Thompson stood there in the Hilton lobby watching its final bloody act—the curtain falling as a recent presidential candidate and his Secret Service detail faced off against the combined members of the National Guard and Chicago police, whose victims lay wailing and bleeding on the lobby floor. How could America continue to exist in the manner it was once conceived if its mechanisms could be appropriated so easily in the name of everything the Republic was meant to stand against?
“It was the ultimate horror,” Thompson described afterward in a letter to a friend. “The final groin-shot that only a beast like Daley would stoop to deliver. It was an LBJ-style trick: no rest for the losers, keep them on the run and if they fall, kick the shit out of them.”
Shares