“It was a dismal time,” my husband Dick recalled one morning in 2016, after opening an overflowing box of materials he had saved from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Inside, we found delegate guides, memos, newspaper clippings, voter surveys and a splintered police club—a gruesome symbol of the violent encounters between police and anti-Vietnam war protesters that would doom Democratic election hopes and ultimately help to christen the successful “Law and Order” campaign of Richard Nixon.
On a personal level, that box brought back vivid memories of our experiences at the convention: on my side, a surprise phone call from then-President Lyndon Johnson—and on Dick’s, a moving candlelit procession and a harrowing police encounter.
The ’68 convention boxes were among some 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents and memorabilia that Dick had carted around for 50 years. Once he turned 80, he had finally decided to examine these boxes, which turned out to be a veritable time capsule of the Sixties.
Over the course of that tumultuous decade, he had worked as senior adviser and speechwriter to two presidents—John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—as well as to two influential hopefuls: Senator Eugene McCarthy and former attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy. After Bobby died, McCarthy had asked Dick to take charge of the process of drafting a peace plank for the convention platform, to codify the party's political will to end the Vietnam War.
I was also in Chicago for that convention. Unlike Dick—who I hadn’t yet met—I had no official role. The convention corresponded to my week’s vacation from my work as a White House Fellow assigned to Lyndon Johnson, and I was there with a group of Washington friends.
As a White House staffer, I had spent hours with the president, both working on inner city and youth projects and listening to him tell stories of his early life and career while visiting his Texas ranch. Despite being firmly against the war, as were my friends and colleagues, I had developed a loyalty to—and an empathy for—Johnson himself, who had withdrawn his own reelection bid earlier that year under a barrage of antiwar disapproval.
In addition to the delegates and media, tens of thousands of war protesters had descended upon Chicago, stoking widespread fear—even expectation—of violence. More than 11,000 police officers were deployed. National Guard and army troops were on alert. McCarthy had appealed to his own followers to stay away and avoid escalating the discord.
Nonetheless, McCarthy’s volunteers came in droves, hopeful that his candidacy still had a chance. By the convention’s second day, however, Vice President Hubert Humphrey had clearly amassed enough delegates to win the nomination. So, the real fight centered on what kind of Vietnam plank would emerge to establish the platform on which the nominee was pledged to run.
A strong plank surfaced from the antiwar delegates, calling for “an unconditional cessation of all bombings” and the “mutual withdrawal of United States forces and North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam.”
The Johnson Administration’s plank, on the other hand, stipulated that bombing sorties to protect our troops must continue, despite North Vietnam’s refusal to engage in serious talks until all bombing had halted. For a brief time, it appeared Humphrey might break with LBJ and support the peace plank. But in the end, he capitulated and backed the establishment plank.
Dick still hoped that, when the vote was taken, a powerful show of force for the peace initiative might change the country’s direction.
'It’s the President'
The hotel suite I shared with my friends was several miles from the two candidates’ Hilton hotel headquarters. During the days, we ventured downtown. We walked to Grant Park, where thousands of demonstrators and protesters had gathered. Hour by hour, the sounds of their belligerent chants filled the air. With each passing day, police response grew increasingly violent.
At night, we hunkered in our hotel, engrossed in TV coverage of the proceedings from the Amphitheatre where the convention was held. On Tuesday night, our telephone rang. A wide-eyed friend called my name, mouthing, “It’s the president of the United States.” At first, I thought she was joking, but when she handed me the receiver, the operator announced the president was coming on the line.
“I have a favor to ask,” Johnson said in a soft voice. What followed was the last thing I could have imagined. “When you were last down here at the ranch, you borrowed my flashlight. Do you know where it is? I’ve looked everywhere.” After telling him where he might look for it, I asked him simply, “How are you?”
“How do you think I am? I never felt lower in my life. I can’t go up to Chicago in front of my own people, my own party, on my own birthday.”
Johnson had hoped to attend the convention to celebrate his 60th birthday. Plans had been made for his helicopter to land on the Amphitheatre’s roof. A five-foot-high cake had been baked, and the Hilton’s Imperial Suite had been reserved. But these hopes had been dashed by the contentious atmosphere within the convention hall and the violent clashes outside. Friends had warned him that “a personal appearance would throw the convention into turmoil.”
I remember how confused and upset I was after that call with the president. I felt a deep personal sadness for the man who, on his 56th birthday four years earlier, had been feted by thousands of cheering Democratic convention supporters, thrilled to see his portrait emblazoned in fireworks over the Atlantic City night sky. Now, he was denied even an appearance at his party’s convention without risking widespread uproar from the enraged masses outside—and the contempt of many inside. If Johnson blamed North Vietnam for the continuing stalemate, the antiwar movement put the blame solely and squarely upon LBJ.
Chicago Descends Into Chaos
The vote on the Vietnam peace plank took place Wednesday afternoon. Although it was defeated by a vote of 1,568 to 1,042, the number of Democrats willing to reject the majority plank dictated by their president and party leader revealed the scope of intra-party dissension.
During the voting, demonstrators in Grant Park voiced their intention to march to the convention hall—despite having no permit to do so. When three protesters climbed a flagpole and started to take down the American flag, police charged into thesurrounding crowd. Chaos ensued. The police threw teargas bombs; the demonstrators responded with rocks and bottles. As people spilled into the street, the Chicago Tribune reported, “Michigan Avenue was turned into a bloodied battleground. Scores were injured and thousands affected by tear gas; scores were thrown into police vans and arrested; glass windows on the Michigan Avenue side of the Hilton were shattered.” Blue lights flashed from a lengthening line of police cars, and barricades thickened to shield the hotel.
The city fell in a state of siege. Enraged by the protesters, police wielded clubs with such abandon that bystanders were indiscriminately thrown to the ground and bludgeoned. A police car crashed into the barricades, pushing people through windows and into the hotel restaurant. McCarthy, peering down from the Hilton’s 23rd floor, saw his worst fears realized on the streets below. When his volunteers asked if they could set up a first-aid station in their 15th-floor hotel suites, he readily agreed.
A Statement in Candlelight
Before going to the convention hall Wednesday night for the nomination roll call, Dick and peace activist Al Lowenstein had secured 1,000 candles from a Chicago synagogue. Their idea: Peace delegates could use them to collectively protest Humphrey’s nomination—even if Mayor Richard Daly cut the lights to hide the protest.
The roll call did not begin until after 11 p.m. As delegates’ names were called, the American public viewed a split screen. On one side, the uproar at the convention, with cheers and jeers in equal order; on the other, edited footage from the bloodbath earlier that night, the sight of bodies cowering under police clubs, the sounds of shrieks and sobbing. Humphrey captured the nomination on the first ballot, but on this night, journalist Theodore White wrote: “The Democrats are finished.”
To mark the sorrow of the moment and show solidarity with the victims of the carnage, Dick and Lowenstein suggested a peaceful candlelight procession from the convention to Grant Park, where the bloodied demonstrators were still gathered. More than 600 delegates from the convention hall joined in.
It was after 2 a.m. when the candlelit procession—stately, sad and silent—reached Grant Park. A Bennington College student described the sight: “We hadn’t dared believe reports of delegates marching from the Amphitheatre. But they were there,” she recalled… “There was a cheer; it didn’t just shout, but welled up, grew and grew as realization came… Nothing will shake my faith in those few hours. The candlelit delegates filed into the crowd on pathways cleared for them, winding through, they were hugged and blessed and loved at every footstep.”
A reporter asked Dick if he had a statement to make. Gesturing to the hundreds of flickering candles moving like fireflies through the field of young people huddled together, he said, “This is a statement.”
The Splintered Billy Club
By the convention’s final night, the violence on the streets had largely been spent. Dick had joined friends at a bar before heading back to his room at the Hilton. “On my way up,” he recalled, “I stopped in at the 15th floor. I wanted to look in on the McCarthy kids… I loved those kids. I wanted to thank them and say goodbye.”
No sooner had he stepped off the elevator than another elevator door opened and a squadron of police streamed down the corridor. Boots shattered the doors; the McCarthy kids, some half asleep, were pushed, pummeled and dragged back to the elevators. The enraged police attacked a group playing cards, an assault so furious that one student, using the card table as a shield, was smashed on his shoulder with enough force to break the policeman’s billy club. Dick was herded along with the kids into an elevator to be taken down to the lobby so they could be hauled off to jail.
I asked Dick what had set things off. “An explosion of madness,” he said, “an assault bent on revenge for the accumulated events of the entire week.”
Dick soon found himself in a nightmarish scene in the hotel lobby where frightened students, some with deep scalp wounds, were being rounded up.
Theodore White’s vivid account told what transpired next: “‘Help us, Mr. Goodwin, help us!’ was the first cry that came to him as he reached the lobby—and there he saw the little knot of students, surrounded by police, the girls crying and hysterical, several boys bleeding. They had first ventured into politics eight months before and only now were tasting its raw and underlying violence. Goodwin, assuming authority, told them to squat on the floor. The police ringed the sitters. Goodwin told the police that both Senator McCarthy and the Vice President himself were on the way down to the lobby to take command.
“This stilled the police momentarily. Loudly, Goodwin gave directions to the youngsters, dispatched one or two to telephone the press and television, made known to the police that television was coming to witness this; and several of the police began to drift away. Surreptitiously, Goodwin told another student to telephone the McCarthy and Humphrey suites and ask them to come at once—the candidates, with their Secret Service guards, might quench the violence and save the youngsters.”
“I knew how fragile my authority was,” Dick later wrote. “The police were already doubtful. Should the scales tip toward disbelief—we would all be swept away into the police wagons already stationed, engines running, just outside the hotel entrance.”
Humphrey’s press secretary refused to wake his boss, but it wasn’t long before the elevator doors opened and Senator McCarthy emerged. “Taking my place,” Dick continued, “he looked over the seated students toward the police. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ he asked. No one answered. ‘Just as I thought. Then turning from the police, he began addressing his volunteers; there was nothing to be afraid of; a nurse would be available for anyone who had been hurt; just get up now and return to your rooms; you’ve all worked hard and need a good night’s sleep; I’ll see all of you tomorrow. As McCarthy talked, the police began to file toward the hotel entrance. By the time he had finished, they were gone. The students rose and went back to their rooms.”
Dick, too, returned to his room. By then it was nearly 5 a.m., and he needed to prepare for his return to Boston. On his way down to the lobby, he stopped on the 15th floor to survey the sad postscript of the 1968 convention. Walking past broken doors and a shattered floor lamp, he spotted the broken police club. He opened his suitcase and slipped it among his peace plank notes, identification lanyard and other memorabilia.
Excerpted from An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Copyright © 2024 by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved
