Snapshots from the Chicago Convention (1968 version)

      Among my favorite souvenirs from more than 20 years of covering national politics for the New York Daily News are three odd rectangular cards: 2’’x 3” plastic sandwiches. Each was imbedded with electronics and I had to use the correct one each day at a turnstile to enter Chicago’s International Amphitheater near the stockyards and cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

      These entrance passes marked the first time such security measures ever were used at a convention—not surprising since all hell broke loose during a convulsive convention week in which, as a national commission later charged, Chicago’s finest engaged in a violent “police riot” against noisy, hairy, disruptive, largely unpleasant but also largely peaceful protestors.

      For a 21-year-old wet-behind-the-ears political journalist, it was almost literally a baptism of fire.

       I had graduated from CCNY barely a year earlier, a wannabe journalist who started a job on the New York Daily News literally one week after wearing a cap and gown at Lewisohn Stadium. It’s not that I had no experience. I had been editor of City’s oldest newspaper, The Campus, a photographer for the yearbook and a contributor to the literary magazine. I also had been a copyboy and news clerk on the old New York Herald Tribune and the New York Post.

      But what landed me in Chicago in’68 for the Daily News was my hustle. Immediately after arriving in the News’ city room I started working for every section of the paper that would have me—even covering a riot in Harlem that, it turned out, was valuable experience. My drive earned me a three-month tryout in the Washington Bureau just five months after I joined the paper.

      I stayed for 20 years, retiring as the Washington Bureau news editor after also serving a total of nine years as the White House and, later, national political correspondent.

      But all that was way ahead of me as I stood on Michigan Avenue one hot August evening outside the convention headquarters hotel, standing between cops and protestors as tempers on both sides boiled over. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley—an old school political boss who, with his beefy jowly face and dull pig-eyed stare, could have passed for an old school Mafioso were he not so thoroughly Irish—was determined to keep the peace in his city, especially when it was facing attack by a horde of hippies, lefties and other undesirables.

      And inside the convention hall it was just as congenial and kumbaya.

      Everyone in the packed hall seemed to hate everyone else. It was Vietnam, of course that soured and affected everything. The sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, who had pursued the war relentlessly, stunned the political world the preceding March by announcing that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s presidential nomination, so great had opposition to his war policies become. His anointed heir was his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, but soon antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy, as well as latecomer liberal Robert F. Kennedy had entered the race, further fracturing an already fractious Democratic party.

      Then Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis in April and seemingly the next week (actually only two months later) so was Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles.

      There was rioting in the streets—especially in Chicago—and Daley was not about to let that happen again as the Democrats convened.

      In all my years covering American politics, I never experienced what I did that week in Chicago. I have been arrested for disorderly conduct and breaking a police line, rousted by cops and Secret Service agents, shouted at by marshals, other cops and assorted security types. But never again did I ever have to endure “Gestapo tactics” like those used in Chicago. Those were the words Democratic Sen. Abraham Ribicoff shouted at Mayor Daley from the convention podium. (“Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home!” Daley shouted back, his face crimson.)

      And, to be fair to the Gestapo, I had seen tactics like this before—in America. Cops wading into unarmed seated protestors, beating the shit out of them with billy clubs swung like baseball bats? Welcome to Bull Connor’s Alabama.

      The protestors, to be sure, were no angels. Some hurled stink bombs inside the headquarters hotel, leaving oily black stains on hallway carpeting. But Daley’s ham-handed refusal to grant the protestors virtually any kind of slack with regard to permitting (and thereby defuse things) just made it worse.

      Finally, even rampant police brutality could not contain the protests and the National Guard was called in to restore order—fitfully. It is ironic to think that two years later, at Kent State University, the National Guard would be vilified for killing four and injuring many more during another antiwar protest. But in Chicago in 1968, compared to the Chicago cops, the National Guard were the good guys.

      For all this mayhem and violence, perhaps my lasting memory of covering this roiling convention was a whispered aside, between legendary political operative Dick Goodwin and legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin. It helped form me as a reporter.

      A former aide to LBJ, Goodwin had been working on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign after RFK broke with Johnson over Vietnam. Goodwin was a fierce presence at the convention—in the middle of everything it seemed—and I covered a brief hallway press conference he gave to a small bunch of us, including Breslin.

      After a few minutes, Goodwin said, “I gotta go,” and made to leave.

      “I’m goin’ with you,” Jimmy said—not a request, a statement. The next day, Breslin’s column was larded with quotes between Goodwin and others, gleaned from being in Goodwin’s car. It taught me right then that the difference between good reporting and great reporting is access

      Based on what little political experience I had in 1968, I don’t blame myself for being blindsided by Chicago in August.

      Earlier that month, I had covered my very first political convention as the Republicans gathered in Miami Beach to crown former vice president Richard M. Nixon as the GOP presidential nominee and Maryland Gov. Spiro T. Agnew as his vice president. It was a staid, orchestrated affair with little drama. I remember most “Youth for Nixon”—vapid smiling young people in white pants and skirts, and shirts heavy with red, white and blue (naturally). Lots of white faces and lots of white teeth. The GOP convention.

      Afterward, as low man in the Daily News Washington Bureau, I was tagged to babysit Nixon in Key Biscayne, Fla., during the two weeks after the GOP gathering and before the Democratic convention in Chicago, opening Aug. 26. (Anyone else in the news business with any seniority took those two weeks off because it would be “all leaves canceled” once the campaign began in earnest after Labor Day.)

      During these two weeks, Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler offered a desultory daily news briefing in the morning, with the “lid” put on for the rest of the day. On one especially somnolent day, UPI Audio’s Pye Chamberlayne and I rented a small sailboat and took it out on Biscayne Bay. I literally had a Mai Tai in my hand as I helped steer the boat.

      “I could get used to this,” I remember thinking at the time. Then I flew to Chicago.

Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based author, columnist and documentary photographer. He was a reporter and editor in the New York Daily News Washington Bureau for 20 years and later served 19 years as the photography columnist of the Washington Post. His current book is ‘Recovered Memory: New York & Paris 1960-1980.’  His next book, done in collaboration with his wife and professional partner Judith Goodman, is ‘The Green Heart of Italy: Umbria and its Ancient Neighbors,’ to be published in Fall, 2025.