Stormy past of the Windy City

In 1968, the Democrats convened in Chicago, which rapidly took on the appearance of a battle zone. This year, they're braving it again. Godfrey Hodgson looks back

Next week, America's Democratic party returns to Chicago for the first time since 1968. It is a brave decision, because the capital of Middle America is the natural place for the Democrats to nominate Bill Clinton as their champion for a second time.

The reason for waiting 28 years to come back is compelling. I witnessed the last Democratic convention in Chicago as a reporter. It was an unmitigated disaster. Wild demonstrations in the streets, and the city police's savage reprisals, all faithfully reported on television, disillusioned some of the left-wing of the party with orthodox politics.

It symbolised their frustration over the Vietnam war and over the condition of black Americans. In the end, it drove a minority into the desperate terrorist activities of white Weathermen ("You don't need a Weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows") and the Black Panthers.

But even for the less extreme members of a whole generation - for President Clinton's generation - the ferocity with which Mayor Richard Daley's beefy policemen tucked into students demonstrating for peace in Vietnam asked hard questions about the nature of American society.

Now, at long last, the Democrats have decided they can put those divisions behind them. The healing is symbolised by the presence on the same platform next week of Tom Hayden and Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. Daley is the son of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who presided over what Hayden's friends in 1968 called "pig city". Hayden was sentenced to 14 months and 14 days for contempt.

The system is collapsing, he told the judge. "Oh, don't be so pessimistic!" was the reply. "Fellows as smart as you could do awfully well under the system". And he has. Divorced from Jane Fonda (herself a radical at the time), he has been a member of the California legislature for 14 years. Next week, he will be back in Chicago - as a delegate.

The Chicago convention was a turning point, and not just for the far left. It guaranteed the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey and, therefore, the election of Richard Nixon. It ended a Democratic monopoly of the presidency broken only by the grandfatherly and largely non-partisan figure of General Eisenhower since 1933 - or as long as anyone below late middle-age could remember.

Now, looking back almost 30 years later, in fact, you could say that August 1968 was the moment when it became apparent that the Democratic party had finally fallen apart. It revealed the bitter hostility dividing working-class traditionalists who followed Lyndon Johnson and vice-president Humphrey from the middle-class idealists who followed Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Johnson became president as a result of John F Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and he won the presidency in his own right largely by painting his Republican opponent in 1964 as a warmonger. Although Johnson had an impressive record as a domestic reformer, passing a historic Civil Rights Act in 1964, liberals became deeply disillusioned with him when, in 1965, he sharply increased the American commitment to the war against the communist guerrillas in Vietnam.

By the beginning of 1968, the country was in a strange mood. Although segregation had been abolished peaceably in the South, hundreds of cities in the North and West had been disrupted by rioting. Universities were in turmoil, and parents and children quarrelled bitterly over the war.

In March, to everyone's astonishment, President Johnson, who had seemed nerveless and implacable, suddenly announced that he would not run for a second term. The stage was set for an unprecedented insurgency.

Two peace candidates - first, Senator Eugene McCarthy, an enigmatic Mid- western Catholic intellectual, then Senator Robert Kennedy - took on President Johnson, then, after Johnson's withdrawal, his successor Hubert Humphrey. In the moment of his victory in the last and biggest primary, in California, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The Democratic campaign had become a passionate, unpredictable civil war.

So when the Democrats converged on Chicago for what had been choreographed as a coronation of President Johnson, the atmosphere was feverish. Hundreds of young volunteers, each more passionately committed to the peace cause than the next, had come to the city to work and demonstrate for their candidate. But the convention, and the city, were ruled with a rod of iron by the last of the great Democratic city bosses - the terrifying Mayor Daley.

"His Honour" Daley, as he liked to be known, was absolutely determined that Humphrey would be nominated, and so he was - by 1,760 votes to McCarthy's 601. But he was also intent on teaching "the kids" a lesson. They represented everything an elderly working- class Irish Catholic politician of the old school found most repellent. They were idealistic, highly educated and in the main upper middle class. They had dared to defy the old Democratic party of the machines and the unions. Worst of all, they appeared to be unpatriotic.

It is not clear how many of the various stories that circulated about the demonstrators Daley really believed. McCarthy supporters said the Mayor's men planned to throw cellophane bags of urine and excrement at the police. Sticks, Molotov cocktails and cherry bombs were solemnly displayed at police headquarters as the weapons the revolutionaries planned to use. It was solemnly said the peaceniks had brought black widow spiders to Chicago to put in the cars of innocent citizens, and Daley at one point actually alleged there was a plot to assassinate Hubert Humphrey and even - ultimate temerity - to do away with "His Honour" himself.

It was odd that none of the 6,300 reporters in town claimed to have seen any of these weapons used. What reporters did see, and I was one of them, was many of the 12,000 Chicago police go completely berserk. Even Mayor Daley's own official report found evidence of "unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence" and of "what can only be called a police riot".

The police weighed in to demonstrators with a savagery I had never seen before. On one occasion, I saw a policeman hurl a young woman bodily through a plate-glass window. There was nothing partisan about the astonishment the police behaviour caused. At different times in the evening, I patrolled the mayhem in the company of Max Hastings, now editor of the London Evening Standard, and Winston Churchill, now an MP.

The demonstrators set up volunteer first-aid posts to treat some 600 victims of police assault. About one-third had head injuries, caused by police truncheons, while one-fifth had injuries in the lower abdomen or genitals caused by being prodded by police night-sticks or kicked by police boots.

Mike Royko, beloved columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times, summed up the stunned feelings of citizens and visitors alike the day after the convention. The city had come to a pretty pass, he suggested, when so many Chicagoans were going around smashing policemen in their knuckles with their chins.

The initial response of the great majority of journalists to what had happened in Chicago was the same as Royko's - to see the police as the villains and the demonstrators as the victims. The truth was, said a future editor of the New York Times, "these were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up". The Washington Post, in the same vein, printed a column which compared Mayor Daley with the gangland boss in Bertold Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

Within days, the atmosphere had changed. Editors and television producers found to their amazement that for tens of millions of inhabitants of what Richard Nixon was to call "the silent majority", it was the demonstrators who were the villains, and the policemen the heroes. Even the liberal Washington Post explained that of course policemen could be expected to club young men wearing beards, which provoked a notably concise letter from a reader: "Dear Sir, What about Lincoln? What about Moses? What about God?"

The tide nonetheless had turned. With Richard Nixon in the White House and his campaign manager, John Mitchell (later ironically jailed himself for his part in Watergate crimes), seven of the radical leaders who had helped to organise the demonstrations in Chicago were put on trial, with Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, whom they hardly knew, for conspiracy.

The trial of the Chicago Seven was a sinister farce. The judge, Julius Hoffman, hectored and bullied the defendants, and the defendants, especially the political buffoon Abbie Hoffman, behaved outrageously in their turn.

Young people everywhere were already in a ferment of rebellion. In Paris, they had boiled over in the "events" of May 1968. In Berlin, Rudi Dutschke's followers pelted the police with contraceptive pills as a none-too-subtle hint that their violence resulted from sexual frustration. In London, the climax came with the violent anti-Vietnam demonstration outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1970.

The world woke up to the existence of another unexpected American political tradition - a traditional of radical populist moralism which had always been there. The irony is that it did so at the very moment when that tradition was going underground again.

What it took the world longer to notice was that the Chicago convention and the trial of the Chicago Seven were the last kicks of a subsiding movement. For the moment, the future lay not with the young radicals, but with Richard Nixon and then with the conservatives. But 28 years on, Bill Clinton can go to Chicago as one of the big winners: those Democrats who were able to transform the idealism of the 1960s into practical politics. In the perverse way that history works, the losers of 1968 may yet have their turn again.