Guest columnist
Bucking convention: 1968 Chicago riot changed the way parties pick a candidate

By Floyd J. McKay
Special to The Times

ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO Chicago Police use nightsticks and tear gas to try to break up protests during the the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968.

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The politicians called it the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies called their protests a Festival of Life.

Mayor Richard Daley called the cops.

In front of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago on a muggy Wednesday, Daley's cops pounded Yippies — and anyone else who got in the way — in an orgy of out-of-control anger that shocked and angered the national television audience.

Demonstrations verging on anarchy, police violence verging on sadism, Chicago in 1968 was the last gasp of old-time political conventions. Chicago was, like everything in 1968, way over the top. And it changed, probably forever, the way American political parties select their presidential candidates.

Chicago was the second of the eight national conventions I would report on for Northwest newspapers or television. In comparison, all the others were mundane. Some were downright boring.

Little remains of what once were genuinely important national political events, in which political leaders picked the nominees of their parties, often — but not always — with at least a nod to voter preference.

In Boston this week and New York next month, we will see instead an expensive public-relations and marketing performance, aimed at voters who mostly have made up their minds but could use reinforcement.

National conventions continue to bring together political leaders, the news media and political junkies; but they no longer serve a practical function. They are a wonderful class reunion, a time to see old friends, to tell lies and feel important.

	Floyd J. McKay

National political conventions, like their successors, the primary nominating elections, came about as reforms — in this case, in the era of Andrew Jackson. Until Jackson, most nominations were by a caucus of members of Congress of the party involved. A form of national nominating emerged in 1828 with state conventions and legislatures selecting Jackson as Democratic nominee. In 1831, Democrats held a national convention to ratify Jackson's selection of Martin Van Buren as running mate for 1832.

Nineteenth-century conventions were an instrument of reform, giving state-level politicians some of the power that had exclusively been enjoyed by national leaders.

Reform began to bite into the convention system with a 1910 Oregon initiative, the direct primary election. Voters could choose their favorite candidate, and delegates — elected separately — were pledged to support that candidate, at least for a minimum number of ballots.

In 1912, 11 other states added primaries, and the number expanded to 25 by 1916.

The direct primary was a highlight of the Progressive Era, and faded in importance as the era drew to a close with America's entry into World War I. Not until the post-World War II era did the primary system expand to its present status. In 2000, there were 40 Democratic and 43 Republican primaries, selecting 65 percent and 84 percent, respectively, of the convention delegates.

This trend toward direct-election primaries really began the erosion of the national convention. But the legendary smoke-filled rooms continued well after the advent of primaries, and it really took a combination of the primaries and television to bring down the conventions — or make them irrelevant.

Chicago was the turning point.

By 1968, television had replaced newspapers as the major news source for most Americans, and the three networks were all-powerful. Walter Cronkite really was the nation's most-trusted man, and at times of national crisis, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the networks had the eyes and ears of nearly every American.

Television loves pageantry, spectacle and action. Chicago delivered in ways that were unsettling to Americans. The streets of the great Midwest city were unsafe, middle-class values were ridiculed by unkempt youth, uniformed police acted like thugs, the mayor cursed a U.S. senator on the convention floor, disillusioned young people sought comfort in their leader, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who won primaries but had no chance at the convention.

In the hot, sweaty, and jammed convention hall, adjacent to the old Stockyards, delegates and media milled about, pushing and shoving for air as earnest speakers implored them to reverse President Lyndon Johnson's policy on Vietnam.

Downtown, television cameras were trained on the Hilton, the convention headquarters, when violence erupted between demonstrators and police. Some 17 minutes of clubbing and screaming were captured on film and shown on national television. In the steamy convention hall, action stopped and delegates denounced what was happening downtown.

In his notebook that night, the reporter-historian Theodore White jotted a terse, "The Democrats are finished."

Indeed, they were, despite a last-minute rally that nearly put Vice President Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon.

Chicago had finished not only the Democrats in 1968 but the national convention as it was then constituted.

The raw emotions of 1968 — perhaps the most traumatic single year in America since the Civil War — were exacerbated by the way Humphrey was nominated. Johnson withdrew after McCarthy won 42.4 percent of Democratic votes in New Hampshire. Robert F. Kennedy entered the race and won California's important primary, then was gunned down at his victory party.

Humphrey, the old "happy warrior" and longtime beacon of the party's liberal wing, did not enter a single primary. He collected delegates in caucus states, and from defectors who had supported other candidates. The combination of a nominee who had not won a single primary and the national television coverage of the Chicago violence forced Democrats to reform their nominating procedures.

What followed was a series of commissions, the most important being the first one, headed by South Dakota Sen. George McGovern. The McGovern reforms called for direct election of delegates, demographic balancing of each delegation and other reforms.

Partly because he knew the rules better than anyone, McGovern gained the nomination in 1972, picking up many McCarthy supporters from 1968.

The 1972 Democratic National Convention kept its turmoil inside the Miami Beach convention hall; no street rioting or police raids. But, like many reforms, the movement overreached itself.

The faces on the convention floor in 1972 were so different from the faces of 1968 that one would think he had walked into the wrong hall.

I was covering the Oregon delegation, which was so picture-perfect under the McGovern rules that the delegation was featured in a center-spread of Life magazine, as the ultimate in balance (or, as critics might say, political correctness). Although I had been covering Oregon politics for eight years, I had never met most of the delegates; most had never met each other.

With other states reflecting to some degree the Oregon model, the convention was so full of good feeling that it never got off the ground. There was so little political discipline that McGovern actually delivered his acceptance speech — tailored for the national television audience — after midnight, Eastern time.

Unlike Chicago, the whole world was not watching.

After the acceptance speech, the euphoric youngsters in the delegation (six of the 34 were under 21) went for a swim in the Atlantic Ocean; in their midst, bobbing up and down like a kid, was 71-year-old Wayne Morse, the former senator.

After McGovern's disastrous showing against President Nixon, Democrats backed off of some reforms, but the rules essentially remain in place. Primaries are favored over caucuses, delegations are to be balanced to reflect gender, age, ethnicity, etc., and procedures are to be open.

The result has been to elevate the primaries in importance, and lower the role of the convention itself. Under the old convention system, heavily influenced by national politicians and insiders, it is unlikely the Democrats would have nominated Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, the only Democrats elected in the past 36 years.

Republicans have been less interested in procedure than in results, a big reason they have dominated the presidency since 1968. National guidelines of the McGovern type have been avoided and the number of delegates remains low compared to the Democrats. Republicans have largely avoided nasty convention infighting after the bitterness of 1964 in San Francisco, when New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller was booed by angry conservatives. Nixon choreographed his conventions, down to instructions to delegates on what not to wear (silly hats and costumes), and how to behave on the floor (sit, keep smiling, the cameras are on you).

Control was the game, and has remained the game at GOP conventions to this day.

Gradually, in the 1990s, both conventions moved closer to the Ronald Reagan model of 1984, the "Morning in America" convention, an unapologetic wallowing in nostalgia, hype and feel-good. Michael Dukakis used Reagan's model in 1988, stressing his family's immigrant origins, and enjoyed a temporary boost in the polls; Clinton in 1996 played much of the Reagan script.

Look for even more in 2004 from the Republicans, but with a dramatically different tilt; Americans will be reminded again and again of 9-11; in addition to feel-good visuals, we will see feel-scared visuals aplenty.

That is the influence of television. A party's worst nightmare is the Chicago disease, either inside or outside the convention. Visuals that will play on television have replaced stem-winding speeches, and few care about platform or credentials fights. Celebrities need to be produced for sound bites. Local television anchors, sent to the conventions as a marketing ploy, need to be fed interviews. Substance is the last thing on the minds of the convention planners. The conventions are all about marketing.

Delegates are extras in this drama, herded about to provide backdrops and applause while the spinners craft the message. If there is no suspense in these conventions, it is because planners don't want suspense, or surprise, or images of bosses and old pols.

Primary elections and television, with a Chicago police baton in the gut in 1968, broke the old system. What remains is less a convention than a trade show.

Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University, is a regular contributor to Times editorial pages. E-mail him at floydmckay@yahoo.com