Opinion: Forty years and four hundred yards apart

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President Obama

(Getty Images file photo)

By Gary C. Woodward

If you are old enough to remember the halcyon days of the “CBS Evening News” and the “NBC Nightly News,” you may have also noticed that one of the most disturbing and also the most ecstatic political memories that you carry actually occurred in the same city and virtually the same location, separated by 40 years and perhaps just 400 yards.

The nadir came in 1968, when many feared that our nation was beginning to fall apart. The stains of the assassination of President Kennedy five years earlier were still visible when Martin Luther King was gunned down in April while organizing a poor people’s campaign in Memphis. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was fatally wounded while campaigning in Los Angeles. By August, and against an enveloping sense of doom, there was at least the modest hope of some sort of political redemption as Democrats gathered in Chicago to stage-manage a presidential nomination. It was supposed to be a celebration of the orderly transfer of leadership that would finally acknowledge public opposition to the Vietnam War. But the nation was not only at war with the North Vietnamese, it was increasingly at war with itself. Inside the International Amphitheater, near the stockyards, the party trudged toward the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey to head up the ticket. The Johnson administration was in free-fall as it tried to find an exit from its war policy. Divided Democrats were in no mood to make it a coronation.

That would become all too clear on the night of Aug. 28, when hundreds of anti-war activists were on hand to seal the fate of the party. Their goal was to march in front of the Hilton and Blackstone hotels along Michigan Avenue, within earshot of the convention delegates. Mayor Richard J. Daley had done what he could to impede coverage of the protests. The plan was to force the networks to cover the proceedings in the convention hall a few miles away, while preventing live television feeds of the confrontations brewing downtown. But the still-powerful news divisions of CBS and NBC weren’t used to being cowed by a machine politician. The convention was also their show, and they found ways to cover the angry confrontation that boiled over into the streets. Their solution was to set up cameras in Grant Park, recording the inevitable clashes that both sides had anticipated for weeks.

The Chicago police turned out to be a machine ratcheted up to unload its fury. They used tear gas, truncheons, jeeps fitted with barbed wire and undisciplined sweeps of bystanders trying to escape to surrounding streets and the park itself. In what a formal investigation later called a “police riot,” Daley’s minions managed to produce the kind of bloodshed and mayhem they were ostensibly dedicated to preventing.

The city and the nation had seen violence many times before. But this conflict in particular settled into the national consciousness as a symptom of a deep and perhaps unbridgeable political rupture. When Walter Cronkite said as much on CBS, he contributed to a middle-class backlash that would be less strident but just as disruptive as the tactics of the “yippies” in the streets. Even so, the meltdown of the Democratic Party in Chicago virtually guaranteed that government would be handed over to the secretive and suspicious Richard Nixon, a living paradox who could just barely conceal his twin instincts for political repression and the overextension of American power.

There was little question the bloodbath of political assassinations between 1963 and 1968 shocked the nation. But all were more or less the products of lone actors. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, Americans had to learn to harden themselves against the distorted logic that allows psychopaths to carry out personal fantasies of revenge with loaded weapons.

That single August night somehow represented a rot that was even deeper. The violence in Chicago was disturbing because it was systemic. The crushing response to citizen-protesters had the apparent imprimatur of official policy. It suddenly made sense to talk about battles in the streets of Prague and Chicago in the same breath. The brutal Soviet suppression of dissidents in Czechoslovakia had an eerie similarity to the military-style sweeps of Michigan Avenue. They all seemed to point to a dying order that would replace a frail will for conciliation with the application of brute power.

If the nation never seemed more troubled after the painful ruptures in the hot summer of 1968, it came the closest to affirming its aspirations 40 years later, reflected in the moment when the same city was the setting for the introduction of a new president and his family. At last there was an electoral signal that the nation could think differently about how it wished to be led. It’s too simplistic to say that the election of 2008 was the final antidote to the poisons of racism and an endlessly interventionist foreign policy. But who can forget those images? On that night, Barack Obama was the perfect embodiment of his own theme of hope. Against the glowing skyline of The Loop, he reclaimed the nation’s honor in the presence of more than 100,000 citizens who witnessed the deceptively short walk to the center of the stage.

Gary C. Woodward is a professor of communication studies and most recently the author of "The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs" (2013). He has a blog at theperfectresponse.com.

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