Memory Lane
The hotels at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 smelt terrible. Protesters against the Vietnam War had smeared the reception halls with Limburger cheese – their way of saying that politics stank.
In the park across the road, they had gathered once again, after two days of being savagely clubbed by the nightsticks of Mayor Daley’s police. On 28th August, it was very hot, very muggy. I was covering it, 50 years ago, for the Express, embedded with the campaign of Eugene Mccarthy, who had led the anti-war movement from the start. Bobby Kennedy, who had entered the race on the coat tails of Mccarthy’s campaign, wasn’t there; he’d been shot dead in Los Angeles. Now the challenge had been taken up by the uninspiring Hubert Humphrey, Mccarthy’s fellow Minnesota politician.
It was getting towards sunset in the park. Dick Gregory, comedian and activist, stood up with a loudhailer and told the restless crowd, ‘Mayor Daley says we can’t have our march to the Convention Centre.
But… my house is on the far side of the Centre, and I’m now invitin’ you all to tea at my house.’ Ten thousand or so. Big house!
Off we trooped, and I got to the front to see what would happen. After a short distance there was a large bridge across the main road; atop it, a row of armoured vehicles; filling the arches across the road and the sidewalks, a mass of National Guardsmen, bayonets fixed. The scene was down lit by a hovering helicopter; bizarrely, a bat was flickering across the searchlight’s glare.
I was perhaps eight feet from a bayonet tip, held by a youth who could have been barely 18 and was clearly terrified. The National Guard Commander announced that anyone crossing a certain line would be arrested. Gregory immediately did so – a symbolic gesture.
Then there was a sound I had never heard before; the crowd started to whimper. They knew what was coming, as the guardsmen began to don their gas masks. Everyone started to run, and the tear gas duly arrived. A reporter I knew from the New York
Times yelled, ‘Follow me.’ We ran, eyes streaming, throat scorching, down side streets till he spotted a bar. We hurtled in, and he begged the bartender to give us as much milk as he could. We drank it. That was the antidote. Yes, indeed; politics stank.
Listen to Christopher Howse discussing Soho’s boozy golden age. Plus: hear Virginia Ironside, Oldie columnist, novelist and stand-up, talk about being a ‘career’ agony aunt, and her son, a member of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.
32 extra articles from Oldie blogs. We have a brilliant interview with the late Lord Carrington who served in Churchill’s C postwar government and was Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Crick visited him and his devoted dachshunds at his lovely 17thcentury manor house in the village of Bledlow. We also have a piece by Harry Mount on what Boris Johnson is really like. Harry worked with him for five years and edited The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson.
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