--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Not in the convention hall, but out in the streets. It's Today Explained.
--:-- [Sound effects: Ambiance of a city]
--:-- Noel King: Union Park is the starting point of this year's big protest against Israel's war in Gaza.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants]
--:-- Noelle King: Make no mistake. Joe Biden could turn off that tap of money and funding immediately. He could do it right now. And that he and Kamala Harris, they are responsible.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: This morning, the protest organizers were drawing this comparison to 1968. When the DNC was in Chicago in 68, a massive Vietnam War protest spiralled into violence when police attacked protesters.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants fade out]
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up, will 2024 be a repeat of 1968? Everybody's asking, so will we.
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--:-- Noelle King: Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
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--:-- Noelle King: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and of course, the perfect cold weather staples.
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--:-- Noelle King: So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, Your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
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--:-- Noelle King: From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look. Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- [Sound effects: Music continues]
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with historian and journalist Rick Pearlstein, who has spent much of his adult life chronicling American conservatives and examining the role that the 60s played in bringing them to power.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Growing up in the 1980s, Reagan land, you know, was kind of boring for me. And the melodrama of the 60s was absolutely galvanizing.
--:-- Noelle King: I couldn't believe how every day seemed to bring a new revolution. And so certainly I was fascinated by this idea of These kids sitting down in the streets and getting beaten within an inch of their lives by the cops and the whole pageant.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: All right, let's go back to the summer of 68. What was the backdrop to the convention in August of that year?
--:-- Noelle King: The backdrop nationally was that the Democratic Party was divided down the middle on the issue of the Vietnam War.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: The whole question is, I mean, what happens if you do win in North Vietnam? What happens if you do win in South Vietnam? What then? You're faced with the same problem.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: How are you going to find a popular government that's going to run the place? And have it turn into eventually a communist government. Is that your idea?
--:-- Noelle King: Well, that doesn't terrify me quite as much as it seems to terrify some other people.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Of course, it had been escalated by a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who believed he was continuing the wishes of, you know, the martyred president, John F. Kennedy.
--:-- Noelle King: I have today ordered to Vietnam the Air Mobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And, you know, a lot of people who are Democrats saw it as part of this great anti-communist crusade. And a lot of people saw it as imperialism, that, you know, basically we were interfering in another country's civil war.
--:-- Noelle King: My own personal position is that the war in Vietnam is unjust, unnecessary, and immoral. And I feel immoral participating in it.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: The idea that we had to get out was very, very prevalent on the left wing of the Democratic Party. And Lyndon Johnson decided he wasn't going to run for president.
--:-- Noelle King: I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: So by the time delegates arrived at the convention, Lyndon Johnson's loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was the nominee apparent.
--:-- Noelle King: And he had kind of been coerced almost into loyally supporting the war, even though he had grave reservations about it.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: I think that for the Democratic Party and convention to try to draw up military strategy and tactics is just a little bit beyond what the American people would expect of a political party and beyond its capacity or ability to do.
--:-- Noelle King: These are matters that must be left up to our commander in chief, to the officer.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And the question of whether he would be nominated or Eugene McCarthy was nominated was live in the air.
--:-- Noelle King: And it looked like Humphrey had it wired, but there was kind of a proxy fight in the form of a platform proposal that the Democratic Party go on the record to end the Vietnam War.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: My feeling is that should he accept it, it would go a long way towards assuring both his nomination and his election.
--:-- Noelle King: If he should decide to oppose the inclusion of a specific peace plank in the Democratic platform I think it would conceivably turn it into a real battle royal
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: Of course at the same time protesters from all over the country flooded in Members of the Youth International Party, yippies, they called themselves converged on Chicago.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social ills.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation, to draw attention from the convention to the streets.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: There's a separate Chicago context. Several months earlier that spring, there had been terrible riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
--:-- [Sound effects: News report plays]
--:-- Noelle King: Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: So there was dread and anticipation, not only within the convention hall, so it seemed, for the Democratic Party, and then outside the convention hall, what would happen when the city hosted, very reluctantly, Thousands of protesters who were much more radical than the kind of protesters we see now.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: They would talk about, you know, we want to overthrow society. You know, we want to overthrow capitalism.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: We are a people. We are all together. We are all under attack. America has decided to devour its youth.
--:-- Noelle King: We will resist. We will not participate in America's Children for Breakfast program. Fuck them.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And here everyone arrives, the city, which is run by this kind of almost oligarch, Mayor Richard J. Daley, who intended no disorder in his city that he was putting on display for the entire world.
--:-- Noelle King: They have no right to come in the city and tell us what they're going to do. We don't permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why would we permit anyone from out of the city to sleep in the park?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: We don't permit our own people to march at night, so why would we permit a lot of people going snake dances at night?
--:-- Noelle King: Disorder came anyway.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Tell me two things. What did Daly do to try to prevent disorder and how did it go so very wrong?
--:-- Noelle King: One of the things he did to try to prevent disorder was to kind of string along these two groups of protesters who wanted to come to the city by not granting them official permission to, A, sleep in a park, which was Lincoln Park.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And that was the intention of a group who identified themselves as hippies. They were led by a guy named Abbie Hoffman, the guy who, a year before, promised to levitate the Pentagon during a protest.
--:-- Noelle King: And when it gets about 300 feet in the air, it's going to start to vibrate. Slowly it bursts, and then a little quicker. And all the evil spirits are going to pour out.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And these were the people who wanted to, they would talk about fornicating in the park. They wanted to have a rock festival.
--:-- Noelle King: The idea was they represented this new youth identity that was revolutionary and was going to completely overthrow bourgeois propriety.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And another group of people wanted to parade to the convention hall, and they were much more kind of conventionally political.
--:-- Noelle King: But a lot of them were kind of radical revolutionaries and the kind of people who would, you know, hoist flags of the enemy in Vietnam, the Viet Cong.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: We say that if the government of the United States does not stop the war, we intend to stop the government of the United States.
--:-- Noelle King: And Daley put his foot down and said, these long-haired miscreants aren't going to get the time of day in our city, which only ratcheted up the tensions and made them even more determined.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: We'll sleep in the park even if you don't want us to. We'll march to the convention hall even if you don't want us to. We'll put our bodies on the line in both cases.
--:-- Noelle King: And it'll be like a football game. Cops versus the yippies on the National Guard or whoever.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And people will be watching that on TV and they'll say, We don't want to watch that boring speech stuff. We want to watch the Rose Bowl out there.
--:-- Noelle King: When did the violence begin? Immediately.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: And now moving off down Balboa Street, and the crowd is running, and the police are chasing them into Jackson, into Grant Park.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: There is an odor of tear gas still left in the air here. From tear gas shells that have been going off periodically for the last hours.
--:-- Noelle King: So you basically had this kind of enveloping dread leading up to the last day of convention, even as the debates over the platform are leading to actual violence inside the convention hall.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: What is your name, sir?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: I mean, Manhattan. And what is your name, sir?
--:-- [Sound effects: Protest chants continue]
--:-- Noelle King: Take your hands off of me. Unless you intend to arrest me, don't push me, please.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: But Walters, you can see. We got bodily pushed out of the way.
--:-- Noelle King: This is the kind of thing that's been going on outside the hall. This is the first time we've had it happen inside the hall.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: I'm sorry to be out of breath, but somebody belted me in his stomach doing that.
--:-- Noelle King: What happened?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: So you had kind of these miniature civil wars breaking out kind of inside among the, you know, the actual credential delegates and outside among protesters and police.
--:-- Noelle King: What was going on inside the convention and how rowdy did it actually get?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: The most dramatic thing that happened inside the convention hall to increase the tension is that that Thursday night, when students who were denied the right to march to the convention hall sat down right in front of that famous hotel, and police just started wading into the crowd and just bashing people on the head.
--:-- Noelle King: Go ahead, come on, go it, officer.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And word got into the convention hall that that was what was happening.
--:-- Noelle King: They were doing the final vote for who would get nominated as president, and there was a third candidate who was kind of running almost as kind of like a symbolic run.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: It was a guy named George McGovern, who later won the nomination in 1972, but he was really the most anti of all the candidates.
--:-- Noelle King: We ought to try to work out a coalition government now if the South Vietnamese continue to veto it we ought to put them on notice that we going to limit our commitment that we're going to reduce it.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And he was nominated by a liberal senator from Connecticut named Abraham Ribicoff.
--:-- Noelle King: And Ribicoff said if George McGovern was the president of the United States, We wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And when he said that, this, you know, kind of corpulent, you know, cigar-chomping political boss, Mayor Daley, shouted something that you could not hear.
--:-- Noelle King: And later, lip readers famously said that he had said something about how Senator Ribicoff was a no-good Jew bastard.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And that was it. You know, the battle was on.
--:-- Noelle King: We'll be back with Rick Perlstein in just a minute.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: I choose not simply to run for president. I seek.
--:-- Noelle King: Today, explain.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Rick Pearlstein, author of Nixonland and Reaganland.
--:-- Noelle King: When we left off, you said on Thursday night of the 68 convention, there was fighting inside the hall. Some slurs were thrown about. What was going on outside the convention center?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: So Michigan Avenue is, you know, the most famous street in Chicago, the Magnificent Mile.
--:-- Noelle King: On the east side of the street is Grant Park, which is this kind of gorgeous 19th century Paris-style park.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And the marchers mass for their march several miles down in the convention hall.
--:-- Noelle King: The police are standing in the street in their way.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: So what they do is the protesters kind of do a military flanking maneuver.
--:-- Noelle King: They walk into the park and try and kind of walk around the policemen.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And the policeman kind of chased them back across the street.
--:-- Noelle King: Vice President Humphrey at his 29th floor room got some of the gas which came up there.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: He choked and sneezed a bit. He said he had itched and took a shower and made a statement saying that he was dismayed by the outbreak.
--:-- Noelle King: And what happens next is the students sat down, did a sit-in strike basically blocking the street right in front of the TV cameras.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And hundreds of white-helmeted Chicago police just methodically started taking their nightsticks and beating these seated protesters.
--:-- Noelle King: The interesting thing about this is that almost universally the bystanders have been horror-stricken, apparently, by this action of the police.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Police wagons lined up, and they would grab young people by the scruff of their neck, throw them into police wagons.
--:-- Noelle King: These are scenes similar to those we saw earlier on videotape of the demonstrators being hustled, which is the kindest word for it, into the police wagons.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And then when there were enough for them to be full, they would throw a tear gas canister inside, and then they would smack the door closed.
--:-- Noelle King: And this was all on TV. It was on all three channels and there was this terrible backlash.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: The majority of the country very much believed that the Chicago police were on the right, the protesters were in the wrong and that was the very backlash against the forces of civil rights and anti-war activism and cultural shifts and all that stuff that Richard Nixon was running for president on as the Republican candidate.
--:-- Noelle King: It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change.
--:-- Noelle King: But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.
--:-- Noelle King: And so could a person say that Richard Nixon, who ended up winning, ended up winning that year because of the way the events of the 1968 DNC played out in Chicago?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Yeah, I don't think so.
--:-- Noelle King: I think the main reason Richard Nixon won was because Hubert Humphrey, who had been kind of manipulated into supporting the Vietnam War that he had grave reservations about from Lyndon Johnson, who just demanded the most intense obeisance and loyalty on the part of his underlings, that he refused to denounce the Vietnam War.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: The American people are not going to stand for any kind of a peace arrangement or any kind of a tactical arrangement relating to the peace discussion that leaves our men in South Vietnam at the mercy of the enemy.
--:-- Noelle King: So I think that was the biggest cause for the Democrats' loss was not, you know, that the protesters, it was kind of like not listening to the protesters.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And the big message that he took to the country in his TV commercials was that the first civil right of all Americans, quote unquote, was to be safe in their own homes.
--:-- Noelle King: So he was campaigning against skyrocketing violent crime rates.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: He was campaigning with commercials that showed these violent protests and, of course, were blaming the protesters for them.
--:-- Noelle King: And generally speaking that if he was elected president he would bring law and order to the White House as opposed to the Democrats who could even control their convention
--:-- Noelle King: We decided to do this episode about the 68 convention months ago even before this year convention seemed exciting.
--:-- Noelle King: Because people kept saying, you know, you keep reading op-eds, oh, the DNC is in Chicago, 2024 is like 1968.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: How much do you believe that to be true?
--:-- Noelle King: And what is causing people to make that comparison?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: It's so interesting. You know, I know a ton about the 1968 convention.
--:-- Noelle King: And in my book, I kind of document it hour by hour and sometimes minute by minute.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And I'm, of course, fascinated by what will happen in politics in 2024.
--:-- Noelle King: And, you know, until I started getting these calls from folks like you, it never occurred to me to understand the 2024 convention in my city, Chicago, by going back to what I studied and wrote in 1968.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: To me, everything from how presidents get chosen now compared to them, how protests in the street work now compared to then, how politicians respond to protests, how the entire apparatus of law enforcement and security work compared to them, how Chicago works compared to them are just so different.
--:-- Noelle King: Right now, the biggest priority on the agenda is the build out of the DNC security perimeter.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Once the perimeter is in place, no cars or foot traffic will be allowed inside without proper clearance.
--:-- Noelle King: You've been to conventions. You know that like a quarter mile away from the arena, there's going to be iron fences.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And you can't get anywhere past those iron fences without going through metal detectors.
--:-- Noelle King: And, you know, protests themselves, you know, one of the things that made 1968 so shocking and so galvanizing with the public was this was a new thing.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: People hadn't seen it before. The idea that you could go into a convention and you didn't know whether the presidential candidate was going to be Hubert Humphrey or Eugene McCarthy, maybe there was a glimmer of possibility that might have happened before the Democratic Party lined up behind Kamala Harris.
--:-- Noelle King: But part of what the protesters were trying to do was influence how the convention would come out.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And after 1968, they completely changed how presidential candidates were chosen.
--:-- Noelle King: They went to a primary system where they used to have these kind of backroom kind of caucus systems.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And finally, you know, no one really cares about these conventions.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, there's just this kind of like, you know, they show up for a night on TV and people watch the speeches.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: And, you know, the idea that this could be this kind of cataclysmic, galvanizing event that, you know, don't forget the slogan of the protesters as they were getting beat up.
--:-- Noelle King: Their chant was the whole world is watching, right?
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Well, the whole world won't be watching.
--:-- Noelle King: So, you know, I'm always saying, you know, history is a process. It's not parallels.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: We can't have 1968 again because we already had 1968.
--:-- Noelle King: It completely shaped the politics we have now and the way the Republican Party does business.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: But because we're that far down the road, a lot of the things that happened in 1968 are inconceivable in 2024.
--:-- Noelle King: It doesn't mean that interesting and even melodramatic and even possibly violent things might not happen in 2024.
--:-- Rick Perlstein: Those will happen for 2024 reasons.
--:-- Noelle King: Those won't happen for 1968 reasons.
--:-- Noelle King: Historian Rick Perlstein.
--:-- Noelle King: All right. So the comparison between today and 68 isn't exactly one to one.
--:-- Noelle King: But the echoes of that year are certainly alive here in Chicago.
--:-- Noelle King: In fact, two young activists I talked to even mirrored the language of 68.
--:-- Noelle King: They told me the whole world is watching.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, the United States is usually on the news everywhere in the world.
--:-- Noelle King: But this is a big deal, right? It's a Democratic National Convention.
--:-- Noelle King: She's going to nominate their presidential candidate.
--:-- Noelle King: There's a lot of momentum, of course, with the Kamala Harris announcement to challenge Trump and to defeat Trump.
--:-- Noelle King: So the world is all affected by the policies of the United States.
--:-- Noelle King: The world looks to the United States to put a stop to the genocide.
--:-- Noelle King: People want a stop to this.
--:-- Noelle King: They've derailed it. They've slowed it down.
--:-- Noelle King: We're going to achieve a ceasefire.
--:-- Noelle King: We're going to achieve a ceasefire.
--:-- Noelle King: Ten months of saying the same thing.
--:-- Noelle King: We don't want no more talks. We want action.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, it's how many more need to die for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put an end to this.
--:-- Noelle King: They can put an end to this in one phone call.
--:-- Noelle King: What these activists are not expecting is a repeat of the violence.
--:-- Noelle King: Our marshals have been preparing for this.
--:-- Noelle King: Our communities keep us safe.
--:-- Noelle King: We keep each other safe.
--:-- Noelle King: And we're going to continue to be out here all day rallying in sight and sound of the DNC to make the demands heard that we need to end U.S. aid to Israel immediately and that humanitarian aid needs to go into Gaza.
--:-- Noelle King: And we are going to continue fighting for the liberation of Palestine until all of historic Palestine is liberated.
--:-- Noelle King: That was Hussam Marajda and Nazik Sankari of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Chicago chapter.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and edited by Miranda Kendi.
--:-- Noelle King: It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristen's daughter.
--:-- Noelle King: Thanks to Amina El-Sadi in Washington.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King in Chicago.
--:-- Noelle King: Today Explained will be reporting from the DNC all this week.
--:-- Noelle King: Thank you.
