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On the other hand: Once America was more inclined to look for the best of itself in its leaders, to invest more faith and hope in them. Now, 20 years later, says Ralph Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts, a more realistic society may be better than its leaders.
Chicago
Nothing is more theatrical than apocalypse, and the air that year was nervy with intimations of last days. Chicago was a masterpiece of the form.
The young men and women of the "movement," the antiwar and anti- Establishment young, had lost their voice in the political process. After Kennedy's death, Eugene McCarthy seemed to vanish from the moral horizon, even though he remained in the race. Hubert Humphrey had endured his long humiliation as Johnson's Vice President, and was the anointed one.
As the summer reached its climax, the Democrats and the forces of protest came to Chicago. For a long time the nation had been flirting with forms of gotterdammerung, with extremes of vocabulary and behavior and an appetite for violent resolution.
Chicago tore the wiring out of the Democratic Party. Wrote Todd Gitlin: "What exploded in Chicago that week was the product of pressures that had been building up for almost a decade." Traditional Democratic liberalism had exhausted itself over Viet Nam. The antiwar forces in the party, especially the young, had grown "radicalized," as they said, and pushed into new territories of recklessness and resolve. As much as any event in 1968, Chicago is an origin myth of the tribe. Grant Park, Lincoln Park, Michigan Avenue. Those were battle names. Chicago was an extravagant dramatization of America's war with itself. "The truth is that these were our children in the streets and the Chicago police beat them up," wrote Tom Wicker of the New York Times , after he watched Daley's cops wade into the scruffy, taunting, passionate young. The air was filthy with tear gas and Yippies' stink bombs and obscenities and a palpable, murderous rage. The American id thrashed up into view of the world. There were both gaiety and terror in the spectacle, and a sheer bizarre surprise.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the Yippies' brilliant impresarios, compiled a ridiculous mock agenda that the authorities took in earnest: the Yippies threatened to put LSD into the city's water supplies, to drug the delegates' food, to get "hyperpotent" male Yippies to seduce the delegates' wives, to paint cars to look like taxis and kidnap delegates to Wisconsin. The underground Express Times warned, "If you're going to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair" -- a sardonic echo of the sweet flower-child tune of the summer before ("If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair").
Chicago was mischief and political subversion on a grand scale. The demonstrators, under the gaze of television cameras, provoked Daley's police to rage. There were unarticulated class antagonisms at work -- many of the demonstrators being children of comparative affluence, the police coming from the city's blue-collar and ethnic neighborhoods. The adrenaline of that difference gave the clubs more force when the cops at last cut loose and went after the kids' ribs and skulls.