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It was a media event with flowing blood and absurdist overtones. The aging Beat poet Allen Ginsberg chanted om in Lincoln Park. Jean Genet, the French homosexual playwright and ex-convict, wrote titillated prose about how attractive and powerful the cops' thighs were. Abbie Hoffman developed a cordial relationship with the plainclothes policemen assigned to tail him everywhere, but he shook them sometimes and spirited around town in a score of disguises.
The war in the streets raged on, and in the hall Ribicoff reprimanded Daley in a tableau that symbolized the end of the rule of the back room and the boss in the Democratic Party. From that day on, the Democratic Party, carrying with it the G.O.P., would struggle to institutionalize the "open democracy" that was one of the ideals of 1968. Each step of the way, with each new reform and primary rule, the process would become messier and more unwieldy. As a result, the party leaders chosen by the back-room bosses, people like John Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, were succeeded by contenders like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter, who could best catch the whims of the moment and spend the most time courting voters in the states with early primaries.
The antiwar Democrats' distaste for Hubert Humphrey seemed somehow more virulent than their feelings about Richard Nixon, possibly because Humphrey for so long had served the hated warmaker Lyndon Johnson. Nixon, who had been nominated in Miami three weeks before Chicago, somehow did not figure in the demonology just then. He was off the radar. Miami was sedate compared with Chicago, but almost anything this side of a combat zone would have been. Nixon surprised the convention by choosing a vice-presidential running mate named Spiro Agnew, the Governor of Maryland who had drawn some attention in the spring by his tough dealing with rioters after the King assassination.
The Moon
Nineteen sixty-eight had a kind of Aristotelian logic, the proportions of tragedy. Hope begot death, revolution begot counterrevolution.
In America the great uprising on the political and cultural left was answered by the rising of George Wallace's army on the right. Wallace, truculent and charismatic in a darkling way, ran a third-party campaign that attracted a large following among blue-collar workers, ethnics and Middle Americans who felt abandoned by their own country and its politics. There was poetry, if not logic, in the fact that many voters who would have supported Robert Kennedy switched to Wallace after Kennedy's death. Kennedy and Wallace, so different in most ways, drew from the same deep pools of passion and longing for a voice.
In Czechoslovakia during the spring, the Communist Party led by Alexander Dubcek undertook reforms that now seem a distant forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost -- efforts to humanize the socialist structure, to encourage greater individual discretion. Euphoria bloomed in the "Prague Spring." But the Soviets could not tolerate that measure of autonomy in their satellite, any more than they could abide Hungary in 1956 or, later, Poland in 1981. In August 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and crushed the hope. Not long after, Dubcek ended up working obscurely for the Forestry Administration in western Slovakia.