Why the Whole World Saw It

The Story of Why the Battle of Michigan Avenue Interrupted the Coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention

Dean Blobaum
23 min readJul 14, 2022
August 28, The Battle of Michigan Avenue, police and protestors

The media doesn’t make the news, it just makes the newscast. Which is, of course, of great consequence. On August 28, 1968, tens of millions of people watching the primetime television news coverage of the nominating speeches at the Democratic National Convention saw that coverage interrupted by scenes of mayhem on the streets of Chicago.

Television coverage showed police officers swing nightsticks at the heads of antiwar protestors, some of whom swung fists back; police sprayed Mace and fired teargas; chants filled the air; reporters and bystanders were not spared; and numerous people were hauled off in police wagons.

Why were those scenes — so iconic in our shared experience of the late 1960s — so widely seen at all? Why was the convention coverage interrupted? How did that happen? That’s a story of a moment — a moment and its aftermath.

In 1968, print media was still the choice of people who wanted thorough stories of daily news events. Even television news people saw the role of the daily newscast as providing the pictures to go along with the day’s news. But for news events that television could cover live, as they happened, there was no substitute for the compelling immediacy and presence of television. Live broadcasts of history-making events and national tragedies (launches and flights of the Mercury 7 astronauts, the assassination and funeral of President John Kennedy) helped establish the credibility of TV news and its central role in American life.

Covering presidential nominating conventions was a quadrennial television spectacle since 1940; NBC broadcast the conventions that year to the relatively few sets in existence. In 1968 the three American television broadcast networks covered the convention, CBS, NBC, and ABC. As far as news programming went, CBS and NBC were equal rivals, but ABC had much weaker news programming and a substantially smaller news staff than CBS and NBC. ABC broadcast only ninety minutes of nightly convention coverage in 1968. The news operations of CBS and NBC each had approximately 700 staff in Chicago for the convention and provided gavel-to-gavel coverage — every minute of the convention plus additional time before the opening gavel and after the closing one.

The Technology of News in 1968

In our present time, when a live stream requires little more than a cellphone, the difficulties of live television are not obvious. But in 1968, lots of big equipment and crews were needed to capture the live immediacy sought by news operations. A studio for live broadcasting utilized several large cameras — the size of a large window air conditioner — on rolling tripods, each with a camera operator. The cameras were cabled to the control room where the director selected which camera to stream to the airwaves. Sound came to the control room separately, from fixed microphones or suspended boom mikes which could be rolled around the studio floor.

Such a setup could be in a location miles from the control room, but cable would need to be laid between the locations, or the live signal would need to be transmitted via microwave relay dishes within range of sight of each other.

A CBS film camera in Chicago on Monday, August 26, 1968.
Figure 1. A CBS film camera in Chicago on Monday, August 26, 1968.

If that was impractical, film and videotape cameras were used. Film cameras were relatively portable and shot 16-millimeter color or black-and-white film. Sound was captured separately on a portable tape recorder; Nagra recorders were the technology of choice. A 400-foot film roll — 11 minutes’ worth — would be shot, developed, and taken to the control room where it (and the sound tape) was transferred to videotape, edited, and fed into the broadcast stream. The developing process took about an hour.

Videotape was widely used by the three networks for television news in 1968, but the typical camera and recording equipment were much bulkier than film. A video camera might be mounted on a truck or a station wagon, with the video recorder and technicians inside the vehicle. Video (with audio) was captured on two-inch tape. Video reels were transported to the broadcast control room, edited, and then played back in the broadcast stream.

An ABC News video camera mounted on a truck in Chicago, August 1968.
Figure 2. An ABC News video camera mounted on a truck in Chicago, August 1968.

Video cameras that could be hand-carried by just one person had just come into use in 1967 and were still a rare sight in the summer of 1968. The Sony model was named the Portapack and at least one of those was in use, by a Japanese news team, on the streets in Chicago. Portapacks were scarce though; film and two-inch videotape were the dominate technologies for mobile reporters.

At the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami Beach at the end of July, the television networks had deployed a fantastic array of equipment. NBC and CBS each had thirty remote camera crews deployed in hotels, outside on the sidewalks, as well as at the airport. all cabled back to the central control room via telephone lines. The news director in the control room could seamlessly switch between live streams from dozens of cameras, giving the television audience the illusion that they were seeing everything and anything of importance that was happening anywhere in or out of the convention venue.

The Locations: The International Amphitheatre

The 1968 Democratic National Convention convened in the International Amphitheatre at 42nd and Halstead Streets in Chicago, a site adjacent to the Union Stock Yard, the meatpacking district that earned Chicago the sobriquet “hog butcher for the world.”

The International Amphitheatre, Chicago, August 1968. Exterior.
Figure 3 The International Amphitheatre, Chicago, August 1968.

The International Amphitheatre was built in 1934 to host the annual International Livestock Exposition. It also hosted basketball and hockey games, concerts, auto shows, and circuses. The Beatles had played in the International Amphitheatre in 1964 and 1966. Four national political conventions had been held in the Amphitheatre prior to 1968. In 1952, the Amphitheatre was the site of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, the first presidential nominating conventions to be broadcast live via television from coast to coast. The Amphitheatre also hosted the 1956 Democratic convention and the 1960 Republican convention.

The news anchors for CBS, NBC, and ABC had booths in the press boxes situated high above the convention floor. Multiple cameras in the booths captured the best angles on the stars: Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley.

Interior of the International Amphitheater during the 1968 Democratic National Convention
Figure 4. The International Amphitheater during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. NBC News booth above the floor; rostrum at left; pool camera center-right.

A pool camera for all networks was on scaffolding opposite the speaker’s rostrum for the standard frontal view of speeches and rollcalls. Each network had additional live cameras at fixed positions around the perimeter of the hall. News reporters roamed the convention floor and did live interviews with delegates. Occasionally these were shot with the network’s most portable live cameras — which still took three technicians to operate — but space was tight in the International Amphitheatre. More often audio for the interview would come via a wireless microphone, while the image was captured by one of the fixed cameras in tight zoom on the reporter and delegate. Live action at the podium with live reaction on the floor added drama to the telecast.

The images and sound from all the cameras and microphones were fed to control rooms housed in trailers behind the scenes on the ground level. The news director sat at a bank of monitors in the control room, choosing which camera or pre-recorded segment to feed into the broadcast stream. In addition to the American television networks, the European Broadcasting Union set up its control complex at the Amphitheatre and beamed color coverage around the world via satellite.

The Locations: The Conrad Hilton Hotel

It was a bit over five miles from the International Amphitheatre to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, which housed the headquarters of the Humphrey and McCarthy campaigns, and where many of the delegates had rooms. The TV networks wanted to set up fixed cameras on scaffolds outside the Hilton, so they could broadcast live the comings and goings of candidates and VIPs. More live cameras inside the hotel would allow live interviews of candidates and delegates and close coverage of meetings in the banquet rooms, like the politically fraught proceedings of the Platform and the Credentials committees.

The Conrad Hilton Hotel, Chicago, 1960s
Figure 5. The Conrad Hilton Hotel, Chicago, 1960s.

Across the street from the Hilton, on the east side of Michigan Avenue, lay Grant Park. The networks expected that Grant Park and the Hilton would be a focus of the antiwar protests that were planned for the week of the convention. The networks wanted live cameras in the park to afford another angle on any protest activity happening in front of the Hilton.

The Locations: Lincoln Park

Another kind of protest, the Yippie’s Festival of Life, was to take place in Lincoln Park, near the hippie enclave of Old Town, three miles north of Grant Park. The networks planned to deploy mobile cameras on the streets and in the parks of Chicago as needed, to cover whatever action happened there. Videotape cameras mounted on station wagons, vans, or trucks could maneuver around the city. Crews with handheld film cameras and sound equipment could be stationed at demonstration sites or mingle and move with marching crowds.

Yippie poster for free festival in Lincoln Park, Chicago, August 1968
Figure 6. Yippie poster for the Festival of Life in Lincoln Park, Chicago, August 25–30, 1968

The mobile units were called “the street team.” The street reporters in Chicago tended to be younger than the reporters in the convention hall. Street reporting placed more physical demands on the reporter, both in the weight of the equipment and the need to keep up with moving crowds.

Print and broadcast media expected there would be multiple antiwar protests, marches, and rallies. They also anticipated disturbances in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, some located not far from the Amphitheatre. During the Republican Convention, a riot broke out in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, just a few miles from the convention location on the island of Miami Beach.

Technical Difficulties

However, technical difficulties intervened in advance of the convention when the networks were still finalizing plans for Chicago. The telephone installers, who belonged to the Chicago local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union, were on strike and their contracts required that they install any and all cables and relay equipment inside and outside the Amphitheatre. The networks grumbled that the convention would need to be held elsewhere, and suggested that Miami was the logical alternative, since their equipment was already there.

Late in July, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley sat down with representatives from the IBEW and from Illinois Bell and worked out a deal. Despite the strike, all the necessary cabling and broadcast equipment would be installed at the Amphitheatre, but not the cables or microwave relay equipment necessary for a live feed between cameras at the downtown hotels and the control rooms in the Amphitheatre five miles away. Consequently, for the duration of the convention, no cameras outside the Amphitheatre would be able to produce a live feed.

The convention would stay in Chicago, but the networks were quite unhappy with this resolution; live television was the whole point of the networks’ presence. But Daley and other Democratic Party officials were apparently satisfied with a solution that restricted live television to the venue where their convention would take place. Live coverage of protests and riots was what they wanted to avoid.

The networks had no choice. The mobile street teams deployed around Chicago would have to use film and video and then deliver it to the Amphitheatre. At previous televised party conventions in Chicago (1952, 1956, and 1960) police vehicles ferried film and video from mobile locations to the Amphitheatre. In 1968, the police refused to allow press use of police transportation. Film and video would need to get to the Amphitheatre by private autos or motorcycle messengers.

Furthermore, the networks’ mobile units did not have the unrestricted movement they had anticipated. Chicago police issued regulations that limited where the mobile units could stop or park. Units were not allowed to stop or park in front of the Hilton; cameras were not permitted on the sidewalks in front of the Hilton, nor were they permitted to shoot out of any windows of the Hilton. Negotiations eventually allowed mobile units to park a block away, behind the hotel.

Nor were the networks permitted to set up scaffolding to support cameras near the Hilton. City officials claimed that such scaffolds would interfere with pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Fixed cameras would only be permitted on top of an existing Hilton canopy on the southwest corner of Balbo and Michigan.

This was consistent with Mayor Daley’s attitude toward the media. Well before the 1968 convention, Daley made no secret of his belief that the media contributed to the social ills of America. He especially objected to favorable coverage given to Rev. Martin Luther King when King came to Chicago determined to draw attention to racial disparities in what was widely called the most segregated city in the country. In September of 1966 he had said as much in a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association when they met in Chicago. “There seems to be little hesitation,” he said, singling out television especially, “in exposing to a vast public, splinter, frivolous and irresponsible individuals who, in many instances, represent groups so small in number as to be practically non-existent. And what is even more deplorable has been the publicity given to the haters, the kooks, and the psychotics” through its “crisis coverage” of the civil rights movement. The media, in Daley’s view, was part of the problem. “The media,” he said, “was used as a tool for a spectacle by a few dissidents.”

This was a view of the media regularly articulated by George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Bull Connor, segregationists from the South; when the mayor of a great Northern city said it, news people were put on notice.

The stage is set.

The Third Night of the Convention

Wednesday, August 28 was the third day of the convention, the day that presidential candidates would be nominated with occasionally stirring speeches from supporters, and the votes of the state delegations would determine the Democratic nominee for president. These were the most newsworthy moments of the entire convention. Wednesday was also the day scheduled for the only antiwar event with a legal permit; a rally organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the Mobe) was scheduled to start at 2 pm at the bandshell at the south end of Grant Park.

The Bandshell Rally

About 10,000 people showed up for the antiwar rally. At one point, a young man shimmied up the flagpole and tried to lower it to half-staff. A number of police — from the 600 that surrounded the rally — waded into the crowd to arrest the man. This angered the crowd and bottles, stones, and debris were thrown at the police. More police waded into the fray and numerous protestors were hit with batons or pushed to the ground. Mobe organizer Rennie Davis was beaten unconscious.

Police wade into the Grant Park Bandshell rally on August 28, 1968.
Figure 7. Police wade into the Grant Park Bandshell rally on August 28, 1968.

At the close of the rally more than half the crowd lined up to march five miles to the International Amphitheatre, intent on delivering their antiwar message to the very doors of the convention. The city had refused to issue a permit for the march and an hour of negotiation failed to resolve the impasse in the marchers’ favor. The march line broke up and many found their way across the park to Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton, blocking the street.

Television crews were in position on the Hilton canopy and several mobile video trucks were in the Balbo and Michigan intersection, caught in the midst of the crowd.

In about an hour, Deputy Police Superintendent James Rochford will order his police to clear the streets. Demonstrators, bystanders, and news people will be clubbed, beaten, Maced, and arrested. Some of them will fight back, throw bottles and rocks, and the attack will escalate. The melee will last about seventeen minutes.

Inside the International Amphitheatre

At the International Amphitheatre, the Democratic convention was on a ninety-minute dinner break. Before the break, the convention had concluded a divisive, emotionally draining afternoon session which debated and then defeated the so-called peace plank for the 1968 platform.

The war in Vietnam had fueled the 1968 contest for the Democratic nomination. Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy entered the race in November 1967 to serve as a vehicle for rising discontent with President Lyndon Johnson and his war. New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy joined McCarthy as a candidate on the antiwar side in March 1968 and two weeks later Johnson withdrew from the race.

Vice-president Hubert Humphrey entered the race and promised to continue Johnson’s war policies. After Kennedy’s assassination in June, South Dakota Senator George McGovern picked up the Kennedy standard to give Kennedy’s delegates their own peace candidate to nominate in Chicago.

McCarthy and Kennedy competed in the primaries and eighty percent of the voters in those primaries had backed one antiwar candidate or another. Under those circumstances, approval of an antiwar plank for the 1968 Democratic party platform might seem like a foregone conclusion. But political parties and their conventions were vastly different in 1968, and the peace plank went down to defeat on Wednesday afternoon by a vote of 1,567 to 1,041.

When the peace plank was defeated, the antiwar delegates began to sing “We Shall Overcome.” In response, and on Mayor Daley’s cue, the convention’s brass band began to play a medley of upbeat numbers: “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover,” “If You Know Susie,” and even, incongruously, the party’s unofficial theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The antiwar faction switched to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the Civil War lyrics of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!” competed with “Let’s sing a song of cheer again!”

By the time the evening session opened, and the delegates reconvened to nominate their presidential candidate, the antiwar faction of the party was in no mood to play nice. On top of everything else, a ninety-minute break was too short a time to find an adequate dinner anywhere near the convention hall.

In an NBC News trailer at the International Amphitheatre, NBC’s executive vice-president for news, Reuven Frank, was in charge of the control room for NBC’s coverage of the convention. Frank said that being in the control room was like being in a submarine, sealed off from the world, seeing only the images that flicker across the monitors. Frank faced a bank of monitors for the cameras in the Amphitheatre; near him sat Shad Northshield, who was the “outside control;” he attended to monitors for all other cameras. Normally, Northshield’s monitors would have continuously shown the feeds from live remote cameras at the hotels, but now they only sporadically came to life when Northshield reviewed film or tape that had been shot an hour or more earlier by the mobile teams in the streets.

A total of five candidates were to be placed in nomination in the convention’s evening session — McCarthy, McGovern, and Humphrey, as well as two favorite sons, North Carolina Governor Dan K. Moore and Rev. Channing Emery Phillips, an activist who had headed RFK’s presidential campaign in D.C. (Rev. Phillips thereby became the first African American nominated for president at a major party convention.) That meant five nominating speeches; and every nominating speech was followed by at least one seconding speech.

Reuven Frank, ensconced in the control room, felt obligated to broadcast each nominating speech in full, but during the seconding speeches and the enthusiastic applause, shouting, singing, and dancing in the aisles that delegates carried out to show their affection for their candidate, he would cut away for commentary from the anchor booth and to reports from the floor of the convention, where reporters interviewed key delegation leaders.

Even as the opening ceremonies and preliminary business of the evening session got underway, it became clear to Frank and other news people that some delegates — especially antiwar delegates — were distracted from the convention proceedings; some delegates were listening to radios and sharing reports amongst themselves. News of the violence at the Grant Park bandshell rally was apparently filtering into the convention, shaping and altering the mood of the antiwar delegates.

In his control room, Frank sat at his bank of monitors, picked the cameras to go live, and cued his reporters and the two NBC anchors, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. He also cued the commercial breaks; Gulf Oil was the primary sponsor of NBC News convention coverage. Frank whispered into the ears of Huntley and Brinkley and told floor reporters when to wrap up their interviews and which reporter or anchor to pass the coverage to.

There was no suspense and little drama about the outcome of the nomination process; Humphrey was assuredly going to be the nominee. An hour of the convention droned by.

Roll the Tape

During the first nomination of the night, that of favorite son Governor Moore, Frank’s assistant director, George Murray, jostled his elbow and said, “Shad wants to talk to you.” Shad Northshield — outside control — sat off to the left and behind a waist-high partition in the control room. But Frank was busy and ignored him, his eyes fixed on the monitors. Eventually, Frank glanced up.

Northshield was standing on a chair and had thrust the better part of his substantial frame across the partition, his head bobbing above Frank’s monitors. “Look at me, you son of a bitch!” Northshield bellowed.

Frank looked. On two monitors, Northshield was reviewing tape from reporters in downtown Chicago. The monitors flickered with people running and other people with blue helmets clubbing them. People were being dragged across the street to a police wagon, tossed inside. Heads were bleeding and medics were hovering over the injured. The monitors were a mess of confusion, chaos, and violence.

The scene at Michigan and Balbo, Chicago, August 28, 1968.
Figure 8. The scene at Michigan and Balbo, Chicago, August 28, 1968.

This was news, but was it news that should interrupt the nominating speeches of the convention? The protestors were not delegates, though some of them supported the antiwar candidates. But the protestors were there because the convention was taking place, were trying to march to the convention hall, and news of what was happening to them at the hands of the police was already agitating some of those in the convention hall.

Where does NBC go next? There had been protests and disturbances in the streets and parks of Chicago since Sunday night. The two previous nights of the convention, NBC had shown taped reports of protestors and police, but on those nights, it was shown only after the convention had been gaveled to a close for the day, after most of the audience had shut off their sets for the night. Should the business of the convention — the reason the audience had tuned in — be interrupted by these scenes from the streets?

Stay in the convention hall or go to the streets? Frank made his decision.

He rolled the tape, pre-empting the seconding speech for Governor Moore. Images of the violence in front of the Hilton, what would come to be called “The Battle of Michigan Avenue,” entered the broadcast stream and were seen by 90 million viewers across the country, close to half the U.S. population.

Just as television had brought the vivid scenes of the war in Vietnam into the American living room, Reuven Frank’s decision to roll the tape had brought another kind of battle into the space where families watched the news of the day.

NBC News reporter Aline Saarinen and her camera crew were on the Conrad Hilton canopy at the southwest corner of Balbo and Michigan. From that vantage point, their camera tracks lines of police four-deep marching east on Balbo, white-shirted commanders in front, blue-shirted officers behind. They reach the intersection where the protestors sit in the street. A police van pulls into view. The police officers and commanders wade into the crowd, clubbing, and hauling people to the van. A young man in a brown shirt takes a swing at a white-shirted officer, a blue-shirted officer swings at him with his club and chases him out of view. People are dragged or shoved toward the van. The police move south on Michigan; “the whole world is watching” is heard on the audio. “A scene of wild disorder, here outside the Conrad Hilton,” says the reporter on tape.

After the first report from Balbo and Michigan, Frank cut back and forth during the nominating speeches, from the live events inside the Amphitheatre to several recorded reports from the Chicago streets. In one tape, the white-uniformed medics of the Medical Committee for Human Rights can be seen assisting the injured. A protester carries a sign saying, “Suppression of Dissension is Fascism.” In another tape, troops from the National Guard march across the screen.

NBC was the first to interrupt their live coverage of the nominating speeches, but CBS would soon catch up. At 9 pm, Walter Cronkite, anchoring the CBS convention booth, read a brief report about the clash between police and protestors in front of the Hilton, After a commercial break, CBS rolled its own taped footage from Balbo and Michigan, pre-empting the beginning of Julian Bond’s seconding speech for Senator McCarthy. “The people of America,” Bond declared in his speech, “are watching us now, as indeed the whole world is watching us.”

Balbo and Michigan Enters the Convention

Small portable television sets were sprinkled around the floor of the convention; actress Shirley Maclaine, a delegate from California, had brought her own television into the hall. She and former NFL star Roosevelt Grier had watched the footage shot at Balbo and Michigan and were interviewed by CBS floor reporter Dan Rather about what they had seen. Maclaine called it “devastating” and Grier compared it to the Russian army rolling into Prague. Additional television monitors were available off the convention floor. Many delegates saw the scenes of violence for themselves, from the same means that viewers across the country saw them. Some delegates had brought in portable radios (“transistor radios” in the parlance of the time) and heard reports from the streets. Wire service stories about the events in the streets were also circulating on the floor.

The antiwar protestors had been denied their five-mile march to the Amphitheatre, but they virtually entered the hall anyway. The scenes from downtown Chicago, having interrupted the convention coverage, would now shape events inside the convention hall itself. The Amphitheatre became an extension of Balbo and Michigan. The violence of the street sharpened the rhetoric in the hall. The Amphitheatre became an echo chamber.

At 10 pm, the roll call for nominations landed on Colorado. Robert Maytag, chair of Colorado’s delegation, was at the microphone: “Colorado rises to a point of information. Is there any rule under which Mayor Daley can be compelled to suspend the police state terror being perpetrated this minute on kids in front of the Conrad Hilton?” Cheers began, followed by boos. Young people in the Colorado delegation flashed the peace sign.

Maytag was of course wrong in saying “this minute.” The violence at the Hilton had occurred nearly two hours earlier. The nature of non-live coverage is that the viewer only knows with certainty what happened at some point in the past, not any events that followed on. “This minute” could be imagined from taped coverage but could not be known. Was the violence still going on? Had Army troops been called out? Were protestors marching to the Amphitheatre? Were they even now outside the doors to the convention? Speculation and rumor had entered the hall, too.

During a seconding speech for the nomination of Humphrey, delivered by Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes, NBC cut away for another tape of the violence on Michigan Avenue. When NBC’s coverage of the convention resumed Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, had already begun his speech nominating George McGovern.

Ribicoff was speaking without a text and without notes. “As I look at the confusion in this hall,” he had begun, “and watch on television the turmoil and violence that is competing with this great convention for the attention of the American people, there is something else in my heart tonight and not the speech I was prepared to give.” Ribicoff was at the rostrum, but he was also speaking from the events at Balbo and Michigan.

His nominating speech was nonetheless fairly predictable and ordinary, all the way through an evocation of Camelot: “The youth of America rallied to the standards of men like George McGovern like they did to the standards of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.” Then, suddenly, he pivoted, and with Mayor Richard J. Daley seated about twenty feet in front of him in the Illinois delegation, he abruptly said, “With George McGovern as President we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”

An immediate wave of cheers in the crowd gave way to boos. For a moment the mayor sat impassively and stroked his chin. But only for a moment. He brushed aside a balloon that had drifted in front of his face. He got to his feet, gestured that Ribicoff should get off the rostrum — or be removed — yelled, cupped his hand, yelled again, and sat down, still shouting at Ribicoff. No microphone caught the words, but curses are easy to read. Taking their cue, the men around Daley were shouting too — George Dunne, Tom Keane, and Daley’s sons.

Figure 9. Ribicoff at rostrum, Daley in center, with hand cupped at mouth. (Chicago Tribune photo by David Klobucar.)

“How hard it is,” said Ribicoff, palms outstretched like a supplicant, looking squarely at Daley, who appears to say “son of a bitch,” to those around him. Then Ribicoff again, “How hard it is,” this time louder and like a playground taunt, “how hard it is to accept the truth,” nodding now and making a smug smile, egging Daley on. Cheers keep Ribicoff going. Daley shouted again, easy to hear it as you see it in his lips: “Motherfucker.”

“How hard it is to accept the truth,” Ribicoff repeated, turning now and speaking to the convention, while he wagged a finger in Daley’s direction, “How hard it is to accept the truth. When we know the problems facing our nation.”

Disorder in the Amphitheatre reached a peak.

Shortly after Ribicoff’s speech, a solid line of Andy Frain security, plainclothes security, and other men made a cordon around the whole of the Illinois delegation, cutting off any access to Mayor Daley. Rumor and speculation, perhaps.

Henceforth, each time the chair recognizes the delegation from Illinois, they are met with boos. Other nominating speeches mentioned the violence in downtown Chicago — speeches by Julian Bond, Philip Stern, and John Conyers — just not as personally and pointedly as Ribicoff’s rhetoric.

The flickering taped images continued to work on the delegates. When the roll call of states for the purpose of making nominations resumed, some delegates tried to leverage Robert’s Rules of Order to stop the convention proceedings.

When New Hampshire was called, the chair for the delegation makes a motion for a recess of the convention until the situation in downtown Chicago “can be clarified for the delegates.” Donald Peterson, chair of the delegation from Wisconsin, as the roll call was winding up, requested “a suspension of the rules for the purpose of adjournment for two weeks at 6pm to relocate the convention to another city.” Convention chairman Carl Albert shouted down Peterson, saying, “Wisconsin is not recognized for that purpose!”

When the gavel came down on the third day of the convention, Hubert Humphrey had won the nomination for president. But the nomination bore the scars of what happened at Balbo and Michigan — a bloodied and bandaged nomination. The riot on the street engendered the rhetoric in the convention hall, staining the nomination.

The list of things beyond the control of the Democratic administration was growing: Democrats couldn’t stop disorder in Vietnam, in the cities, in Chicago, or even on the floor of their own convention. Those minutes of violence on Michigan Avenue, seen around the world, now had to be explained away, leading to the trial on federal conspiracy charges for eight activists who had been in Chicago. The defendants proved to be more agile than the court and — just as Chicago ’68 became a model for how not to host a convention — the trial of the Chicago 8 became an enduring example of how not to conduct a trial.

The protestors out on the streets of Chicago had been chanting “The whole world is watching!” for several days. Until the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, it was more a hope than a statement of fact. When Frank decided to roll the tape and show the audience what was happening on those streets, the whole world actually did see it.

Sources: Reuven Frank’s memoir of his career in broadcast news, Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News, published in 1991, is the primary source for the story of how and why footage from Balbo and Michigan was interspersed with the events on the convention floor. Frank is also the source for some of the details of events inside the hall. The complete coverage of the third night of the convention by both NBC and CBS is available on Youtube and provided many more details of the reaction in the convention hall. In Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein narrates the NBC coverage of the third night. The technical aspects of television news broadcast circa 1968 come from many sources, primarily from the “Corridor of Mirrors: The Television Editorial Process, Chicago” by Thomas Whiteside, originally published in the Winter 1968/69 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review and reprinted on their website for the 60th anniversary of CJR. Other sources include Frank’s memoir, online histories of television stations, and That’s the Way It Is: A History of Television News in America by Charles L. Ponce de Leon. The technical and logistical difficulties the news organizations faced in Chicago are detailed in the Walker Report, the CJR article, biographies of Mayor Richard J. Daley, and contemporaneous newspaper reports. The opening scene and title sequence of Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film, Medium Cool, much of which was shot during the 1968 convention, depicts a film cameraman and his soundman shooting a story and then handing off the film to a motorcycle messenger for delivery to the studio.

Much more about the 1968 Democratic National Convention is at chicago68.com.

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Dean Blobaum
Dean Blobaum

Written by Dean Blobaum

I try to keep the history straight at chicago68.com

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