THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 26, 1996 TAG: 9608260039
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: 92 lines
The national political conventions have become boring and predictable, or so goes the modern-day buzz.
That's no distress to the people who remember them as brutal, dangerous and terrifying.
The Democratic Party today begins its election-year delivery of prime-time politics to a national audience remarkably unimpressed by the quadrennial spectacle.
For a handful of the Virginians in town this week for the four-day formality, however, even outright tedium would be preferable to the memories of convention brutality and violence that this skyline city evokes.
All doubt it could happen again. The Chicago cauldron of 1968 boiled over because of a unique political, historical and generational potion spiked with two assassinations and the Vietnam War.
Yet Virginia veterans of that Democratic National Convention 28 years ago, interviewed in Chicago over the weekend, say the political rallies are still the times when the nation takes a hard look at where it is, and where it's going.
One year, that process might be boring and predictable. In 1968, the country discovered a festering disease.
What the world saw then contributed to Hubert Humphrey's defeat at the polls two months later. It exposed the back-room dealing of the presidential nomination process - a system that nominated Humphrey and backed a platform plank to keep U.S. troops in Vietnam even though a majority of the primary voters had opted for candidates opposed to the war.
``We were basically caught up in a riot,'' remembered Ray Colley, an Alexandria delegate who attended as a party worker in 1968. ``It was truly a tragic time for the country.''
The memories Alan Diamonstein brought home from Chicago that summer were supposed to have been of city streets lined with flag-waving children. Whenever the Newport News delegate hopped the bus to the convention hall, he traveled a pre-arranged route decorated with a red, white and blue frenzy.
Then a Colorado delegate with a portable television showed him the images of anger and brutality that weren't breaking through the police's protective shield.
A state delegate, then serving his first term, Diamonstein hid his Hubert Humphrey credentials in a breast pocket and went to Chicago's Grant Park to see for himself.
``The extent of it was so all-encompassing, so terribly frightening,'' Diamonstein remembered, relaxing in Chicago Sunday morning, preparing for his sixth convention.
He remembered a fresh-faced National Guardsman, probably just a few summer months out of high school, standing watch with a rifle while the protests simmered around him. A demonstrator kept wiggling a small branch in the young man's face, daring him to make a move.
``His hand and his knuckles were just white, he was squeezing the stock so hard. His face was so tense and his arms were shaking like he was straining to hold something back,'' Diamonstein said.
``Finally, whaack!! He hit him with the butt of that rifle,'' Diamonstein said. Then he drew a line from ear to chin, tracing the bloody cut left on the protester's face. ``The tension, the degree of hatred was so frightening, I thought it was going to just boil over. We knew we had to get away from there.
``I hope I never again get caught between two political ideologies so violently opposite to one another,'' he said.
Sue Wrenn, chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, was a Eugene McCarthy supporter, working the convention as a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Democratic Party. She was fresh from a Peace Corps assignment in Thailand, where she developed a disgust for the Vietnam War that would later take her to rallies and Washington protests - all of them peaceful.
In Chicago one night, she went to the party headquarters in the Conrad Hilton, overlooking Grant Park.
``Like most people, I wanted to go to the headquarters to see who in the national media was there - Walter Cronkite, or someone like that. But when I got there, it was a mess. I didn't want to get near any of it,'' Wrenn said.
``I went into the McCarthy suites, and they were bringing in injured protesters - people who'd been beaten up but weren't so bad that they had to go to hospitals right away.
``It was a wrenching time, and one that was very disturbing to me and to much of the country. I think the fabric of our society was frayed.''
It was undoubtedly the most significant political convention of the post-World War II period,'' says Robert Loevy, political science professor at Colorado College.
Not only because of the blood spilled on Michigan Avenue.
Not only because of the tear gas that chased off demonstrators and wafted into Humphrey's 25th-floor hotel suite.
As a result of the 1968 convention, the nation changed the way it nominates its presidential candidates, said Austin Ranney, a University of California-Berkeley political science professor emeritus. ``No gathering of party bosses is ever going to pick a presidential candidate again.'' MEMO: Knight-Ridder News Service contributed to this report.
KEYWORDS: DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION 1996 by CNB