If you were young and on fire and in anguish over the war in Vietnam, was there anyplace to be in late August of 1968 but the streets of Chicago?
The trouble with the standard Chicago ’68 story is its limited cast of characters. No one associates Bill Singer with Chicago 1968. Or James Houlihan, Grace Barry, or, for that matter, Edward Burke.
Actually getting him nominated wasn’t likely, but maybe, against the fierce opposition of the loyalists to Lyndon Johnson and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey, they could get the convention to adopt their so-called peace plank repudiating the war. The McGovernites wanted America to get out of Vietnam and go back to reforming society, and while Bobby Kennedy lived that agenda had seemed electable. “I had friends by this time who had been killed in Vietnam,” says McLennon, who that summer was a college student two years out of the army. “I felt enormous guilt. Robert Kennedy was the great hope for me.”
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The New York Times said “The Battle Hymn” rolled on and on, beyond the point when the “hard-core” Texas and Illinois delegations sat down and shut up, beyond the point when “the Daley claque in the hall’s south gallery” chanting “We love Daley” gave out. Eventually a Chicago alderman, Ralph Metcalfe, asked for a moment of silence in Kennedy’s memory, and then, says McLennon, many of the McGovern people walked out.
Like Houlihan, Grace Barry grew up in the 19th Ward, where her dad was a precinct captain. She remembers assigning a nephew to run messages between the Blackstone and convention headquarters in the Hilton—”He was 12 years old. I figured the crazy people wouldn’t go after him.” The streets outside the two hotels—”all smoky and awful.” The frantic search for Sorensen’s speech—she says she’s the one who found it.
Obama is Schuker’s answer to disaffected friends from 1968 who think people like herself who stayed in politics “took the Kool-Aid.” She says, “There has to be buy-in at some point”—some commitment to the political process—”or else the system will never totally change.”
