I love the smell of tear gas in the morning.
That is a line, in a dark sense of humor, I used to repeat to myself following the anti-Vietnam War riots at the Democrat Party convention in Chicago in 1968.
This is a Patriot’s Day lookback at that convention.
Tear gas fumes were everywhere during the weeklong, nightmarish clashes between the mobilized anti-Vietnam war demonstrators and the Chicago cops. The smell and fumes were in your clothes, in your hair, in the hotel lobby and in the hotel room you woke up in.
While this event will be the twelfth time the party will meet in Chicago, none of the gatherings were or will be as memorable as 1968.
The 1968 Chicago convention was marked by a major anti-Vietnam War protest, demonstrations and riots that the tough and equally riotous Chicago cops beat back with tear gas and long clubs.
The line, in a flashback, came back to me upon hearing that the Democrats will return to Chicago in August to re-nominate President Joe Biden for a second term—if he doesn’t forget he’s running, that is.
My play on the line came from the surreal anti-Vietnam war movie “Apocalypse Now.” It is uttered by crazed Lt Col Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) upon the hellish napalm bombing of the nearby Viet Cong and the NVA.
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” the mad colonel says.
While the movie was released later, in 1979, the line helps describe the unreal weirdness of what took place in the streets of Chicago back then.
It looked as though the apocalypse had descended upon America.
The thousands of protestors wanted to shut the convention down, such was their hatred toward President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and their despised ongoing Vietnam War policy.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, the last of the old-time big city bosses was determined to shut the protesters down instead. And he did, after authorities deployed 12,000 cops, 1,000 agents from the FBI and CIA, as well as 6,000 US. Army troops.
But it was a close and bloody thing. He needed a ton of tear gas to do it. Heads were broken with clubs and rifle butts; arrests were made, and injuries mounted.
Demonstrators—the so-called long-haired radical Hippies and Yippies– threw rocks and fireworks at the cops along with bags filled with urine and feces. Tear gas was everywhere.
They chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
The nightly mayhem was shown on television and people were appalled.
I was one of five Boston Herald reporters assigned to cover the convention.
Since I was the lowest member of the totem pole, I was given the menial job of covering what was expected to be a minor demonstration.
It turned out to be the biggest anti-war riot of the Sixties, a decade noted for scores of big city anti-war demonstrations. It was a bloody event that rocked the country and wrecked Humphrey and the Democrat Party.
I had been in Vietnam months earlier, but I saw more hand-to-hand violence between demonstrators and the cops in Chicago than I did in Vietnam. Chicago was more dangerous than Saigon.
Poor Humphrey. He was your average liberal Democrat who hoped to succeed Johnson, who was not running for-reelection. But he was stuck with Johnson’s loser of a Vietnam war policy.
Humphrey won the nomination, but he needed help.
So, he vainly attempted to persuade then pre-Chappaquiddick Sen. Ted Kennedy to be his running mate.
Kennedy, in mourning at Cape Cod following the June 6 assassination of his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate, turned him down. Humphrey ended up with Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie.
Humphrey and Muskie were defeated by Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the 1968 election.
Had Kennedy accepted and Humphrey and Kennedy been elected, as likely, Kennedy would have been protected by the Secret Service. Chappaquiddick and the death of poor Mary Jo Kopechne in July 1969 would never have happened.
I love the smell of tear gas in the morning.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.
