Marvin Mandel was chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party in the late summer of 1968, four months away from becoming the Free State governor after Spiro Agnew was elected vice president of the United States on the Nixon ticket.
What he saw in and around the Democratic National Convention that year in Chicago appalled the then Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates.
“I wasn’t shocked by the action of the police, I was shocked by the protesters — I have never seen such conduct in my life,” said Mandel, 88, and an Annapolis attorney and lobbyist.
“You had people throwing things out of hotel windows — that’s not [traditional American] protest. It was a disaster area.”
Lou Panos was a 43-year-old columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1968, when the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago.
Police clubbed thousands of anti-war protesters, vice president Hubert H. Humphrey won the nomination while Lyndon Johnson stayed home, and Paul “Bear” Bryant, football coach at the University of Alabama, received 1.5 delegate votes for president of the United States.
“The day after the cops beat up the long-haired and bearded kids — some of them journalists — I happened to see a cop I had become friendly with,” Panos said.
“When I asked him why they [had beaten] the young people, he said: ‘Tell ‘em to get a haircut.’ ”
An American history buff named Presagio was a Chicago police officer in 1968 and helped clear Lincoln and Grant parks of troublemakers.
Now a grandfather retired in the Windy City, he has come to see the Vietnam War as a costly mistake, though his attitude toward the protesters who attempted to derail the convention has not mellowed.
“They were throwing bags of urine and [excrement] at us,” said Presagio, who did not want to use his full name.
“They kept pushing at the cops hoping for a confrontation. Eventually, they succeeded.”
The bloody confrontation — which then-Illinois Gov. Daniel Walker called a “police riot” — injured about 100 demonstrators as well as 100 or so of the 12,000 police officers assigned to the streets. More than 500 people were arrested.
“In some cases,” said Presagio, “a lot of cops were just as nervous facing the hostile crowd as the hippies were facing blue-helmeted cops slapping [riot] batons in the palm of their hands.
“But when they baited us, we hit hard. All the papers and TV showed were hippies getting dragged, punched, pummeled. It was pretty bad.”
This past week, in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the convention, the Chicago Historical Society invited witnesses to record their memories through the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History.
Of his hometown on the shores of Lake Michigan, Terkel — now 96 — said just before the ‘68 convention: “If the vitality is more vital, the banality is more banal. Everything is exaggerated” in Chicago.
If Mandel saw the convention as a civic disgrace — a free-for-all he believes cost Humphrey the election — Panos sees it the other way.
“Anyone who questioned Vietnam admired what these young people were doing” — and carries a particular convention memory that still makes him chuckle.
It seems that a Talbot County delegate named Thomas Lowe couldn’t stay for the entire convention, and when he asked his hotel for a refund, they refused.
“Now Tom wasn’t exactly [liberal] but he did have a sense of humor,” Panos said. “When the hotel wouldn’t reimburse him, he took the key across the street to some of the demonstrators in the park and said, ‘Here, stay in my room — it’s paid for.’ ”
