I am feeling old tonight

I graduated from high school in 1968. The summer of that cataclysmic year I- a lifelong Republican - did the unthinkable: I worked for the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. My study of the history of the Vietnam conflict had convinced me that our involvement there was a serious mistake, and I put my conviction into action during the defining year of the most turbulent decade in my lifetime.

The experience culminated with my stint as a messenger for the McCarthy campaign during the Democratic National Convention in my home town, Chicago. The telephone repairmen were on strike, and I spent the week running messages back and forth between the convention hotels on Michigan Avenue.

What happened on nomination night, of course, is history. Taunted beyond the point of endurance by the "Yippies" and various other New Left creatures, the Chicago Police threw their duty- and the law- to the winds, and simply started busting heads. I thought the Pick Congress hotel was on fire when my eyes started smarting that night. But I soon learned that my tears were caused by tear gas.

The hotel manager refused to open its locked doors to admit a choking, scarlet-faced, elderly lady of obvious means who had gassed while trying to make her way home from a day of shopping. A McCarthy staffer came downstairs, and screamed at the manager until the lady was let in to receive first aid. Meanwhile, my fellow messengers started arriving back at the Congress with bloodied heads and various other wounds inflicted by promiscuous night sticks. Nobody will ever tell me that only those who deserved it were beaten bloody by the police that night. And while I have never lacked sympathy for the cops, who endured the unendurable that week (a family friend was one of them on duty on Michigan Avenue that night; I'd exchanged pleasantries with him earlier that day), I feel about the police who were on Michigan Avenue that night- at least the majority, who ran amok- pretty much the way I feel about impoverished kids who turn to crime: the contributing circumstances need to be borne in mind, but still do not excuse the breaking of the law. And assault and battery against innocent bystanders is against the law, even if one wears a badge- and even if the intended targets are the not-so-innocent among them. That elderly lady was obviously no Yippee agitator, and neither were my well-dressed, short haired, well-behaved "Clean for Gene" colleagues.

Bed sheets were torn apart to use as bandages, and one of our telephones were employed to put in emergency calls to a doctor in the Connecticut delegation on the convention floor. The scene was surreal. We took refuge in the hospitality suite upstairs, away from the tear gas that had permeated the lobby, and watched on the television as a scene unfolded that was taking place literally outside the hotel's doorway at Michigan and Balbo: the people I'd been raised to think of as my protectors of last resort run amok as their targets- innocent and guilty alike- chanted, "The whole world is watching!"

When the convention had adjourned for the night, and things calmed down, I walked over to the Conrad Hilton, the convention's headquarters hotel. My eyes still stung, and a kind of fog hung over the familiar street, eerily illuminated by kleig lights set up by the National Guardsmen who had relieved the police. It was like a scene from the middle of a war, and to witness it in the familiar surroundings of South Michigan Avenue and Grant Park was an experience so beyond belief that I found it hard to take it all in.

Like my colleagues, I was well-dressed. A suit, a tie, horn-rimmed classes and close-cropped hair combined with the badges I was wearing (none of them really official; they just were an attempt to get the message across to anyone disposed to challenge us that week that we were, indeed, there pursuing legitimate business) got me past the police line (which I only noticed as I crossed it) and into the Hilton. Interestingly, I learned later that Abigail McCarthy herself- the candidate's wife- had tried to get through that door not long before, and had failed. But for some reason, the few remaining police didn't say a word as I walked right past them.

The fog hung over the elegant surroundings of the Hilton lobby, too. So did the aroma of rotten eggs; somebody had set off a stink bomb. I left quickly.

My memories of the rest of the evening are sketchy. I do remember a brief conversation a little later in an elevator over at the Sheraton-Blackstone with a McGovern worker about what we would do next. He said that he planned to support Humphrey. "I'm a Democrat," he said. "Really?," I remember replying. "I'm an American, myself."

I remember how disenfranchised I felt that night, and during the weeks thereafter. I got involved in a Senate campaign during my first quarter at River Forest that September. Our candidate- the late Bill Clark, then Illinois' attorney general and subsequently a member of its Supreme Court- gave old Ev Dirksen the biggest scare of his Senate career, but came up short. I ended up rooting for Humphrey on election night after all, but he, of course, did no better.

Gene McCarthy died today. He inspired me and many of my generation to believe that there was something we could do to affect the course of our nation. He gave at least some members of a generation tempted to nihilism an alternative, a reason to believe that it was possible after all, in the cliche of the era, to "work within the system."

In many ways, he was something of a flake; despite agreeing with him on Vietnam, there was little other in the way of foreign policy where we had much in common, as it turned out. The man who said in initiating his challenge of President Johnson in 1968 that he was merely "willing to be President" (thereby infuriating the few professional politicians in his corner) ended up so addicted to the experience of running for the White House that he did it five times, becoming progressively less and less relevant with every race. He ended his days in a nursing home, and his death was overshadowed in the headlines by that of comedian Richard Pryor.

But whatever one thinks of his politics, he was an icon of my generation, a man who represented an era. He is also a significant figure from my own personal past, even though we never met. I am saddened by his death, as little as I agreed with him in the last several decades.

And I'm feeling really, really old tonight. It's as if the last Beatle had died.