On to Chicago: The 1968 Democratic National Convention

"On to Chicago, and let's win there." - Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, June 4th, 1968 The year is 1968. America is tearing itself apart. Martin Luther King Jr. lies dead in Memphis. Cities have burned from coast to coast. Fifty thousand American boys are fighting and dying in the jungles of Vietnam, and the movement to bring them home has shaken the Democratic Party to its foundations. Tonight, in the kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel, a young man raises a revolver toward Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The trigger is pulled. The gun jams. Kennedy walks away with nothing more than a story to tell. He has won the California primary, the biggest prize in the Democratic race. He is alive. He is on his way to Chicago. And nothing about this convention will go the way anyone planned. Inside the International Amphitheatre, the Democratic Party is at war with itself. Three candidates — Kennedy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Senator Eugene McCarthy — arrive in Chicago with passionate supporters, irreconcilable visions, and not enough votes between them. The Vietnam platform is an open wound. The unit rule is a loaded gun of its own. Mayor Richard J. Daley controls the largest delegation in the hall and has not tipped his hand. Outside, ten thousand protesters fill the streets as the eyes of the world press against the glass. No one has the nomination. Everyone wants it. And the only way out of this hall is through each other. As delegates, you will not simply be casting votes. You will be trading favors and breaking promises, drawing lines and crossing them, deciding whether the peace plank lives or dies and whether the machine holds or cracks — all in full view of the floor, with nowhere to hide and no one to do the work for you. What happens in this hall will decide not just who faces Richard Nixon in November, but what the Democratic Party is, what it stands for, and whether it can hold together at all. The gavel is about to fall.