I happened to be in Chicago this time forty years ago, visiting my aunt, the last few days before I started high school.  I walked around a city buzzing with the excitement of the Democrat Party convention, but by the time police and demonstrators were fighting on the streets I was safely indoors.

I grew up in an intensely political family.  My grandfather had been among those called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and my stepfather openly claimed to be a Marxist.  (I like to tell people that the house I lived in as a teenager had an 8 foot tall painting of Lenin’s head on the family room wall.) Though he now usually votes Republican, later in 1968 my father’s name would appear amidst hundreds in the tiny print of a full page ad in the New York Times headlined “Thinking Men Think Humphrey”. 

Like hundreds of thousands of others we felt the loss of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, only months earlier, as if we ourselves had been bereaved, and forty years ago I watched horrified the news films of the riots outside the convention.  I kept an occasional journal when I was a kid.  I still have it, in storage in England, but I know how the entry I wrote that night in Chicago began:  “Remember this date,” I wrote, “because history will.”

Well, I was only 14, but I wasn’t wrong.  I’ve heard a lot about 1968 this year, rather more from the BBC than the American networks.  I assume the preoccupation with that year is because most of the journalists running the shows are just a little older than I, that is, approaching the ends of their careers, and feeling nostalgic for a time when they had newly come of age.  For several months the BBC has been airing four minutes each afternoon: 1968 Day by Day.  If you are old enough to remember that year, or want a sense of how it felt to live through it, it’s worth listening to, which you can do online.  Unfortunately, for copyright reasons – I guess because there is music and archival material – you can’t subscribe to a podcast or download a week at time unless you are in the UK.  You really do have to listen day by day.

This is the first convention season for 32 years that I’ve been in the US, and though I have enjoyed watching the speeches and the razzmatazz, frankly these gatherings were more exciting when I was a kid.  It’s all too stage managed now and the long primary season really does mean it is all over bar the shouting.

It’s also, incidentally, hard to imagine now any candidate thinking an ad in which he gained endorsement of academics and other “pointy-headed intellectuals” would do him (or her!) good.

That phrase was coined by George Wallace, a third party candidate in the 68 election, who had been resoundingly elected Governor of Alabama six years earlier with the declaration:

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

He carried five states in 1968.

Though he later said he had been mistaken about segregation, I cannot imagine that the governor who tried to prevent black students entering the doors of his state university, or presided over state troopers breaking up a voter registration campaign with dogs, whips and tear gas, could imagine just how far we have come these forty years.

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After I wrote this I learned that the 1968 Season on BBC Radio is coming to an end this week.  I don’t know what permanent links they will leave up.  I’m hoping they’ll be selling a dvd — it really was brilliant.