Sen. Eugene McCarthy Almost Got Me Killed

By: Greg Mitchell He eventually turned into an irascible old coot, and a Reagan supporter, no less, but back in the day, he was my man. The day was 1968 and the man was Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who passed away earlier this week.

As head of the McCarthy for President campaign at my college campus that spring, I was the prototypical Clean for Gene guy, experiencing the elation of knocking President Johnson out of the race, and the resentment at Senator Robert Kennedy for entering the race after McCarthy had done the dirty work. Then, of course, came the sudden death of RFK, and with it all hope for halting the Vietnam War any time soon. Our president said he had a "plan for victory" there, but, as it turned out, he didn't, and another 35,000 Americans died.

That summer, as a reporter for my local newspaper in Niagara Falls, N.Y., I got to spend a day with McCarthy's nephew, campaigning for his uncle in the state. Then, on assignment for the paper (but secretly planning to hang out with the diehard McCarthyites), I ended up in Chicago for the epochal Democratic convention. I'd been a political-campaign junkie all my life, but it was McCarthy who got me involved in an actual race for the first time, unless you count speaking up for Richard Nixon in junior high in 1960.

My mentor at the Niagara Gazette in the late-1960s was a young, irreverent City Hall reporter named John Hanchette. He went on to an illustrious career at other papers, and as a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent for Gannett News Service, but back then he was best known for his weekly column. It featured a comic creation known as "Falls Street Louie," who had all the inside dirt on the local politicos.

Hanchette would be in Chicago in late-August '68 to cover party politics at the convention as a Gazette reporter and contributor to the Gannett News Service (GNS). To get to Chicago I took my first ride on a jetliner.

To make a long story short: On the climactic night of Aug. 28, Hanchette and I ended up just floors apart in the same building: the Conrad Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago. I was in McCarthy headquarters and Hanchette occupied one of Gannett's makeshift newsrooms. Probably at about the same time, we pulled back the curtains and looked out our separate windows to see police savagely attacking protestors with nightsticks at the intersection directly below.

Besides writing his own stories, Hanchette was expected to "run" copy from columnist Dave Beetle to GNS at the convention hall. After spotting the carnage in the streets, Hanchette recalls asking Beetle to come to the window for a look. The older reporter didn't seem that impressed until tear gas started seeping into the room through the vents. Then Beetle said, "Hmm, this may be serious."

Like me, Hanchette headed for the streets. By that time, the peak violence had passed, but cops were still pushing reporters and other innocent bystanders through plate glass windows at the front of the hotel. While I screwed up my courage, dodged the nightsticks, and crossed to Grant Park where the angry protest crowd gathered, Hanchette hailed a gypsy cab and headed for the convention hall out by the stockyards. When he got to the Gannett tent he told GNS honcho John C. Quinn what he had seen and suggested that the bad-cop angle should lead the wire report. Dramatic film footage of what would later be labeled a "police riot" had just hit network TV, so Quinn went with it.

When we returned to Niagara Falls that Friday, we each wrote columns for that Sunday's paper. I described the eerie feeling of sitting in Grant Park, with machine guns on Army Jeeps pointed at the crowd, and thousands around me yelling at the soldiers and the media, "The whole world is watching!" -- and knowing that, for once, it was true.

A few years later, I interviewed McCarthy in New York for a magazine profile--he was running for president again, mainly because he could, but he seemed sadly dispirited. In his New York Times obituary this week he was quoted saying that he never could forget the smell of tear gas in the lobby of the Hilton in Chicago in 1968. I guess I haven't either.