Chaotic Convention

Jeff Schweers

Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

As the world watched the streets of Chicago seethe during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Pamela Crowell had a bird's eye view of the chaos below.

She was in Hubert Humphrey's suite at the Conrad Hilton.

"I remember leaning my body way out the window and looking across at everything going on in the park," said Crowell, now Nevada's deputy secretary of state for elections.

As the 25-year-old wife of a Nevada delegate, Crowell saw the sights and sounds of those turbulent, chaotic times -- the smoke, the tear gas, the sirens, the shouts.

So did Clark County District Judge John McGroarty, then a 26-year-old law student, assistant to U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon and an alternate delegate to the convention.

"I was there," McGroarty said. "I saw the demonstrations, I got a whiff of the tear gas, and participated in everything that was going on."

McGroarty remembers it as one of the worst moments for the Democratic Party -- what should have been a coronation for Lyndon Johnson turned into party infighting over the nomination and what to do about Vietnam War after he backed out.

"The fly in the ointment was the Vietnam War," he said.

Except for a brief, poignant moment when everyone sang "We Shall Overcome," the convention floor was in turmoil, he said.

"I remember there was chaos, in the sense there was general disruption on the floor of the convention, people shouting," said McGroarty, who signed on to work on Vice President Humphrey's last-minute nomination campaign and followed him to a November defeat by Richard Nixon.

"When Johnson pulled out, that left Humphrey as the heir apparent with no organization," McGroarty said. "This was the vacuum that everybody entered."

It was also the setting for McGroarty's introduction to the Crowells, who would later figure in his 7 1/2 years working for former Gov. Mike O'Callaghan. It was McGroarty who managed to get them an audience with Humphrey.

"I kept thinking who was this gawky kid," Crowell said. "But he took us upstairs in the Hilton, and when the elevator doors opened, he flashed a folder to the security guards and they let us through."

Once inside, Crowell and her former husband, Carson City attorney William Crowell, spoke to Humphrey briefly and stood in awe at the history being made around them.

It's a memory she'll never forget, and one that's especially sharp this week as the Democrats return to Chicago after 28 years to nominate President Clinton for re-election.

"Inside myself I know I will sit down and watch the Democratic convention with tears in my eyes," said Crowell, now 53.

Her tears won't so much be for the violent clash between young people protesting the Vietnam War and the police who were sent out by Mayor Richard Daley to suppress the demonstrators, but for the ideals her party seems to have wandered from in its quest to regain and keep the White House.

"Good things came out of that convention," Crowell said, notably a new set of rules governing future conventions that were more inclusive of women and minorities.

It was one of the most memorable weeks of McGroarty's life, one that launched him into the orbit of Humphrey's inner circle and nearly turned him off politics after the bitter results.

But it was also one of the most confusing.

McGroarty had been working in Cannon's Washington office for four years, while he worked his way through law school at Howard University. McGroarty said he landed the job because he used to play in the city's basketball league with Cannon's press secretary, the late Jim Joyce.

When one of the Nevada alternates wound up in the hospital a week before the convention, Cannon asked McGroarty if he wanted to go to Chicago.

"I had a certain sense of politics, but I was not acquainted with the day-to-day operations of precinct politics," McGroarty said. "I kept my eyes and ears open for a week back there."

One of the highlights was watching former Gov. Grant Sawyer scribbling notes on a legal pad after being asked at the last minute to deliver a speech live on national TV.

The speech was pitch perfect, McGroarty said. "It was electric."

But the violence surrounding the convention like lingering tear gas will taint McGroarty's memories forever -- the eerie sensation of riding a bus from his hotel to the convention center on deserted streets that had been barricaded by the police, the disgust at turning a street corner to stumble upon a cop beating a kid protester.

"For me the defining moment was that I couldn't believe the violence a half block away," McGroarty said. "To be afraid of unarmed demonstrators is ludicrous."

He also remembers looking out the front door of the Conrad Hilton to see where the tear gas was coming from. "It was a surreal experience."

Through the tears and the tear gas, McGroarty looks back at those days as a time when national politics were still vital and electric -- unlike today's controlled, blow-dried conventions.

"Back in the old days, you were a participant in the making of history," McGroarty said. "Nowadays, it's like an out-of-body experience -- you see what's going on around you and wonder if you're a part of the process anymore."