THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING

Outside the Hilton, at the corner of Michigan avenue and Balbo Drive, I stood talking to Winston Spencer Churchill. Churchill was kicking around the world as a correspondent. I noticed he liked to watch the reaction when he stuck out his hand and said, "Hullo, I'm Winston Churchill." For he resembled his grandfather's pictures taken when that young Winston covered the Boer War at the turn of the century--boyish and freckled, greedy for trouble. Now, behind the police lines, Churchill and I chatted with a guilty, voyeur's air, as if awaiting some illegal sporting event--a cockfight or a sloppily organized human sacrifice.

It was early evening on Wednesday, just after 7. Even on the lakefront, the air stank. The tear gas dispensed by one side and the stink bombs set off by the other lingered in mouth and throat. Across the scene (phalanxes of blue-helmeted cops, battle jeeps with barbed wire like mustaches across their grilles, the guerrilla-idealist young in tantrum, their faces contorted with rage) there swept not only rhythmic waves of sound ("Hey, Hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?") but an amazing Satanic smell, a Yippie genius' brew that simulated vomit, decomposing flesh, death, cloaca and kindred flavors. It was what evil would smell like if it were available in an aerosol can--bad enough to make the South Side stockyards, next door to the convention, smell almost wholesome. This exotic moral stink had drifted halfway around the world, after all, from Vietnam.

In front of the Hilton, on Michigan Avenue, two sides of America ground against each other like tectonic plates. Each side cartooned and ridiculed the other so brutally that by now the two seemed to belong almost to different species. The '60s had a genius for excess and caricature. On one side, the love-it-or-leave-it, proud, Middle American, Okie-from-Muskogee, traditionalist nation of squares who supported the cold war assumptions that took Lyndon Johnson ever deeper into Vietnam. On the other side, the "countercultural" young, either flower children or revolutionaries, and their fellow-traveling adult allies in the antiwar movement, the Eugene McCarthy uprising against L.B.J., people whose hatred of the war in Vietnam led them into ever greater alienation from American society and its figures of authority.

Mayor Richard Daley's front-line forces in Chicago must have been chosen for immovable heft, men built like trucks. Now they silently palm-smacked their clubs, their eyes as narrow as the slits in an armored car. Most of the convention delegates and dignitaries quartered in the fortress Hilton were at the moment three miles away at the convention hall, preparing to bestow upon poor Hubert Humphrey the nomination he thought would redeem the years of humiliation and corrupting self-abasement he had endured as Johnson's Vice President.

The police needed to protect the Hilton nonetheless. It housed not only delegates and candidates but also the country's besieged political process, its apparently crumbling legitimacy. Recollect the famous sequence at the front end of 1968, that bizarre and violent year:

1) The war that America was fighting for inaccessible reasons in an obscure little Southeast Asian country seemed to blow up in America's face with the communists' Tet offensive in late January.