THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING

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2) Minnesota's Democratic Senator, Eugene McCarthy, challenged his President, Lyndon Johnson, in the New Hampshire primary and won 42.4% of the Democratic vote. Seeing that, Robert Kennedy hurried into the race.

3) L.B.J. withdrew as a candidate for re-election.

4) Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a murder that precipitated days of riots in cities across the country.

5) Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles in early June. And so on. It is a part of the folklore, each act more amazing than the one before, a dark jack-in-the-box of history. On Tuesday night of the Democratic Convention week, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia and eradicated the "Prague spring."

Now there was silence on the cops' side of the barricades--an ominous, hurricane stillness. On the other side: the dirty, skinny, red-eyed, hyper, unslept, screaming, antiwar young, their youthful energy converted to electrical fury. Rage shot out of them like sparks, like flaming snakes. No flowers in their hair now. The foresighted wore football helmets.

Then the cops charged. They moved with surprising speed and a nimble fury like that of a rhinoceros attacking. A flying wedge of blue drove down Balbo into the noisy, ragged flesh on Michigan. The cops bent to their work, avengers at harvest time, chop-swinging clubs with methodical ferocity, a burst-boil rage. And in the midst of it, I began to detect a certain professional satisfaction of the kind a hitter feels sometimes. The cops had found a ghastly sweet spot. The sound that a club makes when it strikes a human skull--in earnest--awakens in the hearer a sickened, fearful amazement. No kidding now: a thunk! resonant through the skull and its wet package of thought and immortal soul.

It dawned on me that I was now an animal as much in season as the protesters, for the blue rhino was wheeling back, flailing through the bloodied crowd. I skittered into the Hilton lobby. A cop lumbered after me with club upraised and aimed at my skull just above the left ear. I held up my press credentials like a ridiculous little magic shield, like a clove of garlic or the sign of the cross, and the cop went into freeze-frame and thought about the matter long and hard before at last he lowered his club, a flicker of disappointment in his eye, and moved on to hunt for other game deeper in the lobby.

The cops outside went on banging heads almost indiscriminately. Middle-aged bystanders were as likely to be bloodied as young radicals. People were dragged feetfirst, heads bouncing on pavement, to paddy wagons and hurled in.

The demonstrators knew their McLuhan and chanted, "The whole world is watching." After a delay caused by strikes that prevented live transmission, the television networks finally broadcast the footage of what a national commission would later call a "police riot." Uncle Walter Cronkite was visibly furious. Tom Wicker would write in the New York Times, "Those were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up."