THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING

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The bashing on Michigan Avenue was only one of a series that week. In the last, just before dawn on Friday after the convention adjourned, the police permitted themselves to go berserk in the halls of the Hilton, rousting sleeping McCarthy workers from their rooms and beating on their skulls. Police claimed the workers had been throwing things (beer cans, ashtrays, bags of excrement) down on cops from the windows above.

The 1968 Democratic Convention was part of the Ur-mess of the '60s and in a sense the Big Bang of the American culture wars. And here we are in 1996: more or less the same two tectonic plates are still grinding against each other in America. Their surfaces may be a little smoother now.

Before Johnson fell for the tar baby of Vietnam, Americans believed their Presidents almost always told them the truth. The level of trust and therefore respect for authority was probably foolishly high. All of that changed in the fatal asininity of Vietnam. The baby boomers' rites of passage turned into a huge Oedipal overtoppling of authority, an assault on Dad that was disorientingly successful.

It takes years for all the myth and trauma to work through the system. Maybe they have done so only this summer, after 28 years have passed and the Democrats feel free, as adults now, leaders of the party, to return to the old slaughterhouse. This year the Democrats have conducted a lottery for groups that want to hold protests at their convention.

After the police charged on Michigan Avenue, I lost track of Churchill and did not see him again at the convention. Chicago that week was crawling with famous names, including an unusual number of literary celebrities, all bent on getting high on a snort of anti-Establishment danger and writing about it--Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, who went about dispensing his Buddhist "oms" through the tear gas. Next week the Chicago convention may run more to Hollywood celebrities. None will be teargassed.