Abstract

What Daley Needs, Daley Gets

About 250 delegates and visitors to the Democratic National Convention met at a Chicago hotel late on the night of August 28, 1968. A few hours earlier, Chicago, Illinois Mayor Richard Daley's police force had clubbed apart a protest outside the Conrad Hilton. The meeting watched on TV as political candidate Hubert H. Humphrey got the nomination Daley wanted him to have. A news report said political candidate Edmund Muskie would run with Humphrey because Daley wanted the national ticket to help the four Polish members of the Mayor's Congressional delegation. A lot of the meeting's talk was about the Mayor: Daley and his cops, Daley and political leader George Meany. Everyone agreed that Daley's notion of how to run a convention would kill the ticket and injure the Mayor's power.