From an interview by David Horowitz:
In Radical Son I tell the story how Tom Hayden planned the riot that took place at the Democratic convention in '68. Just to give people a little history, in 1948 which was my first political demonstration I marched in the demonstration, it was a Communist controlled mayday parade.
And we were chanting, 1,2,3,4 we don't want another war, that was the cold war against Communism; 5,6,7,8 win with Wallace in '48, that was Henry Wallace. And what happened in 1948 is that the Communists who had been tremendously influential in the Roosevelt years marched out of the Democratic party because they didn't like Harry Truman had sent military aid to Greece and Turkey to resist the Communist takeover.
And so the Communist party organized a new party, it was called the Progressive party. They got FDR's former Vice President, Henry Wallace to be their presidential candidate. And they got a million and a half votes. That was when the "left" marched out of the Democratic party and they stayed out until 1972.
And it's interesting that a young politician who cut his eye teeth in the Wallace campaign of '48, that was his first big campaign was George McGovern. But what happened to make the McGovern candidacy possible was that Tom Hayden in 1968 organized the riot at the Democratic party convention. Of course, the history books will call it a police riot and image that Richard Daly started the riot, but it was Tom Hayden who picked Chicago and plotted enough provocations so that a riot ensued which I describe in my book. (My note = I read the book - Tom Hayden gave specific instructions to kill "pigs".)
And the result was that Hubert Humphrey, who was an anti-Communist liberal his presidential chances were destroyed. Humphrey would have been president in '68 if it weren't for this demonstration. And in the year that followed, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda and other radicals marched into the Democratic party, changed the rules and shifted the party far to the left from what it once was. And that's why you have all those former Democrats like Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston who are now Republicans.
Here's the rest, it's pretty interesting.
http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/horowitz.htmlPlease allow me to add an eye/ear witness account,which bolsters David Horowitz's words.
In 1968,I was living and working in Manhattan.Besides the Village Voice, there was an "underground" paper that was even farther left, called the EVO, or the EAST VILLAGE OTHER.In that paper, as well as in the VV, not to mention all kinds of pamphlets and handouts, the Yippies asked for people to volunteer for their "army of protesters",which they TRAINED,like a militia, for the '58 protest in Chicago.I wish that I had saved these newspapers,but I didn't.
Shortly before the convention, I was cutting across Central Park, on my way to visit my parents, when what should I come across, but Abbey Hoffman and Rubin, and the rest of that ilk, TRAINING a vast motley crew of " peaceful" protest wannabes, in the fine arts of throwing human waste filled plastic baggies and how to taunt police to get them to hit them, on camera.THIS WAS A PLANNED ATTACK,THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING SPONTANIOUS ABOUT THE CHICAGO "RIOTS" AT THE DEM CONVENTION!
Flash forward to the late summer of 2004. Unlike '68, when the Hippies and Yippies took over Grant Park, I really doubt that Central Park is going to be allowed to be taken over by today's filthy protesters. The GOP convention is NOT adjacent to Central Park,it's to be held in Madison Square Garden and the very tiny park nearby, will NOT accommodate huge numbers of protesters. The nearby "Pocket Parks",as they are called, are even smaller.
Will the protesters disrupt N.Y.C.? They'll try to, but they'll make residents and people who work in Manhattan furious,which won't help their cause and the NYPD isn't going to give them free reign at all.