Protesters and police are clashing on campuses, yet again. A Democratic presidential convention is careening toward Chicago, yet again.

Here at the intersection where news meets punditry and propaganda, we are being bombarded by warnings that a replay of 1968 seems unavoidable. Some are top-tier insights. Others are clearly top-activist incites.

On May Day, a New York Times front page headline proclaimed that already-familiar theme: “Echo of 1968 Haunts Biden In Unrest Now.”

Just two weeks earlier, at the less-elite end of our media message spectrum, a far more inciteful message was delivered to several hundred far-left activists who gathered at Chicago’s local Teamster headquarters for an event that called itself: “March on DNC 2024.”

Among the experts in protest-rousing who spoke there was Joe Iosbaker, a leader of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (which identifies itself as a Marxist-Leninist group). He was championing the making of political mayhem to mess things up for someone he called (in a very Trump-sounding way) “Genocide Joe.”

“Have you heard that the Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago?” Iosbaker asked the gathering, as reported by The Free Press (one of the increasing number of recent news websites). “Are we going to let ’em come here without a protest? This is Chicago, god---- it — we’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.”

But the more we rewind and replay 1968, the more we realize how little our two eras have in common. 1968: American kids were being drafted and sent to fight a Vietnam war we would not win. 2024: America kids are fighting free-speech wars on campuses here in the USA.

Chicago’s August 1968 Democratic convention became stained in history because the whole world watched on TV as Chicago’s police clubbed and mass-arrested Vietnam War protesters outside the Democratic Party’s huge headquarters hotel, the Conrad Hilton.

At the convention podium, Connecticut’s Sen. Abraham Ribicoff famously denounced Chicago police for “Gestapo” tactics. Down on the convention floor, Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley famously provided a one-fingered punctuation. History’s bottom line: The 1968 Democratic convention’s street violence enabled Richard Nixon’s Republicans to successfully proclaim themselves America’s law-and-order party.

Today’s history.com website reports: “ No one knows who or what triggered the first blow, but soon police began clearing out the crowd, pummeling protestors (and innocent bystanders) with billy clubs …”

But that’s not quite right. As a young Newsday correspondent, I saw how it started – and escalated. I had run ahead of the protesters marching on Michigan Avenue, got in front of the hotel just before police sealed the block off. In my suit and tie, I acted like I belonged there. I saw Chicago’s club-wielding police line across Michigan Avenue – as if that would halt thousands of marchers. (Police could have lined up buses and diverted the marchers leftward into Grant Park across the street.)

What happened, of course, was that the front marchers stopped, as ordered. But those far back were unaware, kept marching – and they pushed the compliant front marchers into the cops. So the cops got angry and began clubbing the ones who banged into them.

Then I saw something potentially worse. Nonprotesting sightseers, many elderly, filled the Hilton’s front sidewalk, watching famous politicians come and go. They were penned in on three sides: (1) curbside police barricades in front of them; (2) a barricade that sealed off the sidewalk at the hotel’s entrance; and by (3) the hotel’s huge wall that featured the ground level plate glass window of the hotel’s Haymarket restaurant and bar.

Chicago’s top cop there, standing at the sidewalk’s open north street corner, suddenly ordered his troops to move everyone off that sidewalk. So, starting at the open north end, they used their clubs as people-pushers and began shoving everyone south – unaware they were pushing the people into a dead-end trap.

Well, I ran up and told Deputy Police Superintendent James M. Rocheford the people were barricaded at the other end. He looked stunned and shouted to his officers: “Stop! Let them out! Stop, damn it, stop!” Too late. The plate glass shattered. Those sightseers, some elderly, were shoved through the shards and fell many feet downward onto the Haymarket’s below ground-level floor. Rocheford’s face reddened. He turned toward his officers on Michigan Avenue and shouted: “I want prisoners! Take ’em! Take ’em!”

That’s when the street violence got infamously worse.

Fast-forward to 2024: Chicago’s police and their leaders – now trained and hopefully protest-ready – may face a 21st century challenge that may be unlike anything they have seen. The Free Press’s detailed account reported four of the planning session speakers “had their homes raided by the FBI for their alleged ties to terrorist groups” and one conference attendee was“federally charged for ‘working on behalf of the Russian government.’”

It also quoted guidance attendees got from Jerry Boyle, a volunteer with the nonprofit National Lawyers Guild on how they can disrupt the Democratic National Convention: “I’m not here to tell you what the law is. I’m here to tell you what you can get away with.”

Now this: Sunday in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump told Republican Party donors that President Joe Biden was “running a Gestapo administration.”

We’re in for a long hot summer.

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