TOC: Looking back, was there anything that you might have done differently?
James: Well, we never got the police car over.
All: (Laugh)
Schultz: You can’t guess those things ahead of time. That starts to inform a kind of caution...
Peck: We were trying to grow and we were making a lot of mistakes.
Kurshan: But back then, we didn’t know that.
Peck: And we did a lot of insightful things and we were unencumbered, so we did a lot of things that were worth doing. When I came to Chicago, I met all kinds of people who I didn’t know. Most of my friends were non-Jewish. I lived with people of different colors. I came out of a very cloistered environment and lived in a Technicolor world in every sense of it. Now, that said, could I have been more sensitive to women’s rights? Absolutely. But at least I kind of got there at the time.
James: The thing that I would say about myself is that just living life and going through these experiences, you keep getting in your face how much you don’t know. And for me, what I learned about myself is I was always open to “Oh, yeah, women should be respected,” or “Oh, yeah, this is the way it is.” And I just kept opening up to new things.
Rose: Sometimes when you look back, you contributed something that didn’t turn out the way you wanted to, a strategic or tactical error or mistake. I can look back at a political campaign that I ran and say, “Ah! If we only had done that instead of this.” I cannot look back at ’68 and say we made a tactical mistake or something I should have known to do differently. It didn’t turn out exactly the way I wanted, but I can’t say it was due to a mistake on our part.
Katz: I really think this is an interesting thing, ’cause this comes up with Todd Gitlin and a lot of other writers. If I could name a mistake that was made, it was the Democratic Party not embracing the forces of dissidence. A lot of the rewriting of history is, “Oh, women,” “oh, blacks,” “oh, antiwar people destroyed the Democratic Party.” The Democratic Party, by not responding and embracing us at that point dug itself a grave in ’68 and ’72.
Schultz: Well, there were plenty of Democrats that contributed.
James: But we didn’t know about that.
Schultz: That lack of communication was clear.
Peck: One difference has been, and Tom Hayden talked about this, is that if Kennedy had lived, there were people who—five years after the convention—said that that would have been different for them. Now whether that’s 20/20 hindsight or not, or whether that was purely political judgment that it would have peeled off so many people that would have supported him…
Rose: I believe that—retrospectively—the Robert Kennedy assassination was the pivotal point—political turning point of the world and this country at that time. And I was not a Bobby Kennedy fan.
Peck: I agree and I wasn’t either.
Rose: More than the killing of Martin, that Bobby Kennedy would have been the nominee, we would not have had the convention as it was, the same things would not have happened, he would have been elected President, it would have been a very different world.
Schultz: But there are a lot of such “if”s, Don.
Rose: One point—what happened to Hubert…
Peck: I tend to agree with you and I think that counterfactual histories are always interesting, but I think that there’s a case to be made here.
Schultz: Well, there’s never any going back; people take up different positions, you know. After the Civil War, you had a completely different political configuration in this country. And even if it becomes, as it did, quite repressive, it still has changed utterly from what it was before. And ’68 did change things utterly—things that we don’t even realize. Things like student evaluations came out of the ’68 protest.
Kurshan: Girls wearing jeans to school.

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