National Perspective: The making of mayhem, and the past 50 years

The whole world was watching. And for the past 50 years, the whole world has dealt with the fallout from what happened a half-century ago in Chicago when the Democrats convened, demonstrators marched, police raged, Hubert Humphrey was nominated— and Richard Nixon reaped the benefits.

In a tumultuous end to a tumultuous month — with Soviet tanks roaring into Czechoslovakia and American troops mobilizing into Chicago — the Democrats split apart, overhauled their procedures to marginalize the political bosses who had determined the party's nominees for decades, alienated the core of their governing coalition, set themselves on a course that would see them lose five of the next six presidential elections, prompted a furious conservative insurgency, set the stage for the ascendancy of Reagan Republicanism and prepared the ground for the defection of working-class voters to Donald J. Trump.