Yet another installment of  Michael D. Nolan’s Brooklyn Memoir:  Proximity: What can happen when we live, work and love close together.

The compression of events and ensuing movement can create Proximity. In 1968 I was in the employ of the Public Broadcast Laboratory, a two-year news magazine show (emanating from NBC Studios at "30 Rock" in Manhattan) and funded by the Ford Foundation where Fred Friendly landed after he resigned as president of CBS News. "PBL" was Friendly’s brainchild, built on the "live interconnect" concept- using live television to bring contending points of view from distant locations into active dialog.

One example was a program devoted to Police-Community Relations with black psychology professor Alvin Pouissant speaking from Harvard, neighbors talking from a St. Louis storefront, and Police Chief Herbert Jenkins at his Atlanta headquarters. We went on an advance trip to prep the police chief for the show. "Y’all want some Coca-Cola," an affable Jenkins said as he welcomed us into his office and reached into his private refrigerator for the beverages. Jenkins was noted for his accommodating posture towards civil rights organizations and had been appointed by President Lydon Johnson to the National Commission on Civil Disorders established in the wake of the riots following King’s assassination in April.

Friendly wanted to cover the political conventions in the summer of ’68. I enthusiastically jumped on board the planning team, developing background information on the Mobilization demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. For reasons not clear at the time, the plans for coverage were abruptly yanked. I always suspected the influence of McGeorge Bundy, then president of the Ford Foundation, who had been an architect of American military involvement in Vietnam while serving as an Advisor to President Kennedy.

With some vacation time from PBL, I called my friends at CBS News where I had worked for two years prior and was hired as a field producer to cover the demonstrations. I gleefully left for Chicago.

Through my own activism, I knew the lead organizers Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden well and considered them political comrades. So when my CBS producer asked me to "Go find Tom Hayden", that was a fairly easy assignment. Tom was in disguise and among the demonstrators in Grant Park, across from the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue where many convention delegates were lodged. I guided CBS reporter John Laurence and the camera crew to Hayden . Todd Gitlin, now a journalism-sociology professor at Columbia, stood nearby.

During that volatile summer week, I witnessed comedian Dick Gregory’s March destined for the convention center. Faced with police force and heavy doses of tear gas, Gregory and the demonstrators never left Grant Park. Later in the week, after the worst of the police violence, Eugene McCarthy came to address the demonstrators. On another occasion, Peter, Paul & Mary sang.

Tomorrow night, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe and Jill Biden, and thousands of their supporters will be in Grant Park for what we can only believe will be a landslide Presidential and Congressional victory.

All against the backdrop of another unpopular American military invasion. Forty years later.