I stopped in at Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel recently, exactly eight years after the Democratic National Convention. The Yippies and their banner--a Vietcong flag--were noticeably absent. In their stead was another party and another banner: the American Independent Party and its emblem, a large American eagle--made of styrofoam.

These were the birds, remember, who had taken the unrest of that 1968 convention, fueled it into a protest vote for George Wallace, and helped coronate Richard Nixon. Wallace himself was not here. Most delegates to this year's convention felt he had 'sold out to the pointy-headed bureaucrats' by endorsing Jimmy Carter. But his legacy remained, and that, combined with rumors of a rising conservative tide, gave the convention some respectability as it opened.

The gathering was to be a coalition of the already-think ranks of third party conservatives. The fat-cat, somber-looking pin-striped remnants of the Reagan crusade, shunned by the Republican Party in Kansas City, were here to build a 'New Majority' on the structure of the American Independent Party. For a week they had been on the phone to Reaganites but, as a prominent conservative told me, not one Republican office-holder defected. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson, Illinois Congressman Phillip Crane--none set foot in the Hilton. 'National Review' editor William Rusher and direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie, leaders of the coalition movement, groped around and finally found a candidate in Robert Morris, a McCarthy era witch hunter who heads a nearly defunct Texas college and came to the convention as a newspaper columnist. But Morris was not equal to the task of creating a "New Majority," and the rank and file AIP members prevailed with one of their own, someone who had "labored in the vineyards," former Georgia governor Lester Maddox.

"The kooks won," said the chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom as Maddox snared the nomination, dashing any hopes for conservative unity this fall. And so the articulate smoothies of the Right took their money, donor lists, and relatively rational following and left Chicago a day early--their hopes buried in a large pile of Lester Maddox's racially symbolic pickhandles--pickhandles with which Maddox had little hope of denting fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter's armor.

As that scenario materialized, I began to understand that this convention was more a cultural gathering than a political one--Windy City softball when lined up against the hard-hitting major parties. The questions it raised were not questions of pragmatism or power but questions of an almost anthropological sort. Some could be raised by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Just how were the "kooks," like the rich, different from you and me? Were some of these people not 'kooks?' Where did strongly held principles leave off and 'kookism' begin? What were its manifestations?

I set out in search of the kookism in its various degrees, determined to record the rhetoric and perversities that gave life to this bush league convention.

***

It's Wednesday evening and Homer Marquis is an early arrival Illinois delegate. He talks about Communist control of the Democratic and Republican parties. He asks just how much I know about "that Council on Foreign Relations they got doin' all those evil things." Homer can't tell me his hometown because "those bastards will come and throw stones at my house." Questions about the identify of the 'bastards' go unanswered. "I'm saying all this to help you, young fella," he explains, gripping my shoulder and asking for my address, so as to pass along some literature about Jimmy Carter's cocaine connection.

Mrs. William Gordon of Nebraska, who declines to give her own first name, wastes no time in getting to the point. Rockefeller and Kissinger are at the top of many delegates' pariah lists and she is no exception. Rocky, she says, is running the country and the world through his international Zionist organization that operates in cahoots with the Rothschilds in France and royalty in the Netherlands. "They meet once a year in unknown places." Agents include Kissinger and Carter, and now that Reagan has joined the Council on Foreign Relations, Mrs. Gordon is not so sure about him. Furthermore, the Rockefellers are Jewish and have changed their name many times over the years.

She adds that 'Rosen and Felt' were responsible for the death of J. Edgar Hoover.

Later in the week, these and other similar charges will become more than the mere frothings of a few delegates when John Couture, a member of the convention committee, says in his keynote address that Zionism is the "most insidious, far-reaching, murderous force the world has ever known," and that it "started two world wars" and is ready for a third.

Jack Dembrowski and Bernie Shannon of Stoughton, Massachusetts, don't buy all that stuff. "I only go so far down the road, then I take a left and they take a right," jocular Bernie says.

Both Bernie and Jack say they are basically Democrats. Jack claims he drove 400 miles to President Kennedy's funeral; he voted for McGovern because he opposed the war. Bernie was a great admirer of Bobby. But now Jack is running Bernie's campaign against Edward Kennedy in the Massachusetts senatorial primary.

"When we (immigrants) came over we didn't expect to be taken care of, fed from the golden calf," Jack says, and Bernie notes that Teddy Kennedy has inverted his brother's 'Ask not...' philosophy. Jack figures while he's in town he might get in touch with Jesse Jackson, whom he admires for what he sees as his anti--handout mentality. Both delegates feel blacks should be included in the party so as to broaden its base, but, as the events of the week soon prove, these views go unheeded.

Some of the other positions they hold, however, are shared by fellow delegates, and as I sit and talk at length with Bernie, Jack and Daniel Eller, a former professor of Music at Eastern Michigan University who quit because of the "Marxist orientation of the department," I learn if there is one issue that really drives them it's the pro-life movement.