For a few scary moments, it looked like the situation would turn out very badly indeed.

I was standing with a group of young protesters on 33rd Street, near 6th Ave. The police, outfitted in riot gear, had formed a line across the street and were herding the crowd, now bunched up on the sidewalk, towards 5th Ave. But about eight motorcycle cops had used their bikes to form a barricade across the sidewalk behind us. The police in front had no idea what the police behind us were doing. In fact, despite all the pre-convention publicity of how effective the police are, and their ability to handle these kind of problems, they had no control over this situation which was largely of their own making.

Two possible scenarios crossed my mind. Either people would start falling on top of each other, with the very real likelihood of being injured, or one of us would be pushed into a police officer and his motorcycle, and all heck would break loose. Neither prospect looked promising. Finally, one of the police in the back row climbed on top of their bikes and waved their arms frantically to get the attention of the cops in the front. When they finally did, one cop from the front yelled "You OK?" The officer in the back shouted, somewhat annoyed, "Yes, we will be if you stop pushing them this way."

The mostly young crowd was afraid. You could sense it. But to their credit they did not yell obscenities at the police, or strike out in any way. In fact, all the aggression was coming from the other side, especially from the officer in charge. He pushed at the protesters two or three times, each time without any visible provocation.

I just have to pause here for a moment to make an observation. How many times have I seen an interview with an arrested protester who claimed he or she had done nothing to provoke the police. Almost always my reaction has been, "Yeah, sure." Only now I was seeing this very situation unfold in front of my eyes. These protesters, while certainly noisy, had obeyed police instructions down the entire length of the street. Now they were being treated as if they had gotten wildly out of control, but they hadn't. I know, because I was there.

I saw scenes like this repeated throughout Tuesday night. There would be an uneasy equilibrium between the police and the protesters, and then for some reason, the police would start arresting people. I saw it happen at Herald Square, and near 6th Ave and 29th St. In each case, the police seemed to lose control of the situation, often in ways that they were responsible for themselves.

For instance, there were so many police on so many streets in the midtown and downtown area that enormous crowds were created at the intersections. Often these crowds of tourists, delegates and locals were forced to stand for long periods of time on street corners as they waited to cross the street, as the police tried to control traffic. Protesters, seeing these big crowds, would move to join them. In turn, the police would start pushing people back, often people who had nothing to do with any protest. The mood at these corners was intense and uneasy. No wonder incidents were popping up all over the downtown area.

At some point the police would just start picking people out of the crowd and arresting them. From what I saw, there was often no rhyme or reason behind who they picked to arrest. While the arrests often seemed arbitrary and done in an overly aggressive fashion, I saw no overt acts of police brutality. While Tuesday night was chaotic, it wasn't Chicago 1968.

I'm also convinced that fatigue was a problem for the police. As I stood waiting for a traffic light near Times Square, I overheard one policewoman complaining to a colleauge that she had worked 23 hours in a row the day before. "They had me down for two shifts, 3 a.m. to 2 p.m., " she said in a loud voice. This fatigue was also obvious in the visible frustration that I saw several police captains and commanders exhibit as they tried to control unwieldy situations at crowded street corners.

Meanwhile, back on 33rd Street, the police had pushed us into a tight corner. We had no room to move in any direction – we were practically standing on top of each other. Then the police moved forward again, and started pulling people from the crowd, mostly other reporters. When one of the young people asked what was going on, the captain who had pushed a few of them around earlier told her she and her friends were being arrested for blocking the sidewalk.

Well, that's a neat trick, I said to myself, considering that the only reason we were blocking the sidewalk was that the police has pushed us there. "Just let us through and we'll leave," one young protester pleaded. One of the motorcycle cops snarled back, "Yeah, and where will you go?"

Finally, the police captain came to me. I kept quiet. I wanted to see where they would go. But he saw the convention credential in my shirt pocket. "Get him out of here," he said. As another officer grabbed me, I asked the captain, "Why are you arresting these people? What have they done wrong?" He ignored me. I continued to shout the question at the captain as I was pulled away. "Why are you guys doing this?" I said to the young officer who was pushing me away from the crowd. When we reached the end of the street, he let me go, smiled and said "Thank you sir."

In the background, I could hear the young people chanting "The world is watching."

Well, maybe not the world, but certainly this part of it was.

Things were different today. You could feel it in the air and in the attitudes of the police, especially the ones standing in front of the numerous hotels in the midtown area of Manhattan, where many GOP delegates are staying for the RNC.

As I was walking into the media center just before lunch, a beefy police captain walked up to a couple of younger cops.

"If anything gets dinky around here, you just shut this place down right away," he told them in a stern voice. Then he nodded enthusiastically. "Any monkey business, OK, shut down." Then he walked up the street to deliver the message to the next gaggle of police.

Now I'm not sure what 'dinky' means, but it's obviously a word loaded with meaning for New York police. Word on the street was that this would be the day that trouble would come. Anarchists and similar groups, moving in small numbers, had said they would carry out numerous acts of civil disobedience to disrupt the convention.

But for one protestor, who stood on his own across the street from the Hilton Times Square hotel, ending violence was the main thing on his mind. Dave Robinson, from Brooklyn, stood alone quietly rotating a homemade placard that read "Sorry Texas! In two months we're going to send him home" on one side and "Why do more people have to die?" on the other.

Dave, who looked to be about my age, told me that he had chosen this location because the group he worked with had heard the Texas delegation was staying in the hotel. Well, I told him, I had been in the hotel the day before to go to a Monitor breakfast, and there sure were a lot of people there who talked with a twang. They weren't from Texas, though - try Mississippi and Louisana. He laughed and smiled.

I said I wanted to interview him, but he hesitated.

"It's not about me. It's about the kids serving in Iraq and Afghanistan." He was quiet for another moment. "The people who serve in our volunteer army aren't being treated fairly. They are really getting a raw deal. Somebody has got to stand up for them. I just want to remind these people [he gestured at the hotel across the street] about what's really happening."

He handed me a card with several e-mail addresses on it, including sites like anysodier.us and optruth.com, which offer a much different take on the experience of US soldiers in Iraq than presented by the US government or the mainstream media.

I asked if he felt like he was carrying on a lonely vigil. He guffawed and said, 'Come on Tom, you know there are lots of us around." He gestured to the rest of Times Square.

Dave had first gotten involved as an activist when he joined the Howard Dean campaign. After Mr. Dean dropped out, he got involved in voter registration efforts.

"I've registered both Democrats and Republicans, but to be honest, registering Republicans is not why I got involved. But I do it. Because they have a right to vote as well."

Dave tells me that he's worried about the lack of attention that Americans seem to be paying to what's going on in the world around them. He offered me a vivid description that showed how those from other nations seem more aware.

"If you get off the R train, on Bay Ridge Ave in Brooklyn, there's this diner. If you go into the diner, all day long people just watch the 24 lottery channel. That's what they watch. But if you go just a few blocks away, into the Arab community that lives there, you go into a cafe, and they are watching news all the time. I don't speak Arabic, but I know that the moment something happens, they all stop what they are doing and watch the TV. Now you tell me who is better informed."

I left Dave across the street from the Hilton rotating his sign. As I started to walk away, he waved and told me I could stop by later. "I'm not going anywhere."

That sounds like the right kind of 'dinky' to me.

Former New York mayor Rudy Guliani gave one of the best convention speeches in recent memory Monday night. While it was a tad long, and sometimes lacked focus, it was a great performance and far better than anything at the DNC.

I was watching the speech with a friend from New York, who leaned over to me at one point and remarked, "I see that Rudy really wants to run for governor or New York." Not so sure how current GOP governor George Pataki might feel about that.

But the biggest problem I had with the speech wasn't anything Mr. Guliani said, but what he did not say.

When he was going through his list of foreign nations (German and Italy in particular) that failed to respond properly to acts of terrorism in the 70s and 80s, which sent the "wrong message" to terrorists that they wouldn't face any real repercussions for their acts (which he says ultimately led to 9/11), he failed to mention perhaps the main incident of this kind - the terrorist bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 US Marines. (You could also mention the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut several months earlier that killed more than 60 people.)

Not only did the US fail to track down the people who committed the crime (it is suspected that Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters did it), the bombing forced the US to pack up and leave Lebanon altogether - exactly what the terrorists wanted.

Here's how PBS's Frontline: Target America described the reaction of then President Ronald Reagan's team:

The president assembled his national security team to devise a plan of military action. The planned target was the Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon, which housed Iranian Revolutionary Guards believed to be training Hezbollah fighters. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger aborted the mission, reportedly because of his concerns that it would harm US relations with other Arab nations. Instead, President Reagan ordered the battleship USS New Jersey, stationed off the coast of Lebanon, to the hills near Beirut. The move was seen as largely ineffective. Four months after the Marine barracks bombing, US Marines were ordered to start pulling out of Lebanon.

On the same site, Bill Cowan, a former Marine Colonel who was sent by the Pentagon to discover who bombed the US embassy in Beirut in '83, says if the US had responded in the right way after the barracks bombing, the message would "still be out there."

I believe that if we used military force at that point [the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, 1983], that we would have sent a message that would still be out there today: that when somebody strikes at all -- particularly when you kill 241 servicemen -- ... we're going to do something about it. To not do anything at all, I believe, sent a clear message to those terrorists back then, [and to] people who are terrorists now, and those in the future.

Then to make matters worse, the Reagan administration ended up conducting secret deals with the Iranian government (known, of course, as Iran-Contra) in an arms-for-hostages deal that surely must have given the Iranian government the idea that crime (or terrorism) does pay after all.

So while it's certainly fair game to go after the Italians and the Germans for not doing enough 20 years ago to fight terrorism, Rudy probably should have included the former Reagan administration in that spotlight. But I suppose it is a GOP convention after all, so criticism of the party's patron saint isn't likely to happen any time soon. After all, you don't ever hear many Democrats mention that it was FDR who took away the rights of Japanese-Americans and then imprsioned them, during World War II, do you?

But I just thought a little unexpurgated history would help.

The one thing that they don't tell you about marching in a protest is how much standing around you do. When you watch the marches on TV, they seem so fluid, always in motion.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, as I discovered this afternoon when I joined (so to speak) a quite large group of New York-based protesters who marched from Union Square up to Madison Square Garden.

After all, I reasoned with myself, what better way to understand a protest march than to be in one? Well, not "in" it exactly. I didn't carry any signs, nor shout any slogans. So when you hear the "official" total of marchers given out by local officials (often a dubious number to start with in the first place) you can deduct one person - me. But I did march and it turned out to be quite an experience.

Union Square, the staging area for most of the protests this week, is located in the lower part of Manhattan, off 14th Street. The area has been used as a launch pad for free speech for more than 100 years now, so the sight of placards and banners and the sounds of whistles and drums that greeted me there had a bit of an historic feel.

The square also had the air of a carnival. I know that it's an overworked metaphor, but in this case, not an inappropriate one. Fresh off their rather spectacular march the day before, the people gathered in the square were raring to go. They wanted to march. Meanwhile, the more entrepreneurial members of their number were hawking anti-GOP paraphernalia by the bushload, if you'll pardon the pun. Buttons, stickers ... the most original items, in my opinion, were the "Bush smooshers" - fly swatters with the president's rather smooshed-looking face on them.

It was a diverse lot of protesters, to say the least. Most of them were advocates for better housing for New Yorkers, or a group promoting AIDS research. But there were also the more, well, fringe members of society in the crowd. Most of these sort tended to be on their own, although they did seem to have discovered the printing press with a vengenance. Almost all of them handed me flyers or pamplets, decrying everything from the war in Iraq to justice for the people of (fill in the blank).

Around noon, the protest started off with an air of excitment, and marchers flowed down 15th Street. They went about two blocks ... and stopped. And we stood there. Then we stood around a little bit more. Finally, we stood around again. For about half an hour by my measure. And it was hot. The organizers, however, had planned for this. Volunteers darted through the crowd giving out bottles of water, telling folks to "keep hydrated."

Strangely, no one would give me a bottle. I puzzled over this for a while until I figured it out. I was an older guy dressed in a tie, blue shirt, and khakis, wearing a Tampa Bay Lighting Stanley Cup Champs ball cap. In other words, I looked like I worked for the "man." This was confirmed for me by the rather long hostile glances I would occasionally receive from these volunteers, and the occasional marchers. To the young kid with enough tattoos and piercings to qualify him for the Guinness Book of World Records, I just looked "weird."

Finally I got tired of standing, and went and sat down on a curb next to Eileen Ryan of New York. Ms. Ryan, who was well into her 70s, told me she had missed Sunday's march. "I was in the hospital," she said with a smile. "And they wouldn't let me out until 2 p.m. So I came down today. "

She confessed to me that she didn't have much in common with the marchers, but that didn't matter to her one bit. "We have to stand together in these things, you know," she said with a smile. Then she and her older sister, Grace, stood up and returned to the marchers, as did I.

Around 1 p.m., the police finally opened the barricades and the marchers poured down 15th street, moving at a rather leisurely speed – like purposeful molasses on a hot day. In almost every building we passed, people flung open windows to watch. Many used digital cameras or video recorders to capture the moment.

One of my enduring memories of the march, in fact, will be the use of such technology. If I saw one digital video recorder, I saw a hundred. Every time I looked around, a marcher or bystander was panning the crowd with a hand-held camera. The police that lined the route were no exception, as they often jostled with the nimble media photographers and camera operators for the best positions to film the passing throngs. Police motives for filming, however, were probably a bit different than the media's.

Meanwhile, organizers darted in and out of the crowd using cell phones and phones with walkie-talkie-like abilities to keep the march focused and organized. It occured to me that without this technology, there was a very good chance that this type of march would have been disorganized and potentially dangerous. But the instant communication between those at the front and those at the back made all the difference.

As I marched along, I learned several important lessons.

First, even with a really motivated crowd, it's hard to maintain a real good chant. In fact, I think it's high time that someone just wrote a whole new batch of them. The "hey, hey, ho, ho" stuff really has to go. Now and then someone would strike up a chant, they would be joined by a throng of voices for about two minutes, and then it would ebb like a wave running away from a shore during low tide.

Second, it's really hard to get a New York city police officer to smile for any reason. As the marchers turned up 8th Ave., the police were planted every five feet for about 20 city blocks. That's a lot of police. They all had their little black bowling bags with their riots helmets beside them. And few of them were in a good mood after standing in the 85-degree weather for several hours.

Third, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves kudos for taking the chance to let people march, and Boston mayor Tom Menino looks even worse for stuffing all the demonstrators at the DNC into that gulag of a protest area near the Fleet Center. I cannot express adequately the difference between the two. The stalag in Boston was fenced off, under a set of elevated subway tracks. It was claustrophobic and soulless.

On the other hand, what I witnessed Monday was the best of what America is all about. People of various ethnic and religious backgrounds marching together in the world's largest city with a common purpose ... to exercise their right to free speech. Even if you didn't agree with a lot of what was being promulgated, it was an envigorating, uplifting event.

Once the group reached the end of the route at the corner of 8th Ave. and 31st St., I went back to the RNC media center, which is housed in the former Farley Post Office Building. Most of the crowd stayed put, turning their march into a demonstration, with music, dancing, and even a protest marching band with mock cheerleaders.

Goin' down to the protest turned out to be a very cool idea. Now if i could only get 'hey, hey, ho, ho" out of my head.

When I turned on the TV this morning to catch the news, I confess I was a bit stunned when I heard the "official count" of Sunday's march in New York.

The local CBS station was quoting police officials and the Associated Press, who said that around 110,000 people were a part of the process that streamed past Madison Square Gardens for four and one-half hours.

What! I'm sorry, but that figure is way, way, way too small. I've seen several large marches in Washington, where the official count was 250,000 or more and this march was every bit the equal of those earlier demonstrations.

So I asked a few of the people covering the convention here in New York their thoughts on the size of the rowd. To a person, they scoffed at the lower figure. Monitor photographer Andy Nelson, who was in the thick of the crowd, said it was easily 200,000. One police officer outside the hall said he has heard as many as 400,000.

Organizers put the total at half a million. Well, I'm not sure of that figure either. But I will tell you one thing – it was A LOT of people.

Back in the late 1970s and 80s, a whole rash of flims featured New York City (or a nameless city that sure seemed a lot like New York) as a quasi-police state. Escape from New York with Kurt Russell comes to mind.

On this hot, humid day in New York City, just before noon, you could stand in the middle of 7th Avenue and think you were in one of those old films.

The police presence was overwhelming. There were police on horses, on motorcycles, on bicycles, in cars, in trucks, on foot. Overhead, several police helicopters, flying just above the horizon of skyscrapers near Madison Square Garden, filled the often-empty canyon streets with an ominous, echoing "thud, thud, thud, thud."

Every street corner, it seemed, was occupied by law enforcement. Police stood in the front doors of every major store and hotel from Times Square to the Garden. Several were guarding the McDonalds on 42 St., no doubt a much-sought-after posting.

Near the Port Authority, several dozen policemen and women stood clutching riot helmets in one hand and long wooden riot sticks in the other hand. It seemed like they tried to look relaxed, but actually might have felt a little nervous. No one, after all, was quite sure how all this would turn out.

Then the protesters came. And came. And came, and came, and came, and came. Not just in the tens of thousands, it seemed, but it the hundreds of thousands. The protesters, organized by United for Peace and Justice, marched - peacefully for the most part - past the Garden, site of the convention, for more than four hours Sunday. While most were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, they seemed undeterred by the heat. The march's momentum was only broken around 3 p.m. when someone set fire to a large paper-mache beast that was supposed to represent the evils of the Bush administration. The fire was extinguished, the street cleared, and the crowd surge forward once again.

They decried their favorite targets: the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Halliburton ... and Fox News. "Bush Lies, Who Dies?" was the most common placard, although many carried homemade signs ("I don't hate Bush, but we disagreely strongly.") The mood was one of controlled, but purposeful, anger.

Just one block away from the marchers, hundreds of police officers stood together in large groups near buses, waiting for trouble. They guzzled bottle after bottle of water to take the edge off the heat, brought to them by small yellow police vehicles. Many clutched small black bags, that looked like something in which you would carry a bowling ball. Closer examination reveled helmets and pepper spray. An older African-American woman stood watching them. "I know they have to be here, but it just doesn't feel right, no, it sure doesn't," she said to no one in particular.

For the most part, what I saw of the interaction between protesters and police was almost professional. There seemed to be an understanding between the two that they were just there to do their jobs. Pehaps this was best illustrated when about three dozen cyclists staged a sit-down protest on 38th St., away from the main group. They lay in the road, for the most part quietly, while police officers milled about, putting their bikes on a truck, and then taking the mostly young group members away, one by one, to a waiting police bus.

But there seemed to be little animosity between the two groups. When one woman complained that her plastic handcuffs were too tight, an officer adjusted them immediately, then helped her sit back down. Other members of the cyclist group joked with the crowd of media people who had gathered, demanding that they be paid for having their pictures taken.

Fifty-three people were arrested during the entire march (which is an incredibly small number number when you consider the number of people who marched), and only in one situation that I'm aware of, in front of the Garden, did tempers flare.

Some people protested the protesters: There were the signs held up proclaiming the protesters to be communists. Anti-abortion activists showed. One man planted himself just off Time Square, carrying a sign proclaiming that he was a New Yorker for Bush. He passed his time posing for pictures with Republican delegates, who seemed to be pleased to find someone who actually liked the president.

As the day wound down, protesters drifted away from Union Square, the end of the march. Almost all were pleased. "It was a great day," said Angela Simons from New Jersey. She had come with her entire family. "I'm tired but happy to make my voice heard."

For some, the march was just another tourist attraction in the world's biggest city. A group of young students from India encourged one of their group to haul a protest sign out of a garbage can and pose for a picture. She grinned and meekly waved the sign back and forth. They took turns staging their "protest" and snapping shots that would find their way back to their families on the other side of the world.

By 4:30 in the afternoon, the street in front of the Garden was quiet, but filled with protest signs, water bottles, and torn banners. Police were more noticably relaxed and seemed relieved that they weren't required to make a show of force.

Tomorrow, the protests begin again. This time Disabled Veterans and Billionaires for Bush. No doubt the police are hoping that those protests are as violence-free as this one today.