by Adam Cohen
Even to Chicagoans raised on police corruption, the news that broke in January 1960 came as a shock. Richard Morrison, a twenty-three-year-old burglar in police custody and awaiting trial, revealed that he had been helped in his criminal exploits by twelve officers from the Summerdale police district on the city’s North Side. Morrison, whom the newspapers quickly dubbed the “babbling burglar,” delivered up a seventy-seven-page confession in which he recounted how for a period of almost two years his police accomplices had helped him steal from local shops, using squad cars to take the goods to be fenced. Incredible charges, but they seemed to be confirmed when investigators raided the policemen’s homes and found four truckloads of stolen merchandise. Daley had been on vacation in Florida when the scandal broke, but he came back early to pronounce it “the most shocking and disgraceful incident in the history of the Chicago Police Department.” The newspapers eagerly pointed out that crime statistics from the Summerdale district indicated that burglaries in the area where the police burglary ring operated were up 48 percent in the first nine months of the year. Daley acted quickly to contain the political damage. He met with police commissioner O’Connor, who announced that he was taking personal charge of the investigation. O’Connor began questioning 130 policemen from the Summerdale district, and Daley assured the public that “every police officer — every other person who is in any way involved in these crimes and betrayal of the public trust — will be investigated and brought before the civil service board and prosecuted in the courts if the facts so warrant.” 13
The real danger posed by the Summerdale scandal was not the burglary ring itself, though that was plenty embarrassing. It was that the investigation threatened to open the lid on how policing and politics had mixed during Daley’s five years as mayor. Reports of other police malfeasance quickly surfaced. Another police robbery ring was uncovered in the North Damen Avenue station. And in another case that received lavish press attention, two burglars in Joliet Prison for stealing $1 million in furs and jewels said that they had bribed policemen with payments of up to $1,000 in an attempt to beat the charges. They reported that they gave one $1,000 bribe to a detective who helped disguise the suspect’s hairdo and gave him horn-rimmed glasses so a witness would not recognize him at a police lineup. Most damaging of all were allegations that Daley had personally imposed machine politics on the police department. Jack Muller, an outspoken detective who prided himself on his political independence, charged that Daley was “completely responsible for the scandal which is bringing shame to Chicago’s police department.” The truth was, he said, that O’Connor was “a commissioner in name only.” Daley promoted men up the police hierarchy whom O’Connor did not want elevated, Muller said, and prevented O’Connor from disciplining officers who had “political clout.” Muller also invoked Daley’s dismantling of the Scotland Yard division after his election. Sheriff Joseph Lohman, a onetime Daley protégé, also came forward to accuse Daley and the machine of intruding themselves on his office. Lohman asserted that Daley had asked him to appoint a ward committeeman from the 18th Ward as a chief deputy in the sheriff ’s office. Lohman had refused to go along. “This man was working in the Department of Sewers,” he said, and “he was not qualified to do police work.” Lohman warned that the Chicago Police Department had to be “freed from clout and the captains’ aunties,” Chicago slang for a politician who protects a policeman. The Republicans lost no time in putting the scandal to partisan advantage. Governor Stratton held a press conference in his Chicago office, across the street from City Hall, and threatened to step in and take over the Chicago Police Department unless Daley “stops laughing and cleans up the mess himself — quickly.” To underscore the Republican theme that the machine and city government were overly intertwined, Stratton demanded that Daley step down as party chairman to devote himself more fully to addressing the police crisis. 14
The Summerdale charges were dangerous because they played into people’s worst fears about Daley. When he first ran for mayor, his critics had attacked him as the candidate of the “hoodlum element,” and it now appeared that they were right. The scandal also threatened to make a mockery of Daley’s frequently repeated claims that he had improved city services. It would not matter how many garbage cans or streetlights he added if most Chicagoans believed that their local police were in league with criminals. The more he became the focus of the scandal, the more irate Daley became. At a press conference, he turned on a photographer who was trying to take his picture. “Let’s not have this sort of thing while I’m talking,” he shouted. “I’ll not have the mayor’s office turned into a circus or hippodrome.” In a rant directed at the entire City Hall press corps, Daley yelled, “There are even crooked reporters, and I can spit on some of them right here!” 15
One reason Daley was so tense was that Adamowski appeared to have gained the upper hand in the scandal. Daley had tried to put the matter in Irwin Cohen’s hands, but Adamowski responded that he would charge both Daley and Cohen with obstruction of justice if Cohen didn’t “stop sticking his nose into this investigation.” Daley realized it was time for more dramatic action. As the then police commissioner, Tim O’Connor, put it, “Somebody has to be the sucker and it could be me.” In fact, Daley was soon announcing at a press conference that O’Connor had resigned because of gall bladder problems. And Daley was careful to lay the blame for the troubles at O’Connor’s feet. “Tim was always telling me how he went home at night and watched TV instead of running around getting into trouble,” Daley said. “I should have asked him why he wasn’t running around checking on his policemen at night instead of sitting home watching TV.” Daley appointed an acting commissioner, and a search committee to look for a permanent replacement. Once again, he employed his favorite damage-control tactic: drafting someone of unquestioned integrity, ideally an academic, to make it go away. Daley’s choice to head up his search committee was Orlando W. Wilson, dean of the criminology school at the University of California, and author of Police Administration, a leading criminology textbook. Daley also named his old crony William McFetridge, vice president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, to the committee to keep an eye on Wilson. 16
The Wilson committee met in executive session for twenty-eight days at the University Club. It considered ninety candidates for commissioner, and interviewed fifty-three. It was an indication of just how bad things were in the department that when the committee asked the twenty-four current members that it interviewed what percentage of Chicago police they believed were dishonest, the estimates ran well over 50 percent. While the committee went about its work, Daley reported that he was getting a “tremendous amount” of mail, and that the letters were running 6–1 in his favor. But when reporters asked to see them, press secretary Earl Bush refused, saying they were “letters to the mayor and aren’t meant for publication.” On February 22, the committee settled on its choice for Chicago’s next police commissioner. “We suddenly realized on Sunday night that the best qualified man for the job was the chairman of our committee,” said Franklin Kreml, vice chairman of the committee. The idea had been McFetridge’s, and it was clear he was acting for Daley. 17
Wilson was a brilliant choice. A native of Veblen, South Dakota, he was described by the New York Times in an admiring profile as “lean, hard-boiled, soft-talking [and] scholarly-appearing.” Wilson had a distinguished academic record, but he had also served as a patrolman on the Berkeley police force, and as police chief of Wichita, Kansas, where the mayor had called him “too damned efficient.” As an outsider to Chicago, he could not easily be attacked as a machine hack or a defender of the status quo. Governor Stratton took a break from his criticism of Daley long enough to declare that Wilson “has a good reputation and should be given an opportunity to do a good job.” Adamowski was more skeptical. He told a luncheon of Republican women that “Daley is holding this respected man up as a facade while they try to sweep the whole mess under the rug.” If the department were ever run honestly,
he charged, it would mean the “virtual destruction of the Democratic political machine.” Adamowski tried unsuccessfully to block Wilson’s appointment on procedural grounds. The thin-skinned Daley was becoming testy under the constant criticism. In Springfield to oppose a bill to reform the Chicago Police Department, Daley lashed out at a Republican legislator from Aurora, Illinois, who asked if there was any corruption in the department that had not yet come to light. “I assume if you look closely enough you’ll find dishonest policemen in Aurora,” Daley retorted. Then, drawing on his own service in the Illinois legislature, he added acerbically, “I can’t attest to the honesty in this room.” 18
Before the Summerdale scandal was over, eight Chicago policemen were sent to jail. Hundreds more officers submitted to lie-detector tests, and those who refused were suspended. When he arrived on the scene, Wilson shook up the Chicago Police Department staff, and soon the Summerdale scandal receded from the headlines. Unfortunately for Daley, it was quickly replaced by a new scandal over “loafing” city workers. The city was forced to suspend forty-four employees from the Bureau of Electricity for putting in for bogus overtime work. Making matters worse, the fraudulent overtime reports were all prepared by a timekeeper with syndicate ties, who had once run a large West Side betting parlor. The newspapers had caught the man weeks earlier running his grocery and meat market when he was supposed to be installing traffic lights near Midway Airport. The newspapers were also reporting that city asphalt crews routinely idled on the job sites or at nearby taverns for the last hour or two of their shifts, claiming they could not get asphalt delivered late in the day. The articles were accompanied by photographs of sewer gangs idling and napping at their work sites. Reporters investigating one foreman found that on three separate workdays he was hanging out in a North Side tavern shooting pool and drinking beer when he was supposed to be supervising a fifteen-man Water Department gang. They also discovered that he was operating a $3 million oil and gas business on city time. Daley responded that the foreman in question was a good worker, and that every time the city checked up on him he had been on the job. The complaints against him came from his competitors in the oil business, Daley insisted. In a concession to the criticism, though, Daley said that in the future the sewer foreman would not be permitted to use a city worker as a chauffeur for his air-conditioned Cadillac. 19
With the start of the 1960 Democratic National Convention drawing near, Daley was still formally uncommitted in the presidential race. When former president Harry Truman passed through Chicago on April 6, he and Daley met for a friendly breakfast at the Blackstone Hotel and talked politics. Both men agreed that the recent Wisconsin primary results looked good for the Democrats since Nixon, running unopposed, had polled fewer votes than either Kennedy or Humphrey. Daley also highlighted the fact that Kennedy’s religion had proved to be a nonissue, despite predictions that the nation was not yet ready to elect a Catholic president. “The people were voting for the man,” Daley said. Although Daley seemed to be in the Kennedy camp, there were still other candidates to be reckoned with. The word was out that Illinois native son Adlai Stevenson was contemplating a third run for the presidency. There would be pressure on Daley to stick with his longtime ally, although the consensus among Chicago politicians was that if Stevenson ran again he would lose and pull the machine ticket down with him. At the same time, downstate Democrats were urging Daley to support Missouri senator Stuart Symington. Symington was popular in the agricultural regions of southern Illinois that bordered on his home state, but it seemed unlikely that he would help the Democratic ticket much in Chicago. At a press conference in Daley’s office, a reporter noticed a copy of a book about Symington, entitled Portrait of a Man with a Mission, lying on Daley’s desk. The reporter picked it up and asked if it had any political significance. Daley just laughed and answered, “Take it with you.” On May 11, Daley declared that Kennedy’s victory in the West Virginia primary — a heavily Protestant state in which Kennedy’s Catholicism had been expected to be an issue — was “another indication that Democratic primary voters had spoken in an emphatic manner.” It proved, Daley said, that people “vote for the individual and not for his religion or his geographical qualifications.” But Daley continued to stop short of an endorsement. “We’ll caucus in California and discuss the qualifications of the various candidates,” he said. “That will be the time for a declaration by me — but I repeat, no one can watch the series of primary victories without being impressed.” 20
On July 7, Daley and his family boarded a private car attached to the end of the Sante Fe Chief for the trip to Los Angeles. Their route to California was punctuated by signs along the tracks proclaiming good wishes from various Chicago politicians. “I’ll never forget . . . seeing these signs,” William Daley recalled. A welcoming party that included county assessor P. J. “Parky” Cullerton, Alderman Vito Marzullo, and Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski was on hand to greet the Daleys at Union Railroad Station Sunday morning, the day before the convention opened, but the Daleys snuck out a side door to attend 9 A.M. Mass at the Old Mission Church. Daley’s welcoming party eventually caught up with him at the Hayward Hotel and greeted him with a band playing “Chicago, That Toddlin’ Town.” 21 The fawning continued when Daley settled in at the hotel. He controlled fifty of Illinois’s sixty-nine delegates and he was in a good position to swing most of the remaining downstate votes his way — and he had still not made an endorsement. This made Daley the preeminent kingmaker at the convention, and he was subject to lobbying from all camps. 22
Stevenson had not formally announced, but he made it clear he would be willing to run again. His supporters were hoping they could stop Kennedy from winning on the first ballot, and then they would try to generate a Stevenson draft from the convention floor. Eleanor Roosevelt and Carl Sandburg both made personal appeals to Daley for their friend Stevenson. When Mrs. Roosevelt called to ask for a meeting, Daley traveled to Pasadena, some twenty miles away, to hear her out. But when she was done, Daley told her he could not back Stevenson. Daley’s explanation was that the previous spring he had visited Stevenson at his Libertyville, Illinois, home to sound him out about running for president again. Daley said he told Stevenson that if he planned to, he should enter the primaries to show that he still had support, but that Stevenson responded that he had no plans to run. Now, Daley said, he and other onetime supporters had already made other commitments. In fact, Daley was already firmly in the Kennedy camp, and he had been busily twisting arms in the Illinois delegation. Daley worked on Jacob Arvey, who had been supporting Symington, by indicating that he might not reslate his old mentor as Democratic national committeeman unless he backed Kennedy. It was not long before Arvey was urging his fellow Illinois delegates to fall in line behind Kennedy and Daley, saying, “Let’s give our chairman the authority to be a dominant force at the convention.” The Illinois delegation caucused in secret, and Daley emerged to announce its vote: 59½ for Kennedy, 6½ for Symington, and 2 for Stevenson.
It was a crushing blow to Stevenson. With so little support from his own home state, he had no prospect of putting together a majority of delegates nationally. When he got word of how Illinois had voted, Stevenson tried to make a personal appeal to Daley to reconsider, but Daley dodged his old political patron’s phone calls. Stevenson finally convinced Arvey to act as his intermediary and get Daley to call back. When they spoke, Stevenson drew on their long political friendship, which dated back to 1948, when he gave Daley an important career boost by appointing him state revenue director. Stevenson had, of course, also played a key role in Daley’s election as mayor in 1955. Stevenson made a spirited argument on his own behalf, reminding Daley that he had been the first Illinoisan since Abraham Lincoln to run for president, and promising that if he won the nomination he would campaign vigorously against Nixon. But Daley bluntly told Stevenson that his arguments were not getting him anywhere, since he had no support in his home state’s delegation. In fact, Daley told his ol
d boss, he had not had any support in the delegation four years earlier, and he, Daley, had had to bring the delegates around. As for the lopsidedness of the vote this time, Daley told Stevenson: “You’re lucky to have the two votes you’ve got.” 23
But days later, it was Daley who was being coolly rebuffed. After Kennedy won the nomination, he invited Daley and a few other key backers to his suite at the Biltmore Hotel to discuss his choice of running mates. Daley was, of course, hoping to persuade Kennedy to select a vice presidential nominee who would boost the machine’s statewide slate in Illinois. That made him a Symington supporter, since the Missouri candidate could help the Democratic ticket downstate, precisely the region where Kennedy would be weakest.Daley was least enthusiastic about Lyndon Johnson, who would do less for the ticket downstate and who, as a white southerner, might turn off some of the machine’s black voters. Daley told Kennedy that having Johnson on the ticket would make it harder to carry Illinois. When that failed, Daley brought up how much he had done to help Kennedy secure the nomination. Kennedy, who wanted Johnson because of the help he could give the ticket in Texas and the Deep South, reportedly responded to Daley: “Not you nor anybody else nominated us. We did it ourselves.” In the Chicago Tribune’s telling of the story, Daley had “smoke coming out of his ears” after the encounter. 24
