American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  But by the spring of 1967, more of the criticism of the War on Poverty was coming from conservatives. The growing Black Power movement had by now reached new heights of militancy. Stokely Carmichael resigned as chairman of SNCC in May to travel to Cuba and Vietnam. He left behind a successor, H. Rap Brown, who was even more confrontational. “If you give me a gun I might just shoot Lady Bird,” Brown declared. The violent rhetoric coming out of the black liberation movement was contributing to a phenomenon that the national media had seemingly fallen in love with: white backlash. Some of the backlash was aimed at CAP, which was increasingly identified in the minds of white America with radical black politics. In Houston, the mayor accused anti-poverty program employees of contributing to racial unrest that culminated in a gun battle at Texas Southern University, the state’s largest historically black college. In Alabama, Governor Wallace charged that $500,000 in grants to programs in Wilcox and Lowndes counties amounted to funding the Black Panthers, which began as a black political party in Lowndes County. Even in Chicago, where Daley and Brooks were keeping a close eye on CAP, there were charges that War on Poverty money was being diverted to fund civil rights protests. Washington handed critics a new argument for opposing the program when The Woodlawn Organization was given a $927,000 grant to hire gang members to provide job training to other gang members. The money went directly from Washington to TWO, bypassing the local Daley-controlled board, the CCUO. By the end of the year, it would come out that eight of the staff hired by TWO had been charged with or convicted of serious crimes, including a twenty-one-year-old “center chief ” who had been charged with murdering a thirteen-year-old boy. 18 “This is the only program not included under the jurisdiction of the city of Chicago,” Daley fumed when the staff’s brushes with the criminal justice system came to light. “People say we should have participation by outside agencies and we are for this,” he said. “But we feel it has to be under some direction.” Daley eventually convinced the OEO to cut off funding to the group. 19

  On June 5, the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities held a luncheon for 1,300 at the Hilton Hotel to kick off Project: Good Neighbor. Daley told the crowd that the one-week project had the potential to “do much to erase prejudices which long ago should have been thrust aside.” Other speakers talked about the importance of open housing. And Robert Ingersoll, board chairman of Borg-Warner Corporation and chairman of the project, urged everyone in attendance to sign a “Good Neighbor Declaration.” But the event had a hollow feeling, since Daley and the others did not seem to be taking many practical steps to advance the cause of open housing. In late April, six progressive aldermen had introduced an amendment to strengthen the city’s open-housing law. They proposed to extend the law, which applied only to brokers, to cover all sellers and renters of housing, including owners of single-family homes. The machine did not back the measure, and Daley’s corporation counsel, Ray Simon, weighed in with his opinion that the city did not have the authority to pass such a law. Meanwhile, Daley’s development plans for the city were proceeding impressively. On July 12, he announced that McCormick Place would be rebuilt in no more than eighteen months. It was a quick schedule, he conceded, for such a mammoth project, but “with crews working 24 hours a day if necessary, it can be done,” he said. “Where there is a will there is always a way.” The following day, Daley stood at the corner of Dearborn and Madison to preside over the cornerstone ceremony for the First National Bank of Chicago Building. 20

  This municipal tranquillity was soon threatened, when a rash of urban rioting swept the nation. It started on July 12 in Newark, New Jersey, with an altercation between a black cabdriver and two policemen. A day later, protesters clashed with the Newark police and began looting stores. Then, the unrest escalated. Rioters and looters seized control of roughly half of Newark’s twenty-four square miles. Snipers took positions on rooftops, and arsonists set buildings on fire across the city. It took five days, 1,400 Newark police, and 300 New Jersey police to restore the peace. Before it was over, twenty-seven people were dead, and there was $10 million in property damage. Days later, rioting began in Detroit, and the devastation was even worse. Large sections of the city were set on fire, forty-three people were killed, and a staggering 7,000 people were arrested. To restore the order in Detroit, 4,700 army paratroopers and 5,000 National Guardsmen had to be called in to back up the local police. When the rioting ended in one city, it began in another — Milwaukee; New Haven, Connecticut; Wilmington, Delaware; and Flint, Michigan. 21

  Daley was adamant that Chicago would not go the way of Newark or Detroit. He called a press conference on July 27 and delivered a grim-faced warning that rioting would not be tolerated. The National Guard was on alert, he said, and it would be on the streets in an hour with live ammunition. “As long as I am mayor of Chicago, law and order will prevail,” Daley insisted. When a reporter pointed out that King had warned that Chicago had the kind of problems that had led to riots in other cities, Daley lashed out at the man he had once gone to great lengths to embrace. “We don’t need him to tell us what to do,” Daley said of King. “He has been asked to join in our constructive programs and he has refused. He only comes here for one purpose — or to any other city he has visited — and that is to cause trouble.” The next day, Daley addressed an enthusiastic audience at the 49th annual Illinois American Legion at the Palmer House and repeated the promise he made at the press conference: “Law and order must prevail; it will prevail.” In fact, this time law and order did prevail. In the summer of 1967, when more than 128 American cities erupted in rioting, Chicago somehow escaped unscathed. 22

  Daley’s admirers were happy to give him the credit. It was his tough talk, many of them said, that let potential rioters know they would be dealt with swiftly and harshly. Others said it was the antipoverty money Daley had attracted to the city. “Chicago is in on every conceivable program the Federal Government has to offer,” one reporter noted. Some attributed the absence of rioting to the Democratic machine, which reached into every block of the ghetto, and made even the city’s poorest blacks feel they had some stake in the system. “The trained and loyal members of the Democrats’ campaign army are armed with the promise of food and favors,” said Joseph Meeks, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. “They will be effective in influencing almost anyone who has a modicum of reason.” But rioting, and the absence of rioting, is not so easily explained. Less than a year later, the machine would still be handing out food and favors, and Daley would be talking even tougher. But the response in Chicago’s ghettos would be very different. 23

  Every headline about a city erupting in looting and arson drove another nail into the coffin of CAP. The program’s defenders argued that the unrest only illustrated more vividly that the nation’s urban poor were desperately in need of intervention, but that was not the majority view. The uprisings “not only raised the question whether the poor should be ‘rewarded’ after engaging in violence,” New York Times columnist Tom Wicker observed, “it also brought wild but unsubstantiated charges that O.E.O. employees had helped foment the riots.” The War on Poverty was rapidly losing the support of the two groups that dominated the Democratic majority in Congress: urban liberals from the North, and rural conservatives from the South. Southern Democrats increasingly identified Washington’s anti-poverty programs with black militancy and voter registration drives that threatened the white power structure in some regions. Northern Democrats had also become convinced that federal anti-poverty money was being used to fund political protests and acts of insurrection, like a Cleveland demonstration in which angry poor people marched on City Hall and dropped rats on the steps. Even many urban liberals were finally coming around to Daley’s long-held view that a poverty program not under the control of the political establishment was worse than none at all. 24

  The reform being proposed was an amendment to the Economic Act of 1967 that would reshape the entire CAP program along the lines of Dale
y’s Chicago Concept. It was a measure Congressman Pucinski, Daley’s point man on the issue, had been promoting for some time, but the actual amendment was introduced by House Committee on Education and Labor chair Edith Green (D-Oregon). Republican congressman Charles Goodell attacked the proposed modification as a “bosses and boll weevil amendment,” a joint effort by machine politicians from the North and legislators from the rural South to take control over the federal poverty program. It soon became clear, however, that CAP was not going to be reauthorized without it. Green’s amendment passed, finally closing the chapter on the contentious idea of “maximum feasible participation.” A few months later, Shriver left the War on Poverty to become ambassador to France. In the end, Daley was the victor in the War on Poverty. His Chicago Concept, once attacked as illegal and corrupt, was now law nationwide. 25

  On August 15, 1967, Daley unveiled a new rust-colored Picasso sculpture to stand in front of the Civic Center. The 162-ton statue, which would come to be known simply as the Chicago Picasso, had already endured weeks of abuse. Amateur art critics were comparing Picasso’s abstract creation to everything from a dodo bird to a giant cheese slicer. The Chicago Daily News had called it Chicago’s “greatest conversation piece since Mrs. O’Leary’s lantern.” The Chicago Tribune, seemingly straining to find the right words, hailed the sculpture’s “off-beat attractiveness — not the attractiveness of a marble nymph in a glade but of a great monumental something which turned aside questions and pulled the mind in a strange direction.” Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks composed a poem that she read at the unveiling. It captured Chicago’s awkward relationship with its new masterpiece: “Art hurts,” Brooks declared. “Art urges voyages — and it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer ready.” Republican alderman John Hoellen, happy to have found another issue on which to bait Daley, introduced a resolution in the city council to send the sculpture back to France and replace it with a likeness of Cubs first baseman Ernie Banks. (City Hall was not amused. Told that Hoellen was objecting that no one knew what the statue was, Tom Keane responded: “It’s a baboon, and its name is John Hoellen.”) Daley, with his ingrained Bridgeport sensibility, did not care for the artwork he was unveiling. “He was disturbed,” recalls his speechwriter Earl Bush. “He said, ‘Picasso’s art is not what’s appreciated.’ I said, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter that you like it or not. Picasso brings credibility, no matter how grotesque it is.’” Daley appreciated the credibility and went ahead with the unveiling, even though his heart was with the demonstrators who were gathered at the scene holding signs reading “Give It Back,” and “Colossal Boo Boo.” 26

  Over Labor Day weekend, 2,000 delegates representing 200 leftist organizations gathered at the Palmer House in Chicago for a convention of the National Conference for New Politics. The chaos that ensued was one of the clearest indications yet that the Black Power movement was tearing the left apart. When Martin Luther King gave the keynote address, black militants drowned him out with chants of “Kill whitey.” Black delegates, who were only 10 percent to 15 percent of the convention, demanded and were given 50 percent of the votes on all resolutions. The delegates then went on to adopt a series of radical resolutions, including a condemnation of Israel’s Six Day War as an “imperialist Zionist war” in the Middle East, which many Jewish delegates viewed as anti-Semitic, and an injunction to do work among white Americans to humanize their “savage and beast-like” character. The disastrous gathering deepened a divide that already existed on the left between Vietnam War–focused whites and civil rights– and Black Power–focused blacks. “We are a movement of people with radically different needs,” white radical Rennie Davis said afterward. “A super-coalition makes no sense.” 27

  That fall, Daley traveled to Washington to attend a $500-a-plate dinner for the Democratic National Committee. Daley and his congressional stalwarts Dan Rostenkowski and John Kluczynski listened politely as Johnson told a black-tie audience of thousands that he would not back down over Vietnam. By now, popular opinion was turning against “Johnson’s War.” The number of dead and injured Americans had been growing at an alarming rate — from 2,500 in 1965 to 33,000 in 1966, to 80,000 so far in 1967 — and the United States seemed no closer to winning. Liberal media had been fulminating against the war for years, but now moderate-to-conservative publications like the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine were beginning to express doubt or outright opposition. On September 20, the Christian Science Monitor had reported that of 205 congressmen interviewed, 43 said they had recently dropped their support for Johnson’s policies. Daley had been silent on the great issue that was tearing the nation apart. “He was very much domestic in focus,” says his son William Daley. “His focus was never international in anything except promoting Chicago.” 28

  Though he would later go down in history as one of the great enemies of the anti-war movement, Daley did not in fact support the Vietnam War. In the early years, he paid little attention to the far-off hostilities. “He probably thought, like most Americans in 1961 and 1963, that it was no big deal,” says William Daley. He grew to like the war less as young men, particularly young Chicagoans from neighborhoods like Bridgeport, started coming back with horrible injuries or in pine boxes. Daley’s son John had gone to grammar school with a young man who went off to serve. “His mother came pounding on the door one night,” William Daley recalls. “The poor kid ended up stepping on a mine. He survived and had hundreds of operations, and died a few years later.” With the casualties mounting, and America accomplishing so little, Daley began to form more definite views. An important consideration for Daley, of course, was the effect that the war could have on the Chicago Democratic machine. Like the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War had become a deeply divisive issue that threatened to drive a wedge through the machine’s electorate. Independent anti-war candidates might begin to make inroads among some machine voters, just as pro–civil rights candidates had begun to. Before the 1966 elections, Johnson aide Lawrence O’Brien went on a trip around the country. “There was a conversation I had with Mayor Daley, initiated by him, where he expressed great concern about Vietnam,” says O’Brien. “He said this was a growing disaster and this was going to be devastating to the Democratic party. I sent the President a memo, ‘If Richard Daley has become concerned about Vietnam, you’ve got to realize that it is not some passing cloud.’” Daley had an opportunity that same year, 1966, to tell Johnson personally how he felt about the war. Daley was at the White House lobbying for federal aid for various Chicago projects. As he began to leave, Johnson stopped him. “Listen, Dick, I’ve got a lot of trouble over there in Vietnam,” the president said. “What do you think about it?” Daley thought for a moment and answered. “Well, Mr. President, when you’ve got a losing hand in poker you just throw in your cards,” he said. “But what about American prestige?” Johnson asked. “You put your prestige in your back pocket and walk away.” 29

  Daley’s opposition to the Vietnam War may have been largely political. But he also had a more personal reason to feel that it was time for the hostilities to end. In May 1967, one of Bridgeport’s most beloved young men enlisted and was killed in Vietnam. Joseph Mc-Keon was a star — one of the few Bridgeporters or De La Salle graduates to attend Harvard — and a friend of Michael Daley’s. “We used to socialize with him,” recalls Alderman Edward Burke. “There was nothing in his background that would have ever indicated he wanted to be a Marine and go to Vietnam.” McKeon’s parents were friendly with Daley, and owned a funeral home that was a neighborhood institution. “He was the neighborhood’s bright guy,” says William Daley. “He goes into the Marine Corps, had a great future ahead of him and he’s there three weeks and boom.” The loss of young McKeon hit Bridgeport hard, and considerably dampened the neighborhood’s enthusiasm for the war. 30

  Daley did not have Vietnam on his mind the night of the October 1967 Democratic Party fund-raiser. He had gone to Washington for a specific reason: to
make a pitch to host the upcoming Democratic convention. Chicago had not hosted a Democratic convention since 1956, when Stevenson was nominated. Daley had a dozen years of building and redevelopment he wanted to share with the world, and the national media glare of a major political convention was one of the best ways to do it. He also saw a Chicago convention as a means of boosting the machine ticket in the November election. The Democrats were likely to have a tough fight for governor on their hands, whether Otto Kerner ran for a third time or not, and the excitement of a convention in Chicago could make the difference in a close race. National Democrats were also contemplating a Texas location, since President Johnson was still considered likely to run for reelection. But intraparty fighting in the state, as well as the long shadow of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, made Texas an unlikely choice. The television networks wanted the Democrats to join the Republicans in Miami Beach, since it would reduce their costs of covering the conventions. But Daley buttonholed Johnson and made the argument that he found worked best with presidents. Johnson might lose Illinois and its twenty-six electoral votes, he warned, if the convention were held anywhere but Chicago. 31

  On October 8, the day after Daley’s appearance at the black-tie dinner, Chicago was selected to host the convention. New Jersey attorney general David Wilentz, chairman of the site selection committee, declared that the committee was favorably impressed by Chicago’s central geographic location and its experience in holding conventions. But DNC chairman John Bailey said the financial incentives Chicago offered had played an important role in the final decision. The proposal put together by Daley and his business allies had been generous: $750,000 in cash and another $150,000 worth of services. Daley had accentuated Chicago’s positives through an aggressive marketing campaign. He mailed “A New Platform for Chicago,” a paean to the city’s many fine points, to members of the site selection committee, and had it printed in the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times. Daley made his own personal pitch through his statements to the media. “It has great hotel facilities,” Daley said of Chicago. “It has great newspaper and TV facilities. And it’s in a good time zone for viewing on TV.” 32 Daley also promised that Johnson’s vote in Chicago would exceed the 65 percent he got in 1964, and that law and order would prevail during convention week. “No thousands will come to our city and take over our streets, our city, and our convention,” he said. 33