American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Humphrey selected Maine senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate, and the two men accepted their nominations Thursday night. In his acceptance speech, the new presidential nominee struggled to bring together his bitterly divided party. Humphrey offered something to both Daley and the demonstrators. “We do not want a police state, but we do need a state of law and order,” he said. Humphrey, who had a reputation for equivocating on important issues, found that his attempts to please everyone pleased no one. As a sign held by a protester in Grant Park earlier in the week put it: “There are Two Sides to Every Question — Humphrey Endorses Both of Them.” But Humphrey’s bigger problem was the damage the disastrous events of the last week had done to the Democratic Party. “It seems to me, on the last day of the Democratic convention, the party could fairly be classified as a disaster area,” David Brinkley said in an NBC news broadcast at the end of the convention. “Hubert Humphrey, after a long time of yearning for it, has finally won his party’s nomination, and in the opinion of a great many people, including a great many of the delegates, there is serious question now about how much the nomination he won is worth.” 39

  The police attacks, like the convention itself, were winding down. The police arrested another eighty people on Thursday, and police and National Guardsmen turned away two marches headed toward the International Amphitheatre. There was a brief melee at 18th and Michigan, south of the Loop, where three thousand marchers were routed by three volleys of gas, but the crowd dispersed without resisting. Further up Michigan Avenue, near the Hilton Hotel, more serious trouble was developing. At 4:00 Friday morning, responding to reports that objects were being thrown out the windows onto Michigan Avenue, police got passkeys from hotel management and raided the entire fifteenth floor, which was the headquarters of the Mc-Carthy campaign. Sleeping McCarthy staffers and volunteers — on the Michigan Avenue side and on the opposite side — were roused from their beds and beaten. One staff member who told police they had no authority to do what they were doing was beaten by three policemen. An Irish businessman who came to Chicago as part of an “Irish for McCarthy” contingent recalled that when McCarthy’s young supporters were heading out through the hotel hallways, the police began attacking again: “I saw a policeman’s club raised high in the air among the McCarthy workers still in the hall,” he said. “For a long time it seemed to hang there. Then it was descending in a gleaming arc with rapid and enormous force. I heard it hit a boy’s head. It was sharper and louder than a door slamming. Like the sound of the first impact in an auto accident. It was followed by the distinctive squish of flesh and skin parting. And the boy had done nothing to provoke this. Then other clubs started to fall and girls began screaming. . . .” Senator McCarthy, who was awoken by his staff, came out and complained to the police about their treatment of his staff. “You can’t just come up here and knock heads,” he objected. In fact, that is just what the Chicago police had done. The attack on the McCarthy staff did nothing to dampen Daley’s enthusiasm for his police. As the week drew to a close, he sent a teletype message to police superintendent Conlisk stating that “The Democratic National Committee and the mayor of Chicago express their heartfelt gratitude to the men and women of the Chicago Police Department for their devotion to duty and a job well done.” 40

  When the convention was over, the majority of the national media were caustic in their assessment of Daley’s performance. “The blame has to be taken at the top,” the Washington Post editorialized. “Brutes ought not to be put into police uniforms. Chicago has been disgraced by them — and even more by those responsible for their barbarity.” The convention had been a “military nightmare, Richard J. Daley, host,” columnist Mary McGrory wrote. “The truth was,” Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “those were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up.” But Daley’s local reviews were more favorable. The conservative Chicago Tribune strongly endorsed his law-and-order stand, and had little sympathy for the victims of the violence. In a front-page editorial, the paper denounced the “bearded, dirty, lawless rabble” that used “every sort of provocation against police and National Guardsmen — vile taunts, lye solutions, bricks and rubble.” It concluded that “Mayor Daley and the police deserve congratulations rather than criticism.” The Chicago Daily News, in an August 31 editorial, said that while Daley bore “a large burden of blame,” there was another side of the story. The paper agreed with Daley that radical groups and hard-core dissidents had instigated much of the violence. And they found grim solace in Daley’s assessment of the week: what really mattered was that “no one was killed.” It was not only the newspapers that took Daley’s side — many Chicagoans spoke out in support of Daley, and few dared to question his actions. “Knock on any door. Any cab door. The response is Johnny-One-Note: ‘Daley’s OK,’” Chicago historian Studs Terkel observed dejectedly after the convention. “And what of THE University, boasting more Nobel Prize winners than any other campus on earth, Doc? Their silence is the silence of the dead.” 41

  Daley began his September 9 press conference, his first after the convention, in a jovial mood. But it did not take long for him to explode. A Chicago Daily News reporter suggested that when Daley shouted at Ribicoff he had used a “four letter word beginning with mother.” Daley shouted: “You’re a liar. Don’t say that. I never used that kind of language in my life.” But Daley would not say what he had shouted at Ribicoff. It was, he said, “immaterial.” Matt Danaher, sitting outside the press conference, backed up his boss’s story. “I was sitting next to him,” Danaher said. “He’d never use a word like the one [the Daily News reporter] said. He doesn’t talk that way.... He’s a daily communicant.” Daley then summed up the Chicago police philosophy in a quote that his critics would repeat endlessly. “Gentlemen, get this thing straight for once and for all,” he said. “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.” 42

  A few days earlier, Daley’s office had published an official report on the convention violence. “Strategy of Confrontation” was an expansion of the points Daley outlined in his Walter Cronkite interview. It made now-familiar arguments about “revolutionaries” who had come to Chicago determined to engage law enforcement in “hostile confrontation,” and policemen who did their best to avoid being drawn in. “Strategy of Confrontation” talked archly of information obtained by the Intelligence Division of the Chicago Police Department concerning “schemes to assassinate Senator Eugene McCarthy, Mayor Richard J. Daley and other political and civic leaders.” The report indicated that among the threats to the social order that had occurred in Chicago, unbeknownst to most of America, was a plan to murder a young female supporter of Eugene McCarthy and blame it on the police. Naturally, the police did not want to mention these schemes and rumors at the time “for fear of planting the idea in still other minds.” The document also contained an occasionally bizarre list of weapons used by the demonstrators, including items like “aerosol can with contents which act like stink bomb,” and “paint.” Among the “battle” supplies listed were “revolutionary literature” and “dangerous drugs.” 43

  Daley was also involved in a filmed version of “Strategy of Confrontation.” His staff worked on producing the video, while he asked the networks for help in “balancing the one-sided portrayal” of the Chicago police during the convention. All three networks turned Daley down. NBC responded with an invitation to discuss the events with a panel of reporters in a special edition of Meet the Press, which Daley declined. Within a month, a private film company, working with city employees, had completed What Trees Do They Plant? The title was one of Daley’s favorite swipes at reformers, who sat back and criticized while men like Daley were getting things done. Daley pursued independent stations, and found 140 in the U.S., Canada, and England who agreed to air it. The film featured footage of police officers describing being attacked by peace protesters, and an assortment of weapons said to have been confiscated from demonstrat
ors, including a flattened beer can and broken park bench slats. The standout in the arsenal was a Louisville Slugger with the words “Cops are Pigs” on one side, and “Love” on the other — though it was unclear where exactly it had come from. 44

  For all the national criticism directed at Daley, his reputation in Chicago did not seem to have suffered. Even before his propaganda efforts, he claimed that mail to City Hall was running 60,000 in support of him and the Chicago police and only 4,000 against. The numbers seemed improbably one-sided, but there were other indications that Daley’s stance had been popular with average Chicagoans. Cars around the city began to sport bumper stickers saying “We Support Mayor Daley and His Chicago Police.” Jack Mabley, a columnist with Chicago’s American, had written one of the most disturbing pieces of reportage to come out of the convention. It described a policeman who “went animal when a crippled man couldn’t get away fast enough.” The policeman, angry that the man hopping along with the help of a stick was not gone, shoved him in the back, hit him with a night stick, and threw him into a lamppost. Mabley got an overwhelming response to his reporting — 80 percent to 85 percent of it supporting Daley and the police. “You can’t help that gnawing feeling — can all these people be right and I be wrong?” Mabley said. In mid-September, Daley received praise from an unexpected quarter: Georgia’s segregationist governor Lester Maddox announced that he was supporting an independent ticket of George Wallace for president and Daley for vice president. 45

  The November elections did not go well for Daley and the Democrats. Humphrey won Chicago by 370,000 votes, which was not enough to stop Nixon from carrying Illinois by 135,000 votes. Governor Samuel Shapiro, who had moved up to the job when Otto Kerner was named to the federal bench in May, lost to Republican Richard Ogilvie. Though the Democrats lost the governorship, downstate Democrat Paul Simon was elected lieutenant governor. Simon explained his win — the first time the two parties had split the state’s top two offices — by saying that he was able to “convey an image of independence” Shapiro had not. But the election was not without its bright spots for the machine. With Ogilvie out as chairman of the Cook County Board, the board — which now had a 10–4 Democratic majority — would certainly choose a machine loyalist as his successor. That would allow Daley to once again take control of Cook County government. And Daley protégé Edward Hanrahan was elected state’s attorney, keeping that important prose-cutorial position in the machine’s hands. Daley had no easy explanation for the Democrats’ poor showing statewide — he attributed Humphrey’s loss to the fact that “he didn’t get enough votes.” But he was emphatic that the November elections were only a temporary setback. Asked by a reporter at a press conference if he was worried about Governor-elect Ogilvie’s threat to “disassemble the Chicago Democratic machine,” Daley responded defiantly: “You try it!” 46

  On December 1, an investigative commission headed up by Daniel Walker, a corporate lawyer and president of the Chicago Crime Commission, released its report on violence at the Democratic convention. Walker’s investigation, undertaken at the behest of President Johnson’s National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, sifted through almost 3,437 eyewitness accounts, 180 hours of film, and 20,000 still photographs, and relied on the work of 212 investigators. The Walker Report, also known as Rights in Conflict, offered tepid criticism of the protesters but came down hard on the Chicago Police Department. The police were involved in “enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that the individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest,” the report stated. Its famous conclusion was that the Chicago police had engaged in a “police riot.” The Walker Report traced the police misbehavior directly to Daley, and his shoot-to-kill comments after the April 1968 unrest. Daley’s remarks were “widely reported both in Chicago and throughout the nation,” the report noted. “Undoubtedly it had some effect on the attitude of Chicago policemen towards their role in riots and other disorders.” The report also criticized the city for not publicly condemning the offending police officers after the convention violence. “If no action is taken against them, the effect can only be to discourage the majority of policemen who acted responsibly, and further weaken the bond between police and community,” the commission concluded. Daley, not troubled that this careful study had labeled his police officers rioters, cautioned that the 345-page report “must be read in full.” He was gratified, he said, that the Walker Commission had concluded that “the majority of policemen did act responsibly under extremely provocative circumstances.” 47

  CHAPTER

  14

  We Wore Suits and Ties

  Daley, who rarely got ill, began 1969 by staying home sick with the flu. 1 His associates noticed that he was starting to slow down, and that he seemed to be losing his edge. There was talk that the travails of 1968 — the West Side riots, the convention clashes, and the excoriation by the national press — had taken a physical and psychological toll on him. Daley’s friend Dr. Eric Oldberg, president of the Chicago Board of Health, said the mayor “was on the brink of something serious. ... He was in very bad shape.” It was unfortunate timing, because 1969 was a year in which he would need all the strength he could muster. 2

  On February 10, a federal court ruled against the city in the Gautreaux case. The landmark decision confirmed the obvious: that the Chicago Housing Authority had discriminated against blacks for decades in where it located its projects and which tenants it allowed to move in. The case had begun in 1965, when the Illinois affiliate of the ACLU set up a Civil Rights Committee, which investigated the city’s public housing policies. Alexander Polikoff, then a lawyer in private practice, agreed to head up a team to investigate the possibilities of litigation. The ACLU filed its class-action suit against the CHA on August 9, 1966, on behalf of Dorothy Gautreaux, a public housing tenant, and other black tenants and applicants. The plaintiffs charged that since 1950, virtually all the sites selected by the CHA to build family housing were “in Negro neighborhoods and within the areas known as the Negro Ghetto” because of the CHA’s policy of avoiding placing public housing in white parts of the city. The plaintiffs charged that the CHA’s policies violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination in federally funded programs. 3

  The case had been assigned to Judge Richard Austin. It looked at first like another example of an important lawsuit being assigned to a judge who owed a political debt to Daley. Austin and Daley had a long history. Daley had plucked him from obscurity, handing him the Democratic nomination for governor against incumbent William Stratton in 1956. Afterward, Daley was responsible for President Kennedy appointing Austin to the federal bench. But Austin’s gratitude may have been tempered by hard feelings over the 1956 gubernatorial race. It was said at the time that Daley had struck a deal with Stratton that in exchange for increasing Chicago’s taxing authority, the machine would run a weak campaign against him in the next election. The rumor was that Austin had been “trimmed,” or not given the machine’s full support. The evidence on this point is mixed, and Austin may simply have lost a very close election because Adlai Stevenson dragged down the whole Democratic ticket that year. But the 1956 election may also have inclined Austin to use the case to pay Daley back. 4

  Austin seemed skeptical about the lawsuit at first. Polikoff recalls that Austin’s initial reaction to the plaintiffs’ claims was “Where do you want to put ’em? On Lake Shore Drive?” But his views changed after the plaintiffs set out their claims of racial discrimination in painstaking detail. Their case, which unfolded over two and a half years of pleadings and hearings, explained how the CHA had worked with the political establishment to keep public housing out of white wards. Of the thirty-three project sites that had been proposed by the CHA since 1950, the plaintiffs noted, thirty-two were in predominantly black neighborhoods. And since Daley’s
election as mayor, virtually every new unit of housing built by the CHA had been built in the black ghetto. Of 10,256 family apartments completed or in development, 18 were in the Lincoln Park urban renewal area, 12 were in the Hyde Park urban renewal area, and another 33 were in a white neighborhood with a growing black population. The remaining 10,193 apartments — 99.4 percent of the total — were located in black neighborhoods. The result of these “siting” decisions was that by 1967, outside of the CHA’s four white projects, the city’s public housing tenants were about 99 percent black. “The pattern of segregation,” the plaintiffs charged, “has been nearly perfect.” 5

  The plaintiffs’ case also featured damaging testimony from the CHA’s own employees about the degree to which racial considerations permeated its operations. C. E. Humphrey, executive director of the CHA from 1968 to 1973, gave a view from inside the agency of the cooperation between the CHA and the City Council about racial consideration in site selection. As for tenant selection, Tamaara Tabb, former supervisor of tenant selection for the CHA, testified that the CHA had different policies for whites and blacks. The agency had a firm policy of keeping apartments in Trumbull Park, Bridgeport, and other projects vacant rather than rent them to black families, Tabb said. The CHA kept separate waiting lists for blacks and whites, and the Central Rental Office and the staffs of each of the four white projects were instructed not to rent to “B” families — CHA code for blacks. 6