American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley’s victory margin was, of course, inflated by the machine’s usual vote theft and other irregularities. In the 29th Ward, a black “plantation ward” presided over by white committeeman Bernard Neistein — who lived outside the ward in a lakefront high-rise — Friedman poll watchers and election judges were not allowed into seven voting precincts. When a twenty-seven-year-old Friedman campaign worker showed up in the 29th Precinct of the 29th Ward to install a Republican poll watcher, they were both arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. In the 49th Precinct, Dolores Bosley was allowed to remain but she could not stop Democratic judges from walking into the voting booth with voters and pulling the lever for them. “I kept telling them this was illegal, but they paid no attention to me,” she said afterward. In the 5th Precinct, a Democratic worker attacked a Chicago Daily News photographer who tried to photograph the voting. And when a Chicago Sun-Times reporter with poll-watcher credentials tried to examine a voting machine in the 24th Ward, the Democratic precinct captain shoved him against a wall. When the reporter pointed out that he was allowed by law to check the machine, the precinct captain responded “You don’t come out here to get no law” and ejected him from the polling place. An investigation by the attorney general would later reveal that 272 votes had been cast in the precinct, although only 259 voters had requested ballots. Daley would have won without these improprieties, but the machine continued to resort to vote theft even in elections that were not close. 51

  Friedman’s attempt to put together an anti-machine majority — cobbled together from reform Democrats, Republicans, and blacks — had failed dismally. Many blacks remained loyal to the machine because they regarded the small favors their precinct captains handed out as better than nothing — which is to say, better than the reformers were offering. Many were also skeptical of white reformers on questions of race. “Chicago blacks are all too familiar with reform candidates,” wrote black columnist Vernon Jarrett, who noted that blacks had suffered when Mayor Ed Kelly was ousted in favor of racially insensitive reformer Martin Kennelly. But there were nevertheless signs that the machine’s hold on black voters was beginning to erode. Voter turnout was light — the lowest in a mayoral election since 1935. The drop-off in black wards was particularly sharp. In the 2nd Ward, home of the Robert Taylor Homes and the heart of the old Dawson submachine, the Democratic vote plunged 21 percent from the last mayoral election, in 1967. As he had been doing for the last eight years, Daley made up for these lost black votes by picking up more votes in white wards on the Northwest and Southwest sides, where homeowners had decided that Daley was their best hope of keeping public housing out of their neighborhoods. Many of these voters were Republicans who claimed they were casting their first Democratic votes ever for Daley. 52

  In an uncanny bit of timing, it was just after the April mayoral election — when the political risks to the machine were least — that Daley’s special state investigation of the Black Panther raid was ready to announce its findings. Sears told reporters he might have a story for them later in the day. But Judge Power, who had oversight of the grand jury, ordered Sears not to say anything, and the announcement was put off. Hanrahan went to the City Council chamber where Daley was presiding, and the two men had a private talk. When a reporter asked about the conversation, Daley insisted Hanrahan had just stopped by to say hello. Asked whether they had discussed the grand jury, Daley scowled and asked, “What grand jury?” Rumors spread that the grand jury had wanted to indict Hanrahan, but that Judge Power had stopped it from doing so. What was clear was that Judge Power had turned against Sears, the special prosecutor he himself had chosen, and had even appointed a “friend of the court” to start investigating the conduct of the special prosecutor. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that a fix was on, and that the machine was stepping in to protect Hanrahan. “Judge Power’s excessive activities on Mr. Hanrahan’s behalf serve no public purpose other than to remind everyone that both he and Mr. Hanrahan are close friends of Mayor Daley and leading figures in the Democratic machine,” the Chicago Tribune noted in an editorial. The indictment of Hanrahan that did not come earlier finally came in August. Hanrahan and thirteen other law enforcement officials were charged with conspiring to obstruct justice by engaging in a police cover-up and interfering with the defenses of the seven surviving Panthers who were charged with attempted murder. The Chicago Bar Association suggested Hanrahan take a leave of absence or resign to defend himself, but Hanrahan dug in his heels. Daley once again blamed the bind he found himself in on the press. “We’ve got to stop this doctrine of guilt by association and accusation without proof,” he said. “I hope this thing will be tried on the evidence and not through the news media.” 53

  But blaming the media did not get Daley out of his political bind. Hanrahan was now a deeply divisive figure — reviled by many blacks, but still popular in the white ethnic wards. Daley could not afford to lose the state’s attorney’s office — Adamowski had shown just how effective the position could be for launching a prosecutorial war on the machine. To win the race, Daley would need the votes of both white ethnics and blacks. He initially reslated Hanrahan, hoping that the uproar would die down. But within weeks, under pressure from blacks and white liberals, Daley dumped Hanrahan and slated Raymond Berg, chief judge of Traffic Court. Berg, who was not much involved in politics, was a “blue ribbon” choice, designed to put the controversy over Hanrahan and the Panther raid to rest. But Hanrahan had other ideas: he promptly announced that he was running for reelection anyway. Daley’s support for Berg was lukewarm. He allowed most of the machine’s white ward committeemen to line up behind Hanrahan, who remained popular with the machine’s white ethnic base. Daley’s handling of the state’s attorney race lost the machine support among black voters: many resented that Hanrahan had been reslated, even briefly, and some suspected Daley was still quietly on his side. The Panther killings, and the machine’s response to them, were for some black voters a political turning point. As Bobby Rush explained with only mild overstatement: “The legacy of Fred’s murder was that the black community totally and completely broke the chains that bound them to the Democratic Machine.” 54

  During the summer of 1971, Daley’s behavior seemed to be turning erratic and peculiar. His health and vigor were in decline, and he was becoming more withdrawn. Unlike his early years in office when reporters gathered at his desk for daily press conferences, Daley was now meeting with the City Hall press corps only infrequently. And an uncharacteristic bitterness was creeping into his public statements. When his proposal for a $55 million lakefront stadium drew criticism from environmentalists and others, Daley lashed out. He decried the “polluted and twisted minds” of his critics, and said to reporters covering the story: “It is the nature of guys like yourselves that ruins everything. You great geniuses.” 55 In Milwaukee for a meeting of the Conference of Mayors, Daley announced that he intended to nominate Milwaukee mayor Henry Meier for vice president of the United States in 1972. No one was more astonished than Henry Meier, who called the announcement “news to me.” 56

  Daley’s most bizarre outburst came at a City Council meeting in July. First-term alderman Dick Simpson of the lakefront 44th Ward, a University of Illinois–Chicago political science professor and Singer ally, assailed Daley’s naming of Thomas Keane Jr., son of Alderman Tom Keane, to the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals. “We must end nepotism,” Simpson said. “There has to come a time when we say that city government is open to all the people.” Simpson also objected that the younger Keane was an executive with Arthur Rubloff ’s real estate firm. “Charges will be made that this represents big business and politics,” Simpson said. Asked by Daley who would make the charges, Simpson said, “My students.” Machine aldermen lined up to defend Keane and Daley from Simpson’s charges, and Daley read a treacly poem celebrating the father-son bond. The outcome was never in doubt: the Keane appointment was approved 45–2. Daley was nevertheless livid at being challenged. After stepping d
own from the podium and turning the gavel over to Alderman Claude Holman, the council’s president pro tem, he unleashed a tirade at Simpson. “If you are a teacher, God help the students who are in your class,” Daley said. “I hope the halls of all the great educational institutions will stop being places for agitation and hatred against this society. And talk about the young people! With their cynical smiles and their fakery and their polluted minds!” Singer recalls that during the tirade Daley was “purple.” Daley’s strangely vitriolic outburst was as hard to explain as it was frightening. Dr. Eric Oldberg, Daley’s friend and physician, said, “This thing has been bottled up” in Daley since the 1968 Democratic convention. 57

  The increasingly thin-skinned Daley was soon the subject of another attack — the most withering of his career. Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko had long been one of Daley’s fiercest detractors. Royko was a crusading populist who had been taking on Daley since 1964 for all of the usual reasons: that he was wrong on civil rights, too brutal at the Democratic convention, and too mired in corrupt politics. The criticism was not original, but Royko’s words mattered in a way that attacks from Lakefront liberals and Republican reformers did not. Royko, the son of a Ukrainian tavern owner and a Polish housewife, was a certified Bungalow Belt white ethnic who spoke directly to the machine’s political base. He also had a way of lacing his barbs with caustic humor. In a 1967 column about corruption in Daley’s Chicago, Royko suggested changing the motto on the city seal from Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) to Ubi Est Mea (Where’s Mine). A 1970 column on Chicago’s high-rise public housing called Daley’s role in kicking off construction at one site “a shovelful of bad thinking.”

  In the fall of 1970, Royko published Boss, a scathing portrait of Daley. The book, which attacked the mayor as “arrogant, crude, conniving, ruthless, suspicious, and intolerant,” became an instant bestseller. What hurt the most, though, was that it was being snapped up in working-class white neighborhoods — the machine’s political base. Royko reported in his column that Sis Daley had been spotted in a store near the Daley home turning a cardboard advertisement for the book facedown, turning books on the shelves around so the title did not show, and asking the store manager to stop selling the book.In fact, Boss was pulled from the shelves of two hundred Chicago-area stores, but customer demand was so great that most restored it. Daley did not respond to Royko’s attack, but Sis delivered a retort that no doubt spoke for both of them. “When there is an odious criticism of the mayor, I always consider the source,” she said. “I read the book one evening after we’d retired to bed. Mind you, Royko never talked to any member of the family, so his information is shallow, secondhand, hogwash at best.” Sis was not done with Royko. “He is a hater — a man who hates men in government, generally. The book is trash. I advised the mayor it wasn’t worth his reading.” 58

  Before 1972 ended, another federal investigation presented serious trouble. On December 15, former governor Otto Kerner, now a Federal Appeals Court judge, was indicted for bribery, conspiracy, and tax evasion. He was charged with arranging favorable horse-racing dates for a track in exchange for racetrack stock that he was permitted to buy far below its market value. Kerner was eventually convicted, and sentenced to three years in federal prison. 59 Kerner’s indictment had been brought by a zealous young Republican U.S. attorney, James Thompson, who was appointed by Nixon and was working with Nixon attorney general John Mitchell to put the heat on the Democratic machine. If Thompson could bring down a sitting federal judge like Kerner, there would be nothing to stop him from going after Daley’s allies in the machine, and even Daley himself. During the Kerner trial, it appeared that Thompson might indeed have been planning to go after Daley next. Thompson had a former Illinois Racing Board chairman testify that Daley had introduced him to Kerner in 1960 and “induced” him to lend $100,000 to Kerner’s gubernatorial campaign. Daley insisted that he had done nothing wrong, and pointed out that, unlike Kerner, he had never received any racetrack stock. “I never have and I never will,” Daley declared. 60

  The machine lost another federal case a few months later that would prove even more damaging. On April 19, 1971, the United States Supreme Court refused to disturb a Federal Appeals Court ruling that struck down a key component of the machine’s patronage operations. The lower court had held that, other than policymakers and other high-level officers, city workers could not be dismissed based on their political affiliation. The suit had been brought by Michael Shakman, a Hyde Park lawyer who was an independent candidate for delegate to the Illinois 1970 Constitutional Convention. Shakman lost his election to a machine candidate by just 623 votes out of 24,000 cast, and as he noted in his court papers, considerably more than 623 patronage employees lived in the district. Shakman charged that the patronage system was responsible for the fact that every Chicago mayor elected since 1931 had the backing of the Democratic machine, and that the current composition of the City Council was one Republican, three independent Democrats, and forty-six members of the regular Democratic machine. The Shakman case had started out before U.S. District Court Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, through the same purportedly random process that had assigned the 1968 Democratic convention rally case to William Lynch. Marovitz had been friends with Daley since their days serving together in the Illinois legislature in the 1930s, and he maintained that he spoke with Daley by telephone almost every evening. Shakman had asked Marovitz to disqualify himself, but Marovitz refused. “It’s an obvious fact of life,” he said, “that men in high public positions know each other. I was and am a close friend of Mayor Richard J. Daley.” Marovitz had initially dismissed Shakman’s case quickly. But on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reversed that decision. Now that the Supreme Court had denied review, Marovitz would be forced to preside over the dismantling of the patronage system.

  After more than a year of negotiations, Shakman and the city reached a settlement. The consent decree, which Daley signed in 1972, prohibited the firing of government workers on political grounds. It was a significant blow to the machine: without the threat that they would be fired, patronage workers would not feel the same pressure to deliver on election day. Still, the settlement did not entirely undo the patronage system, since it did not prohibit Daley from hiring government workers on political grounds. Daley was also adept at finding loopholes in any restrictions he agreed to. During the settlement discussions, he offered a resolution declaring it the “official policy” of the party to “condemn and oppose compulsory financial contributions by public employees, contractors or suppliers, to any individual or organization.” But he explained to reporters: “This means no dues. But the key word is compulsory. Voluntary contributions can be accepted.” It would take a second round of litigation, known as Shakman II, to outlaw the hiring of government workers on political grounds. That decision, which proved far more damaging to the machine, did not come until after Daley’s death. 61

  The machine was also seeing erosion on another important front: the black wards that had long been a critical part of its electoral base. When Dawson stepped down in 1970, Daley had handed his congressional seat to Ralph Metcalfe. Metcalfe was a heroic figure in the black community, a onetime track star who had finished second to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Metcalfe also had a perfect machine résumé. He began as a protégé of Dawson’s, and won election as 3rd Ward alderman in 1955, when Daley was first elected mayor. In the late 1950s, when Daley crushed the Dawson submachine, Metcalfe had switched his loyalty to Daley. Metcalfe had been a member in good standing of Daley’s “silent six,” the compliant black aldermen who spoke little and uniformly supported him on civil rights issues. And he had negotiated for Daley with King in 1966, encouraging the civil rights leader to moderate his demands. Metcalfe won his congressional seat by running against Alderman A. A. “Sammy” Rayner, an independent who had earlier challenged Dawson for the same seat — on a platform of ending Dawson’s “plantation–Uncle Tom politics”— and
lost.

  In the span of a year, Metcalfe went from being one of the machine’s most subservient followers to one of its harshest critics. There were many factors involved in Metcalfe’s break with the machine. As a congressman, he had a stronger political base than he had as an alderman, meaning there was less the machine could do to punish him if he went his own way. Metcalfe’s political supporters and constitutents were also becoming more ambivalent about the machine, and some of them — notably his own son, Ralph — were urging him to sever his ties. But the issue that drove a wedge between Metcalfe and Daley was the police, a source of great bitterness in the black community. As Renault Robinson, executive director of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, explained: “You were as afraid of the police as you were of burglars and robbers because if you ran into a white police officer, he would rather kick your teeth in than help you.” Metcalfe had long remained silent about police misconduct, but he became sensitized to the problem in March 1971 when Dr. Herbert Odom, a South Side dentist and a friend, was stopped in his Cadillac one night because his license plate light was out. The police ticketed him, and the dentist and the officers got into an argument. Odom was taken away in handcuffs and jailed for several hours. A furious Metcalfe called Police Superintendent Conlisk and asked him to a meeting in the ward. Conlisk would not come. 62