American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Then a second black dentist, Daniel Claiborne, ran into trouble with the police. Claiborne had suffered a stroke and was unconscious in his car, but the police assumed he was drunk and took him off to jail rather than getting him medical attention. After this second incident involving another of his leading constituents, Metcalfe stormed into Conlisk’s office with a list of demands, including recruitment of more black officers and establishment of a citizens review board. Conlisk refused to meet with Metcalfe, and Daley declined an invitation to a meeting in the ward about police brutality, saying he had set up his own conference on the subject. Daley’s refusal to come to his district to discuss the problem was the final straw. When Metcalfe broke with the machine, he broke completely, and quickly became one of its harshest critics. As he put it at a PUSH rally several years later, “It’s never too late to be black.” 63

  Metcalfe’s political conversion was a milestone in Chicago politics. “No one ever broke away until Metcalfe did,” independent 5th Ward alderman Leon Despres wrote in a memo discussing how the machine used its black elected officials. Black machine politicians traditionally held their offices as part of an implicit deal. In exchange for their power and perquisites, they had to follow the machine’s line on racial issues, from housing segregation to police brutality. Metcalfe, the city’s leading black political figure and heir to Congressman Dawson, had now declared that this long-standing arrangement was no longer satisfactory. Daley was furious at the betrayal, and was quick to retaliate against his wayward protégé. The city dispatched building inspectors to Metcalfe’s 3rd Ward offices and cited him for code violations. His police guard was taken away, and Daley inflicted the oldest form of machine revenge: Metcalfe was stripped of his patronage, including ten summer Park District jobs he had been getting for decades. Three staff members working in his year-round ward athletic program — a program the machine had been especially proud of in an earlier day — were terminated. 64 Daley’s retribution was not merely to even the score, but to send a message. “No alderman dared take Daley on for fear that he would punish them,” William Singer said later. “The clearest case was Metcalfe.” 65

  The March 1972 primary results held more bad news for Daley. Edward Hanrahan, whom Daley had removed from the ticket, had defeated Daley’s choice, Raymond Berg. That meant that the next state’s attorney — who had the power to prosecute malfeasance in city government — would be either a renegade Democrat whom Daley had formally dumped from the ticket or a Republican. Making matters worse, Daley’s candidate for governor, Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, had suffered an upset at the hands of Daniel Walker, the Chicago lawyer known for being the author of the Walker Report and popularizing the phrase “police riot.” Walker had made his candidacy a referendum on the Chicago machine. “Across the nation the Democratic Party has been opening its doors, reforming its organization, modernizing its rules,” Walker had declared. “But not in Illinois. The party here is still controlled by an antiquated machine dedicated to special privilege politics and performing a discredited function: the exchange of jobs for blocs of votes. The voters deserve better.” 66

  But Daley’s biggest grief arose from the presidential delegate election that was also on the ballot. Lost in the commotion over peace protests and police riots at the 1968 Democratic convention was a significant change in party policy. The delegates had adopted a new set of rules governing the selection of convention delegates. The McGovern Commission, as the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection was known, had traveled around the country soliciting views about the party and its operations. Alderman Despres spoke for many of the witnesses that appeared before the commission when he condemned the local Democratic Party as an “autocratic, authoritarian organization” that “leads to shameful exploitation of the voter.” What the McGovern Commission recommended, and the delegates adopted, was a plan to require that at the next convention blacks, women, Spanish-speakers, and people between the ages of eighteen and thirty had to be represented as delegate candidates in proportion to their population in each congressional district. The new rules also required that delegate selection be done in public, with the time and place of the sessions publicized in advance. 67

  Daley argued that the McGovern Rules had no validity under Illinois law. In the March 1972 primary, in which fifty-nine Chicago delegates were to be selected, the slate put up by the machine looked like a cross-section of the inner sanctum of the Sherman House on election night, heavy with older white men like Tom Keane and Matt Danaher. When Chicago’s delegation fell short of the party’s new equal-representation rules, independent alderman William Singer teamed up with the Reverend Jesse Jackson to question the validity of the slate. They held caucuses throughout the city, and elected their own slate of delegates in informal voice-vote elections, where voting was conducted over the heckling of machine representatives who had infiltrated the meetings. The Daley slate and the Singer-Jackson slate represented two extremes of the cultural chasm that had split the Democratic Party four years earlier. “They laughed at us because we wore suits and ties,” said Alderman Edward Vrdolyak, a Daley delegate and one of the lawyers who represented the group before the Credentials Committee. “Some of them weren’t even wearing shoes.” 68

  Daley filed suit in Circuit Court seeking an injunction to prevent the seating of the Singer-Jackson group. Not surprisingly, given the machine’s record in the local courts, Daley prevailed. But the Singer-Jackson group got the case moved to federal court, where they won. As the legal skirmishes continued, the matter moved toward the Convention Credentials Committee in Washington just ten days before the convention was to meet. Daley was confident he would prevail there. Asked if this party organ might rule against him, Daley replied: “You know they wouldn’t do that to me.” But in a sign of how much the party had changed in just four years, the Credentials Committee voted 71–61 to seat the Singer-Jackson slate, because the Daley slate had not complied with the delegate selection rules. The Daley camp was outraged that delegates duly elected at the ballot box were being replaced by delegates chosen by a handful of people voting in community rooms and church basements. “It is an insult to Chicago voters,” said former Chicago Corporation counsel Raymond Simon, who was working for the Daley slate, “to tell them that their spokesmen at the convention are to be the people they voted to defeat at the primary March 21.” Daley insisted that it was anti-Democratic. “How can they be told they must have so many delegates who are women, who are black, and who are Spanish-speaking?” he asked. “Where are the rights of the people to elect who they want as delegates?” 69

  The Democratic convention was about to begin in Miami, and rumor had it that Daley had traveled there to make a personal appeal to have his delegates seated. In fact, he had remained at his lake house in Grand Beach, Michigan, venturing out only for brief visits to Notre Dame Roman Catholic Church in Long Beach, Indiana. The Daley delegates settled into the Diplomat Hotel, still hoping a floor fight would lead to the expulsion of the Singer-Jackson contingent. Before the full convention voted, various compromises were floated, including seating both delegations and giving each of the 118 delegates half a vote. McGovern was eager for a compromise, but Daley would not accept phone calls or visits from the McGovern staff. “He needs us more than we need him,” one Daley associate said of McGovern. When the full convention voted to seat the Singer-Jackson slate, by 1,486.05 to 1,371.55, Daley was furious. After Mc-Govern got the nomination, Daley broke with tradition and failed to rally around his party’s candidate. He did not make his usual congratulatory phone call. Washington senator Henry Jackson quoted Daley as saying the groups that had gotten McGovern the nomination were “destroying the Democratic party.” 70

  The fall campaign in Chicago was conducted under a shadow: U.S. attorney James Thompson indicted forty people on September 16 on charges of vote fraud in the 1972 primary. Thompson’s investigation, which found that up to 50 percent of the votes cast in some Chicago precincts were fraudule
nt, arose out of the vote-fraud series the Chicago Tribune had published earlier in the year. On the eve of the presidential election, the number of indictments went up to seventy-five. Among those charged were four Democratic precinct captains, fifteen Democratic election judges, and a high-ranking member of the 24th Ward Organization. Most of the defendants had worked in machine strongholds on the South and West sides. In many cases, ballot applications were so crudely forged, Thompson said, that they should have easily been caught by the Chicago Board of Elections. Thompson’s office declared that Chicago’s whole political system was permeated with fraud and that it could bring more than a thousand indictments “if we had the manpower and time.” Before the investigation was over, there would be eighty-three indictments, and sixty-six people would be convicted or would plead guilty. 71 McGovern and Daley eventually had a meeting — Daley insisted that it be one-on-one — to discuss the presidential race. McGovern sought the advice of his vice presidential running mate, Sargent Shriver, who knew Daley well. Shriver told McGovern not to focus on Vietnam and other policy issues, but instead to try to convince Daley that he was a good man, concerned about his family, about religion, and that he would be a political ally if he were elected. The meeting between McGovern and Daley did not go particularly well — McGovern talked too much about the war — but the two men eventually worked out a chilly alliance. Several Daley allies were named to the Democratic National Committee, and Daley signed on with the McGovern campaign. At a September 12 rally at the corner of State and Madison, Daley introduced McGovern as the “next president of the United States” and urged Chicagoans to support him. Perhaps more significant, earlier in the day Daley had brought McGovern to the Sherman House to meet with the Cook County Democratic Central Committee. “This has been an unusual election,” Daley told the committeemen, many of whom had been locked out of the Miami convention by the McGovern forces. “But that’s all behind us now,” Daley said. “Today we’re interested in electing all the ticket.” McGovern carried Chicago by 171,928 votes, on his way to losing Illinois and forty-eight other states. McGovern’s showing in Chicago was low for a Democratic presidential nominee, but it is hard to know how much of the fault lies with Daley and the machine. McGovern ran weakly across the country, and Nixon’s campaign shrewdly targeted the white ethnic voters who made up the core constituency of the Chicago machine. “We delivered Chicago for George McGovern,” Daley said afterward, “one of the few big cities which did.” In late October, less than two weeks before election day, a judge dismissed all the charges against Hanrahan arising out of the Black Panther raid. But Hanrahan was rejected by Cook County voters, losing ten of the city’s fourteen black wards in the process. Hanrahan’s defeat left Daley with something he had worked for years to fend off: a Republican state’s attorney. And the new governor of Illinois was Dan Walker, who had been elected after a campaign in which he walked 1,200 miles across the state, decrying machine corruption the whole way. 72

  CHAPTER

  15

  If a Man Can’t Put His Arms

  Around His Sons

  Daley began 1973 on a wistful note, returning to Springfield to pass the torch to a new generation. Richard M. Daley, Daley’s eldest son, had been elected to fill his old state senate seat the previous fall. Daley, Sis, and a brigade of other family members accompanied thirty-year-old Richie to Springfield on the first day of the legislative session. “I was here this morning 34 years ago,” Daley reflected. “It brings back many memories.” The passage of time seemed to be sapping Daley of his relentlessly optimistic approach to Chicago’s problems. At a February appearance at the University of Chicago, he abandoned his frequently repeated refrain that the end of slum housing in Chicago was imminent. “All of us want to end poverty, to eliminate slums, to provide every child with the best possible education, to have decent housing for every family,” he declared. But these would not be easy goals to achieve. “Eliminating slums involves people,” Daley explained. “And it’s obvious that working out problems of individuals is more taxing and time-consuming than working with the physical environment. . . . In the human situation we have very little control and the problem changes constantly.” 1

  Daley also found himself in the middle of a new scandal, one that hit closer to home than any so far. Chicago Today reported, in its February 8 edition, that more than $2.9 million in city insurance premiums had been switched to the Evanston insurance firm of Heil & Heil shortly after Daley’s son John joined it. These particular premiums had a long political pedigree: Daley had previously given them to Joe Gill, his predecessor as head of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, as a reward for supporting him for boss. Two months after Gill died, which happened to be just around the time John Daley got his insurance license and signed on with the firm, the premiums ended up with Heil & Heil. David Stahl, who was then city controller, recalls that Daley called him into his office one day while John, who was working as a summer volunteer for a city welfare program, was present. Daley informed Stahl that John had accepted a job with Heil & Heil, and that the city business should follow him. Several months later, a reporter asked Stahl if Daley had been behind the transfer. Stahl did not respond, but raised the matter with Daley. Thinking that Daley had given him permission to tell the truth, Stahl spoke openly about Daley’s role in the transfer after the news broke in Chicago Today. As it turned out, Stahl had misunderstood what the mayor wanted him to do; he ended up confirming that Daley had ordered the insurance business moved at the same time the mayor was denying it. 2

  More disclosures about Daley’s sons followed in the next few days. Next in the limelight were Richard and Michael, both lawyers, who were criticized for benefiting from lucrative court appointments from several Circuit Court judges. In one case, a judge had named Richard Daley and one of his partners as trustees in a class-action suit against Montgomery Ward for which they received fees totaling $150,000. Judge Daniel Covelli, who had appointed the Daleys to eight cases in the past several years, said: “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with appointing the Daley boys. I’ve found them to be the finest gentlemen I’ve ever met.” The day the story broke, a furious Daley made his own views on the subject known at a meeting of the Cook County Democratic Committee. “If I can’t help my sons then they can kiss my ass,” Daley told his machine colleagues, who listened to this explosion in rapt attention. “I make no apologies to anyone. There are many men in this room whose fathers helped them, and they went on to become fine public officials.” Daley then unleashed a line that became famous: “If a man can’t put his arms around his sons, then what kind of a world are we living in?” 3

  Every day’s newspapers seemed to bring more exposés of favoritism and conflict. Daley’s response was, as always, to turn the criticism back on the media. When a reporter asked how much money John Daley had received in commissions from Heil & Heil, the mayor snapped: “It will be disclosed at the proper time. And it will bring to a head some of the untrue statements and unfair statements made.” When asked when the proper time might be, Daley moved for the door and said: “That’s the end of this. No comment.” More than ever, Daley had begun to see reporters in conspiratorial terms. “Don’t cozy up to the press, but be dignified,” he admonished a meeting of city officials. “They are trying to destroy me and the Democratic Party. They are not going to destroy me.” One reform Daley did institute as a result of the Heil & Heil scandal was pushing out the excessively honest David Stahl. Stahl, one of the “whiz kids,” had enjoyed a bright career and a good working relationship with Daley. But he soon left Chicago for a job with a Washington think tank. “This was a difficult time,” recalled Stahl. “I was not welcome in his office. He did not shed a lot of tears when I came in to tell him I was resigning and moving to Washington.” But larger reforms were elusive. North Side alderman Dick Simpson introduced a resolution that would have required Daley to give account for the “nepotism and conflict of interest” involving his sons. Not surprisingly, th
e City Council buried it.4

  James Thompson was less forgiving of official corruption than the Chicago City Council. Thirty-six-year-old James Thompson, a six-foot six-inch native Chicagoan, taught criminal law at Northwestern Law School for five years before Nixon appointed him U.S. attorney on the recommendation of Senator Percy. Thompson had made a strong impression by sending Kerner, a respected former governor and federal judge, off to prison. He followed the Kerner case just a few months later by charging Cook County clerk Edward Barrett with accepting bribes to buy voting machines from a particular manufacturer. Barrett, who had been county clerk since 1955, was closer to Daley than Kerner had been, and he was more important to the machine: his position put him in charge of thousands of patronage jobs. Thompson was clearly looking for more machine targets: he had set up a public corruption unit in cooperation with the Internal Revenue Service called “CRIMP”— for Crime, Racketeering, Influence, Money and Politicians. In fact, it seemed increasingly clear that prosecutors at all levels were interested in the machine. When local police raided fifty-three suspected policy wheel locations around the city, Bernard Carey — the Republican state’s attorney who had defeated Ed Hanrahan — said he believed Daley condoned policy wheels and knew that Democratic precinct captains played a large role in the policy racket. Daley dismissed Carey’s charges as “political bunk.” 5

  Amid the growing tide of scandal, Daley continued to promote downtown development. In May, he attended a ceremony marking the placement of the final 2,000-pound girder on the Sears Tower, which made it the largest tower in the world. Dignitaries at the event listened as a chorus of hard-hat electrical workers sang a song they had written especially for the occasion. It was a proud moment for the city, even though reviews of the Sears Tower itself were mixed: one critic would say its appearance was “not unlike staggered stacks of catalogs.” Despite all of the new skyscrapers that had gone up in the Loop in recent years, Chicago’s central business district still had work to do to upgrade its image. Daley alluded to the Loop’s problems in a backhanded compliment he delivered to the annual meeting of the State Street Council at the Palmer House. “I’m not afraid to come down to the Loop to shop — with or without bodyguards,” he told a less-than-amused audience of retailers and businessmen. 6