The Senator and the Priest

by Andrew M. Greeley

The next day the Daily News wrote an editorial saying that it decried the fact that another Chicago paper had sent six “reporters” to Senator Moran’s announcement of his reelection campaign and that these reporters had dominated the question period afterwards. This, the News contended, went far beyond an editorial position on a campaign and became actual participation in the campaign. It raised questions which ought to trouble everyone in Illinois. It then listed the names of all six of the “reporters,” none of whom had press credentials.

  Mary Margaret issued a statement the next day which denied Schlenk’s allegation that I had lied and quoted extensively from the Daily News editorial. “There may have been some lies at the campaign announcement but they came not from the Senator but from the pseudo-journalists.”

  “Do you want me to cut that last sentence?” she asked.

  “What does Manny say?”

  “She loved it.”

  “Then go with it.”

  “You bet … . Are we still having lunch next Monday?”

  “That is a provocative question, Ms. O’Malley.”

  “It was meant to be.”

  “Have I given any indication that I want to abolish that custom?”

  “Not.”

  “Then we will have lunch in the Senate dining room at the usual time.”

  “I will look forward to it … Oh, your brother called this morning. I told him you were in conference. He was very angry.”

  The muscles in my body tightened up, as they usually do when Tony is mentioned.

  “The usual?”

  “This time the public humiliation of your daughter.”

  “And you said in reply that neither the young woman in question nor her mother or father thought she’d been humiliated?”

  “You’re a mind-reader, Senator.”

  On the first Sunday in Advent, the Daily News’s magazine section carried a feature article on our child.

  NOT SO WILD AN IRISH ROSE

  It was a delightful piece whose theme was that despite her red hair and her green eyes and her great beauty, Senator Moran’s daughter was, like her father, a very relaxed and even conservative young woman—all of this despite her feverish activity on the basketball court. She dismissed the hubbub about the valedictorian issue, claimed that she and her rival were still good friends, and said that, if your father is in public life, you’re a target for creeps and she could deal with that. Yes she was dating a young man from Chicago whose privacy she would respect by not revealing his name. It could not be termed “serious,” at least not yet. Yes she was going to graduate school and she wanted to become an expert on the education of kids and teens. Yes she was very proud of her parents because they were active in public life and at the same time totally cool parents. Her grandparents were totally cute too.

  “I didn’t know she was doing this interview,” I said to her mother at our Monday lunch.

  “Neither did I!”

  “Dolly must have called her and assumed that she would ask us.”

  “Dolly is too smart even to imply that.”

  “She did it on her own?”

  “That bother you, Mr. Mom?”

  “No, it’s the sort of thing her mother would have done. Does her grandmother know about it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Is there any chance of that New Yorker piece appearing before the election?”

  “I asked her that. She says they wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “I was afraid of that,” I nudged her thigh with my knee.

  She stiffened in response.

  “You know too damn much,” she whispered, “about turning me on.”

  “I’ve had a lifetime to study your reactions.”

  Life went on in the United States Senate. A southerner was winning presidential primaries around the country. He seemed all right to me because he sounded like a Democratic Hat McCoy.

  “What do you think of this guy?” I asked Hatfield one day when I met him in the corridors.

  “Don’t like him one bit. He’s the kinda fella y’all should be putting up all along. Bill Clinton without the libido. I’m glad I’m not up for reelection. Y’all might carry ole Ketuck this time.”

  The Governor dropped into my office unannounced one morning, “jest to say hiyah.”

  “Always welcome here, Mr. President.”

  He grinned like a mischievous elf.

  “I see by the papers you might like to be vice president.”

  “The papers lie, Mr. President.”

  A quick spasm of disappointment flashed across his face.

  “I want to make sure you carry Illinois,” I added. “Besides I gave my word.”

  “I understand, Senator, I understand. I admire your integrity. If I should win, you’d be more help to me h’yar. Still I won’t take this ‘no’ for a definitive answer. Now I’d be pleased to meet that pretty woman out thare with red hair, your wife, I presume.”

  I thought of Rhett Butler as played by Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind.

  He turned on all his compone charm for my wife who replied with all her West Side Irish charm. Everyone in the office stopped working. They applauded when he left the room.

  “Right nice y’all cheering!” he bowed as he left.

  “I told him no way,” I announced as soon as the door closed. “Now y’all get back to work, ya’hear!”

  “Will he win, Daddy?” Maran asked that night at supper after my wife had celebrated the governor’s charm.

  “I think so, dear. But he has to carry Illinois to be sure.”

  “We’re a blue state!” Marytre protested.

  “That’s right.”

  How to stop the plan to prevent Bobby Bill from stealing Illinois?

  I could lose the presidential election for the Democrats.

  “I hyar the man came to call on ya, the other day,” Hat McCoy said to me as we filed in for a quorum call.

  “Shunuff?”

  “He offer ya anything t’ all.”

  “He did remark that, should he be nominated and elected, I’d be a heap of help to him right here in this building.”

  “He’s right on that. He a going to win, Irish, he a going to win.”

  “He’s Irish too,” I said, “another one of your left-foot kickers.”

  The convention was in Chicago. We came back for it because I was a delegate and because we wanted the kids to see it. Our guy was the heavy favorite, but it was not a sure thing. It would be an exciting event. He won unanimously on the third ballot and we sneaked out and went home.

  The Reliable woman who was guarding the house greeted us at the door.

  “The President is on the line, Senator, sir.”

  I picked up the phone.

  “Tom Moran.”

  “I promised I’d ask you once more, Senator, so I’m asking.”

  “I’d love to do it, Mr. President. I really would. But I can’t.”

  “I understand. I admire your integrity. See y’all in Washington in January.”

  “You bet, Mr. President.”

  I hung up, feeling sad and empty. Virtue is rarely its own reward, in the short run anyway.

  “He said he’d see us uns in Washington in January.”

  Applause from all, even the Ambassador and Mrs. O’Malley who just came in the door.

  Mary Margaret hugged me fiercely.

  “I’m so proud of you, Tommy. So proud.”

  “I hope he mentions that he called you,” the Ambassador said.

  “Why should he?” I asked.

  “’Cause he’ll need you when he gets there.”

  The nominee did mention me.

  “My first thought was to round up your Yewnited States Senator from Illinois and put him on the ticket. He said that because of his commitment here he couldn’t do it. I’d like to have had him, but I admire his integrity. He made the right decision. If we win this race, I’ll be confident of one very loyal and honest ally over on the Hill and y’all in this grea
t Prairie state will have one of the finest men I’ve ever met as your senator.”

  “Didn’t your man kiss the blarney stone?” Ambassador O’Malley chuckled.

  His wife was busy scribbling in her notebook.

  “What are you thinking, Tommy?” she asked.

  “Just now feeling that virtue is not necessarily its own reward!”

  “It’s worth twenty thousand, maybe fifty thousand votes,” the Ambassador chortled. “We’ve canceled them out.”

  I could not shake my conviction, now almost absolute, that there would be some massive dirty trick at the end.

  I confided this to Joe McDermott after the acceptance speech.

  “Do you have anything in your life that could create a scandal?” he asked, almost like a clinician. “A love affair, maybe?”

  “Only one bed partner all my life and no complaints about her.”

  “I figured.”

  So we went back to the Beltway for August. No recess now until Labor Day. The big game was on. I worried about my own campaign. I had heard they were going after me with a phalanx of Catholic anti-abortion campaigners. Petitions were being signed in every diocese in the State, requesting the bishops to excommunicate me.

  Father Jim, Mary Margaret’s brother, called me in mid-August.

  “I have a message for you from the Cardinal,” he said.

  “OK.”

  “You know he disagrees with your stand on abortion …”

  “I haven’t taken a stand in the six years I’ve been in the Senate,” I replied hotly.

  “He knows that. He also says that he accepts your good faith in the matter and he does not believe in using the Eucharist as punishment.”

  “He’s said that in public,” I said, still a little angry.

  “Therefore he will head off this excommunication nonsense, even in the diocese that threatened you the last time.”

  “Oh,” I said cooling down. “Does he expect a response from me?”

  “It might be a good idea.”

  “Will a ‘thank you very much’ do?”

  “Just right. I’ll pass the word on.”

  Still we weren’t prepared for the assault of the “pro-life” brigades.

  Our first rally was on Labor Day, sponsored by Chicago Unions, at Gately Stadium in South Chicago near the site of the massacre at Little Steel in 1937. The labor people filled the stadium. I spoke after the crowd had been called to order and a local priest—who shook my hands warmly—had prayed the invocation.

  “The murders at Republic Steel are history,” I began, “as are the crimes against humanity by the steel companies lead by the notorious Tom Girdler.”

  I was interrupted by a crowd of maybe two hundred placard-waving, hymn-singing men and women who poured in from one of the entrances of the stadium, overcoming the cops who were there, and rushed towards the raised platform on which I was standing. Their theme seemed to be that Tommy Moran was as bad as Adolf Hitler. They swarmed on to the platform, tore away the mike, and pushed me off the edge.

  “You should die and go to hell!” one of the two women who pushed me off the platform shouted.

  I landed on the ground in one piece or so I thought. Several other women pounced on me and began to beat me. I lost consciousness with the ironic thought that I might die at the hands of those who were part of the household of faith.

  I woke up in a hospital bed, opened my eyes, and looked around. A doctor and a nurse hovered over me, four women with intolerably red hair watched me anxiously.

  “The script calls for me to ask where I am,” I muttered, my voice hoarse.

  “You are,” the doctor, a handsome man with dark skin and an English accent, said, “in South Chicago Hospital. I am Doctor Rajiv. And who, sir, are you?”

  I thought about it.

  “Thomas Patrick Moran, attorney at law.”

  “And what work do you do, Mr. Thomas Patrick Moran?”

  “I don’t work. I’m a United States Senator.”

  The four women with the tear-stained faces laughed. That was part of the script.

  “What happened to me?”

  “You were assaulted at a political rally, pushed off a platform, and beaten viciously. You have had a mild brain concussion and may have suffered internal injuries. We will keep you in the hospital for twenty-four hours to make sure that you are able to go back on your campaign.”

  The four women insisted on kissing me, the oldest quite demonstratively. She was undoubtedly my wife.

  “Can you identify these women, Senator?”

  “I think so … If I may read from left to right, Mary Rose Moran, my daughter, Mary Margaret O’Malley, my long suffering wife, Mary Therese Moran, my youngest daughter, and Mary Ann Moran, my middle daughter.”

  “You are very fortunate, Senator,” the doctor frowned in disapproval. “They might have killed you.”

  “Do you wish to show him the tape now, Ms. O’Malley?”

  My good wife pressed a button.

  The tape revealed me speaking to a crowd of people in an unfamiliar sports arena. Before I could work my way into the talk, a swarm of angry women erupted out of one of the entrances to the arena and rushed the platform on which I was speaking. They were comparing me to Hitler. Two of them pushed me off the platform and into a crowd of milling women who began to beat me with placards they were carrying. Then the camera switched to some dozen women who are assaulting my three red heads. They fought back with commendable vigor and gave better than they received. A police ambulance, blue light whirling, forced its way into the arena and pushed towards the platform. The women who had beaten me fled, but were captured by angry cops and angry people from whoever it was I had been talking to.

  I closed my eyes.

  “This is still the United States of America?” I asked.

  “I fear so, Senator.”

  Then my brother was on the monitor.

  “I am terribly disturbed that my only brother was injured this afternoon. Yet I can’t fault the attackers. They were fighting for what they believe. Tommy should never have run for the Senate.”

  Then a short man with flaming eyes.

  “If Catholics had done this to the Nazis, the holocaust would not have happened.”

  Then the Mayor of Chicago in a sports shirt with the Lake behind him.

  “All my sympathies and those of my family go to Senator Moran and his family. They are my friends and neighbors. I am ashamed that this happened in Chicago. I’m sure that the State’s Attorney will want to prosecute these rioters to the fullest extent of the law.”

  “What would that be, Mayor?”

  “Attempted murder. What else?”

  Then Sean Cardinal Cronin, resplendent in red cummerbund, zucchetto, and cloak.

  Cardinal Cronin stared at the camera for a minute.

  “I will not judge the rioters. But I will certainly judge their behavior. They have disgraced the Catholic Church. If we want to change people’s minds, we do so by prayer, patience, and good example, not by trying to kill them. Senator Moran is a distinguished Catholic gentleman. He has never voted on abortion legislation. The attack on him, his wife, and children is objectively a serious sin for which the rioters must do appropriate penance. I am driving out to the hospital now to visit them.”

  “His brother is a priest, Cardinal.”

  “I am not unaware of that.”

  “He said that the Senator had brought it on himself.”

  “Father Moran does not speak for the church or for the Archdiocese and I do. I believe his words are as dangerous to the peace and civility of American life as were the despicable acts of the rioters.”

  “And this time,” the Cardinal appeared in the doorway of the hospital room, “I really mean it!”

  He was wearing the same garb as we had seen on television.

  Trailing behind him was his self-effacing little auxiliary bishop Blackie Ryan, attired in his usual Chicago Bulls jacket and an open clerical shirt.<
br />
  “In the old days, Tommy Moran, we would gather together a bunch of our guys and beat those people up. I concede that the new days are better but not so satisfying.”

  We all laughed. Doctor Rajiv bowed to the Cardinal and kissed his ring, which is a no-no in Chicago. Sean Cronin was nothing if not graceful.

  “Your Beatitude,” he said, “would you tell the swarm of people downstairs that the Senator is recovering and will probably be able to leave the hospital tomorrow afternoon. And will the rest of you, Mrs. Moran excepted, please join the Cardinal for his report. We must permit the Senator to rest.”

  “Cardinal,” I called after him, “tell them that when Doctor Rajiv asked what my work was, I said that I didn’t work; I was a United States Senator.”

  “I will tell them that and then assure them that many think he is the hardest working Senator in Washington.”

  “I’ll sing you a lullaby, Tommy love,” the incredibly lovely woman who was apparently my wife said, “and you can go to sleep.”

  CHAPTER 33

  LEANING ON Mary Margaret’s arm I ambled cautiously out of the elevator the next afternoon. The lobby of South Chicago Hospital was filled—the whole O’Malley clan, with musical instruments, my campaign staff, Chris and Manny from Washington, the media, a mass of uniformed cops, and a similar mass of the off-duty Reliables.

  “Senator, do you blame Rodge Crispjin for the attack on you?”

  “I have no reason to do that.”

  “Did you know, Senator, that he said that while he disapproved of violence, he could understand why people are angry?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “Would you comment on his comment, Senator?”

  “It needs no comment.”

  “Are you going to withdraw from your campaign?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Did you know that the police are charging the protesters with attempted murder?”

  “I had heard that, yes.”

  “Do you approve?”

  “The police must do what they have to do to prevent riots.”

  “Don’t you think that the protesters are doing the same thing that the civil rights protesters did forty years ago?”

  “I don’t think that the followers of Dr. King ever tried to kill anyone.”