American Pharaoh (43 page)

By the time election day came around, there was little suspense about how things would turn out. In the end, Daley won an overwhelming victory, 778,612 to 311,940, carrying every ward except the Far Northwest Side 41st, Sheehan’s home ward. Daley’s 71 percent of the vote was a near record, falling just short of the 76 percent that Mayor Kelly won in his 1935 landslide. Sheehan blamed his loss on “the power of an entrenched machine.” In his victory statement, Daley thanked the voters and promised that “As mayor of Chicago, I shall embrace charity, love, mercy, and walk humbly with my God.”
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CHAPTER

7

Two for You, Three for Me

T
he wave of goodwill that swept Daley into his second term as mayor did not last long. State’s attorney Benjamin Adamowski,
ever on the lookout for scandals that could be traced to Daley and the machine, found a good one a month after the election.
On May 7, he asked a grand jury to hand up indictments in connection with a $500,000-a-year ticket-fixing scandal in Chicago
Traffic Court. That the court was fixing tickets was the worst-kept secret in Chicago, but Adamowski’s investigation had the
potential to tie the practice directly to the Democratic machine. Daley’s response to Adamowski’s legal assault was to direct
his commissioner of investigation, Irwin Cohen, to look into the charges. Cohen was an odd creation. Shortly after taking
office, Daley had arranged for one of his allies on the City Council to introduce an ordinance giving the mayor authority
for investigating all allegations of wrongdoing. Daley’s carefully conceived plan called for an investigator who would serve
at the pleasure of the mayor, and who was prohibited from revealing any information he collected to anyone but the mayor.
Before taking the job, Cohen had distinguished himself by heading up a City Council crime committee that failed to find any
link between criminal activity in the city and politics. The commissioner of investigation’s office allowed Daley to take
control of impending scandals, pushing other official bodies and the press to the side. As Cohen noted when he was appointed,
his agency had been “set up exclusively for the benefit of the mayor.” But Daley’s critics also understood exactly what Cohen’s
office was up to. One Republican had objected a year earlier when Daley shunted another potentially embarrassing case from
the City Council to his commissioner of investigation. “One of the chief functions of a legislative body is investigation
of charges against public employees,” he complained. “This is being by-passed in favor of a secret investigation that will
be revealed only to the mayor.” Cohen’s probe of the Traffic Court would allow Daley to say he was taking the charges seriously,
with no risk that anything would come from it.
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Adamowski would be far more difficult to control. Daley publicly charged that his old nemesis was on a “fishing expedition,”
but the trouble was, the fishing was getting good. Three deputy clerks of the court and one bailiff were soon arrested on
corruption charges, and the scandal was reaching ever closer to the Democratic machine. The fact was, it would be hard to
have a scandal in Traffic Court without involving the machine since it had hundreds of Democratic patronage workers on its
payroll. But Adamowski’s real target was Daley himself, and he was quick to lay the blame for the scandal at the steps of
City Hall. If the mayor had required his comptroller to conduct the required audits of Traffic Court records, Adamowski charged,
the misconduct would have been caught. Daley “better start complying with the law,” Adamowski declared, “or he may turn out
to be the biggest fish we’re angling for.”
²

It is difficult to believe that Daley did not know firsthand that patronage workers in Traffic Court were fixing tickets.
It had been a thoroughly ingrained practice of the Democratic machine for years. Daley’s old patron Jake Arvey once admitted
that when he was an alderman “to fix a parking ticket ... was the pattern.” And many Chicagoans had more recent stories of
ticket fixing, including one newspaper reporter who said that when he started out there was someone on staff who routinely
fixed all of the reporters’ traffic tickets. Daley had only one response when the machine’s corruption was dragged out into
the open in a way that was too credible to ignore. He ostentatiously embraced reform, and turned to men with unassailable
reputations to vouch for his integrity. On May 28, with Adamowski still working to expand his investigation, Daley announced
that he had hired the directors of Northwestern University’s Transportation Center and its Traffic Institute to investigate
ticketing procedures in Traffic Court and to recommend reforms. Their inquiry would not concern itself with such mundane matters
as which particular Traffic Court employees might have violated the law. It would be not an “investigation of people, but
an investigation of a system.”
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It was a welcome relief from scandal when the queen of England showed up. Daley relished any opportunity to entertain dignitaries,
but when Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, accepted his invitation to join President Eisenhower for the opening
of the Saint Lawrence Seaway on June 29, 1959, Daley realized it would be a great moment in Chicago history. It would be the
first time a reigning British monarch had ever visited Chicago, and Daley took great pains to choreograph every detail of
the visit. On the appointed day, more than a million people lined the shores of Lake Michigan to greet the queen and prince
as they arrived on the royal yacht
Britannia,
accompanied by seven warships and five hundred smaller vessels, including two Chinese junks. Daley presented the queen with
a box of recordings by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the prince with two polo mallets, and he hosted a lavish dinner
for the royal couple, complete with gold tablecloths, gold service, and 50,000 roses. In remarks that were perhaps more informal
than his royal company was accustomed to, Daley invited them to “come again and bring the children.” The queen’s visit created
a media frenzy that more than met Daley’s expectations. The
Sun-Times
alone put the story on its front page, and promised additional stories and pictures on pages 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 24, and 25, prompting
Time
magazine to snipe that the paper had single-handedly confirmed Chicago’s reputation as the Windy City. The queen’s visit
was one of the highlights of Daley’s years in office; his associates say it was an important turning point for him in coming
to appreciate the stature that came with his office. Daley might have started out as a precinct captain knocking on doors
in the 11th Ward, and he might have still lived in a simple bungalow in Bridgeport. But he had invited the queen of England
to come to Chicago as his guest, and she had come.
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In another sign that he was moving up in the world, Daley was elevated from vice president to president of the U.S. Conference
of Mayors in July. It ushered in an era in which Daley would be seen as one of the nation’s leading voices on urban affairs.
At home in Chicago, Daley continued to push for downtown redevelopment. In August, he held a press conference at City Hall
to unveil plans for a $20 million Hartford Fire Insurance Company building. Daley praised the company for its decision to
build in the city, and hailed the building as “another gem for the crown of our new Wacker Drive,” a street that had been
steadily upgrading since its el was torn down in 1948. Daley had also put together another bond issue for urban development
to be voted on in the November election. This time, he was asking the voters to approve a total of $66 million in new borrowing,
including a $25 million bond for more streetlights, $15 million for sewer improvements, $15 million for bridges, grade separations,
and viaducts, and several smaller bonds. The entire package of bonds was approved by the voters, and after the election Daley
said he had directed city officials to proceed “full speed ahead” in spending the money. The easy approval of new construction
money only whetted Daley’s appetite for more. In a speech to the Better Business Bureau’s annual meeting days after the bonds
passed, he unveiled plans for an additional $751 million in capital improvement spending over the next five years. The money
would be used, he said, to build more expressways, bridges, lighting, government buildings, and downtown parking.
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The bad news for Daley was that the city employee scandals were growing. His attempt to pass the Traffic Court scandal off
to city investigator Cohen did not end the matter. Adamowski was able to score political points by loudly attacking the “Cohen
Rug Company” — where, Adamowski said, Daley sent things to be swept under the rug. The
Chicago Tribune
had also begun to uncover some unsavory employees on the city payroll. An asphalt foreman in the Department of Streets and
Sanitation was revealed to be on probation for looting cars in the Midway Airport parking lot. A paving supervisor was found
to be working a full eight-hour shift as a trucking company supervisor. It also turned out that he was a juice man for the
syndicate who had been arrested twelve times for robbery; on one occasion he had been shot by police while resisting arrest.
Another employee collected gambling money in the Loop for the syndicate. It looked as if the syndicate, which had helped put
Daley in office, was using its share of patronage positions to keep some of its own staff on the city payroll. Daley lashed
out at the newspapers that were making what he considered to be baseless charges. “If we take the attitude that because a
man made a mistake 25 or 30 years ago, that he shouldn’t be employed, then where are we going?” he said. Daley then added,
“If I took that attitude then I wouldn’t be in government!” He never elaborated on what lurked in his past that would have
made him ineligible for government service.
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In December, Governor Stratton announced his intention to run for a third term in 1960. It was generally agreed that a strong
Democrat would have a good chance of defeating him. Stratton had barely won reelection in 1956, despite a Republican landslide
that year. And 1960 was already looking like a Democratic year — in the 1958 midterm elections, the Democrats had won twelve
Senate seats from the Republicans, and forty-eight House seats. Daley’s name began to circulate as a possible gubernatorial
candidate. As usual, he kept his own counsel, and always dodged the question when he was asked if he was considering running.
“What do you think?” he said to one reporter who asked him directly. When he was told that he would have a tough race against
Stratton, Daley responded, “Could be, could be.”
⁷
But if Daley was not saying yes, he also was not making any effort to dampen the speculation. There is no doubt that if Daley
had wanted his party’s nomination for governor, he could have had it. In the end, though, Daley took himself out of the running,
without explaining why. If he had run, it would have been a hard-fought race, and Daley’s close association with Chicago and
the Democratic machine would have hurt him with voters in the suburbs and down-state. The risk-averse Daley might simply have
been unwilling to give up the powerful position to which he had just been reelected for the mere chance of becoming governor.
Daniel Rostenkowski believes that Daley enjoyed being considered for governor, but that he was not interested in moving beyond
his twin posts of mayor and machine boss. Daley’s son William says his father’s resistance was due to his commitment to running
ethnically balanced tickets — and his concern about John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy. William Daley says his father
talked it over with Kennedy. “Kennedy said, ‘Why don’t you run for governor?’” William Daley says. “He said, ‘If we have two
Catholics — one running for president and one for governor — only one is going to win, and it’s not going to be you.’”
⁸

Daley began the presidential campaign year by declaring on January 3, 1960, that John F. Kennedy was “highly qualified to
lead our nation.” Even though he had hastened to add that there were also “other highly qualified Democrat[s],” Daley’s words
were strong encouragement to Kennedy, who had just announced his intention to run.
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Daley had long-standing ties to the Kennedy family. Joseph Kennedy, the candidate’s father, owned Merchandise Mart, the massive
retailing space on the north bank of the Chicago River, and had been cultivating Daley for years. “Joe Kennedy first approached
him in the forties or thirties when he was in the legislature,” says William Daley. And Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver
was chairman of the Chicago Board of Education. Daley was probably genuinely excited by the possibility that a fellow Irish-Catholic
might be elected president of the United States — the ultimate rebuke to generations of WASPs who had looked down on and mistreated
his long-suffering people. But like most members of the machine, Daley never let idealism interfere with the pragmatic concern
of holding on to power. “A lot of these guys, their political horizons extend all the way to end of the ward,” a Chicago reformer
once said, in describing the thinking of men like Daley. “They don’t care what’s going on in the state or the country. They
don’t care whether a bill passes or fails. They want the jobs. They want to run their wards. They don’t care who is president
or senator. How many jobs has a senator got?” What Daley probably liked best about Kennedy was that with his youth and charm,
and his ethnic and religious bond to many Cook County voters, he looked like the candidate with the best chance of sweeping
the entire machine slate into office with him.
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