American Pharaoh (47 page)

Daley reacted forcefully to the Republican accusations. “The people of Chicago are just as honorable and honest as any section
of the state,” he insisted, and the Republicans had offered up nothing more than “Hitler type” propaganda in support of their
allegations. The Democrats welcomed a statewide recount and would even help pay for one, he told reporters. What it would
show, he said, was that the voting irregularities were at least as widespread in Republican strongholds downstate as they
were in Chicago. “In certain counties, the results are so fantastically, overwhelmingly Republican that there might have been
error in their eagerness,” Daley said confidently. “You look at some of those downstate counties and it’s just as fantastic
as some of those precincts they’re pointing at in Chicago.” Daley detected a nefarious anti-Kennedy conspiracy behind the
vote-fraud charges. “It’s a joint effort by Republican conservatives in the north and Dixiecrats in the south to prevent the
man elected by the people from becoming President of the United States,” he insisted.
³⁸

There were several recanvasses and recounts of the Chicago voting, at the urging of the Republicans. A reexamination of so-called
D&O ballots, those that had been marked “defective” or “objected to,” and defective voting machines, showed a moderate but
unmistakable pattern of errors in favor of the Democrat in both the presidential and state’s attorney races. A recount of
ballots cast in the 906 Cook County precincts that still used paper ballots revealed an even clearer pattern of mistakes working
in favor of the machine slate. The Democrat-dominated Board of Election Commissioners and the Republican vote counters disagreed
over how to interpret various kinds of disputed ballots, and the two groups ended up with widely differing tallies. The discrepancy
was not surprising, given that the Board of Election Commissioners included in its ranks a chairman who had long machine ties,
Daley’s corporation counsel, and a newly elected county judge whom Daley had personally slated for his judgeship. Despite
its bias in favor of the machine, even the Board of Election Commissioners conceded when the recanvass ended December 9 that
Nixon had gained 943 votes in the process and Adamowski had picked up 6,186. The Republicans contended that the recanvass
had produced an additional 4,500 votes for Nixon, and 13,000 for Adamowski. In some precincts, the errors were large and fairly
suspicious. In the 57th precinct of the 31st Ward — which just happened to be Tom Keane’s home turf — the first tally gave
Kennedy 323 votes and Nixon 78, but the recanvass found that Kennedy had only 237 votes and Nixon actually had 162. In the
same precinct, Ward’s victory margin plunged by two-thirds in the recount. If the Republican count was correct, this canvass
of less than one-third of the Cook County precincts, looking at only one particular kind of voting irregularity, had erased
more than half of both Kennedy’s and Ward’s margins of victory.
³⁹

Although these initial recounts suggested serious flaws in the reported election results, the Republican challenges to the
election went nowhere. A Republican national committeewoman filed a suit in Cook County Circuit Court. The case was assigned
to Judge Thomas Kluczynski, a machine loyalist who less than a year later would be appointed to the Federal District Court
on Daley’s recommendation. Not surprisingly, on December 13, Kluczynski summarily dismissed the Republicans’ case. Taking
another tack, the Republicans tried to convince the State Electoral Board not to certify Illinois’s electoral votes for Kennedy.
The Republicans presented written evidence and called witnesses to support their fraud claim. Daley personally delivered the
Democratic response. The election had been “more closely supervised than any in recent years,” he insisted. “We in Chicago
are no better or no worse than the rest of the State,” Daley told the board. “They could allege fraud about results in Grundy
County, Moline, they could allege the same thing in Du-Page County, and that has been alleged, but I say to you people who
allege fraud, come up with the evidence.” The board rejected the Republican appeal. It did not affirmatively decide that the
election had been clean or that the Democratic ticket actually had won more votes. It simply decided that the Republicans
had not put forth enough solid evidence of fraud to justify the extraordinary step of setting aside a presidential election
in the state. Illinois’s votes were duly cast for Kennedy when the electors met in Springfield on December 19, 1960.
⁴⁰

If Daley and the machine did steal the election for Kennedy, it would not, by itself, have changed the outcome. Kennedy ended
up prevailing in the Electoral College 303–219 (with fifteen votes cast by independent “Dixiecrat” voters from the Deep South
for Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia), a wide enough margin that he would have been elected even if Illinois had gone Republican.
But Daley and the machine could not have known that on election night, when the presidential race looked like a dead heat.
If they were stealing votes for Kennedy on election night, it meant that they were willing to steal the White House as casually
as they would have stolen an aldermanic seat. In his memoirs, Nixon explains why he decided not to contest the Illinois results.
He was concerned that a challenge to the legitimacy of a presidential race would have hurt the nation’s standing in the world,
he says. Perhaps more sincere was the other reason he gave: his concern that if he did contest the result “[c]harges of ‘sore
loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.” Although he did not participate
in the challenge to the Illinois result, Nixon seemed to believe he had been robbed by the Democratic machine. A vivid but
electorally inaccurate comment by Pat Nixon about the head of the Chicago Board of Elections probably expressed Nixon’s own
views: “If it weren’t for an evil, cigar-smoking man in Chicago, Sidney T. Holzman, my husband would have been President of
the United States.”
⁴¹

Was the election stolen? There have always been those in Chicago who have sworn it was. Curtis Foster was a bodyguard for
West Side alderman Benjamin Lewis and president of the 24th Ward Organization. The once heavily Jewish 24th Ward was by 1960
poor and black, and it was precisely the kind of loyal machine ward where vote theft was reported to be routine. In the Kennedy-Nixon
election, it produced some of the most eye-catching returns for the Democratic ticket. Kennedy carried it by 24,211 to 2,131
— getting almost 92 percent of the vote — and Ward bested Adamowski by 23,440 to 2,190.
⁴²
Andre Foster recalls sitting in his father’s polling place in a barbershop on Roosevelt Road that night when someone came
to the door after the polls had closed. “Some guy knocked on the door and said, ‘We need thirty more votes,’” recalls Foster.
“I heard him say it.” And, says Foster, “If they gave him an order to get thirty more votes, they gave a lot of people the
order.” Precinct captains often stole votes for the machine, according to Foster, and they certainly did on November 8, 1960.
If the precinct captain then fabricated the required number of votes, depending on how he did it, it might well not have been
detected in the minimal recanvasses conducted afterward, checking paper ballots against the number of votes on tally sheets.
⁴³

The 1960 election would certainly not have been the first in which a political machine stole votes on a massive scale. For
as long as there have been machines in America, there have been creative methods of making the votes work out right on election
night. In the pivotal 1886 New York City mayoral election, Tammany Hall kept control of City Hall by simply throwing out votes
cast for United Labor Party candidate Henry George. For days after the election, uncounted ballots for George could be seen
floating down the Hudson River. Chicago politicians have historically been as resourceful in this regard as any. In Chicago’s
very first mayoral election, the winning Democratic candidate was accused of stealing the election — by an indignant Whig
Party. In the 1880s, about half of the city’s polling places were located in saloons, where Democratic votes could easily
be bought off in exchange for a “liquid reward.” And in 1935, more than one hundred election officials were sentenced to jail
for fraud.
⁴⁴
Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago journalist who spoke through his fictional alter ego saloonkeeper-philosopher Mr. Dooley,
recalled his own days as a precinct captain in the 6th Ward: “I mind th’ time whin we r-rolled ip twinty-siven hundred dimocratic
votes in this wan precinct an’ th’ only wans that voted was th’ judges iv election an’ th’ captains.” Traditional machine
methods included casting ballots for noncitizens, copying signatures of drunks off flophouse registration books, and, of course,
voting the dead. In the Chicago vernacular, voter fraud fell into two categories: “running up the count,” and “leveling the
count.” Leveling the count occurred after the polls closed. After tallying the votes, election judges would reduce the votes
for Republican and independent candidates to some predetermined level, and shift those votes into the Democratic column. Running
up the count occurred in many ways, limited only by the ingenuity of individual precinct captains and machine workers. “It
was the easiest thing in the world to do in the old machine,” says Andre Foster, who helped his precinct captain father work
the 24th Ward. “My father did it and I did it.”
⁴⁵

Just how Chicago vote theft worked — and how commonly it occurred — was laid bare in 1972 by a
Chicago Tribune
investigative series that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize. Machine functionaries knew that if they did not produce the vote
totals Daley expected from them they were likely to be “vised,” or removed from office. As one article in the series explained
in a headline, “Vote Stealing Boils Down to Precinct Chief Survival.” Precinct captains were under pressure to run up the
count however they could — ghost voting, bribing voters with groceries or whiskey, getting machine partisans to vote “early
and often,” or literally stuffing the ballot box. Given that the machine controlled the Chicago Board of Elections, which
was supposed to protect against this kind of malfeasance, there was little to stand in the way. To report its 1972 series,
the
Tribune
sent reporters and investigators from a Chicago good-government group to observe polling places firsthand on election day.
The worst suspicions of the machine’s critics were confirmed, and Daley’s repeated denials were convincingly refuted.
⁴⁶

Voting fraud began on registration day. Daley regularly preached about the critical importance of registering voters. A good
machine precinct captain went door-to-door to every home in his district to make sure that every eligible adult was registered,
and whenever possible registered as a Democrat. But the machine often took this registration process a step further. It turned
out that precinct captains made it a practice of stopping by skid row hotels and copying names out of the registration books.
These skid row denizens, many of whom were alcoholics, transients, or mentally unstable, were not likely to vote on their
own, so the machine could simply vote a straight Democratic ticket on their behalf. As part of his reporting, Bill Recktenwald,
a
Tribune
reporter who worked on the vote fraud series, moved into transient hotels and flophouses that charged $7.25 a week for tiny
“cubicle rooms.” He registered under false names like Henry David Thoreau, Jay Gatsby, and James Joyce. One of the hotels
he moved into was the McCoy Hotel, owned at the time by Charles Swibel, chairman of the board of the Chicago Housing Authority,
and a close political ally of Daley’s. The hotel was located in the ward in which Edward Quigley, Daley’s sewer commissioner
and a pillar of the machine, was ward committeeman. Recktenwald watched as precinct workers arrived at the hotel to sign up
new voters. “It didn’t take long to see that something was wrong, because no one was there in front of the desk when they
were registering people,” he recalls. When he checked the registration rolls, he saw that he had been among those involuntarily
signed up to vote. “James Joyce became a registered voter at the McCoy Hotel.”
⁴⁷

One reason vote theft was so easy was the imbalance between the two parties in Chicago. Every ward theoretically had both
Democratic and Republican ward organizations, each headed by its own ward committeeman. But in many wards the Republican leadership
was weak, or had cut a deal with the Democratic machine. In the 36th Ward, Peter J. Miller was Republican ward committeeman
and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. But at the same time, Miller held a Democratic patronage job as paymaster
of the Chicago Sanitary District, and regularly voted with the Democrats in the legislature on issues of importance to Daley.
Many Republican ward organizations did not even have precinct captains. When Charles Percy ran for governor against machine
Democrat Otto Kerner in 1964, Percy demanded that Chicago’s Republican ward committeemen produce lists of their precinct captains.
It turned out that 1,500 to 2,000 of the city’s precincts did not have Republican precinct captains.
⁴⁸