American Pharaoh (77 page)

On June 5, the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities held a luncheon for 1,300 at the Hilton Hotel to kick
off Project: Good Neighbor. Daley told the crowd that the one-week project had the potential to “do much to erase prejudices
which long ago should have been thrust aside.” Other speakers talked about the importance of open housing. And Robert Ingersoll,
board chairman of Borg-Warner Corporation and chairman of the project, urged everyone in attendance to sign a “Good Neighbor
Declaration.” But the event had a hollow feeling, since Daley and the others did not seem to be taking many practical steps
to advance the cause of open housing. In late April, six progressive aldermen had introduced an amendment to strengthen the
city’s open-housing law. They proposed to extend the law, which applied only to brokers, to cover all sellers and renters
of housing, including owners of single-family homes. The machine did not back the measure, and Daley’s corporation counsel,
Ray Simon, weighed in with his opinion that the city did not have the authority to pass such a law. Meanwhile, Daley’s development
plans for the city were proceeding impressively. On July 12, he announced that McCormick Place would be rebuilt in no more
than eighteen months. It was a quick schedule, he conceded, for such a mammoth project, but “with crews working 24 hours a
day if necessary, it can be done,” he said. “Where there is a will there is always a way.” The following day, Daley stood
at the corner of Dearborn and Madison to preside over the cornerstone ceremony for the First National Bank of Chicago Building.
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This municipal tranquillity was soon threatened, when a rash of urban rioting swept the nation. It started on July 12 in Newark,
New Jersey, with an altercation between a black cabdriver and two policemen. A day later, protesters clashed with the Newark
police and began looting stores. Then, the unrest escalated. Rioters and looters seized control of roughly half of Newark’s
twenty-four square miles. Snipers took positions on rooftops, and arsonists set buildings on fire across the city. It took
five days, 1,400 Newark police, and 300 New Jersey police to restore the peace. Before it was over, twenty-seven people were
dead, and there was $10 million in property damage. Days later, rioting began in Detroit, and the devastation was even worse.
Large sections of the city were set on fire, forty-three people were killed, and a staggering 7,000 people were arrested.
To restore the order in Detroit, 4,700 army paratroopers and 5,000 National Guardsmen had to be called in to back up the local
police. When the rioting ended in one city, it began in another — Milwaukee; New Haven, Connecticut; Wilmington, Delaware;
and Flint, Michigan.
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Daley was adamant that Chicago would not go the way of Newark or Detroit. He called a press conference on July 27 and delivered
a grim-faced warning that rioting would not be tolerated. The National Guard was on alert, he said, and it would be on the
streets in an hour with live ammunition. “As long as I am mayor of Chicago, law and order will prevail,” Daley insisted. When
a reporter pointed out that King had warned that Chicago had the kind of problems that had led to riots in other cities, Daley
lashed out at the man he had once gone to great lengths to embrace. “We don’t need him to tell us what to do,” Daley said
of King. “He has been asked to join in our constructive programs and he has refused. He only comes here for one purpose —
or to any other city he has visited — and that is to cause trouble.” The next day, Daley addressed an enthusiastic audience
at the 49th annual Illinois American Legion at the Palmer House and repeated the promise he made at the press conference:
“Law and order must prevail; it will prevail.” In fact, this time law and order did prevail. In the summer of 1967, when more
than 128 American cities erupted in rioting, Chicago somehow escaped unscathed.
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Daley’s admirers were happy to give him the credit. It was his tough talk, many of them said, that let potential rioters know
they would be dealt with swiftly and harshly. Others said it was the antipoverty money Daley had attracted to the city. “Chicago
is in on every conceivable program the Federal Government has to offer,” one reporter noted. Some attributed the absence of
rioting to the Democratic machine, which reached into every block of the ghetto, and made even the city’s poorest blacks feel
they had some stake in the system. “The trained and loyal members of the Democrats’ campaign army are armed with the promise
of food and favors,” said Joseph Meeks, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. “They will be effective in
influencing almost anyone who has a modicum of reason.” But rioting, and the absence of rioting, is not so easily explained.
Less than a year later, the machine would still be handing out food and favors, and Daley would be talking even tougher. But
the response in Chicago’s ghettos would be very different.
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Every headline about a city erupting in looting and arson drove another nail into the coffin of CAP. The program’s defenders
argued that the unrest only illustrated more vividly that the nation’s urban poor were desperately in need of intervention,
but that was not the majority view. The uprisings “not only raised the question whether the poor should be ‘rewarded’ after
engaging in violence,”
New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker observed, “it also brought wild but unsubstantiated charges that O.E.O. employees had helped foment
the riots.” The War on Poverty was rapidly losing the support of the two groups that dominated the Democratic majority in
Congress: urban liberals from the North, and rural conservatives from the South. Southern Democrats increasingly identified
Washington’s anti-poverty programs with black militancy and voter registration drives that threatened the white power structure
in some regions. Northern Democrats had also become convinced that federal anti-poverty money was being used to fund political
protests and acts of insurrection, like a Cleveland demonstration in which angry poor people marched on City Hall and dropped
rats on the steps. Even many urban liberals were finally coming around to Daley’s long-held view that a poverty program not
under the control of the political establishment was worse than none at all.
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The reform being proposed was an amendment to the Economic Act of 1967 that would reshape the entire CAP program along the
lines of Daley’s Chicago Concept. It was a measure Congressman Pucinski, Daley’s point man on the issue, had been promoting
for some time, but the actual amendment was introduced by House Committee on Education and Labor chair Edith Green (D-Oregon).
Republican congressman Charles Goodell attacked the proposed modification as a “bosses and boll weevil amendment,” a joint
effort by machine politicians from the North and legislators from the rural South to take control over the federal poverty
program. It soon became clear, however, that CAP was not going to be reauthorized without it. Green’s amendment passed, finally
closing the chapter on the contentious idea of “maximum feasible participation.” A few months later, Shriver left the War
on Poverty to become ambassador to France. In the end, Daley was the victor in the War on Poverty. His Chicago Concept, once
attacked as illegal and corrupt, was now law nationwide.
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On August 15, 1967, Daley unveiled a new rust-colored Picasso sculpture to stand in front of the Civic Center. The 162-ton
statue, which would come to be known simply as the Chicago Picasso, had already endured weeks of abuse. Amateur art critics
were comparing Picasso’s abstract creation to everything from a dodo bird to a giant cheese slicer. The
Chicago Daily News
had called it Chicago’s “greatest conversation piece since Mrs. O’Leary’s lantern.” The
Chicago Tribune,
seemingly straining to find the right words, hailed the sculpture’s “off-beat attractiveness — not the attractiveness of
a marble nymph in a glade but of a great monumental something which turned aside questions and pulled the mind in a strange
direction.” Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks composed a poem that she read at the unveiling. It captured Chicago’s awkward relationship
with its new masterpiece: “Art hurts,” Brooks declared. “Art urges voyages — and it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer
ready.” Republican alderman John Hoellen, happy to have found another issue on which to bait Daley, introduced a resolution
in the city council to send the sculpture back to France and replace it with a likeness of Cubs first baseman Ernie Banks.
(City Hall was not amused. Told that Hoellen was objecting that no one knew what the statue was, Tom Keane responded: “It’s
a baboon, and its name is John Hoellen.”) Daley, with his ingrained Bridgeport sensibility, did not care for the artwork he
was unveiling. “He was disturbed,” recalls his speechwriter Earl Bush. “He said, ‘Picasso’s art is not what’s appreciated.’
I said, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter that you like it or not. Picasso brings credibility, no matter how grotesque it is.’” Daley
appreciated the credibility and went ahead with the unveiling, even though his heart was with the demonstrators who were gathered
at the scene holding signs reading “Give It Back,” and “Colossal Boo Boo.”
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Over Labor Day weekend, 2,000 delegates representing 200 leftist organizations gathered at the Palmer House in Chicago for
a convention of the National Conference for New Politics. The chaos that ensued was one of the clearest indications yet that
the Black Power movement was tearing the left apart. When Martin Luther King gave the keynote address, black militants drowned
him out with chants of “Kill whitey.” Black delegates, who were only 10 percent to 15 percent of the convention, demanded
and were given 50 percent of the votes on all resolutions. The delegates then went on to adopt a series of radical resolutions,
including a condemnation of Israel’s Six Day War as an “imperialist Zionist war” in the Middle East, which many Jewish delegates
viewed as anti-Semitic, and an injunction to do work among white Americans to humanize their “savage and beast-like” character.
The disastrous gathering deepened a divide that already existed on the left between Vietnam War–focused whites and civil rights–
and Black Power–focused blacks. “We are a movement of people with radically different needs,” white radical Rennie Davis said
afterward. “A super-coalition makes no sense.”
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That fall, Daley traveled to Washington to attend a $500-a-plate dinner for the Democratic National Committee. Daley and his
congressional stalwarts Dan Rostenkowski and John Kluczynski listened politely as Johnson told a black-tie audience of thousands
that he would not back down over Vietnam. By now, popular opinion was turning against “Johnson’s War.” The number of dead
and injured Americans had been growing at an alarming rate — from 2,500 in 1965 to 33,000 in 1966, to 80,000 so far in 1967
— and the United States seemed no closer to winning. Liberal media had been fulminating against the war for years, but now
moderate-to-conservative publications like the
Richmond Times-Dispatch,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and
Time
magazine were beginning to express doubt or outright opposition. On September 20, the
Christian Science Monitor
had reported that of 205 congressmen interviewed, 43 said they had recently dropped their support for Johnson’s policies.
Daley had been silent on the great issue that was tearing the nation apart. “He was very much domestic in focus,” says his
son William Daley. “His focus was never international in anything except promoting Chicago.”
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Though he would later go down in history as one of the great enemies of the anti-war movement, Daley did not in fact support
the Vietnam War. In the early years, he paid little attention to the far-off hostilities. “He probably thought, like most
Americans in 1961 and 1963, that it was no big deal,” says William Daley. He grew to like the war less as young men, particularly
young Chicagoans from neighborhoods like Bridgeport, started coming back with horrible injuries or in pine boxes. Daley’s
son John had gone to grammar school with a young man who went off to serve. “His mother came pounding on the door one night,”
William Daley recalls. “The poor kid ended up stepping on a mine. He survived and had hundreds of operations, and died a few
years later.” With the casualties mounting, and America accomplishing so little, Daley began to form more definite views.
An important consideration for Daley, of course, was the effect that the war could have on the Chicago Democratic machine.
Like the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War had become a deeply divisive issue that threatened to drive a wedge through
the machine’s electorate. Independent anti-war candidates might begin to make inroads among some machine voters, just as pro–civil
rights candidates had begun to. Before the 1966 elections, Johnson aide Lawrence O’Brien went on a trip around the country.
“There was a conversation I had with Mayor Daley, initiated by him, where he expressed great concern about Vietnam,” says
O’Brien. “He said this was a growing disaster and this was going to be devastating to the Democratic party. I sent the President
a memo, ‘If Richard Daley has become concerned about Vietnam, you’ve got to realize that it is not some passing cloud.’” Daley
had an opportunity that same year, 1966, to tell Johnson personally how he felt about the war. Daley was at the White House
lobbying for federal aid for various Chicago projects. As he began to leave, Johnson stopped him. “Listen, Dick, I’ve got
a lot of trouble over there in Vietnam,” the president said. “What do you think about it?” Daley thought for a moment and
answered. “Well, Mr. President, when you’ve got a losing hand in poker you just throw in your cards,” he said. “But what about
American prestige?” Johnson asked. “You put your prestige in your back pocket and walk away.”
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