American Pharaoh (92 page)

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 fraudulent, 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

D
aley 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, the 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

The Central Area Committee, still concerned about the state of the Loop, hired the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
for $400,000 to draft yet another plan for the city. Their lavishly illustrated 125-page plan, which was released in May 1973,
bore the boosterish name Chicago 21, because it was intended to carry the city into the twenty-first century. Chicago 21 laid
out a $15 billion blueprint for overhauling downtown Chicago, including new construction and an aggressive campaign to double
the central area’s population. Among its suggestions were building more family-sized apartments, constructing a playground
on the banks of the Chicago River, and developing more mass-transit lines. In time, the plan envisioned an entirely new transit
system containing moving sidewalks, gondola cars, and two levels of underground streets to separate cars and trucks from pedestrians.
The main thrust of Chicago 21 was finding ways to make Chicago more attractive to middle-income and wealthy residents, who
had been fleeing the city for the suburbs in large numbers. The suburban ring around Chicago added a million new residents
during the 1960s, climbing from 2.6 million to 3.6 million. During the same period, Chicago’s population declined from 3.6
million to 3.3 million. The city was also rapidly becoming blacker and poorer. It had gained 300,000 black residents in the
1960s, for a total of 1.1 million, while it lost 570,000 whites. Chicago began the 1960s with about one in ten residents on
government assistance, and ended with nearly one in five.
⁷