Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (5 page)

The Daley-Metcalfe split ignited the black, independent political movement that would ultimately bring down the Democratic machine—though only after both Daley and Metcalfe had died. It would also lead to the election of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, and provide the base for the meteoric rise in Illinois politics of Barack Obama.

Hyde Park was a great beat; its Fifth Ward was a hotbed of liberal activism and anti-machine dissent, rich with crackling politics and vivid characters.

My favorites were the colorful lead actors in the ward’s ongoing political drama: Alderman Leon M. Despres, the irrepressible dean of the City Council’s small, vocal independent bloc; and Marshall Korshak, the wily Democratic ward committeeman and patronage dispenser who had the unenviable task of trying to tame this bastion of anti-Daleyism. Each of them was Jewish. Each was a lawyer. They were contemporaries in age, and lived blocks apart. Yet Despres and Korshak could not have been more different.

Despres was an erudite labor and civil liberties lawyer with deep roots in the left-wing politics of the 1930s. For years he was a fearless, lone dissenting voice on the City Council, using his mastery of parliamentary rules to try to frustrate Daley’s maneuvers. With oratorical talents more suited for the U.S. Senate than the Chicago City Council, Despres would, on occasion, bewilder his less lettered colleagues with passages from Shakespeare. More often, he would infuriate them by shining an unforgiving light on corruption and racial discrimination in Chicago.

“There is not one bit of evidence to support the charge that Alderman Marzullo and his transportation committee are taking pay-offs from the taxi industry . . . not one bit,” Despres said one day, his tongue firmly planted in cheek, as he railed against a proposed taxi fare hike. “But if each and every member of the transportation committee were on the payrolls of the Yellow and Checker Cab companies, they wouldn’t behave any differently than they do right now.”

The target of Despres’s attack, a crusty, old ward boss named Vito Marzullo, shook his fist in rage, uttering expletives in two languages. A decade later, when Despres was shot in the leg while on his way home from a late night of work, Marzullo offered a tart observation that probably summed up the feeling of many council members: “They aimed too low.”

Despres became a great resource as well as a mentor to me. By then, in his fifth term as alderman, he was an undisputed expert on the City Council and the labyrinthine workings of local government. He was always ready with a brilliant, biting quote. Yet I learned as much from Korshak, a wry, world-weary veteran of the Democratic machine, who migrated to Hyde Park from Chicago’s notorious Twenty-Fourth Ward.

Once a Jewish ghetto on the city’s West Side, the Twenty-Fourth Ward had become a seat of political power in Chicago thanks to its ability to deliver overwhelming margins for the Democratic ticket. The ward’s longtime boss, Colonel Jacob Arvey, was the county Democratic chairman who, in 1948, pulled off an improbable trifecta by carrying Illinois for Harry Truman and two long-shot candidates, Adlai Stevenson II for governor and Paul Douglas for the U.S. Senate.

The tradition of tight organization and gaudy vote totals continued even after the ward’s makeup turned from predominantly Jewish to black. The first African American alderman of the Twenty-Fourth Ward, Ben Lewis, won a special election in 1958, the handpicked designee of the ward’s real power: a Democratic boss named Erwin “Izzy” Horwitz. In 1963, Lewis was shot to death in his ward office. His bodyguard, George Collins, who said he had gone out for a smoke when Lewis was murdered, succeeded him as alderman and later rose to Congress.

When Collins, in turn, perished in a plane crash in 1972, his grieving widow, Cardiss, visited Mayor Daley to propose herself as her husband’s replacement. As the legend goes, Daley gently explained to Mrs. Collins that he had another candidate in mind. “Mr. Mayor,” she purportedly replied, “did I mention that George kept a diary?” Whatever occurred in that meeting, Mrs. Collins emerged as the mayor’s choice. Cardiss Collins went on to serve two decades in Congress. The Ben Lewis murder was never solved.

But if the Twenty-Fourth Ward was infamous for its politics, it had an even seamier history as home to the Jewish wing of organized crime in Chicago, which developed deep ties to labor racketeers and Las Vegas gambling interests. And Korshak maintained a foot in both traditions.

He had spent his life in service to the Democratic organization, and was rewarded with a series of public positions, from state legislator to the coveted patronage post of city treasurer. Under the friendly rules of Chicago politics, Korshak also developed a lucrative law practice, greatly enhanced by the clout he wielded.

But Marshall was not the most powerful Korshak. His brother Sidney rose through that other Twenty-Fourth Ward career path and became organized crime’s lawyer in Vegas and Hollywood. Sidney oversaw the legal work for several mob-owned casinos, and through his ties to the Teamsters union, he had the power to bring film productions to a screeching halt until the “right people” got their cut. As such, he was a man the entertainment industry didn’t cross.

Like Despres, Marshall Korshak became an invaluable resource to me, a tutor on the ins and outs of Chicago politics.

In 1974, when a local man drowned in the unsupervised swimming pool of a Hyde Park motel with reputedly shady management, I was assigned by the
Herald
to look into it. After a bit of investigation, I found that the motel had neither the required license nor a lifeguard to operate a public pool. I asked Korshak, as both the Democratic ward leader and city revenue director, for comment. “This is an outrage,” he said. “We’re going to throw the book at them!” But when the case was called a few weeks later, the promised reckoning never came. A city attorney stood up in court and sheepishly reported that the revenue department had simply “misfiled” the motel’s license.

I called Korshak back. “How could this happen?” I asked. “Weeks later, this license suddenly ‘turns up’? You had an open-and-shut case!”

“David, let me answer off the record,” Korshak wearily responded. “If you’re going to work in this town, there’s one thing you need to know: in the city of Chicago, there’s no such thing as an ‘open-and-shut case.’”

Another early mentor was Don Rose, a local writer, newspaper publisher, and political activist from the Hyde Park area with deep roots in the civil rights and antiwar movements. By the time I met him, Rose’s life had had many acts. As a young man in the 1950s, he was a jazz trumpeter and heroin addict. By the ’60s, he had cleaned up, and served as Martin Luther King Jr.’s press secretary during the reverend’s 1966 marches for open housing in Chicago. (King claimed that the racism he encountered in Chicago was more “hateful” than anything he had encountered in the South.) Rose had also served as the spokesman for the Chicago Seven, the eclectic crew of hippies, yippies, and leftist lawyers who led the antiwar protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Don lays claim to the iconic line chanted by the protesters as the Chicago police advanced: “The whole world is watching!”

In the 1970s, Don took on yet another incarnation, this time as a part-time political consultant and ad maker. Outraged by the Black Panther slayings and committed to being a burr under Daley’s saddle, he orchestrated the upset election of a former FBI agent, Bernard Carey, for state’s attorney. Carey was a Republican, but in the topsy-turvy world of Daley’s Chicago, liberals often supported reform-minded Republicans for local office. And Don was in the forefront of those fights.

The bearded, biting Rose also was a deft writer, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago politics. He was a fixture at the preferred watering holes of Chicago’s coolest journalists—Royko, Studs Terkel, and others—many of whom shared Don’s political leanings, admired him as a talent, and revered him as a source.

Shortly after taking on the
Herald
column, I called Rose cold and asked him to critique my work and to offer guidance. He generously did so except during one period in 1975, when he felt I was insufficiently supportive of one of his candidates.

“You’re letting yourself be used,” he bellowed in fury over the phone one day. By the following year, though, Don had forgiven me. In fact, it was his letter of recommendation in which he pointedly recalled that we “had not always agreed” that, in 1976, helped secure me a coveted summer internship at the
Chicago Tribune
.

A City Council race to replace the venerated Despres, which was hotly contested, gave me the opportunity to earn my spurs with some original investigative reporting.

There were four candidates in the race, three African Americans and a white man named Ross Lathrop, who had no political involvement in the community prior to the race, but who nevertheless seemed to be gaining traction. Though Lathrop postured himself as an independent candidate, I began to suspect that Korshak and the machine Democrats had put him up for the seat, hoping to keep it in friendly hands if the African American candidates split the black vote. Korshak, of course, denied this.

Lathrop won the election, but when his campaign finance disclosure appeared months later, I became suspicious about a series of large contributions that had all come in during a five-day period from eight construction and engineering contractors, only one of whom listed an address in the ward. I suspected that the donations were procured by Mike Igoe, a Korshak lieutenant rumored to be in line to become the next ward committeeman. Igoe’s day job was secretary of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, through whose office all county contracts passed before final approval.

I spent a day at the county building, looking for matches between Lathrop’s donors and county contracts. After cutting through the red tape designed to discourage such foraging, I hit the mother lode. “Bingo,” I muttered to myself. “Every single one.”

Among them, Lathrop’s donors had received nearly thirty million dollars in county contracts, all of which passed through Igoe. When I called them, a few even acknowledged that they could not have distinguished Lathrop from a bale of hay. Igoe fessed up that he had solicited the donations on Lathrop’s behalf.

There was nothing illegal, or even unusual, about the donations—certainly not in the Wild, Wild West of Chicago and Cook County—but they called into question Lathrop’s credentials as a self-styled reformer, and tied him to the Democratic organization. Though this wasn’t an earthshaking story, it was thrilling for me to pursue a hunch, do the sometimes tedious reporting, and ultimately reveal something meaningful to the public.

Of course, the time I spent in a dark room reviewing records at the County Building was time I wasn’t spending in class or at the library. I wish I could retake some of the courses I sprinted through then, doing only enough work to get by with decent grades. The education I was offered was far better than the one for which I settled. But I was a young man in a big hurry. I had found a calling, and the best preparation for it was on the street, not in the classroom.

I loved politics, and I loved reporting, but I pursued journalism relentlessly for another reason.

In the spring of 1974, I got an unusual call from my dad. We spoke relatively often, but almost always because I’d called him for advice or solace, or to ask for a few bucks to tide me over. He rarely phoned me, and his message had a strange, parting tone.

“Whatever happens, I know now that you and your sister are going to do very well in life,” he said. “I want you to know I am so proud of you both, and the people you’ve become.”

I didn’t know what had prompted the call and, though pleased by his praise, didn’t think much about it.

A few days later, there was a knock on the door of the shabby off-campus apartment I shared with two others. My roommate Daniel Nugent, a longhaired, guitar-playing anthropology student from Tucson, answered the door.

“My name is Gardner, Chicago Police,” said the man on the other side of it. “I’m looking for David Axelrod. Is he home?”

Daniel hesitated. It was, after all, the ’70s. The apartment we lived in was once known as Happy House, for some of the unwholesome frivolity that took place there, and such unannounced visits by police were rarely good news. The officer persisted. “Please, son,” he said gently. “I have something I have to tell him.”

I overheard the conversation and nodded at Daniel, who reluctantly opened the door and waved the officer into the darkened foyer. From the living room, I could hear the haunting guitar instrumental “Jessica,” by the Allman Brothers, still playing on the turntable.

“Are you David?”

I said I was.

“Is your father Joseph Axelrod?”

The question itself hinted at something awful.

“David, we just got a call from New York City. The NYPD. They found your dad in his apartment. They think it was a suicide. They need you to go home to identify his body.”

“Oh God,” Daniel said softly.

The Allman Brothers continued to play as the three of us stood in silence for a long moment.

Officer Gardner gave me a contact at the NYPD, grasped my shoulder, and shook my hand. “I’m so sorry to have to bring you this news, son.”

I thanked him, but I didn’t cry. Not then. I don’t remember saying much of anything at all. I didn’t ask many questions. I heard his words but I couldn’t quite grasp them. I was numb, dazed.

I called my mother because I didn’t know what else to do.

“What?” she screamed into the phone. “Are they sure? I can’t believe it. Are they sure, Dave?”

I asked her to tell my sister.

I hung up, and my thoughts turned to that last phone call, which suddenly made sense. My dad knew then that he was going to kill himself. When he said he was sure my sister and I would do well in life, he knew he would not be there to see it. He was calling to say good-bye.

Oh, how I wished I had had the chance to tell him how much he meant to me. There was no one I loved more. I hoped he knew that—but if he did, I thought, then why had he left me?