Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (9 page)

It wasn’t that Byrne and Daley were bad debaters. It’s just that Harold was so much better. By turns funny, moving, and incisive, Harold thoroughly dominated his opponents and commanded the stage.

“I am running to end Jane Byrne’s four-year effort to further institutionalize racial discrimination in this great city,” Harold declared. He railed against patronage abuses and corruption, and attacked Byrne’s police chief as “the top cop who’s become a political prop,” castigating him for endorsing the mayor in TV ads. “Then he compounded it by saying he had every right to do it,” Harold thundered. “Well, every right should not be exercised. There’s a question of judgment and discretion . . . the day I walk into that office, Superintendent Brzeczek will go.”

It was a tour de force, and the impact among African American voters was seismic. Suddenly, it seemed that every black man, woman, and even kid was sporting the blue Washington button with the sunrise design, to signify the coming of a new day. (That button became my starting point when we were designing the iconic Obama logo in 2007.) Thanks to Harold’s campaign, these Chicagoans felt that they were full participants in the civic life of the city. Their pride in that, and in him, was inspiring.

As the signs of this burgeoning, new movement became obvious, a growing sense of panic and foreboding was cresting in the other camps. Eager to cut into Daley’s support, Byrne and her team played the race card, exploiting the fear of a black mayor among residents of the white ethnic neighborhoods where Daley was strong. In the final days of the campaign, I was chatting with Alderman Roman Pucinski, a voluble former congressman and old machine hand, who was backing Byrne. “Washington could win this thing,” he said. “But I think the Ogilvie letter will help. Have you seen it?”

Pucinski cheerfully shared with me a copy of a Byrne direct mail piece—a letter from former Illinois governor Richard Ogilvie to voters on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Though Ogilvie was a Republican, he still held favor with voters in the conservative, all-white Northwest Side. And his message was blunt. Only two candidates were viable: Byrne and Washington. It was the smoking gun. I had picked up plenty of talk about race in private conversations with pols around town. Yet this was an official mailing, penned by a major figure in Byrne’s camp, with a simple message: vote for Byrne or the black guy wins.

I pitched the story hard for page one, but when the next day’s paper appeared, it had been cut in half and buried in the Metro section. Given the implications of the letter, and the election, I was livid at the dismissive way the story was treated by the editors. Their stunning misjudgment was one I would remember as I began to evaluate my future at the paper.

On the Sunday before the election, I was at the office, working and watching the evening news out of the corner of my eye. I saw a clip of Byrne at one of Chicago’s notorious public housing developments. What made the scene unusual was that there were no security men in the picture. Her normally aggressive detail was nowhere to be seen, as an edgy crowd of black residents jostled the petite mayor.

“This is exactly the picture they want,” I said to my colleagues. “The valiant mayor wading into the unruly black mob. They staged this!”

I made a small reference to it in my account of the day. Two months after the election, a documentary called
The Last Campaign of Lady Jane
showed Byrne’s strategists watching the same news clip and high-fiving one another in response to the image of the mayor under siege.

Even so, it wasn’t enough. The woman who had made history just four years earlier was now swept out in its tide.

On primary day, Harold hit the heady numbers he needed: an unheard-of 69 percent turnout among African Americans, with Washington claiming 82 percent of that vote overall. Along with a tiny sliver of support among white liberals, Harold Washington became the Democratic nominee for mayor of Chicago.

Normally, in a town where fifty of the fifty aldermen were Democrats, that would have been tantamount to election. Yet such a conclusion would defy the history of a city where race and ethnicity trumped party. So, rather than embrace the results of the primary, many of the city’s Democratic committeemen gravitated to Harold’s Republican opponent.

Bernard Epton, a balding, bearded Jew, was a state legislator from Hyde Park who looked and sounded more like a Talmudic scholar than a politician. A liberal on social issues, he was a wholly unlikely standard-bearer for the anti-Washington forces. But he was white, and that was good enough for them.

Sensing an opportunity to seize one of the Democratic Party’s crown jewels, Chicago’s City Hall, state and national Republicans rushed in to take over the Epton campaign. Their less-than-subtle slogan, “Epton Now, Before It’s Too Late,” misread the depth of racial antagonism in Chicago. The folks they were counting on needed no prodding or reminders.

When former vice president Walter Mondale, gearing up for his own campaign for the presidency, campaigned with Harold at Saint Pascal, a Northwest Side church, an angry mob greeted them. The iconic image of contorted faces shouting racial epithets came to symbolize the dismal contest and Chicago’s enduring problem. But it also nudged enough liberal consciences to tip the balance.

With the nation watching, Washington captured a majority of Hispanic votes and just enough of the white vote to edge Epton, who was almost an apparition in his own campaign.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime campaign to cover, one that shone a bright light on the politics of race. And though the campaign ended, the struggle did not.

For decades under the elder Daley and his successors, the Chicago City Council was a docile charade, where aldermen, reliant on the patronage of the mayor, invariably fell in line. Yet almost as soon as Washington took the oath, a bloc of twenty-nine aldermen who opposed his election organized to thwart his agenda.

The situation was quickly dubbed the Council Wars. Its leaders were the two Eddies—Ed Vrdolyak, a cunning, smooth-talking tavern owner’s son from the old, immigrant wards bordering the dying steel mills on the Southeast Side; and Ed Burke, a flamboyant second-generation alderman and ward boss from the Back of the Yards neighborhood, who joined the council at the age of twenty-five, after his father’s sudden death.

Both lawyers, Vrdolyak and Burke had fastened themselves to the machine and became wealthy trading on their clout and the City Hall patronage that fueled their ward organizations. They began their careers as Daley loyalists, seamlessly transferred their allegiances to Bilandic, and then eventually cut a deal with Byrne, even though they were numbers one and two in her notorious “cabal of evil men.”

Vrdolyak and Burke knew there would be no such deal forthcoming from Harold, who seemed more serious than Byrne about scrapping the old patronage system. So they hijacked the council using the most potent organizing tool available, race, to stymie the new mayor and preserve as much of their power as they could. The council meetings took on the aura of theater as Harold regularly locked horns with the Eddies in a battle of wits and parliamentary procedure.

 • • • 

I broke loose from the story long enough to head to Iowa to handicap the upcoming Democratic presidential caucuses. I would come to love the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the only stops on the presidential calendar where candidates genuinely interact with voters. The people in the early states poke and prod and comparison-shop in a way that simply isn’t possible later in the process.

The conventional wisdom leading up to the 1984 campaign held that Mondale was the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination and the dubious honor of challenging Reagan. The Minnesotan would almost certainly win Iowa. The question was, who would finish second and earn the chance to stop Mondale down the line?

As I traveled the state, it became clear to me that Gary Hart, a young senator from Colorado, could be that guy, but he wasn’t yet on many radar screens. The manager of George McGovern’s ill-fated presidential campaign twelve years earlier, Hart was not a party insider or Washington schmoozer. He was running an insurgent campaign, offering a new vision for the Democratic Party.

The handsome, earnest Coloradan impressed Iowans—and me as well—with his message of reform, deftly positioning Mondale as the candidate of a Democratic vision badly in need of updating. The buzz on the ground was favorable. When I returned to the paper to write my piece, the editors were skeptical. On caucus night, however, Hart edged out all the other challengers to Mondale to place second, setting up a confrontation in independent-minded New Hampshire, where Hart had already laid siege.

Eight days later, Hart stung Mondale in the Granite State, scrambling a nomination fight that most had assumed a foregone conclusion. Covering Hart that night, I worked on a forward-looking piece about how he, as McGovern’s manager and a strong liberal, would try to win votes in more conservative southern states with primaries that were next on the election calendar. It turned out that he had a well-conceived plan, keyed to his expansive work on military reform and his willingness to challenge organized labor on trade issues.

I was proud of the story, but when I returned to the
Trib
after a few days on the road, I found that it had been gutted. My reporting was combined with that of the reporter covering Mondale and mashed into a wire service–style campaign piece. The reporting and analysis were lost. I stormed over to the National Desk.

“You know, the AP does a fine job of covering what happened that day,” I said to the editor on duty, my voice rising. “Why do you bother sending us?”

“Sorry,” he said. “We just didn’t have the space for two stories so we had to put them together.”

In that instant, my frustrations boiled over. Change was happening at the paper, foreshadowing disturbing trends in the industry. The atmosphere of bonhomie and shared mission I cherished had yielded to a kind of bloodless grind. What drew me and many of my colleagues to journalism was a healthy skepticism of authority. Now, in Squires’s more corporate, go-along-to-get-along newsroom, I had fallen out of place.

For months, Congressman Paul Simon, a progressive champion from downstate Illinois, had been urging me to leave the paper and join his campaign for the U.S. Senate. We had a good relationship, and he apparently felt my contacts and cachet as a political writer for the state’s largest paper would redound to his benefit.

I deeply admired Simon and felt a kinship with him. At nineteen, he had dropped out of college and bought a little newspaper in Troy, Illinois. He used the paper to crusade against a local gambling syndicate. When he couldn’t recruit others to challenge local officials beholden to the mob, Simon ran for the state legislature himself and won the seat.

In Springfield during the 1950s and ’60s, he fought a courageous battle for civil rights, though the downstate district he represented was more like the rural South in its culture and politics than Chicago. Even as the amiable Simon maintained friendships with machine Democrats, he was a steadfast voice for reform in a legislature dominated by politicians who profited handsomely from the corrupt status quo.

With his big jug ears and horn-rim glasses, Paul was an authentic character—the Orville Redenbacher of Illinois politics. He was decent, honorable, and idealistic, and represented the kind of hopeful politics I believed in. If I jumped ship, I knew he would never embarrass me.

So when Simon and his wife, Jeanne, first came to my home to make the case to my wife and me, I was intrigued, if not yet convinced. Susan was deeply concerned about the implications for our family. Lauren was struggling with seizures and our son, Michael, had just been born.

“What is it like for the kids to have a father in politics?” Susan asked Jeanne, who had met her husband in Springfield when both were state legislators. “Well, it’s a mixed bag,” Jeanne said. “When our son was young he got to sit next to George McGovern and Fritz Mondale at a dinner. On the other hand, his dad wasn’t home very much.”

When the Simons left, Susan closed the door behind them and said, “That didn’t sound like a great deal to me!”

So I put Simon on hold. Besides, I wasn’t quite ready to give up on journalism. Despite my growing disenchantment, I had a coveted position at the
Tribune
at a relatively young age, and the prospect of bigger things to come. “Leaving would be a terrible mistake,” one of the higher-ups lectured me sternly when he heard I was contemplating a move. “You could be the editor of this newspaper someday!”

By the spring of 1984, I was reconsidering Simon’s offer. I loved reporting but not my bosses or the direction of the paper, and I increasingly felt as if I were doing my work by rote. More and more, I wondered if I could have a bigger impact by being in the arena than by simply writing about those who were. I recalled what an old political reporter who had made the jump from journalism to politics told me: “One day you’re going to get tired of chasing people down hallways to ask questions you already know the answers to.”

Perhaps that time had come.

Moreover, Simon’s circumstances had changed. Since his visit to my home at the start of his campaign, he had won a competitive Democratic primary. Now, as he prepared to face Republican incumbent Charles Percy, in what promised to be a marquee national race in the fall of ’84, Simon again asked me to join.

We had two small children, one of whom was seriously ill. Susan, who had quit her job to care for them, bore the brunt of the burden, while I far too often ditched my responsibilities as a husband and a father. Yet in an act of love—and more than a little weariness at hearing my constant complaints about the paper—Susan changed her mind.

Despite legitimate concerns about additional demands on my time and uncertainties about what would come after the campaign, she said that I should seriously consider making the move.

“You don’t want to go through life unhappy,” she told me. “If you think you’ll be happier doing this, you should go ahead and do it. We’ll make it work.”