Richard J. Daley-A Personal Memoir

...He also serves as president of the Cook County Board--and, as positions of patronage and consequence go, within Chicago's metropolitan area, it is second only to the Mayor's job...

...But it is not necessarily a negative one...

...I 4 February 1977:80 At the moment, the two jobs are in separate hands, for the first time since Richard Daley pulled them together almost 22 years ago, and this drops a bit of melodrama into the succession: it's as if the jobs were separate halves of a map of buried treasure, and the plot line called for the pirates to scheme and struggle and try to piece the thing together again...

...Pretty soon I knew this young pors schedule better than his intended, my cousin, Sis...

...in Salamfi home-rebuilding and community agricultural projects...

...At the same time, Dunne is far better liked by The Organization's ghetto ward bosses than Richard Daley was...

...At the same time, his campaign instincts are sound, shaped as they have been by his countywide experience...

...Well, none of these things has come to pass...

...It was a ramshackle place, we were all poor...

...Blacks and Jews there weren't...

...Once, just a few years ago, if people in Chicago tried to foresee what events might attend the passing of Richard Daley, they used strong language, language they felt suited the turmoil of 1968, the ghetto riots, the Democratic National Convention...

...I lived in this world and also in a ten-yearold's world of needs--for ice-cream cones, candy bars, caps for my toy pistol, with the ultimate a bleacher seat at Comiskey Park, home of the last-place White Sox...

...How many humans, told as the shadow approached that this was to be the inscription on their tombstone, would rail against it...

...Finally, several of the city's ghetto politicians have played shrewd hands since Daley's death and they are pulling themselves up a notch or two---in the Council, in the legislature, on the County Board...

...Meanwhile, dozens of alleged pundits have had a go at him and several wrote the 'definitive words' many hours before they got him into his grave at Holy Sepulchre...

...My God, he was human loaded with limitations, foibles, blind-spots, prejudices, ego, and a power drive combined with a sense of omniscience that rivaled de Gaulle's...

...The office of Mayor is held by Michael Bilandic, a quiet lawyer...

...Since the law calls for the Council to choose one of its members to act as Mayor until a special election is held, it wasn't surprising for The Organization's aldermen to pick Michael Bilandic...

...But after the sixth visit my father came home in triumph...

...It is difficult for me to enumerate a single relative in a typically numeorus Irish family who is not now, or did not spend most of his or her working life on the city, county, state, or federal payroll thanks to his intercession, or "clout" as the numerous observers so often and so aptly described it...

...With this base and the trust of Mayor Daley, he became the Council's strong man...

...In short, he was a man and, as such, had something in common with da Vinci, as well as A1 Capone...

...This ward has been affected more than any other by the land development policies of the Daley years...

...It was even the custom to prophesy a time for reckoning, or to speak of bills coming due and things falling apart...

...It wasn't a flood but one of the few working trickles in the block...

...From about '30 to '34 our dinner table kept expanding in direct proportion to the number of unemployed bricklayers, steamfitters, carpenters who were our cousins, brothers-in-law, uncles, aunts, nieces and old friends...

...I needed one...

...It's also tough for Bilandic to build on his natural base, his fellow aldermen...

...He has farther to go than Dunne does...

...His public relations were abominable...

...The man was reinstated...

...But, in the end I always got my tribute and they got their privacy...

...With the cashed-in scrip we managed a cash-flow...

...I took them, and I never paid off, so this is a last attempt...

...manship and the office of Mayor at the same time: Anton Cermak, Edward Kelly and Richard Daley...

...Needless to say, he's likely to carry the city well as The Organization's man for Mayor...

...I'm not, although I haven't lived in his city for nearly thirty years and hadn't talked to him in a year or so...

...He took care of a lot of slobs who were white, black, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, most of them a lot like him--finite, hypocritical, often mean, sometimes splendid...

...I didn't say we were nice...

...In the annals of the machine, they are acknowledged as its strongest bosses...

...Aunt Nora's daughter, Sis, was being courted by a short, heavy-set guy already in polities...

...A number of The Organization's old boys say they might try for the nomination: Michael Howlett, popular in Chicago bur a failed candidate for governor, Cecil Partee, the intelligent boss of a South Side ghetto ward and a failed candidate for attorney general, and Roman Pucinski, the alderman and committeeman of a Northwest Side ward, the 41st...

...As it flourished, so did Dunne, as its political boss and an insurance broker, banker and real estate man...

...The story is as arcane as a shyster's spiel but as honest and legal as a page torn from Blackstone...

...He was more Catholic than the Pope--detested divorce, couldn't tolerate a dirty joke, practiced the deceptive art of nursing a single highball for hours on end with the aid of quarts of soda, pounds of ice...

...Dick, he's a hot head and a fool...

...Nor am I ashamed to say that in an atypical, detached, and distant way, I have always been "one of his own...

...I developed a racket...

...My father's sister, Nora Guilfoyle, a widow with ten children, lived down the road from us on Throop Street, in a neighborhood called Bridgeport, in Chicago, Illinois...

...in Rabinal the re-establishment of a clinic and wholesale roofing and home-rebuilding...

...Sometimes I was suffered for five, ten, fifteen minutes, actually conversed with about school, baseball, family news...

...We were Polish, Irish, Czech, a few Germans...

...This isn't to say George Dunne will become the next boss by acclamation...

...In those days, people MICHAEL MCAULIFFE, /ormerly o/ the Chicago Sun-Times and Billboard magazine, is a communications consultant in New York...

...The prospects for a strong black candidacy seem poor, for several reasons...

...Dunne has come to understand the political values of suburbia better than most of The Organization's ward bosses...

...This is a problem for a lot of The Organization's officeholders, especially in the Council...

...Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, Chicago's leading black politician, cannot be beaten on the South Side, but he seems a little too old and ill to run citywide or even to sponsor someone else to do it...

...Mayor Daley's 1975 opponent, William Singer, said he'd be less inclined to run if Dunne is the man to beat...

...I got up to go a half dozen times but was sat back down--Dick Daley somehow knew that such a "favor" meant more to me than any job he could ever give me and he fulfilled the contract right over any objection I might raise...

...Michael Bilandie is trying to put the pieces together, but it will be hard for him...

...What the old man's clout held back, they felt, would finally erupt...

...But he's a good worker and he needs the job...

...To me, the essential thing about him was that he took care of his own...

...It is two and a half miles southwest of the Loop and its back door was the stockyards...

...Also, Bilandie doesn't have a record to run on...

...Four times Daley told my father to tell the guy to "Go to hell...

...The other three held the chairRICHARD 3...

...He was going to night school and was also secretary to "Pighead Joe" McDonough, our neighbor and County Treasurer, so named I guess because he was fat, bald, and had distended nostrils...

...I asked him how he did it...

...Every 1,460th day or so, he asked that they repay the favors...

...He's a product of Daley's neighborhood, Bridgeport, and he served as the alderman of the Mayor's home ward, the l l t h . For the past two years, Alderman Bilandic chaired the major committee of the City CounHe was short, overweight, a disastrous orator...

...For years, they all just sat there, kept their mouths shut, voted the way they were told to vote, and neglected to tie their name to a single idea, a single policy...

...Although I was an altar boy, I still spent a lot of time in the temporal world of those humble houses, that awful stench, the capacious emptiness of my schoolboy pockets...

...So, I would saunter down to my aunt's living room and get very talkative with the young couple as my aunt hovered a discreet room or two away...

...Please forgive me for the subjective, egotistical hunch that I knew Richard Daley longer, better, and in a more human context than most biographers, commentators, obituary writers, critics, and even lackeys...

...Few people know the values of development as well as he, and few people are as esteemed by the developers...

...He would likely have done anything save strike a priest for John Kennedy, yet he continually put forward narrow, limited party hacks for local office--men so inept at campaigning and lacking in appeal that they couldn't win with the machine delivering a solid base of votes for them...

...The chairman's title is held by George Dunne, a handsome and self-effacing millionaire...

...But underneath all that flesh, those warts, the jumbled sentences, the cold fury visited on the ward committeemen who didn't deliver on election day, the cute Irish "poll" and the rectitudinous Catholic prude, there existed a man whose patron saint was really Santa Claus...

...at the same time he never seemed to appreciate the towering moral stature of Martin Luther King, Jr., despite many first-hand opportunities to do so...

...William Singer may still decide to take his chances, too...

...He was largely responsible for giving us Adlai Stevenson...

...Few people could look as bad to some, as good to others, as he did because few people have so central a base and the whole nation as a canvas to move around in...

...My father was a city employee...

...No literary luminary, from Upton Sinclair to James T. Farrell to Saul Bellow, has ever succeeded in recapturing or even evoking the recollection of the stench that pervaded our little world from the blood, entrails and hides of the slaughtered animals on a hot summer's day...

...Each group had its own church, usually Catholic...

...4 February 1977:82...

...For the last 10 years, as The Organization's strongest man in county government, h e has handled the requests of his fellow ward bosses for jobs and favors with the county...

...Somehow, the powers of the chairman and the powers of the Mayor seem to blend magieally into the making of a strong leader...

...He lived in a city he loved and he ruled it for a long, long time...

...I may well be the only guy on earth who ever grafted Dick Daley for something approaching hard cash with anything resembling consistency...

...AN APPEAL: A Benedictine mission in Guatemala needs additional funds to continue its rehabilitation projects set up after last February's devastating earthquake...

...The town of Tactic is reconstructing houses and operating a clinic specializing in treating eye diseases...

...And yet, and yet, there was that day in the '50s that I passed through Chicago, dropped by to see him, and spent about ninety minutes closeted with him and a man named Harry S. Truman...

...Readers should send funds for Guatemala to Rev...

...If he cannot get The Organization to slate him to run for the office, a wand is going to wave somewhere in the next 120 days and he will be snatched back into the City Council, as just one of its 50 members...

...Twice, Dunne has swept the suburbs for the presidency of the County Board...

...There was the man who worked with my father who once joined an insurgent political movement back in the '40s and soon found himself a pariah and out of a job...

...This can be seen as a narrow, xenophobic, and far from purely philanthropic trait...

...The feelings are strictly personal, not political, but they naturally have a political effect...

...What a pity he died so close to Christmas...

...In order to become Acting Mayor, he promised them he wouldn't try to run for the real job...

...The field could be crowded, even if it won't be quite as crowded as it is now...

...I told Dick he was punishing the fellow for his manhood and, goddamnit, I'm his uncle, ain't I?" Once Richard Daley took the time to tell me his version of John Kennedy's narrow, imperative, eightthousand-vote victory over Richard Nixon in Illinois in 1960...

...Javier Hillenbrand, O.S.B., c/o Blue Cloud Abbey, Marvin, South Dakota, 57251...

...He didn't give a good goddamn what anybody thought, and one of his few but frequent vulgarities was to tell, or indicate to those in his disfavor (often journalists), that they "can kiss my ass...

...My father went to see the then patronage-dispenser four or five times...

...They held the party chairmanship and did much of their work offstage...

...The young pol never failed to lay a nickel, dime and, as the romance waxed, sometimes a quarter on me together with a suggestion about where one might get the best ice cream cones in the neighborhood--not the closest place, mind you, but the farthest store where they had the best...

...He's a ward boss, but his ward isn't just another ward, because half of it is the Gold Coast, the broad strip of expensive town houses and luxury highrises set off by Chicago's boulevard, Michigan Avenue...

...Since the ward leaders elect the chairman, it wasn't surprising for them to turn to George Dunne...

...Commonweal: 81 ell, the finance committee...

...His and my code demand at least the effort...

...The last time out, about 75 percent of them turned out to say, "Yeah, for duh Mair . . . . " Cunning, loving, sentimental, brutal, devious, honest, loyal to the point of being a neurotic, unforgiving and generous, all these words could be applied to Richard J. Daley...

...we had these needs for jobs, food, spending money, and to call each other names...

...I know, I got my first present from it nearly fifty years ago...

...I ! seemed to believe in cities . . . "urbi et orbi" as each new Pope says when he lays on the first barucha...

...This is where the future of the machine is likely to be decided, for it accounted for the Percy landslide, Thompson's landslide and Gerald Ford's victory in Illinois...

...During the depression they paid in scrip and the boys downtown were cashing it for the boobs at a nice, 15 to 20 percent discount because the city stood behind it...

...He is the boss of the 42nd Ward on the Near North Side...

...We were urban provincials-often crude, sometimes tough, rarely well-educated, probably scared, and we had needs---many of them...

...He had the reindeer ready to go, he knew every chimney in town, and his bag--well, let me tell you, it was a big one...

...One of the few ways up or out if you weren't brilliant was politics...

...PERSON I IEI IOIR MICHAEL McAULIFFE He never understood me and Christ knows I never understood him...

...They seem convinced of his fairness...

...Most of us, including Dick Daley, were not brilliant...

...Boys and girls, there once was a Santa Claus...

...A lot of pressure is getting eased this way...

...So, the fat little autocratic power broker who often looked like Buddha on the tube is gone and are any of us the better for it...

...It was an on-going contract...

...Dunne is holding one of the ingredients, the chairmanship, free and clear, for the time being...

...Richard J. Daley laid several bribes on me about forty-five or forty-six years ago...

...It has been a quiet burial...

...Bilandie is holding the Mayor's job on a short-term lease...

...I believe his will and estate, if made public, will reflect no more wealth than his official earnings and I know that Sis still bakes a lot of her own bread...

...He had the sure, unerring knack of taking on the role of heavy...

...A a veteran of an important and visible office, of course, Dunne has a long record, with a little something for everybody in it...

...I think one of the reasons he got into the power game was to help all the slobs he knew and was related to who didn't have a notion about how to get their noses near the trough...

...Neither did anyone else with the possible exception of his wife...

...They didn't hold a public office themselves...

...More Likely Moreover, George Dunne fits the job description...