Hizzoner, Da Mare

...The author, a psychology professor at Loyola University who attended Maryknoll Seminary and Catholic University, mercifully eschews an inspirational tone...

...While Eugene Kennedy fully understands Daley's character, he shows too much eagerness to explain away and even to apologize for the Mayor's problems in responding to a new era...

...After he lost a race for county sheriff in 1946, he did yeoman duty for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and served as a young reformer in Governor Stevenson's cabinet...

...Daley's roots defined not only his style but also his limits...

...Yet despite his king-maker role, Daley was a singularly local figure...

...Pat-trick's Day publication date in Chicago and the Irish author's frequent evocations of Gaelic traditions and Celtic warriors, this biography of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley is not a simple bit of blarney...

...Though he kept company with presidents and Cabinet members, he remained comfortable only with his friends from Bridgeport...

...Two years later, he ousted an incumbent mayor in the primary, and for the next 20 years he remained the unassailable head of both the party and the government, winning 78 per cent of the vote in his sixth mayoral election the year before he died...

...Though personally uninterested in graft, his control over the city was too complete to leave him...

...He also surprises us with a fairly kind assessment of Daley's career...

...During his first decade in office, Daley did much to change the face of Chicago...

...If Kennedy's approach is a bit too apologetic and reveals more about his subject's life than his times, Himself is nevertheless an interesting chronicle of a complex urban baron who dominated the politics of a major city like few other people could-or ever will...

...blameless amid the venality that put many of those around him in jail, including former governor and judge Otto Kerner...

...While most Chi-cagoans were awed by their mayor's political and administrative skills, many reformers and liberal intellectuals could only feel enmity toward him...

...According to the author, simply outwaiting the Republicans rather than tampering with the election returns made sure Illinois went to John Kennedy and thus settled the close election...

...Himself is, rather, what was once called a color story and more recently came to be known as the New Journalism...

...Perhaps because Kennedy shares Daley's background, he understands the importance of a traditional Catholic upbringing and an immigrant heritage to a man who attended mass every morning, went home to dinner with his wife and family every night and in between ran the largest, best-organized, longest-lasting political machine in the country...

...He was increasingly unable to adapt to the new people and to the new currents that emerged in the 1960s as the white ethnic children of immigrants like himself prospered and moved out of Chicago...

...By the early 1970s, Chicago had become increasingly populated with alienated blacks and affluent whites less interested in the spoils of victory than in the personal and ideological purity of their elected officials...

...Continuing to combine luck and pluck, Daley rose in the ranks of the Democratic organization...

...But in the mid-1960s, Daley's confrontation tactics put an end to his progressive image...

...Reviewed by Harvey D. Shapiro Former "NL " Chicago Correspondent Despite the cute title, the St...

...Kennedy uncovers little that is new as he traces Daley's life from his birth in the Bridgeport section of Chicago in 1902 through his lifelong residence on South Lowe Avenue to his death in 1976...

...In an era when other mayors have used their offices as stepping-stones to jobs in Washington (or television), Daley's whole being was immersed in what he always called the great city of Chicago...

...He is able to capture much of the Damon Runyon quality of Chicago politics evoked by such real-life figures as Hinky Dink Kenna, Bathhouse John Coughlin and Short Pencil Sidney Lewis, and by precinct captains counting the absentee ballots of dead voters...

...Daley insured John F. Kennedy his Presidential nomination in 1960, we are told, because he longed to see an Irish Catholic make the run...

...Following the 1968 riots among West Side blacks, Daley issued his controversial "shoot to kill" order to police...

...If "da mare" was not as benighted as his critics alleged, neither was he as innocent as Kennedy seems to suggest...

...The problem with Himself is that it contains the same old Daley story we find elsewhere...

...The Machine" had ossified into an anachronism solely dependent upon the force of Daley's personality for its continued existence...

...Daley's brilliance as a political strategist was often employed in the pursuit of narrow and dubious goals, too: He built up the Loop and the roads leading to it, but he could not stem much decay anywhere else...

...Nor is it a solemn tribute to an Irish Catholic altar boy from the stockyards who rose to head the nation's second largest city for 20 years...

...Eight years later, Robert Kennedy would still remark, "Daley's the whole ball game...

...Fortunately, Eugene Kennedy writes well...

...Working as a clerk in the stockyards and going to law school at night, Dick Daley became a precinct captain at 21 and soon acquired a patronage job with the City Council...

...He also refrains from giving us another of those dreadful psychohistories that mock an already suspect science by reducing great events to so many unresolved Oedipal conflicts...

...It evokes the flavor as well as the facts marking the events being discussed, so that even an obscure ward-heeler who enters the stage, must be described at length before a scene may be played out...

...And in 1969, State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan led a bloody raid on the home of Black Panther party leaders...

...The mayor's image later regained some of its former luster, but his vaunted political machine began to show signs of stress...

...By 1972, Daley was nationally vilified: His fellow Democrats refused to seat his delegation at the national convention...

...In 1936, when Bridgeport's state legislator died 15 days before the election, a write-in campaign put Daley in office-Ironically, and very briefly, as a Republican...

...In 1950, he took over the patronage-rich job of Cook County Clerk and went on to win the party chairmanship in 1953...

...And Daley secured Kennedy's election by delaying reports of Cook County's lopsided vote totals until the heavily Republican downstate counties had reported their tallies...

...Later that year, the Democratic National Convention disintegrated amid what many would label a "police riot" in the streets of Chicago...

...Still and all, Richard J. Daley was a fascinating man-a larger-than-life figure in an era of more and more photogenic but hollow political candidates...