Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  The story described the warm welcome the Irish people gave the USS Mason crew. “They called us Yanks,” one man said. “I felt like a real American for the first time in my life.”

  William Dawson had the story framed for Ed, who hung it in his office.

  * * *

  Ed held no campaign events during the run up to the 1943 mayoral election. “It’s war time and I have important duties to perform,” he said to me after he won the nomination in February.

  “The people know who I am and what I’ve done.”

  “And McKibben is the weakest candidate you have ever faced,” I said. The Republicans hadn’t been able to find anyone substantial who was willing to take Ed on. “I’ll keep to my daily schedule,” Ed had said. “Visit the defense plants, broadcast my radio addresses, confer with the president and you’ll—”

  “Photograph you as you don’t campaign and get the pictures in the papers,” I said. Ed had smiled.

  “Right. And you might take a few shots of me and the kids helping Margaret to pour coffee and hand out donuts to the servicemen at the USO,” he said.

  Ed’s noncampaign ended with his ceremonial ride on the new State Street Subway two days before the polls opened. The subway, paid for with New Deal money, had taken five years to construct. I don’t think Ed ever enjoyed anything more than collaborating with the teams of engineers that came to work on the project. At first, he’d been told it would be impossible. Chicago’s soil was too porous to support a subway, especially one that was five miles long and went under the Chicago River. But Ed found some younger men and a very bright woman who figured out that if they went down forty-eight feet they’d reach solid ground. It took a lot of skill and guts to dig a trench in the Chicago River and sink huge steel tubes so far below the surface. “Make no small plans,” Ed kept saying to them. “No small plans.” Now the subway was ready to go and I planned a very special photograph. One of the construction crew tied me to a pillar on the platform in the Michigan–Chicago Avenue station. I leaned over the tracks and just as the lead car came whooshing through the tunnel, I snapped a photograph of Ed sitting next to the driver front and center. His face was bright in the shadows.

  * * *

  The citizens of Chicago went to their polling places the next morning, carrying newspapers with Mayor Ed Kelly on the front page under the headline “We Did It!” Ed won with an overwhelming majority with especially high totals in the Negro wards.

  But the sweetest moment for my cousin came when a Western Union messenger marched with great ceremony into the mayor’s office on April 7, 1943.

  “From the White House, Washington, DC,” the kid said.

  Ed read the telegram. He reached into his pocket, handed the kid a five-dollar bill.

  “Jeepers creepers,” the kid said. “Thank you, Mayor Kelly.”

  Then Ed gave me the yellow paper with its tape of words. It read YOUR REELECTION MAKES YOUR OLD FRIEND VERY HAPPY. FDR.

  “Some tribute, Ed,” I said.

  “All I’ll ever need,” he answered. He folded up the telegram, took out the leather case that held his holy medal, and put the telegram inside.

  A week later, a gigantic box arrived. Pat Nash was there when Ed opened it. It was a gift from Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York. A life-size representation of Chief Tammany, with his faithful dog that looked very much like a wolf.

  Ed laughed. “We’ll ship it up to Eagle River,” he said. “There will be an Indian on Indian Point at last.”

  * * *

  It was June 5, 1944. Mariann and Mike’s second wedding anniversary. I’d called her that morning. Mike had been transferred to Cherry Point, North Carolina, where he was learning to fly off carriers. No way of dodging the dangerous assignment. A very chancy undertaking, and I could tell she was nervous. Some good news, though—she was expecting a baby in November, and planned to move to North Carolina so she could be close to Mike.

  I told her I was attending one of the concerts in the Grant Park Music Festival that Ed had started. As president of the South Park Board, even before he was elected mayor, Ed had built a band shell in the park, and all during the Depression years, and now throughout the war, James Petrillo, as head of the musicians’ union, had assembled an orchestra to play free concerts. Ed had agreed to pay each musician ten dollars for two hours of playing, which was very good since they were only earning twenty-five cents an hour in the clubs.

  Big stars came to Chicago regularly. I’d tried to photograph the crowd who turned out to hear Lily Pons sing in the summer of 1939. Never had so many people been together. Three hundred and thirty thousand. I’d stood on the stage aiming the camera but all I got were heads and hats. James Petrillo had hired a photographer in a plane and got a good shot of the park—people shoulder to shoulder stretching all the way to the lake.

  Tonight’s audience wouldn’t be as big as that. Lily Pons had been a movie star as well as an opera singer. Besides, thousands of the young fellows who’d come to hear her were off fighting in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific.

  Ed’s driver parked right on Michigan Avenue in a special place guarded by four policemen. Margaret and the kids were in Eagle River so I would sit with him in the section reserved for the mayor and his family. Ed seemed preoccupied.

  “Everything alright?” I asked.

  “Don’t say anything, Nora, but Grace Tully is very worried about the president’s health. He can’t shake this bronchitis.”

  “He needs a vacation,” I said. “A real rest.”

  “Not a chance,” Ed said. “Grace told me something important is about to happen. We’ll know very soon.”

  “The invasion?” I said.

  “Sshh,” Ed said, though nobody was near to us as we waited in the car for the police to clear a path for us through the crowd into the park. It was common knowledge that the Allies were going to move into Europe. The only question was when and where. A big secret and I doubted Grace would give Ed any details over the telephone.

  We followed the two policemen to the special area to the left of the band shell. Ed wanted me to photograph him with the people who came up to shake his hand, then take their address and send them a print. First the aldermen lined up to say hello, then regular people. A word to his bodyguard and they were passed through. An older couple told Ed they had three sons serving. One in the Army, one in the Navy, and one in the Marine Corps.

  “Thought there’d be more safety in spreading them around. We’re from Bridgeport,” the woman said. “My mother was friendly with your grandmother when she worked in the parish office. Anyone in need got some help.”

  “And what was your mother’s name?” I asked after I snapped the picture.

  “Ann McIntyre,” the woman said. “She married my father, George McKenzie.”

  “I think I knew them. Did they live on Archer?”

  The woman looked at me. “I thought I knew all the Kellys. I don’t remember.” She stopped. “Oh, are you that Kelly woman who—” She looked at her husband. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Dear God, I thought, I’m sixty-five years old and still the black sheep of the family.

  Ed didn’t seem too interested in the Beethoven or the bit from Bach or even Schubert’s “Ave Maria” sung by a young woman I thought was as good as Lily Pons. He hardly looked at the stage at all but kept turning around, looking out of the park as if expecting someone. Which, of course, he was. Because just when the orchestra began its second encore right about eleven o’clock, a detective walked up fast and whispered something to Ed.

  “Come on,” Ed said to me.

  “What?”

  Ed was very quiet as our car pulled up to City Hall. We went down to the basement radio studio. What’s he going to do? Broadcast? But the big radio set was tuned to receive.

  “It’s the BBC,” the technician said. “They’ve just announced that there would be important news soon.”

  Static. Then a voice came through.


  “The greatest armada in human history is moving toward the coast of France.” He sounded like an American, and said he was aboard one of the hundreds of ships now off the coast of France. We could hear the sounds of guns, wind, and waves and then screams.

  “Dear God, Ed,” I said.

  The technician fiddled with the dial trying to bring in the broadcast more clearly.

  “Achtung, achtung,” we heard, and then reams of German.

  “We’ve picked up the German report,” the technician said.

  “They’re denying there is an invasion,” Ed said, “but at the same time saying their guns are destroying the advancing fleet.”

  I’d forgotten Ed had learned some German from his grandfather Lang. After midnight now, 7:00 a.m. in France, on what would be called “The Longest Day.” Strange it was Rommel who came up with the phrase when he said that the first twenty-four hours of the invasion would be decisive.

  “This is it,” Ed said. “Pray.”

  “I am.” We spent the whole night listening to the radio transmission.

  But a week would pass before reports came from Normandy. One story described the terrifying assault of a cliff face by a company of Army Rangers. They disabled a Nazi gun emplacement that had been firing down on the fellows trying to run across the beach to find some shelter. The place was called “Pointe du Hoc,” a rocky outcrop fifty feet about the beach.

  Pointe du Hoc. That was Maud Gonne’s beach, I thought as I read the report and remembered Willie Yeats standing on that same stretch of sand declaiming his poem.

  “We know their dreams only to know they dreamed and are dead.” “Easter, 1916.” His verses were about how the execution of ten Irish revolutionaries “changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.” And was “a terrible beauty” being born on that same beach on D-Day? Were the boys who were crawling across the sand propelled by a dream, or were they only scrabbling to stay alive, terrified, praying for five more minutes of life? Changed, changed utterly? Beauty? Certainly these boys had died to end a great evil. Hitler and the Nazis, but would that console their families?

  Margaret, Ed and I listened together to the Philco radio in their living room, as Roosevelt addressed the nation on the end of the “Longest Day.” He told us “the road would be long and hard” and that “the enemy was strong and would try to hurl back our forces.” He warned that our boys would be “sore tried by night and by day without rest but they would not stop until victory is won.”

  Much later we would see newsreel footage in which lines of “our boys,” bent down under their packs, marched up through France. The survivors of that horrendous landing were going off to take on the enemy and risk death again. But they would bring us peace, the president had promised.

  I prayed for all them and for Franklin Roosevelt too.

  “Not well,” Ed had said to me, at the end of the broadcast. “He’s just not well. Only sixty-two, younger than we are. But … but…”

  10

  JULY 15, 1944

  Most Americans didn’t know the name Harry Truman, the man who would become the vice presidential nominee, when the Democrats started arriving in Chicago for their convention that summer. No massive demonstration would be needed this time to ensure FDR’s nomination, even though he would be serving a fourth term. But how could we replace the commander-in-chief with victory a real possibility? “The challenge,” Ed said, “was to nominate the right vice president.”

  Ed and the other Big City Bosses mistrusted Henry Wallace. It wasn’t that the present vice president was too progressive. Nobody was more of a New Dealer than Ed. How many hundreds of times had I heard him say, “Roosevelt is my religion.” It was Wallace’s strange beliefs that made the bosses nervous. Wallace was connected to esoteric societies. Wallace believed that the Great Soul of Russia was being expressed through the Soviets, and that he understood how to contain the shadow side of Josef Stalin. Now, Roosevelt himself had been taken with Uncle Joe—but the bosses recognized a power-hungry tyrant when they saw one. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” was one of Ed’s favorite sayings. Grace Tully had told Ed that Wallace participated in séances where a Sioux Indian spirit guide gave him information that he shared with the president.

  “Can him,” Ed Flynn of the Bronx had said.

  The president had agreed to consider replacing Wallace, but wasn’t being clear about whom he preferred. Ed and Flynn of New York wanted Truman. He had been elected to the Senate with the help of the Kansas City boss, Tom Pendergast—which was held against him by some, but Ed thought Pendergast was a good judge of men. And after all, Margaret knew Truman and his family, and had introduced me to Truman in Paris at the end of the last war.

  The convention was to begin on Wednesday, July 19. On the Saturday before, Ed received a call from Grace Tully. He was to go down to Union Station that afternoon. The president was on his way to the Philippines via California and had arranged to have his private railcar stop on a siding so he could meet secretly with Ed and a few of the party leaders.

  “Roosevelt gave me a letter that I’m supposed to release at the convention that names Harry Truman and William Douglas as acceptable running mates,” Ed said when he came back from the meeting. “Both of them?” I asked Ed. We were in his apartment. Very hot in Chicago, Margaret was with the children in Eagle River, but would come back to see Ed, as mayor, open the convention.

  “Our president always leaves himself room to maneuver. In fact, Roosevelt wants me to call Jimmy Byrnes in Washington and tell him to come to Chicago,” Ed said. “He is encouraging him to go for the VP spot, too.” I knew about Byrnes. He’d been an Irish Catholic until he’d converted to his rich wife’s Episcopal religion to run for governor of South Carolina. Now he was a congressman. He’d voted against the anti-lynching bill.

  “William Dawson will have a fit,” I said.

  “I know,” Ed said. “It should be Harry Truman, but he’s giving interviews to Missouri reporters telling them he absolutely will not be a candidate for vice president. It seems he’s terrified at the thought of stepping into Roosevelt’s shoes. He is hiding out at the Stevens Hotel.”

  “Well, that’s refreshing,” I said. “I wonder if I should talk to him. I think he’d remember me.” But Ed was out the door, off to the Blackstone Hotel where the deals were being done.

  I thought of Miami. “Move closer.” How easily Garner would have been president and now … Please God, not Byrnes.

  Truman was a good man. A point for him that he doesn’t want the job! Why shouldn’t I talk to him?

  * * *

  “If you’re looking for Ed, he’s across the street at the Blackstone. That’s where the action is but my idiot editor sent me here.” Manny Mandel had seated himself in a big armchair just inside the lobby of the Stevens Hotel. I’d walked the two miles along Michigan Avenue from my apartment to this cluster of hotels, glad for the breezes that stirred the humid air. Always cooler by the lake.

  “Where’s your popgun, Nora?” Manny said. “Or doesn’t the mayor want proof of his shenanigans?”

  “Are you afraid of a little competition, Manny?”

  “From you?” He laughed. “You had some good instincts but you were never able to go for the jugular. I guess that’s because you’re a woman, Nora. That’s your problem. No dame really has the stomach to—”

  “Put a sock in it, Manny,” I said.

  I started toward the desk. Manny followed, camera in hand. What was I to do? Ask the clerk to put me through to Harry Truman’s room with Manny listening to every word. He’d take my picture. Label it “Kelly emissary in secret meeting with Truman.” I turned around.

  “So long, Manny,” I said. “Happy hunting.”

  I stepped into the revolving door and pushed the panel. As I came around to the street a man was waiting to step into my place. “It’s you,” I said. “Did I conjure you up?”

  “Excuse me?” Harry Truman took off his hat. I knew he
wanted to go into the revolving door but I didn’t move.

  “Good evening,” I said. “I’m Nora Kelly.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Margaret Noll’s friend. Paris. You and your unit came to my apartment. We had lunch at Maxim’s.”

  “Oh. A long time ago but nice to see you,” he said, trying to edge by me.

  “Please,” I said. “Could I speak to you for a minute?” I stepped closer to him, away from the door. “I’m Ed Kelly’s cousin and Margaret is his wife. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose, but…” He was trying to get inside.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” I said, desperate.

  “I just finished my second constitutional. Good night.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes. I bet you haven’t seen Buckingham Fountain yet. And it’s not far away.”

  “Well…,” Truman said. He was a polite little guy. What could he do when I took his elbow and directed him across Michigan Avenue but walk along with me?

  “One of the largest fountains in the world,” I said, as we climbed the steps and stood on the plaza. “And it was Ed convinced Kate Buckingham to donate the money to build it and then pushed through a hundred different obstacles to make it a reality. He gets things done, Mr. Truman. He’s a good man to have on your side.”

  “We’ve got fountains in Kansas City,” Truman said.

  “But do yours have eight hundred lights that turn the water into a dozen different colors?” Right on cue a jet of crimson shot into the sky, and then turned yellow, blue, purple, green. “Ed worked with the engineers to position the lights,” I said. “Nothing like it in the world when it was opened in 1927.”

  “Impressive,” Truman said. “Now I’ll be heading back. My wife and daughter are arriving tomorrow morning and I’d like to get at least one night’s rest before they come.”