by Adam Cohen
When he got back to Chicago, Daley traveled to Springfield to stir up enthusiasm for the ticket among downstate Democrats, and to test the political waters outside the borders of Cook County. Daley learned that Kerner was running strongly downstate, but Kennedy seemed to be in trouble. One downstate Democrat was predicting that Nixon would carry Illinois by 200,000 votes. Daley attended four seminars with congressional and legislative candidates where he instructed them on the importance of good organizational work. As election day approached, the statewide races began to hit a fever pitch. The usually restrained Governor Stratton launched a broadside against Kerner and his supporters in Chicago. “We are up against the slimiest, dirtiest machine in the history of Illinois,” Stratton declared. “If my opponent is elected, Dick Daley will dictate his every action and every single piece of legislation.” Daley fired back: “The people on two occasions have demonstrated what they think of Daley as mayor. There were 70% voting in favor of my record at the 1959 city election.” 25
The state’s attorney race between Adamowski and Ward was also turning ugly. Adamowski continued to dredge up new scandals involving City Hall and the machine — and to pick fights with Daley. He had a grand jury investigating charges that city workers were accepting “gratuities” for helping a trucking company cheat the city and county by short-weighting loads of construction supplies. Daley said the allegations were politically motivated and demanded “in the interest of fair play, in the interest of good government, and in the interest of the good name of Chicago” that Adamowski turn over the names of the city employees to him. Adamowski refused, saying that it was just another attempt by Daley to derail an investigation of machine wrongdoing. When Adamowski was not fighting with Daley, he was taking swings at his actual opponent. One debate between Adamowski and Ward at the West Suburban Bar Association was “less a debate than a match under Marquis of Queensberry Rules,” according to one reporter who covered it. “The antagonists refused point-blank to shake hands before they came out swinging. And in the swinging they rid themselves of gloves in favor of the old-fashioned bare-knuckle assault.” Even when Adamowski was debating Ward, he continued to focus on the threat to Chicago posed by Daley and the machine. “In Cook County there is an organization that has its tentacles in every office and many businesses with the single exception of the state’s attorney’s office,” he warned. Daley, for his part, told a Ward fund-raiser at the Sherman Hotel that Adamowski was a “sadly inadequate person” who was trying to “soft-pedal and cover up his own failures.” 26
The Kennedy-Nixon race in Illinois was not as bare-knuckled, but it was still attracting considerable attention. With Eisenhower’s eight years as president drawing to a close, one era of America was ending and another was dawning. The choice between the young and suave Massachusetts senator and Eisenhower’s two-term vice president presented two very different directions for the nation. That Kennedy would be the first Roman Catholic to occupy the White House added to the controversy. In some parts of the country, including large swaths of downstate Illinois, fears that the pope would run the country under Kennedy was generating strong support for Nixon. In other regions, like Cook County, the prospect of a Catholic president was filling voters with excitement and pride. Presidential elections in Illinois generally broke down into a battle between Catholic-black-Jewish-immigrant-Democratic Chicago against Protestant-white-Republican downstate. But this year, Kennedy’s Catholicism made the traditional schism more pronounced than ever. Going into the election, straw polls indicated that the outcome was very much in doubt. On Chicago’s final registration day about 200,000 new voters added their names to the voting rolls. Combined with 40,000 additional registrations that had been collected in the weeks before, it was the largest number of new registrations in Chicago since 1944. Voter enthusiasm was, Daley declared, the highest it had been since that year, which marked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s last run for the presidency. Much of the enthusiasm was clearly being generated by the presidential race, but the machine’s highest priority was the Adamowski-Ward contest. Word from the Morrison Hotel was that nothing — not even electing Kennedy — was as important as taking back the state’s attorney’s office. “State’s Attorney Adamowski is right,” the Daily News declared. “City Hall is out to get him. Many Democratic precinct captains, under urging from the ward committeemen, are reported writing off Kennedy as far as many voters are concerned if they’ll only vote for Adamowski’s opponent.” 27
Sargent Shriver had resigned from his position as chairman of the Chicago Board of Education to run his brother-in-law’s Illinois campaign. But there was no question that Kennedy’s real Illinois campaign chairman was Daley. Daley had definite ideas about how to run a statewide race in Illinois. Kennedy’s national staff wanted him to make some early appearances in Chicago, but Daley had Kennedy start out by making an early swing through downstate, where he could try to steal away some Nixon votes. Next, Daley had Kennedy campaign in the Cook County suburbs, also Republican territory, joined by gubernatorial candidate Kerner and Senator Douglas, who was running for reelection. Daley wanted Kennedy to make an appearance in Chicago, but not yet. His plan was to unleash Kennedy on the city in the waning hours, in the tradition of Harry Truman, whose appearance at a rally in Chicago late in the 1948 campaign was credited with helping him capture Illinois and the White House. In the meantime, Daley continued to fire up the machine for the battle of its life. On October 28, he gathered in the faithful for a massive Chicago-style luncheon-for-thousands at the Sherman Hotel. Tables stretched out of the ornate ballroom and into the mezzanine to accommodate a crowd that was said to be the largest in the history of the hotel. Hundreds of others who had been unable to purchase tickets forced their way in, either to bask in the glory of the Cook County Democratic Organization at the height of its powers or simply to make sure that their ward committeeman noted their attendance. 28
As election day drew near, rumors began to spread through the city that Daley and the machine were preparing to steal the election. The Chicago Daily News investigated the city’s election operations and found that the stage was set for election fraud. Of the 180 jobs at the Board of Election Commissioners, the paper found, all but four were held by Democrats. Most of these workers, who were responsible for ensuring the integrity of the election process, had been hired on the recommendation of machine politicians, and the paper detailed which sponsors were responsible for particular employees. The Daily News also printed a series of articles calling attention to thousands of ineligible names on the Chicago voter rolls, an issue that would take on greater significance after the voting was done. Also before election day, Republicans and nonpartisan civic groups began to question the integrity of the process. Adamowski charged that city workers aligned with the machine were threatening homeowners who put his campaign posters up in their windows. City workers were also tearing his posters down from telephone poles, he charged. Adamowski conceded that there was a city ordinance prohibiting the placing of campaign posters on telephone poles. “But what amazes me,” Adamowski said, “is that the city workers with their rakes and shovels tore down only the Republican posters.” 29
On October 27, David Brill, chairman of an organization calling itself the Committee for Honest Elections, asked Daley to meet with him to discuss preventing fraud in the upcoming election. Daley insisted that there was no reason to worry, and charged Brill’s organization with acting irresponsibly in making the charges. But Brill said that canvassers from the Committee for Honest Elections had already turned up evidence of potential fraud, and he challenged Daley’s description of his organization’s efforts. “If calling the election commissioners’ attention to registration from vacant lots, barber shops, and vacated buildings is an ‘irresponsibility’ then that word has lost its usual meaning,” he said. Brill got his meeting with Daley the next day. “I’m not here to create acrimony,” Brill assured Daley. All he wanted was City Hall’s help in purging unqualified voters from the ro
lls. Daley reacted angrily, as he often did when his interests were threatened, and accused Brill of being politically motivated. “Everyone knows you’re a Republican,” Daley said. “Why don’t you admit it.” Daley denied Brill’s request for credentials for inspectors from the Committee for Honest Elections to observe polling places on election day. 30
Kennedy finally made his long-awaited appearance in Chicago on Friday night, November 4, when he was the guest of honor at the machine’s torchlight parade. The parade was a remarkable Chicago event, a means of reaching hundreds of thousands of voters in an age when live campaigning had not yet been displaced by television. In addition to whipping up enthusiasm for Democratic candidates among the electorate, the parade fired up the party faithful to work hard in the final days leading up to the election. Every ward organization, elected official, and patronage worker was under intense pressure to generate a large turnout. The night before the parade, ward offices across the city were filled with party workers calling patronage workers and friends of the organization to remind them to show up. The notices sent out by machine leaders left no doubt that participation was mandatory, and attendance would be taken. “You must be present at 4654 Cottage Grove, Democratic Headquarters, at 4:30 P.M. Friday,” Alderman Claude Holman wrote to members of the 4th Ward Organization. “I personally will receive you aboard the bus.” The parade began at Michigan Avenue and West Madison, and proceeded west toward Chicago Stadium. It was a raucous event, filled with band music, floats, and glimmering torches, which gave the march an almost primeval feel. Leading the way were Daley and the charismatic young candidate for president. City officials were no doubt overstating when they estimated that more than 1,000,000 people watched or participated, but Kennedy and the machine together did produce a massive turnout. At the Chicago Stadium rally, a capacity crowd of 28,000 watched a lineup of 110 entertainers, including Gene Kelly, Joey Bishop, Vic Damone, and Myrna Loy, and listened as Daley promised that Kennedy would win Chicago by half a million votes. 31
Election day, November 8, was cold and windy in Chicago. Daley and Sis voted, as they always did, at the firehouse at 35th and Lowe, half a block from their home. After stopping in at the 11th Ward offices, Daley went to City Hall to wait out the election returns. The uninviting weather did nothing to dampen voter turnout across the city. An extraordinary 89.3 percent of eligible voters in Chicago were reported to have cast ballots, compared to a national turnout of less than 65 percent. Throughout the day, news reports from Illinois and around the nation indicated that the presidential race was incredibly close. As the first returns began to come in, Chet Huntley declared on NBC, “It looks like we have a cliff-hanger.” As the night wore on, it appeared that the presidential race would turn on the results in four states where the lead had been seesawing all night: California, Michigan, Minnesota, and Illinois. But Daley hastened to assure Kennedy that when all the votes were tabulated he would emerge victorious in Illinois. According to Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960, Daley called Robert Kennedy at around 1:00 A.M. to tell him that Illinois would go Democratic because “Daley knew which of his precincts were out and which of theirs were out.” Daley later called Kennedy friend and campaign staffer Kenneth O’Donnell and told him to reassure the senator that even though his lead appeared to be dwindling as the downstate vote came in, he would nevertheless carry Illinois. “We’re trying to hold back our returns,” O’Donnell quotes Daley as telling him. “Every time we announce two hundred more votes for Kennedy in Chicago, they come up out of nowhere downstate with another three hundred votes for Nixon.” 32
When the election-night canvass was complete, Kennedy had carried Illinois and won the race. Kennedy had won the popular vote nationally by a razor-thin 49.7 percent to 49.6 percent margin, but nowhere was the vote closer than in Illinois. He had won the state by a mere 8,858 votes out of 4,657,394 cast, powered by a remarkable 456,312-vote edge in Chicago. Kennedy’s Chicago vote total resulted from unprecedented margins in some of the key machine wards. The Automatic Eleven gave Kennedy a 168,611-vote edge, 35 percent more than Daley had squeezed out of them in his own election in 1955. Dawson’s five wards produced an 81,554 margin for Kennedy, 49,363 votes more than Daley had won there in 1955, an election in which Dawson had worked hard to pull out every last voter he could. The vote totals in individual wards were also striking — Kennedy took Daley’s 11th Ward and Vito Marzullo’s 25th by 14,000 votes each. In Illinois and Cook County, it was a clean sweep for the machine: Otto Kerner unseated Stratton from the governorship by a wide margin, Senator Paul Douglas was easily reelected, and most satisfying of all, Ward ousted Adamowski from the state’s attorney’s office by 25,000 votes. Daley’s triumph was complete, and for the first time since he took over the machine his influence would extend to the White House. Within days of the election, he was in the flattering position of having to deny a flurry of rumors that he would be leaving Chicago for a position with the Kennedy administration. 33
The only discordant note for Daley was the fact that Kennedy’s paper-thin win in Illinois was quickly becoming, as Mike Royko put it, “a subject of debate, as well as lawsuits and fist fights.” Republicans and good-government groups had, of course, been saying for months that the machine was gearing up to steal the election. On election night, as the Illinois returns came in, the Republicans believed their fears were being borne out. It appeared that the machine was engaging in an old tactic: waiting to report the tallies from their reliable precincts until they could tell how many votes they needed to win. “The Democrats are holding back about two hundred Cook County precincts, waiting to see what the count is downstate,” Nixon campaign chairman Leonard Hall said at 2:30 A.M., according to Nixon’s Six Crises. “We are trying to get them to throw them in but they refuse to do so. Unless they do, they will be able to count us out, no matter what happens downstate.” Nixon saw a Daley-Kennedy conspiracy at work, but Adamowski was just as convinced that he was the true target of Daley’s vote manipulations. On election night, Adamowski said later, he could see from the odd fits and starts of the vote reports that the machine was stealing the state’s attorney race. When the first returns came in, he said, he turned to his wife and said, “‘I will win on the basis of these returns.’” But for the next few hours, Adamowski says, returns came in for every office except state’s attorney. At 11:00, the returns started to come in again for his race, and this time they were weighted heavily against him. “[W]ithin a matter of five or ten minutes I leaned over to my wife,” Adamowski related later. “I said, ‘Well, you might as well get prepared. I’m going to lose by between 25,000 and 40,000.’” 34
Machine sympathizers have generally responded in two ways to charges that Daley intentionally held back election results in 1960 either to elect Kennedy or to defeat Adamowski. Some, like Daley biographer Len O’Connor, have argued that no votes were withheld on election night. In fact, O’Connor argues, Daley actually rushed votes out in order to intimidate downstate politicians and let them know that the Democrats were running so strongly it would be pointless for them to try to manipulate the results. The problem with O’Connor’s argument is that it conflicts with how most observers recall votes coming in on election night, and with O’Donnell’s account of what Daley told him on election night. The other explanation commonly offered is that Daley did hold back votes, but that he did it not to steal the election, but to prevent Republicans from stealing it downstate. In Eugene Kennedy’s account, Daley was simply waiting for a few untrustworthy downstate counties to report their results. “He reported the withheld votes because now it was too late for additional returns to come in from downstate,” Kennedy writes approvingly. “He had outwaited them.” 35
The question of whether Daley had stuffed ballot boxes for Kennedy was of more than merely academic interest. The results in the Electoral College were not as close as they had been in the popular vote, but Nixon would have won if he had carried two states where the election results were susp
ect and the margins of victory were narrow: Illinois and Texas. The Democrats had carried Texas, the home of Kennedy’s politically resourceful vice presidential running mate, but by a mere 46,000 votes. The question for the Republicans was whether to undertake the difficult, and incendiary, task of trying to overturn the results of a presidential race by alleging fraud. Working against them was the fact that the Texas Republican state chairman was saying that even if Lyndon Johnson’s political cronies had somehow stolen the state for the Democrats in his home region of East Texas, it was pointless to try to challenge it now. Texas Republicans knew, as the New York Times put it, that “they can’t out-count Lyndon Johnson.” After giving serious thought to throwing his weight behind a formal challenge to the presidential results, Nixon decided against it. “The Vice-President ran the race and accepts the decision of the voters,” his press secretary Herbert G. Klein announced on November 11. “The decision made on Tuesday stands.” 36
The Republican National Committee did not give up as easily. It announced that it was sending representatives into eight states, including Illinois and Texas, to investigate the election returns. A series of newspaper articles by Earl Mazo, a journalist and Nixon biographer, made the case that there had been widespread fraud around the country, but particularly in Texas and Chicago. The Mazo articles, which were picked up in the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, gave new weight to the Republican charges. Senator Thurston Morton of Kentucky, chairman of the RNC, paid a visit to Chicago in December and announced that he was forming the National Recount and Fair Elections Committee. Leading Republicans were also beginning to speak out. Barry Goldwater declared that Chicago had “the rottenest election machinery in the United States.” In Illinois, Republicans were also complaining about how the election had turned out. Adamowski, the loudest of the in-state critics, charged that Daley had stolen 100,000 Democratic votes in ten machine-dominated Chicago wards and had become “the most powerful political boss in America through a rigged election contest.” 37