American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Daley decided at the last minute to surprise the reformers by showing up at Libertyville. He arrived in a limousine with Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, Cook County Circuit Court clerk Matt Danaher, and state auditor Michael Howlett. Wearing his usual formal attire of a dark suit and tie, Daley stood out from the 8,000 progressives dressed for a country picnic. He took the stage and delivered a speech aimed shrewdly at his anti-machine audience. Daley spoke of his hard work for Stevenson’s father, for Senator Paul Douglas, and for President Kennedy. And he called the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Adlai Stevenson III some of “the great leaders of our day.” Before he was finished, Daley almost sounded as if he himself was joining the anti-machine ranks. “[W]e need the participation of people who are dedicated to decency in the government,” he said. “And we cannot live in the past. I welcome the modernization of the Democratic Party.” Stevenson threw away a prepared speech and spoke graciously of Daley. 21

  During his own speech, Senator George McGovern stopped to announce the news that Senator Everett Dirksen had died. McGovern launched into an impromptu eulogy, and Jesse Jackson led a choir in a rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as everyone held hands. But it was Daley who attracted the attention of the seasoned politicians in the crowd. As de facto head of the Democratic Party, Daley would choose the Democrat who would run against the Republican-appointed interim senator who would fill Dirksen’s seat. The man Daley decided to nominate was the picnic host. It was a brilliant act of co-optation, removing the leader of the state’s fast-growing movement of independent Democrats. “On Daley’s part, his performance was a master-stroke,” wrote Chicago Tribune political editor George Tagge. “He assured himself of relative freedom from liberal harassment as he sets about his reelection plans for spring of ’71.” Like his father before him, the reform-minded Stevenson turned out to be entirely willing to enter into an alliance with Daley and the Chicago machine in order to get elected. “Stevenson said Daley was a feudal boss,” the joke went, “but he didn’t say he was a bad feudal boss.” 22

  The Chicago 8 trial began in U.S. District Court in Chicago in September 1969. If Daley and Foran were hoping the proceedings would settle the score with the anti-war demonstrators, they were about to be bitterly disappointed. The trial quickly devolved into an absurdist piece of political theater. Chief defense counsel William Kunstler, who shared the Yippies’ iconoclastic sensibility, moved for a mistrial because of the way in which the judge read the charges to the jury on the first day. “Your Honor sounded like Orson Welles reciting the Declaration of Independence,” Kunstler protested. At various points in the trial, the defendants placed a Vietcong flag over the defense table, read comic books, and showed up in court dressed in judicial robes. When prosecutor Richard Schultz mentioned Abbie Hoffman in his opening statement, Hoffman blew the jurors a kiss.

  To the defendants, the proceedings were a chance to put the system on trial. They were helped considerably by the presence of Judge Julius Hoffman, the crusty seventy-four-year-old Eisenhower appointee who was presiding. Hoffman did not even try to appear impartial in considering the arguments of Foran (whom he called “one of the finest prosecutors in the country”) and Kunstler (the defendants’ “mouthpiece,” Hoffman called him). When the American Civil Liberties Union tried to file a friend-of-the-court brief, a common occurrence in federal court, Hoffman snapped, “I’m not running a school for civil rights.” The trial reached its nadir when the irascible Hoffman ordered the outspoken Seale to sit in the courtroom gagged and handcuffed to a metal folding chair. The next day, demonstrators descended on the courthouse with “Free Bobby” signs. Seale was later unbound, but he continued to act out, at one point calling Hoffman “a pig and a fascist and a racist.” Hoffman eventually sentenced Seale to four years in jail for contempt of court, turning the Chicago 8 into the Chicago 7.

  Outside the courtroom, hundreds of members of the radical Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society had descended on Chicago to hold a “days of rage” protest in sympathy with the Chicago 8 defendants. Organized into what they called the New Red Army, Weathermen wearing motorcycle helmets and armed with clubs attacked automobiles, beating up passengers seemingly at random. They hurled rocks through the windows of stores, banks, and government buildings. (“The first rock of the revolution went through a window of the Chicago Historical Society,” the New York Times observed wryly.) The radicals focused much of their wrath on the Gold Coast along the lakefront, walking down elegant streets shouting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,” smashing the lobby windows of luxury apartment buildings, and in one case throwing a doorman into a hedge. Chicago police faced off against the Weathermen, wielding clubs and tear gas. The clashes were reminiscent of the convention week violence that was being recounted in federal court, but with a difference: few people believed that the police were overre-acting in their response to the New Red Army. Over several days, more than 150 demonstrators were arrested, and three were shot by police. Daley eventually asked Governor Richard Ogilvie to send in the National guard, and 2,600 guardsmen were deployed to keep the peace. 23

  In between the outbursts, the prosecutors tried to make their case against the defendants. Several Chicago police officers testified that they observed the defendants during convention week, including one who claimed to have seen Rubin flip a lit cigarette at a policeman, and another who reported hearing Abbie Hoffman tell a group of demonstrators, “Tomorrow we’re going to storm the Hilton.” But the defendants put on their own evidence that it was the Chicago police who had caused the violence. Rennie Davis testified that he was struck 30 or 40 times near the Grant Park band shell by police yelling “Kill Davis, Kill Davis.” After the beating, he said, “my tie was solid blood.” He needed thirteen stitches to close his scalp wounds. 24

  The most eagerly awaited moment of the trial came on January 6, 1970, a blustery below-freezing day, when Daley himself showed up to testify. Many spectators had waited in line all night, camping out in sleeping bags, for a chance to see the defense lawyers try to tear the mayor apart. “You could feel the excitement in the courtroom the way you sense and see bubbles before water boils,” a journalist on the scene observed. Daley looked to be in good spirits when he arrived with his entourage, eager to answer any questions the defense had for him. In his questioning, Kunstler tried to show that it was Daley who was the center of a conspiracy surrounding the convention week clashes. Wasn’t William McFetridge, the superintendent of the Park District who denied the permits, the same man who nominated him for mayor in 1954? Hoffman sustained the prosecution’s objection. Wasn’t Judge Lynch, who denied permits to the protesters, Daley’s former law partner? Another objection was sustained. And what, Kunstler asked, was Daley’s relationship to Foran, the U.S. attorney who had started out as land acquisition counsel for urban renewal projects in the Chicago Corporation Counsel’s office? “I think he’s one of the greatest attorneys in the United States,” Daley responded. Hoffman shielded Daley from most of the defense’s line of inquiry, sustaining all seventy of the prosecution’s objections. But Daley helped himself by remaining uncharacteristically cool throughout it all, even when Kunstler asked him, “Did you say to Senator Abraham Ribicoff, ‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch?’” In the end, Daley had little of substance to add to the case. The defense wanted badly to show that he and his “corrupt” political machine had conspired to crush the demonstrations, but Daley insisted under oath that he had never told anyone to deny permits to the protesters. “I gave Mr. Stahl the same instructions I gave any other department, certainly, to meet with them, to try to cooperate with them, and do everything they could to make sure that they would be given every courtesy and hospitality.” Daley also insisted that he had not spoken with Judge Lynch about the permit litigation pending before him. To many observers, Daley’s testimony was not credible, but by keeping his cool and sticking to his story, he came off well. At one point, Abbie Hoffman went up to Daley and, gesturing to invisible shotgun
s on his waist, said, “Why don’t we just settle it right here? To hell with this law stuff.” Daley simply laughed. 25

  When the trial finally ended, after four and one half months, the jury reached a compromise verdict. It found the defendants not guilty of conspiracy, but five of them — Dellinger, Hoffman, Rubin, Davis, and Hayden — guilty of crossing state lines with the intention of violating the statute. Each was given a five-year jail sentence and a $5,000 fine. Asked if he saw the verdict as a vindication of his actions during the Democratic National Convention, Daley responded tersely: “I look no place for vindication.” It was just as well, because in the end the trial gave him none. The Chicago 7’s convictions were all later reversed on appeal, in a decision that took Judge Hoffman to task for his “antagonistic” attitude toward the defense. After the trial was over, Hoffman cited the defendants for contempt during the trial and imposed hundreds of years of prison sentences on them for the alleged contempt. These rulings were also set aside on appeal, in another decision sharply critical of Hoffman. 26

  In the spring of 1969, trouble was quietly brewing between blacks and the police on the West Side. City Hall’s attitude toward the black neighborhoods changed after the April 1968 riots: Daley and his staff were now always wondering when the next blowup would come. Much of their concern centered on the Black Panthers, who had founded an Illinois branch two months after King’s assassination. At the center of the Chicago Black Panther movement was Fred Hampton. Hampton had become a local hero in 1967 when he led a protest in Maywood, a small suburb west of Chicago, against “whites only” swimming pools. Hampton had been president of the Youth Council of the Maywood NAACP until he joined Bobby Rush and several others in founding the local Black Panther group. Black leadership in Chicago, which had shifted from the accommodationist Dawson to the confrontational but peaceful Raby, entered a new phase with Hampton. He ran afoul of the law shortly after the founding of the Panther chapter for being part of a group of black youths who beat and robbed a Good Humor Ice Cream man, stealing his ice cream and distributing it in the ghetto “Robin Hood” style. Hampton, who claimed he was nowhere near the playground in question, told reporters: “I may be a pretty big mother, but I can’t eat no seven hundred and ten ice cream bars.” Though Hampton was convicted, he and his supporters claimed it was a political frame-up. 27

  The two black groups City Hall feared the most — the Black Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers street gang — were themselves bitter rivals. The Daley administration and the FBI watched their antagonism play out, hoping they would destroy each other in a power struggle. Their enmity reached its high water mark when a Panther was shot by a Ranger on the South Side. Afterward, Blackstone Rangers leader Jeff Fort met with Hampton, Rush, and other Panthers to talk about merging the two groups. The negotiations foundered, but an informal truce was arranged. As they had in other parts of the country, Chicago’s Black Panthers had begun to gain some credibility in the mainstream black community by establishing a health clinic and free breakfast program. As the free-meal program expanded throughout the city, feeding hundreds of poor children, mainly through churches, the Chicago police and the FBI grew more intent on quashing them.

  At 4:45 A.M. on the morning of December 4, 1969, the Chicago police led a pre-dawn raid on a first-floor apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street in the West Side ghetto, the home of Black Panther Fred Hampton. The raiding party, fourteen heavily armed officers under the direction of state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan’s office, had ostensibly come to serve a search warrant for a cache of illegal weapons. But they arrived in the early hours of morning, when all the lights in the apartment were off, and within moments gunfire broke out. After eight solid minutes of shooting, two of the nine people in the apartment were killed — Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark — and another four had gunshot wounds. Two policemen were also injured, neither seriously. According to the police, they arrived at the apartment, announced their intention to search the premises, and were met with gunshots. “There must have been six or seven of them shooting,” one policeman said. “Our men had no choice but to return the fire.” That afternoon, Hanrahan held a news conference at which he displayed eighteen shotguns, rifles, and pistols, and a thousand rounds of ammunition that he said were confiscated from the apartment during the raid. He commended the officers for their restraint and bravery under the circumstances. 28

  The Panthers immediately challenged Hanrahan’s account, and pronounced the raid a “planned murder.” The occupants of the apartment who survived the attack insisted that no shots had come from inside, and that the police had fired without provocation. The police blundered by failing to seal the apartment for the next thirteen days. This open access allowed Black Panther deputy defense minister Bobby Rush to conduct a tour for reporters in which he pointed to evidence that he said confirmed the Panthers’ version of events. “A look at the holes in the walls would show anyone that all the shots were made by persons who entered the apartment and then went from room to room firing in an attempt to kill everyone there,” he said. 29

  The Panthers were not alone in questioning the police account of the raid. While Hampton was eulogized before a crowd of more than five thousand, the Illinois Civil Liberties Union, the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, and three independent alderman demanded an investigation. And columnist Mike Royko openly mocked Hanrahan’s assertion that the police had “miraculously” avoided injury in the melee. “Indeed, it does appear that miracles occurred,” Royko wrote. “The Panthers’ bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction — namely, at themselves.” Hanrahan continued to insist that the police had done nothing wrong, and his office produced a twenty-eight-minute reenactment of his version of the raid — in the tradition of Daley’s What Trees Do They Plant? — that ran on local television. But it was Hanrahan’s misfortune that the Nixon administration was now in charge of the U.S. Justice Department, and it was eager to investigate big-city Democratic machines. On January 5, 1970, the Republican U.S. attorney impaneled a grand jury to consider the Black Panther deaths. Rather than allow the Republicans to conduct the only inquiry, Daley had Cook County Circuit Court judge Joseph Power, his onetime law partner, appoint Barnabas Sears, a former president of the Chicago Bar Association, as a special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation. 30

  The city’s 1970 Saint Patrick’s Day parade was held three days early, to avoid conflicting with the upcoming primary day. Daley stood on the reviewing stand as 500,000 people thronged to State Street on March 14. The machine’s candidates ran strongly in the congressional primary on March 17. In the most important race, Alderman Ralph Metcalfe, the machine’s nominee to replace the retiring Bill Dawson, defeated anti-machine candidate Alderman A. A. “Sammy” Rayner. In another important congressional race, on the racially mixed Southwest Side, white machine candidate Morgan Murphy Jr. defeated civil rights activist Gus Savage. But not all of the news for the machine was good. Voter registration figures showed that Chicago was continuing to lose voters: enrollment in the city was 1,552,434, down from 1,656,445 in 1968 and 1,701,088 in 1966. Most of that decline was occurring because of the flight of the machine’s base — white ethnic voters — to the suburbs. At the same time, enrollment in the Cook County suburbs had surpassed one million for the first time. 31

  The eighty-member Cook County Democratic Committee reelected Daley as county chairman on March 31. Daley’s machine supporters gave him a standing ovation for several minutes and made their usual efforts to outdo each other in praising the boss. Congressman Rostenkowski, chairman of the state’s Democratic congressional delegation, called Daley “the greatest political phenomenon in the country.” It was widely agreed that Daley would be running for reelection in 1971. In his remarks to the group, Daley let loose another classic Daleyism. Noting that the Democratic Party needed to have faith in itself, he reflected: “Today the real problem is the
future.” A few days later, the Chicago Civil Service Commission reported that while the city’s population was declining, the number of temporary or patronage employees in the city had risen to a record 15,680, up from only 3,478 when Daley was elected in 1955. 32

  On May 15, 1970, a federal grand jury issued a 249-page report that was highly critical of the Black Panther raid, of the subsequent police department investigations, and of Hanrahan. Although the police had claimed that six or seven Panthers had fired at them, the grand jury found that only one of the 82 to 99 bullets recovered at the scene could be traced to the Panthers’ weapons. The grand jury also found evidence of a law enforcement cover-up. The police firearms expert testified that he had initially lied about the results of ballistics tests to keep his job. And the coroner’s office had misre-ported Hampton’s wounds in a critical respect. It turned out that Hampton had actually been shot from above while lying in bed, circumstances that were inconsistent with the official account of a tense shoot-out with police. The city’s investigation of the incident was “so seriously deficient that it suggests purposeful malfeasance,” the grand jury reported. Daley pronounced himself “shocked” by the findings, and said the new report would be “given the most serious consideration.” 33

  Two weeks later, Daley declined to reappoint a member of the Chicago school board. Jack Witkowsky had done a “fine job,” Daley said, but he had decided to appoint a politically connected lawyer who had worked as an adviser to several elected officials because of his “better understanding of the legislature.” It seemed clear that Daley’s real motivation was to ensure that board president Frank Whiston would be reelected, foiling an attempt to replace him with the more liberal Warren Bacon. In the end, Bacon withdrew and Daley ally Whiston had no opposition. But Daley’s dumping of Witkowsky was just another indication that he had been less than honest, during the Willis crisis, when he repeatedly claimed that he did not meddle in school politics. 34