Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  As interesting as those courses were, what really fascinated me was the community that surrounded the campus, starting with the Hyde Park home of the university. Nestled in the heart of the South Side, the U of C was an island, largely cut off from the low-income areas around it through the creative use of “urban renewal” and the visible presence of a robust security force. Mike Nichols, who attended the college in the 1950s before attaining fame as a comic and a film director, described the Hyde Park community of his day as “black and white together, shoulder to shoulder, against the lower classes.” Yet Hyde Park also had a rich history as the seat of liberal, anti-machine politics in Chicago. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Hyde Park sent to the City Council aldermen who stood up, often alone, for government reform and racial integration. Hyde Park was a world apart from that of the antiquated, rough-and-tumble machine politics that still ruled the city.

  Chicago was a parochial town, divided into fifty wards with strong, ethnic identities and politics that could best be described as tribal. There were the black wards of the South and West Sides; the heavily Jewish wards on the lakefront in the North Side; small but growing Hispanic enclaves (Mexican in the South, Puerto Rican in the North); and the white ethnic strongholds of the Northwest and Southwest Sides, mostly Irish, Italian, and Polish. At times these tribes had warred over political spoils. Richard J. Daley’s great genius was to forge them into a cohesive political whole. Seizing two powerful positions, as party chair and mayor, Daley used the vast patronage at his disposal to harmonize the disparate parts of the machine, and keep it humming. It was a system of interlocking mutual obligations.

  To maintain that system, the mayor relied on the Democratic committeemen, who reigned over their ward organizations like rough-hewn feudal lords.

  Each ward had its chieftain, and Daley would ply them with patronage in exchange for their political fealty to the party’s ticket and, by extension, his public programs. The committeemen, in turn, would build ward organizations made up of an army of patronage workers, who owed their public jobs to their more important work in their precincts on behalf of the local party and its candidates.

  The precinct captains would essentially become customer service representatives, using their clout and connections to deliver “favors” to residents: a new trash can or a curb repair; help with a job; or running interference with some government bureaucracy. In exchange, the captains expected loyalty from grateful voters for the party’s entire slate of candidates.

  Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, who went on to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was one of the most powerful men in Washington before he went to prison for chiseling a few extra bucks by cashing in government-issued stamps. He was also a local Democratic committeeman, and he would come home to Chicago from Washington every week to tend to his ward duties. When his precinct captains gathered, they often opened their meetings with a polka in his honor. “Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Rostenkowski,” the faithful would sing in praise of their leader, whose dad, Joe, had preceded him as the ward’s committeeman. “He’s our Ways, he’s our Means . . . that’s Danny Rostenkowski!”

  Of course, when public workers were evaluated on the basis of votes in their precincts rather than their performance (or even attendance) at their public jobs, it didn’t exactly guarantee quality government. It did, however, guarantee lopsided vote totals that, in some precincts, occasionally defied common sense and even the rules of arithmetic. Some voters found it galling that they were required to pledge their ballots in exchange for “favors,” or basic public services that they already paid for through their taxes. In any case, they had little recourse. Many accepted it as the way Chicago worked.

  At its zenith, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Daley’s power was enormous. He had wielded it to build and modernize Chicago, earning cover boy treatment in Time magazine as America’s leading mayor. And he amplified it by providing the critical votes for Jack Kennedy in 1960, delivering enough late-breaking ballots to tip the state and the election to his fellow Irish Catholic—a favor Kennedy would never forget.

  Even as his power and health waned, his organization began to fracture, and voters increasingly balked at the old arrangements, Daley remained the Man. When he suffered a stroke in 1974, and disappeared for months, reporters asked Ed Vrdolyak, one of the young turks on the City Council, how he and other committeemen would choose their slate of candidates for the upcoming election.

  “Well, Daley will tell us who we’re for and we’ll be for ’em, just like always,” he said.

  “But Ed,” one scribe responded. “We don’t even know if he can speak!”

  Vrdolyak was unfazed. “He can point, can’t he?”

  Still, by the time I arrived in Chicago in the fall of ’72, things were changing rapidly. Once-quiescent voters, many in the long-neglected African American community, were rumbling with discontent. Dan Walker, a corporate lawyer who had issued a blistering official report on police misconduct at the ’68 convention, stunned the political world by defeating Daley’s candidate for governor, Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon. A Republican would unseat the local Democratic prosecutor who had orchestrated a police raid that resulted in the deaths of two unarmed leaders of the Black Panthers, and a crusading young U.S. attorney named James R. Thompson, appointed by President Nixon, was rattling cages with corruption investigations that would eventually put several of Daley’s lieutenants in the federal penitentiary.

  Chicago’s four newspapers covered this raucous scene with side-of-the-mouth verve, led by Mike Royko of the Chicago Daily News. The Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist had just published his book Boss, a brilliant takedown of Daley and his machine. In DC, two young investigative reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, had begun to unravel the Watergate scandal. And in 1973, Timothy Crouse published The Boys on the Bus, which depicted life on the campaign trail for some of the great national political reporters.

  I was transfixed by both the Chicago political scene and the growing Watergate saga in Washington. Journalism seemed like a great way to sate my thirst for politics. Yet while I was a voracious reader of newspapers, I had no experience writing for them, and the University of Chicago’s predilection for the intellectual meant there weren’t many campus outlets that provided a grittier experience. So when my summer break came, I returned to New York, sat down with the Yellow Pages, and visited just about any newspaper or magazine I could find, asking for a chance.

  After dozens of rejections, I walked into the nearly empty offices of a down-on-its-luck weekly called the Villager, in Greenwich Village. The paper had enjoyed a great run, until a snappy, irreverent rival more suited to the times, the Village Voice, stole many of its readers and most of its advertising base. The Villager’s misfortune was my opportunity. Desperate for help, they offered me a fifty-dollar-a-week internship to augment their bare-bones operation.

  “You’re going to have to do a little of everything, because we’re a bit thin on staff,” said the paper’s wiry young editor, Reed Ide, as we sat in a barren office. “You’ll have to learn as you go.”

  He was as good as his word. During six months at the Villager—a stint I stretched into the fall by delaying my return to school—I got great, early grounding as a newspaperman. Crime, zoning, community festivals—I covered it all. And aware of my interest in politics, they threw me plenty of that as well. I covered a walking tour of the Village by my childhood hero John Lindsay, now an embittered, outgoing incumbent whose promising career had never reached the heights he imagined. I represented the paper at a small luncheon briefing with Abe Beame, who would succeed Lindsay. I was in heaven.

  The long summer also gave me a chance to spend more time with my dad, who, for the first time, hinted that he was struggling financially. One night, when we were out to dinner, he asked if the paper needed an advice columnist. “You know, it would be really h
elpful if I could pick up a few extra bucks,” he explained, with a trace of embarrassment. “You think they might have any interest?”

  My dad was paying my tuition, and I knew he was helping to support my grandmother and her sister. Yet it was only then that I began to understand that he was really stretched. Later, I learned that he also had taken on a part-time job administering psychological tests at a local settlement house, though he hadn’t done such work since his early days at the Veterans Administration.

  For all our years together, my father was always the one who provided a listening ear and loving support. Even throughout the stormy relationship with my mom, he never shared with us kids his pain, disappointments, or burdens. So this conversation was striking. I didn’t ask my bosses, who could barely pay me, if there was a slot for my dad. I simply told him, a few days later, that there was nothing available. He never spoke to me about his financial difficulties again.

  When I returned to Chicago, I walked into the offices of the Hyde Park Herald, another weekly community newspaper. Armed with a stack of clippings from my stint at the Villager, I was hoping that the Herald would be willing to take the same leap of faith. The general manager was a big, garrulous man named Murvin Bohannan. “Everyone calls me Bo,” he said, extending a big hand across his desk when I walked into his office. With a jaunty smile and an ever-present Tiparillo clenched between his teeth, he looked like an African American version of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Bo listened to my pitch, skimmed my portfolio, and looked me over for a long moment. “So you say you know something about politics?” he asked.

  I nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, sir. It’s what really interests me.”

  “Well, you showed up at the right time. I had a guy who wrote a column on local politics, but he just quit. You think you can do that?”

  I had no doubt, I told him. Just give me a shot.

  “Okay. Fifteen dollars a column, and we’ll see how you do,” he said. “You work out, maybe you can do some other stuff for us, too.”

  Looking back, I see that it was kind of crazy on both our parts—crazy of Bo for entrusting a political column to an unproven eighteen-year-old kid after maybe a half hour of conversation; and of me for unreservedly accepting the assignment. Still, I was too young to know what I didn’t know, and I plunged into political reporting with an enthusiasm I rarely demonstrated for my academic work.

  My first column, published on December 19, 1973, and entitled “The Mayor, Metcalfe and Police Brutality,” examined the growing gulf between Mayor Daley and his top African American lieutenant, Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, over the treatment of black residents by the Chicago Police Department.

  Metcalfe became a local hero after running alongside Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin and returned home to become a cog in the Democratic machine. But in 1972, he broke from Daley after one of Metcalfe’s constituents, a respected South Side dentist, was stopped and grievously mistreated by police officers for the apparent crime of being black, a not-infrequent occurrence in Chicago. Metcalfe was soon calling for an independent civilian agency with the power to investigate alleged incidents of misconduct. In the column, I analyzed a recent speech by the mayor condemning police brutality and subsequently calling for a civic committee to review the problem—a proposal that fell well short of the civilian agency with investigative power that Metcalfe’s panel had demanded.

  Their relationship deteriorated, and in 1975, Metcalfe refused to endorse the mayor for reelection. A year later, Daley tried to purge Metcalfe, but the defiant congressman defeated Daley’s candidate by an overwhelming margin, a harbinger of dramatic changes ahead in Chicago’s politics.

  The Daley-Metcalfe split ignited the black, independent political movement that would ultimately bring down the Democratic machine—though only after both Daley and Metcalfe had died. It would also lead to the election of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, and provide the base for the meteoric rise in Illinois politics of Barack Obama.

  Hyde Park was a great beat; its Fifth Ward was a hotbed of liberal activism and anti-machine dissent, rich with crackling politics and vivid characters.

  My favorites were the colorful lead actors in the ward’s ongoing political drama: Alderman Leon M. Despres, the irrepressible dean of the City Council’s small, vocal independent bloc; and Marshall Korshak, the wily Democratic ward committeeman and patronage dispenser who had the unenviable task of trying to tame this bastion of anti-Daleyism. Each of them was Jewish. Each was a lawyer. They were contemporaries in age, and lived blocks apart. Yet Despres and Korshak could not have been more different.

  Despres was an erudite labor and civil liberties lawyer with deep roots in the left-wing politics of the 1930s. For years he was a fearless, lone dissenting voice on the City Council, using his mastery of parliamentary rules to try to frustrate Daley’s maneuvers. With oratorical talents more suited for the U.S. Senate than the Chicago City Council, Despres would, on occasion, bewilder his less lettered colleagues with passages from Shakespeare. More often, he would infuriate them by shining an unforgiving light on corruption and racial discrimination in Chicago.

  “There is not one bit of evidence to support the charge that Alderman Marzullo and his transportation committee are taking pay-offs from the taxi industry . . . not one bit,” Despres said one day, his tongue firmly planted in cheek, as he railed against a proposed taxi fare hike. “But if each and every member of the transportation committee were on the payrolls of the Yellow and Checker Cab companies, they wouldn’t behave any differently than they do right now.”

  The target of Despres’s attack, a crusty, old ward boss named Vito Marzullo, shook his fist in rage, uttering expletives in two languages. A decade later, when Despres was shot in the leg while on his way home from a late night of work, Marzullo offered a tart observation that probably summed up the feeling of many council members: “They aimed too low.”

  Despres became a great resource as well as a mentor to me. By then, in his fifth term as alderman, he was an undisputed expert on the City Council and the labyrinthine workings of local government. He was always ready with a brilliant, biting quote. Yet I learned as much from Korshak, a wry, world-weary veteran of the Democratic machine, who migrated to Hyde Park from Chicago’s notorious Twenty-Fourth Ward.

  Once a Jewish ghetto on the city’s West Side, the Twenty-Fourth Ward had become a seat of political power in Chicago thanks to its ability to deliver overwhelming margins for the Democratic ticket. The ward’s longtime boss, Colonel Jacob Arvey, was the county Democratic chairman who, in 1948, pulled off an improbable trifecta by carrying Illinois for Harry Truman and two long-shot candidates, Adlai Stevenson II for governor and Paul Douglas for the U.S. Senate.

  The tradition of tight organization and gaudy vote totals continued even after the ward’s makeup turned from predominantly Jewish to black. The first African American alderman of the Twenty-Fourth Ward, Ben Lewis, won a special election in 1958, the handpicked designee of the ward’s real power: a Democratic boss named Erwin “Izzy” Horwitz. In 1963, Lewis was shot to death in his ward office. His bodyguard, George Collins, who said he had gone out for a smoke when Lewis was murdered, succeeded him as alderman and later rose to Congress.

  When Collins, in turn, perished in a plane crash in 1972, his grieving widow, Cardiss, visited Mayor Daley to propose herself as her husband’s replacement. As the legend goes, Daley gently explained to Mrs. Collins that he had another candidate in mind. “Mr. Mayor,” she purportedly replied, “did I mention that George kept a diary?” Whatever occurred in that meeting, Mrs. Collins emerged as the mayor’s choice. Cardiss Collins went on to serve two decades in Congress. The Ben Lewis murder was never solved.

  But if the Twenty-Fourth Ward was infamous for its politics, it had an even seamier history as home to the Jewish wing of organized crime in Chicago, which developed deep ties to labor rack
eteers and Las Vegas gambling interests. And Korshak maintained a foot in both traditions.

  He had spent his life in service to the Democratic organization, and was rewarded with a series of public positions, from state legislator to the coveted patronage post of city treasurer. Under the friendly rules of Chicago politics, Korshak also developed a lucrative law practice, greatly enhanced by the clout he wielded.

  But Marshall was not the most powerful Korshak. His brother Sidney rose through that other Twenty-Fourth Ward career path and became organized crime’s lawyer in Vegas and Hollywood. Sidney oversaw the legal work for several mob-owned casinos, and through his ties to the Teamsters union, he had the power to bring film productions to a screeching halt until the “right people” got their cut. As such, he was a man the entertainment industry didn’t cross.

  Like Despres, Marshall Korshak became an invaluable resource to me, a tutor on the ins and outs of Chicago politics.

  In 1974, when a local man drowned in the unsupervised swimming pool of a Hyde Park motel with reputedly shady management, I was assigned by the Herald to look into it. After a bit of investigation, I found that the motel had neither the required license nor a lifeguard to operate a public pool. I asked Korshak, as both the Democratic ward leader and city revenue director, for comment. “This is an outrage,” he said. “We’re going to throw the book at them!” But when the case was called a few weeks later, the promised reckoning never came. A city attorney stood up in court and sheepishly reported that the revenue department had simply “misfiled” the motel’s license.

  I called Korshak back. “How could this happen?” I asked. “Weeks later, this license suddenly ‘turns up’? You had an open-and-shut case!”

  “David, let me answer off the record,” Korshak wearily responded. “If you’re going to work in this town, there’s one thing you need to know: in the city of Chicago, there’s no such thing as an ‘open-and-shut case.’”