Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  “Are you fucking nuts?” said one driver, pushing me off the running board of his truck, when I asked him for a reaction to the Fitzsimmons raise. “You trying to get me killed?” His was the standard response.

  Still, the only thing scarier to me than an angry Teamster was the prospect of returning to Agrella from my first solo assignment without a story. Finally, I found a few guys bitter (or crazy) enough to challenge their corrupt and menacing union boss on the record.

  Such were my days that summer, a steady and varied diet of challenges, each meant as a test and almost all of them an education. I loved the paper, and like the eight other aspiring reporters who worked as Tribune interns that summer, I desperately wanted to stay. History said the Trib would keep only a few of us, and I was bound and determined to be among them.

  It was a diverse class, and everyone’s assumption was that the paper’s selections would reflect that diversity. So I found myself competing all summer with a bright, young Jewish guy named Paul Weingarten. We each quietly assumed that, between us, it would be one or the other, but not both. If Paul worked extra hours, I made sure I put in at least as many. Whenever there was a tough or odious assignment, and volunteers were requested, our hands shot up in unison. I read his excellent copy with a mixture of admiration and dread, and pushed myself that much harder. At summer’s end, we were shocked to learn that we had both been hired. “I just couldn’t choose between you guys,” Bernie explained.

  So began my formative years at the Tribune, which at the time still represented what was best about the journalism of that era. Though my colleagues were all different, most shared one quality: an unquenchable thirst for a good yarn. They viewed reporting as a calling. As products of one of America’s most competitive newspaper towns, they lived to get it first and to get it right.

  Our editors would be as enthusiastic about a good story as their reporters, often sending congratulatory notes and handing out small bonuses for scoops or simply a well-told story. They also were fearless, or so it seemed to me; always willing—maybe even delighting—in taking the high and mighty down a peg when they deserved it.

  There were plenty of role models, but none more so than Bernie, the city editor, whose guidance meant everything to a kid still reeling from the loss of his dad and looking to find his way. When I joined the staff, he sat me down and explained the facts of life to a young man in a hurry.

  “I know you love politics; that’s what impressed us,” he said. “And the truth is you probably already know more about the committeemen and aldermen and all that jazz than ninety-nine percent of the people in this newsroom. But there’s a lot more to reporting and a lot more to life. So starting next week, you’re on nights, six p.m. to two a.m.”

  Bernie was right. I would have loved simply to step into the political beat, but I was twenty-one years old, and a reporter at one of the biggest papers in the country. Who was I to gripe? And as it turned out, that nightside stint was exactly what he promised: another layer of my education. Murder, mayhem, and disasters, both man-made and the natural variety, became my beat, as that’s pretty much the bread and butter of the late-night shift.

  The night city editor was a former Green Beret named Frank Blatchford, who loved nothing more than a grisly crime or gruesome catastrophe because they would put him and his team to the test. The more horrific the disaster, the more blissful Frank would become. Around the Tribune, such calamities were known as Blatchford Brighteners. I had my share, each a learning experience about large notions such as evil, heroism, and the perils of life in the big city.

  I covered an elevated train that overshot the tracks and fell twenty feet to the downtown street below, scattering bodies in its wreckage. Stunned pedestrians ran from person to person, trying to identify the living to offer help.

  A massive fire broke out at a Commonwealth Edison facility, where wreckage pinned a fireman to the upper wall of a huge, burning plant. An elderly police surgeon climbed into a cherry picker, rose seventy feet, and amputated the fireman’s pinned leg, in a vain effort to free him and save his life.

  One night, early in my tenure, we heard a crackling bulletin on the newsroom police radio—“shots fired . . . officer down.” It was a drug raid gone wrong. I raced to a South Side police district and waited with other reporters until two detectives dragged a suspect in, bloodied and bruised.

  “What happened to him?” I shouted as the trio passed by.

  One of the detectives turned around to see who had asked such a naïve question, and shot me a scowl. “He had a fall,” he sneered, as they disappeared into the lockup. An older, streetwise reporter from City News grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me close. “The kind of fall you take when you kill a cop,” she whispered.

  • • •

  During my nearly three years on nights, I learned more about reporting, about Chicago, about people and life, than I ever could have imagined. Bernie’s admonition had been right.

  Yet Bernie also honored my long-term interest in politics by assigning me, in election season, to cover candidates—albeit almost always the sure losers. In that spirit, he gave me a reprieve from nights in early 1979 to cover the seemingly quixotic mayoral campaign of Jane Byrne. I didn’t know it then, but a campaign that seemed like a welcome respite would become another watershed in my career—and in Chicago political history.

  A slight, pugnacious Irishwoman from Chicago’s Northwest Side, Byrne was one of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s favorites. He appointed her as his consumer commissioner—a rare spot for a woman in Daley’s all-male domain. When the mayor died in 1976, Byrne continued in her city post. The man who replaced Daley as mayor, a charismatically challenged former alderman named Michael Bilandic, failed to share the Old Man’s appreciation for Byrne’s feisty Celtic charms. Their relationship eroded, and by 1977, Byrne was accusing Bilandic of having struck a corrupt bargain with the politically connected taxicab industry for another rate hike.

  Byrne declared her candidacy for mayor with a full-throated call for reform. “A cabal of evil men has fastened itself onto the government of the city of Chicago,” Byrne charged, inveighing against the “fast-buck artists” on the City Council—scheming lawyer-politicians who she claimed were running Bilandic and the city for their own gain. Suddenly, the woman who had been a stalwart defender of Daley and his organization had been transformed into the darling of the city’s anti-machine liberals.

  Her punchiest lines were provided by Jay McMullen, a longtime City Hall reporter for the Chicago Daily News, who first had covered Byrne, then married her. In between, the two had a racy affair that was the talk of the City Hall pressroom—with the loutish McMullen doing most of the talking.

  Byrne soon joined forces with my clever, rabble-rousing friend and mentor Don Rose, who signed on as the campaign manager and chief strategist. Together, they took dead aim at Bilandic and the machine.

  As the old saying goes, “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” Byrne, McMullen, and Rose ran a smart campaign, but fate—or at least the weather gods—dealt them one hell of an opportunity when Chicago was hit with an epic snowstorm.

  Day after day, for weeks before the primary election, the white stuff came down; and not just light dustings, but wet, heavy snow that clogged the streets and snarled traffic. Rose cut an ad with Byrne, speaking over images of an immobilized transit stop, vowing competent new government. As the public fumed, Bilandic, the hapless understudy thrust into the mayoralty after Daley’s death, was a portrait of indifference, futility, and denial. Bilandic’s tone-deafness was reflected in his emergency order to turn the city’s rapid transit lines into express service from downtown to the suburbs, bypassing stops in the city’s mostly black South and West Side neighborhoods.

  In the midst of the snows, state senator Richard M. Daley, son of the late mayor, dropped by City Hall to urge Bilandic to take action. On the way home to Bridgeport, the neigh
borhood where both Bilandic and Daley lived, Daley dusted off an icy window and pointed to a group of freezing commuters. “You see those people, Mike? They’re waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. And they hate you!”

  “They should walk, Richard,” Bilandic replied. “It’s good for them.” Daley slumped in his seat, and resigned himself to disaster for Bilandic and the Democratic machine.

  On primary night, the disaster came. Byrne stunned Bilandic, propelled by a two-to-one margin in some of the city’s black wards. At her Election Night headquarters, Don Rose scrambled around frantically, almost in disbelief, as the numbers came in. He had realized his impossible dream of wresting from the machine its most coveted prize, City Hall.

  In a stunning turn, Jane Byrne had been transformed from gadfly into a historic figure—the woman who toppled the mighty Chicago machine. But her good fortune would also transform my life. Byrne plucked one of the Tribune’s lead political writers for her mayoral staff, clearing the way for me to grab his spot on the political beat. Since I was the resident expert on this unexpected new mayor, Bernie decided my nightside apprenticeship was over. Instead of covering fires, plane crashes, and homicides, I was covering local, state, and national politics. I had just turned twenty-four. And within the next few years, I would add the titles of City Hall bureau chief and weekly political columnist to my growing portfolio.

  • • •

  The promotion came at a propitious time in my life. The previous fall, I had begun dating a raven-haired, blue-eyed beauty named Susan Landau, and it was becoming serious. We had met when I was still in college. Susan was raised in Hyde Park, the daughter of an eminent medical professor, and had come home after college to contemplate her next steps. In the interim, she had taken a job as a typesetter at the University of Chicago Press. A friend of mine who also worked there invited me to join a coed basketball game in which Susan was a regular. She was pleasant and bright, though painfully shy. She also was long, graceful, and athletic, and in every way out of my league. Besides, she had a steady boyfriend, who also was a member of the basketball group.

  So Susan and I remained basketball acquaintances. I graduated and got a job. She moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to explore a graduate program, and then returned to enroll for a master’s degree in the U of C’s highly regarded business school. Emboldened by a regular paycheck and the news that she and her boyfriend had broken up, I mustered all the courage I needed—and it was a lot—to ask Susan out.

  On our first date, we went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant called the Azteca, which had passable food but outstanding margaritas by the pitcher. We talked for hours, and she was lovely company. As we hopped in Susan’s car for the ride back to mine at the Tribune, I blurted out something I instantly regretted: “I just want you to know, I’m not looking to get married.” It was a supremely asinine remark, probably prompted by my dawning recognition, combined with fear, that I could fall head over heels in love with this woman.

  Susan fired back, “Who the hell is asking?” It was right out of Katharine Hepburn, and only piqued my sense that this was the gal for me.

  Happily, Susan didn’t give up on me on the spot, and we began seeing each other more and more frequently. She was fun and easygoing, thoughtful and caring—and very independent. While she was interested in my work, it was very clear that Susan was going to pursue her own dreams, not live through mine.

  We also shared profound setbacks in our lives. Susan had lost two brothers to illness. I had lost my dad. Few people our age had experienced that kind of grief, or felt comfortable talking about it. With Susan, I felt I could talk about anything. Shortly after the mayoral election that spring, Susan and I decided to move in together. By September, we were married.

  Yet as we took our vows, I already had plunged into the daily work of charting how Byrne was flagrantly and repeatedly breaking her promises to the voters who had swept her into office. I had wondered during the campaign whether Byrne was for real or simply masquerading as a reformer to win the election. Now I had the answer. In the blink of an eye, Byrne made the transition from populist to potentate, shedding all reform pretensions and running City Hall like a parody of the old machine.

  Her roguish husband in her ear, Byrne quickly cut deals with the “cabal of evil men” she had railed against just months earlier. Two cunning, young City Council operators who had been her frequent campaign targets, Ed Vrdolyak and Ed Burke, became her council floor leaders. She filled key positions with the favored appointees of the notorious First Ward, for generations the political arm of Italian organized crime in Chicago. She marginalized African Americans who served on key boards and commissions, inexplicably antagonizing the voting bloc that had propelled her into office. And in a Shakespearean twist, Byrne quickly moved to crush Richard M. Daley, namesake of her longtime patron, apparently fearful that Richard II might return to claim the throne.

  It was a head-spinning reversal.

  When Daley, seeking higher ground from which to defend his political franchise, announced that he would run for state’s attorney in 1980, Byrne recruited Alderman Burke, once a stalwart Daley ally, to run against him in a Democratic primary. And with carrots in one hand and a big stick in the other, she lined up most of the old machine ward committeemen to back her man.

  But Byrne’s machinations weren’t limited to local politics.

  In the fall of 1979, she staged the largest fund-raiser in Chicago history and invited the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, to be the evening’s speaker. More than ten thousand people, most of whom had opposed Byrne earlier in the year but now were hoping to hang on to their patronage jobs and contracts, crammed into McCormick Place, the sprawling convention center on the banks of Lake Michigan, where the president and the mayor exchanged lavish praise.

  Hailing Carter as the “savior of the nation’s big cities,” Byrne called for unity behind the president. If the convention were that night, she said, “I would vote in our party caucus without hesitancy to renominate our present leader for another four years.” Carter sat beaming a few feet away. Of course, the convention wasn’t that night, and two weeks later, Byrne endorsed Carter’s rival, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, for president. Renominating Carter, she said, would be a “disaster” for the Democratic Party.

  It might not have been the greatest betrayal in the history of American politics, but it certainly was one of the most public. Byrne had been a Young Democrat when Mayor Daley helped deliver Illinois and the presidency to John F. Kennedy. Now she apparently believed she could do the same for JFK’s surviving brother. Only it wasn’t 1960. Between the scars of Chappaquiddick—where, in 1969, a young woman drowned in Teddy’s car after he drove off a small bridge and fled—and the growing sense of alienation from liberal Democrats among Chicago’s ethnic Catholics, the youngest Kennedy brother was bound to face a tough road. And, as it turned out, Byrne’s imprimatur became more an albatross than a boon.

  By the time of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, a perennial showcase for candidates that falls just before the Illinois primary, Kennedy himself must have been questioning just how much of a blessing Byrne’s endorsement was as noisy hecklers—many of them aggrieved firefighters battling Byrne for a new contract—greeted them along the parade route. Meanwhile, Daley, who already had close ties to Carter, seized on the opportunity created by Byrne’s audacious gambit and tied his fortunes to the president and his delegate slates.

  On primary day, both Carter and Daley rolled to victory, handing Byrne a humiliating defeat, though one she characteristically refused to accept.

  That summer, when Kennedy made a last-ditch effort to change the rules at the Democratic National Convention and free Carter delegates to switch their votes, Byrne flew to New York City with Vrdolyak and other political muscle in tow. As the mayor set up a command post in a posh hotel suite, her henchmen invaded the floor of the convention at Madison Square Garden and headed f
or the Illinois delegation, dominated by Carter delegates. I was on the floor when they arrived, and watched in amazement as pandemonium ensued.

  In one section, John Donovan, Byrne’s sanitation commissioner, got into a scrap with state senator Jeremiah Joyce, a pugnacious former Chicago cop and ardent ally of Daley and Carter. Charlie Chew, a flamboyant, African American legislator and Carter supporter, sat on a nearby railing, urging Joyce on. “Hit him again,” Chew bellowed, from under a festive straw hat. “Hit him again!”

  In another section, Charles Swibel, Byrne’s controversial housing authority czar and bagman, grabbed the pint-size Cook County treasurer Ed Rosewell by the collar and told him that salacious, career-ending revelations would be leaked about him unless he switched sides. Rosewell broke into tears. Sensing an opportunity, Mike Holewinski, a Carter floor whip, summoned the few Chicago reporters on site to survey the wreckage.

  “Look what they’ve done to this fine, upstanding public official,” said Holewinski, placing a consoling arm around the red-eyed, sniffling treasurer. “They have no shame!”

  While the bedlam continued, I ran to the unguarded house phone by the Illinois stanchion, somehow reached the Tribune convention bureau, and began dictating. When the editors in the booth read what was going on, they ripped up the front page of the afternoon edition and made room for the story. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

  After Daley defeated Byrne’s candidate in the primary for state’s attorney, I asked her at every opportunity if she would be supporting Daley in the fall election. We both knew the answer, but then and for months after, she refused to give it. Two weeks before the election, Byrne summoned the City Hall press corps to her office for what we were told was a major announcement that had implications for the election.

  In sorrowful tones, Byrne announced that she had uncovered a plot, concocted by Daley and others and carried out through his allies in the city’s building department, to deny permits to developers that would provide minority housing in the predominantly white wards of Daley and his allies. She leveled a separate charge accusing an alderman, and Daley ally, of barring an African American developer from building homes in the alderman’s ward. The charges were explosive, recalling a long legacy of racism in these neighborhoods. It threatened to drive a wedge between Daley and the black votes he would need to win, which, I presumed, was her intention.