I pitched the story hard for page one, but when the next day’s paper appeared, it had been cut in half and buried in the Metro section. Given the implications of the letter, and the election, I was livid at the dismissive way the story was treated by the editors. Their stunning misjudgment was one I would remember as I began to evaluate my future at the paper.
On the Sunday before the election, I was at the office, working and watching the evening news out of the corner of my eye. I saw a clip of Byrne at one of Chicago’s notorious public housing developments. What made the scene unusual was that there were no security men in the picture. Her normally aggressive detail was nowhere to be seen, as an edgy crowd of black residents jostled the petite mayor.
“This is exactly the picture they want,” I said to my colleagues. “The valiant mayor wading into the unruly black mob. They staged this!”
I made a small reference to it in my account of the day. Two months after the election, a documentary called The Last Campaign of Lady Jane showed Byrne’s strategists watching the same news clip and high-fiving one another in response to the image of the mayor under siege.
Even so, it wasn’t enough. The woman who had made history just four years earlier was now swept out in its tide.
On primary day, Harold hit the heady numbers he needed: an unheard-of 69 percent turnout among African Americans, with Washington claiming 82 percent of that vote overall. Along with a tiny sliver of support among white liberals, Harold Washington became the Democratic nominee for mayor of Chicago.
Normally, in a town where fifty of the fifty aldermen were Democrats, that would have been tantamount to election. Yet such a conclusion would defy the history of a city where race and ethnicity trumped party. So, rather than embrace the results of the primary, many of the city’s Democratic committeemen gravitated to Harold’s Republican opponent.
Bernard Epton, a balding, bearded Jew, was a state legislator from Hyde Park who looked and sounded more like a Talmudic scholar than a politician. A liberal on social issues, he was a wholly unlikely standard-bearer for the anti-Washington forces. But he was white, and that was good enough for them.
Sensing an opportunity to seize one of the Democratic Party’s crown jewels, Chicago’s City Hall, state and national Republicans rushed in to take over the Epton campaign. Their less-than-subtle slogan, “Epton Now, Before It’s Too Late,” misread the depth of racial antagonism in Chicago. The folks they were counting on needed no prodding or reminders.
When former vice president Walter Mondale, gearing up for his own campaign for the presidency, campaigned with Harold at Saint Pascal, a Northwest Side church, an angry mob greeted them. The iconic image of contorted faces shouting racial epithets came to symbolize the dismal contest and Chicago’s enduring problem. But it also nudged enough liberal consciences to tip the balance.
With the nation watching, Washington captured a majority of Hispanic votes and just enough of the white vote to edge Epton, who was almost an apparition in his own campaign.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime campaign to cover, one that shone a bright light on the politics of race. And though the campaign ended, the struggle did not.
For decades under the elder Daley and his successors, the Chicago City Council was a docile charade, where aldermen, reliant on the patronage of the mayor, invariably fell in line. Yet almost as soon as Washington took the oath, a bloc of twenty-nine aldermen who opposed his election organized to thwart his agenda.
The situation was quickly dubbed the Council Wars. Its leaders were the two Eddies—Ed Vrdolyak, a cunning, smooth-talking tavern owner’s son from the old, immigrant wards bordering the dying steel mills on the Southeast Side; and Ed Burke, a flamboyant second-generation alderman and ward boss from the Back of the Yards neighborhood, who joined the council at the age of twenty-five, after his father’s sudden death.
Both lawyers, Vrdolyak and Burke had fastened themselves to the machine and became wealthy trading on their clout and the City Hall patronage that fueled their ward organizations. They began their careers as Daley loyalists, seamlessly transferred their allegiances to Bilandic, and then eventually cut a deal with Byrne, even though they were numbers one and two in her notorious “cabal of evil men.”
Vrdolyak and Burke knew there would be no such deal forthcoming from Harold, who seemed more serious than Byrne about scrapping the old patronage system. So they hijacked the council using the most potent organizing tool available, race, to stymie the new mayor and preserve as much of their power as they could. The council meetings took on the aura of theater as Harold regularly locked horns with the Eddies in a battle of wits and parliamentary procedure.
• • •
I broke loose from the story long enough to head to Iowa to handicap the upcoming Democratic presidential caucuses. I would come to love the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the only stops on the presidential calendar where candidates genuinely interact with voters. The people in the early states poke and prod and comparison-shop in a way that simply isn’t possible later in the process.
The conventional wisdom leading up to the 1984 campaign held that Mondale was the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination and the dubious honor of challenging Reagan. The Minnesotan would almost certainly win Iowa. The question was, who would finish second and earn the chance to stop Mondale down the line?
As I traveled the state, it became clear to me that Gary Hart, a young senator from Colorado, could be that guy, but he wasn’t yet on many radar screens. The manager of George McGovern’s ill-fated presidential campaign twelve years earlier, Hart was not a party insider or Washington schmoozer. He was running an insurgent campaign, offering a new vision for the Democratic Party.
The handsome, earnest Coloradan impressed Iowans—and me as well—with his message of reform, deftly positioning Mondale as the candidate of a Democratic vision badly in need of updating. The buzz on the ground was favorable. When I returned to the paper to write my piece, the editors were skeptical. On caucus night, however, Hart edged out all the other challengers to Mondale to place second, setting up a confrontation in independent-minded New Hampshire, where Hart had already laid siege.
Eight days later, Hart stung Mondale in the Granite State, scrambling a nomination fight that most had assumed a foregone conclusion. Covering Hart that night, I worked on a forward-looking piece about how he, as McGovern’s manager and a strong liberal, would try to win votes in more conservative southern states with primaries that were next on the election calendar. It turned out that he had a well-conceived plan, keyed to his expansive work on military reform and his willingness to challenge organized labor on trade issues.
I was proud of the story, but when I returned to the Trib after a few days on the road, I found that it had been gutted. My reporting was combined with that of the reporter covering Mondale and mashed into a wire service–style campaign piece. The reporting and analysis were lost. I stormed over to the National Desk.
“You know, the AP does a fine job of covering what happened that day,” I said to the editor on duty, my voice rising. “Why do you bother sending us?”
“Sorry,” he said. “We just didn’t have the space for two stories so we had to put them together.”
In that instant, my frustrations boiled over. Change was happening at the paper, foreshadowing disturbing trends in the industry. The atmosphere of bonhomie and shared mission I cherished had yielded to a kind of bloodless grind. What drew me and many of my colleagues to journalism was a healthy skepticism of authority. Now, in Squires’s more corporate, go-along-to-get-along newsroom, I had fallen out of place.
For months, Congressman Paul Simon, a progressive champion from downstate Illinois, had been urging me to leave the paper and join his campaign for the U.S. Senate. We had a good relationship, and he apparently felt my contacts and cachet as a political writer for the state’s largest paper would redound to his benefit.
&
nbsp; I deeply admired Simon and felt a kinship with him. At nineteen, he had dropped out of college and bought a little newspaper in Troy, Illinois. He used the paper to crusade against a local gambling syndicate. When he couldn’t recruit others to challenge local officials beholden to the mob, Simon ran for the state legislature himself and won the seat.
In Springfield during the 1950s and ’60s, he fought a courageous battle for civil rights, though the downstate district he represented was more like the rural South in its culture and politics than Chicago. Even as the amiable Simon maintained friendships with machine Democrats, he was a steadfast voice for reform in a legislature dominated by politicians who profited handsomely from the corrupt status quo.
With his big jug ears and horn-rim glasses, Paul was an authentic character—the Orville Redenbacher of Illinois politics. He was decent, honorable, and idealistic, and represented the kind of hopeful politics I believed in. If I jumped ship, I knew he would never embarrass me.
So when Simon and his wife, Jeanne, first came to my home to make the case to my wife and me, I was intrigued, if not yet convinced. Susan was deeply concerned about the implications for our family. Lauren was struggling with seizures and our son, Michael, had just been born.
“What is it like for the kids to have a father in politics?” Susan asked Jeanne, who had met her husband in Springfield when both were state legislators. “Well, it’s a mixed bag,” Jeanne said. “When our son was young he got to sit next to George McGovern and Fritz Mondale at a dinner. On the other hand, his dad wasn’t home very much.”
When the Simons left, Susan closed the door behind them and said, “That didn’t sound like a great deal to me!”
So I put Simon on hold. Besides, I wasn’t quite ready to give up on journalism. Despite my growing disenchantment, I had a coveted position at the Tribune at a relatively young age, and the prospect of bigger things to come. “Leaving would be a terrible mistake,” one of the higher-ups lectured me sternly when he heard I was contemplating a move. “You could be the editor of this newspaper someday!”
By the spring of 1984, I was reconsidering Simon’s offer. I loved reporting but not my bosses or the direction of the paper, and I increasingly felt as if I were doing my work by rote. More and more, I wondered if I could have a bigger impact by being in the arena than by simply writing about those who were. I recalled what an old political reporter who had made the jump from journalism to politics told me: “One day you’re going to get tired of chasing people down hallways to ask questions you already know the answers to.”
Perhaps that time had come.
Moreover, Simon’s circumstances had changed. Since his visit to my home at the start of his campaign, he had won a competitive Democratic primary. Now, as he prepared to face Republican incumbent Charles Percy, in what promised to be a marquee national race in the fall of ’84, Simon again asked me to join.
We had two small children, one of whom was seriously ill. Susan, who had quit her job to care for them, bore the brunt of the burden, while I far too often ditched my responsibilities as a husband and a father. Yet in an act of love—and more than a little weariness at hearing my constant complaints about the paper—Susan changed her mind.
Despite legitimate concerns about additional demands on my time and uncertainties about what would come after the campaign, she said that I should seriously consider making the move.
“You don’t want to go through life unhappy,” she told me. “If you think you’ll be happier doing this, you should go ahead and do it. We’ll make it work.”
So, at twenty-nine, I left the security of the Tribune for a new adventure.
I was back in campaigns.
FOUR
BOW-TIE BRAVADO
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, I made the transition from chronicler to campaigner.
After a decade of studious public neutrality, I was now in the ring as the communications director for Paul Simon, in a race that already was drawing the eyes of the nation. At first I felt a bit odd applauding at campaign events. I was accustomed to having my hands filled with a reporter’s notebook and pen. On the whole, though, I was surprised at how easy it had been to trade in those tools for a new career; how naturally I’d adjusted to my new role, and the colorful characters who would become my allies and friends.
On the first day I walked into Simon’s bustling headquarters, just across from City Hall, I encountered an intense young fund-raiser sitting in an open cubicle, working his quarry over the phone.
Curious, I stopped to watch the spectacle.
“Five hundred bucks? Five hundred bucks! You know what you’re telling me? You don’t give a shit about Israel,” the intense, wiry young man shouted at God knows which mover and shaker on the other end of the line. “I’d be embarrassed for you to take your five hundred bucks.”
The kid hung up and stared at the phone, which rang an instant later. “Yeah, that’s better,” he said, in a markedly calmer tone. “Thanks.”
Even at twenty-four, Rahm Emanuel had a gift for getting his point across, a quality I would see on display many times as we teamed up in the decades to come.
Rahm, who split his time between fund-raising and field duties, was part of an impressive kiddie corps of young political talent who found inspiration in Simon’s defiant liberalism. With his bow tie, horn-rim glasses, and ill-fitting suits—several bequeathed to him by a slightly shorter constituent—Simon was the antithesis of the blow-dried, finger-to-the-wind politicians who were increasingly in fashion. He was an authentic, unapologetic liberal in the Age of Reagan, and to the band of idealistic young men and women I was joining, that made Simon the coolest candidate around.
It also made him the perfect counterpoint to Charles Percy, a three-term incumbent whose rapid conversion from reliable moderate to Reagan cheerleader had given whiplash to voters across the political spectrum. Yet Percy, a senior member of the Senate and chair of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, hadn’t made that shift idly. After a rocky start following his election, Reagan was ascendant. Now the Gipper was a solid bet to carry his native Illinois in his race for a second term. Percy was determined to make peace with the conservatives he had battled in the past, and grab hold of Reagan’s long coattails. And if that meant shifting positions on some hot-button issues such as school prayer or professing unbridled enthusiasm for the “miracle” of Reaganomics, so be it.
One irony was that Percy, so willing to subjugate his views to politics on other issues, had held firm on one topic, and it would cost him dearly. As the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, he had strayed from the American-Jewish community by supporting arms sales to Saudi Arabia and proclaiming that Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization, officially pledged to Israel’s destruction, was a “relative moderate.” This led to a furious campaign among the pro-Israel activists to oust him. Half of Simon’s money would come from the community, which was critical to his chances. (We happily accepted those donations then. But, in retrospect, it foreshadowed an unhealthy trend toward the issue-driven funding that would increasingly cause public officials to look over their shoulders for fear of offending well-heeled interest groups.)
Simon had a base in conservative downstate Illinois. He had been a popular lieutenant governor in the late 1960s and early ’70s, before eventually winning a seat in Congress. Yet the Reagan tide meant that, to win, Simon would have to swim upstream.
In addition to Rahm Emanuel, Simon’s talented young team included many who would go on to hold public office, lead campaigns, or become noted policy experts. Among them was David Wilhelm, a wholesome twenty-seven-year-old field whiz from Ohio, who eight years later would manage Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and then become chair of the Democratic National Committee.
For the primary, the communications role I assumed had been played by a gifted young lawyer whose rustic-sounding name pegged him as a produ
ct of small-town Illinois. It took me only a few minutes of conversation to see that Forrest Claypool was a special talent. Then just twenty-six, Forrest would become my lieutenant in the campaign, my business partner afterward, and, later, a brilliant, reform-minded public official in Chicago.
I would need his help, because my role would soon grow.
When I arrived at the campaign, I found that Simon had hired a new manager. Tom Pazzi, a fast-talking itinerant campaign operative, had served earlier in the 1984 election cycle, in the brief, unsuccessful presidential quest of Senator Alan Cranston of California. It quickly became apparent that Cranston had done Simon no favors by recommending his old aide as a prospective manager.
A short, stocky fireplug, Pazzi loved to talk, and talk, and talk. And he insisted that those of us in senior campaign positions had nothing more urgent to do than be there to listen to him. One thing Pazzi didn’t talk much about was hiring and budget, both of which were growing well beyond the campaign’s capacity to sustain them. Pazzi’s mismanagement was compounded by a quirky personality, and after a staff insurrection, Simon decided to let him go.
Lacking any better options, Simon decided to install me as Pazzi’s replacement.
Green as I was to campaigns, I was well known to the Chicago press corps and political community and, from this new perch, could handle the local politics and shepherd the message. Wilhelm, who was a master organizer, would act as executive director, overseeing the field, budget, and general operations.
When the time came to tell Pazzi he was out, he had already flown to San Francisco, site of the 1984 convention. He had hatched an absurdly elaborate plan to shepherd Congressman Simon through the city during the four-day event, and when we arrived at our hotel, Pazzi was outside, barking into a walkie-talkie: “Pazzi to base, Pazzi to base.” If Simon had any misgivings about the sacking, they probably were allayed by the sight of his manager playing General Eisenhower on the streets of San Francisco.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 8