American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago
and the Nation
by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
“Cohen and Taylor put Daley in historical perspective.... If you want to understand the most beautiful and most corrupt city
of mid-twentieth-century America, and the power that urban machines once had, you could not do better than to read this gripping
book.”
— David L. Chappell,
Newsday
“Briskly written, authoritative, and thoroughly honest.”
— Steve Neal,
Chicago Sun-Times Book Week
“Readers likely will find that they have revisited a place from their and this nation’s past.
American Pharaoh
isn’t just about Daley and the city he grew up in and ran for more than twenty years. It is the gritty reality of how it
feels to be inside a melting pot. It is a modern history lesson that takes us from the Irish immigration in the mid-1800s
through the Civil Rights Era of the ’60s.”
— Robert T. Nelson,
Seattle Times
“This is a myth-shattering portrait of Mayor Daley the elder....
American Pharaoh
is an eye-opening work that enthralls the reader from page 1.”
— Studs Terkel, author of
Working
and
My American Century
“This fine biography speaks to our time as well as to memory.... Cohen and Taylor know Chicago, byways and all, and they tell
a good story. Their detailed account of personalities and events never lets us forget the grander drama of Daley’s public
life, its bright successes shadowed by elements of tragedy.”
— Wilson Carey McWilliams,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Cohen and Taylor’s book stands as the one indispensable source on Daley, the argument-starter and the argument-settler....
American Pharaoh
accomplishes the odd feat of leaving its readers with a more positive impression of Daley than they probably used to have
while also being, page by page, quite anti-Daley.... A fascinating and admirably complete biography.”
— Nicholas Lehmann,
New Republic
“Until now, the definitive chronicle of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s two-decade reign over Chicago has been Mike Royko’s
Boss,
published in 1970, when Daley was still very much in power. The intervening years have permitted the authors of this hefty
new biography a cooler perspective. Cohen and Taylor hit all the high points while also sketching a compelling social history
of mid-century Chicago.”
—
The New Yorker
“A fascinatingly detailed civic biography.... Through the prism of the public housing issue and throughout
American Pharaoh
, the authors do an excellent job of exposing the tragic racial history of postwar America. . . . Cohen and Taylor have written
history as it did unfold, clear-eyed and astringently.”
— David C. Ward,
Boston Book Review
“Superb.... Daley’s story is vividly told by Cohen and Taylor in what is not only the best full-scale investigation of the
Daley reign but one of the finest political biographies of recent years. . . . Highly recommended.”
— Karl Helicher,
Library Journal
“A masterly biography.... Indeed, the patronage and favoritism afforded by big-spending government at all levels (and the
waste and corruption it entails) drive the rhythm of this book: an insistent ostinato of greed and power.”
— John Lilly,
American Spectator
“Worth the attention of anyone interested in big-city politics.”
— Larry King,
USA Today
“Cohen and Taylor are fastidiously fair to the famous mayor and do not take sides. No edge and no attitude adorn this encyclopedic
saga of the fifty wards. Like their subject, the authors take Chicago very seriously. To anyone interested in America or its
cities, Chicago is fascinating. Art, commerce, political power, and race are part of the city’s story, especially race....
American Pharaoh
is fast-paced, comprehensive, and written well enough to evoke the sights and sounds of a great city in turbulent times.”
— Martin F. Nolan,
Washington Monthly
“Engrossing and massively detailed. . . .
American Pharaoh
is a vital and necessary work that students of American political history are likely to consult for decades to come.”
— Andrew O’Hehir,
Salon.com
AMERICAN PHARAOH
. Copyright © 2000 by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2427-9
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Little, Brown and Company.
First eBook Edition: May 2001
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
Beverly Cohen and Stuart Cohen
and
Barbara Taylor and James, William, and Caroline Kaplan
Daley’s Chicago
“This is Chicago, this is America.”
—Richard J. Daley, press conference, August 29, 1968
Contents
Extraordinary acclaim for American Pharaoh
Chapter 2: A House for All Peoples
Chapter 3: Chicago Ain’t Ready for Reform
Chapter 4: I Am the Mayor and Don’t You Forget It
Chapter 5: Public Aid Penitentiary
Chapter 6: Make No Little Plans
Chapter 7: Two for You, Three for Me
Chapter 8: Beware of the Press, Mayor
Chapter 9: We’re Going to Have a Movement in Chicago
Chapter 10: All of Us Are Trying to Eliminate Slums
Chapter 11: The Outcome Was Bitterly Disappointing
Chapter 13: Preserving Disorder
Chapter 14: We Wore Suits and Ties
Chapter 15: If a Man Can’t Put His Arms Around His Sons
A
s Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley prepared to talk to Walter Cronkite on August 29, 1968, a CBS News camera panned across the
empty floor of the Democratic National Convention. The news reports from the convention so far had been grim and bloody, filled
with footage of the Chicago police charging into crowds of unarmed anti-war demonstrators, swinging clubs and breaking heads.
The elderly, the young, and innocent bystanders of all kinds had been attacked by Daley’s army in blue — some were teargassed,
others had their skulls cracked, and still others were shoved through plate-glass windows. Daley, the wily machine boss who
ruled Chicago like a feudal preserve, was being portrayed in the national media as a homegrown American tyrant: just the night
before, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut had stood at the podium and decried, to a nationwide television audience,
the “Gestapo tactics” being used on the streets of Chicago.
But as the CBS camera scanned the International Amphitheatre, it found no sign of this tyrannical Daley. The protest signs
that filled the streets were absent from the hall: all the camera picked up were banners, lovingly hung from the rafters by
machine foot soldiers, praising Chicago’s embattled leader. “World’s Greatest Mayor! Richard J. Daley,” exclaimed one, signed
“14th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, Edward M. Burke, Committeeman.” Nor could the camera find any of the thousands
of demonstrators who were loudly denouncing Daley and the Chicago police for engaging in unprovoked violence. The only nondelegates
admitted to the galleries were precinct captains and patronage workers, who waved American flags and held placards reading
“We love Mayor Daley” and “Police Keep Up the Good Work.”
1
Against this carefully crafted backdrop, Daley arrived in the CBS anchor booth and took a seat beside Cronkite. Like most
of the media covering the convention, Cronkite had been outraged by the violence of the past week, and had been vocal in his
criticism of the Chicago police. In the next few minutes, before a television audience of millions, it seemed that Daley would
be gently torn apart by America’s most beloved newsman. As the TV camera rolled, the two men warily exchanged pleasantries.
Cronkite declared that CBS had received hundreds of telegrams and “a lot of phone calls” taking Daley’s side over the recent
violence. “I can tell you this, Mr. Daley, that you have a lot of supporters around the country as well as in Chicago,” Cronkite
said. Daley assured Cronkite that, through his nightly news broadcasts, he was a “constant visitor” in the Daley home. Then
Daley brought the casual conversation to an abrupt halt. Accustomed to being in control, the mayor produced a typewritten
statement and — defying the traditions of the on-air interview — began reading an uncompromising defense of the Chicago police
and of himself.
2
The anti-war demonstrators who had converged on Chicago were nothing less than terrorists, Daley said sternly. “They came
here equipped with caustics, with helmets, and with their own brigade of medics,” he read, his voice a mixture of midwestern
flatness and working-class rough edges. “They had maps locating the hotels and routes of buses for the guidance of terrorists
from out of town.” The truth was, it had been the demonstrators who had been violent and the police who had been the victims,
Daley insisted — the media were just too biased to report the clashes fairly. “How is it that you never showed on television,
Walter, the crowd marching down the street to confront the police?” Daley asked. “You show it after ... it happens. Is the
television industry interested in this violence? I’d like to have them show the fifty-one policemen who were injured, some
of them severely.” Cronkite offered up a hesitant defense of his news-gathering colleagues. “Maybe the police take care of
their own and get them out of the way when they’re wounded,” the newsman suggested. “They don’t take care of them,” Daley
snapped. “They’re lying on the street like everyone else.”
3
Daley was not finished putting his gloss on the week’s events. The leaders of the anti-war movement were Communists, Daley
insisted — David Dellinger, leader of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, had even visited Hanoi. Why, Daley
wanted to know, had none of this been reported in the media? “Can’t you get their record?” Daley asked, again impatient. “Anyone
can get their record.” Cronkite gently raised a point much on the minds of his colleagues: that among those injured by the
Chicago police had been thirty-two members of the press. But Daley had a quick retort. “Many of them are hippies themselves,”
he explained. “They’re a part of this movement. Some of them are revolutionaries and they want these things to happen. There
isn’t any secret about that.” Finally, Daley announced that he was going to share with Cronkite something “that I never said
to anyone.” He had received intelligence reports in recent weeks that “certain people” planned to assassinate the presidential
candidates and Daley himself. “I didn’t want what happened in Dallas or what happened in California to happen in Chicago,”
Daley said, invoking the shootings of John Kennedy in 1963, and Robert Kennedy only a few months before the convention. “So
I took the necessary precautions.”
4
Most of what Daley told Cronkite was simply untrue. The young men and women who had descended on Chicago were upset about
the Vietnam War and critical of the way the country was being run, but few of them were actually Communists. The vast majority
of reporters injured by the Chicago police were professional newsmen with no ties to the anti-war movement. And if there were
actual plots to assassinate the presidential candidates during convention week, they were never mentioned again, and no one
was ever arrested or prosecuted. As for a threat to assassinate Daley, he admitted himself in the course of the interview
that it was a common enough occurrence — “I’ve had that constantly,” he noted — and it certainly provided no justification
for raging attacks against unarmed civilians. Most egregious of all was Daley’s attempt to blame the hundreds of anti-war
demonstrators for being beaten up by the Chicago police. By week’s end, more than one hundred civilians would be hospitalized
and hundreds more treated by mobile medical units. A few months after the convention, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by President
Johnson would carefully sift through the evidence, examining video evidence and evaluating three thousand eyewitness accounts.
The panel would conclude that Daley’s officers had engaged in an unjustified “police riot.”
5