Eliot Ness (32 page)

Ness Is Necessary

E
liot tried to make the best of a bad situation.

He hired a band to sit in an open car and bang out jaunty tunes as the car rolled slowly down the street. Behind the band came a shiny new automobile with Eliot’s picture stuck on every available surface. A local radio personality, George Kilbride, rode in a truck with a large megaphone strapped to the top. He called himself the “Voice of Tomorrow.” Next came another open car, this one with Eliot and Betty in the backseat.

Tony LaBranche, a former boxer and a longtime handball and tennis buddy of Eliot’s, was the operation’s ringleader. Ten years earlier, a drunk LaBranche had invoked Eliot’s name at a police station to avoid spending the night in jail after a car accident, sparking the first bad press of Eliot’s Cleveland tenure. He now had a way to make up for it. He chose the neighborhood and cleared traffic each time they conducted their small parade. He seeded the route with supporters to assure waving and cheering when Eliot and Betty rolled by. Behind Eliot and Betty’s car came the “beauty squad”—three attractive young women with big smiles and even bigger brassieres, assuring still more waving and cheering.

“This is the Eliot Ness caravan,” the Voice of Tomorrow boomed from the megaphone. “In the car immediately behind the sound truck are Eliot Ness, candidate for mayor of Cleveland, and Mrs. Ness. They are going today to discuss Cleveland problems with Cleveland people.”

The Diebold Company chairman and new father had decided, against all sensible advice, to run for mayor against a popular incumbent. And he was doing it in his own way.
The Plain Dealer
’s Bud Silverman heralded the miniparades as an idea that had “revolutionized major political campaigning in Cleveland. This is the caravan about which thousands of citizens are talking with such enthusiasm that some professional campaigners here already sense the end of the venerable ward meeting as a forum of candidacy.”

It certainly was something different. Eliot was the featured attraction, of course, but Silverman pointed out that Kilbride almost always stole the
show, expertly riffing on the campaign’s themes and the sights and sounds of the neighborhood around him.

Is that group of persons waiting for a streetcar?

“Eliot Ness has a plan for a transportation system that works, not jerks,” comes the voice.

See those children playing tag around their mothers on the crowded sidewalk?

“Cleveland needs playgrounds. For action now, Ness is necessary.”

The caravan halts at an important intersection. The band busts loose again. Out of the cars spill the occupants. The beauty squad, armed with Ness literature and buttons, disappears into the side streets for door-to-door visitations.

The campaign’s managers worried about one of the beauty squad members—willowy, brown-eyed Winifred Higgins. The concern was well placed.
The thirty-two-year-old Higgins had been Eliot’s secretary at the Social Protection Division, where the two developed a close bond. After the war she divorced her husband and followed Eliot to Cleveland. On business trips, Eliot wrote to “Winnie Darling”—ostensibly the letter would be about his itinerary and hotel arrangements but somehow he would manage to work in praise for his secretary’s smile and “sex appeal.” He often closed out telegrams to her with an emphatic “Love and Kisses.”

Not that he gave anything away in public. Stepping out of the car, he always clasped Betty’s hand. They strolled down the sidewalk alongside LaBranche, who would guide potential voters into their orbit. “Meet the next mayor and his wife,” he’d say, time and again.

These outings offered nothing of substance, which worked out for the best. Eliot was unexpectedly having difficulty with his speeches. He tended to lose his way even with the text right in front of him. He would trail off in the middle of a sentence, distracted by a face in the crowd or a plane flying overhead. Red-faced and watery-eyed, he proved much better at playing the greeter. Campaign polling showed that older women were his best block of voters, and so LaBranche sought out ladies over forty. They always seemed thrilled to shake the former safety director’s hand.

At one caravan event in Ward 12, veteran councilman Herman H. Finkle rode with Eliot and Betty. Stopping at a central intersection, the three climbed out together in front of a small crowd.

“Do you know who that is?” precinct captain Bill Blackman asked a preteen boy standing at the curb.

The boy consulted the campaign literature Blackman had just handed him.

“Sure, that’s Mr. Ness,” he said.

“Kee-rect,” Blackman declared with his best carnival-barker drawl. “And do you know who that is?” he continued, now indicating Finkle, a key Ness supporter.

The boy again perused his handouts. He was flummoxed.

“That,” Blackman happily heaved, “is our distinguished city councilman, the Honorable Herman H. Finkle.”

“’Tis not,” the boy said.

“Why certainly it is.”

The boy, put on the spot, grimaced. “Have him take off his hat,” he said.

Finkle, smiling, did so, displaying his shiny bald dome. The boy again flipped through his campaign literature. Blackman, feeling the happy democratic moment slipping away, pointed to the picture of Finkle.

“Now I know it ain’t Mr. Finkle,” the kid triumphantly announced. “Mr. Finkle’s got hair.”

That brought a good laugh, for Finkle had used the same campaign photo for twenty years. With Blackman sending the boy off to hand out the literature, Eliot, Betty, and the councilman, hat firmly back in place, headed down the sidewalk, shaking hands and smiling. Here and there, they’d duck into a store to offer campaign handbills for the front counter and to cluck over the hardworking proprietors, the backbone of America. When they came to a store that sold liquor, Betty, careful of propriety, stayed outside.

***

It didn’t matter that Eliot hadn’t voted in seven years.
*
It didn’t matter that for most of his adult life he had been registered as an independent voter. He was the Republican Party’s choice for mayor of Cleveland. The same day the newspapers reported his candidacy—“Eliot Ness it is,” The
Plain Dealer
declared on July 30, 1947—he and Betty had gone down to the board of elections office to register to vote. It would be the first time Betty had ever done so. They listed their residence as Wade Park Manor, a hotel in
University Circle. The couple had been renting a house in the nearby town of Bratenahl.

The announcement that Eliot would run for mayor surprised most political observers. The
Plain Dealer
reported that the “heavy contributors to the Republican party, naturally, are practically delirious with enthusiasm that a person of ability, stature and appeal is about to challenge the formidable incumbent, Thomas A. Burke.” In actuality, the heavy contributors were glad to have
any
candidate to take on Burke, the former city law director who had succeeded Lausche in 1944. At least six prominent Republicans—including the notoriously corrupt former mayor, Harry L. Davis, and even Eliot’s former assistant, Robert Chamberlin—had turned aside inquiries from a committee tasked with finding a credible candidate. Cleveland, after all, was a Democratic city and Burke a popular Democratic mayor. More than that, the Republican organization in Cleveland had collapsed since Burton’s departure for the U.S. Senate. The state party now focused primarily on the city’s suburbs.

Eliot acknowledged to reporters that he had been drafted by Republican muckety-mucks, but he insisted: “Nobody has told me what to do, and, of course, nobody can.” Chamberlin and another longtime friend, reporter-turned-PR-man Ralph Kelly, Marion Kelly’s husband, would run the campaign, not party hacks.

No one was quite sure why Eliot had decided to make the race. He himself judged his chances as “slight.” Was he bored with the business world already? Probably. But some old friends worried it was worse than that. They wondered if he was pursuing a quixotic political campaign in an effort to jolt himself out of an alcoholic torpor, a desperate attempt to reclaim his old life, his old drive and ambition. That did sound like Eliot, always one to make bold, even fatalistic gestures. Eliot was self-aware, perhaps too much so for his own good. He surely sensed he was slipping. The evidence was right there on his campaign posters. His once perfectly cut and slicked hair was now slightly askew. His eyes, always tinged with sadness, now also had a heaviness, as if he were straining to stay awake. He looked at least a decade older than his forty-five years.

Something was definitely up. The desire to run for public office required a certain kind of egotism that Eliot simply did not possess. Everyone in Cleveland politics knew he could have become mayor back in 1941 without much effort. Heck, he could have sandbagged Burton and declared for the U.S. Senate the year before. He would have had a good shot at it. One night
late in 1940, he and Lausche, joking around, had flipped a coin to decide which of them would run for mayor. Eliot won the toss—and immediately insisted on best two of three. As comfortable as he was with reporters, and as much as he enjoyed speaking before admiring crowds, Eliot just didn’t like the idea of being one more huckster on the hustings. He believed there were other, better ways to do his civic duty.

Now, seven years later, Eliot realized he would need to run an active, “news-producing” campaign if he had any hope of beating a popular and personable incumbent who had won two-thirds of the vote two years before. His team came up with catchy, alliterative slogans—“Vote Yes for Eliot Ness,” “Ness Is Necessary”—and printed up a four-page tabloid, the
Ness News
. Eliot made pitches on the radio and stood in front of factory gates with an armful of campaign leaflets.

His chief theme, however, was negative. “This town used to have a forward spirit,” he said, coming out of the election board office with Betty after registering to vote. “It has gotten listless, apathetic and careless. Anyone wanting to have proof of this can look in any direction and see evidence of it: uncared for playgrounds; the air full of smoke; streets full of holes; a noisy, inadequate, poorly maintained transportation system. . . . What we are seeing is the natural result of five years in office on the part of any administration. Accomplishments are difficult to achieve in public service. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of desire, and it has to be accompanied, in order to add up to success, by a thrill of doing and a thrill of accomplishment.”

This was the best he could come up with. That the current administration lacked adequate get-up-and-go. That there was smog in one of the country’s foremost industrial cities. His opponents would hit much harder than that. Local CIO leader A. E. Stevenson told union members that as safety director Eliot “ordered police on horses to charge defenseless men, women and children during a strike at the Fisher Body plant in 1939.” The charge was an outrageous lie, but that hardly mattered. The Democrats kept repeating it. Eliot wanted Clevelanders to remember him as the heroic public safety director who had cleaned up the police force, run the Mob out of town, made the roads safer, and given city hall a youthful dazzle. But that had been a long time ago—or at least it felt like a long time ago to most people. At one campaign stop, a man asked Eliot about the torso-killer investigation, still officially open even though it had been nearly a decade since a murder had been attributed to the Mad Butcher. It was the biggest
black mark on Eliot’s six-year directorship, and it annoyed him that he couldn’t tell all he knew about the case. Those murders had been “solved,” he snapped. He moved on without elaborating.

Eliot eventually started being specific about his plans for the city if elected, sticking mainly with issues right in his wheelhouse. It rankled him that the police department’s crime-prevention bureau, one of his proudest accomplishments, had languished since he left office, and he brought it up at every opportunity. In a fifteen-minute radio broadcast on WTAM, he promised that Cleveland women would be safer under a Ness administration because he would refocus police priorities. “Our purpose should not be to fill our jails with people who have committed crimes,” he said. “Our purpose should be to prevent crimes.” At rallies, he held up photographs of pothole-pitted streets and neighborhood squares awash in litter. “It is a difficult problem to keep a large city clean and to keep its streets repaired,” he said. “The present administration, which I have called the ‘ho-hum administration,’ has done a much poorer job than might be expected.”

This was deadly boring stuff. The
Plain Dealer
put it mildly (appropriately enough) when it called Eliot “no ball of fire as a candidate.” Eliot was even boring himself. He may have jumped into the race to rejuvenate himself, to reignite his fire, but it wasn’t happening. He soon began to lose interest in the campaign. After downtown campaign rallies, he’d sometimes slip away from his handlers and head over to city hall, where he’d pop his head into the office of Safety Director Alvin Sutton, a longtime acquaintance.

“What are you doing here?” Sutton asked him more than once. “You’re running for mayor and I’m working for Burke. He’s about fifty feet from here. Why don’t you come back after work, so we can have a drink or something?”

Eliot would offer his lazy, affable smile and encourage Sutton to duck out for that drink now rather than later. He’d even suggest inviting Burke along. For years afterward, Sutton would shake his head at the memory. “I think he was just innocent and unaware of the political realities,” he said.

The nonpartisan primary vote arrived on September 30 and, as expected, Burke breezed to victory, scoring 47 percent of the vote to Eliot’s 30 percent, with former councilman Eddie Pucel taking 23 percent.

Burke and Eliot moved on to the general election. Pucel’s strength in the primary surprised everyone, and Eliot’s only hope in November would be to take most of the insurgent Democrat’s votes. No one had to tell him there wasn’t much chance of that, seeing as Pucel’s support came mostly from
union members and hard-core lefties.
Plain Dealer
columnist Philip Porter summed up the first phase of the election: “The most notable thing about the primary campaign is that . . . it was a bore. The ‘outs’ can’t get much of a hearing unless they are at least interesting.” He would later add that Eliot was a “wretched public speaker.”