Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (8 page)

When my editors heard about all this, Byrne’s day became infinitely worse. They plastered the main story across page one, complete with analysis of the obvious political intent of Byrne’s showy charges. They turned her blustery threat against the
Trib
into a sidebar story, placing that on the front page as well. And my byline was prominently displayed.

The next day, I was digging into Byrne’s charge when a package of documents was dropped on my desk from an anonymous source. It turned out that one of the developers whose cause Byrne had championed was white, not black, as she had implied. Moreover, he had a long history of housing code violations and a youthful conviction for negligent homicide. My follow-up story, “‘Black Victim of Racism’ Is White,” led the Sunday paper.

Despite all Byrne’s machinations, and the opposition of the many Democratic committeemen who bowed to her will, Daley narrowly edged out his Republican opponent to become the county prosecutor. Through her desperate attempts to bury him, Byrne stirred a suburban backlash that lifted him, creating the future opponent she most feared.

 • • • 

The following year, 1981, brought big changes in my life.

On June 17, Susan and I welcomed our first child, Lauren, into the world. Everyone boasts that their baby is the cutest who ever lived. Lauren actually was. Small, at under six pounds, with blue, almond-shaped eyes, she was destined, I had no doubt, as I held her in my arms, to turn heads and break hearts. Yet when Lauren turned seven months old, it was our hearts that were broken.

Having just arrived at work, I was sitting at my desk in the newsroom when the phone rang. I could tell it was Susan, but I could barely make out what she was saying. Her voice was filled with a dread I had never heard before. “Something’s wrong with the baby,” she screamed. “I’m taking her to the hospital.”

I raced after them. When I got there, Susan explained that she had found Lauren blue and limp in her crib. She thought, at first, that the baby had died. Then, she said, Lauren’s arms snapped up, her eyes rolled back in her head, as she made strange, guttural sounds.

“She’s had a seizure,” the neurologist explained. “It was probably caused by a fever.”

Lauren had been sick with a cold that had kept her awake for several nights. Susan, who was working on her MBA degree and was facing exams, had consulted a pediatrician, who prescribed a cold medication for the baby. Then she had the seizures. “She’ll probably be fine in a couple of days,” the neurologist assured us.

She wouldn’t be all right. Not in a couple of days. Not ever. A month after we first arrived at the hospital, Lauren was released, still seizing as many as ten times a day. Susan stayed by her side every minute of that dreadful month, which was one of the coldest in Chicago history. Every day, I would walk the six blocks from our apartment across frozen, abandoned streets to be with them. It turns out, I thought, that hell is cold, not hot.

Susan and I had been married for less than two years when Lauren’s epilepsy erupted. We were in our midtwenties, still trying to figure out how to be a couple. Now we had a chronically ill child who would require constant care, and for whom every seizure could have mortal consequences. It would test our relationship and launch Susan on a lifelong crusade for epilepsy research.

There were struggles at work as well. The economic pressures that later would visit newsrooms everywhere began to reshape the
Tribune
, even before the arrival of the Internet.

Dissatisfied with their diminishing margins, the
Tribune
board brought in new management to wring greater profits out of its newspapers. The muscular, irreverent tradition of Chicago journalism, where there was nothing more valued than “a good yarn,” was becoming secondary to the bottom line.

Costly crusades against abuses by powerful public and private interests felt less welcome. Veteran reporters and writers became an expendable luxury when young, eager recruits would work for less. So, some of my closest friends began to leave the paper.

The new management regime installed its own editor, and rather than choosing a veteran of Chicago journalism, they picked a preening, ambitious son of the South, James D. Squires, to change the culture at the
Tribune
. Squires was a whiz kid who had made his name as a young political reporter for the Nashville
Tennessean
. He quickly rose to become the
Tribune
’s Washington bureau chief, then editor of the
Orlando
Sentinel-Star
, a
Tribune
property. Before he took over as
Tribune
editor, Squires hadn’t spent much time in Chicago, and hastened to make it clear that he had little regard for the way things had been done before his arrival.

Several of the key editors who were my mentors were replaced. Before long, the city editor who had hired me, Bernie Judge, would be gone.

One player who rose in the shake-up was F. Richard Ciccone, the paper’s political editor, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. Quick-witted and knowledgeable, the ex-marine could write as fast as he could type. Even blind drunk, as he often was in those days, Dick could turn out brilliantly written copy on deadline without breaking a sweat. Yet his reporting was often based on the conventional thinking of the old-line pols with whom he frequently shared libations. Ciccone, who had spent a great deal of time with Squires covering campaigns, was named metropolitan and then managing editor. I moved up and acquired the title of political writer, but Squires and Ciccone also brought in another political reporter from Washington, Steve Neal, to share the beat and, I believed, compete with me.

Now, instead of nurturing mentors who valued my work, I was working for two men each of whom saw himself as the consummate political reporter and had little regard for the upstarts who followed. Where Bill and Bernie generally greeted my story ideas with enthusiasm, Squires and Ciccone more often received them with studied indifference.

The new dynamics made life at the
Tribune
less fun. Yet the dynamics at Byrne’s City Hall still made it the greatest story around. Investigative stories in the Byrne years were ripe and easy to come by, given the antipathy she stirred within a city bureaucracy filled with eager tipsters.

One piece I wrote detailed how Byrne was larding the executive staff at O’Hare airport with the unqualified relatives of city commissioners, political allies, and other VIPs, including the son of
Sun-Times
columnist Mike Royko. My source challenged me to include all the names, suggesting that I might try to protect the child of a revered, reform-minded journalist.

I didn’t know Royko well, but I had met him the previous year, when we were both covering the Republican primary in Wisconsin. In his prime, he turned out five, even six, columns a week. They were brilliantly written—often funny, sometimes poignant, and almost always filled with saucy, side-of-the-mouth wisdom. The H. L. Mencken of his time, Royko had a similarly prickly reputation, but when I told him the first time we met how much I admired his work, he seemed genuinely pleased—even surprised.

Why, I asked a mutual friend, would Royko even care what a twenty-five-year-old kid thought of his work? After all, he must hear it all the time. The Pulitzer committee had rendered its verdict years earlier.

“Mike lives every day in fear that he’ll be found out,” the friend said. “He lives in fear that people will look behind the curtain and find out that he’s not as good as they thought.”

I came to learn that Royko wasn’t alone. Many of the successful, creative people in the public realm whom I have known have been driven, at least in part, by that same fear. I regularly battle it myself, my mother’s nagging question “What did they say?” playing in my head.

Now, with the information about his son in hand, I met Royko at his favorite haunt, the Billy Goat Tavern, to ask for a comment. I could see the anguish in his face as he explained that his son had problems. He had dropped out of school, and Royko, a widower, told him that if he wasn’t in school, he had to find a job. The boy approached one of Royko’s friends, who, in turn, asked McMullen, the mayor’s husband, for help.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Royko said. “But when the kid came home, and was so proud that he had a job, I didn’t have the heart to tell him no.”

Today, with the benefit of years, I would have omitted Royko’s son from the story. In my uncompromising, youthful zeal, however, I included it. It didn’t matter. Before it could appear in print, Squires walked by and threw the copy on my desk, a line struck through the reference to Royko.

“We’re not going to get into a pissing match with fucking Mike Royko,” he harrumphed, saving me from adding to the pain of a single father coping with a troubled son. It was the right call, but for the wrong reason. Unbeknownst to me, Squires and the brass were intent on bringing Royko across the street to Tribune Tower, which they would do a few years later. Still, even though the item never saw the light of day, there were consequences. However warm Royko had been in our first encounter, he, understandably, was less so forever after.

Another tip led me to focus on Byrne’s chief of police detectives, a storied department veteran highly regarded for, among other things, breaking up major cartage theft rings. My source said that William Hanhardt’s success was not the product of good policing and his work was not aimed at fighting crime. Instead, the source said, Hanhardt was busting independent operators on behalf of the Chicago mob.

Almost as soon as I began investigating the story, however, the City Desk got a furious call from our beat reporter at police headquarters. “What is this kid doing?” the police reporter said. “He’s maligning a hero cop. This story is ridiculous. You have to pull him off this before he embarrasses the paper!”

The editors yielded to the judgment of their longtime beat man. And who was I to question them?

Years later, Hanhardt was indicted for masterminding a national jewel theft ring, his mob ties exposed. I’ve often wondered what induced the police reporter, now deceased, to intervene. Was he simply protecting a source, or was our man at police headquarters, who was always dressed to the nines, working for a more tangible kind of tip? There was a history of this in Chicago. In a story that is part of the city’s enduring journalistic lore, a
Tribune
reporter named Jake Lingle was shot to death on a crowded street by a mob hit man. Lingle was lionized as a martyr, until it was revealed that he had been doing business with Al Capone.

 • • • 

A looming showdown for City Hall between Daley and Byrne was the focus of a lot of attention in the summer of 1982. Yet as the ’83 election approached, the wild card would be the African American community. Black voters had been the key to Byrne’s victory in 1979, but now they felt betrayed. Community leaders were calling for a “plebiscite” to choose a black candidate for mayor. There was only one black candidate who might pose a real threat to the other Democratic candidates, and everyone knew it.

That summer, Ciccone asked me to write a four-part series on the upcoming mayoral race, and my first stop was a rundown storefront on the South Side, just off the Dan Ryan Expressway, that served as the headquarters of Congressman Harold Washington.

Washington was also a product of the Democratic machine, albeit a balky one. His father, Roy, had been a Democratic precinct captain, and Harold had risen through the ranks as a protégé of Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, when Metcalfe was still in Daley’s good graces. Yet as a member of the legislature, Washington often tangled with his party’s leaders over the issues of civil rights and police brutality.

A voracious reader, Washington also was a powerful speaker, for whom words were sometimes a stiletto and often a bludgeon. Harold—everyone in Chicago simply referred to him by his first name—could charm, amuse, or land on an opponent like a ton of bricks, often in the same rhetorical flight. And he did it with irresistible gusto.

When Metcalfe died in 1978, the ward committeemen in the district named a reliable political hack as his replacement. When he came up for reelection, Harold annihilated him in the primary and eventually took a seat in Congress. No one in politics felt, or articulated, the sense of alienation and injustice experienced by black residents of Chicago better than Harold Washington. Yet his rebellious nature and provocative speeches were tempered by shrewd political instincts, honed over a lifetime in the brawling wards of Chicago politics.

When I asked Harold if he was going to run, he settled back in his big leather desk chair and suggested we speak off the record.

“You know what it’s like to be a congressman?” he asked. “They treat you like a king. You can come and go as you please. No one cares. Now, mayor? That’s a real job, twenty-four/seven. Lots of headaches. Lots of problems. Why would I do that to myself?”

But what about the genuine draft that appeared to be gaining steam within the black community? How could he resist?

“So here’s what I am going to do,” he said. “I am going to say to those folks, ‘Okay. You register another fifty thousand voters in the next three months. You raise half a million dollars. Then I’ll know this is for real.’ They’ll never make those goals.’”

The next time I saw Harold was a little more than three months later, as he announced his candidacy for mayor. Spotting me amid the throng of reporters and cameras, he pulled me aside and recalled our conversation of the previous summer.

“They hit every target I threw at them,” he said, with a shrug and a smile, his hands spread. “What else could I do?”

Over time it became clear that Harold was anything but a reluctant candidate. As Byrne and Daley positioned themselves against each other, Harold aggressively worked the black and liberal lakefront wards, an ebullient campaigner sensing an opportunity to make history by becoming the city’s first black mayor—or at least by transforming the black, independent political movement into an enduring force.

With three vivid personalities (Byrne, Daley, and Washington) waging battle, Chicagoans were riveted by the unusual spectacle of a wide-open mayor’s race. The city’s TV stations agreed to simulcast one of the debates in prime time, an event that would normally be relegated to a poorly watched weekend slot. The arrangement was tailor-made for Harold, an electric performer, who lacked the funds to compete with Byrne and Daley in thirty-second ads. Now he could use the platform the debates provided to reach many voters who hadn’t seen him before.