American Pharaoh (45 page)

With the start of the 1960 Democratic National Convention drawing near, Daley was still formally uncommitted in the presidential
race. When former president Harry Truman passed through Chicago on April 6, he and Daley met for a friendly breakfast at the
Blackstone Hotel and talked politics. Both men agreed that the recent Wisconsin primary results looked good for the Democrats
since Nixon, running unopposed, had polled fewer votes than either Kennedy or Humphrey. Daley also highlighted the fact that
Kennedy’s religion had proved to be a nonissue, despite predictions that the nation was not yet ready to elect a Catholic
president. “The people were voting for the man,” Daley said. Although Daley seemed to be in the Kennedy camp, there were still
other candidates to be reckoned with. The word was out that Illinois native son Adlai Stevenson was contemplating a third
run for the presidency. There would be pressure on Daley to stick with his longtime ally, although the consensus among Chicago
politicians was that if Stevenson ran again he would lose and pull the machine ticket down with him. At the same time, downstate
Democrats were urging Daley to support Missouri senator Stuart Symington. Symington was popular in the agricultural regions
of southern Illinois that bordered on his home state, but it seemed unlikely that he would help the Democratic ticket much
in Chicago. At a press conference in Daley’s office, a reporter noticed a copy of a book about Symington, entitled
Portrait of a Man with a Mission,
lying on Daley’s desk. The reporter picked it up and asked if it had any political significance. Daley just laughed and answered,
“Take it with you.” On May 11, Daley declared that Kennedy’s victory in the West Virginia primary — a heavily Protestant state
in which Kennedy’s Catholicism had been expected to be an issue — was “another indication that Democratic primary voters had
spoken in an emphatic manner.” It proved, Daley said, that people “vote for the individual and not for his religion or his
geographical qualifications.” But Daley continued to stop short of an endorsement. “We’ll caucus in California and discuss
the qualifications of the various candidates,” he said. “That will be the time for a declaration by me — but I repeat, no
one can watch the series of primary victories without being impressed.”
²⁰

On July 7, Daley and his family boarded a private car attached to the end of the Sante Fe Chief for the trip to Los Angeles.
Their route to California was punctuated by signs along the tracks proclaiming good wishes from various Chicago politicians.
“I’ll never forget . . . seeing these signs,” William Daley recalled. A welcoming party that included county assessor P. J.
“Parky” Cullerton, Alderman Vito Marzullo, and Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski was on hand to greet the Daleys at Union Railroad
Station Sunday morning, the day before the convention opened, but the Daleys snuck out a side door to attend 9
A.M.
Mass at the Old Mission Church. Daley’s welcoming party eventually caught up with him at the Hayward Hotel and greeted him
with a band playing “Chicago, That Toddlin’ Town.”
²¹
The fawning continued when Daley settled in at the hotel. He controlled fifty of Illinois’s sixty-nine delegates and he was
in a good position to swing most of the remaining downstate votes his way — and he had still not made an endorsement. This
made Daley the preeminent kingmaker at the convention, and he was subject to lobbying from all camps.
²²

Stevenson had not formally announced, but he made it clear he would be willing to run again. His supporters were hoping they
could stop Kennedy from winning on the first ballot, and then they would try to generate a Stevenson draft from the convention
floor. Eleanor Roosevelt and Carl Sandburg both made personal appeals to Daley for their friend Stevenson. When Mrs. Roosevelt
called to ask for a meeting, Daley traveled to Pasadena, some twenty miles away, to hear her out. But when she was done, Daley
told her he could not back Stevenson. Daley’s explanation was that the previous spring he had visited Stevenson at his Libertyville,
Illinois, home to sound him out about running for president again. Daley said he told Stevenson that if he planned to, he
should enter the primaries to show that he still had support, but that Stevenson responded that he had no plans to run. Now,
Daley said, he and other onetime supporters had already made other commitments. In fact, Daley was already firmly in the Kennedy
camp, and he had been busily twisting arms in the Illinois delegation. Daley worked on Jacob Arvey, who had been supporting
Symington, by indicating that he might not reslate his old mentor as Democratic national committeeman unless he backed Kennedy.
It was not long before Arvey was urging his fellow Illinois delegates to fall in line behind Kennedy and Daley, saying, “Let’s
give our chairman the authority to be a dominant force at the convention.” The Illinois delegation caucused in secret, and
Daley emerged to announce its vote: 59½ for Kennedy, 6½ for Symington, and 2 for Stevenson.

It was a crushing blow to Stevenson. With so little support from his own home state, he had no prospect of putting together
a majority of delegates nationally. When he got word of how Illinois had voted, Stevenson tried to make a personal appeal
to Daley to reconsider, but Daley dodged his old political patron’s phone calls. Stevenson finally convinced Arvey to act
as his intermediary and get Daley to call back. When they spoke, Stevenson drew on their long political friendship, which
dated back to 1948, when he gave Daley an important career boost by appointing him state revenue director. Stevenson had,
of course, also played a key role in Daley’s election as mayor in 1955. Stevenson made a spirited argument on his own behalf,
reminding Daley that he had been the first Illinoisan since Abraham Lincoln to run for president, and promising that if he
won the nomination he would campaign vigorously against Nixon. But Daley bluntly told Stevenson that his arguments were not
getting him anywhere, since he had no support in his home state’s delegation. In fact, Daley told his old boss, he had not
had any support in the delegation four years earlier, and he, Daley, had had to bring the delegates around. As for the lopsidedness
of the vote this time, Daley told Stevenson: “You’re lucky to have the two votes you’ve got.”
²³

But days later, it was Daley who was being coolly rebuffed. After Kennedy won the nomination, he invited Daley and a few other
key backers to his suite at the Biltmore Hotel to discuss his choice of running mates. Daley was, of course, hoping to persuade
Kennedy to select a vice presidential nominee who would boost the machine’s statewide slate in Illinois. That made him a Symington
supporter, since the Missouri candidate could help the Democratic ticket downstate, precisely the region where Kennedy would
be weakest.Daley was least enthusiastic about Lyndon Johnson, who would do less for the ticket downstate and who, as a white
southerner, might turn off some of the machine’s black voters. Daley told Kennedy that having Johnson on the ticket would
make it harder to carry Illinois. When that failed, Daley brought up how much he had done to help Kennedy secure the nomination.
Kennedy, who wanted Johnson because of the help he could give the ticket in Texas and the Deep South, reportedly responded
to Daley: “Not you nor anybody else nominated us. We did it ourselves.” In the
Chicago Tribune
’s telling of the story, Daley had “smoke coming out of his ears” after the encounter.
²⁴

When he got back to Chicago, Daley traveled to Springfield to stir up enthusiasm for the ticket among downstate Democrats,
and to test the political waters outside the borders of Cook County. Daley learned that Kerner was running strongly downstate,
but Kennedy seemed to be in trouble. One downstate Democrat was predicting that Nixon would carry Illinois by 200,000 votes.
Daley attended four seminars with congressional and legislative candidates where he instructed them on the importance of good
organizational work. As election day approached, the statewide races began to hit a fever pitch. The usually restrained Governor
Stratton launched a broadside against Kerner and his supporters in Chicago. “We are up against the slimiest, dirtiest machine
in the history of Illinois,” Stratton declared. “If my opponent is elected, Dick Daley will dictate his every action and every
single piece of legislation.” Daley fired back: “The people on two occasions have demonstrated what they think of Daley as
mayor. There were 70% voting in favor of my record at the 1959 city election.”
²⁵

The state’s attorney race between Adamowski and Ward was also turning ugly. Adamowski continued to dredge up new scandals
involving City Hall and the machine — and to pick fights with Daley. He had a grand jury investigating charges that city workers
were accepting “gratuities” for helping a trucking company cheat the city and county by short-weighting loads of construction
supplies. Daley said the allegations were politically motivated and demanded “in the interest of fair play, in the interest
of good government, and in the interest of the good name of Chicago” that Adamowski turn over the names of the city employees
to him. Adamowski refused, saying that it was just another attempt by Daley to derail an investigation of machine wrongdoing.
When Adamowski was not fighting with Daley, he was taking swings at his actual opponent. One debate between Adamowski and
Ward at the West Suburban Bar Association was “less a debate than a match under Marquis of Queensberry Rules,” according to
one reporter who covered it. “The antagonists refused point-blank to shake hands before they came out swinging. And in the
swinging they rid themselves of gloves in favor of the old-fashioned bare-knuckle assault.” Even when Adamowski was debating
Ward, he continued to focus on the threat to Chicago posed by Daley and the machine. “In Cook County there is an organization
that has its tentacles in every office and many businesses with the single exception of the state’s attorney’s office,” he
warned. Daley, for his part, told a Ward fund-raiser at the Sherman Hotel that Adamowski was a “sadly inadequate person” who
was trying to “soft-pedal and cover up his own failures.”
²⁶

The Kennedy-Nixon race in Illinois was not as bare-knuckled, but it was still attracting considerable attention. With Eisenhower’s
eight years as president drawing to a close, one era of America was ending and another was dawning. The choice between the
young and suave Massachusetts senator and Eisenhower’s two-term vice president presented two very different directions for
the nation. That Kennedy would be the first Roman Catholic to occupy the White House added to the controversy. In some parts
of the country, including large swaths of downstate Illinois, fears that the pope would run the country under Kennedy was
generating strong support for Nixon. In other regions, like Cook County, the prospect of a Catholic president was filling
voters with excitement and pride. Presidential elections in Illinois generally broke down into a battle between Catholic-black-Jewish-immigrant-Democratic
Chicago against Protestant-white-Republican downstate. But this year, Kennedy’s Catholicism made the traditional schism more
pronounced than ever. Going into the election, straw polls indicated that the outcome was very much in doubt. On Chicago’s
final registration day about 200,000 new voters added their names to the voting rolls. Combined with 40,000 additional registrations
that had been collected in the weeks before, it was the largest number of new registrations in Chicago since 1944. Voter enthusiasm
was, Daley declared, the highest it had been since that year, which marked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s last run for the presidency.
Much of the enthusiasm was clearly being generated by the presidential race, but the machine’s highest priority was the Adamowski-Ward
contest. Word from the Morrison Hotel was that nothing — not even electing Kennedy — was as important as taking back the state’s
attorney’s office. “State’s Attorney Adamowski is right,” the
Daily News
declared. “City Hall is out to get him. Many Democratic precinct captains, under urging from the ward committeemen, are reported
writing off Kennedy as far as many voters are concerned if they’ll only vote for Adamowski’s opponent.”
²⁷