American Pharaoh (48 page)

In his defense of the 1960 results to the State Election Board, Daley emphasized that 25,000 election judges had been present
in the precincts on election day to oversee the voting. It was true that, according to state law, both Republican and Democratic
election judges were to be present at every polling place. But as Daley well knew, in many Chicago wards the Democratic ward
bosses selected both the Democratic and Republican judges. Despite what the election law said, it was not uncommon for all
five judges in a precinct to be Democrats. In one ward, the
Tribune
found a mother and daughter, both Democrats, who had been recruited to serve as judges by their Democratic precinct captain.
In one election, Mrs. Alla Reeves served as a Democratic judge while her daughter Beverly served as a Republican. The next
year, they switched. Actual Republican judges were often turned away by the Democratic machine when they showed up at polling
places. In 1972, the machine-dominated Board of Elections declined to appoint 474 Republican judges, claiming their applications
had never been received.
⁴⁹

Even when Republican election judges were present, the machine could usually intimidate them into doing nothing even when
they saw the election law being broken. Election judges were nominally in charge of the voting on election day, but as a practical
matter the Democratic precinct captains were in control. Election judges had the legal right to order a police officer to
stop voter fraud, and even to make an arrest. But as a practical matter, it was not likely that a Chicago policeman would
take a Republican’s side against a Democratic machine operative. On the other hand, Republican election judges knew that if
they behaved, they would receive not only the official stipend of $25, but a little something extra from the Democratic precinct
captain — and they would be allowed to share in the breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided by the precinct captain for his
workers, rather than fend for themselves. Judges who did try to exert their authority were easily intimidated by the captain
and his staff. In cases where Republican judges raised objections, Democratic captains were known to “fire” them — and remove
their names from pay vouchers. In a hotly contested 1966 election, twenty-five-year-old James Hutchinson showed up at a South
Side polling place as a Republican poll watcher. When he asked to inspect the voting records, he was arrested. He was kept
in custody in a room in Chicago City Hall until the polls were closed, although he was never charged with any crime. One election
judge reported that after she and a colleague asked too many questions at a 24th Ward polling place, three gang members showed
up and asked, “What does it take to get you guys out of here, a death threat?” The gang members, who were seen talking to
an assistant precinct captain, said they had been sent by “the organization.” Before they left, they told the judges, “You
better be out of here by the time we come back.” It was not an idle threat. Poll watchers who interfered with the machine’s
work were often roughed up. A University of Illinois student who tried to stop fraud as a poll watcher at the 14th precinct
of the 24th Ward in 1972 testified before the state legislature that he had his life threatened, and then was beaten up by
two Democratic workers as a Chicago policeman looked on. Wesley Spraggins, director of a West Side insurgent political group,
told the same committee that while trying to keep the machine honest, his members were beaten up and received death threats,
and had bricks thrown through their windows. His own dog, he said, had been poisoned.
⁵⁰

With no one to keep it honest, the machine’s election-day offenses were anything but subtle. Most common was so-called four-legged
voting, in which a ward heeler literally walked into the machine with the voter to make sure he voted a straight Democratic
ticket. It was useful for those whose infirmity or poor command of written English made them unreliable voters. But it also
ensured that people whose votes the machine had bought by one means or another kept their side of the bargain. Precinct workers
sometimes hovered outside the booth and intervened when a voter took more than about thirty seconds, a sign he might be splitting
his vote, rather than pulling a single lever to vote the straight Democratic ticket. Ghost voters were another mainstay of
machine politics — voters who were dead, had moved out of the district, or perhaps never existed at all. Before the 1972 election,
the
Tribune
sent out a mailing to 5,495 voters listed on the registration rolls but not in the phone book. More than 10 percent were
returned by the Post Office because the recipient was dead, had moved, or was unknown. Of these, sixty-two were found to be
registered from vacant lots or empty buildings, even in a new supplemental list that was prepared one week before the election.
No list is perfect, and part of the problem might have been that the process of purging names when voters died or moved was
flawed. But the
Tribune
found no shortage of evidence that the machine was actually casting ballots for many of these ghost voters. Fred Tims, an
elderly man with a heart condition who was too ill to vote, said that a scrawl written in the precinct binder in the 5th precinct
of the 24th Ward when his vote was cast was definitely not his. In the 11th precinct of the same ward, the
Tribune
found four voters named “Mitchell” whose names, according to a handwriting expert, were all forged by the same person.
⁵¹
In the 23rd precinct of the 25th Ward, Elizabeth Roland, nominally a Republican judge, tried to vote although she was not
listed in the precinct binder. A poll watcher from a nonpartisan civic group challenged her attempt to vote, pointing out
that it would have violated the election law. But when the poll watcher stepped away to make a phone call, Roland voted, giving
as her address 2117 W. Roosevelt Road, a nonexistent address.
⁵²

The election law stated that only election judges could handle election materials and tally votes. But it was most often the
Democratic precinct captain and his assistants who had control over the ballot box. As a result, in precincts that still used
paper ballots, machine workers could simply add and erase pencil marks until the tally turned out right, as “Short Pencil”
Lewis was alleged to have done back in 1955 when Daley was first elected. Votes could be stolen just as easily with voting
machines. One nonpartisan poll watcher showed up at the 51st precinct of the 24th Ward to observe the voting in the 1972 election.
When he arrived at the polling place, a barbershop on Pulaski Avenue, a half hour before the polls opened, he was not allowed
in. He watched through a window, however, as precinct captain Walter Simmons and five election judges jump-started the democratic
process. “We looked into the polling place and saw the [ judges] and Mr. Simmons voting repeatedly,” the watcher reported.
“Simmons voted five or six times, and each of the [election judges did the] same thing two or three times.” Before the polls
officially opened, the machine slate was twenty votes ahead. In one 21st Ward precinct, a reporter watched as a Democratic
judge voted three times on paper ballots, and three times in the voting machine. And Recktenwald watched one man stand in
a voting machine and vote seventy times. When Recktenwald asked what he was doing, the man said he was testing it. The Democratic
machine also transported voters by van from one polling place to another, and had them vote each time they got out. “You could
register to vote in twelve different precincts,” says Andre Foster. “There was no way to check it, and that’s what we did.”
⁵³

Adamowski continued challenging the outcome of the election even after Kennedy took office in January 1961, but the machine’s
brand of vote theft was difficult to detect through recanvassing. The Cook County Circuit Court, a machine stronghold, was
also imposing heavy expenses on Adamowski for the labor-intensive process of hand-checking ballots. Before long, he gave up
the challenge. “Under the guise of expediting the case, the court took the recount out of the hands of my attorneys and proceeded
to burden me with every conceivable expense,” he said after Ward’s election was certified. “It was justice by bankruptcy.”
As it turned out, that was not the end of it. A final inquiry was conducted by a special prosecutor, Morris J. Wexler, who
was appointed to act in place of state’s attorney Ward, who was deemed to have a conflict. Wexler investigated vote theft
for several months, tracking down specific allegations of miscounts, vote buying, and other improprieties. His report, released
April 13, 1961, confirmed that something had been amiss in the election. He found that in precincts with “major mistakes”
in both the presidential and state’s attorney tabulations, when both were in favor of the same party — suggesting possible
malfeasance — a statistically improbable 7 of 7 favored the Democratic candidates.
⁵⁴
He also found a variety of other troubling practices, like a voting machine in one precinct that was set up so party workers
could see how voters were voting. But ultimately, Wexler’s findings were inconclusive. In a public statement, Wexler estimated
that Adamowski might have been illegally deprived of as many as 10,000 votes — more than Kennedy’s statewide victory margin.
⁵⁵

Wexler stunned Chicago by deciding to bring criminal charges against 650 election officials for their part in the alleged
fraud. The machine maneuvered to get the case assigned to a Democratic judge from East Saint Louis who was an old friend of
Democratic county clerk Edward Barrett. Judge John Marshall Karns’s pro-defense rulings over the course of the prosecution
eviscerated Wexler’s case. In the end, all of the defendants had their charges dismissed. The machine’s critics were appalled.
The Republican
Chicago Tribune
fumed that Judge Karns had “never allowed the prosecution to present” its case, or to vindicate “the legal right of citizens
to have their votes counted and not stolen.” With this setback, the attempts to learn the truth about the 1960 election were
almost concluded. Charges of vote theft in the election surfaced one last, idiosyncratic time, in another criminal case. In
the spring of 1962, a precinct captain and two precinct workers from the 28th Ward were prosecuted after an election judge
confessed to her priest that she had witnessed vote tampering in her precinct on election night. Several election judges cooperated
with the government and testified that ballots had been changed. The FBI supported the prosecution with the results of their
examination of the ballots in question. Faced with this compelling evidence, the three defendants changed their pleas to guilty.
On March 6, 1962, the men were sentenced to short jail terms.
⁵⁶

Daley, true to form, tried to respond to the accusations of corruption by appealing to a respected institution to lend him
some of its moral stature. He appealed to three University of Chicago professors, all Democrats, to prepare a report on the
charges of vote fraud. One of the study’s authors had been appointed by Daley to the board of the Chicago Regional Port Authority.
The professors made no real attempt to undertake an independent investigation of whether fraud had occurred. Instead, they
conceded, they proceeded by attempting to “examine evidence put forward by Republican leaders and the Chicago newspapers to
support the charges which they made.” They also relied heavily on information provided to them by Daley press secretary Earl
Bush. Based on this very limited inquiry, they concluded in their forty-eight-page report that the accusations that “wholesale
election fraud was perpetrated in Chicago were baseless and unsubstantiated.” Daley and the machine also continued to insist
that Republicans had stolen votes in Kankakee, LaSalle, and other downstate counties, and that this vote theft in Nixon’s
favor was not being investigated.

Still, despite the machine’s best efforts, neither Daley nor Kennedy would easily shake the suspicion that Illinois had been
stolen for the Democrats. A joke was making the rounds in Washington that had President Kennedy, Dean Rusk, and Daley in a
lifeboat that had only enough food for one. The three men had to decide which two would jump overboard. Kennedy said that
he was too important. Rusk said that he was too important. And Daley said the only democratic thing to do was to vote. Daley
won the vote, 8–2. At the spring 1961 Gridiron Club roast, attended by President Kennedy, the Washington press corps put on
a humorous skit about the presidential election. Washington reporters impersonated Cook County poll watchers and sang, to
the tune of “Tea for Two”:

Two for you, and three for me

And here’s a few; they all are free

And counting fast, I see they’re all cast for Jack.
⁵⁷

CHAPTER

8

Beware of the Press, Mayor

M
ayor Daley was given exalted treatment at the Kennedy inauguration. He and Sis were invited to join the Kennedys in the presidential
box. At the main ball, the new president made a point of walking out of his box and stopping by Daley’s table, saying he just
wanted to “visit.” Kennedy also invited the Daleys to the White House the following morning. When they arrived for their 10:15
appointment, they were the first visitors to the Kennedy White House other than a former occupant of the residence, Harry
Truman. Daley said later that his visit was “strictly social,” but word quickly spread that Kennedy had offered to appoint
him anything from commerce secretary to postmaster general. Rumors of a cabinet appointment are, of course, far easier to
come by than an actual appointment. Around the same time, William Dawson’s name began to be mentioned as a candidate for postmaster
general. When the elderly congressman’s name made it into the papers, it was arranged that he would be offered the position
with the understanding that he would turn it down. Even if Kennedy had made Daley a real offer, it is unlikely he would have
accepted. “He always wanted to be considered,” says Daniel Rostenkowski, “but when shove came to push he wasn’t going to take
it.” Chicago City Hall, not Washington, was the center of Daley’s world. Years later, when machine loyalists briefly sported
“Daley for President” buttons at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, it was understood that he would not be interested
in that job. “The mayor doesn’t want to be president,” the joke went. “He just wants to stay here and send one of his guys
down there to the White House.”
¹