Adam Cohen - American Pharaoh

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.

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 nations past. American Pharaoh isnt 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 Daleys public life, its bright successes shadowed by elements of tragedy.

Wilson Carey McWilliams, San Francisco Chronicle

Cohen and Taylors 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. Daleys two-decade reign over Chicago has been Mike Roykos 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.... Daleys 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 citys 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 OHehir, Salon.com

Beverly Cohen and Stuart Cohen
and

Barbara Taylor and James, William, and Caroline Kaplan

Daleys Chicago

This is Chicago, this is America.

Richard J. Daley, press conference, August 29, 1968

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 Daleys 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 Chicagos embattled leader. Worlds 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.

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 Americas 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 Daleys 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.