One hundred days after his 1983 election, Mayor Harold Washington said there was a key difference between his new job and his old one as a congressman: In Congress, you could pick your fights. As mayor, you take them all on.
The same might be said for his friends.
The new round of indictments in the Operation Incubator investigation named two former aldermen who were in Washington`s camp and Washington`s onetime friend Clarence McClain, as well as a former city official McClain had brought into the Washington administration.
Investigators say Washington is not a target of the investigation, but the probe reaches closer to the heart of a Chicago mayor`s administration than any since a string of friends and allies of Mayor Richard J. Daley were convicted in 1974.
Washington has had to field frequent questions on how much blame he should assume for the alleged wrongdoing of others. Like Daley, the mayor has had some good moments and some bad ones in containing the political damage.
There is the good Harold: He created a city ethics code by executive order one month after the investigation was disclosed. He brought in former U.S. Atty. Thomas Sullivan to investigate the allegations and asked the city council to give Sullivan tough subpoena powers. He fired a high-ranking aide when Sullivan`s report questioned the aide`s actions. He later engineered the passage of a tougher ethics code by the city council.
There is the bad Harold: He dismissed Sullivan and then asked him to return. He promised to release Sullivan`s report and then claimed he couldn`t by law. He said McClain was no longer a friend or confidant, but he couldn`t stem speculation, fueled by McClain, that the controversial figure continued to wield influence in the mayor`s administration.
Bad Harold bristled at how the media and federal investigators handled the investigation. At a press conference on Feb. 11, 1986, with New York Mayor Edward Koch, Washington said the FBI may be trying to ”set people up.” Koch, by contrast, said he was happy that the FBI had uncovered corruption in New York.
If Washington took a lesson from any mayor in how to handle the fallout from corruption, it was from Daley, not Koch.
”There are pretty close similarities in the way they both handled” the taint from corrupt associates, said city council parliamentarian Leon Despres, an independent alderman during the Daley years.
”Each of them was able to convince the electorate that he personally was not corrupt,” Despres said. ”When the corruption was called to their attention, there was no condoning of it. There`s a pretty subtle difference, though. Daley really felt that one of his jobs was to protect everybody.”
Daley was hit by a wave of indictments orchestrated by then-U.S. Atty. James Thompson that named Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Matthew Danaher, one of the mayor`s closest friends. On successive days, Ald. Paul Wigoda was convicted of income-tax evasion, Ald. Thomas Keane was convicted of mail fraud and Daley`s press secretary, Earl Bush, was convicted of mail fraud.
Danaher died before he could come to trial, which created a vacancy that was filled by Morgan Finley, who was indicted last Thursday in the Incubator investigation.
Daley blasted media leaks of grand-jury proceedings as ”a disgrace.”
Washington called leaks and media coverage of the Incubator investigation
”arrogant” and ”just insane.”
Daley said Thompson was waging a personal vendetta against him. Washington suggested that Incubator might be an attempt to embarrass him. Yet both Daley and Washington were eventually praised by the investigators who led the inquiries into their administrations.
Washington`s chief liability in his handling of the investigation may be his loyalty to McClain, a friend and political aide from the mayor`s days in the legislature.
After he publicly stated that McClain was no longer an adviser, Washington privately defended the controversial figure. ”I told him once, You`ve got to get rid of this guy,” said a mayoral adviser who asked anonymity. ”He said, What? What has he done?”
The mayor also rejected demands that he denounce McClain. ”That simply is not in his character,” Despres said.
Washington may have appeared equivocal about McClain, but when aldermanic allies implicated in the investiation sought re-election, he pointedly ignored them.
It was long rumored that at least two of those aldermen, Marian Humes and Perry Hutchinson, who were indicted Thursday, had quiet ties to the mayor`s council opposition and might ”flip.” Washington, with just 25 supporters in the 50-member council, could not afford to antagonize the incumbents by endorsing challengers, but his silence had nearly as much impact in their election losses this year.
”That was a wise political move,” said political activist Lu Palmer.
”The fact that he did not endorse them could certainly be seen as a signal that he did not want them.”
Palmer believes the black community`s faith in Washington was never shaken by the Incubator investigation. But the ongoing investigation may have hampered Washington`s efforts to draw a larger share of white votes in this year`s mayoral election than he got in 1983.
A Tribune poll conducted last December found that 39.6 percent of Chicago residents polled believed that the mayor was ”not at all effective” in keeping corruption out of his administration.
A round of indictments the month before the election helped refresh the minds of voters about the ongoing scandal. A second round of indictments might have hurt Washington had they come before the election, but even his toughest opponents concede that they won`t get to make much hay out of the charges announced last week. ”The question (of Washington`s proximity to corruption) may have been timely before the election,” said Ald. Edward Burke (14th).
”But wouldn`t you say that it`s moot now?”
Regular Democrats may be more reluctant to comment because the new indictments hit them, too. Finley, clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court and Democratic committeeman of Lyons Township, was charged with conspiracy, fraud, extortion and racketeering, and his office`s chief investigator, Michael Lambesis, was indicted for a second time.
Mel Dubrock, who also was charged, is a former 11th Ward precinct captain who was given a top job in the Department of Streets and Sanitation by Mayor Michael Bilandic. It was Dubrock who told Bilandic during the blizzard of January, 1979, that city playlots had been cleared of snow and were available for parking cars, a gaffe that helped knock Bilandic out of office in the mayoral election that year.
The indictment of Finley will increase interest in the 1988 campaign for his post, which controls 2,159 full- and part-time jobs.
Cook County Republicans hope to field a well-known candidate for Finley`s job. ”We`d like to have the cloud still hanging around there” when the election approaches, said county GOP Chairman Donald Totten.
Finley indicated before his indictment that he would seek re-election, but it seems unlikely he would be slated again by the Cook County Democratic Organization if he still faced trial. There has been speculation that Washington wants mayoral aide Michael Holewinski to seek the post.
If Washington is worried that Incubator could hurt candidates he supports, or could influence how history judges his administration, he might take heart in Daley`s experience.
Last week, a citizens` group announced that it would petition the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp commemorating Mayor Daley.
The group is the Illinois Committee for Honest Government.
