On a flight back from Washington, D.C., in 1972, the Mayor spoke at length about a number of subjects. He said he could have been governor of Illinois in 1960 but that he wanted John Kennedy to be elected president. He did not believe there could be a successful ticket with Irish Catholics for president and governor. ”I was thinking of my four sons,” Daley said, ”and I wanted John Kennedy to be their president.”
A flight attendant asked the Mayor if he cared for a drink. Daley ordered a Bloody Mary. I normally would not have had a drink at lunch, but to be sociable I ordered, inexplicably, a beer.
”When the beverages were served, I began drinking the beer, when suddenly the Mayor exclaimed: ”Do you drink a lot of beer, Frank?” I replied that I did not, but he seemed oblivious to my answer. For the next 20 minutes he spoke of the Irish and the curse of alcohol and how many families in his neighborhood had been ”destroyed because of fathers and husbands who took to drink.”
During the rest of the flight I never took another sip of beer. The Mayor ordered a second Bloody Mary.
He described a saloon in his neighborhood. It was called Sheehan`s and, he said, it was at 38th Street and Halsted. Sheehan was a man with white hair and ”a real sweet turkey face. Everyone had to check his gun when he came in,” Daley continued, ”the policemen and the hoods.” I thought to myself that must have been one tough neighborhood that he grew up in.
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April, 1974, was the time the Mayor made one of his rare acceptances of an invitation to appear on national television. The program, on NBC, was called ”The Loyal Opposition.”
Edwin Newman was to moderate from a studio in New York City, and NBC newsman Bob Jamieson was to talk with the Mayor in Chicago. Joining in the discussion from a studio in Washington were Senators George McGovern, Edward M. Kennedy and Henry Jackson, along with Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss.
In the NBC studio before the program, the Mayor spoke with and saw the men in the Washington and New York studios through a closed circuit monitor. While studio personnel adjusted Daley`s microphone and dusted powder on his forehead, Senator Kennedy took his place before the cameras in Washington, and Edwin Newman exclaimed:
”You know that gentleman out there in Chicago, don`t you, Senator?”
Kennedy replied that he did, and the Mayor immediately said: ”Good evening, Senator. How is young Teddy coming along?”-a reference to the senator`s son hospitalized for a cancerous leg condition.
It was an example of Daley the man and Daley the politician.
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Daley once came to a wake at my house. He had known my father distantly decades before in Springfield. My father had gone there with his father, an attorney, to seek redress for the operators of cleaning shops from whom the state had wrongfully collected excessive taxes.
Daley was the minority leader of the Senate at the time and helped provide legislative assistance. All of that was long ago. My father was waked in his house, and the word reached my mother and me that the Mayor was standing out front in the line of mourners waiting to pay their last respects. I quickly went out of the house and down the steps to the Mayor, who was standing bareheaded holding his hat amidst the light falling snow. Ahead of him, waiting to enter the house were 20 or more people. ”Mr. Mayor,” I said, ”please come in.” ”No,” said he, ”I`ll wait my turn.” And that he did.
When he finally approached my father`s casket, there was one more Daley touch. I thanked him for coming, and there was something in the way I said it that implied his visit was to please me. He quickly and gently let my mother, who was standing beside me, know that his visit was because of the respect he had for her husband and had nothing to do with me.
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In 1975, Daley attended the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Boston. It was the custom of Daley at such meetings to invite those aides who traveled with him to be his guests for a dinner at a popular restaurant.
The place chosen for this particular event in Boston was Jimmy`s on the waterfront. My wife and I were seated moments ahead of the rest of the party and were joined at our long family-style table by Mrs. Daley and one of her daughters, Ellie. Jane Byrne came and sat with the four of us. When this happened, Mrs. Daley turned to her daughter and whispered, ”Let`s get out of here.” The Daley women then moved away.
Meanwhile, the Mayor and the other members of his party had sat at an adjoining table. During the course of the evening, Byrne would write notes and pass them to other guests for relay to the Mayor, who sat behind her, several seats away. Here was a dinner party consisting of 20 people sitting at two tables, with Byrne, the 41-year-old-cochairman of the Democratic Party of Cook County slipping notes to and winking at the 73-year-old party chairman throughout the course of the evening. A casual observer might have thought that the cochairman was flirting. She wasn`t. She was showing everyone, however, that a special relationship existed between her and the Mayor.
When the meeting concluded the next day, Mrs. Daley gave strict orders to the bodyguards that no one was to know which return flight to Chicago she and the Mayor would take, nor should anyone be told the time of their departure from the hotel. She was determined, the bodyguards later said, that Jane Byrne not be on the same plane.
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When Hirohito came to Chicago for a visit in 1975, I prepared a suggested introduction for the Mayor to deliver at a formal dinner for the Japanese Emperor.
After reading my suggested words, which lauded Japanese-Americans for their contributions to our city and country, the Mayor exclaimed:
”Didn`t you lay it on kind of thick, Frank? You know, Sis and I saw the Arizona out at Pearl Harbor. Along with us was a group of visiting Japs, and a guy from the State Department pointed out that one of them had burns on his face from the Hiroshima bomb, and I said, `He`s a hell of a lot better off than the 900 guys buried here in the Arizona.` And the State Department guy didn`t like what I said.
”I didn`t give a damn. Remember, Frank, we always forgive, but we never forget.”
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When Anwar Sadat came to Chicago, also in 1975, he had not as yet made his momentous visit to Jerusalem. In view of the fact that many of the dignitaries at the dinner Daley hosted in honor of the Egyptian president were Jewish, my suggested remarks were cautious.
Again, Daley took me by surprise when he put aside the prepared remarks and ad-libbed one of the most laudatory introductions I ever heard him give. Sadat, he said, was a man who worked tirelessly to better the living conditions of his people. He was a man who wanted peace and a man who had suffered much during years of imprisonment by the British government because of his determination to end its colonial rule.
As I sat there listening to the Mayor, I concluded that because of his Irish tradition, there was a bond between him and any national leader who struggled to end British colonialism.
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On Thursday, August 1, 1974, the Mayor telephoned and asked me to come to his summer home in Grand Beach, Mich., to discuss plans for his return to City Hall (after his absence due to a minor stroke in May of that year). My wife accompanied me on the ride and waited outside a friend`s nearby house while I walked a short distance to visit with the Mayor.
It was my first trip to his Grand Beach residence. It was located north of the town at the end of a three-mile dirt road. After walking past a small frame garage where one of the bodyguards was on duty, I went through the gate, past a swimming pool and ascended the wood steps that led to the kitchen door, where Mrs. Daley greeted me. The Mayor met me in the kitchen and escorted me to a closed porch overlooking Lake Michigan. Our meeting was to last two hours.
During the first half of it, the Mayor and I talked about his return to City Hall, about the media, and politics in general. As I started to leave, Mrs. Daley asked me to stay for lunch. When she insisted, I told her I had something ”terrible to report.” I left a girl outside waiting. ”You left Sally in the car?” Mrs. Daley asked. When I said yes, she and the Mayor told me to get her right away. I ran the short distance to the friend`s house and returned with Sally along the dirt road to be greeted by the recuperating Mayor, who was standing just outside his property. ”This is unforgivable,”
he said, referring to my keeping my wife waiting. He hugged Sally and we walked back to the house for a two-hour lunch with Mrs. Daley. In the world of Richard J. Daley, a man`s wife came first. He was not amused by someone who appeared to be placing his job ahead of his wife.
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One of Daley`s weaknesses was that he was often influenced by rumors and gossip. During his era, the careers of many Chicagoans were greatly harmed by his vulnerability on this subject. On one occasion, for example, I told him that Alderman Robert J. O`Rourke, a Republican, had died earlier in the day from a heart attack. O`Rourke was one of the most decent people I knew in government. He was a bachelor, a man who engaged in athletic activities and took good care of himself. The Mayor, when he heard the news of O`Rourke`s death, lifted his right arm as if he were about to take a drink. ”Too much of this, too much of this,” Daley said. As far as I knew, O`Rourke was a teetotaler. Someone apparently had given the Mayor erroneous information.
The Mayor also separated himself from colleagues who got in trouble with the law. An example of this was the way Daley was totally unsympathetic to the fate that befell federal judge Otto Kerner. When the former governor was on his way to prison, Daley told me that he, too, had been offered ”the same racetrack stock deal” that Kerner accepted but that he, the Mayor, had turned it down.
Another prominent person who was surprisingly rebuffed by the Mayor was the widow of the man he usually described as ”our late, beloved, martyred President,” John F. Kennedy. Three weeks before the Mayor`s death, Jacqueline Kennedy telephoned him at City Hall. She was an editor for Viking Press in New York. The purpose of her call, she told the mayoral assistant, was to arrange an appointment with him for Eugene C. Kennedy, who was writing a biography about the Mayor. Daley refused to take the telephone call. Showing how strong was his dislike for even the best intentioned of writers and editors, Daley snapped: ”She`s just trying to make money off of me. She`s just trying to use me.”
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After I had been working for the Mayor for a long period of time, I went in to ask him if I might take a week`s vacation. I planned to go to southwest Michigan with my wife and children. The Mayor said that I could and called in his secretary, Kay Spear, and directed her to draw up a check for me from one of the Democratic Party funds in the amount of $250. After she had done so and presented it to him, he handed it to me, saying that I should use it to take my wife and children out to dinner. Then he proceeded to name the places from which I might choose. He said there was Skip`s Other Place on the Red Arrow Highway or Skip`s original place not too far away. There was Hymie and Maxine`s in downtown Michigan City. The Red Lantern Inn in Beverly Shores and Tosi`s in Stevensville. He went on and on. He was a walking, talking glossary of Berrien County, Michigan, restaurants. I thanked the Mayor for the check and his suggestions and shortly thereafter took my one week vacation.
Upon its conclusion, I returned to City Hall to find that the Rev. Jesse Jackson was conducting a demonstration in the fifth floor lobby at City Hall outside the Mayor`s office. As I entered his office, I was aware of the demonstration and all of the problems the Mayor was facing, especially those of the Board of Education, but I knew that his first words would pertain to my vacation and whether I had followed his suggestion that I take my wife and family out to dinner.
So I brought it up first. ”I want to thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, for making possible the very nice dinner that my wife and children and I enjoyed the other night,” I said. ”Where did you go?” the Mayor inquired. Now, the fact was that I had gone for six days without remembering the $250 check and the Mayor`s dinner suggestion. On the final night of my vacation, I remembered and took my family out to dinner. But the easiest place to go was a nearby roadside inn called the ”Blue Chip Lounge,” where the dinner cost $16.50 for a party of five.
All this flashed through my mind when the Mayor asked his question. I knew he would think less of me if he heard that I had taken my family to such a relatively nongrandiose place for their meal, so I decided to tell him that we had gone somewhere that he would approve. ”I took them to Tosi`s,” I said.
”What night did you go,” the Mayor asked. Now I could sense trouble approaching in the distance. I immediately decided to pick a night that I did not think he would be cruising about southwest Michigan. ”Wednesday,” I said. ”What time did you get there?” he asked. ”About six o`clock,” I replied, thinking that was too early for the Mayor to arrive for dinner.
I was sitting alongside the Mayor at his desk, and with this answer he began to edge his chair a little closer to mine. ”Where did you sit?” he asked. I knew I had to pick a place that they were unlikely to have seated him, so I said, ”By the kitchen door.”
”Didn`t you see me?” he asked, drawing even closer. ”No,” I said.
”If I had seen you I would have said `hello.` ”
All the while Daley was asking these questions, he was concentrating on my face. I could tell he was wondering, ”Why in the hell is Sullivan lying about something so unimportant as where he took his family for dinner?” Daley might also have been thinking: ”I have sat here for almost 20 years lying to other men when I thought it was necessary. I never thought Sullivan had the guts to do the same thing.” Suddenly, I sensed there was a touch of admiration in Daley`s eyes.
