The warden stood to leave our brief family orientation. “I’ll give you a moment to say goodbye,” he said, stepping to his office door. When it shut, my sister and I turned to our father. His soldier’s face fell, vanquished and vulnerable; once sky-blue eyes clouded with sadness and bewilderment. As we left the prison, I said to my sister, “I just saw Dad die.” She replied quietly, “I know.”
Actually, he survived his time in prison. But less than two years later, in the still, dark, early morning of May 9, 1976, my father, Otto Kerner — retired U.S. Army major general, former U.S. district attorney for the northern district of Illinois, former Cook County judge, former governor of Illinois, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders, and former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals — surrendered his last breath.
The next day, Illinois’ poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, penned the opening stanza of a remembrance titled “Otto Kerner”:
He was a man extensive and extending.
But we do not love largeness very long.
We look with narrowing littleness
on largeness.
Brooks’ husband, Henry Blakely, elaborated her insight with these closing lines of his poem “Of Otto Kerner”:
and his was the soldiers error,
knowing
but not deeply believing
any who followed the flag
could be enemy.
And so
he was flanked, taken,
and then beheaded,
the fate, sometimes, of princes.
And I will be remembering
murders
and old kingdoms dead
because of great men killed.
Little has since been written about Otto Kerner, save occasional reference to his chairmanship of the 1968 commission that produced the so-called Kerner Report and his incongruous 1973 federal conviction and imprisonment. The first biography of him, “Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights,” by Chicago Tribune columnist Bill Barnhart and retired Illinois legislator Republican Gene Schlickman, fills a great void. It is a vital account of a man that Tom Wicker’s dust jacket blurb aptly proclaims “an admirably dedicated public servant, later victimized by partisan prosecution.”
The Kerner Report’s finding that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal” and that “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto” is a landmark. Its insufficiently heeded calling to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group still resonates today.
The new biography digs deeply into the wellspring that fed Kerner’s work on the commission and his 40-year career in public service. The story of his Czech forebears’ passion for civil liberty and his parents’ struggle that took his father from unskilled laborer to attorney general of Illinois and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals is authoritatively drawn from unpublished private–as well as public–documents. Fresh materials enrich the portrayal of his boyhood, education and early dual careers in the military and the law.
Regrettably, a dark caricature reveals none of the joy in his 39-year marriage with the youngest daughter of Anton Cermak, the Chicago mayor killed in 1933 by an assassin’s bullet intended for President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. But accounts of his prosecutorial, judicial and gubernatorial years and his work on the Civil Disorders Commission are valuable. His 1958 judicial struggle with the Catholic Church over adoption reform and his gubernatorial initiatives in mental health, statewide open housing and economic development are warmly celebrated. Research into his work on the commission is enlightening, especially the unearthing of a commission background document, “The Harvest of American Racism,” likening 1967’s urban black activists to Colonial revolutionaries.
While the collective effect of these vignettes is somewhat impressionistic, what is missing is mostly implied in the whole. For example, readers may well wonder how Kerner achieved consensus from rival Illinois legislators and contentious commission members. Nowhere detailed was his capacity to sublimate tactics, strategy and ego to substantive objectives. His quietly efficacious leadership was a respected alternative to the politics of noisy confrontation and blatant self-promotion that sold newspapers, but accomplished little.
The book might also have done well to delve into Kerner’s view of class in America as it informed his public life. It was a view reinforced by the career of Anton Cermak, benefactor of Kerner’s father and creator of the pan-ethnic, labor-based, anti-Prohibition Cook County Democratic Party that heralded Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential election sweep.
Growing up in a neighborhood of laborers, Kerner appreciated the role of the corner tavern. As a child, he carried buckets of beer on a pole over his shoulder to workmen for small change. He and his neighbors ate for free in the beer garden where adults drank and socialized in the Old World custom before radio, television and movies. He recalled that the tavern’s only neighborhood safe was where laborers put their wages at day’s end and that the tavern was where they went to borrow for their first home rather than face formidable lenders downtown.
What Kerner understood–and what Cermak capitalized on politically–was that threadbare, ethnic laborers felt disenfranchised by Prohibition in ways never grasped by well-clad, white-collar managers who could afford expensive, illegal Canadian liquor and who felt at home in the city’s imposing, marbled halls of commerce. Prohibition sensitized Kerner to the deep-seated political, economic and social misunderstandings between the haves and have-nots and anchored his belief that we must try harder to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
The Kerner Report was as much a watershed for America’s civil liberty as it was for Kerner’s. In January 1969, Richard Nixon–the nation’s first critic of the Kerner Report–was sworn in as president, and his campaign manager, John Mitchell, launched his masquerade as attorney general . The intangible civil rights of minorities advanced by Kerner were set on a collision course with a specious theory of intangible rights invented by Mitchell’s prosecutors to allege Kerner failed to give citizens of Illinois “good and faithful services” as governor. With Kerner’s conviction, Nixon and Mitchell managed to destroy one of America’s most respected civil rights advocates.
In a disturbing and poignant account, Barnhart and Schlickman accurately report that, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Justice Department’s overreaching theory 11 years after Kerner died, surviving defendants were granted reversals, while an otherwise timely appeal to reverse Kerner’s conviction was denied because he was dead.
But the book fails to relate this injustice to the broad pattern of misconduct by Kerner’s prosecutors who made him their target, not crime. Absent are incontrovertible proofs of his assertion that he was convicted by witnesses the government induced to lie. Missing is the revelation that the government’s keystone bribery count named no briber or quid pro quo. Omitted is the government’s obstruction of justice in hiding its campaign to ruin his reputation through prejudicial, pretrial leaks to the press of confidential grand jury proceedings and IRS information. Ignored is the government’s admission that original IRS notes were destroyed and recreated to frame the perjury allegation he steadfastly denied. Uncritically repeated is the government’s cover story that its investigation was inspired–within a year of Kerner’s 1968 U.S. Senate confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals–by a faded moll’s yarn that he was connected to the mob. Neglected is the story that government agents on the case commonly joked that their code acronym, CRIMP, stood for Corrupt Republicans Investigating Marj’s Pals, Marj referring to Marjorie Everett, a key government witness.
The authors fail to recognize the enormity of the injustice Kerner suffered when they dismiss strong evidence of the political inspiration behind his prosecution. They recount the famous November 1970 meeting in which Nixon, Mitchell and cohorts plotted their 1972 re-election campaign strategy to attract southern and northern white Democratic voters disgruntled by their party’s national civil rights and integration initiatives of the 1960s. They also repeat Mitchell’s boast that Illinois Democrats wouldn’t be so powerful after his grand jury got through in Chicago. They even admit that Mitchell’s Justice Department officials had briefed Chicago prosecutors about Kerner only a month earlier, in October 1970. But they doubt that Mitchell’s boast pertained to Kerner because no grand jury was then convened, overlooking the Kerner grand jury Mitchell seated in Chicago just a month after the 1970 holidays. To whom do they think Mitchell was referring, if not Kerner?
Kerner’s U.S. appellate court opinions in defense of civil liberty and his persistent advocacy of Kerner Report recommendations were widely known to frustrate, embarrass and enrage Nixon and Mitchell. Not only did he block their draconian approach to law and order, he called them to task for impeding racial progress. In Nixon’s Oval Office tapes,Mitchell is heard complaining about Kerner just two weeks before he called him in front of the June 1971 Grand Jury: “Now he’s out talking about his Kerner Commission Report when he should be keeping his damn mouth shut as a judge.” The question is not whether Nixon and Mitchell possessed the motive, means and opportunity to get Otto Kerner, but whether a smoking gun eventually will be found in the Nixon tapes. .
Long before my father’s trial and 10 years before he died, my sister, Helena, and I sat alone with him at dinner in the governor’s mansion. “I may not leave you much materially when I’m gone,” he said, “but you will have something that will open more doors than all the money in the world: You will have a good name.”
His reputation was the heart of his being, and his conviction proved a fatal wound. At his trial in 1973, he testified, “This suit, this action is so very important to me. It’s my life.”
When his good name was taken, he felt a cherished door to great public service shut forever. This inspirational storyof his life may prove him wrong about that. It strengthens faith that the legacy of his good works will eventually overwhelm the calumny of his enemies. It renews hope that he will be exonerated, his injuries remedied and his name restored–and that similar injustice may yet be thwarted. In this context, “Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights” is a good place to learn how we might more fully realize our great capacity for genuine nobility as human beings.
