Illinois Justice: The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens
By Kenneth A. Manaster
University of Chicago Press, 317 pages, $30
A cigar-chomping city fire inspector silently and critically appraised the interior of Catherine O’Leary’s barn behind her house at 137 DeKoven St. on Oct. 8, 1871. Nervously, O’Leary paused from milking her cow to ask whether a mutual understanding might be reached.
The inspector puffed his cigar and allowed judiciously that, just maybe, it was possible. She slipped him an envelope containing cash, whereupon he pocketed it, ponderously marked his form “approved,” and left. Much relieved, O’Leary returned to her milking. Then the cow kicked over a kerosene lantern on the floor and ignited the Chicago Fire.
That’s fiction, of course. The scene was part of a 1978 Second City comedy skit, with the evil inspector played by Jim Belushi, amid newspaper revelations of petty but epidemic graft taken by inspectors of all kinds in the Mirage scandal. Chicagoans laughed at the skit because our history of constant public corruption is seen as amusing, even quaint, an element of local color rather like Wrigley Field.
Many writers have tried to explain and denounce this corruption ever since 28 voters elected the first five town trustees in 1833. The latest entry on a shelf of such books is Kenneth A. Manaster’s “Illinois Justice: The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens.”
Even people who lived in Chicago and followed the headlines at the time might struggle to remember just which scandal the title is describing. The year 1969 also saw the police killings of two Black Panthers and the start of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial stemming from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. Four years later, former Gov. Otto Kerner and his sidekick Theodore J. Isaacs were jailed for taking illegal racetrack stock favors. When it comes to Chicago and Illinois public corruption, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.
“Illinois Justice” explores a 32-year-old scandal that was middling by our standards. Nonetheless, it is an important book. Among other things, it illuminates what went wrong with the federal independent-counsel investigations of the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s and the Clinton-Whitewater-Monica affairs of the 1990s.
Just the facts: Chicago lawyer Isaacs, the Army buddy, campaign manager, state revenue director and later prison mate of Kerner, had been charged in 1964 with rigging a state contract. The indictments were dismissed by the Illinois Supreme Court. Isaacs had given sweetheart bank-stock deals to the court’s chief justice and an associate justice. This was normal procedure. At the time, Illinois corporations dispensed cut-rate stocks to politicians like gumball machines.
A gadfly reformer, Sherman H. Skolnick, and Illinois newspapers raised a stink about the Isaacs case. The state high court was moved to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within weeks, not years, the commission revealed the facts and forced the resignations of Chief Justice Roy J. Solfisburg Jr. of Aurora and Justice Ray I. Klingbiel of East Moline.
The spectacular performance of the commission’s chief counsel, John Paul Stevens, propelled his elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975. Manaster served on the commission staff as a state assistant attorney general and now is a law professor in California.
Isaacs and Kerner, by then a federal appellate judge, were jailed in the 1970s for an unrelated racing-stock scam. Their prosecutor was a young U.S. attorney named James R. Thompson, later governor from 1977-91.
Did you keep all that straight? Unfortunately, the braided kinships of Illinois politicians and businessmen — relationships that usually are not technically illegal — demand the closest attention to unravel. This is another reason why public corruption persists.
The Chicago Daily News did not cover itself with glory in reporting the Isaacs case, perhaps in part because the newspaper’s chief executive was a friend and business associate of Isaacs’. Tracking corruption is a full-time, grubby, frustrating job. A successful investigation such as that achieved by Manaster’s commission is an exception. Such an effort requires labor and money, resources that reformers, including the media, are not eager to expend.
Manaster writes clearly — “for a lawyer,” a journalist cannot resist the temptation to add — about the minutiae of bank and stock dealings in the Isaacs case. Still, he gets bogged down in these details. The heart of the book lies in the final chapter, “Integrity of the Judgments,” and the foreword, written by Stevens.
Stevens cites the dictum of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall that the Constitution does not prohibit Congress from passing stupid laws. For example, the (now-lapsed) law creating special prosecutors was stupid but not unconstitutional. And so it came to pass that the Iran-contra and Clinton prosecutors spent many years and many millions of dollars to little effect. By contrast, Stevens notes, the 1969 Illinois commission had a narrow assignment and a stringent deadline. If we want to root out corruption, that is the way to do it.
Manaster notes another major feature of public corruption in that Solfisburg and Klingbiel, testifying on the commission’s witness stand, sincerely did not believe they had done anything wrong. In their minds, they merely had tried to help their constituents by fostering economic growth through a bank while exchanging favors with their friends. Favors and friends are not illegal.
Such is the essential defense raised today by defenders of Mayor Richard M. Daley and his O’Hare International Airport and city-contractor cronies. Likewise, it was raised by city and county officials in the Operations Silver Shovel and Haunted Hall scandals of the 1990s, and Cook County judges in the Operation Greylord scandal of the 1980s, and Mayor Richard J. Daley’s friends jailed by Thompson in the 1970s, and the Chicago police scandals of the 1960s, and the Kefauver Crime Commission targets of the 1950s, and . . . let us now draw a curtain of modesty across this parade of wrongdoers.
In any case, our corrupt politicians still tend to receive their indictments with a pose of wide-eyed befuddlement and victimhood, a boneheaded obtuseness about ethics that drives reformers and editorial writers to cry out with will-they-never-learn lamentations.
Manaster observes that during his 1969 testimony, Isaacs “seemed to view his and his friends’ activities — whether in government service or outside ventures — as akin to participation in an exclusive private club.” The bank in question, Civic Center Bank, was little more than a clout-and-money playground for this club. Similar ones thrive even now.
By the way, Kerner was an especially clueless crook. Manaster does not note this, but as the U.S. attorney here in the 1950s, Kerner said: “There is no such thing as organized crime or syndicated crime or gambling. It is only newspaper talk.” Only a creature of the Chicago political machine could say such a thing.
Manaster’s conclusions are judicious and well-reasoned. But he does not address the larger question of why Chicago has a 170-year history of fundamental corruption. The continual procession of crooked politicians to jail as choreographed by recent U.S. attorneys, however gratifying to citizens, does not strike at the heart of the problem either.
Rather, endemic corruption suggests that something is wrong with our prevailing laws, institutions and customs. Until those are changed, there will be plenty of work for prosecutors — and Second City comedians.
