Friends and colleagues of reporter Jacquelyn Heard feared she’d be eaten alive when Mayor Richard Daley hired her as his press secretary. At 32, she was too young, they thought, too humble, too earnest to survive in the shark-tank atmosphere of City Hall.
That was in 1997. Nine years later, Heard hasn’t just survived in the pressure cooker job, but thrived, even as a long list of top Daley administration officials have been fired or flamed out.
She is one of the longest-serving top officials in one of the longest-serving administrations in Chicago history, though one increasingly rocked by turmoil and turnover.
In her years under Daley, Heard has evolved into a close mayoral confidant with influence in the shaping of policy on education, public housing, crime fighting and a wide array of other matters that go well beyond the bounds of her job title. In the process she has developed a personal bond with her demanding and sometimes explosive boss.
Her role as Daley’s spokeswoman hasn’t been easy of late. The recent conviction of Daley’s one-time patronage chief, part of an escalating federal probe of city hiring fraud, has put a premium on damage control and image preservation.
Obscured by the scandal is one of City Hall’s most fascinating back stories: the ascendance of Heard. It is a story that plays against stereotype, in a town where cronies and fat cats have long been portrayed as the only true powerbrokers.
Heard grew up in West Side public housing and has endured intense personal tragedy–the random murder of a sister whose children she is raising. She has no political pedigree.
Yet Daley, often stiff and distant, has grown “very comfortable with Jackie,” said William Daley, the former U.S. commerce secretary who is the mayor’s brother. “It’s been a very tough last couple of years for him, and I think that has helped make their bond and friendship grow stronger.”
Heard, 41, spends so much time with her boss that mayoral staffers call the path between their fifth-floor offices “Jackie Heard Way.” Daley calls her frequently after hours, often just to chat or check up on her family.
“The saying is that opposites attract,” said Julian Green, a former Daley press aide who now works for U.S. Sen. Barack Obama. “You have the mayor who is very passionate and a very demanding boss and who is notorious for getting his point across. On the other side, you have Jackie who is quiet and shy and is a nurturer.”
The two couldn’t be more different. Descended from the city’s Irish-American political aristocracy, Daley has a reputation for mangling English and chewing out and chewing up subordinates.
Heard, who is African-American, is quiet, unflappable and self-effacing, a media specialist who hates being in the limelight herself. Her reluctance to toot her own horn, keeping her contributions on policy decisions to herself, has helped develop her influence with Daley.
As she has grown closer to Daley, she has grown ferociously protective of him. She is cordial but cautious with her old colleagues in the City Hall press corps, whose coverage of scandal and political intrigue often puts her boss on the defensive. Favorable stories are selectively planted with pliant media outlets, while press attempts to obtain information that could prove unflattering to the administration can be stonewalled.
Even as her influence has grown, Heard in many ways remains a classic working parent whose social life revolves around getting to ballgames and school concerts or driving her mother, Mary, to the grocery.
Heard is, in fact, quite happy to budget plenty of chauffeuring time for her mom–and there is a story behind that which explains much about how her life and career were formed.
Fresh out of journalism school in 1987, Heard snagged a reporting internship with the Chicago Tribune. But there was a problem. She had never learned to drive, a prerequisite for a job where on-the-spot mobility was imperative. Her big break might’ve been over before it began if her editors found out.
To the rescue came Heard’s mother, who drafted a pool of friends to drive the young reporter to assignments. They spent eight-hour shifts parked near Tribune offices, at the ready when Heard needed to dash out to the scene of a murder, fire or other breaking news.
The arrangement lasted not for a week or two, but six months–long enough for Heard to earn her license and a full-time job. Her editors never knew.
Support from a close-knit and dedicated family has been Heard’s secret weapon in her climb to the centers of power.
Heard is a self-described loner. Her passions are antiquing, Scrabble and jumping double-Dutch rope, a skill honed growing up on the playgrounds of the old Henry Horner Homes.
Mother set the bar high
Double-Dutch was a social icebreaker for Heard, so studious and shy as a youngster that friends tried to bribe her with cash to go to parties.
When not in school or jumping rope, she stuck to the 13th-floor apartment at 111 N. Wood St. that she shared with her mother and younger sister, Karen. An older brother lived with Heard’s grandparents in Vicksburg, Miss. Heard’s parents were separated, and her father rarely came around.
Mary Heard was a teacher’s aide. A firm and focused woman who set expectations high for her daughters, she refused to allow them to be defined by their circumstances.
“I always told them, if somebody else can do it, you can too,” said Mary Heard, now 72.
Jackie, a devoted bookworm, one summer set out to learn the dictionary and made it to “G,” much to the bemusement of Karen, who constantly poked fun at her as a “goody-two-shoes.”
Karen was the spunky sister, the one who later in life would get a tattoo. Jackie had to be persuaded to get her ears pierced.
In 2nd grade, Karen once feuded with another girl who threatened to have her big brothers settle it with Jackie on the playground. Heard defused the threat by passing a note to classmates asking them to stand with her after school. All 32 did, and the crisis passed.
That steadiness comes from her mother.
“Jackie has a lot of my sister’s ways, maybe in a little more sophisticated manner” said Heard’s aunt, Ruby Bryant. “It’s ingrained in them to do what you need to do, do it with compassion, do it ethically, do it religiously.”
Bryant, a retired assistant school principal in Chicago, also played a significant role in Heard’s upbringing. Bryant had two daughters of her own, and the families were inseparable.
Nearly every weekend and vacation they would pile into Bryant’s car and head off to museums, malls, restaurants or road trips. It was part of a deliberate strategy to expose the Heard girls to the world outside Horner Homes.
Jackie, an honors student, eventually won admission to one of the city’s top high schools at the time, Lane Tech. Lane was 6 miles and sometimes a 90-minute bus ride away. She often left home before sunrise, but had perfect attendance.
“On those many mornings when the elevator didn’t work, my mom would literally walk me down the 13 flights of stairs,” Heard recalled. “It was only when I got older it dawned on me she then had to walk back up those 13 flights of stairs.”
It was at Lane that Heard first got the journalism bug, and that was out of defiance. A teacher had ripped her class, telling students he doubted one of them could make it as a journalist.
Heard graduated 12th out of a class of 1,300 and won a full scholarship to Northwestern University, where she majored in journalism. But the Evanston campus was so different from the West Side, or from Lane Tech for that matter, that Heard was in culture shock.
Early in her freshman year, Heard called her mother in a panic. “Ma, these people, they have cars and they’ve got designer clothes. I don’t have any of those things,” Heard recalls saying. “They’ve gone to private schools. I think I might have chosen the wrong school.”
Mary Heard replied, “But you all wound up in the same place, correct? What does that say about you?” Then Heard remembers her mother saying: “You have no choice. You have to do well there. You have to. There’s no other option, Jackie, so don’t even consider it.”
End of discussion. End of panic attack.
Society parties to City Hall
Heard felt another twinge of intimidation when she first joined the Tribune. There was the driving problem, of course. Then there were all those salty and hard-to-impress veteran reporters, many years her senior, whose bylines she had been reading for years. One introduced himself by declaring, “I’ve got ties older than you.”
In hindsight, there was a measure of irony in the first story Heard covered, a deadly blaze in a South Side hotel riddled with building code violations. “Hotel in fatal fire linked to city aide,” read the headline.
Heard spent a decade at the Tribune, covering everything from the suburbs to society parties to schools. Newsrooms, much like City Hall, can be populated by climbers with sharp elbows. Heard wasn’t one of them. Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski remembers her as intensely hard-working, earnest and pleasant.
“She wanted to do good and do something that matters,” Lipinski recalled.
And she did. In 1995, Heard scored several scoops in the coverage of a cheating scandal at Steinmetz High School that led to the school being stripped of a statewide academic title. The incident later was dramatized by HBO in a television movie.
Heard also had the byline on another memorable story, one she would rather forget. In 1989, she prematurely killed off Ald. Vito Marzullo, then the 91-year-old dean of the City Council. A tip–which turned out to be bad–came to the paper just before deadline. An editor, who believed the tipster, told Heard to write the obituary, though they did not have full confirmation.
By 1996, Heard had moved on to cover Daley on the City Hall beat. She was engaged to be married. Her life and career seemed on cruise control.
But on the morning of July 13, that changed in an instant.
A robbery attempt at a clothing store on West Madison Street turned into a shootout between gang members. One customer was cut down in the crossfire: Karen Heard.
Jackie and Karen had been inseparable. They talked on the phone constantly, and had been preoccupied planning Jackie’s wedding. Karen wanted salmon pink for the bridesmaids’ dresses, Jackie silver gray.
Karen was there when Jackie met her fiance, Henry Bassett Jr., while buying a car from a dealership in Schaumburg where he worked as a finance manager. Bassett was clearly interested. With Jackie out of earshot, it was Karen who counseled Bassett on his prospects.
“She was my only sister, beauty consultant, gossip partner, deep-into-the-night telephone mate, my closest friend,” Heard later wrote to a judge at the sentencing for one of the killers. “Now that Karen is gone. … I find it difficult to breathe, really.”
Heard felt numb. She teared up on the floor of the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, back at work just weeks after Karen’s death, when President Bill Clinton launched into a litany of promises for the next four years. She still teared up years later, once while pawing through the ice cream case at a grocery store. Inside was a box of Karen’s favorite flavor, amaretto.
Two men were convicted in Karen’s death, but a cycle of appeals and retrials didn’t end until last December. Each court appearance opened old sores.
Keeping sister’s memory alive
Time has eased, but not erased, the intensity of Heard’s sorrow. “It’s still with her,” said Heard’s cousin Gwen Smith. “Jackie’s not one to revisit things very often, but at holidays and other events, she’ll start talking about how Karen would have acted.”
Some of that, Smith said, is an effort to keep Karen’s memory alive for her children. Karen was a single parent. When she was killed, her daughter, Brittney, was 6 and her son, Keith, just 1. Heard and Bassett, who live in the Austin neighborhood, have been raising them since. They call her “Auntie.”
Years ago, as Heard was preparing Keith for his first day of school, the phone rang. It was a mayoral aide also named Karen. The little boy assumed it was his mother. “Is she calling to see if I’m having a good day on my first day?” he asked.
Heard had barely settled into her role as instant parent when Daley’s job offer came out of the blue. His spokesman, Jim Williams, was leaving to take a television reporting job. Heard was shocked. She had been covering Daley’s administration for more than a year, but she wasn’t sure he even knew who she was.
Daley concedes he couldn’t put the name with the face at the time and says only that she was recommended by people whom he did not name.
Race was surely part of the equation. In his 17 years as mayor, Daley has had three chief spokesmen. They have been the public face of his tenure, and all have been African-American.
Daley offered Heard the job over a breakfast that stretched on for hours. “I just felt comfortable in our first discussion,” Daley recalled. Heard said the mayor did almost all the talking.
She put off Daley for a week and agonized so much she woke up ill. Heard said she loved being a reporter and never considered anything else.
To this day, she can recite passages of stories she wrote. Some poked fun at Daley.
“Only in Chicago would a mayor named Daley have more clout than the Prince of Peace,” Heard wrote when aldermen reluctantly bowed to his wishes and voted to eliminate Good Friday as an official city holiday.
The decision came to this: Heard had no desire to become an editor at the Tribune, and because of her family, she wasn’t going to leave town to work on the paper’s national or foreign staffs. Careerwise, she reasoned, she had gone as far as she could go at the paper, and the money at City Hall was good. Her current salary is $146,700.
As a reporter covering Daley, Heard was, by necessity, thrust into an adversarial role with an administration that was often secretive and distrustful of the press. At first, she said, some Daley aides greeted her warily when she joined his senior staff.
Yet Heard insists it was her instincts as a reporter that helped gain Daley’s trust. “The mayor expects the people around him to honestly tell him what they think,” she said. “Because of the title and who he is, people sometimes shy away from giving him the bald truth. I didn’t.”
Avis LaVelle, Daley’s press secretary from 1989 to 1992, said he can scare underlings into becoming “yes” men or women. “I find the mayor has tremendous respect for people who stand their ground,” she said. “He can be volatile sometimes, and some people go scurrying around like mice, but I don’t think that is what he respects most.”
Asked to describe Heard, Daley replied, “Trusted adviser and good judgment.”
A former city department head, among those who have departed in the heavy turnover in Daley’s Cabinet during the last two years, had a different take.
The mayor is the dictatorial boss, and Heard is the soldier who faithfully puts out his message, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“She’s a survivor. She is extremely and exclusively loyal to the mayor. … I never got a sense she very often disagreed with him.”
Heard understands “the minimum requirements of the press,” he said, “and also knows how to run a story to ground–either by not giving access to information or to give so much of it, it is not clear.” Reporters or average citizens seeking city records through the Freedom of Information Act routinely are slowed by foot-dragging or stymied altogether.
`She’s a calming influence’
For his part, Daley acknowledged he has developed a special “chemistry” with Heard. Both declined to be specific about contributions she makes to administration policy.
That he has come to depend on her is obvious. Daley insisted she sit in while he was being interviewed about her for this story.
Administration sources say Heard plays a critical role in hot-button policy issues, from schools to aviation to public housing and transportation. In 2003, Heard’s forceful advocacy for a plan to respond to outbreaks of violence with saturation police patrols helped convince Daley that the strategy would be welcomed on the streets. The strategy worked.
The joke around the mayor’s office is that if you’re a Cabinet officer in hot water, the last thing you want to do is accept a lunch invitation from Heard. She’s likely to be the one to deliver the message that it’s time to go.
Last year, for example, Heard consulted with Planning Commissioner Denise Casalino, once a rising star. Shortly after, Casalino quit because of conflicts of interest involving her developer husband.
Bassett likened the relationship between his wife and her boss to a marriage. “Over a nine-year span you grow to lean on a person and trust them,” said Bassett, who was hired as a lobbyist for the city-run Chicago Housing Authority after Heard joined the administration. “They have the same sense of humor–witty, dry, corny. … She’s got common sense, and I think he appreciates it.”
“Serene,” is the word David Axelrod, Daley’s political strategist, uses to describe Heard. “She’s not panicky or given to fits of anger,” Axelrod explained. “She’s a calming influence on the whole operation.”
Heard’s biggest challenges may lie ahead as the federal investigation works its way up the City Hall food chain, possibly at the same time her boss runs for re-election next February.
Those who know Heard don’t sell her short.
“Because she is so friendly and approachable, sometimes people underestimate her,” said one colleague. “She is tough.”
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bsecter@tribune.com
gwashburn@tribune.com
