Cities: Clouter with Conscience

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Now unchallenged king of Illinois Democrats, he was ready to turn his hand to national prince-making. Although cool toward Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956, Daley could not really go against his fellow IIlinoisan. But he could fight against Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver, that intrepid fellow whose crime investigations had caused all sorts of trouble in Daley's Democratic Chicago. Having lost out to Adlai for the top spot, Keef was now after the nomination for Vice President. Daley set out to block him—and he selected as his own candidate Senator John Kennedy, whose shrewd, cool, political acumen he had come to like. Daley's delegation was the first to announce a major break to Kennedy's candidacy. The tension that followed the first and indecisive balloting at the convention was the most electric political moment of the year: at one point Kennedy stood within 38½ votes of the nomination, only to teeter and fall back. A breath-taking near miss it was for Kennedy, but one of the byproducts of the experience was a Kennedy-Daley alliance that still exists.

Between 1956 and 1960. Daley was a key supporter and consultant in Kennedy's race for the presidential nomination. At the party convention in Los Angeles. Daley sat Buddha-like while a Stevenson demonstration enveloped the floor. He exhibited emotion only once: when a Stevensonite grabbed the Illinois standard out of his hands, Daley boiled up a black rage.

For Election Day 1960, Daley had predicted a Chicago plurality of 450,000 votes for Kennedy. The margin was actually 456,000—giving Kennedy a statewide edge of 8,858. Daley was unworried by the fact that investigators later turned up voting irregularities involving no fewer than 677 election judges in 133 Chicago precincts. So, obviously, was Kennedy.* On the day after his inauguration, he posed in the White House for pictures with the Daley family, autographed one for the mayor. "Do you know," says Daley with great pride, "that we were the first family the President received?"

Robber Cops. Turning once again to his city, Daley resumed his campaign to rebuild Chicago's façade and to weed the jungle behind it. There was, for example, the Chicago police department. It was almost legend that Chicago's cops were the best that money could buy—and they could be bought easily. Public respect for the police had never been high, but it hit its nadir in 1960, when a two-bit thief blew the whistle on eight cops who were part of a burglary ring. The policemen had even used their patrol cars to haul away the loot, which over a two-year period amounted to about $100,000 in TV sets and electrical appliances.