Read Believer: My Forty Years in Politics for Free Online Page A

party and its candidates.
    The precinct captains would essentially become customer service representatives, using their clout and connections to deliver “favors” to residents: a new trash can or a curb repair; help with a job; or running interference with some government bureaucracy. In exchange, the captains expected loyalty from grateful voters for the party’s entire slate of candidates.
    Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, who went on to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was one of the most powerful men in Washington before he went to prison for chiseling a few extra bucks by cashing in government-issued stamps. He was also a local Democratic committeeman, and he would come home to Chicago from Washington every week to tend to his ward duties. When his precinct captains gathered, they often opened their meetings with a polka in his honor. “Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Rostenkowski,” the faithful would sing in praise of their leader, whose dad, Joe, had preceded him as the ward’s committeeman. “He’s our Ways, he’s our Means . . . that’s Danny Rostenkowski!”
    Of course, when public workers were evaluated on the basis of votes in their precincts rather than their performance (or even attendance) at their public jobs, it didn’t exactly guarantee quality government. It did, however, guarantee lopsided vote totals that, in some precincts, occasionally defied common sense and even the rules of arithmetic. Some voters found it galling that they were required to pledge their ballots in exchange for “favors,” or basic public services that they already paid for through their taxes. In any case, they had little recourse. Many accepted it as the way Chicago worked.
    At its zenith, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Daley’s power was enormous. He had wielded it to build and modernize Chicago, earning cover boy treatment in
Time
magazine as America’s leading mayor. And he amplified it by providing the critical votes for Jack Kennedy in 1960, delivering enough late-breaking ballots to tip the state and the election to his fellow Irish Catholic—a favor Kennedy would never forget.
    Even as his power and health waned, his organization began to fracture, and voters increasingly balked at the old arrangements, Daley remained the Man. When he suffered a stroke in 1974, and disappeared for months, reporters asked Ed Vrdolyak, one of the young turks on the City Council, how he and other committeemen would choose their slate of candidates for the upcoming election.
    “Well, Daley will tell us who we’re for and we’ll be for ’em, just like always,” he said.
    “But Ed,” one scribe responded. “We don’t even know if he can speak!”
    Vrdolyak was unfazed. “He can point, can’t he?”
    Still, by the time I arrived in Chicago in the fall of ’72, things were changing rapidly. Once-quiescent voters, many in the long-neglected African American community, were rumbling with discontent. Dan Walker, a corporate lawyer who had issued a blistering official report on police misconduct at the ’68 convention, stunned the political world by defeating Daley’s candidate for governor, Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon. A Republican would unseat the local Democratic prosecutor who had orchestrated a police raid that resulted in the deaths of two unarmed leaders of the Black Panthers, and a crusading young U.S. attorney named James R. Thompson, appointed by President Nixon, was rattling cages with corruption investigations that would eventually put several of Daley’s lieutenants in the federal penitentiary.
    Chicago’s four newspapers covered this raucous scene with side-of-the-mouth verve, led by Mike Royko of the
Chicago
Daily News
. The Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist had just published his book
Boss
, a brilliant takedown of Daley and his machine. In DC, two young investigative reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the
Washington Post
, had begun to unravel the Watergate