Hamburg Heaven

By Keith Wheeler

BOSS: RICHARD J. DALEY OF CHICAGO by Mike Royko. 215 pages. Dutton. $5.95.

Burn the jacket, tear off the covers, excommunicate the author, and erase every proper noun, a book about Chicago remains, beyond any mistaking, a book about Chicago. The essential juices of the place somehow force any author to write with a special accent about the only city on earth where the likes ol Big Bill Thompson and Al Capone could coexist as civic leaders. In Chicago, there is indeed a certain interchangeability between politics and other lines of work. "The Hawk," Mike Royko writes, "was the outside lookout man at a bookie joint. Then his eyes got weak, and he had to wear thick glasses, so he entered politics . . ."

Royko is a newspaperman, a columnist and commentator for the Chicago Daily News. Though his book is essentially a hatchet job, released more or less to coincide with the campaign for last week's mayoralty election in Chicago, Royko sees Mayor Richard Daley as an inevitable product of the Chicago environment. The mayor was born into a workingman's family in Bridgeport, an Irish neighborhood in that South Side region known, without comment, as Back of the Yards. He was born to membership in the Hamburgs, an athletic club whose members took their exercise by beating the bejesus out of any blacks and Slavs foolish enough to stray onto the wrong side of the street. As young Hamburgs grew older, fatter and more sophisticated, the bonds of brotherhood held and forged a collective political power. The proto-mayor eventually used it to propel him into office.

The only really atypical aspect of Daley's youth was the size of his family: he was a greatly cherished only child. In a milieu where family solidarity was a virtue (and a power source) prized even above gang loyalty, Daley thus suffered a certain limitation--until he married into the numerous clan of Eleanor Guilfoyle. As an officeholder, he consolidated his family position by exploiting the rich grab bag of political patronage on behalf of the Guilfoyles. As Royko observes, "Eleanor's parents might well have said that they did not lose a daughter, they gained an employment agency."

All along, Royko insists, Daley never abandoned the original set of convictions he grew up with, though as his power increased, it became prudent to appear at least polite to other values. It did not astonish Royko when the mayor stayed inside his modest Bridgeport bungalow--he still lives there in his eminence--and not even the curtains twitched during the few nights in 1964 it took his neighbors to give the heave-ho to two Negro students who moved in a block and a half down the street.

Consequently, Royko confesses puzzlement that Daley's most consistently loyal constituency is in the black ghetto wards. Their loyalty, though, may be due to the diligence of Democratic precinct workers, who remind the voters that the continued receipt of welfare checks is somehow inextricable from the franchise. Then, being thorough in their work, says Royko, they accompany the voter into the polling booth to make sure he does not forget.

Royko's account leads inevitably to the 1968 national Democratic Convention, when the delegates were welcomed by signs proclaiming YOU HAVE ARRIVED IN DALEY COUNTRY! Daley was misguided, Royko says, to order his cops to shag Abbie Hoffman's Yippies out of the south end of Lincoln Park. The city, he contends, could not have chosen a better place to quarantine the protesters than the one they chose themselves. Instead, the police stormed in and all the world's TV audience gaped at the resulting riots. The author, indeed, may be guilty of some small taint of Chicago chauvinism when he assigns cosmic significance to that confrontation: "This is what may have determined the election and altered the course of world history--the decision that nobody would be in Lincoln Park after 11 o'clock."

No such book, of course, could be published without noting one of Daley's most famous political pronouncements. It came in 1968, after he had ridden a helicopter over the smoking West Side ruins in the wake of black riots touched off by the assassination of Martin Luther King. "I said to him [the police superintendent] very emphatically and very definitely that an order be issued by him immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand, because they're potential murderers, and to issue a police order to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city."

Within two days, even city hall became aware--with surprise--that the mayor's words had appalled many people outside his special world. However, Royko notes, the official strategy chosen to turn away public wrath was right in character. "It was damn bad reporting," the mayor's public relations counsel said, mildly chiding the press as he presented them with a classic non sequitur: "They should have printed what he meant, not what he said."

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