By RALPH WHITEHEAD JR.

Requiem for Daley seems really for Howlett

The book gives a fragmented
and distorted picture of the Mayor's dealings with Jimmy Carter

Requiem: The Decline and Demise of Mayor Daley and His Era,
Len O'Connor.
Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1977.
203 pp. $8.95

RUSHED onto the page and into print, all the better to capitalize on the death of Richard J. Daley, Requiem shows the signs of hasty work: errors of fact, slipshod research, glib judgments and yards and yards of conjecture. The book displays' only some of the color and none of the common sense of Len O'Connor's earlier profile of the late mayor, Clout. Nor is Requiem's quality helped along by its dubious thesis: namely, at the end of his life and his career, Mayor Daley was losing his mind and his power.

Yet, at least two of the issues raised by the book do seem worth pursuing: one is the nature of Michael J. Howlett's campaign for governor last year, and the other is the character of Mayor Daley's relationship to Jimmy Carter, as Carter sought first the Democratic nomination and then the White House.

As much as it's a Daley story, Requiem is also a Howlett story, and perhaps even more so. A lot of the book is about Howlett, and in some places it even seems to be by Howlett, as told to his old friend O'Connor. Or, at the least, it is by O'Connor clearly telling the Howlett side, on Howlett's behalf. Thus, the subtitle could just as well be "The Decline and Demise of Michael J. Howlett and His Era."

Requiem portrays Howlett strictly as a victim: an affable and easygoing man of little ambition as the story picks him up in the middle of 1975. He's the secretary of state and wants to be nothing more than the secretary of state — or so the book contends. But a villain, Richard J. Daley, compulsive and deranged, wants to drive Howlett into a thankless campaign for the governorship in 1976 that Howlett supposedly doesn't seek and wouldn't accept, were it not for Daley's cunning and sleight-of-hand. In time, Howlett relents, resigns himself to running and defeats an incumbent governor of his own party, only to have Daley pull the plug and refuse to give him strong enough backing in the general election against James R. Thompson. Or so we're told.

Well, there are a number of things to be said about this portrait.

Howlett's ambition

First, Howlett's ambition wasn't as modest as Requiem would make it seem. For more than 20 years, Howlett had been working his way up, slowly but steadily, through the constitutional offices. He'd been cultivating a Downstate following and distancing himself just enough from Mayor Daley and a lot of the other boys up in Cook County. He'd even moved his home to Springfield for several years. He did keep an open alliance with John Touhy, but even Touhy, despite his origins on the West Side of Chicago, was also trying in the early 1970's to broaden his own base by serving as the state

RALPH WHITEHEAD JR.
A former journalist in Chicago, he recently joined the faculty of the Department of Journalistic Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst, Mass.

4/ December 1977/ Illinois Issues

chairman of the Democratic party, perhaps Howlett wasn't grooming him-self for the governorship for all those years, but it's only fair to say that a lot of politicians who thought a great deal of Mike Howlett figured he was getting ready to go for the top. They were all delighted with the prospect of backing him.

Second, if Howlett was running for governor and if he did think he'd be able to use the secretary of state's office as a steppingstone to the higher office, then he was guilty of a serious (though a highly understandable) misreading of the power and stature of a secretary of state.

In the lore of Illinois politics, the office of secretary of state is valued highly and there are reasons why the lore is sound. The secretary of state surely controls the sinews of political war. With 3,800 patronage jobs and with those jobs spread nicely and evenly through a network of outlets in six dozen different counties, the office carries its own broad, deep and ready-made base for a political organization, specially one with clout in a primary. At the same time, all those driver's licenses and other public records offer he basis for a lot of day-by-day recognition of the secretary's name. For the last 25 years, the office has also appeared to be a Downstate preserve, at least on the Democratic side. It is thought to belong by political custom to downstate's leading Democrat, a Paul Powell or an Alan Dixon. With the Cook County vote secured by the Democratic organization and with downstate sewed up through the power and pelf of the office, a secretary of state is a powerful gubernatorial candidate for the Democrats — or so the theory would seem to go.

If you take a closer look, though, will begin to see how narrow and even trivial the secretary's office actually is. Its duties tend to be clerical or ceremonial. It carries few if any formal powers to shape policies on the major issues of taxes, the shape of the budget, criminal justice and social programs. Thus, it isn't a place where a rising politician is likely to be able to build the kind of record required for a campaign for governor. The office simply lacks stature: if Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, then the secretary of state, as one Chicago politician likes to put it, will go down in history as the Great Laminator.

Consequently, as much as Howlett might have gained through the office — and he did gain at least some of the Downstate identification carried by a secretary of state — he lost far more. As one of Thompson's campaign advisors explained it: "Secretary of state isn't a starring role. It's more of a character part, more of a supporting role."

Thus, Howlett was typecast as a supporting player. As the private campaign polls taken by Dan Walker and Jim Thompson showed in the summer of 1975, Mike Howlett was an enormously popular man. He was well liked throughout Illinois, in Chicago and the suburbs and Downstate, but he was popular as the secretary of state. The office evidently was able to shrink or limit his stature to fit its own size and no more. (Maybe it's time to change the lore surrounding the secretary of state's office and to draw the rule-of-thumb as follows: it's a valued office for a man or a woman who wants to run time after time for secretary of state, but is willing to forego the higher offices of governor or U.S. senator).

Howlett's public image

The third thing that's wrong with O'Connor's portrait is that if Howlett was the victim of anything at all, he was the victim of his own obsolete sense of how to build a public career and how to run a statewide political campaign in the 1970's.

Michael J. Howlett is the old pol's old pol. Therein lies a good deal of the man's charm, not to mention his popularity as an after dinner speaker, boon companion and drinking buddy. He was committed to old-fashioned face-to-face campaigning, not only for the precinct captains but also for himself, as an officeholder and as a candidate. For him, the best way and the only way to build a vote was to get onto the stump, move through the crowds, take people by the hand and look them straight in the eye. Once, Howlett took aside Chicago Alderman Clifford Kelley, and as Kelley tells the story, took him through the Howlett philosophy for building a public image:

"Mike and I were talking — this was a few years ago — and he puts his hand on my shoulder and says: 'Cliff, the name Michael J. Howlett stands for honesty and integrity in government in Illinois — you know that, don't you?'

"And I said: 'Yes, sir, I do know that, it does indeed stand for those things.'

"And he said: 'Well, Cliff, you want to know why the name of Michael J. Howlett stands for honesty and integrity of government?'

"So I said: 'Yes, sir, of course I'd like to know.'

"And he said: 'Well, for the last 20 years, I've gone up and down this state. I've gone to every county fair, every railroad crossing, every town square, every bean supper, all the communion breakfasts and the sports banquets, the Father's Nights, the bingo games, the Holy Name meetings, the "L" stops, you name it, everywhere — and every place I've gone, all those years, I've said: "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, or good afternoon, or good evening, my name is Michael J. Howlett, and I stand for honesty and integrity in government." That's why, Cliff, that's why!'"

After two decades or more of careful groundwork, after moving up through the constitutional offices, after nursing his name recognition higher and higher over the years, and after building up his popularity and his favorability at the same slow but steady rate, Michael J. Howlett was wasted in the general election by a newcomer, James R. Thompson — a man who was totally unknown outside of the Chicago media market as late as the fall of 1975.

One of the reasons for this was all too simple: Thompson knew how to use the laborsaving technology of the mass media, how to let his image do the walking on the front pages and through the air, and in a few months he was able to create impressions powerful enough to obscure all those built up so carefully by Howlett by a chat or a talk or a handshake one at a time.

It's easy to see why Howlett could

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become distressed and even bitter, or at least why O'Connor could feel bitter on Howlett's behalf. The man ended a long and valued career in humiliation and saw the one person left in the world who genuinely owed him, Daley, collapse and die of a heart attack only six weeks later taking Howlett's due bill into the ground at Holy Sepulchre. But the shares of the blame for Howlett's failure should still be placed where they belong and not carelessly heaped on Daley's grave.

Jimmy Carter's courtship

Requiem also offers a fragmented and distorted picture of Daley's dealings with Jimmy Carter. As O'Connor tells it, Carter was as much of an outsider as he wanted the country to think he was, and consequently Carter stuck it to the mayor every chance he got, either personally or through his hard-eyed campaign staff. O'Connor says Carter let Daley know the mayor's influence on Carter's campaign and the administration to follow was to be nil.

This simply isn't true. For several years, Carter took pains to try to cultivate Mayor Daley. He visited him in Chicago on several occasions, as a governor of the same party persuasion and as the chairman of the 1974 Democratic Campaign Committee. He returned to Chicago early in 1975 when the mayor was running for his sixth term and walked through a guided tour of Daley's campaign, complete with wall charts of its organizational patterns, its media plans and all the rest. Carter hoped the mayor might in time realize that he, too, was a student of political organization. As Carter's presidential campaign began to surface, he kept in even closer touch with Daley, in person or on the phone. In Marathon, the long and carefully detailed account of the 1976 campaign by Jules Witcover, Carter's courtship of the mayor is described:

"All through the campaign, Carter had assiduously maintained direct communications with Chicago's authentic boss, understanding full well that no other single Democrat, save Kennedy or perhaps Humphrey, had it within his power to tip the scales at the proper moment.

'"We would place a call to Daley every week or ten days,' Greg Schneiders said. 'Carter himself always talked to Daley. Nobody else in the campaign ever talked to him until after the convention. The calls were always the same, never specific, never that an endorsement at some point would be helpful. It was always, "I just wanted to talk with you, let you know how the campaign is going."'"

Moreover, Carter approached the mayor with tact and delicacy. He didn't address him implicitly as The Boss, the poker-faced and ham-handed master of clout, but as a man of moral force and aspirations. In short, Carter treated the mayor just as Daley evidently saw himself — as a spiritual leader. The rhetoric of Mayor Daley's endorsement of Carter reflected these conversations:

"I've known him for years," the mayor said. "He's got a religious tone in what he says and maybe we should have a little more religion in our community . . . The man talks about true values."

Carter also appreciated Daley's force and value as a symbolic figure in the Democratic party. "He's important," Carter told Martin Schram of Newsday in the middle of the campaign. "You know, the county chairperson of a south Georgia rural area and the county chairperson of a metropolitan county in Pennsylvania or New York, they look on Mayor Daley as a sort of surrogate for them. He was a professional and his word was his bond, and they look to him as an exemplification of what they are. And his support therefore is significant in the eyes of the media, in the eyes of the delegates whom he can influence, and in his posture as a loyal local Democratic official."

And so it goes. If you read through the emerging literature on the 1976 campaign, the reporters who were on the road with Carter month after month all agree his regard for Mayor Daley was a personal as well as a political feeling.

Only Len O'Connor, sitting in Chicago, where he evidently dropped by for an occasional press conference at City Hall or ceremonial event at a Loop hotel, came up with a different story. Thus, the burden of proof would seem to be on him.

So, Requiem stacks up as little more than 203 pages of exploitation; it is tasteless, untouched by intelligence or careful judgment, and dead wrong. If Richard Daley had been a rock star or a movie hero, this book would fit nicely into the pages of the National Enquirer

6/ December 1977/ Illinois Issues