A few frank comments from Jay McMullen

By ED McMullen

THE WAY the story goes, Jane Byrne got mad at her husband one day and hit him in the forehead with an ashtray. They rushed Jay McMullen to a hospital and stitched him up, then shipped him off to Florida for a few days until the wound healed. A nurse who was there for the stitching told Walter Jacobson of WBBM-TV all about it.

Only trouble is, Jay told Walter, it didn't happen. But McMullen told us he has become accustomed to knocking down rumors since his wife became mayor of Chicago. Considering the way the volatile mayor has been tossing people out of City Hall, it wasn't too far-fetched to think Jay was her latest victim.

McMullen, a flamboyant, raffish, outspoken, 60-year-old newspaper reporter, married Mrs. Byrne a year before her stunning 1979 election victory. Last January, he took a one-year leave of absence from the Chicago Sun-Times to become her press secretary and chief political adviser. At his first appearance as press secretary, when the mayor was asked if she was happy with the first press release he wrote, McMullen interjected, "I wrote it lying right next to her. If she didn't like it, she could have changed it." In September, People Magazine quoted him as saying the mayor "has great legs and a great little ass."

One recent afternoon we spent an hour talking to McMullen in his office on the sixth floor of City Hall.

McMullen seemed to go out of his way to put distance between the mayor and her mentor, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. The Daley administration, he said, "swept so many things under the rug that even the mayor, as a commissioner [of consumer services], was not aware of what was going on in the budget department. She had no way of knowing. Her relationship with Daley was, first, with her department, and second, politically. He never shared any fiscal secrets with her — the state of city finances — and all these hat tricks that Daley was pulling with the budget."

Daley's son, Richie, McMullen predicted, won't run for mayor in 1983, as many observers expect. "The memories of the Daley machine and the things that went on here in the Daley years are still too fresh in people's minds," McMullen said. "You can recycle Richie any way you want to, but you've still got a Daley. . . . Dick Daley was not popular in his last years in office. Some people felt sorry for him. But when he ran against Billy Singer a lot of guys cashed in a lot of chits to put Dick Daley over in that election. And now that somebody else has been in, and we found out what the rotten timbers underneath were, I don't think people are going back to a Daley for a long time." (The interview took place shortly before Richie Daley was elected Cook County state's attorney November 4.)

McMullen said he doubted Daley would run for mayor, whether or not he won the state's attorney race. "I think what Richie will eventually do is run for Congress," he said.

The mayor is a cinch for reelection, he said.

"I can't see any new major challenge. [Roman] Pucinski ran once and couldn't even beat [Michael] Bilandic. I think Danny Rostenkowski's heart is in Washington. I don't think Tom Hynes is that interested; I think he'll run again for assessor. He's got to run again for assessor, so he'd be getting elected as assessor in November [1982] and what's he going to do, delcare for mayor in December — a month later? .... I think by the time 1983 rolls around you're going to find that Jane Byrne has got this government so turned around that her popularity will discourage anybody who even has a notion. And I'll tell you one other thing: We're going to have a war chest that will enable her to put up any kind of a campaign that she wants. Every year in city government alone about 1,500 people retire, resign or die, which means the mayor every year names 1,500 new people. These are her people. Over a four-year period this eliminates 6,000 or more former employees who are beholden to the previous administrations and adds 6,000 new troops who are her's. So every year that the mayor is in office she becomes stronger, becomes more experienced. She spots trouble spots and copes with them, and builds up her war chest. We'll be ready in 1983 for anything that comes along, don't worry."

Some people say McMullen talks too much.

"When they refer to Jay McMullen, they refer to him as the mayor's press spokesman," McMullen said. "If you don't speak in this job, what do you do? I make sure that people get my message and I don't pull any punches."

What about that quote in People Magazine?

"I never made that remark, not that the remark was so goddamn bad. You know, this is the kind of remark a guy might say in joking to a friend sitting in the bar having a drink, but nobody in his right mind would ever make that kind of remark to a reporter about his wife if she's a public figure like the mayor. I mean, I'm not insane."

Is he going back to the Sun-Times? On December 5, he announced he wasn't. Yet a few weeks before, during this interview, he said he expected to return. At that time he said: "I think I've reorganized the mayor's press relations. I've got her format fairly well-established. Dealing with the City Hall press is a very ticklish operation. I know the syndrome, I was part of it at one time, and I understand it, and I taught the mayor how to deal with it so she is not at a disadvantage at all times in meeting the press."

A columnist said recently that McMullen was thinking of running for the state Senate in 1982. Any truth to that?

"You know what? I planted that, just to get somebody stirred up. I wouldn't run for public office if somebody gave me a million dollars."

January 1981/Illinois Issues/36