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60 6. The Crazy Eight Emerge The Senate was starting to look silly. One day we even got into a contentious debate about the opening prayer. Iwas at my law office Christmas party on December 20, 1976, at a place called the Junk in Chicago’s Chinatown. We took the staff there and had lunch and a few drinks, the typical Christmas party. The Junk’s owner, George Chung, a big-time Democrat, came running out of the kitchen and said, “Turn the TV on; turn the TV on!” It was all over the news that Mayor Richard J. Daley had died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four. As his health had been declining, his family had been keeping him at their house on Lake Michigan. Thomas R. Donovan, one of the mayor’s closest advisors as well as his patronage chief, actually had been running city hall for a while. (Donovan later became the nationally acclaimed president and CEO of the Chicago Board of Trade.)1 News of Daley’s death stunned us because the mayor had been such a force, a legendary power, since the 1950s, certainly for my entire political career. Nobody was prepared, politically, for the mayor’s death. It was another blow that rocked the status quo and meant that enormous changes were looming at the beginning of 1977. Because of the November election results , we were already going to have a new governor, a new U.S. president, and, for us, a new Senate president. So it was more than just the mayor’s death. Political life as we knew it in the city and the county would be forever different. Republican James R. Thompson won his first of four terms as governor, defeating our party’s candidate, Michael Howlett Sr., after Howlett had upended the incumbent, Governor Dan Walker, in the primary back in March. Howlett had won four consecutive statewide general elections before that—three as auditor of public accounts (a predecessor to the comptroller position) and one as secretary of state. At least we got rid of Walker—something we were all happy about. Thompson’s first term the crazy eight emerge 61 was a two-year term, mandated by the 1970 Illinois Constitution so that all future gubernatorial elections, starting in 1978, would not be held the same year as a presidential election. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, ousted incumbent president Gerald R. Ford at the national level, so there were changes everywhere at the top—Thompson the Republican governor, Carter the Democratic president. Our leader, Cecil Partee, gave up his Senate seat and the Senate presidency to be the Democratic nominee for attorney general. But he lost in the general election to incumbent Republican William Scott, who won his third term as attorney general. With Partee’s return to Chicago, there was a lot of speculation that I would become the new Senate president, a position I indeed wanted. It’s fair to say many considered me the front-runner. I had indicated to Mayor Daley right after the November election that I was interested in becoming Senate president. Daley seemed receptive. He didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes, either. He was usually more direct. If he didn’t like something, you knew about it. I was enthused by the fact that he did not say no and considered myself a contender. So after the mayor died, I went to see George Dunne, committeeman of the Forty-Second Ward and a former state representative. I also went to see Parky Cullerton , the Thirty-Eighth Ward committeeman and influential member of the late mayor’s inner circle, and Chicago alderman Michael Bilandic. After Daley died, of course, the big question became who was going to take over for the mayor. The city council voted to make Bilandic the acting mayor, pending a special election. The powers also settled on Dunne as the Cook County board president and leader of the Democratic Party in Cook County. Dunne apparently did not get the reception he wanted in order for him to become a future candidate for mayor. More than a few people thought that Alderman Wilson Frost, an African American from the South Side, had a good shot at becoming acting mayor. Frost was the head of the finance committee and was Emil Jones’s Thirty-Fourth Ward committeeman. He was highly regarded but didn’t get the mayoral nod; he later became a member of...

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