Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago

8. Daley and Dissent: 1960–69

176 Daley and Dissent 176 8 Daley and Dissent 1960–69 Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites anarchy. —U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead vs. U.S.,  Of all the cities I worked, Chicago is the most corrupt as far as politics and the police are concerned. It is the only town I know of where the cops will pick your pockets clean after a pinch [arrest]. In any other town, once they found the needle tracks on my arm, I would be locked up for the night with enough money to leave town the following morning. But in Chicago they would not leave me enough money for carfare. —junkie pickpocket “Black Sam,” quoted by Richard C. Lindberg, “‘Raising Cain’” That Daley’s machine stole votes for the Democratic ticket in  has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. However, the legend that vote fraud in Chicago gave the presidency to John F. Kennedy is false.1 Certainly, Daley supported Kennedy and the president rewarded him. In contrast to another myth that Daley never wanted any job but mayor, he contemplated running for governor in  but concluded that the top of the Illinois ticket could not contain two Catholics. He slated a Protestant, Otto Kerner, for governor. “I was thinking of my four sons and I wanted John Kennedy to be their president,” he said.2 (He also had three daughters.) The important point for understanding machine politics is that Chicago’s vote fraud was directed less at electing Kennedy than Daley and Dissent 177 at beating State’s Attorney Benjamin Adamowski.The machine could not tolerate an ambitious Republican prosecutor with subpoena powers, and so Adamowski lost. “All politics is local,” as the proverb says. Extra votes for Kennedy were scooped up at the  polls as an extravagant gift, so to speak, to the national party. Senior Illinois Republicans still can cite from memory the number of disputed votes—,—by which Kennedy carried the state. In  Roosevelt University dean George H. Watson and wealthy Republican businessman (later U.S. senator) Charles H. Percy, along with the Better Government Association, set up Operation Watchdog to monitor and expose such blatant vote fraud. A decade was needed before it spectacularly did so. From Daley’s viewpoint, scarcely had he been rid of Adamowski as state’s attorney when he faced a Republican Cook County sheriff. Richard B. Ogilvie was elected sheriff in . As a federal prosecutor, he had convicted mob boss Anthony “BigTuna” Accardo of tax evasion (the conviction having been overturned on appeal). Ogilvie still is regarded as incorruptible and served from  to  as a great governor of Illinois. Sheriff Ogilvie transformed the county police department from a patronage sandbox into (briefly) a respected, professional law enforcement agency. The state legislature, at Ogilvie’s request and in honor of the venerable Progressive tradition of civil service, created a police merit board to protect county officers from wicked politics. Soon enough, though, the merit board became a tool of the machine. Meanwhile, Ogilvie launched eighteen hundred vice raids, including a full-scale invasion of Cicero in . Ogilvie’s relationship with a crooked Chicago cop and murderer, Richard Cain, remains an enigma. Cain was yet another Chicago figure seemingly conjured by a novelist on amphetamines. Allegedly, Cain’s natural father was the mobster Sam Giancana. Cain has been implicated (inconclusively ) in both the training of Cuban refugees for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Bay of Pigs invasion in  and the mob’s alleged plot to assassinate President Kennedy in . Still not established is whether Cain duped Ogilvie or whether the sheriff cynically used Cain for political advantage. Not disputed is that after Ogilvie fired Cain as his chief in- 178 Daley and Dissent vestigator in , Cain became a top aide to Giancana, then was killed by the mob in . Chicago police superintendent Orlando Wilson supposedly warned Ogilvie against hiring Cain, who had assisted Ogilvie in the investigation of Accardo. A former top state and federal investigator, Paul Newey, studied recently released FBI files on the Kennedy assassination and deduced that Ogilvie had cut a deal to hire Cain in exchange for the support of organized crime in his candidacy for sheriff. Newey also disclosed that his original source for this allegation had been J. Edgar Hoover in . It is possible that Hoover was smearing Ogilvie from fear that...