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6 The Family Business R eporters working out of the City Hall press room were skeptical. To them, several hundred angry people protesting Jane Byrne’s appointments to the Chicago Housing Authority was something that made their jobs more interesting for a few days but nothing more. It hardly proved that black Chicago was on the verge of a political miracle. Harry Golden Jr., the City Hall reporter for the Sun-Times stretching back to the 1960s, didn’t look upon the ChicagoFest boycott as significant so much as ironic. White teens showed up wearing T-shirts thanking Jesse Jackson for convincing black people to stay away from the festival. Jackson making friends in white Chicago by allowing them to have a whites-only party: Golden and his City Hall colleagues had a good laugh over that one. Golden had seen it before. Self-appointed black leaders find some issue around which to whip up black anger; Jesse Jackson calls a press conference proclaiming black Chicago ready for political liberation; then election day rolls around, and it’s just as it had been four years earlier and four years before that: The angry black voters seemed invisible, their leaders all bluster. Elections were about boots on the ground and war chests, not demonstrations; winning was the art of lining up key supporters around the city. Golden wanted to know: Where were Washington’s endorsements? Golden was more inclined to heed the views of Iola McGowan, a black committeewoman whose star had risen under Byrne. McGowan claimed Washington wouldn’t crack 50 percent in her ward. McGowan was an elected official, put in office by a black constituency. Who was Lu Palmer but a hot-headed re- The Family Business 65 porter who went off the deep end in the early 1970s, flushing a column—a column !—down the toilet. In the fall of 1982, Washington strategists like Renault Robinson spoke of an “80–80” strategy. If 80 percent of the black registered voters showed up at the polls and if 80 percent voted for Washington, then Washington could theoretically win without a single white vote and only a small slice of the Latino vote. Yet no black mayoral candidate had won even a majority of the black vote, let alone 80 percent. Black voter turnout had never topped 70 percent. Polls that November showed Washington trailing both Richard M. Daley and Byrne even among black voters. Why would this same candidate who just six years earlier had lost the black vote to Michael Bilandic suddenly inspire black Chicago? Chicago’s most able local political writer, Mike Royko, declared that Washington didn’t “have a prayer of winning.” More than one pundit latched on to a view popular among Daley supporters that Washington was nothing but a Byrne stalking horse. The Byrne-Daley story was one they had been writing in their heads for the past few years, ever since Byrne, less than one year into her tenure, pulled strings so the party supported someone over Daley when he ran for Cook County state’s attorney. That election, nasty and mean, was only the first volley in a three-year fight for control among rival party bosses. So entrenched was this notion of a Byrne-Daley showdown that a popular comedy club opened a musical satire called Byrne, Baby, Byrne II: See Dick and Jane Run. A See Dick and Jane Run coloring book sold in area bookstores. Both sides in the Byrne-Daley split were driven by self-righteousness, which only added to the intrigue. The renegade ward bosses aligned with Daley spoke of a vindictive Byrne punishing their wards because of their support for her rival. Those behind Byrne spoke derisively of those acting as if the mayor’s seat was somehow “Richie” Daley’s by birthright. “An old-style Irish blood feud,” Golden said, rubbing his hands together with anticipation. Richard M. Daley grew up living the life of a prince. He was still in grammar school when his father took control of the Cook County Democratic Party. As a child, he spent a night in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and met Queen Elizabeth . The other kids in school nicknamed him “Mayor.” Those from old-world families understood that the nickname was part joke and part acknowledgment of the obligations that fall on the eldest son. The son attended the same Bridgeport elementary school as the father. When he was young, the father left the neighborhood each...

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