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20 Any White Will Do T here may have been a time when Jane Byrne was considering a life beyond politics. The gossip columnists had her weighing offers as a television analyst, a college instructor, and a consultant. She sang a line in a USA Today commercial; she lent her image to a chain of Mexican restaurants. But a small squib announcing that Byrne was studying Spanish was one of many clues that revealed what the former mayor really had on her mind. By mid-1985, with election day nearly two years off, she had hired a press secretary. In July of that year, she declared her intentions of running for mayor in 1987. She could no longer sit on the sidelines, she explained, when petty politics were destroying the city she loved. The cunning of Byrne’s decision was not lost on Ed Vrdolyak, Dan Rostenkowski , or any of a long list of politicians mulling a run. The second white to announce risked the spoiler label, but only Byrne had the temerity to announce so unfashionably early. Let the political pros point out how unpopular she was inside the Daley camp or along the lakefront. Once she declared, she was in the driver’s seat. Vrdolyak did what he could to change Byrne’s mind. He had an aide spread rumors about the lawsuits pending against Byrne over her old campaign debts and hinted at the secrets he might reveal should Byrne remain in the race— “truth-slinging,” Royko dubbed it. But Byrne wouldn’t budge. Initially, Vrdolyak indicated he was indifferent to the name of the mayor so long as it wasn’t Harold Washington. The rumor mill had two high-profile Republicans mulling a race for mayor, U.S. Attorney Dan Webb and former Illinois Governor Richard Ogilvie. He had only good things to say about Any White Will Do 231 Webb during a 1985 interview. “Of course,” he said during that same interview when asked if he could work better with Ogilvie than with Washington. “I could work better with you,” he said to the reporter asking the question. In other interviews Vrdolyak expressed his support for “anyone in the entire universe against Harold.” Yet with time the field narrowed. Washington seemed vulnerable, the mayor ’s seat was ripe for the taking, yet Chicago politics had also become a racial obstacle course that only the bravest or most foolhardy politician would risk. Those who wanted to be mayor in the worst way—those pushing themselves at every opportunity, such as Alderman Richard Mell and former Parks boss Ed Kelly—were not worth taking seriously, and those who were seemed ambivalent at best. Rich Daley’s candidacy ended when his idea for a nonpartisan election was thwarted—there was no way he would risk re-creating a replay of 1983. That left only Vrdolyak, who in November 1986 announced that he was in. “It’s going to be war out there,” Vrdolyak said with characteristic bravado. Inside the Washington camp, there was talk of their man skipping the Democratic primary and running as an independent. That way he would be running against the Republican and Democratic nominees, virtually ensuring himself two white foes. Washington, however, ran in the Democratic primary. There was speculation in the press that the independent route looked less appealing when no serious Republican entered the race,1 but Washington’s advisers insisted that their man never seriously contemplated a run as an independent. It had all been a ploy to keep his foes guessing. Once Washington committed to running in the primary, Vrdolyak announced he would run in the general election to avoid hurting Byrne’s chances. The chairman of the country’s largest local Democratic organization would run as a third-party candidate against his own party ’s nominee. The local Democrats didn’t bother with an endorsement session. Vrdolyak, as chairman, sent a letter to all the ward committeemen decreeing it “meaningless .” It was the first time in more than fifty years that the Cook County Democratic Party would forgo an endorsement session for mayor, and presumably one of the rare times in U.S. history when a party chairman declared his own party’s endorsement meaningless. The fabled Chicago machine seemed suddenly feeble. There was always a chance Byrne would beat Washington and face Vrdo­ lyak in the general election, but that didn’t stop him from announcing that he would loan the Byrne campaign two thousand workers. To be...

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