Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago

7. Big Nineteen, Big Nine: 1946–59

Big Nineteen, Big Nine 153 153 7 Big Nineteen, Big Nine 1946–59 There IS graft in the [police] department. It’s no secret! But it is just a symptom of what is wrong with Chicago. I don’t know when it started, but everybody in this crazy town, big people and little people, would rather pay somebody off than obey the law. Chicago people don’t WANT strict law enforcement! —anonymous Chicago police officer, letter to a Chicago Daily News columnist,  Senator Estes Kefauver’s Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce held explosive hearings in Miami, Kansas City, and St. Louis in . Kefauver planned to take his show to Chicago that fall. He went there in October to make preparations, staying at the famed Drake Hotel on the lakefront Gold Coast. Chicago labor attorney Sidney R. Korshak suggested that Kefauver might delay his hearings until after the November  elections—it was shaping up as a bad year for Democrats —and Kefauver assented. In  the New York Times, in a four-part investigation of Korshak’s mob-connected career, charged that he had blackmailed Kefauver with infrared photographs secretly taken by the mob that showed the senator and a call girl in his hotel room. During the height of the Watergate era’s journalistic reliance on “blind” or unnamed sources to reveal wrongdoing , the newspaper identified its source only as a “highly respected business executive.” Though the senator had a reputation as a womanizer, his 154 Big Nineteen, Big Nine former associates denied the allegation and apparently it was not otherwise corroborated until .1 Both the Times and Kefauver’s defenders missed the point that if Korshak did blackmail Kefauver, it might have been unnecessary. Chastened by President Truman (who called him “Senator Cow Fever”) and others, including Cook County Democrats, Kefauver already appreciated the need to minimize the political damage to his party in the upcoming elections. The Kefauver hearings were the Alamogordo of televised national scandal . Like the first atomic-bomb explosion in that New Mexican desert, it rained fallout all over the political terrain. The rubrics of corruption and reform gradually faded into the concept of constant, mass-mediated scandal with its consequent public cynicism about government. Corruption and scandal might seem to walk hand in hand, but they are different things. Corruption can exist without scandal, but not vice versa. Corruption is the effort to transmute improper public influence into private gain. Reform is the effort to prevent that activity. Scandal is a publicized episode that brings disgrace to individuals and offends the moral norms of a community . The key word is publicized. Corruption often is not made public because its participants desire secrecy. Kefauver’s publicized hearings established, among other innovations, the practice of witnesses invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination , offending the public’s sense of rectitude, without which there is no scandal. After a half-century of televised political scandals, a group of scholars considered “why people don’t trust government” (also the title of their book).2 The usual suspects were rounded up, including negative framing of the news by the media. Although none of the writers said so explicitly, they viewed public cynicism as a social pathology. Whether skepticism toward government is unhealthful or realistic was not debated. Publicity from his crime hearings, as it happened, helped win Kefauver the Democratic nomination for vice president in Chicago in . Kefauver’s hearings anticipated McCarthyite Communist hunting in the s, Vietnam War probes in the s, Watergate in the s, Iran-contra in the s, and the Clinton impeachment in the s. In the early s in Big Nineteen, Big Nine 155 Chicago, U.S. attorney James R. Thompson artfully used television news in his campaign to convict Mayor Daley’s associates of corruption.Thompson was an author of the modern culture of scandal, of reform considered as a branch of law enforcement, as the following chapters will explore. Kefauver, despite his priority in video images of investigative gavel banging, did not invent televised scandal any more than Richard Nixon fathered illegal bugging or Jim Thompson zealous prosecution. The political landscape is littered with such as Carey Estes Kefauver, able politicians who wanted to be president but never made it for reasons including bad luck as much as anything else. Dignified, slender, and soft-spoken, yet never living down an image as an Appalachian bumpkin with a jacko...