Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod Read Free Book Online

politics?” he asked.
    I nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, sir. It’s what really interests me.”
    “Well, you showed up at the right time. I had a guy who wrote a column on local politics, but he just quit. You think you can do that?”
    I had no doubt, I told him. Just give me a shot.
    “Okay. Fifteen dollars a column, and we’ll see how you do,” he said. “You work out, maybe you can do some other stuff for us, too.”
    Looking back, I see that it was kind of crazy on both our parts—crazy of Bo for entrusting a political column to an unproven eighteen-year-old kid after maybe a half hour of conversation; and of me for unreservedly accepting the assignment. Still, I was too young to know what I didn’t know, and I plunged into political reporting with an enthusiasm I rarely demonstrated for my academic work.
    My first column, published on December 19, 1973, and entitled “The Mayor, Metcalfe and Police Brutality,” examined the growing gulf between Mayor Daley and his top African American lieutenant, Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, over the treatment of black residents by the Chicago Police Department.
    Metcalfe became a local hero after running alongside Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin and returned home to become a cog in the Democratic machine. But in 1972, he broke from Daley after one of Metcalfe’s constituents, a respected South Side dentist, was stopped and grievously mistreated by police officers for the apparent crime of being black, a not-infrequent occurrence in Chicago. Metcalfe was soon calling for an independent civilian agency with the power to investigate alleged incidents of misconduct. In the column, I analyzed a recent speech by the mayor condemning police brutality and subsequently calling for a civic committee to review the problem—a proposal that fell well short of the civilian agency with investigative power that Metcalfe’s panel had demanded.
    Their relationship deteriorated, and in 1975, Metcalfe refused to endorse the mayor for reelection. A year later, Daley tried to purge Metcalfe, but the defiant congressman defeated Daley’s candidate by an overwhelming margin, a harbinger of dramatic changes ahead in Chicago’s politics.
    The Daley-Metcalfe split ignited the black, independent political movement that would ultimately bring down the Democratic machine—though only after both Daley and Metcalfe had died. It would also lead to the election of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, and provide the base for the meteoric rise in Illinois politics of Barack Obama.
    Hyde Park was a great beat; its Fifth Ward was a hotbed of liberal activism and anti-machine dissent, rich with crackling politics and vivid characters.
    My favorites were the colorful lead actors in the ward’s ongoing political drama: Alderman Leon M. Despres, the irrepressible dean of the City Council’s small, vocal independent bloc; and Marshall Korshak, the wily Democratic ward committeeman and patronage dispenser who had the unenviable task of trying to tame this bastion of anti-Daleyism. Each of them was Jewish. Each was a lawyer. They were contemporaries in age, and lived blocks apart. Yet Despres and Korshak could not have been more different.
    Despres was an erudite labor and civil liberties lawyer with deep roots in the left-wing politics of the 1930s. For years he was a fearless, lone dissenting voice on the City Council, using his mastery of parliamentary rules to try to frustrate Daley’s maneuvers. With oratorical talents more suited for the U.S. Senate than the Chicago City Council, Despres would, on occasion, bewilder his less lettered colleagues with passages from Shakespeare. More often, he would infuriate them by shining an unforgiving light on corruption and racial discrimination in Chicago.
    “There is not one bit of evidence to support the charge that Alderman Marzullo and his transportation committee are taking pay-offs from the taxi industry . . . not one