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

investigation, I found that the motel had neither the required license nor a lifeguard to operate a public pool. I asked Korshak, as both the Democratic ward leader and city revenue director, for comment. “This is an outrage,” he said. “We’re going to throw the book at them!” But when the case was called a few weeks later, the promised reckoning never came. A city attorney stood up in court and sheepishly reported that the revenue department had simply “misfiled” the motel’s license.
    I called Korshak back. “How could this happen?” I asked. “Weeks later, this license suddenly ‘turns up’? You had an open-and-shut case!”
    “David, let me answer off the record,” Korshak wearily responded. “If you’re going to work in this town, there’s one thing you need to know: in the city of Chicago, there’s no such thing as an ‘open-and-shut case.’”
    Another early mentor was Don Rose, a local writer, newspaper publisher, and political activist from the Hyde Park area with deep roots in the civil rights and antiwar movements. By the time I met him, Rose’s life had had many acts. As a young man in the 1950s, he was a jazz trumpeter and heroin addict. By the ’60s, he had cleaned up, and served as Martin Luther King Jr.’s press secretary during the reverend’s 1966 marches for open housing in Chicago. (King claimed that the racism he encountered in Chicago was more “hateful” than anything he had encountered in the South.) Rose had also served as the spokesman for the Chicago Seven, the eclectic crew of hippies, yippies, and leftist lawyers who led the antiwar protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Don lays claim to the iconic line chanted by the protesters as the Chicago police advanced: “The whole world is watching!”
    In the 1970s, Don took on yet another incarnation, this time as a part-time political consultant and ad maker. Outraged by the Black Panther slayings and committed to being a burr under Daley’s saddle, he orchestrated the upset election of a former FBI agent, Bernard Carey, for state’s attorney. Carey was a Republican, but in the topsy-turvy world of Daley’s Chicago, liberals often supported reform-minded Republicans for local office. And Don was in the forefront of those fights.
    The bearded, biting Rose also was a deft writer, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago politics. He was a fixture at the preferred watering holes of Chicago’s coolest journalists—Royko, Studs Terkel, and others—many of whom shared Don’s political leanings, admired him as a talent, and revered him as a source.
    Shortly after taking on the
Herald
column, I called Rose cold and asked him to critique my work and to offer guidance. He generously did so except during one period in 1975, when he felt I was insufficiently supportive of one of his candidates.
    “You’re letting yourself be used,” he bellowed in fury over the phone one day. By the following year, though, Don had forgiven me. In fact, it was his letter of recommendation in which he pointedly recalled that we “had not always agreed” that, in 1976, helped secure me a coveted summer internship at the
Chicago Tribune
.
    A City Council race to replace the venerated Despres, which was hotly contested, gave me the opportunity to earn my spurs with some original investigative reporting.
    There were four candidates in the race, three African Americans and a white man named Ross Lathrop, who had no political involvement in the community prior to the race, but who nevertheless seemed to be gaining traction. Though Lathrop postured himself as an independent candidate, I began to suspect that Korshak and the machine Democrats had put him up for the seat, hoping to keep it in friendly hands if the African American candidates split the black vote. Korshak, of course, denied this.
    Lathrop won the election, but when his campaign finance disclosure appeared months later, I became suspicious about a series of large