Mayorissimo

By Laurence I. Barrett

HIMSELF! THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MAYOR RICHARD J. DALEY by Eugene Kennedy Viking; 288 pages; $10.95

As America's urban malaise deepened in the late '60s, a revisionist theory about the governance of American cities took shape. It dictated that machine politics is a better system than the progressivism preached by editorial writers, professors and other muzzy do-gooders. Proponents would offer Chicago as ruled by Richard Daley--"the city that works" --as exhibit A.

Certainly Chicago has withstood the termite trends better than New York, the ancient source of its inferiority complex. and such closer rivals as Detroit and Cleveland. And certainly Daley, who dominated the city's political back rooms and front parlors, must get credit. His death 1 5 months ago after almost 22 years as mayorissimo was truly a national event.

How Daley climbed from night-school striver to feared duke is the lesser part of Eugene Kennedy's Himself! Kennedy is more interested in his subject's mentality and soul and in political hierarchy. For this exploration the author is aptly qualified: he was a Catholic priest for 22 years, still serves as a psychology professor at Loyola University of Chicago, and has a sense of the Irish American tribe that only genes can provide.

Kennedy does not have to probe very deeply to find in Daley the spirit of an Irish warrior chieftain. Gaelic legend has a mother feeding the weaning morsel to such an infant with the tip of his father's sword: no better means to teach the proper ways of life and death. To Daley, politics was unremitting combat. Once attained, power could not be shared because sharing would tempt others to become chieftains.

Daley is seen skewering his rivals, and an occasional ally when necessary, in his long march to dominion. Kennedy depicts him often playing "the Irish warrior hanging the enemy heads on the gate."

The city within that gate, Daley's duchy, was a festival of contradictions. The mayor was a friend of labor, but he squashed a union leader when a taxi strike threatened disruption. He was an old New Dealer, but he knew how to promote business. He wanted dollars from Washington, but even when the donor was a Democratic Administration, Daley insisted that his city hall rather than alien bureaucrats control the money. He was relatively honest, but he tolerated the baksheesh habit all around him because it served the System and the System served him.

Kennedy's city hall portraits and caricatures cannot be faulted. The author's implied conclusions-- his four cheers for Daley's works-- are far less persuasive. He accepts Daley's atavistic brand of leadership as not merely effective, but necessary. He does not pause to wonder whether having potholes filled quickly is worth dictatorship by a corrupt machine. He gives scant attention to the hallmark of successful tribalism: suppression of all weaker tribes. He seems not to recall that other cities from time to time, such as La Guardia's New York and Philadelphia during the Clark-Dilworth period, have managed to combine decency and effective government.

The book conveys much of the joyous, raucous spirit of Chicago, but in the end its message is as grim as Richard Daley's phiz. It is far easier to give power to a warrior chieftain than to get our cities' diverse tribes to govern themselves by the quaint notions taught in civics classes.

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