Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, 1973
As eldest son and political heir to the man who ran Chicago for 21 years, young Rich Daley was a rising star. Elected to the state senate at 30, he quickly became chairman of the powerful judiciary committee. Then in 1976 his father died, and Rich's career went into neutral. After the two-year interregnum of Mayor Michael Bilandic, Jane Byrne, an erstwhile protégée of the elder Daley, took command of the city machine. Rich was a potential rival, and Byrne moved to isolate him. Today, at 37, he is fighting a lonely battle for political survival. In next week's Illinois primary, he will stand as a candidate for Cook County state's attorney—running without his party's endorsement.
The turnabout that has Rich Daley declaring publicly, "I am not the hand-picked candidate of the mayor of Chicago," is one that has left him wounded and angry. He is believed to have been deeply offended by Mayor Byrne's alleged attempt to exclude his mother from official ceremonies welcoming the Pope to Chicago. The son, presumably, also resents Byrne's penchant for tracing the city's financial woes to his father's regime. "To use my father's name and face and picture—and then to abuse them," he muses bitterly, fingering a rumpled mass card from the senior Daley's funeral. "I really wonder where politics is going."
Where Rich Daley is going may be more to the point. Inevitably, there is gloating among politicians who once feared him. "Rich doesn't have his father's judgment, finesse, instinct or craftiness," one longtime associate has said. "He's never been in a position where he had to." Now he is. Although a few unions have rallied behind him, organization Democrats who might be privately sympathetic are loath to cross the new mayor, who has already cut patronage in Daley's 11th ward. "I understand that people do what they have to do to protect their jobs and their pensions," he says grimly.
Growing up, Richard Michael Daley regularly rode with his father in the mayoral limousine and learned a political litany he still recites: "Get different viewpoints on issues. Stand by your decisions. Never blame someone else for your own problems." He received his law degree from DePaul University, started a law firm, then entered politics. In the legislature, he remembers, "At first they had this attitude, 'Is he going to go back and tell his dad?' " "When Rich raised his little finger," says one veteran state capital observer, "things happened."
One thing that happened was that Rich made enemies. Fellow legislators considered him arrogant, and he was forced to withdraw as a candidate for senate president a month before his father's death. Afterward, he says, "I became more out front in terms of issues," sponsoring legislation for nursing home reform and a revised mental health code. "He saw what it was like to be identified with something constructive," says a friend, "and he liked it." Those who know Rich best say he has also been deeply affected by the birth in 1978 of his third child, Kevin, with a crippling spinal defect. And though he still holds the ward committeeman's job he inherited from his father, the junior Daley has appealed for support—and sometimes received it—from some of the old man's liberal antagonists. "Rich grew up under the wings of power," says one watchful political veteran. "Now he's really seeing the world from the other side."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
