A confession: I love Chicago.
Or, more accurately, I have loved Chicago.
I’ve lived there several times over many years. And still get a thrill seeing that massive, architecturally bold skyline rising on the rim of the vast prairies perched on a beautiful, 18-mile lakefront that still belongs to people, not factories.
I have appreciated Chicago because, like its blunt, former football coach Mike Ditka, the Windy City disdains airs. In an old Western movie, one of my favorite actors, Sam Elliott, warns naïve pioneers: “You think the meek shall inherit the Earth. The meek ain’t gonna inherit shit west of Chicago.”
Chicago has gifted the world with the skyscraper, Ferris wheel, Wrigley’s gum, deep-dish pizza, the first car radios and portable phones (from Motorola), Cracker Jack, the blood bank, Playboy, oh, and the zipper. Thank you.
And then, there's Grant Park. When the Great Fire consumed much of Chicago in 1871, the city dumped countless tons of the rubble into Lake Michigan, turning a disaster into a beautiful 319-acre front yard.
Appropriately enough, when Americans elected their first black president, Barack Obama held his election night celebration in the park named for Illinois native Ulysses Grant, the Civil War general and Republican president who sent federal troops into the South to enforce black voting rights.
But like most of the nation’s big cities so ineptly run by Democrats, Chicago is enduring a rough time.
It’s gone from reigning commercial capital of the Heartland to occasional murder capital of the country. Its 228 square miles with three million souls was once the second largest city.
Cancel the violins. It’s Chicagoans’ own fault. They’ve been electing Democrats to run the place for nearly a century now. But their recent ones are not pros, just progressive pretenders with a clear DEI agenda.
I’ve been able to mark the decay of Chicago (the name is an Indian word for smelly native onions that once grew there).
We’re all going to hear an awful lot more about Chicago in the coming months. For reasons that defy common sense, the party of the nation’s oldest president, an 81-year-old man who’s mentally decaying right before our eyes, has selected decaying Chicago for its presidential nominating convention this August.
Like their president, who routinely stumbles along seemingly unaware of his destination, Democrats have (unthinkingly?) scheduled their 2024 August convention within exactly one week of the 56th anniversary of their disastrous 1968 Chicago convention.
That convention became a violent, nearly week-long riot — allegedly against the Vietnam War – that also attracted angry anti-American protestors and anarchists more interested in destroying institutions. I was there. Their violence and the reciprocal police response by a Democrat administration shattered party unity.
Those nightly scenes of tear gas and violence came during two Democrat presidencies of deadly urban riots, political assassinations, and mounting U.S. involvement in an unpopular and deadly foreign war.
That doomed the campaign of Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie and helped usher in two terms of Republican presidents, interrupted by four years of another weak Democrat, and then 12 more years of GOP rule.
Bad news for this year’s convention planners: Radical leftists and paid instigators are already planning to transplant their current campus disruptions for national media exposure to the Windy City.
And there’s no guarantee they won’t show up first 92 miles north in July for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
I’ve been asked many times how the political turmoil of Donald Trump’s presidency and then the distressing weaknesses of Joe Biden physically, mentally, and strategically compare with the 1960s.
They don’t.
President Eisenhower ended the Korean War and avoided several foreign military involvements during his two terms through the 1950s. Four months into the ensuing presidency, John Kennedy began the U.S. involvement in South Vietnam with a few dozen “advisers.” They were not permitted to shoot back.
Mission creep, of course, led to their combat involvement, more troops to protect them, then offensive operations, including bombing of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The sudden collapse and chaotic U.S. exit (repeated later in Afghanistan by Biden) led to some five million refugees, nearly two million of them in the U.S.
By the end, 540,000 U.S. military were in-country, 58,220 did not come home alive, 1,244 are still missing.
But those total numbers do not capture the horror and anger of those war years; the Democrat convention year of 1968 was the deadliest:16,899.
Know this: Of the 58,220 U.S. fatalities in Vietnam, 5,299 died of wounds, 938 from illness, 9,107 perished in accidents, 236 were murdered, and 382 killed themselves.
These numbers do not include lingering physical and mental damage in postwar years, including cancers from Agent Orange and subsequent ongoing veteran suicides.
Not to mention the decade's political assassinations, bombings, and urban riots with billions in damages.
So, no offense to young modern-day doomsayers, but the recent turmoil, including campus occupations, the “insurrection,” and mean tweets, are not anywhere near the same level as the 1960s.
Chicago’s International Amphitheater (since demolished) was the site of the 1968 Democrat convention. Located a few miles south of downtown Chicago, the site also hosted both party conventions in 1952. They were the first broadcast on television, but the networks’ equipment was too cumbersome to move.
That amphitheater was built in 1900 to house livestock shows because – wait for it – the vast Chicago Stockyards were just across the street.
There, beginning in 1864, men with soon-to-be familiar names like Armour and Swift, industrialized meatpacking, at one point producing 90 percent of the nation’s meat.
Railroads (and eventually aviation) became key to Chicago’s economic life. As a result, farmers and ranchers as far away as Montana had markets for their crops, sheep, cattle, and hogs. Before their demise, these millions of critters left behind droppings that accumulated.
On a heavily humid August afternoon in 1968 (there is no other kind in Chicago), I arrived at the convention site with Harrison Salisbury, then N.Y. Times national editor, and Russell Baker, humor columnist.
The rangy Baker unfolded from the air-conditioned car, inhaled the oppressive stockyard aroma, and said, “Chicago is so, so broad-shouldered.”
For nearly a week, the nation’s attention was split. It was focused inside where Democrats fought over Vietnam and then over tactics of the city’s police under Mayor Richard J. Daley.
He was 13 years into his 21 years as mayor (his son would hold the office 22 years). And the senior Daley was outraged.
I watched from maybe 20 feet away as a presidential cabinet member, Abraham Ribicoff, looked down at Daley in front of the nationwide audience and denounced his Gestapo-like police tactics.
A livid Daley yelled back. He made a gesture across his throat. And the convention devolved into anger and divisions.
Ribicoff had a point. A few miles to the north, where the scent of teargas hung heavy, rioting protesters would surge down Michigan Avenue.
Leaning out a window four floors above, I watched as mounted police swung nightsticks and nudged their horses sideways, squeezing protesters against the wall and then into and through store windows.
Daley was a portly man who feigned innocence well. I once asked him about reports that one of his department chiefs had arranged a city job for his own son. Daley replied, “What father wouldn’t help a family member?”
Under Daley, his son, and most previous Democrat mayors, Chicago was known as the city that worked. That was thanks to the political machine that oiled city services to keep employers, employees, and voters happy. And keep themselves in office.
It wasn’t Democrat. It wasn’t anti-Republican. Daley once warned New York Mayor John Lindsay, “John, youse forgot why you were elected — to collect da garbage.”
One night, I noticed two men trying to break into a parked car. I called 911. Fifty-two seconds later, in the country’s third-largest city, three police cars silently arrived.
I wrote here a while back about how the machine’s precinct captains kept residents happy and voting for "da mayor." My secretary was robbed one evening. Here’s the revealing story of how her captain turned that terrifying incident into another happy voter.
That doesn’t happen anymore because the current mayor, Brandon Johnson, and his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, are mouthy progressive ideologues. They favor virtue signals and photo ops over ensuring city services. Johnson was all for sanctuary city status until – Oops! – city costs for illegal immigrants hit $300 million.
The city and Illinois, under ample Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker, are crumbling. Pritzker and California’s Gavin Newsom fancy themselves as available replacements for Biden. Lord, help us.
Did you see how, despite his trial, Donald Trump campaigned at a Harlem bodega and last week at a New York firehouse? That doesn’t happen in Chicago anymore. That city’s mayors are regularly attacking police. Taxes are rising. Gigantic pension obligations loom unfunded.
Looting gangs wander the once Magnificent Mile, where fancy stores have closed. Companies like Boeing and residents who can afford it are moving elsewhere, leaving the city’s worsening financial burden to those with less.
Yet Joe Biden and his party want to showcase this city on national television with a presidential nominating convention that looks to also attract some unwelcome guests intent on misbehaving.