Nickel-and-diming

By Jim Tuohy

Every once in a while my old pal Dino calls me when he’s in town and we work out together, usually doing some serious power lifting.

Thus we were lifting a few the other afternoon at the Old Town Ale House when Street Jimmy came in with a bunch of change. Street Jimmy has been written about very humorously elsewhere in this publication by Bruce Elliot, the artist in residence at the Ale House who came about his position by the happy coincidence of  being married to the proprietress.

Street Jimmy is a junkie whose main source of legitimate income arrives from begging in the vicinity of North and Wells. When he accumulates enough nickels and dimes and pennies he brings them into the Ale House where the bartender agrees to convert them into dollar bills, since Jimmy’s heroin connection apparently does not consider things like pennies proper monetary units to be used in a respectable dope deal.

In fact, the Ale House bartenders won’t take the pennies, either, only the higher denominations of change. That doesn’t stop Street Jimmy from trying; he always clatters a mass of pennies onto the bar along with nickels and dimes even though he is always refused. Bruce has pointed out that Jimmy’s powers of retention may have suffered a bit by the way he has chosen to conduct his path through life.

“I hated pennies, too,” said Dino, watching the transaction between Jimmy and the bartender.

Dino and I were in the Marine Corps together back in the 1950s around the time of the Korean War. Actually, to phrase our military service as I just did is a bit misleading. Where we were stationed was in downtown San Francisco, and the fighting had ended several months before we enlisted. But we are technically Korean War veterans, and we have a ribbon and the G.I. Bill to prove it.

In those days the Marines had a headquarters and supply building at 100 Harrison Street, almost at the Embarcadero, under the Bay Bridge. Dino had gone in the Corps from McCook, Nebraska, about a month before I had gone in from Chicago, but we ended up at the same duty station, where we carried out office duties when we weren’t detached to Special Services. I played basketball and Dino played baseball. To extend our ball-playing detachments from our regular duties, I used my influence to get Dino on the basketball team in the winter, and he used his influence to get me on the baseball team in the spring.

I looked good in my baseball uniform that said MARINES across the jersey, and I had nice form when I played catch, but I had grown up playing 16-inch softball and I never in my life had played a game of hardball, a game in Chicago we called “league.” However, I had a private conceit that I might be one of those athletes who could master a new sport almost immediately. I found out at the first practice that not only was I not a potential master, I was a menace to the orderly conduct of the game, that I couldn’t hit and I couldn’t field, and that I never would.  In the outfield I ran in to catch flies that landed behind me. At the plate, no matter how light the bat, I couldn’t swing it around fast enough to hit even the slowest pitch.

Out of friendship they let me stay on the team, and once in a hastily scheduled non-league game against a pickup team from a destroyer that was undergoing repairs at Hunter’s Point, I got into a game. The game had become so one-sided in our favor that the coach asked me if I wanted to pinch hit. It was a desperate attempt to keep the score down by reversing the logic of baseball strategy—putting in a bad hitter to replace a good one.

Everyone expected me to make an out and help bring the game to a merciful close, but I had been studying the pitcher. I discerned that his deliveries were seldom strikes. Guys like Dino swung and connected on pitches outside the strike zone because they were so easy to hit. My plan, therefore–knowing even the lamest of pitches were beyond my ability to catch up with–was to not swing at anything. I calculated, from my close observations, that the pitcher’s chances of throwing three strikes out of seven pitches were close to zero; he had not done so the entire game. I would take a walk, and I would someday be able to tell my children and grandchildren that in my entire baseball career with the United States Marines I was able to reach base every time I batted.

I stepped confidently in the box, waving heavy lumber; I had no intention of swinging it, so it didn’t matter that I could barely lift the bat off my shoulder . I squinted intimidatingly at the pitcher. The first pitch came, fat and right over the heart of the plate. Called strike one. The second pitch arrived slow and down the middle. Strike two. I knew this couldn’t last; I was too good at calculating odds. Third pitch. Strike three.

We played it safer with Dino on the basketball team. While I could look okay throwing the ball around before a baseball game, Dino was so awful in all aspects of basketball that we didn’t dare expose him to pregame warm up drills. He would drop passes, kick balls into the seats, and launch layups into space. But he too looked good in his uniform so we dressed him for every game and put an Ace bandage over most of one leg. He became our designated best player who was out with an injury, a role he excelled at, putting on a show for the other team, limping and exhorting us to carry on as best we could without him. And of course, if we chose to, we could point out that we were losing games without the services of our star.

Dino had many of the requirements of a good con man. He was handsome in a crooked-nose Marlboro Man kind of way, had a good speaking voice and a direct trustful gaze, and he was a glib liar. It made him a very good panhandler. As Marine PFC’s we were paid about $80 a month, so money was always tight to those of us who were not careful with it. Dino supplemented the cost of our liberty adventures, if need be, with some panhandling. He had developed a successful spiel about being a serviceman stranded without enough money to get the ferry over to the Naval Hospital in Oakland, or to the Marine security detail at Treasure Island or to his duties as a chaplain’s assistant at the Presidio.

One of Dino’s most successful nights came when we were at the old Hungry I between sets of the Vince Guaraldi Trio and Mort Sahl. We were on the last beers we could afford (at about 35 cents each) when Dino said, “Let me go out and see if I can raise enough for another drink.”

He left and I prepared to make my beer last. But I didn’t have to. Dino was back in no more than ten minutes with something like nine dollars and twenty-five cents. It was enough for us to drink until closing, and then to get a six-pack for the walk back to the barracks.

We were sitting with our six-pack at an empty newspaper kiosk on Market Street when a guy walked unsteadily towards us. He was husky and rugged looking, rather swarthy. He could have been anything, I thought, a drifter, a merchant marine. But he was friendly and talkative and we gave him a beer. His name was Art. Art DiBenidetto. We talked of nothing important, as good natured drunks tend to, and Dino said on payday he was going to buy a watch for his girlfriend’s birthday back in Nebraska.

“A watch?” Art asked. “You want a watch? Come with me.”

Dino and I looked at each other knowing what the other was thinking: This might not be good, but it might be interesting. Warily, we followed Art. We turned a corner and we were in Union Square in front of a granite building where a maintenance man was hosing down the sidewalk.

“Good morning, Mr.DiBenidetto,” the man said as he turned off the hose and unlocked the building’s elegant front door. We went to the second floor where a sign in the door of a store said “DiBenidetto Brothers Jewelers.” Art owned one of the fanciest jewelry stores in San Francisco. He told Dino to pick out a watch for his girl friend. He told me to pick out a watch for myself. We said something like, “No, no, we couldn’t,” but without much conviction.

‘Listen, you guys gave me your last beer,” said Art, who it turned out had been a lieutenant in the Marine Corps in World War II. “That was worth a lot more to me than a couple of watches.”

Actually, I think it was three watches. Dino ended up getting one for himself.

As Street Jimmy scooped up his rejected pennies from the bar at the Ale House, Dino said, “Pennies were a pain–at least a disappointment. I’d get somebody to listen to my story, which was the hard part, but then end up with more pennies than quarters.”

I never panhandled; I never had Dino’s knack, but I once had a banner bottle deposit day.

It was June of 1982 and I was writing a story at the apartment of my beloved Miss Jones, who was off at work. Her apartment was two blocks from Wrigley Field, close enough to hear the crowd roar. I took a break about one o’clock and turned on the TV to Channel 9. A pregame interview was in progress and I discovered the Cubs were about to play the Phillies, which was of only casual interest to me until I found out the starting pitchers were Fergie Jenkins for the Cubs and Steve Carlton for the Phillies–two sure hall of famers. Pete Rose was playing first for the Phillies and Mike Schmidt third, two more hall of famers. Ryne Sandberg was also on the Cubs but it was too early to know he would one day make it to the hall, although I enjoyed watching him, a smooth natural talent. Maybe I could slip out for a while…

The problem was, I had no money, which was no surprise, but after a thorough search of Miss Jones’s stashing spots I found she had left no money around either. But there were some empty pop bottles in the pantry. In an effort to be environmentally sound we had taken to buying Coca-Cola in 8-packs of 16-ounce returnable bottles, each bottle worth a 10-cent refund. There were two 8-packs, worth $1.60. I think at the time it cost $2.50 to get into the bleachers and perhaps $4.50 to get a general admission ticket. There were a few assorted pop bottles in the pantry, most of them quart-sized. When I was a kid these bottles had a nickel return, so it would take a lot of them to get me up to bleacher money, even if they had gone up to a dime. All I could do was try. All those great players were beckoning to me.

I loaded the bottles in an unwieldy box and set out at a fast pace for the Jewel at Southport and Addison. The game was about to start. I waited anxiously as the service desk person did some button-pushing calculations before a piece of paper clickety-clicked from a slot. She went into a desk drawer and pulled out—bills! A five! A couple of ones! A Kennedy half dollar! Refunds on quart bottles were now 25 cents each, much more than the old days. I had more than seven dollars!

I hustled down Addison. I had enough money to get into the bleachers with enough left over for a beer and even a hot dog if I chose. Or I could pay my way into the grandstand and wiggle my way into the box seats, where my distinguished gray hair would make me look as if I belonged. It was a beautiful sunny day. I was almost skipping along with happiness when a thought exploded in my head:

I AM 48 YEARS OLD AND I HAVE JUST RETURNED POP BOTTLES TO GET ENOUGH NICKELS AND DIMES TO GET INTO A CUB GAME. I DID THAT WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD. THIS IS THE EXTENT TO WHICH MY LIFE HAS PROGRESSED? WHY AM I HAPPY?

Still, under achiever as I was, I couldn’t contain my joy. I was seated in the boxes in time to watch the Cubs score five runs off Carlton in the second as they went on to win 12 to 11.

“I thought for a moment there in the Jewel I might have do a you if I came up a little short,” I said to Dino in the Ale House. “I might have to beg outside the park. Maybe I could have said I was a disabled vet.”

“You were, as far as earning power went,” said Dino. “How much does it cost to get into Wrigley now?”

“The last time I went it was seventy-six dollars for seats in the area I paid four-fifty for that day.”

“Where’d you get seventy-six bucks?” Dino asked.

“I didn’t. My friend Andy Rayburn from Canada took me. We have a deal. Whenever he’s in Chicago he takes me to a Cub game. Whenever I’m in Ottawa I take him to a Senators hockey game. So far I’ve never been to Ottawa.”

“Well if that deal falls through you might consider saving bottles,” Dino said. “At an average, say, of fifteen cents each you would only need about five hundred to get enough dough for a good ticket. Getting them to the Jewel would be a problem, though.”

“Or I could wait for you to come to town and you could do your Frisco thing. How long you think it would take for you to raise seventy-six bucks on game day at Clark and Addison?”

“I’m fifty years out of practice, but I would guess about twenty minutes,” Dino said with his direct trustful gaze.

end

Royko

By Jim Tuohy

Mike Royko was standing near the grill at the Billy Goat one afternoon talking to a rewriteman from the Sun-Times. The man had recently written a story that had appeared in the paper without his name on it. Instead the byline was that of the reporter who had gathered the facts.

The rewriteman, who was new at the paper, told Royko that a pompous editor had pointed out how well written the story was, not knowing who really wrote it. The editor was, in effect, giving the new employee a lecture in Journalism with his own story.

“So I told him I wrote it, thereby deflating him. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, been a bigger man,” said the rewriteman.

“Fuck that,” Royko said. “Stick it to the asshole. Always call those mopes on shit like that.”

Then he told a story.

Writing “Boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago” was as hard on him as any work he had ever done.

“Not writing the book,” he said. “I loved writing the book, but as the deadline approached I was spending more time on it. In the meantime I was putting out the column every day and I didn’t want the quality to suffer just because I was involved in a personal project. It wouldn’t be fair to the readers. I didn’t want to take a leave of absence to finish the book because that wouldn’t be fair to the readers either. So I had to work hard on the columns and hard on the book and when it was finished I didn’t even know what I had. I didn’t know if it would sell.

“Then the pressure was off and I’m just doing normal work and then the book comes out and it’s a hit and for the first time we’ve got some money and Carol and I take like a belated honeymoon to Europe.

“We go first class on a ship and one night I’m at the bar and there’s some guy in there talking about Chicago politics. He’s a blowhard, loud. I don’t say much, but finally he says something that is completely wrong. It’s just wrong, so I say ‘That’s wrong. I’m from Chicago and you’re wrong.’

“He says, ‘Your trouble is you don’t understand Chicago politics, how it really works. There’s a new book out by a guy named Mike Royko and if you read that, then you’ll know something and then come and talk to me.’

“I put my hand out, grab his and say. ‘My name is Mike Royko asshole.’

“Always stick it to them.”

***

One of the funniest promotions Royko ever worked out was The First Annual Mixed Breed (Mongrel) Dog show of 1967. It was conceived of shortly after the Westminster Dog Show had concluded at Madison Square Garden. In a column Royko described the purpose of the show and the judging categories, including Best of Show, which would resemble nothing ever seen in formal dog shows. Among other ribbons to be won were one to the dog that answered the least amount of commands and another: The Dog That Barks the Longest for No Known Reason.

Promotional events at which a columnist participates are a good way for newspapers to test his popularity. Royko always drew, especially in the early days, more than anticipated. There were hundreds of entries at Soldier Field on a sunny weekend afternoon, and with them some of the ugliest, ill-mannered dogs in the midwest (The dog that was eventually named Best of Show, an astoundingly unattractive animal, was described in the Daily News by Van Gordon Sauter as resembling a foot scraper). A writer doing a freelance piece encountered Royko on the infield, somewhere between dogs barking for unknown reasons and those disregarding instructions. Eager dog owners were holding their dogs for inspection and asking dozens of questions. He looked uncharacteristically discombobulated.

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “All these people are serious about these dogs. They really want them to win these categories. They don’t see anything funny about it. I’m never doing this again.”

There never was a Second Annual Mixed Breed Dog Show.

***

Mike Royko and Marshall Field, the owner of the Daily News and Sun-Times, were friendly and often fished together. Deep sea fishing was a passion for both of them, but while Royko had other abilities, such as being the best newspaper columnist in America, Field had only a desultory interest in the business Royko loved.

In the early 1980s William Wrigley, whose family had owned the Chicago Cubs for years, was undergoing a messy divorce. Royko, as he did all stories everywhere and in many different publications, followed the Wrigley matter closely. He became convinced Wrigley needed cash and might be willing to sell the Cubs. He had an idea.

“See, I saw the Cubs as an opportunity to fuck the Tribune. I would arrange to buy them, and then take the radio and television rights away from WGN. I went to Charlie 0. Finley (the former owner of the Oakland A’s and a drinking buddy of Royko’s at the Billy Goat). I asked him how much he thought the Cubs would sell for if they were put on the market. He said around $21 or $22 million. I said if I could put a deal together would he be general manager. He’s the smartest baseball guy around. He said yes but he wants 15 per cent. I went to Marshall and said, ‘Why don’t you buy them. Then you take them off Tribune radio and television and put them on WFLD-TV (Then the Field-owned tv station in town, Channel 32). Without the Cubs, Channel 9 isn’t worth a shit. And it would have made something out of 32. He says he doesn’t want to spend $22 million but he will put up most of it, if I can get the rest. I went back to Finley and asked if he could get other investors and he said, yeah, easy. So I’m working like a son-of-bitch making all these calls, trying to do it in a hurry. I’m going to take one percent, just so I can say I own the Chicago Cubs. I’ve stressed the urgency to Marshall, telling him we don’t want anyone to find out. Well, I get it all arranged on a Friday and I call Marshall, and he’s gone. Deep sea fishing in the Caribbean and is unreachable.”

In the meantime, Don Rueben, the influential and shrewd lawyer who represents the Tribune, learned the Sun-Times might buy the Cubs.

“Rueben hears the rumor and immediately grasps what it all means. That was Saturday. On Monday the Tribune bought the Cubs from Wrigley for $21.5 million. I never could get hold of Marshall.

“Later that week, on a Thursday I think, I’m having lunch at the Tavern Club and Marshall is there, back from fishing. The Trib’s got the gaddamn Cubs. He saunters over to my table and says, ‘Well, Mike, maybe the Bears will be up for sale.’

“I said, ‘Marshall, get the fuck away from me.'”

* * *

Around the time the Chicago Daily News was folding, in March of 1978, a writer was sitting with Royko in the corner at the Billy Goat and Bobby Shriver walked in. The son of R. Sargeant Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Bobby had been at the City News Bureau when Royko had hired him as his legman.

Royko suddenly cut off the conversation with the writer and joined Shriver at the end of the bar.

“Hey, Royko,” said the writer, “you see someone more famous come into the room and you drop you’re old friends?” It was obvious the writer meant the comment as a joke, but Royko exploded.

“Don’t ever accuse me of being a starfucker,” he yelled. “This is my legman and I want to talk to him. He’s a good newspaperman.”

It turned out that what Royko wanted to talk about was Shriver’s job. Royko was going over to the Sun-Times and, in the complicated union-management arrangements at the time, had the ability to protect one job, his legman. His first legman, Terry Shaffer, was then a reporter at the Daily News and was going to lose his job. So Royko was telling Bobby Shriver that in order to keep Shaffer, who had a family, working he was making Shaffer his legman again, putting Shriver out of a job. Shriver took it well. Terry Shaffer became Royko’s first and last Daily News legman.

Royko made a lot of phone calls on behalf of Daily News people who would not be absorbed by the Sun-Times.

* * *

In the mid -1970s, Royko, out late drinking on Lincoln, got into an argument with a group of people, mostly actors, in a booth. It climaxed with his throwing catsup from a bottle onto the fur coat of a pretty girl. The tavern owner insisted the bartender call the cops. Royko was taken to jail and charged with battery, a felony. He stayed in jail until Sam Sianis arrived in the morning and bailed him out.

The matter dragged out in court longer than it should have, the owner and actors seemingly enjoying the publicity. It should have been an easy matter to settle.

“The woman’s not the problem,” said Royko on the phone one day. “She’s satisfied. I’ve written her a letter of apology. Christ, it’s a collector’s item. I said I was the worst piece of shit that ever lived. I groveled. We offered to buy her a new fur coat. She said she didn’t need a new one, just pay for the cleaning on the old one. We did. It’s the guys. They say, ‘He behaved very badly. He was drunk. Of course I was drunk. That’s what I thought saloons were for.”

In the end, that was exactly the defense used by Julius Echeles, Royko’s colorful lawyer. Dram shop laws require a bar to refuse service to an obviously drunken person who enters it. Royko had three witnesses who said they had drunk with him at various places through the night, and he was drunker at each place and blasted when he went into the Lincoln Avenue bar. The case was settled.

At about the same time there was another incident on Lincoln Avenue in which Royko cracked a window somehow.

Michaela Tuohy, who wrote a gossip column for the Reader called “Hot Tripe”, described the incident as follows: “Mike Royko, window shopping along Lincoln Avenue, found the one he wanted to break.”

Royko did not talk to her for a year, even though they were fairly good friends. Royko called Tuohy “Chicago’s broken nose beauty,” which was a Nelson Algren phrase for a particular look the city has.

* * *

Nelson Algren and Royko were close. A group, including Royko, had worked on getting a section of Evergreen Street in Algren’s old neighborhood renamed for him. Not those funny little brown vanity signs they have now, but the regular street sign. They were successful in getting a block renamed but the residents complained it was too confusing having one block named Algren and all the rest of the street named Evergreen. It was changed back.

Royko was also close to Studs Terkel. Royko got the new Mayor Daley, Richard M., to name a bridge for Terkel. The Division Street bridge just west of Halsted, crossing onto Goose Island, is now the Studs Terkel Bridge. Royko attended the dedication ceremony.

“Richie likes me, but don’t tell anyone,” he said conspiratorially. “When he was first running for state’s attorney he was visiting the Tribune editorial board, where they question candidates on their views. They asked me to sit in. I could see he was really nervous. So I asked the first question, a real soft one that he would have no trouble with, and he was relieved and handled himself well after that. He knew what I had done and we have gotten along o.k. since.”

How about getting a Nelson Algren Street again?

‘That’s next,” said Royko.

* * *

Royko was standing at the bar at O’Rourke’s on a Saturday afternoon making a list of the 10 Biggest Assholes in the United States and another list of the 10 Biggest Assholes in Chicago.

He was asking people for nominations but he was rejecting almost all of them, either because he already had them on the list or because of arcane reasons only he could decipher.

A man and a woman, out on a date, came in and talked to Paul Sequeira, a photographer who had worked at the Daily News with Royko. Royko’s wife Carol had died and he had not yet remarried. Royko asked the newcomers for Asshole nominations. They were polite and good natured but looked at Royko as if he were some kind of indelicate creature not to be approached. Then Sequeira introduced them and their attitude changed, especially the man’s. “You’re Mike Royko? Wow!” That sort of thing.

Royko, engaging the woman, for some reason did a 30-second denunciation of attorneys. He asked her occupation.

“I’m an attorney,” she said.

That exchange did not seem to get them off on bad footing, however, because as time went on the conversation became much more intimate. The man seemed unaware, so glad was he to be near Mike Royko and be able to say a word to him every once in a while. Finally, a newspaperman standing nearby began singing the lyrics to “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”

“A lady doesn’t leave her escort. It isn’t fair, it isn’t nice. A lady doesn’t wander all over the room and blow on some other guy’s dice…So let’s keep the party polite…Stick with me, baby, I’m the fella you came in with…”

And suddenly they were gone, as the man talked to Sequeira. He looked around, and cognizance slid down his face.

“I think my girl just left with Mike Royko,” he said.

“Now you’ve learned something about the girl,” said the singing newspaperman.

* * *

Royko, who never did as much television as he could have, was a special commentator on Channel 7 the night of the mayoral primary in February of 1979. Mayor Michael Bilandic, who in a power grab had succeeded Richard J. Daley, was a heavy favorite to beat Jane Byrne.

The early returns as reported by television and radio gave Bilandic the expected lead. One by one the stations were declaring him the projected winner. Television political reporters were doing the same thing, explaining why it looked like Bilandic.

Except Royko. He sat on the outer edge of the set, beyond the big-voiced anchorman and political reporters, saying little, looking at scraps of paper, working figures on his wrist calculator.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think Bilandic has enough to do it. The strong Byrne areas are still to come in.”

He was the first person on television to go against the tide and call a Byrne victory. Later that week, sitting at the far end of the bar at the Billy Goat, near the VIP room, Royko talked to a writer from the Chicago Lawyer. What had he picked up that the television computers had not? asked the writer.

“I was just doing the usual thing,” he said. “Looking at the precinct-by-precinct results coming in from the City News Bureau, making some phone calls. Keeping an eye on the key precincts.”

A photographer from the Washington Journalism Review, which was doing a profile on Royko, was snapping pictures as he talked. Sam Sianis was called over to get into the photograph. The Chicago Lawyer guy, out of frame, asked why Royko did television that night.

“They called and asked. I don’t do anything election night, anyway, besides follow the results. I figured I could do the same thing on the set.”

They pay?

“Yeah.”

How much?

“Seven hundred and fifty. I know. They got a good deal.”

***

“You’re right,” said Royko in the Billy Goat early one evening as he stood near the angle of the bar under the always-on television. The Cubs were preparing to lose a night game. “Daley’s decision to run for state’s attorney and then against Byrne was a defensive one. The Daleys had nothing against Byrne at first. Sis Daley went to her inauguration and was all smiles with her. The Daleys were happy with Richie where he was, in the state senate. He was becoming more acceptable to the liberals since his dad died, making deals with Dawn Clark Netch and that shit. He was in no hurry. He was young and could run for almost any job in the state, including governor.

“Then Byrne listened to Vrdolyak who convinced her that Daley was the ultimate enemy and she began carving up his ward, firing his people, taking away patronage. To protect himself he had to take a counter measure, which was run for state’s attorney, a job I don’t think he ever thought about before. Mayors have to be careful with state’s attorneys or they’ll be facing a shitpot full of indictments.”

* * *

On a cold, snowy February night, Royko talked about writing books. “I wrote Boss because of my agent, who was really a great guy. He encouraged me. But he died, and I’ve never wanted to work with anyone else. I don’t think I’ll ever write another book.”

He never did, although his columns were published in several books, including “Sez Who? Sez Me,” which was sold at the Billy Goat. They were on a ledge near the television with a sign that said Mike Royko’s book was on sale here, autographed.

“They printed about 70,000 books,” Royko said. “Then the publisher calls me up and says they’re going to put it on remainder and do I want some at a low price. I say yeah, ship ’em all to me. I figured they’d send me a few boxes, but when they arrived the boxes of books filled my driveway. There were hundreds, thousands. I never saw so goddamn many books.

“So I brought them to Sam. I figure this is the natural place to sell the book because the first 10 columns are about Sam and the Billy Goat. I always did think the way publishers sell books is backwards. I think they ought to sell them in saloons. The author’s there, people are drinking and have money. They come up to you and say, ‘Where can I get your book? Right here. Twenty bucks. You don’t have to tell them to go to some bookstore. The next morning they’re not going to remember about some bookstore.”

Royko was good at inscriptions. Larry Green, a former Daily news reporter and editor, asked Royko to sign one of his books for his Jewish mother in Michigan. “Mrs. Green,” Royko wrote, “Larry’s a nice boy. But he’s kind of skinny.”

Royko often wrote introductions for other writers’s books, and sometimes blurbs for jacket covers. Publishers say one of the hardest things to get writers to do is write blurbs. For some reason they put it off, perhaps thinking it will take no time at all, and then the deadline for printing the jacket cover passes.

Once Royko had promised an author a blurb, and the deadline was fast approaching. The writer called Royko at his office.

“Mike, they’re pushing us; you want me to write the blurb for you, so you don’t have to fuck with it?”

“Yeah, you write it and call me back and read it to me,” Royko said.

The writer struggled for a while to say something terse and Roykoesque but not trying to top him. Fifteen words or so. He called Royko.

“Not bad. I’ll call you back.”

Twenty minutes later he called. He had written two blurbs, neither of which resembled the one the author had written. They were better and longer, both about 60 words. Pride of authorship.

A week later Royko saw the writer in a saloon.

“Which one did they take?”

The writer told him.

“I thought they would. You can keep the other one and use it some other time.”

“Don’t worry I will,” said the author.

When the book came out some months later, there was an autograph party and then a lot of people gathered at the Billy Goat. Royko was there and got into a long discussion on Christianity with the author’s very Catholic cousin. The discussion soon escalated into an argument and then into a potential fistfight as both men took off their coats. The author’s attractive daughter stepped between them, and Royko, with an eye for the ladies, began to chat with her, forgetting all about the fight, leaving the cousin poised to defend his faith but having an opponent whose restless mind had wandered onto other topics.

* * *

Mike Royko, who had left the Chicago Sun-Times when it was bought by Rupert Murdoch, stood near the stairs of the Billy Goat arguing with Bernie Judge, who had left the Tribune and become city editor of the Sun-Times.

The main points of contention in this alcohol-enhanced confrontation were: Royko said Judge was a sell-out for going to work for Murdoch, and Judge said Royko was a sell-out for going to work for the Tribune, the company Royko had so long and publicly despised. Voices rose, volume increased. Bad words. Sam Sianis went over and said to cut it out, they were acting like children. The contestants mumbled and parted. Judge considered the situation. He went to Royko.

“Mike, Sam’s right. We’re acting like children. I’m sorry,” He extended his hand.

“Fuck you,” said Royko.

Judge swung at him and Sam dashed over, got Judge away from Royko and out into a cab, taking his car keys away from him. The next day Judge asked Larry Finley, who was going to lunch at the Billy Goat, to get his car keys back.

“You tell Bernie I want to talk to him personally,” said Sam. Judge stopped in after work, creating the odd situation of the city editor of a major metropolitan daily getting a lecture from a saloon owner before he could get the keys to his car back.

Royko received no lecture.

* * *

The entire Tribune Tower was made a no smoking zone. There was only one exception. Mike Royko’s office. So if you were a good friend of his he would let you come in a take a smoke break.

Not long after the no smoking edict, Royko had a party at his house in Winnetka. All the big executives were there, and so were the working stiffs, reporters and former Royko legmen. Royko had his own edict: all non-smokers could gather out on the patio; all smokers could smoke anywhere inside.

“I loved it,” said reporter Susie Kuczka, a former Royko legman. “Every time I’d pass John Madigan, the guy who made the building no smoking, I’d blow smoke in his face.”

* * *

The day Mike Royko died a reporter sat in the Billy Goat by himself thinking how a good part of Chicago journalism had also died.

But maybe not. Guys like Mike Royko pass on to everyone who knew them a bit of journalistic integrity, sort of like Mr. Roberts and Ensign Pulver. And that can be passed on again.

Back in 1966, when Royko was moving into a position of prominence among the city columnists, a young reporter from the City News Bureau asked him if fame made it harder for him to get information; were people more guarded?

“No, it’s easier,” Royko said. “They know who you are, and you have some power. But you have to quote them accurately. If you’re accurate, even if you catch ’em with their pants down, they’ll accept it. As long as you don’t attack their family–you know, say somebody’s wife is ugly or something.

“See, politicians know how the game is played. If they fuck up, the press might catch them.  So if you’re accurate, they live with it. Just don’t make up shit, or get it wrong. They might even buy you a drink when they run into you.”

A few years later the reporter did a story on a politician that was not entirely favorable. The politician telephoned. He said he wished some quotes that put him in a bad light had not been used. Then he said:

“But what the hell, I said it. And you caught it. Let’s meet. I’ll buy you a drink.”

                                                                              

Editor’s Note: James Tuohy, an award-winning journalist, is a veteran of UPI, The Chicago Sun-Times and CBS News. He is the former associate editor of the Chicago Lawyer, an investigative monthly that broke many of the stories that led to the federal Greylord investigation. He is the Co-author of Greylord, Justice Chicago Style. He was a friend of Mike Royko for 30 years.

(This article was first published in the May 15, 1997 issue of New City).

The Rest of the Way is by the Stars

By Nelson Algren

(First published October 5, 1970 in the Chicago Free Press)

“The Vietnamese ruling establishment is still dominated by the more educated elite and the bourgeoisie left behind by the French and by the new urban rich. There is still an inadequate concern for the welfare of the rural peasant and worker. The Viet Cong have a more revolutionary image, whatever their ultimate intention may be. The Chieu Hoi program can only sell the GVN image which exists.”-Department of Defense statement on the Chieu Hoi or Open Arms amnesty program.

“l’d   like to work with the Vietnamese the rest of my life,” Sgt. Y, wheeling the jeep that was taking us to the Saigon Chieu Hoi center assured me. “I’ve got a volleyball team out here that beats the Americans every time.”

A GI jacket bearing the legend, “When I die I’ll go straight to heaven- l’ve done my time in hell,” is such a common sight around Saigon that I was pleasantly surprised to find an American soldier to whom Vietnam was nearer heaven. Nor did Sgt. Y. share the usual American complaint that the Vietnamese soldier “bugs out.”

“Most reliable men I’ve ever worked with,” he informed me. As he’d just returned from a jungle mission with an Armed Propaganda Team I had to correct my earlier impression.

Sgt. Y. Was a large-size Californian wearing blue levis, muddy combat boots and a shirt that looked like he might have found it on a bush. He’d set up four interviews for me at the Chieu Hoi center.  

The building which houses the library, interrogation rooms, classrooms and offices of the center was built, by the French, of white enduring stone. It is spacious, air-conditioned and well appointed. When the French were having their day it must have been well-shaded too. The French built solidly because they had all the time in the world:  it was their country and they were never going home.

The low dark barracks in the rear look like some boomtown company quarters after the boom is done. The Americans build in a hurry because they’re going home any day now: it was never their country and they were always going home any day now.

The men billeted in them are probably living no worse than the North Vietnamese Army or the Viet Cong. Lying or sitting on their bunks, idling in or out, they seem bored by something more than idleness and the heat: an air of psychological fatigue. You don’t become one with people you fought just by crossing over into their lines; all you do is turn those with whom you fought into deadlier enemies.

Some gave up out of weariness and some out of fear. Some because their officers lied. (As though the common soldier is ever told the truth.) Perhaps their passivity derives from no longer knowing just who they are.

The barrenness of their billets isn’t due to American stinginess. The Americans, if permitted, would install air-conditioning, a snackbar, juke-boxes, a steam-bath-massage parlor with adjoining swimming pool and a landing field for choppers bringing in colored Kleenex and chocolate macaroons vacuum-packed in Brooklyn. The Americans would pour it on.

But there can’t be any pouring. “Standards will be kept deliberately modest” is the ruling. “It is expected that returnees will be accommodated in modest comfort but not at a level that would incite the envy of neighboring Vietnamese troops.” Vietnamese envy is easily incited.

The present standards of the Saigon Chieu Hoi center must seem sufficiently high to most Vietnamese because, now and again, a Saigonese cowboy will present himself as a defector, pass the screening, and enjoy a month’s vacation with pay; and take off in a new suit of clothes.

Chieu Hoi is financed by the U.S. and guided by American advisors. It is modeled after the amnesty mission which had success in the Philippines against the Hukbalahops. Its purpose is to turn the insurgent into a friend by rewarding him with a respected place in the Establishment. Something like offering a member of the Black Panthers a job as an executive in Head Start. Forget the NVA and become a Kit Carson Scout.

RETURNEE AWARDED VN. $26,000

Saigon (VP) The ministry of Open-Arms recently decided to grant VN $26,000 to a returnee in An Xuyen who guided the RVNAF combatants to launch an operation during which a number of communist weapons were seized. The Weapons seized included one K-50, six Russian rifles and one Mauser. During the operation the RVN killed 10 communists and captured four others. The returnee was a guerilla at Phong Lac village in Song Ong Doc districts, An Xuyen. –Saigon Daily News

Once a defector has passed a screening which ascertains that he is not an infiltrator, he pledges loyalty to the government of South Vietnam and receives an ID card entitling him to the same privileges, immunities and responsibilities of every other citizen of that curious republic. He receives a mattress, a blanket, two suits of clothing and $61 in piastres; as well as the opportunity to develop a skill in woodworking, brick-laying or animal husbandry. He is also required to attend classes in political orientation. He is a Hoi Chanh.

A Hoi Chanh may remain in a Chieu Hoi center, with his family, for as long as 60 days. He is then offered the alternatives of serving as a regular soldier in the Vietnamese military, of joining the Americans as a Kit Carson Scout, of going into a government Chieu Hoi village or of returning to his own village. He is usually sufficiently shrewd not to return to his own.

If he prefers farming to fighting he is given a six months’ supply of rice and $90 for purchase of building materials. Roofing and cement is provided by the American government. He sometimes winds up with roofing, rice and cement, but without land to build on.

Sgt. Y. took me to a jerry-built construction, called “The Club,” to ‘ meet our interviewees. The Club looks like one of those general stores on the outskirts of town where a rusty dipper hangs on a pump. The furniture consisted of three mess tables and half a dozen benches. The walls were covered with coca-cola ads and dated Vietnamese calendars. A Vietnamese woman sold coffee, tea, rice and cigarettes here. It was a Hoi Chanh  Playboy club.

Our interpreter was a schoolboy from Hanoi, wearing steel-rimmed glasses and a St. Chris. He introduced me to Van, a boy hardly older but much tougher, who’d fought six years with the NFL. I asked the boy from Hanoi to ask the VC boy why he’d defected.

“I was second in charge of eight men of the Dong Nai regiment. We were stationed in Binh Duong Province. Our people had taken Saigon, we were told.

“There were a hundred of us. We moved only at night. We were not to fight on the way. By day we rested. I had four clips of 30 rounds apiece for my AK-47. We did not know how we were to be reinforced or supplied. On the outskirts of Saigon we were beaten. It turned out to be a lie that our people held Saigon.

“I realized that we were a suicide mission. I found a leaflet promising safety and-amnesty to soldiers of the Dong Nai regiment.

“I had no wish to die. When I was sent to get rice, that night, I walked to where the ARVN troops had dug in. I made a lot of noise and held my rifle and the leaflet over my head. I became a Hoi Chanh.

“What will you do when you have finished here?”

“I take the one-year draft exemption.”

This kid was simply war-weary, that was all.

The next interviewee was a man, in his middle-thirties, who’d served eight years’ as a medical officer with The People’s Army of North Vietnam. His family was still in Hanoi.

“Will measures be taken against your family because of your defection?”

“They may find things harder economically.”  

Though nobody would be busted, I took this to mean somebody might get fired. I asked him why he’d defected.

“Because I am a doctor first, a soldier second. In the North I had to be a soldier first. There the best doctor is the best soldier. I am a good doctor but a poor soldier. I am a poor soldier because I am not political.”

“Do you consider the Chieu Hoi program to be non-political?”

“Yes,” Sgt. Y. cut in.

“If so,” I wondered, “why the acceleration? Isn’t the aim of accelerated pacification to capture as much territory as possible before a cease-fire, in order to strengthen our bargaining position?” `

“Capturing the minds and hearts of men is our purpose,” Sgt. Y. assured me. `

“Isn’t that what the Japanese meant when they spoke of ‘co-existence’?”

“The Japanese didn’t practice co-existence. They practiced ‘Break and Subdue’.”

“Don’t we do the same thing under ‘Clear and Destroy?”

‘If it were we wouldn’t be winning the war that the Japanese lost.”

“I didn’t know we were winning it.”

“America has never lost a war.”

The Hanoi boy’s spectacles slid down his nose.

“The Americans had to run like hell at Inchon,” I remembered.

“They didn’t run,” the sergeant was certain, “they walked.”

The next interviewee had been a professional soldier 28 years, and if he lived another 28 he’d still be soldiering. He appeared to be in his early thirties but was actually 43. His name and rank were sewn on his sleeve: Major Luan.

Major Luan had a broad, strong-boned face of such strong intelligence that, though he wasn’t a big man, he gave the impression of being a six-footer. This impression also derived from his self-con-fidence. He spoke so directly that his cordiality seemed challenging. He was the son of a farmer of the north; and had turned soldier when he’d been only 15.

“The French came to our village,” he explained, in the tone of a defense lawyer confident of his client’s innocence. “They made our girls stand in the middle of our village. Some of the girls were married. Some were mothers. It made no difference to the French. Their officers chose among them, pointing to this or that one, like men in a whorehouse. Wherever the French officers went, they took what they chose for their pleasure. If it gave them pleasure to kill, they killed. I have since killed many French. But not one have I killed for pleasure.”

“The Americans gave much support, in money and planes and guns to the French. There was even a plan to use a nuclear bomb at Dien Bien Phu. So aren’t you now fighting for what you used to fight against?  Even though the Americans do not kill for pleasure?”

“No,” Major Luan answered decisively, “I fight now for the same object I fought as a boy: the freedom of the Vietnamese people.”

“Do you believe that, had the election promised by the Geneva conference been held in 1954,Diem would have won over Ho?”

“Ho would have won,” the major admitted, “and we would now have a communist country.”

“Wouldn’t that be preferable to having two countries engaged in an endless war?”

“No. Better no country than a communist country. I fight with the Americans now because that is to fight for what I have always fought; the freedom of the individual man to vote, to speak freely, to assemble freely, and to have a fair trial.”

“When the Saigon Chief of Police executed a suspect in front of the American TV cameras, many Americans began to doubt that we were fighting for the right of a suspect to a fair trial.”

“That was just an accident in time and space,” Sgt. Y. explained. I didn’t know what he meant.

The Major stood up looking exasperated. He walked up and down, frowning, wanting to be understood before he began speaking. Finally he stopped and looked at me seriously.

“You cannot understand hatred,” he assured me. “I do not approve of what Chief of Police Loan did- but I understand it. You think there is always time to be reasonable. But there is not always time. When you live with memories of what the enemy has done to your friends, it is hard, when your own chance comes, not to do the same to him. Yet, even when my own desire was vengeance, I have kept my men from killing. It was not easy.”

He sat down looking troubled. There was sweat on his forehead; he wiped it off. Then, with an effort, he smiled.

“You too might have done what the Chief of Police did—if you did not know a TV camera was watching.”

“TV only shows the VC side of things anyhow,” Sgt. Y. complained. “When the air force bombs the wrong village by mistake, they play it up. Why don’t they show what the VC does?”

“I was only speaking about the reaction in the States,” I told both the major and the sergeant, “seeing an unarmed man, with his hands bound behind him, executed on the spot, made a lot of people sick. And what made them sick was knowing that they were on the same side as the Chief of Police of Saigon.”

“I have killed many men in battle,” Major Luan persisted in taking the argument as a personal accusation, “but I have never killed an unarmed man. Many times I have taken prisoner men it would have given me satisfaction to kill on the spot. But I did not because I have self-control. There is only one man in the world I would not take prisoner. And into him I would put my knife as far as it would go.”

Major Luan looked out at the low, dark line of barracks.

“General Giap,” he told himself softly, “General Giap.”

Although the Chieu Hoi program is pointed for battlefield defections, few men come in by that route. The soldier may be ready to desert; but he lacks confidence that the Green Beret will hold his fire. So most give themselves up at civilian centers or to the National Police. Some have their families arrange their defections. More give themselves up to Vietnamese forces than to American. More come in from the N.F.L. than from the P.A.V.N.

Chieu Hoi pays the Hoi Chanh for every weapon he brings in with him; or to which he leads an American or GVN force. The ministry of Chieu Hoi paid out 23 million piastres in 1968 for weapons brought in or discovered. One Nguyen Van Bang earned 2,028,500 piastres-about 12,000 American dollars–for revealing one cache.

Psychological warfare experts in South Vietnam are using astrology to bring Viet Cong over to the government side during the lunar New Year starting Tuesday. A professional astrologer, Thai Son, who writes a popular horoscope for Saigon newspapers, has prepared a forecast sheet to be included in Tet gift packages. The Joint United States-Public Affairs Office says the sheet makes predictions favorable to the government and unfavorable to its enemies. The United States agency is advising the government on preparing and distributing 100,000 of the astrological charts as well as 28 other items, designed to boost the Cheiu Hoi, or ‘open arms’ defection program.-AP dispatch from Saigon in the Baltimore Sun.

The next defector to whom I spoke was a wan youth who’d picked up $26,000 for serving as a guide in an operation which led to the capture of one K-50, six Russian rifles and one Mauser. He hadn’t kept the whole reward for himself, he apologized, but had given VN $5,000 toward a fund for the rebuilding of Hue. With the balance he planned to buy a Yamaha. And added, in English, that he hoped to become a Kit Carson Scout.

The Kit Carson Scouts have distinguished themselves. Dinh van Minh, on patrol northwest of Da-nang,. recommended an ambush site to his American commander and fired the first claymore, killing five NVA men. He then threw grenades into the enemy position and continued to fight, although wounded. Minh was recommended for the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and the NFL put a VN $100,000 price on his capture. Eight men kidnapped him from his home, and cut the soles of his feet to make his escape difficult. Minh succeeded in escaping, nonetheless, and returned to the First Marine Division.

Truong Kinh, a Kit Carson Scout with the Fifth Marines, is credited with the killing of 55 NFL men in a single day’s fighting. “Even more important than the number killed,” his CO commented, “is that Kinh has won the respect of every Marine in the outfit.”

The names of heroic Vietnamese, who have come over to the American side, would make a long, long list. What is troubling about it is that the achievement is simply one of successful counter-terrorism. One fails to see what it has to do with “winning the minds and hearts of men.” And those Hoi Chanh who do not become incorporated into an army outfit, remain unincorporated in Vietnamese society. These VC and NVA men, lying apathetically around the Saigon Chieu Hoi center have become second-class citizens in South Vietnam. As, indeed, have those multitudes who’ve been bombed out; then given free cement.

Rep. Chamberlane of Michigan offers us a direct route to victory in our pacification program: “There is no doubt that soap boosts morale,” he assures us, “and of the nutritive value of candy there can be no doubt”- and so devises a Victory in Vietnam motto: Candy is dandy and soap brings hope.

How such minds get elected to public office is something I’ve never been able to figure out. Though I make an effort whenever Roman Pucinski makes a public statement.

While the GVN estimates that the NFL has lost the equivalent of 10 divisions, by defections through the Chieu Hoi program, it has itself lost 100,000 men whom nobody solicited to quit fighting. That some of them are now embattled as policemen, among Saigon’s 50,000 “White Mice National Police,” seems plausible.

The risks being taken, and the hardships now endured, by Americans trying to provide schools, medical help and modern agricultural techniques to the South Vietnamese, is a struggle, essentially, against the present government in Saigon. That government’s opposition to ‘land reform, a position supported by the U.S. Embassy upon the ground that such tenure would create “political instability,” has reduced the hope of “winning the hearts and minds of men” to what, with less hypocrisy, Imperial Japan called “Break and Subdue.” And what we term “Clear and Destroy;”

Imperial Japan’s policy on land reform in Vietnam was sustained by Diem’s concentration camp order of Jan. 11, 1956. And has since, by the support of American weaponry, been ‘sustained by the present government in Saigon. lndeed, the major cadres of the American pacification programs are derived today from the party organized by the Japanese business-military complex: the Dai Viet.

“In our time,” George Orwell wrote, “political speech and writing, are largely the defense of the indefensible … political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Mil1ions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. ”

Not even Orwell could foretell a day when Earth’s mightiest power would seek help, in rectifying frontiers of a country 10,000 miles away, by consulting a wandering astrologist.

The rest of the way is by the stars.

 

 

Jim Tuohy on Roger Ebert

ROGER EBERT OUTDRAWS THE BASKETBALL TEAM

By James Tuohy

ROGER EBERT HAD arrived at the movies, but the movies had not. “There’s no 1 o’clock screening of Trenchcoat,” Ebert said into a telephone at the reception desk of the Film Media Center, a film-editing firm that has a screening room. “It’s been cancelled.”

Ebert was calling his office—the one at Tribune Productions, not the one at the Chicago Sun-Times or the one at WLS or the one at the University of Chicago. He used to have one at the Mer­chandise Mart too, but he recently quit doing mo­vie reviews there for Channel 5. He keeps busy, though, doing daily reviews and weekly articles for the Sun-Times, radio commentaries for ABC radio, and At the Movies, the weekly program in which Ebert and Tribune critic Gene Siskel review movies, which appears on 130 television stations.

The crowded schedule occasionally creates logistical breakdowns, such as on this Wednesday after­noon, as Ebert was informed by the At the Movies office that Walt Disney productions had failed to furnish a print of Trenchcoat. At The Movies had been informed of the cancellation, but this informa­tion was not transmitted to Ebert.

“You have to remember to take it out of the book when it’s cancelled,” said Ebert calmly into the telephone. He stood with his rain coat hanging loose and open, its collar up, and he held a white bag in his hand. He replaced the receiver, took off his coat, and sat down on a flat, cloth-upholstered couch. He reached in the bag and spread on the floor a hamburger with ketchup, mustard, onion, and hot pep­per, French fries and, somewhat futilely, a medium-sized diet drink. It was lunch time.

* * *

Breakfast for Ebert had been in Columbia, Missouri. He and Siskel appeared at the University of Missouri the night before, and Ebert returned to Chica­go about 10:15 a.m., armed with a line for the day: “Fifteen-hundred people came to see us. We out­drew the basketball team.” The comment was typi­cal of Ebert, pithy and cheerful and delivered with a hint in his voice that it might even be true.

There were almost 9,000 people at the basketball game in Columbia, but there was a game.

Ebert took a cab to the fringe of Old Town, to an old three-story, red-brick townhouse he bought last year, moving from a smaller townhouse around the corner. “One day I was looking for a parking place, and I saw a For Sale sign. The owners showed me around, and I said ‘I’ll take it.”

It cost about a quarter of a million dollars.

Ebert does not give details on his earnings, but media personalities at his level talk about salaries in chunks of hundreds of thousands, and he’s making several chunks. He owns several pieces of property, including the townhouse he moved out of.

“It’s hard for me to know how much I have because a lot of it is tied up in mortgages,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that I’m rich, but I make more money than I ever thought I would.”

Such statements have to be coaxed out of Ebert, for whom money has never been the primary reason for doing what he does. He gave up his lucrative three-day-a-week contract with Channel 5 simply because he wanted more free time. A bachelor and for 17 years a well-paid movie critic for the Sun- Times, Ebert lived comfortably long before his other contracts came along. He does radio and television mainly because he likes to.

“It’s fun,” said Ebert, who always had a streak of ham in him, whether on the stage in high school, telling jokes in a bar, recounting travel adventures to friends, or making guest appearances on talk shows. “I thought, at this point in my career, I would be writing a general interest column, but now that At the Movies is a hit I don’t have time. It’s OK, though. I love the movies.”

Ebert walked through the living room of his townhouse, which has been kept out of the grasp of interior decorators. He walked into the kitchen, fed his two cats, dropped his bag in a second-floor bedroom, and called the Sun-Times from a third-floor study. He picked up five radio scripts from a desk. Each one-minute long, they would be played on 400 ABC-affiliated radio stations the following week.

Ebert walked to his 1980 grey four-door Volkswagen and drove to the Stone Container Building at Wacker and Michigan. There, in a small studio, he sat at an empty table and laid his scripts down in front of a microphone. On the other side of the glass sat Bob Benninghoff, the engineer.

After some preliminaries, he said into the mike, “This is Movie News for Tuesday, March 15th…John Huston received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award . . . Who else do you know who’s been master of the hunt… beachcomber in Mexico… lover of great women… Boxer…director…African Queen…Key Largo… Treasure of Sierra Madre…Why, if it weren’t for John Huston, the late show wouldn’t be worth staying up for…”

Ebert looked over to Benninghoff again. “Was that a take? It was too short, wasn’t it? Do another one. I’ll add a sentence…Take two…the Late Show wouldn’t be worth staying up for. Of course, he also made Annie, but nobody’s perfect.”

Because of stumbles in delivery, Ebert did four takes. “He’s working hard on this,” said Benninghoff.

Ebert ran through the other four scripts with retakes on only two of them. He had entered the studio at 12:30 p.m. At 12:49 he completed the tap­ings, his week of radio toils finished. “I’ve got a mo­vie at one o’clock,” said Ebert, who never wears a watch.

“Don’t they wait for you, Rog?” asked Benning­hoff.

“They have a way of inviting other people, Bob.”

In his car Ebert listened to tapes of the current week of ABC broadcasts, which Benninghoff had given him. Movie News runs at 7:45 a.m. in Chicago, and Ebert seldom listens to it then. Ebert parked in a lot next to Lenny’s, a prefabricated hot dog stand on Ontario, where he ordered lunch, the one he would take in a white bag to the Film Media Center.

***

One of Ebert’s great culinary disappointments has been that the Steak-and-Shake chain has never successfully entered the Chicago market. He grew to love Steak-and-Shake steak burgers as a child in Urbana. The white-and-black-tiled short-order shops have inspired Ebert to rhapsodies through the years, both written and oral.

Ebert was born in Urbana on June 18, 1942, the only child of Walter and Annabelle Ebert. Walter, who was 40 when Roger was born, was an electrician. Annabelle worked as a bookkeeper. Roger’s stable, two-car Midwestern childhood could have been used in scripting an Andy Hardy movie.

He lived all his growing years in the same two-bedroom white stucco house with green shutters at 410 W. Washington Street. The Eberts lived across the street from the city editor of the Champaign News-Gazette, and he sometimes took Roger with him down to the paper, even when Roger was still in the grades at St. Mary’s Catholic School. For almost as long as he remembers going to Steak-­and-Shake, Roger wanted to be a newspaperman. When he was in fifth grade he put out his own newspaper, The Washington Street News. When he was 15 he began working 30 hours a week at the News-Gazette, covering sports and features, and he wrote for and became editor of the Urbana High School paper, The Echo. Along the way, Ebert, took first place in a state radio contest, preparing a five-minute newscast on deadline and then reading it.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois in 1960, Ebert started his own weekly paper, The Spectator, which was devoted to the arts and poli­tics. Like his writing skills, Ebert’s interest in the arts developed early, the cultural opportunities be­ing extensive in a university town. As early as grade school he began attending concerts, plays, and, of course, the movies. He became a regular col­umnist for the Daily Illini when he was a freshman and the editor of the paper when he was a senior. While still in college he sold pieces to Panorama Magazine, the Saturday feature section of the Chi­cago Daily News. In 1966, after going to graduate school and being accepted into the doctoral program in English at the University of Chicago, Ebert was hired as a reporter at the Sun-Times.

He covered routine stories and wrangled feature assignments. He wrote about underground films. He wrote a review of the movie Blowup, did the Sun-Times’ obituary of Walt Disney, and was sent to the West Coast to do feature stories on the film­ing of Camelot. Seven months after he started at the Sun-Times, the paper’s movie critic retired. On April 1, 1967, Ebert became the youngest movie critic on a daily newspaper in the United States.

“It was very exciting. I was very lucky.”

Ebert was also very good. Before Ebert, Chicago daily movie critics generally behaved as nightlife columnists still do, cheerleading for advertisers. Ebert knew that a whole new generation of movie­goers was buying newspapers, and they considered films serious artistic endeavors, not just Saturday night diversions.

His first review was of Galia, a French art film. “What we’re hearing is the sound of the French New Wave rolling aside,” he wrote. Chicago news­papers weren’t used to reviews about prissy foreign waves. The old-time hack reviewers could only scratch their heads.

Ebert, possessor of a smooth writing style, brought magazine-quality slickness to his daily re­views. His background as an English major gave him a solid understanding of plotting and pace, if not always the nuances of film mechanics, and his age kept him attuned to the concerns of the anxious young people of the 1960s.

On the other hand, although his prose was as so­phisticated as, say, that of the reviewers for Time magazine, Ebert liked more movies than did non- newspaper critics, many of whom seemed bored by movies without subtitles. He did not reserve high ratings for films that were made with aspirations to high art. A movie, he believed, was successful if it became in the end what it set out to be in the begin­ning. A good John Wayne western should be re­cognized as such, Ebert believed, and should not be belittled because it didn’t try to be as important as The Rules of the Game.

In 1975 Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize for criti­cism. The award was given for 10 articles he had written during 1974, including reviews and com­mentaries. One of the reviews was an effective de­molition of Mame, which Ebert had finished writ­ing within 45 minutes of the screening.

***

At 1:45 p.m., his Lenny’s lunch completed, Roger Ebert was talking on the phone in his office at the Sun-Times to his office at Tribune Productions. “It’s not your fault. It’s all right. This way I don’t have to see Trenchcoat, and I’m in my office two hours early.”

Ebert’s office is in a corner of the fourth floor fea­tures section of the newspaper, with windows that look east toward the Wrigley Building and the Chi­cago River. He had to write a review of Death Watch for Friday’s paper, as well as a script for At The Movies.

Ebert’s office has more pictures, signs, posters, books, papers, plants, and knickknacks than the eye can quickly comprehend, even on a careful sweep of the room. There are posters for Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Headline Hunters, The Third Man, and The Seven Samurai. Near his old Smith-Corona typewriter is a gumball machine with glass gumballs in it, close by a dozen little Disney figurines and big Donald Duck. On top of filing cabinets are old newspapers, pocket books, film refer­ence volumes, and video tape containers. On the walls are pictures of Ebert with Lillian Gish, Harri­son Ford, and Pia Isadore. On a pile of post cards is one showing a buxom blonde in a revealing outfit, signed “Sex Symbol Sybil.”

The phone rang.

“…We outdrew the basketball team,” said Ebert. “Fifteen-hundred people packed the auditorium. The show is real popular there . . .”

Ebert answered some mail. “Dear Cary, next time I’ll go-fer the dictionary. . . Dear Sonny, I share your enthusiasm, especially for E.S. White and cats.”

Bobby Zaren called. Zaren is a legendary press agent known for sending out only personal letters, never press releases or mimeographed letters.

” . . . Right, Bobby…That’s why you’re the number one press agent in New York–or is it publicist now? I like press agent better. Press agent sounds like someone smoking cigars and running blondes down Broadway.”

Ebert was delaying the moment when he would write. He had seen Death Watch in New York more than a week before and could have written the review any time, but he never writes until he has to.

At 3:15 he wrote the script for reviews of two mo­vies he would give on the At The Movies show to be taped the next day. At 3:45 he was done.

Ebert was due at 6:30 at the University of Chica­go on Michigan Avenue, where he teaches a film class every Wednesday night. Tonight the subject would be Frederic Fellini. Ebert paged through a file of Fellini material.

At 5:30, using no notes, Ebert began writing his review of Death Watch. He worked at a computer terminal behind his desk. He was finished, after re­visions, at 6.

There were about 100 people at his film class. Ebert passed out free tickets to a screening, gave away a couple of paperbacks he had received in the mail, and showed 8 1/2, leading a discussion after­wards. The class broke up at 10, and he and a pret­ty psychiatrist went to Miller’s Pub for a late sup­per. She talked about her high school days in a small Missouri town, and mention of Missouri re­minded Ebert that he had just been there. “We out­drew the basketball team,” he said.

* * *

The following day, Ebert left his Volkswagen in the parking lot of the WGN-TV studios on the Northwest Side. “When I get inside, the first thing I that will happen is that Gene will say something about my being late, like “The World’s Latest Movie Critic.”

But, when Ebert opened the door of room 136, Siskel was typing his script in a corner cubi­cle and he said nothing. It turned out he had a bad cold and was saving his voice for the taping.

Although Ebert writes his two reviews the after­noon before the taping, Siskel waits until Thursday morning because Wednesday is a crowded day for him. He regularly comes in an hour early on Thurs­day, allowing him to needle Ebert about being late.

Ebert was the youngest daily movie critic in the country until Siskel, three years younger, got the Tribune job in 1970. They have spent so much time being adversaries that friendship has come slowly, if it can be said to have arrived at all. They do not meet socially, indeed, do not travel in the same so­cial circles. Ebert lives simply, dates a variety of women, and frequently goes to dinner with a few old friends, a couple of whom are carpenters. Siskel lives in a Gold Coast co-op and is married to an ad­vertising woman who is a former Channel 2 producer, and his social activities involve the high-power­ed media people of the city. The Siskels might be dining at Le Perroquet while Ebert and his pals are eating at the Parthenon.

It might be said that Siskel and Ebert have a strong lack of dislike for each other. The strongest bond between them is their respect for each other’s professionalism. They retain good humor while working together, though remaining dogged com­petitors in large and small ways. When Sun-Times TV columnist Ron Powers won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, two years before Ebert did, Ebert said he was happy for Powers but admitted he never could have been happy if it had gone to Siskel. For the two and a half years that he did re­views for Channel 5 Ebert’s total earnings exceeded Siskel’s and, he admitted, that fact gave him great satisfaction.

As Siskel typed, Ebert talked with Joe Antelo, the executive producer of At The Movies. There had been an article about Ebert and Siskel in USA Today that morning. It said they “are on the verge of turning themselves into the hottest properties in non-network television.”

“Nice article,” said Antelo.

“Couldn’t be better,” said Ebert. ‘Said we were the hottest thing in syndication.”

Ebert and Siskel first got together at WTTW in1975, a once-a-month show titled Opening Soon At a Theater Near You. In 1979, the show evolved in­to the weekly Sneak Previews, which ran for three seasons and became the highest rated program in the history of the Public Broadcasting System. But PBS is a strange operation. The budgets are big, but salaries are small. In August of 1981, after three years of Sneak Previews, the WTTIV ma­nagement offered Ebert and Siskel a four-year con­tract at a raise of $100 each year. WTTW would sell the program to commercial syndication, but Ebert and Siskel would share in none of the profits. In the meantime, Antelo approached Don Ephraim, lawyer for Ebert and Siskel, about putting together a package for Tribune Productions. Ebert and Siskel now share in profits that have raised their salaries by hundreds of thousands each year.

Ebert developed a line to cover the whole WTTW situation: “I already pledged to PBS and got my tote bag. I’ll be damned if I’ll pledge four years of my life, too.” The USA Today writer used it as the last line of his story.

When Siskel finished his script–reviews of The King of Comedy and Tender Mercies–his pages were joined with Ebert’s reviews of My Tutor and High Road to China. All the copy was put in a long roll and sent down to the teleprompter.

After separate lunches in the WGN cafeteria—a gyros sandwich from the steam line for Ebert, skin­less breast of chicken from home for Siskel—and separate trips to makeup, the two critics were seated on the set at 1:15 p.m.

Siskel, wearing a brown sport coat, red crew neck sweater, and red-checked sport shirt, read Variety. Ebert, wearing black slacks, a blue V-neck sweater, and blue button-down shirt, talked.

Ebert had kept up a running commentary all morning—which Siskel, too hoarse to banter, had endured silently. Ebert had been particularly de­lighted by a wire-service story in the Sun-Times that said women found men with hair sexier than men without. He had taped it to the wall. “Phil, you probably saw today that article about women’s at­titude toward baldheaded men,” said Ebert to the floor manager, Phil Reid. “It said a man without hair is like a ring without a diamond.”

The start of taping had been delayed by a technical problem. Ebert continued his patter, comment­ing repeatedly on Siskel’s cold-induced passiveness.

“My partner here is fighting his usual losing bat­tle with catatonia…If my car behaved like Gene, I’d need a new set of jumper cables.”

”That’s a Rodney Dangerfield line,” he said. It is not a Rodney Dangerfield line. Ebert just wanted an excuse to do a series of Rodney Dangerfield jokes, which he did.

The taping went slowly due to technical troubles, but Ebert’s and Siskel’s readings went smoothly, requiring few retakes. Their ad libs between reviews, some almost two minutes long, were recorded without retakes.

The Stinker of the Week portion of the program requires the presence of a skunk named Aroma, and at 3:20 it was placed in a seat next to Ebert. He began petting it. “Hi, kiddo,” he said to the skunk.

Siskel did not address the skunk.

“Gene’s a little afraid of the skunk,” said Nancy Stanley, the makeup woman.

Ebert said he had received a post card during the week from a viewer who wanted to know if the skunk was real. “People are so used to special effects these days they can’t even tell a real animal,” said Ebert. “I wrote her hack and said the skunk is real but Gene is a special effect.”

The tape rolled with a close up of Aroma. “No, we couldn’t keep him away,” said Siskel, ad libbing the introduction. “That’s Aroma, and it’s time for The Stinker of the Week.”

“Do you know we actually got a post card want­ing to know if Aroma is real?” asked Ebert.

“Yes,” replied Siskel. “I told them the skunk is real but you are a special effect.”

Ebert let out a great laugh.

The sound was bad, and the exchange was reshot three times. On the last one Ebert could not resist the temptation to add a rejoinder: “Jumper cable for Mr. Siskel, please.”

It was not as funny as it had been the original way. It was, in fact, a non sequitur, but producer Nancy De Los Santos let it stand.

“OK, Roger, that’s a wrap for you,” said De Los Santos at 4:10.

Ebert had time to go home, shower, and change clothes before leaving for the 6 o’clock screening of Trenchcoat, a movie so bad he contemplated awarding it no stars.

On the way home that night Ebert stopped at O’Rourke’s, an Old Town bar he did a lot to popula­rize. Through the years Ebert wrote about O’Rourke’s, interviewed actors there, and hosted parties there. The place gained a reputation as a hangout for celebrities and media stars. Ebert quit drinking three years ago, but he still drops in for brief visits.

Ebert started to tell a political story to Chris Chandler, a press aide to Mayor Harold Washington. But he was interrupted by a woman who said she was a reporter from Newsweek. “We’ve been thinking about doing a story on you,” she said.

“Any time,” said Ebert. “USA Today says we’re the hottest thing in syndication. We went down to the University of Missouri and outdrew the basket­ball team.”

The woman looked impressed. Ebert looked like a man who knows how to have fun.

 

Pottawattomie Ghosts

By Nelson Algren

Pottawattomie Ghosts

The city was as yet no more than a fort when it first felt itself besieged. Whites were within and Pottawattomies were without.

Having no ammo, the Whites would have been wiser to stay within. Instead they came out.

Marching yet.

A brave named Black Partridge persuaded another brave it would be lousy politics to tomahawk Captain Kinzie’s daughter. Take a look at the statue in Grant Park if you doubt me. It shows Black Partridge saving Mrs. Helm from a Red Panther. But among the Pottawattomies Black Partridge came to be known as Uncle Tomahawk.

The skeletons on the shore were given coffined burial the following spring. But the waters washed the sands until the coffins rose from their graves. Then the boxes fell in and lake winds thinned those dry grey bones. Till they strangely turned into Pottawattomie ghosts spread false rumours through dunes and town. The last ambush is not yet.

The coffins were still thrusting blackly through the dunes 20 years after the massacre.

A dread of besiegement shifted from decade to decade like the sands beyond the gate. Someone, nobody knew who, was going to poison the wells. In Europe bearded fanatics were blowing up captains beside their kings; men with beards were coming off ships in New York harbor every day. Somebody, nobody knew who, was going to blow up City Hall. People heard gunfire but there was nobody there.

Bearded men began showing up in Chicago. Some brought wives; it looked like they were going to reproduce!

When street-car workers went out on strike, in 1885, Mayor Harrison declared that nine out of ten Chicagoans were sympathetic to them. Yet suspicion of some alien conspiracy moved behind the minds of the men behind the police department. Six strikers were murdered, outside of the McCormick works, in the city’s first police riot.

The mayor instructed Police Inspector Bonfield to keep hands off the protest meeting called the following evening on Randolph Street between Halsted and Desplaines. Harrison mingled with the protestors to demonstrate whose side he was on. After describing the meeting as “tame,” he left.

Acting then upon no orders save his own, Bonfield decided to disperse the crowd. He marched 176 men into it and a bomb ripped his ranks. Police, in panic, began firing upon each other. Sixty-seven officers were wounded. Seven died.

Subsequently a monument was erected on Randolph Street, to commemorate the memory of an unlawful assault by policemen and their bad aim.

Algren and Viet Nam

by Warren Leming

Algren had an ever changing relation to the United States, honed in the 30’s when he hit the road and did jail time in Texas; saw the U.S. Communist party at its highwater mark in the same period, led by men like Mike Gold who had both a feel for American literature and the people who made it. Algren’s friend Richard Wright was in the Party and was later denounced by an ambitious James Baldwin, who watched Wright flee to Paris, with a number of other American intellectuals, never to return. Algren, like Paul Robeson had his passport pulled by the State Department, and for reasons that were never clear, could not travel for ten years. He described the U.S. to H.E.F. Donahue as “an Imperialist son of a bitch.”

But for all that: Algren, as he aged, came to the bitter conclusion that he had been both stiffed and undermined by the System, while wondering where his cut of the profits was. He saw men of lesser ability living comfortably if compromised while he continued a bare bones existence in a third story walk up, unencumbered by wealth or fame. The stark contradiction of his condition can be seen in his letters from Viet Nam where he encountered the dark side of American hypocrisy in a genocidal war and assassination programs like Phoenix which helped produce people like Chicago’s own John Burge, whose torture tactics mirror exactly what the Phoenix programmers were doing in Viet Nam where Burge was a part of the program. What goes around, comes around as the Street would have it.

But this is not to suggest that Algren didn’t have some very Capitalist desires of his own despite his legendary inability to acquire and then manage whatever money came his way.  That he’d had a stellar American literary career was as much a fact as was his dire financial situation as he aged  midst Post War excess.

Unlike France or Germay, where aging artists are considered part of the National legacy, Algren, James T. Farrell, Scott Fitzgerald, and many others were simply left to fend for themselves in an increasingly commercial atmosphere which today seems benign given the Disneyland cum Meat Market where American values were to veer.

In the late Sixties, while in Saigon, during the War, Algren makes some grave mistakes. Thinking himself still in Marsailles during the last days of the Second World War, he dabbles in the Black Market and comes very close to a beating or worse while ineptly attempting to game the completely corrupted sand box that Saigon had become.  Its an almost fatal error, as was the trip, which saw him stumble from disastrous relationships; an increasing incomprehension as to what he was a part of; and ultimately his humiliation at the hands of thugs.

As he aged, Algren’s feel for the demi-monde began to desert him. His confusion over his situation in Saigon is but one of many examples of both his bitterness at his situation and his inability to see that the Game had changed, and that he too was now part of something perverse and dangerous which was to end in the absolute debacle of Viet Nam, with which the United States has yet to come to terms. Algren commented on his own growing isolation to H.E.F. Donahue during Donahue’s long, and at times woefully kack handed interview (in the early 60’s) “Conversations with Algren.” When asked about the 30’s and the WPA, Algren responded: “…..it put me in touch with people who were politically alert and I know there are oftentimes now when I think, well, where did everybody go?” A casual response and yet, underneath it, we sense how our own horribly skewed times had their beginnings, long ago.

(Warren Leming is a writer/critic who knew Nelson Algren, and co-founded the Nelson Algren Committee (www.nelsonalgren.org), which will host the 22nd annual Nelson Algren birthday party March 26th, at Wicker Park Arts, 2215 w. North Ave. at 8 pm. (for more info call: 773 235 4267),or visit the website.

Adam and Eve

By Christopher Chandler

 

In The Beginning

Human beings first evolved in Southern Africa about 200,000 years ago, the scientists now tell us. What they call “Mitochondrial Eve” is the common ancestor of all living women, according to DNA studies. It looks like we migrated south to the ocean, and up the coast to Ethiopia. About 100,000 years ago we started moving into the Middle East and Asia, and all the way to Australia by 70,000 years ago.

We didn’t enter Europe until about 50,000 years ago, probably because our distant cousins the Neanderthals were already there. We slowly replaced them, probably because we were better hunters. The prevailing theory is that what gave us humans the advantage is that we had a division of labor: the men hunted and the women and children gathered, providing a secure diet and safety for the women and children. Neanderthal families hunted big game all together, judging by the many broken bones suffered by all. Recent DNA studies indicate that Europeans and Asians have from 1 to 4 per cent Neanderthal genes.

The Garden of Eden

There were at least three flourishing cultures around 40,000 years ago, in Southwest Europe, South Africa and northern South America, judging by the art works they left behind. In south west France and northern Spain there are hundreds of painted caves, dating from roughly 40,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago. The paintings show the animals they hunted: cattle, bison, deer, horses and mammoths.

Their other art work, statuettes and engravings, are virtually all of women.

They buried their dead with care, even the smallest of children. They often lived as cliff dwellers, side by side, separated by leather walls, each family with it’s own fireplace and decorated ceiling. They played the flute, and enjoyed fish, fruit and nuts along with their game.

From all indications they were prosperous and peaceful. There is no evidence of violence in all the art and artifacts. There is also no evidence of religion, beyond the apparent worship of women, and a belief in the afterlife.

Expelled from Eden

This Golden Age came to an end with the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers. Some followed the climate north, and those who remained struggled through the Neolithic Age, inventing the bow and arrow to hunt smaller game. They developed “semi-domestication” or wild herds. Then came the discovery of agriculture in the Middle East about 8,000 years ago, a more secure source of food that spread throughout Europe and Eurasia. Western culture’s most ancient texts date back to about 3,000 years ago.

The Bible’s account of how Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden may reflect the transition from hunting to farming. Farming is hard work, as God tells Adam. Cain was the farmer and Able the shepherd, and Cain prevails.

There are many reminders in human beings of our tens of thousands of years as hunters and gatherers. Men still like to fish and hunt, women like to gather, and men still tend to worship women.

 

JFK

By Christopher Chandler

The 1991 movie “JFK” begins with the famous speech by President Eisenhower warning of the growing power of the “military industrial complex,” and the effects this will have on the soul of America. It relates the valiant efforts by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, to unravel the conspiracy behind the assassination of the president, pursuing men with ties to the CIA and the mob.

Towards the end, Garrison interviews a “Black Ops” agent, played by Donald Sutherland, who lays out the whole picture. The assassination was carried out by a conspiracy that involved the highest levels of government.

But of all the documentary clips Stone uses, he was apparently unaware of CBS news footage of Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, telling the press it was Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, who succeeded Kennedy just days before, who had arranged the killing.

“The world will never know the true facts of what occurred,” he says to reporters, in footage found in the National Archives by researcher Dennis Mueller for the documentary “The Grassy Knoll.”

“I want to correct what I said before about the vice president,” Ruby tells reporters. “The vice president?” a reporter asks. “When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson,” Ruby replies. “If he was the vice president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved president Kennedy.”

“Would you explain again?” a reporter asks. “Well, the answer is the man in office now.”

This is just one piece of evidence in the picture that is finally emerging of how Johnson orchestrated the assassination. There are many more, including:

–  The Billy Sol Estes federal court filing, in which the long time Johnson business partner lists seven men who were killed because they got in Johnson’s way. The last name on the list was John F. Kennedy.

—  The deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt, the CIA operative involved in the Bay of Pigs and later arrested in the Watergate break in. He drew a diagram for his son of those involved in the assassination of Kennedy, and at the top of the pyramid was Johnson.

—   The book by a chief investigator for the Congressional Investigation which documents how Johnson micromanaged every detail of Kennedy’s visit to Dallas, including trying to change the seating in the presidents limo, and calling Oswald’s doctor to tell him to get a deathbed confession. The investigator, Douglas P. Horne, also documents how the Secret Service deliberately destroyed protective survey reports sought by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1995.

Bits and pieces of evidence are finally coming to light. Hundreds of books have been written about the assassination, tracing CIA and mob connections, and demonstrating the falsifying of evidence by the Warren Commission. But until recently little was written about who might have led the conspiracy.

The context of the assassination is provided by “JFK and the Unspeakable, and Why It Matters” by James W. Douglass, a book Oliver Stone calls “The best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance.” Douglass proves, with painstaking research, that president Kennedy was carrying out a radical change in American foreign policy. He had already ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam, and was planning a full exit. He was working with Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev on a joint flight to the moon, as a symbol of the end of the cold war. He was a severe threat to the military industrial complex.

He was a threat to the CIA. After the Bay of Pigs, he fired CIA director Allen Dulles and planned to transfer Black OP’s to the Chiefs of Staff. He was a threat to the mob, with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy pursuing it relentlessly. He was planning to accept Hoover’s resignation. He had many enemies, but he was a popular president bound for reelection.

“L.B.J.: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination,” makes a strong case that Johnson orchestrated the whole thing. It details LBJ’s ruthless rise to power and documents his serious mental problems. A revised edition is to be published Nov. 22. We will see what further revelations it contains.

The key to the whole conspiracy might be found in a meeting the night before the assassination between Johnson, Hoover and Nixon. It was at a party in the home of billionaire Clint Murchison. Dallas reporter Penn Jones Jr. first wrote about the meeting. Here we have the vice president and would be successor, the man who would be in charge of any investigation, and the leader of the opposition party.

Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Brown, described the event as a party honoring Hoover. Johnson arrived late and a small group went into a private meeting. Others in the meeting included the host, Murchison, and John J. McCloy of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and a representative of Rockefeller interests. Brown says that after the meeting, a tense LBJ told her, “After tomorrow, those Goddamn Kennedy’s will never embarrass me again.”

When this meeting and other evidence of Johnson’s involvement were described in the final episode of  a series on the History Channel in 2003, there was a public outcry from Johnson supporters. The history channel withdrew the program, appointed three historians who found it lacked credibility, and issued a public apology.

But if that meeting took place, and it is corroborated in different ways by a number of witnesses, I think we have reached the heart of the conspiracy. Johnson was going over the final plans for the assassination and the cover up. He would be president the next day.

Within days of the assassination he canceled the troop withdrawal from Vietnam and assured generals the Communists would never win on his watch. He assured Hoover he had a permanent job. He appointed Allen Dulles, the CIA director Kennedy had fired, to the Warren Commission.

There is one final piece to the puzzle. In 1968 Johnson announced he would not seek the nomination of his party, and the history books take him at his word. But there is strong evidence that Johnson was planning on coming to the Democratic Convention and being renominated by acclaim.

Emmett Dedmon, the editor the the Chicago Sun-Times during the convention, wrote in the revised version of his book on Chicago history of a conversation he had with former Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley many years later when they were dining at the Tavern Club with their wives. Dedmon asked Daley how much of the decision to have police crack down on anti war protestors at the Convention was his, and how much was Johnson’s. The images of police beating demonstrators in front of the Hilton Hotel, broadcast to a nationwide audience, had been a disaster for the Democratic party.

“Daley’s answer was in the character of the man. ‘Emmett,’ he said, ‘ I was raised in the Eleventh Ward and taught party loyalty. Whatever it was, they will never hear it from me.” But then he added, in one of the few moments that it might be said he was ever off guard, “But I will tell you that twice I had to tell the president of the United States that he could not come to Chicago—once when he was sitting in Air Force One on the runway with the engines running.” This later reference, of course, was the night of the president’s birthday, when Johnson had obviously anticipated coming before the convention for an ovation and, hopefully, a nomination by acclamation.”

But he couldn’t be renominated if he was greeted by anti war protestors. The street in front of the Hilton had to be cleared.

So Johnson announces he’s not running, Bobby Kennedy is assassinated, and Johnson plans to run again. Kennedy was shot the night he won the California primary and was assured of the Democratic nomination. He was way ahead in the polls and no doubt would have been our next president.

It would be the same basic conspiracy that killed JFK; Nixon to enjoy the removal of an unbeatable candidate, billionaires sighing in relief, and Black Ops to make it happen. The removal of a man who as president would have ended the Vietnam war, and got to the bottom of his brother’s assassination.

And what of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King? And Malcolm X? Who controls the Black Ops today? To what extent is that same basic conspiracy still in place? In two years it will be the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. We will honor him if the truth can finally emerge.

North Avenue Magazine Returns! As a blog.

North Avenue Magazine is a review of art and politics from the perspective of Chicago’s North Side, and especially along North Avenue from Old Town to Wicker Park, the stomping grounds of Nelsen Algren, Studs Terkel and Mike Royko.