"A sad ending to a sad story"

     When I heard the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had gone and done it, I of course felt bad — for him, at least for the decent human being he had once been, long ago. And for his family. I'd gotten to know his brother, Chris, a little, when he was head of the Merchandise Mart, and found him a smart man, energetic, devoted to family and dedicated to social justice. I knew how proud he was of his father's legacy, and how fiercely he tried to protect it from those who'd tear down his memory. 

     But he was powerless to protect that reputation from the rolling besmirchment that is RFK Jr. As terrible as it must have been to see his brother descend in vaccine nuttiness and paranoid conspiracy theorizing, to see him now outdo himself by kissing the ring of Trump is, as Chris and his family wrote in a letter released Friday, "a sad ending to a sad story ... Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today are a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear." Speaking of their father in the present tense underscores just how real he is to them, still, 56 years after his death. 

         Robert Vickrey (Smithsonian)

     And it is a sad story. RFK Jr. lost his father when he was 14. He struggled with heroin addiction for decades, became a respected environmental lawyer, but then changed. I remember reading a story about RFK Jr. thundering against the windmills he once boosted when they were going to be put within sight of the family compound at Hyannisport. Maybe the good-for-you-but-not-for-me hypocrisy somehow tore his mind apart.

     I haven't talked to Chris since his ill-considered, poorly-executed run for the governorship in 2018. I'd pissed him off by writing a column saying, in essence, if he really cared about what he says he believes in, he'd drop out and support Dan Biss, because otherwise they'll both lose to J.B. Pritzker (which is indeed what happened). No Nostradamus, I saw Pritzker as a scion of wealth and nothing more, failing to sense what a magnificent governor he would turn out to be.
      Rather than consider my advice, Kennedy was angry and felt betrayed. Loyalty is very big among those who resent being judged by their words and actions. We never spoke again. That's okay. I get by, though I did enjoy our conversations, and what, despite our widely divergent stations in life, at some moments felt like actual friendship. (Even though, now that I think about it, at the time I quoted to him Aristotle's line about how between master and slave there is no friendship). When the news broke Friday, I rooted around for Chris's phone number, thinking to send him a supportive note during what has to be a difficult moment — save grudges for junior high. But I actually know several Chris Kennedys at this point, and didn't want to bother the wrong one. Probably just as well. I can't imagine him caring one way or the other. I'm surprised I do, but then, I'm slow to give up on people.

    As for RFK Jr., this really isn't the "sad ending" his siblings envision. If only it were. Alas, again, they are putting the bright spin on an erring family member. RFK Jr.'s story is not at its end, unfortunately, but now continues, to a fresh hell, the humiliation of being a Trump acolyte. Take a glance at a piece I wrote in 2016, "Chris Christie in rags" about the "stunned, miserable stare" on Christie's face when he found himself standing in Trump's rogue's gallery of supporters, just another supernumerary to the Great Chee-toh God, hoping to huff a contact high of ego and power. The former governor of New Jersey later tried to reinvent himself as a person with a functional conscience, and speak out against Trump. Too little, too late. Or as I sometimes will write a reader: a person who thinks that Donald Trump is a good idea for this country can't really expect anyone to care what he thinks about anything else. It's the same reason you don't ask homeless people for stock tips. I wonder as RFK slides deeper into the Trumpian netherworld whether it will ever occur to him that he had done this to himself. 

     I haven't written much about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because, honestly, I find him too repellent to contemplate. But I keep up with someone in the Kennedy circle, who met RFK Jr. a few times, and asked her what she thinks of him. "A shocking monster," she replied, without hesitation. And that was before he endorsed the greatest menace to American democracy since the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.  

    Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about John F. Kennedy's style — his brother Ted generously granted me an interview and sent me a kind letter after it was published — and like many Americans, harbor still a small wellspring of respect for a family that gave so much to the country. But the source of that spring went dry years and years in the past, and the ground around it has become dry and cracked. Just a fading, tattered memory among a dwindling band of people, a ruined dream that even some who carry the revered name and cursed blood  stopped caring about a long time ago. 

Sky's the limit.

     It isn't much of a photo. First, the shot makes the street look brighter than it was, at about 8:30, as I came back from walking Kitty around the point. It was pretty dark. The phone commanded me to hold still, and I did, while it sucked up what light there was from the streetlamp.
     But if you look closely, you'll see him. A young man on roller skates who had rolled past me on First Ave, holding a flashlight. He was doing a few circles at the intersection with Center, waiting for a car to pass. 
    That flashlight caught my eye because, as far as I recall, I've never seen anybody skate by at night using a flashlight to guide his way and, I assume, alert cars that he's there. Actually, I rarely see skaters at all. Or skateboarders, for that matter. I assume they're at home scrolling through Tik Tok. Maybe watching videos of skaters. 
     The caution of that flashlight made him relatable to me. I'm a cautious guy. I see kids on their bikes, in groups of three and four, tearing down the street at night, unilluminated, in their dark clothes, and think, "C'mon guys. Don't do that. Stuff happens." I remember having a light on my bike, a big chrome thing, streamlined like a jet liner engine nacelle. It tended to go out of whack, if I recall, the batteries leaking over time.
     But the overwhelming idea left me, in this illuminated skater's wake, was that I had never seen that before. Never. Not a guy skating with a flashlight. And there is something comforting in seeing a creative person do something new. Something hopeful. It's like that day at breakfast, probably 20 years ago, when a waitress asked my younger son how he wanted his two eggs, and he said he wanted one scrambled, one sunny-side up. I looked at him, amazed. In a lifetime of ordering eggs I'd never considered that I could split the order, and left to my own devices would have never imagining it possible. This kid, I thought, is unbound by dull convention. He could do anything. 

What does 'Free Palestine' mean?

     "From the river to the sea," the speaker's voice echoed across Union Park. "Palestine will be free."
     The sun was high and blazing Monday, the air electric with drums and chants and squawking bullhorns. Thousands of people milled around, holding signs, backpacks, bottles of water.
     The only way to cover such a sprawling chaos is to pick a person and dive in. I settled on a trio holding a banner 45 feet long featuring the thought of the day: "FREE PALESTINE." I approached the young man on the left and asked: Free Palestine ... of what? To me, the end of that phrase is obvious: "... of Jews."
     "Absolutely not," he said. "To me, it means the freedom in Palestine to live, to have food and water. To not be in an open-air prison. To not be exterminated."
     He said they were with Students for Justice in Palestine.
     "My personal goal, the reason why I'm here, is to call for a cease-fire and to call for peace," continued the man, 19, who did not want to be identified. "The situation is pretty complicated, to be honest. It would take a long time, but I do think a single-state solution could work."
     A future of peaceful coexistence was not exactly being floated from the stage.
     "Stop all aid to the racist, colonial, terrorist state of Israel!" the speaker shouted. "We will continue to march, until we ... achieve total and complete liberation of Palestine. From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free."
     At a New Students for a Democratic Society booth — echos of the 1960s SDS — I spoke with a young woman whose face was wrapped in a green keffiyeh.
     "Everybody has the right to exist, to live," she said. "We believe everybody should be liberated, but most importantly, the Palestinian people should be liberated."
     And the Jews?

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"Nice try, gramps."

     Nothing like free food to draw a crowd. I slid into some kind of Content Creators Corner at the Democratic National Convention not because I consider myself "a content creator" — though  did ask the doorkeeper, breezing by, "Do newspaper columnists count?" and was told we do — but because I saw they had free soft pretzels. 

      And my backyard, as you might know, has become a rolling orgy of little brown birds flapping and scrabbling around my constantly stocked bird feeder. Sometimes dozens at a time. Nor are they alone. They're are often several rabbits and two or three or four or five squirrels. I'm not happy about it but what can I do? They're hungry.

     I glanced out the kitchen window last Thursday morning and saw this bad boy. All alone. The brown bird shindig had mysteriously moved on. "About time you showed up," I muttered, admiring his fierce hunter's profile. He'd thin the herd.  

     Wrong. No sooner had I snapped this photo — not that good, through the window at a distance — when a development entered, stage left. A young squirrel who had obviously been asleep during the lesson about not being eaten, nudged into the frame and began poking around the seed husks under the feeder, looking for seeds that had fallen to the ground. Those brown birds, in their frenzy, are sloppy eaters. 

    "This'll be quick," I thought, anticipating what was to come. But it wasn't. To be honest, the hawk seemed to barely notice the squirrel. Then he did. It looked like this:

     If ever a hawk had easy pickings, this had to be it. But hawks are designed to dive bomb prey from a great height. This narrow gap didn't allow him to get up a head of steam. Plus there was the obstacle of the feeder, whose anti-squirrel defenses — a baffle and length of PVC pipe — you may now pause to admire 

    When the hawk made its move, it turned out that little squirrel was not so oblivious after all. He bolted under the protection of the fire pit, and some kindling stacked around it, while the hawk flopped and flapped after him, quite ineffectively.

     The amazing part was that the squirrel didn't even wait for the hawk to go away. After the encounter, he was back nosing the seed leavings as if to say, "Nice try gramps." The hawk flew off, no doubt disgusted with himself, in search of less nimble prey.

Brandon Johnson salutes his past while looking toward the future

     It's Monday morning. In a few hours, he will address thousands of Democrats gathered at the United Center and millions more tuning into the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
     But right now, Mayor Brandon Johnson is at Walter H. Dyett High School for the Arts, at 555 E. 51st St., about to speak to a few dozen people. He stands poised by the steps to a small platform.
     "They're coming for him!" Jitu Brown, national director of Journey for Justice, a coalition of grassroots educational organizations, tells the gathering. Brown, who led a 34-day hunger strike in 2015 to reopen Dyett, prowls the stage, invoking faceless forces set against the mayor.
     "Because they want him to privatize. They want him to privatize," Brown says. "They don't want him to love Black and Brown children. They were silent when they were closing over 160 schools in this city. ... They don't get to decide no more. Kwame Nkrumah said this: 'It is better to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else.'"
     With that two-edged maxim tossed out, the man trying to govern the sprawling city of Chicago as it welcomes one president, two candidates, thousands of delegates and protesters, not to forget all the other daily doings of a major city, takes the podium.
     "I'm grateful that we have come together to fortify our position as we push for sustainable community schools to be the model throughout our entire school district," says Johnson, who joined the 2015 Dyett hunger strike on its 24th day. "This model is not simply about teachers and teachers' assistants; it's also about the families who make up the community."
     Party politics might be about to push Johnson onto the world stage, but first Johnson takes the time to go to Bronzeville and give some love to a cause dear to his heart.
     "Sustainable community schools" is a major Chicago Teachers Union effort to remake the public schools so rather than compete for scarce magnet slots, students attend schools in their own neighborhoods with curriculum that will, in the CTU's words, "humanize education in a way that is antiracist and advances equity and justice."
     It's a message Johnson is eager to share with the world. Earlier, at the Chicago Hilton, 720 S. Michigan Ave., Johnson told a Michigan delegation breakfast that politicians need to put public money where their mouths are.

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Chicago convention history is hardly conventional

Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery

     I had two scene-setters in the Sunday paper. The first, posted Sunday, was on how the Democratic National Convention might affect the city's battered reputation. This is the second, a quickstep through Chicago's convention history.

     The nation was falling apart. The agricultural South, having forced the United States at its birth into a devil’s bargain, had no intention of abandoning the highly profitable ancient evil. They invoked God, the Bible, science and common sense when explaining why slavery had to continue forever.
     But the North could no longer accept Southern sheriffs infiltrating their cities, seizing free Blacks and dragging them back to bondage. The 1860 election was seen as a crossroads. Not in liberating the South — that wasn’t even on the table, initially — but determining the future of the unfinished West.
     Would the seven territories between Missouri and the Pacific allow slavery? Would the South get the respect they craved? The Democrats, meeting in Charleston, couldn’t even settle on a consensus candidate: the party ended up nominating two different candidates at two different conventions. Their confusion seemed an opportunity for the new Republican Party, formed out of the ashes of the Revolutionary War era Whigs.
     Where should Republicans hold their convention? Chicago had a burgeoning industrial city, with a population of 110,000 — making it the country’s ninth-largest, not half the size of Baltimore. No big shakes. So why here? And no, not because of Abraham Lincoln. He wasn’t even a consideration; had he been, the convention might have ended up elsewhere.
     Part of Chicago’s allure was that it wasn’t an Eastern city. Holding the convention on the coast would “run a big chance of losing the West.” Plus, then as now, Chicago was good at receiving guests.

Hotel rooms and railroads

     “Essentially Chicago had the infrastructure in 1860 in terms of railroads and hotel rooms,” said Ed Achorn, author of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.”
     “Illinois was also a vital swing state in the election, and the convention would help promote the party. But the site also appealed to the executive committee of the Republican National Committee because members believed it was neutral ground. No serious candidate in their view came from Illinois. William Seward, Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and Simon Cameron were deemed the big contenders. Lincoln was considered a veep possibility at best.”
     Chicago wasn’t really neutral ground. Lincoln’s homegrown forces knew the political terrain very well. While Seward’s New York supporters were parading a brass band around the Wigwam, the impressive log convention hall built where Lake and Wacker meet today, Lincoln’s team filled the balcony reserved for spectators.
     Chicago would host 24 more Democratic and Republican national conventions, including three years when both parties held their conventions here. Most — 22 — were in the century between 1860 and 1960, when the city held its last Republican Convention and nominated Richard M. Nixon for the first time. We’ve held only three since, counting the 2024 Democratic National Convention, commencing here Aug. 19.

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Looking back at a convention when conventions really meant something

Franklin D. Roosevelt heading toward the Democratic National Convention at the Chicago Stadium in 1932.

     The Democratic National Convention begins Monday. It's a big deal, supposedly, even though its central purpose is long gone. Starting in 1831, and for 125 years, votes were taken, alliances made, deadlocks broken.
     The last contested convention was the Republican Convention in 1964. In 1972, voters assumed the task, in primaries. Now conventions are publicity extravaganzas — four-day infomercials — promoting what has already been decided.

     What were they like previously? I just re-read "Happy Days Are Here Again: The 1932 Democratic Convention, the Emergence of FDR — and How America Was Changed Forever" by Steve Neal, a political columnist at the Sun-Times who died in 2004. He delighted in this stuff, had deep knowledge and wide connections. This was his last book, and it's a gripping read even if you know how it ends.
     In the summer of 1932, the nation was mired in the Great Depression. Chicago was paying its teachers in scrip. Still, politics then resembled politics now.
     "It's pretty hard to exaggerate the bitterness here," a columnist wrote. "Names are called, accusations made, treachery charged, and discreditable stories spread."
     Herbert Hoover was the aloof Republican president, refusing to aid his suffering nation. He seemed a sitting duck, and the chance to defeat him was up for grabs.
     Neal focuses on FDR, but there are a half dozen others who could have also become the nominee: cigar-chewing, derby-hatted Alfred E. Smith, the "Happy Warrior" who had lost in 1924 and 1928; Huey Long, the "Kingfish" who brazenly took 10% percent of the salaries of all public employees in Louisiana, because he could; John Nance Garner, aka "Cactus Jack;" Albert Ritchie, Maryland's four-term governor and former Secretary of War Newton Baker, seen as the man who would swoop in if FDR stumbled.
     And stumble Roosevelt did, especially in trying to eliminate the "two-third rule" that prevented him, with a simple majority of delegates, from cakewalking into the nomination on the first ballot.
     "If FDR is nominated, it will certainly prove there is no limit to the amount of fumbling one can do and still win a game," future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter wrote.
     Giants roamed the city. Comedian Will Rogers covered the convention, as did novelist John Dos Passos. H.L. Mencken and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. went into a Loop speakeasy where the Bard of Baltimore took objection to the crooner.
     "Finally, Mencken said to the young lady behind the bar, 'I'd like to shoot that son of a bitch,'" Lodge, a future diplomat and senator, recalled. "'The young lady did not bat an eye ... She reached under the counter, pulled out a Thompson submachine gun, laid it on the counter, and with a condescending fluttering of her eyelids said, indifferently, 'Go ahead.'"

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Earl B. Dickerson, a Black University of Chicago-trained lawyer, appeared before the all-white Resolutions Committee to press for a civil rights plank. "He asked his party to take a firm stand 'against discrimination by reason of race, creed or color as being outdated, barbarous and un-American,'" Neal wrote. It didn't work but reminds us how far we had to come to see a woman of color run for president.