WHY BELLOW SUPPORTS A DALEY IN CHICAGO

Author: By Curtis Wilkie, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, April 4, 1989
Page: 25
Section: LIVING

Bellow, who has been politically unaligned for most of his life, is openly endorsing Richard M. Daley in his race for mayor of Chicago today, and Bellow's involvement in the Daley campaign is a symbol of the conflict that grips Chicago.

Bellow, who is Jewish, could be characterized as a liberal, although he does not typecast himself. He has even been critical in his novels of the Chicago political machine that Daley's father, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, controlled for more than two decades.

But Bellow was so incensed by an anti-Semitic charge made last year by Steve Cokely, a black assistant to Acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer, that he lent his name to the Daley effort this year.

"That was the only reason," he said.

It was Cokely who said that Jewish doctors deliberately injected AIDS virus into blacks. Coupled with the doctrine of Louis Farrakhan, another black leader in Chicago whose ministry over the Fruit of Islam has been punctuated with anti-Semitic slurs, Bellow had had enough.

"Richie Daley was the only one who had the courage to speak out against Cokely," he said. Six days after the Cokely controversy broke, Sawyer finally fired him, but it was too late for Bellow and thousands of white Lakeshore liberals -- many of whom had helped elect Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington.

For the moment, the good will is gone.

Over lunch yesterday at Eli's, a Chicago steak house that serves as a watering spot for many of the city's politicians, Bellow acknowledged the irony of his decision to support Daley.

When he was reminded that the villains in one of his latest novels, "More Die of Heartbreak," were a politically connected Chicago businessman and a judge controlled by the machine, Bellow grinned. "I don't think you can blame Richie Daley for things that took place years ago," he said.

Chicago, he said, "is like a Third World country. After you get independence, you get a dictator." In other words, Washington -- a black insurgent who was elected mayor in 1983 -- liberated the city from the machine, but then Washington established his own black-oriented regime.

Bellow said he admired Washington's political instincts, but was troubled by the racial division.

Although he has not plunged into politics before, Bellow's interest in the subject has been nurtured by his friend, Eugene Kennedy, another prominent Chicago novelist and writer who joined Bellow at yesterday's lunch.

"We mooch around with politics," Kennedy said. Kennedy writes regularly about Chicago politics, and Bellow had been accompanying him to some meetings with political leaders.

"When we met with him, Harold Washington said he read 'Augie March'," Bellow recalled, referring to one of his prize-winning novels.

"Yeah, he even read 'Queen Bee'," Kennedy said of one of his own novels.

After lunch -- where Bellow limited himself to tomato juice and a corned beef sandwich -- the two novelists joined a couple of reporters and state Sen. Jeremiah Joyce, a Daley partisan, for a visit to the Daley campaign headquarters.

They schmoozed, like veteran political operatives, with William Daley, the candidate's brother and chief strategist, and state Sen. Timothy Degnan, who is running the field operation.

Bellow was concerned that after today's election, in which Daley is expected to win, another "black demagogue" might emerge to attempt to take charge of the city.

Bellow was born in Canada in 1915, but moved to Chicago when he was 9 years old. The city, whose rich character was best captured in his novel, "The Adventures of Augie March," has a strong hold on him.

One of the guests at lunch yesterday was Ben Bentley, a Chicago man-about- town who is older than Bellow. Bentley was a prizefight announcer in Jack Dempsey's era, a throwback to the days when Al Capone, rather than the machine, ruled the city. Bentley never heard of Augie March, a fictional child of his own neighborhood. But he and Bellow were delighted to discover that they attended the same schools and the same synagogue in the 31st ward more than a half-century ago.

For all of Bellow's fame -- the Nobel Prize, the National Book Award, the Pulitizer Prize -- Bentley is not the only one unfamiliar with Bellow's work.

After he was told that Bellow had endorsed him earlier this year, Rich Daley said that he had always liked Bellow's poetry.

wilkie;04/03 LDRISC;04/05,12:35 BELLOW04