Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [65]
And in city government there are such distinguished leaders as Ira J. Bach, Mayor Daley’s chief of city planning; ex-newspaperman Alvin E. Rose, Executive Director of the Chicago Housing Authority; Charles R. Swibel, builder of Chicago’s Marina City and Vice-Chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority; penologist Fred Hoehler; and Alderman Ralph Metcalfe, former Olympic sprint champion.
And then there are the distinguished Chicagoans on the national scene. Paul Douglas, the Senior Senator from Illinois, is among the most prominent. A former professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Douglas cut his political teeth as alderman from Chicago’s Fifth Ward, that traditional stronghold of the independent Democrats. Now one of the most powerful leaders on Capitol Hill, Douglas is still an independent. He has twice been voted “Best Senator.” His wife, the former Emily Taft, is a daughter of the famous sculptor, Lorado Taft, and served one term in the House of Representatives.
The Fifth Ward, which includes the campus of the University of Chicago, has also produced such leaders as State Senator Marshall Korshak, one of Illinois’ officials-on-the-way-up; former corporation counsel Barnet Modes; Robert Merriam; and present alderman Leon Despres – a thorn in the side of the Daley administration (as was Douglas to the Kelly-Nash machine).
The Chicagoan presently considered as the most likely prospect to follow in Douglas’s footsteps is United States Representative Sidney R. Yates, a former All-Big-Ten basketball player. Yates was slated by the Democratic organization last winter to oppose the Republican incumbent, Senator Everett Dirksen, in the 1962 senatorial elections. (The Hyde Park area from which Douglas comes is on the South Side; Yates represents a North Side district.) A liberal and a Navy veteran of World War II, Congressman Yates played a prominent role in the drive to keep Admiral Hyman G. Rickover in the Navy, and because Yates and his colleagues were successful, America today holds a clear lead in nuclear-powered submarines. In his seven terms in Congress Yates has earned the respect of veteran Washington newsmen as well as that of his own constituents.
Also serving the national government are such former Chicagoans as the brilliant Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg (who attended Harrison High with my brother Joe); the sophisticated R. Sargent Shriver, Jr., President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, who organized the Peace Corps; United States Representative Roman Pucinski, a former Sun-Times reporter, who is one of the outstanding young congressmen in Washington; and – from Adlai Stevenson’s law office – Federal Communications Chairman Newton Minow, Undersecretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, and Ambassador to Denmark William McCormick Blair, Jr.
Of all the emissaries from Chicago, however, probably none inspires greater respect and affection among reporters than Adlai E. Stevenson, United States Ambassador to the United Nations. I’ve come to know Adlai well, both in victory and in defeat. He is a remarkable man. So highly developed and well balanced are his qualities of intellect, idealism, and humility that he has actually grown in stature under adversities that would have crushed the spirit of a lesser human being.
To many people, Stevenson appeared to have come “out of the blue” to win the 1952 Democratic Presidential nomination. Actually, as this columnist can testify, his name as the possible candidate had been appearing in various columns for years. Long before he entered politics, he was prominent in public affairs and government. A former three-term president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, he served as special counsel to the