His father was a stern, law-and-order man whose 21-year tenure as Chicago mayor will forever be associated with the 1968 Democratic convention protests over the Vietnam War.
But his son, current Mayor Richard M. Daley, has a much more conciliatory view about that history than you might expect. In an interview with the Financial Times, he declared off-limits attempts to make political capital out of links between two of his constituents – Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weather Underground radical group that bombed the U.S. Capitol and other targets in the 1970s. Mr. Obama has declared that he and Mr. Ayers have a “friendly” relationship and served together on a foundation board. Mr. Ayers has become controversial again because, in a newspaper interview that happened to be published on 9/11, he declared not only that he didn’t regret setting bombs but that he and his colleagues “didn’t do enough.”
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John Curry says:
Daley lies when he said that the Weatherman inspired "Days of Rage" action in Chicago was only against the federal government and not against his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley.
After the 1968 Democratic Convention, Mayor Richard J. Daley was constantly in the pantheon of "establishment" figures reviled by the hard left. Why do you think the Weathermen decided to have "Days of Rage", an attempt at street revolt and anarchy, in downtown Chicago? Denunciation of "Nixon-Daley", despite the obvious political divide between the two, was a common rallying call of the hard left in Chicago in those days.
I was downtown on that day. It was the only day in my entire life that I saw City Hall completely encircled by a shoulder-to-shoulder phalanx of Chicago Policemen. If there was really no concern that the Weathermen identified Daley as part of their problem, would City Hall have been so protected? It is only because the Weatherman movement was so sparsely supported and so operationally pathetic that the "Days of Rage" rioting was easily suppressed. Not without injury however. One of those injured for life was then Sheriff Richard Elrod, who now serves as a circuit court judge. If Judge Elrod felt free to speak his mind, given that he depends on the Daley machine to succeed in his judicial retention campaigns without much cost, I think he would give testimony much different than that of Mayor Daley on the subject.
This story is right on the money. Daley stands to reap huge benefits with Obama in the White House. He therefore is happy to minimize the importance of Bill Ayers as a person embedded in the personal story and political rise of Barack Obama.