THE SAD part of Chicago's latest corruption scandal is that the city's greatest columnist is no longer around to interpret it to the outside world. Mike Royko would surely have enjoyed explaining the charges laid against the Illinois governor, the breadth of which even the federal prosecutor describes as "staggering", writes Frank McNally
Whether Royko would have been staggered is another matter. For 34 years until his death in 1997, he specialised in detailing the city's uniquely pragmatic approach to politics, with particular reference to Mayor Richard Daley's infamous machine. In one of he early columns, he suggesting updating Chicago's Latin motto from Urbs in Horto ("City in a Garden") to Ubi Est Mea? ("Where's mine?").
Rather annoyingly for those of us who groan under the yoke of producing four columns a week, Royko wrote five - and occasionally six - for most of his career. Only towards the end, when in poor health (he died at 64 from a brain aneurism) did he reluctantly reduce it to four.
He pursued this regime first with the Daily News,until it closed; then with the Sun-Timesuntil Rupert Murdoch bought it (and he resigned in protest); and finally with the Chicago Tribune: once the self-styled "world's greatest newspaper".
He also somehow found time to write a book about his favourite subject. Boss, published in 1972, was of course the "unauthorised biography" of Daley, who initially forced many bookstores not to stock it. Despite this, it became a best-seller and the definitive work on its subject. Jimmy Breslin, one of Royko's few worthy rivals, said of the book: "You can't know how this country works until you read [it]." A classic Royko column about the Boss was inspired by Daley's typically robust advice to critics: "They can kiss my ass".
In this, Royko compared the mayor's posterior to the Blarney Stone and predicted that, in time, it too could become a major tourist attraction.
Kissing it would not give you oratorical powers, he suggested: but City Hall insiders had long known that it conferred "the gift of wealth". For all he mocked him, Royko's feelings were not entirely negative.
When Daley died suddenly just before Christmas 1976, the columnist surprised readers with a generous, if back-handed tribute.
The mayor was the embodiment of the city, he wrote: more effect than cause.
"Daley was a pious man - faithful to his church, a believer in the Fourth of July, apple pie, motherhood, baseball, the Boy Scouts, the flag, and sitting down to dinner with the family [. . .He was also] deeply offended by public displays of immorality. And for all the swinging new lifestyles, that is still basically Chicago [. . .] On the other hand, there were financial vices. If somebody in City Hall saw a chance to make a fast bundle or two, Daley wasn't given to preaching. His advice amounted to: 'Don't get caught.' But that's Chicago, too. The question has never been how you made it, but if you made it. This town was built by great men who demanded that drunks and harlots be arrested, while charging them rent until the cops arrived." Royko did not write only about corruption.
One of his funnier columns was a thoroughly disingenuous apology to Irish readers, who had been phoning in angrily after he suggested their race had a higher than normal capacity for both "beer and boasting". He explained: ". . .I didn't mean it in a critical way. I have always admired people who can hold their drink, and there is nothing wrong with harmless boasting, so long as it isn't dull. But most of the callers did not see it that way. As one man put it: 'How would you like a punch in the head?' "
Royko was not himself of Irish extraction. His father was Ukrainian, his mother Polish, and his favourite prism through which to study Chicago was an imaginary Polish-American character called Slats Grobnik. As such, he may have had more than usual insight into the under-fire Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, who also has roots in eastern Europe.
Shocked or not by such allegations as the governor's attempted sale of Barack Obama's soon-to-be-vacant senate seat, Royko would at least have recognised the general scenario.
Of the even bigger vacuum left behind by Mayor Daley's death, he wrote gleefully that it had: ". . .the ingredients for the best political donnybrook we've had in 50 years.
"They'll be kicking and gouging, grabbing and tripping, elbowing and kneeing to grab all, or a thin sliver of the power he left behind."
He would surely have had fun unravelling Blagojevich's various alleged sins.
Or would he? The worrying news its that the Chicago Tribuneitself has featured on Blagojevich's rap-sheet.
Or at any rate, its owners' attempts to sell Wrigley Field - home of Royko's beloved Chicago Cubs, where his memorial service was held - have earned a cameo role in the controversy. In return for his help in securing tax breaks for the deal, Blagojevich was recorded as saying he would require the paper's editorial writers to be sacked, making way for more sympathetic coverage. Worse still, the coded response from a Tribune financial adviser on this subject, as relayed by the governor's chief of staff, was sufficiently encouraging for Blagojevich to gush: "Oh, that's fantastic." Maybe, after all, poor Royko is better off where he is. But staggered or otherwise, he must be turning in his grave.
