Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights

Rating:
Summary: Kerner: The Conflict O Intangible Rights
Review: I've just finished reading the excellent biography of Otto Kerner- Kerner: The Conflicts of Intangible Rights. What a wonderful and interesting read! It was real page-turner for me as the story of his life unfolded and touched on the many famous and infamous names in Illinois history.

The research that they did was real yeomanship delving into the relationships and background of Kerner through their interviews (seven pages of Appendixes), references (twenty five pages of Notes) and a Bibliography of fifteen pages referencing Articles, Books, Dissertations and Oral Histories.

The Index reads like a WHO's WHO from Illinois to Washington, DC. As a former resident of Lake and Cook County from 1950 -1973 a great many of the names have many memories attached to them.

The book provided a new insight for me into Otto Kerner, the person as well as the politician and finally as a fallen hero. Hopefully, through the effort and dedication that was put into producing this book, it will provide generations to come a better understanding of Otto Kerner as an Illinois' icon.

Because of Schlickman's service to the people of Illinois in serving in the Illinois House for sixteen years and his experience in Illinois government and politics this book presents a clear and unbiased knowledge of the greater events in Otto Kerner's life.

I want to thank the authors for providing the opportunity for me to have a much better understanding of Otto Kerner- the man.

Rating:
Summary: WHAT HAPPENED TO OTTO KERNER
Review: Son looks at biography Otto Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights by Bill Barnhart & Gene Schlickman

The warden stood to leave our brief family orientation. "I'll give you a moment to say goodbye", he said, stepping to his office door. When it shut my sister and I turned to our father. His soldier's face fell, vanquished and vulnerable; once sky-blue eyes clouded with sadness and bewilderment. As we left the prison, I said to my sister, "I just saw Dad die." She replied quietly, "I know."

Less than two years later, in the still, dark, early morning of May 9, 1976, my father, Otto Kerner - retired U.S. Army major general, former U.S. district attorney for the northern district of Illinois, former Cook County judge, former governor of Illinois, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders, and former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals - surrendered his last breath.

The next day, Illinois' poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, penned the opening stanza of a remembrance entitled, Otto Kerner: He was a man extensive and extending. But we do not love largeness very long. We look with narrowing littleness on largeness. Brooks' husband, the late poet Henry Blakely, elaborated her insight with these closing lines of his poem, Of Otto Kerner:

and his was the soldier's error, knowing but not deeply believing any who followed the flag could be enemy.

And so he was flanked, taken, and then beheaded, the fate, sometimes, of princes.

And I will be remembering murders and old kingdoms dead because of great men killed.

Little has since been written about Otto Kerner, save occasional reference to his chairmanship of the 1968 Commission that produced the so-called "Kerner Report" and his incongruous 1973 federal conviction and imprisonment. Otto Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights, the first biography of him by Chicago Tribune columnist Bill Barnhart and retired Republican Illinois legislator Gene Schlickman, fills a great void. It is a vital account of a man that Tom Wicker's dust jacket blurb aptly proclaims "an admirably dedicated public servant, later victimized by partisan prosecution."

The Kerner Report's finding that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal" and that "white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto" is a landmark. And its insufficiently heeded calling "to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens - urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group" still resonates today.

The new biography digs deeply into the wellspring that fed Kerner's work on the Commission and his forty-year career in public service. The story of his Czech forebears' passion for civil liberty and his parents' struggle that took his father from unskilled laborer to attorney general of Illinois and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals is authoritatively drawn from unpublished private - as well as public - documents. And fresh materials enrich the portrayal of his boyhood, his education, and his early dual careers in the military and the law.

Regrettably, a dark caricature reveals none of the joy in his thirty-nine year marriage with the youngest daughter of Anton Cermak, the Chicago mayor killed by an assassin's bullet intended for President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. But accounts of his prosecutorial, judicial, and gubernatorial years and his work on the Civil Disorders Commission are valuable. His 1958 judicial struggle with the Catholic Church over adoption reform and his gubernatorial initiatives in mental health, statewide open housing, and economic development are warmly celebrated. And research into his work on the Commission is enlightening, especially the unearthing of a Commission background document entitled, The Harvest of American Racism, likening 1967's urban black activists to colonial revolutionaries.

While the collective effect of these vignettes is somewhat impressionistic, what is missing is mostly implied in the whole. For example, readers may well wonder how Kerner achieved consensus from rival Illinois legislators and contentious Commission members. Nowhere detailed was his capacity to sublimate tactics, strategy and ego to substantive objectives. His quietly efficacious leadership modeled a respected alternative to the politics of noisy confrontation and blatant self-promotion that sold newspapers, but accomplished little.

The book might also have done well to delve into Kerner's view of class in America as it informed his public life. It was a view reinforced by the career of Anton Cermak, benefactor of Kerner's father and creator of the pan-ethnic, labor-based, anti-Prohibition, Cook County Democratic Party that heralded Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 presidential election sweep. Growing up in a neighborhood of laborers, Kerner appreciated the role of the corner tavern. As a child, he carried buckets of beer on a pole over his shoulder to workmen for small change. He and his neighbors ate for free in the beer garden where adults drank and socialized in the Old World custom before radio, television, and movies. And he recalled that the tavern's only neighborhood safe was where laborers put their wages at day's end and that the tavern was where they went to borrow for their first home rather than face formidable lenders downtown. What Kerner understood - and what Cermak capitalized on politically - was that threadbare, ethnic laborers felt disenfranchised by Prohibition in ways never grasped by well-clad, white-collar managers who could afford expensive, illegal Canadian liquor and who felt at home in the city's imposing, marbled halls of commerce. Prohibition sensitized Kerner to the deep-seated political, economic and social misunderstandings between the haves and the have-nots and anchored his belief that we must try harder to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

The Kerner Report was as much a watershed for America's civil liberty as it was for Kerner's. In January 1969, Richard Nixon - the nation's first critic of the Kerner Report - was sworn in as president, and his campaign manager, John Mitchell, launched his masquerade as attorney general in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice. The intangible civil rights of minorities advanced by Kerner were set on a collision course with a specious theory of intangible rights invented by Mitchell's prosecutors to allege Kerner failed to give citizens of Illinois "good and faithful services" as governor. With his conviction, Nixon and Mitchell managed to destroy one of America's most respected civil rights advocates. In a disturbing and poignant account, the authors accurately report that, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Justice Department's overreaching theory eleven years after Kerner died, surviving defendants were granted reversals, while an otherwise timely appeal to reverse Kerner's conviction was denied because he was dead.

But the book fails to relate this injustice to the broad pattern of misconduct by Kerner's prosecutors who made him their target; not crime. Absent are incontrovertible proofs of his assertion that he was convicted by witnesses whom the government induced to lie. Missing is revelation that the government's keystone bribery count named no briber or quid pro quo. Omitted is the government's obstruction of justice in hiding its campaign to ruin his reputation through prejudicial, pre-trial leaks to the press of confidential grand jury proceedings and IRS information. Ignored is the government's admission that original IRS notes were destroyed and recreated to frame the perjury allegation he steadfastly denied. Uncritically repeated is the government's cover story that their investigation was inspired - within a year of Kerner's 1968 U.S. Senate confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals - by a faded moll's yarn that he was connected to the Mob. Neglected is the story that government agents on the case commonly joked that their code acronym, CRIMP, stood for Corrupt Republicans Investigating Marje's Pals, "Marje" referring to Marjorie Everett, a key witness suborned by the government to testify in Kerner's trial.

And the authors fail to recognize the enormity of the injustice Kerner suffered when they dismiss strong evidence of the political inspiration behind his prosecution. They recount the famous November 1970 meeting where Nixon, Mitchell and cohorts plotted their racist 1972 re-election campaign strategy to split-off southern and northern white Democratic voters disgruntled by their party's national civil rights and integration initiatives of the 1960s. They also repeat John Mitchell's boast that Illinois Democrats wouldn't be so powerful after his grand jury got through in Chicago when that meeting turned to winning Illinois. They even admit that Mitchell's Justice Department officials had briefed Chicago prosecutors about Kerner only a month earlier in October 1970.

Rating:
Summary: WHAT HAPPENED TO OTTO KERNER
Review: Son looks at biography Otto Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights by Bill Barnhart & Gene Schlickman

The warden stood to leave our brief family orientation. "I'll give you a moment to say goodbye", he said, stepping to his office door. When it shut my sister and I turned to our father. His soldier's face fell, vanquished and vulnerable; once sky-blue eyes clouded with sadness and bewilderment. As we left the prison, I said to my sister, "I just saw Dad die." She replied quietly, "I know."

Less than two years later, in the still, dark, early morning of May 9, 1976, my father, Otto Kerner - retired U.S. Army major general, former U.S. district attorney for the northern district of Illinois, former Cook County judge, former governor of Illinois, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders, and former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals - surrendered his last breath.

The next day, Illinois' poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, penned the opening stanza of a remembrance entitled, Otto Kerner: He was a man extensive and extending. But we do not love largeness very long. We look with narrowing littleness on largeness. Brooks' husband, the late poet Henry Blakely, elaborated her insight with these closing lines of his poem, Of Otto Kerner:

and his was the soldier's error, knowing but not deeply believing any who followed the flag could be enemy.

And so he was flanked, taken, and then beheaded, the fate, sometimes, of princes.

And I will be remembering murders and old kingdoms dead because of great men killed.

Little has since been written about Otto Kerner, save occasional reference to his chairmanship of the 1968 Commission that produced the so-called "Kerner Report" and his incongruous 1973 federal conviction and imprisonment. Otto Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights, the first biography of him by Chicago Tribune columnist Bill Barnhart and retired Republican Illinois legislator Gene Schlickman, fills a great void. It is a vital account of a man that Tom Wicker's dust jacket blurb aptly proclaims "an admirably dedicated public servant, later victimized by partisan prosecution."

The Kerner Report's finding that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal" and that "white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto" is a landmark. And its insufficiently heeded calling "to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens - urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group" still resonates today.

The new biography digs deeply into the wellspring that fed Kerner's work on the Commission and his forty-year career in public service. The story of his Czech forebears' passion for civil liberty and his parents' struggle that took his father from unskilled laborer to attorney general of Illinois and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals is authoritatively drawn from unpublished private - as well as public - documents. And fresh materials enrich the portrayal of his boyhood, his education, and his early dual careers in the military and the law.

Regrettably, a dark caricature reveals none of the joy in his thirty-nine year marriage with the youngest daughter of Anton Cermak, the Chicago mayor killed by an assassin's bullet intended for President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. But accounts of his prosecutorial, judicial, and gubernatorial years and his work on the Civil Disorders Commission are valuable. His 1958 judicial struggle with the Catholic Church over adoption reform and his gubernatorial initiatives in mental health, statewide open housing, and economic development are warmly celebrated. And research into his work on the Commission is enlightening, especially the unearthing of a Commission background document entitled, The Harvest of American Racism, likening 1967's urban black activists to colonial revolutionaries.

While the collective effect of these vignettes is somewhat impressionistic, what is missing is mostly implied in the whole. For example, readers may well wonder how Kerner achieved consensus from rival Illinois legislators and contentious Commission members. Nowhere detailed was his capacity to sublimate tactics, strategy and ego to substantive objectives. His quietly efficacious leadership modeled a respected alternative to the politics of noisy confrontation and blatant self-promotion that sold newspapers, but accomplished little.

The book might also have done well to delve into Kerner's view of class in America as it informed his public life. It was a view reinforced by the career of Anton Cermak, benefactor of Kerner's father and creator of the pan-ethnic, labor-based, anti-Prohibition, Cook County Democratic Party that heralded Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 presidential election sweep. Growing up in a neighborhood of laborers, Kerner appreciated the role of the corner tavern. As a child, he carried buckets of beer on a pole over his shoulder to workmen for small change. He and his neighbors ate for free in the beer garden where adults drank and socialized in the Old World custom before radio, television, and movies. And he recalled that the tavern's only neighborhood safe was where laborers put their wages at day's end and that the tavern was where they went to borrow for their first home rather than face formidable lenders downtown. What Kerner understood - and what Cermak capitalized on politically - was that threadbare, ethnic laborers felt disenfranchised by Prohibition in ways never grasped by well-clad, white-collar managers who could afford expensive, illegal Canadian liquor and who felt at home in the city's imposing, marbled halls of commerce. Prohibition sensitized Kerner to the deep-seated political, economic and social misunderstandings between the haves and the have-nots and anchored his belief that we must try harder to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

The Kerner Report was as much a watershed for America's civil liberty as it was for Kerner's. In January 1969, Richard Nixon - the nation's first critic of the Kerner Report - was sworn in as president, and his campaign manager, John Mitchell, launched his masquerade as attorney general in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice. The intangible civil rights of minorities advanced by Kerner were set on a collision course with a specious theory of intangible rights invented by Mitchell's prosecutors to allege Kerner failed to give citizens of Illinois "good and faithful services" as governor. With his conviction, Nixon and Mitchell managed to destroy one of America's most respected civil rights advocates. In a disturbing and poignant account, the authors accurately report that, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Justice Department's overreaching theory eleven years after Kerner died, surviving defendants were granted reversals, while an otherwise timely appeal to reverse Kerner's conviction was denied because he was dead.

But the book fails to relate this injustice to the broad pattern of misconduct by Kerner's prosecutors who made him their target; not crime. Absent are incontrovertible proofs of his assertion that he was convicted by witnesses whom the government induced to lie. Missing is revelation that the government's keystone bribery count named no briber or quid pro quo. Omitted is the government's obstruction of justice in hiding its campaign to ruin his reputation through prejudicial, pre-trial leaks to the press of confidential grand jury proceedings and IRS information. Ignored is the government's admission that original IRS notes were destroyed and recreated to frame the perjury allegation he steadfastly denied. Uncritically repeated is the government's cover story that their investigation was inspired - within a year of Kerner's 1968 U.S. Senate confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals - by a faded moll's yarn that he was connected to the Mob. Neglected is the story that government agents on the case commonly joked that their code acronym, CRIMP, stood for Corrupt Republicans Investigating Marje's Pals, "Marje" referring to Marjorie Everett, a key witness suborned by the government to testify in Kerner's trial.

And the authors fail to recognize the enormity of the injustice Kerner suffered when they dismiss strong evidence of the political inspiration behind his prosecution. They recount the famous November 1970 meeting where Nixon, Mitchell and cohorts plotted their racist 1972 re-election campaign strategy to split-off southern and northern white Democratic voters disgruntled by their party's national civil rights and integration initiatives of the 1960s. They also repeat John Mitchell's boast that Illinois Democrats wouldn't be so powerful after his grand jury got through in Chicago when that meeting turned to winning Illinois. They even admit that Mitchell's Justice Department officials had briefed Chicago prosecutors about Kerner only a month earlier in October 1970.

Rating:
Summary: What Happened To Otto Kerner
Review: The warden stood to leave our brief family orientation. "I'll give you a moment to say goodbye", he said, stepping to his office door. When it shut my sister and I turned to our father. His soldier's face fell, vanquished and vulnerable; once sky-blue eyes clouded with sadness and bewilderment. As we left the prison, I said to my sister, "I just saw Dad die." She replied quietly, "I know."

Less than two years later, in the still, dark, early morning of May 9, 1976, my father, Otto Kerner - retired U.S. Army major general, former U.S. district attorney for the northern district of Illinois, former Cook County judge, former governor of Illinois, former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders, and former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals - surrendered his last breath.

The next day, Illinois' poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, penned the opening stanza of a remembrance entitled, Otto Kerner:

He was a man extensive and extending/But we do not love largeness very long/We look with narrowing littleness on largeness.

Brooks' husband, the late poet Henry Blakely, elaborated her insight with these closing lines of his poem, Of Otto Kerner:

and his was the soldier's error/knowing/but not deeply believing/any who followed the flag/could be enemy/And so/he was flanked, taken/and then beheaded/the fate, sometimes, of princes/And I will be remembering/murders/and old kingdoms dead/because of great men killed.

Little has since been written about Otto Kerner, save occasional reference to his chairmanship of the 1968 Commission that produced the so-called "Kerner Report" and his incongruous 1973 federal conviction and imprisonment. Otto Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights, the first biography of him by Chicago Tribune columnist Bill Barnhart and retired Republican Illinois legislator Gene Schlickman is a vital account of a man that Tom Wicker's dust jacket blurb aptly proclaims "an admirably dedicated public servant, later victimized by partisan prosecution."

The Kerner Report's finding that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal" and that "white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto" was a landmark as well as a watershed for America's and Kerner's civil liberty. In January 1969, Richard Nixon - the nation's first critic of the Kerner Report - became president, and his campaign manager, John Mitchell, launched his masquerade as U.S. Department of Justice attorney general. Intangible civil rights of minorities advanced by Kerner were set on a collision course with a specious intangible rights theory invented by Mitchell's prosecutors to denigrate this most respected civil rights advocate. The authors correctly report that, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the government's theory, surviving defendants were granted reversals, while an otherwise timely appeal to reverse Kerner's conviction was denied because he had died.

But they fail to report the broad pattern of government misconduct that made Kerner a target; not crime. Absent are incontrovertible proofs that Kerner was convicted by witnesses whom the government induced to lie, that the government's keystone bribery count named no briber or quid pro quo, that the government obstructed justice in hiding its campaign to ruin his reputation through prejudicial, pre-trial leaks to the media, and that original IRS notes were destroyed and recreated to frame the perjury allegation he steadfastly denied. Uncritically repeated is the government's cover story that the official investigation was inspired - within a year of Kerner's 1968 U.S. Senate confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals - by a tale that he was connected to the Mob. Neglected is the story that government agents on the case commonly joked that their code acronym, CRIMP, stood for Corrupt Republicans Investigating Marje's Pals, "Marje" referring to Marjorie Everett, a key witness suborned by the government to testify in Kerner's trial.

Whatsmore, the authors miss the enormity of the injustice Kerner suffered when they dismiss strong evidence of the political inspiration behind his prosecution. They recount the famous November 1970 meeting where Nixon, Mitchell and cohorts plotted their racist 1972 re-election campaign strategy to split-off southern and northern white voters disgruntled by Democratic national civil rights and integration initiatives of the 1960s and repeat John Mitchell's boast there that Illinois Democrats wouldn't be so powerful after his grand jury got through in Chicago. Admitting that Mitchell's Washington, D.C. Justice Department officials had briefed Chicago prosecutors about Kerner only a month earlier in October 1970, they nevertheless doubt Mitchell's boast pertained to Kerner because no grand jury was then convened, overlooking Mitchell's Kerner grand jury seated in Chicago just a month after the 1970 holidays. To whom else was Mitchell referring, if not Kerner?

Kerner's U.S. Appellate Court opinions in defense of civil liberty and his persistent advocacy of Kerner Report recommendations frustrated, embarrassed and enraged Nixon and Mitchell. He not only blocked their draconian approach to law and order; he criticized their impeding racial progress. In Nixon's Oval Office tapes released October 5, 1999, Mitchell is heard complaining about Kerner just two weeks before he called him in front of the June 1971 Grand Jury: "Now he's out talking about his Kerner Commission Report when he should be keeping his damn mouth shut as a judge."

Long before my father's trial, my sister, Helena, and I sat alone with him at dinner in the Governor's Mansion. "I may not leave you much materially when I'm gone", he said, "but you will have something that will open more doors than all the money in the world: you will have a good name." When his good name was taken, he felt the door to public service shut forever. This book, despite its shortcomings, may prove him wrong about that. It renews hope that his legacy of good works may yet overwhelm the calumny of his enemies, remedy his injuries, exonerate, restore his name and thwart like future injustice. In this light, Otto Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights reveals how we might more fully realize our great capacity for genuine nobility as human beings.