AMERICAN PHARAOH: Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation.

• Author: Nolan, Martin F.
• Position: Review

AMERICAN PHARAOH: Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor Little, Brown & Co., $26.95

WHEN NEW YORK CITY MAYOR Rudolph Giuliani was unable to detect a hint of imperfection among his trigger-happy police this year, he might have learned a lesson, as most mayors could, from Richard Joseph Daley. Facing charges of City Hall corruption in the 1960s, the mayor found solace in scripture. "Look at the Lord's disciples," Daley said. "One denied Him, one doubted Him, one betrayed Him. If Our Lord couldn't have perfection, how are you going to have it in city government?"

Daley was about as humble as Giuliani, but he knew the uses of humility. He knew when to play the religion card, the race card, the party card and anything else in his artfully-shuffled deck. He ruled Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976, earning the title of American Pharaoh, which Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor bestow upon him.

Was he a bold builder? A fine family man? A bigoted bully? A cold, vengeful schemer? A loyal neighborhood guy? A visionary civic leader? A shrewd, cautious county chairman? An impetuous, impatient hack? The authors' answer: Yes.

They are fastidiously fair to the famous mayor and do not take sides. No edge and no attitude adorn this encyclopedic saga of the 50 wards. Like their subject, they take Chicago very seriously. To anyone interested in America or its cities, Chicago is fascinating. Art, commerce, political power, and race are part of the city's story, especially race, the dominant subplot of American Pharaoh.

When Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago in the 1960s, a theatrical showdown seemed inevitable, but Cohen and Taylor downplay the drama: "To King, Chicago was `the most segregated city in the North,' but to Daley it was simply a `city of neighborhoods.' What King viewed as Jim Crow-like segregation, Daley saw as the natural instinct of free people to stick with their own kind." Daley "co-opted" King, the book concludes, without saying whether that was good or bad.

The authors offer multiple choice answers to Daley's obsession with clean streets, particularly downtown. From 1955, their statistics, and his, are impressive: 40 new street sweepers; 10,000 tons of street dirt; and "the first installment of 7,000 new wire garbage baskets." Motivation? Sounding rather like the first page of Charles deGaulle's memoirs, an unnamed "Chicago journalist" suggested that the city was Daley's "`Our...