The life of the mayor for-life.

• Author: Ehrenhalt, Alan
• Position: First Son: The Biography of Richard M. Daley by Keith Koeneman - Book review

Richard M. Daley may not have been the smartest guy in the room. But he knew how to run Chicago.

First Son: The Biography

of Richard M. Daley

by Keith Koeneman

University of Chicago Press, 392 pp.

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There's no doubt something to be said for being the smartest person in the room. In politics, though, power and success often flow to the less brilliant who accept their own limitations and take full advantage of the gaudier intellects around them.

That is, in many ways, the story of Richard M. Daley. Eldest son of the legendary Chicago mayor and political boss, Daley entered politics at an early age surrounded by doubters who considered him an inarticulate, unsophisticated mediocrity, incapable of maintaining the family legacy. The disparaging comments continued through his first two decades in Illinois public office and did not disappear even during the early stages of his mayoralty, which began in 1989. "There are smarter people than me," Daley once told a reporter. "I know that. I've met a lot of them. I don't say too much. I just listen and try to figure out where they're coming from."

But when he retired in 2011 after twenty-two years as mayor, Daley could genuinely be said to have had the last laugh. He had exercised power about as nimbly as his father had, turned Chicago into a laboratory for new ideas in urban management, and guided the city's transformation from a large but inward-looking midwestern metropolis to a place with legitimate global aspirations.

The odyssey of Richard M. Daley is laid out with scrupulous detail in First Son, a new biography by Keith Koeneman that takes Daley from his initial political venture as a state constitutional convention delegate to the final moments of his tenure on the fifth floor of city hall. The book wanders from its subject at times, and the prose is less than dazzling. But it is a valuable book, admirably fair and balanced, and vastly informative about four colorful and highly eventful decades in the life of America's third-largest metropolis.

Chicago is, for all of its attractions, a deeply flawed city, and Daley accumulated a long list of disappointments to go with his successes. Early in his tenure, he attracted national attention by taking personal control of the city's school system, but it was only marginally better when he left office than when he started out. The crime rate, and especially the murder rate, remained frighteningly high, fueled by a horrendous gang...