The gallant youths exchange glances. On the one hand, he has a point. On the other, not the goal but the game, in the deed the glory. So what the hell! They open fire, the cannons roar, and minutes later their bodies line the street.
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Why? Rising Up Angry operated at a high pitch of left-wing ferocity, but wasn’t Chandler quite the lefty himself? “We hadn’t consulted with them on two articles,” Chandler explains. “One of them was Denise DeClue’s article on underground abortion clinics. There was a lot of craziness.” Chandler says his financial backer was a local developer who’d cover the payroll every week by handing him money in an envelope so there’d be no paper trail. But rich angels have powerful friends who aren’t quite so nice, and when Chandler’s money guy told him not to publish a story about a pal of his and the Free Press published it anyway, the envelopes stopped.
After the Free Press folded, Chandler launched the Daily Planet, an alternative biweekly, and DeClue was his star reporter. (Later she’d be the second of his three wives—Algren introduced them.) At roughly the same time, other young entrepreneurs launched the Chicago Reader. Comparing the two from the sidelines, in my wisdom I declared that the Reader didn’t have a prayer, as it was uncommitted politically (and free!), while the Daily Planet was full of the two-fisted political content the times demanded. The Daily Planet survived a year and a half.
Before Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Chandler had taken a leave to work in Kennedy’s Gary office during the Indiana primary; that’s how he’d gotten to know McGovern. But after the job was offered, something happened.
In Chandler’s view, the problem with Miller, who became much closer to Washington than either Mitchell or Chandler had ever been, was that he didn’t have the same interest in politics. “When Harold died,” says Chandler, “he didn’t have anybody around him who could strategize. We were all gone.”
“After Harold died,” Chandler reminisces, “I did have some peaceful years. I spent eight years as a science writer up at Northwestern. I got fired there too.” It was just politics, he explains: the head of his department quit, so he applied for the job, which would have meant jumping over his immediate boss, who wasn’t about to let that happen. “I won the first round on appeal,” Chandler tells me, “but there’s no way to win those battles.”
