White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said last week that he aspires to become Chicago mayor after Richard M. Daley retires. Some thought Emanuel was being presumptuous by claiming dibs as the successor to Daley, who has signaled no plans to retire. Others thought it was just another Machiavellian move by a brilliant and polarizing Chicagoan. In any case, here are 10 facts:
Emanuel’s father, Benjamin, was born in Jerusalem with the last name of Auerbach. But Benjamin changed his last name to honor his brother, Emanuel Auerbach, a Jew killed in the Arab insurrection in 1936. The renamed Benjamin Emanuel settled in Chicago, where he became a pediatrician.
One of the best-known stories about Rahm Emanuel is that he sent a dead fish to a political enemy in 1998. But it wasn’t that simple. Emanuel and two Democratic colleagues got into a dispute with a pollster. One of the colleagues read a USA Today story about a company that could be hired to send a dead fish in a handsome mahogany box, and he suggested that the three send the fish to the pollster. Which they did. Emanuel later claimed not to know that such a gesture carried Mafia overtones of “you will sleep with the fishes.”
Emanuel, who has built a take-no-prisoners macho image, was once a ballet dancer. He studied at the Evanston School of Ballet, and at Sarah Lawrence College, where he graduated with a B.A. in liberal arts.
In “The Thumpin’,” a book by former Tribune reporter Naftali Bendavid, Emanuel is quoted as using the F-word more than three dozen times. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had found a way to finance the stimulus program: “Put a quarter in a jar every time Rahm uses a swear word.”
Emanuel lost part of the middle finger on his right hand as a high school senior working on a meat slicer at Arby’s. He avoided treatment because he didn’t want to miss the prom, but was hospitalized when the finger became infected. He has been known to flip the middle half-finger at people to great effect, though President Barack Obama has joked that the injury “rendered him practically mute.”
In three years after he left the Clinton administration, Emanuel made $16 million in investment banking, including at least $320,000 after he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to a 14-month stint on the board of mortgage giant Freddie Mac. The Tribune sought minutes of Freddie Mac’s meetings from Emanuel’s tenure, but the Obama administration denied the request, saying it was “commercial information” exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
When Richard Daley won the mayor’s office in 1989, Emanuel was his chief fundraiser, helping the campaign collect $13 million in seven weeks. In 2002, Daley’s political organization — including patronage workers whose hiring was later found illegal — helped Emanuel win election to Congress.
Emanuel has two brothers of great accomplishment. Ezekiel, a physician who is a leading figure in medical ethics, serves as an adviser to Obama. Ari is a Hollywood agent, one of the inspirations for the Ari Gold character in HBO’s “Entourage.” For a time, the three brothers were distributed evenly across America, with Ari in Los Angeles, Ezekiel in Chicago and Rahm in Washington. “We couldn’t possibly be within a thousand miles of each other, because the force fields just wouldn’t let it happen,” Ezekiel once said. But now he and Rahm are both working in Washington.
Emanuel’s friendship with White House adviser David Axelrod goes back to 1982, when Axelrod was a Tribune reporter and Emanuel sought publicity for a political group, Illinois Public Action. Axelrod told The New Yorker: “He was just relentless. Rahm chased me down to the recovery room after my second child was born. He says, ‘What is it, a boy or a girl?’ I said, ‘It’s a boy.’ He said, ‘Mazel tov,’ and then a little pause. Then he says, ‘When do you think you’ll be back at work?'”
The president, whose middle name is Hussein, has a chief of staff whose middle name is Israel. What a country.
mjacob@tribune.com
Mark Jacob is a deputy metro editor for the Tribune.
Sources: “The Thumpin’ ” by Naftali Bendavid; The New Yorker; The Washington Post; washingtonian.com; Tribune archives; and Tribune news services.
