Campaign!: The 1983 Election that Rocked Chicago

Part of The Special Collections and Preservation Division at the Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library

Mike Leonard, NBC News correspondent: “This is storytelling at its best. With insight, compassion and humor Peter Nolan turns a semi-forgotten big city mayoral battle into a riveting and timeless tale of human behavior…the good and the bad.”

From the Foreword by F. Richard Ciccone, Author of Daley: Power and Presidential Politics and Mike Royko: A Life in Print; former Managing Editor of the Chicago Tribune: “In Campaign!, veteran newsman Peter Nolan, who covered all the players in the 1983 contest, has written a first-hand account of not only the key participants, the candidates and their top supporters, but also of relatively unknown election workers who invested their time and passions in a way not seen since in Chicago politics. Nolan does not shy from inserting himself into the story where it warrants. His tale of being recruited by Epton as potential City Hall press secretary is only one of the anecdotes that reflects on how unusual the campaign seemed…This is a book that every Chicago politician ought to keep under his pillow…There is never enough history, and this is a nice slice of it.”

A native of Buffalo, NY, Peter Nolan arrived in Chicago near the end of the turbulent 1960's. He worked in television news as a writer, reporter and commentator and won three Emmys and several journalism awards. He lives in the Chicago suburb of Glenview and has six children and fifteen grandchildren.

Publishers Weekly Select Review: "This veteran newsman's account of the tumultuous mayoral race that upended city politics and made Harold Washington the first African-American to lead the city of Chicago offers a bit of political history, some rough character sketches, and snippets of professional memoir. Nolan paints a deft portrait of the political vacuum that ensued after iconic mayor Richard J. Daley's death in 1976 and the players that jockeyed to fill his shoes. As a political reporter, he's well-informed about the way things worked in Chicago, but his periodic departures into what seems to be nostalgia for an outdated model of governance prove distracting. At the same time, the dispassionate recounting of brutal race politics and their inflammatory effect on the 1983 election offers a solid, workmanlike piece of journalistic history. Nolan's dedication to recounting the perspective and political records of bit players, though, means he commits the journalistic sin of burying the lede, noting only in passing that a federal investigation into voter fraud threw Washington's 48,000-vote margin of victory into question." -July 2012, one of 45 self-published books selected for review this quarter