Behind the Scenes of Rahm Emanuel’s Poor Mayoral Strategy
Mental Health Clinics and schools, it seems, have no more political clout with Chicago’s mayor than they do with the GOP.
“They knew who she was, she was at every sit-in,” said Ginsberg-Jaeckle. “But she was never contacted by them, they never met with her, not once.”
Three months later, Helen Morley would be dead. Her friends blamed the closing of the mental health center. Of course, there was no direct link between the clinic closing and the heart attack that felled Morley at age fifty-six. But her friends are sure that the trauma of losing her anchor—the clinic and the tight-knit com- munity there—is what pushed her ailing body to the limit. They said as much during a protest outside the city health department offices a week and a half after Morley’s death, with a coffin and large photos of her in tow.
“We don’t have an autopsy or a medical examiner’s report. You can’t show her death was related to the clinic closure,” said Ginsberg-Jaeckle. “But it would be hard for anyone to say that given her heart conditions and other conditions she suffered from, that the stress and cumulative impact of everything she was going through didn’t play a major role.”
If Emanuel did indeed think largely in terms of adversaries, Morley was not a worthy one for him. She was impoverished, unemployed; many saw her as “crazy,” as she herself sometimes said she was. Her unhappiness with the mayor and her death would cost him no political capital.
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