Richard E. Friedman worked in the Illinois attorney general’s office and as head of the Better Government Association before mounting a quixotic challenge to Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1971 election.

A onetime Democrat who ran as a Republican, Friedman used his campaign to highlight his objections to Daley’s Democratic machine. He cited high crime rates, rising transit fares, troubles with the city’s school system and a housing shortages while arguing that tax dollars were being used to prop up an army of patronage workers.

He lost in a landslide.

“I remember how brave it was when he ran for mayor,” said former Ald. Dick Simpson, who supported Friedman in the race. “Most people were afraid to do that because of the power of the machine.”

His foray into Chicago politics wasn’t the only adventure in Friedman’s life. He operated hot air balloons, held a glider pilot’s license, climbed mountains in the Andes, prospected for uranium, kayaked in Lake Michigan and practiced judo.

Friedman, 93, died of complications from leukemia April 3 while in hospice care at the Smith Care Center at the Plymouth Harbor retirement community in Sarasota, Florida, said his wife of 51 years, former Chicago TV news anchor Jorie Lueloff. Friedman had been a longtime Lincoln Park resident until making Sarasota his primary home in 2012.

Born Richard Emanuel Friedman in the Austin neighborhood, Friedman graduated from private schools. In 1951, he received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Grinnell College in Iowa, driving a taxicab to support himself. Friedman then moved to south suburban Flossmoor with his family and enrolled at Northwestern University’s School of Law, where he worked on Republican Robert Merriam’s unsuccessful 1955 mayoral campaign against Daley.

Friedman served in the Air Force during the Korean War, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He completed his law degree in 1956 and was an administrative assistant to then-Illinois Treasurer Joseph Lohman, also working on Lohman’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for governor.

In 1961, Friedman became a special assistant attorney general under Democrat William Clark. A year later, he made an unsuccessful bid as a Democrat to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Ed Derwinski.

Friedman returned to the state attorney general’s office and was named first assistant attorney general in 1964. Friedman left state government in 1969 to become the executive director of the Better Government Association, leaving two years later to run for mayor.

“I suppose I got frustrated running the BGA,” Friedman told the Tribune in 1971. “You see all that’s going on and you really can’t do anything about it. I want to do something. I like to do things.”

Casting himself as a centrist, Friedman told the Tribune that he hoped to form a coalition with independents and liberal Democrats if he snared the GOP nomination for mayor. Less than a week later, Republican leaders gave him the nod, and he began a four-month campaign.

“He was a generally very inventive thinker,” said veteran journalist, political activist and political consultant Don Rose, who supported Friedman’s mayoral run. “He was a bright and inventive guy who came up with all kinds of interesting ideas.”

Throughout the race, Friedman hit Daley for not disclosing his income, for isolating himself from voters and for urban renewal projects on the Near North Side.

“I’m running for the forgotten Chicagoan, the guy on the block who doesn’t have clout, who refuses to bribe city payrollers to get a tree cut down or a gutter fixed or garbage collected, who can’t make the kind of immense ‘contributions’ to the machine’s campaign funds that will bring him contracts, influence, a tax break,” he told the Tribune in 1971.

In the end, however, Daley defeated Friedman with nearly 70% of the vote, winning all but two of the city’s 50 wards.

Upon conceding defeat, Friedman told supporters at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel that “this campaign has been honest, open, candid and vigorous. And this campaign has fulfilled a responsibility to talk about the issues that confront Chicago. We have done that.”

Shortly after the election, Friedman married Lueloff and signed on as the Chicago-based regional administrator of the federal department of Health, Education and Welfare.

In that job, Friedman persuaded his bosses to set aside money in government construction budgets for sculptures to be placed outside public buildings, making him partly responsible for the placement of Claes Oldenburg’s Batcolumn sculpture in front of the Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building at 600 W. Madison St., and Alexander Calder’s famed Flamingo stabile in front of the Kluczynski Federal Building.

Friedman also was assigned the task of setting up the Fort Indiantown Gap camp for Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in 1975 after the end of the Vietnam War.

“He had 24 hours to fix it all up and make it work, and he did,” Lueloff said.

Friedman and Lueloff sponsored a three-generation family of 14 Vietnamese refugees. Friedman received a presidential citation for his work with the resettlement program.

In 1977, Friedman went into private law practice, first as a partner with Epton, Mullin, Segal and Druth, and then with Rosenthal & Schanfield.

In 1983, Friedman and his mentor, attorney Morris Leibman, founded the National Strategy Forum, a Chicago-based nonprofit and nonpartisan research institute that analyzes issues related to U.S. national security and strategy. Friedman was president of that organization, and later its chair.

At the outset, the National Strategy Forum was a series of lunchtime discussions for leaders and academics wanting to know more about national security issues. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the group’s discussion topics pivoted away from nuclear issues to more economic ones, and after 9/11, the focus shifted to terror.

Among the speakers brought to Chicago for the group’s regular discussions included Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Les Aspin and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s top military adviser. In 1995, Friedman took part in an unsuccessful effort to persuade Powell to run for president the following year.

Friedman oversaw the National Strategy Forum until it was shuttered in 2013, then was appointed to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs as a senior fellow for national and urban security affairs. In both roles, Friedman was a forceful advocate for finding solutions that balanced the protection of civil liberties with the need for enhanced national security.

“Richard was an incredibly intellectual, stimulating, well-informed individual who was an ardent proponent of good government,” said Crate & Barrel co-founder Gordon Segal, a longtime friend and neighbor.

Friedman was well-traveled — Segal recalled Friedman traveling to Kazakhstan and Afghanistan as a young man. In 1968, the Tribune reported that he had set a national endurance record for a class 3 balloon flight. He remained aloft for one hour and two minutes, two and a half minutes longer than the previous record, receiving certification for the achievement from the Sport Balloon Society of America.

“(Though) I set the endurance record for the class 3 size balloon, the prevailing winds carried me off course,” Friedman told the Tribune in 1968. “Instead of a grassy meadow to land in, I wound up in a tree several miles off target.”

Friedman and Lueloff divided their time between a farm in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine and their home in Lincoln Park before retiring to Florida.

Friedman also is survived by a sister, Diane Ciral.

A family service is planned for later this year.

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

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