Flashback: As Danville Passes an Open Housing Ordinance Quaker Announces its Decision to Build a Cereal Plant There. And a Call from Washington, D. C.

[A memoir of fifty plus years in politics for my kids and grandchildren].

The next day after hearing from the harried mayor of Danville, Illinois, Al Gardner, I drove there. We grabbed lunch at a small restaurant on the main street. The colloquy went:

He: “Let’s review the bidding. First let me say this was the dangdest experience in my life. You guys walk in without an appointment. You introduce me to that very nice guy who is the…what is it?...chairman of the board of Quaker Oats…and both of you tell me that you are seriously thinking of building a big cereal plant in this town—which sorely needs new industry. Then you tell me I can’t say anything about it—following which you say that an Open Housing ordinance would help the town’s prospects toward getting the plant. But even with the passage of such an ordinance it’s not a sure-fire thing. And you wind up by saying that I shouldn’t use the new plant as a pretext for passing the Ordinance. That puts me in a difficult position, you know? We are a city that hasn’t had any racial difficulty or violence or anything like that—unlike your hometown of Chicago, may I say.”

He paused for that to sink in. It did. I told him I understand the point very well.

“Okay. For me to go to the city council and say—right out of the blue—I am going to ask you to support an Open Housing ordinance…they’ll think I fell out of bed and hit my head, you know what I mean? It’d help me an awful lot if I could indicate that good things were to happen after passage of the Ordinance, good things in an economic development sense.”

I can’t let you say that, Al because that would be in the nature of a promise and I can’t promise that because that would be misleading. Your people just have to want to accomplish it on their own. And following that, there might very well be an announcement that would be helpful to your economic development program.

“I can tell you that I’m a lay minister and I have never had any difficulty, nor has this town had any difficulty, with people of color. There is no more, how you put it, segregation than there is in your home town of Chicago which has the reputation of being the most segregated city in the north.”

I understand. Al, if this makes a lot of trouble for you, just tell me and we’ll consider going somewhere else.

“Did I say that? I don’t think I said that. I’ll say this: I’ll take a whack at it and I think I’ll get it passed. Pass the butter.”

One other thing.

“What now?”

We don’t want anything to get in the local newspaper ahead of time…sort of unofficially, like a leak…that would grease the vote.

“Now did I say I would do that?”

No, but I’m just telling you that if that happened, it might be very unfortunate.

“I said I’ll take a whack at it and I think I’ll get it passed. Any other restraints on my legislative or administrative rights?”

None whatever.

He did get it passed. He did what I would have done. He didn’t leak it to the papers but passed the word discreetly to the Council members. Even so, it was a gamble. The day the ordinance passed, Quaker announced its decision to build the cereal plant in Danville. While Danville had a 14% nonwhite population that year, in 1968, it now has a 20% nonwhite population. From all reports, the plant helped the town’s employment level. But it didn’t help Al Gardner get reelected. He lost and lost again when he tried to run for the state senate. But the ordinance didn’t do it. From all reports, what cost him was his decision—made by many other mayors of the time—to turn the main street into a mall, shutting off the traffic. That same decision made by Chicago mayor Jane Byrne…in accordance with the latest fancy theory of urban planners…turned State street into a garden patch—a deserted garden patch—before it was reconverted to a street. But Danville mayor Al Gardner, who died at 80, was a great mayor for the town.



******************

Lillian and I were in Washington, D. C. on January 20, 1969 for the Nixon presidential inaugural, the second one for me: the first being John F. Kennedy’s eight years earlier when everyone braving the snowy drifts and saber-tooth winds had to endure the world’s longest invocation by Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston and lifelong pal of the Kennedy family. Everything bad had happened at the Kennedy inauguration which I partially filmed with my new movie camera until the oil in the wheels froze.

First the unconscionably long invocation from a prelate with Irish brogue but in the final stage of decrepitude. Then in the middle of the Cardinal’s prayer, the rostrum suddenly burst into flame from an electrical short-circuit on the portable heater which Vice President-elect Lyndon Johnson put out by beating the flames with his hat. Finally when the poet Robert Frost, well in his 80s, was helped to the rostrum to read his poem, the glare of the sun and the whiteness of the atmosphere gave him snow-blindness. Again Lyndon Johnson to the rescue with the self-same hat—holding it over the rostrum, casting a shadow so the old man could read it in his whinny New England voice.

Finally the address by the newly sworn-in president. As he jabbed a characteristic forefinger and said that the torch had been passed to a new generation born in the 20th century, I cast a look at Dwight Eisenhower who, hands shoved deeply into his overcoat pocket, looked like he had been administered a physic. Newly-demoted private citizen Richard Nixon had a spectacular ski-jump nose anyhow but in the below zero temperature it had turned so red it looked like it might fall off. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, already in failing health, sat like a statue side-by-side with old Harry Truman while he thumbed through the program (he would be dead by the following November, never having been opposed by any Republican in that impregnable Texas district which now is as solidly Republican as it was Democratic). House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (Cokie Roberts’ father) stood up at one point unaccountably, just to stamp his feet to see if he could feel them.

The inauguration of Richard Nixon was much different. Favorable weather for one thing. The Speaker, Carl Albert of Oklahoma, well fortified with scotch was unusually convivial (somewhere distant his longtime, aging admirer, a once gorgeous, now, sadly, no more, red-haired waitress in the Senate dining room, waited as she had for a decade for a hurried back-room encounter before he was rushed away for ceremonial duties). And the two bourbon brothers: Sen. Thruston B. Morton of Kentucky (who didn’t want to succeed Everett Dirksen as GOP Senate leader because it would be too much work) and Rep. Rogers C. B. [for Clark Ballard but which he insisted stood for Chesapeake Bay] Morton of Maryland, well lubricated and cheery. And Louisiana’s Sen. Allen Ellender, the appropriations chairman, who narrowly missed tumbling down the entire Capitol step-way and rolling into the Marine Band which was blaring loudly, his unsteady gait worsened by late morning pre-inaugural lubricants.

There was Gerald Ford—a future president…in fact the very next president--the House minority leader regarded as a right-wing wacko because he had done yeoman’s duty trying to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren…speaking of whom, there he was, a fellow Californian who hated Nixon’s guts, having to swear him in, having decided privately to retire that same year: his wife, Nina, still golden-haired and California-looking (who died in 1991 at 101, long after her husband was filed away). And there were the Warren family members, including a daughter, Virginia, the second wife of John Charles Daly, host of “What’s My Line,” the hottest TV show of the period, dapper Daly, celebrity, more actor, more Broadway boulevardier than newsman, more radio announcer than analyst, a native of South Africa who had the most pleasantly attuned British-toned voice of upper-crust status in broadcasting—he having broken the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the death of Franklin Roosevelt to the world on CBS, even now a closet conservative—unsympathetic to civil rights as could be expected from his South Africa background, ending up doing moderating chores for the American Enterprise Institute. Wheezy Everett Dirksen was at one end of a row, having chosen it deliberately to set himself apart from the man he despised, Chuck Percy; white-thatched John B. Anderson of Rockford, Ill., chairman of the House Republican Conference, God’s angry man who was moving quickly from Right to Left, soon departing the GOP for an independent presidential candidacy and ultimately the Democratic party.

At the Illinois reception (in the old Patent Office, built in the time of Abraham Lincoln), the Nixons arrived; Pat had gone home to bed and the president was accompanied by his daughters, Julie and Tricia. As he walked past me it struck me that he had just missed—narrowly missed—being good looking. Standing in the glare of the klieg-lights, side by side, was the president and his blonde Tricia, and as they turned for the cameras Lillian nudged me, citing the identical tracings of their noses—the famed Nixon noses—sweeping down their faces and then swerving upward.

The fun of inaugurals is to meet old-time friends. One was Jack Gleason. He had worked in the House years ago when I had been there. Now he was working there again—sort of. What do you mean, sort of?

“I’m working informally with a new guy from Texas, George Bush—his secretary is a friend of yours, Rose Zamaria.”

Rose Zamaria? Yes. She and I worked for years together for Al Quie. What’s she doing?

“She’s Bush’s administrative assistant.”

Yeah, I knew that I guess. She used to be a Democrat, working for Albert Thomas the Congressman from Houston. Her husband, Tom, a friend of mine. He retired from the U. S. Army and works for General Services.

“That’s right. Now she’s a Republican and Bush’s top person.”

What does that have to do with you, Jack?

“Well, you see, he’s really connected for a two-term House member. His Dad was Prescott Bush: you know, the former Senator from Connecticut? The whole family is pretty well wired into politics. George—George Bush—is doing some spade-work for Nixon. I’m not actually attached to the House. I’m working with a group of other people in a townhouse and Bush and Rose are kind of helping. I’m paid by the Nixon campaign. We’ve been in the townhouse since the day after election, trying to find the right kind of people to work in the administration. We coordinate our stuff with him. What about you?”

No, got a good job at Quaker.”

“Nobody’s asking you to quit your job for keeps. Taking a job in Washington’s a kind of investment, especially if you’re in public affairs like you. Ultimately you return with broader contacts. Think about it.”

I have. There’s only one job I would consider taking.

“Which is…?”

Assistant secretary of HEW for legislation. Having that job, being in charge of the HEW agenda, would be terrific experience. I couldn’t imagine anything that would be more fun.

“Would help you when you would go back to the private sector as well.”

Anything else, forget about it. I had a friend who had that job under Ike. His job was to help Elliott Richardson pass a whole raft of legislation and it gave him the equivalent of a doctorate in congressional procedure.

“You want me to see if there’s an opening?”

Well, yeah but that job’s usually reserved for people who have worked full-time in a campaign. I didn’t. Not saying I’d take it—or turn it down. But it’s the only one that interests me.

A few months later, my phone rings at Quaker. Jack Gleason.

You still working out of the townhouse?

“You bet. Rose Zamaria says hello. You come to Washington regularly?

Yep.

“Let’s set a date. I got something you might be interested in.”

The next week he said, “I got something here. But it’s not assistant secretary of HEW.”

Ok. Goodbye.

“No-no. In some ways—in some ways—it’s better.”

How can that be?

“You remember when Nixon talked about Black Capitalism? He wanted to encourage blacks and other minorities to have the same opportunities others have to start their own businesses?”

Yep.

“This would involve you starting your own agency. In Commerce. Assistant to the secretary.”

Assistant secretary?

“Sorry. Assistant to the secretary. Not assistant secretary but get this: you’d be able to start your own agency of the federal government, from scratch. And the president is deeply interested in it because he feels it’s a golden chance to (a) do good and (b) help the Republicans with the black vote. Why I think you’d be better than anybody else is because you’re a political expert and…and that’s a big and…a corporate guy…and—another big and—you are well known in Chicago in the minority community, probably the only Republican some of them think hasn’t got horns. You’ve done a lot of stuff in the black community. We checked you out already.”

What about the downside?

“Huh?”

The downside. Are you going to tell me?

“No downside.”

Yes downside. The secretary of commerce is Stans. Maurice Stans.

“So?”

He’s a Minnesotan, remember? From Shakopee. I’m a transplanted Minnesotan. Talk about somebody who is a…

“Well, he is a [scatological description of genitalia]. I’ll give you that. But don’t you think that the experience of starting your own agency is better than assuming a job that’s already there like assistant secretary of HEW?”

Nope.

**********************

Two weeks later my phone rings.

“Jack Gleason here.”

`Bye.

“Listen. I took the liberty of floating your name and he’d like to see you on your next trip.”

Who?

“Stans. He says he never met you.”

He’s right. But I know his reputation.

“What’s wrong with meeting the secretary of commerce? Aren’t you in the business of trying to meet people for Quaker. You going to turn down a chance to meet the secretary of commerce who in the future might be able to help you and your company?”

I’m sure Bob Stuart knows him. And knows him well because Stans was Nixon’s finance chairman and Bob and his family have been generous givers.

“Not talking about Stuart at this point. Frankly, this puts me in a tough spot because Stans would like to talk it over with you and I don’t want to tell him that you told me you don’t want to talk with him—don’t like to even talk with him. That’s a helluva note to tell a cabinet officer.”

All right. I’ll drop in and see him.

“Gee, we little people are very grateful for that, Roeser.”

No, I don’t want to be snooty. I just don’t want to mislead him, that’s all.

We got together the next week.

Personal Asides: Soo First with the Trivia Answer, Followed by WPD…Sorry, Forgot to Credit Lovie’s Leather on Nixon…The Latest Terry Trivia.

Soo.

Judging by the time notation in response, the correspondent Soo won the latest Terry Przybylski presidential trivia contest followed closely by WPD. The question was: who was the only southerner to serve as president between the post Civil War and the election of Lyndon Johnson? The answer: Woodrow Wilson, born in Virginia who also spent some time practicing law in Augusta, Georgia. True, he was elected president after having been governor of New Jersey but his roots were southern. And not particularly enlightened in civil rights, either as WPD relates in Reader’s Response.

Lovie’s Leather.

Excuse this senior citizens’s faltering response to the fact that Lovie’s Leather also had the answer right to this question: With Minnesota having gone the longest in the nation without voting for a Republican president, who was the president it supported? Answer: Richard Nixon over George McGovern in 1972. Sorry, Lovie.

Latest Terry Trivia.

This’ll be somewhat easier than the past ones, I think. In 2008 there will be no incumbent president or vice president running on either party’s national ticket. When was the last time that happened?

Flashback: Quaker’s Social Responsibility Program Goes to Danville, Illinois with a Spectacular Offer to the Mayor—all in Confidence.

[Fifty plus years in politics written for my kids and grandchildren].

The late sixties and early `70s saw corporations moving to embrace what was called “social responsibility” to meet the rising tide of minority inflammation caused by the false great expectations generated by the Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” The “Great Society” stemmed from a memorable reference in a presidential address written by Richard Goodwin (husband of Pulitzer prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin who om 1977 unsuccessfully tried to block my appointment to Harvard’s Kennedy school but was overruled by Teddy Kennedy). In the address and others to follow, Johnson, a cunning and duplicitous legislative leader and malevolent president, sought to eradicate all poverty by spurring new government programs. From 1950 to 1968 the poverty rate had steadily declined by one percentage point per year. Since the LBJ years the poverty rate has held firm, neither raised nor lowered. Seven trillion dollars and Johnson’s extravagant language have produced little positive gains—and much wrong.


Nowhere was the disaster more relevant than with the Elementary and Secondary Education act of 1965, passed with extensive fanfare that it would rectify educational disadvantages of poor children (Rep. Albert H. Quie of Minnesota, my old chieftain, a well-meaning socially moderate Republican, played a major role in its enactment). A study by the National Institute of Education of the act’s Title I found that such gains as were achieved during one school year had been dissipated in the next. Title I students entered new grades as far behind as they would have been in absence of Title I; “Head Start,” the brilliantly publicized preschool program saw gains made in one year evaporate in the next.


There is a good reason for this which we did not fully recognize during the Great Society fanfare and which still not has penetrated the current liberal mindset. We believed in government’s power to achieve unparalleled change—a great huzza begun in academe and carried forth by the popular news media--despite the fact that under FDR it had not cured the Depression (our entrance into World War II did). The Sixties under Johnson launched an era of unprecedented social reform. Blacks were to be drawn up by government to full equality; crime, ignorance and poverty were to be eradicated by legislation, progressive court decisions. But the legacy was counterproductive.


Two books are the key to viable reform of the mindless old “reform.” The first: Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 by Charles Murray [Basic Books, N. Y., 1984] which has not been surpassed—and indeed, not satisfactorily answered by liberals. Rather than I summarize it, you should read it. An essential portion is Chapter 9: “The Family.” It has three basic points which have never been contradicted: First, the welfare state constructed during the 1960s and 1970s created a system of disincentives including the paying of women to have children out of wedlock in poor homes. Second, by doling out dollars that could not be matched by the economy, the government encouraged poor women to stay home.


Staying home for women with children could be seen as a good but when taken together--encouragement to have children out of wedlock and then remaining home which would spur more children born out of wedlock. Third, by lowering the threshold of learning in the public schools, by guaranteeing that all would be passed on to succeeding grades, it ruined a major element of societal discipline. Fourth, easing the punishment for criminal activity by proclaiming it is society’s fault for law-breaking, not the individual’s, the perpetrator, seen as victim, was encouraged in his ways.


It is important to note that in the overall…in academe and the media…the myth of the Great Society is still propagated with very little appreciation of the defects of the era. When you read popular daily newspapers and watch fashionable mainstream media the idea continues to be generated that the poor are being disadvantaged by skewed national priorities that do not pour even more financial resources to “education”—a political cliché adopted by elements of both political parties as essential for electoral success. In Illinois this is particularly current, politicians by now understanding the fallacy but smelling the meat a-cooking from votes from the under-class and pop academe and media support.


But worse than all the wasted treasure expended in behalf of “inner-city education” is the ignored reality that underscores the problem of the poor—particularly black poor. It is the diagnosis that no one has been explained than the economist and social analyst George Gilder in the second book which is a corollary to the first: Men and Marriage [Pelican, 1986] which is still valid—ignored by the liberal social elite but never contradicted nor even considered worth answering. The very first lines in Chapter One states the thesis: The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality. The overall sexual behavior of women in the modern world differs relatively little from the sexual life of women in primitive societies. It is male behavior that must be changed to create a civilized order.


Men lust but they know not what for: they wander and lose track of the goal: they fight and compete but they forget the prize; they spread seed but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory but miss the meaning of life. The prime fact of life is the sexual superiority of women. Sexual love, intercourse, marriage, conception of a child, childbearing—even breast feeding—all are critical experiences psychologically. They are times when our emotions are most intense, our lives are most deeply changed and society is perpetuated in our own image. And they all entail sexual roles that demonstrate the primacy of women.


Bad as the record is, it is worsened by the fact that the contemporary U.S. elites ignore it, believing that to question government aid is to embrace racism or callousness in the face of poverty. The record shows otherwise. In 1988, as The Economist magazine shows, less than 1 percent of America’s poor was composed of couples that (1) finished high school, (2) gotr married and stayed married and (3) kept a job—even a minimum wage job—for a year. The incentives spawned in the 1960s made it less and less likely that people would consider it worthwhile to follow these basic steps—marriage and a steady job—both of which are the escape hatches from poverty and have proved to be for generations.


I am frank to say that during the 1960s and 1970s, I suspected, felt viscerally but regrettably did not have the intellectual curiosity or the acumen to probe the grounds for these contentions until the pioneering studies made by these two authors. Hence I contributed to the social disease myself—and not just in token form, in substantially large measure. Hence when charges are made, as some have, that my conservatism stems from a racist and insensitive elderly, patriarchal, unduly religious, white background, I must stifle not just a yawn but mirth…since as a federal official, an “enlightened, moderate-to-progressive Republican”—let us say a kind of Rockefeller Republican, having changed gradually from the conservatism learned from my Father as he shaved each morning and in counter-distinction to the lessons given by Walter Judd, became—albeit a Republican—an exponent of government as social corrector.


Thus was I as responsible as some—more so than many—for inculcation of the early view that government can solve the poverty problem. My only consolation is that a true onetime “Rockefeller Republican” exceeded me in the fallacy and later renounced it as do I: George Gilder himself. Gilder’s father, killed in World War II, was a college roommate of David Rockefeller who became deeply involved in Gilder’s upbringing, sending Gilder to Phillips Exeter and Harvard. Gilder wrote, with his college roommate Bruce Chapman (now also a social conservative) the book The Party that Lost Its Head, an attack on the policies of Barry Goldwater (a book that made some impression on me in 1965). He was a speech-writer for Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Richard Nixon. He was an early Fellow of the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics, Harvard.


While I do not know Gilder and never met him, we came to the same conclusion anent Republican—and all--liberalism at about the same time—me from disenchantment after government service, he, vastly more perceptive, after longtime reflection. He became one of the early popularizers of supply-side economics, became a dot-com multi-millionaire, lost most of it with the bursting of that bubble, becoming later chairman of the Lehrman Institute, program director of the Manhattan Institute and is a frequent Op Ed contributor to the “Wall Street Journal.” He and Chapman (head of the Census Bureau under Reagan, former speech-writer for him and now-conservative Catholic) helped found the Discovery Institute which became the leading think tank of the Intelligent Design movement. To sense the continuing liberal dissatisfaction with Gilder, read his bio on Wikipedia, written by an anonymous someone who calls him an “anti-feminist.” Anti-feminist he is by current liberal reckoning, but in absolute terms, far from anti-feminist, Gilder is a true feminist, calling attention to the natural superiority of women: thus does the age old liberal bias from academe and pop media continue to confound us all.


***************


At Quaker, two of us were responsible for its social responsibility program—my immediate boss, Bob Thurston, a senior vice president and board director who engendered the corporation with a sense of the importance of heightened social responsibility. I was the full-time implementer as well as political officer and corporate lobbyist. The program was always modest in scope but we liked to think that its parts could easily be replicated by other companies. It began with a once-a-week after-work employee participation program on tutoring disadvantaged kids at a public housing project on the South Side where Quaker volunteers would be bused and returned.


It followed with a complete revision of the corporate philanthropy program, directed by Bob Thurston in which we all played a part, but perhaps I foremost: getting new, innovative social programs to receive some funding. The social responsibility program which I directed continued with a series of courses for minority—principally black—public housing residents to encourage them to improve their lives: a nutrition education program conducted by a black consumer expert who would take people on trips to food stores (with the emphasis on no Quaker commercial overtone), instruct them on how to buy economically, how to prepare food well—in short, the essentials of homemaking. Another course was designed to whet the interest of potential entrepreneurs by instructing them in enterprise, with the emphasis on food market management (taken from the company’s own self-management series given to prospective entrepreneurs). The latter course involved us getting banking representatives to lecture on capital formation etc. Its goal was not so much to spur new businesses as to encourage, subtly, mostly male residents of the housing projects to take advantage of free courses that could steer them to the private sector.


At the same time we generated what is still a kind of revolutionary concept: the use of corporate leverage to attain social change in the public arena. It’s fair to say that among major corporations, we were the first to see that there are limitations to what companies can do for the poor in philanthropy and voluntarism—but not in exercise of social influence. Corporations have inherent power in the public arena: either to do things or not to do things. None of us—Bob Thurston, Bob Stuart, the chairman, or I—have fully determined who devised the first concrete use of that philosophy…I know it did not come from me. I had always believed it came from Bob Stuart which at our last meeting he denied; perhaps it came from Bob Thurston (I always thought it did but don’t know for sure). Anyhow, it centered on a decision by Quaker to build a large cereal plant somewhere in the Midwest. The concept was revolutionary—and still is revolutionary to this day. It has demonstrably good and bad points. At that time we saw only the good.


The rationale goes like this. Whenever a major corporation undertakes to locate a plant in a community—and in our case, our plants were usually in smaller cities…for example, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Jackson, Tennessee, Rockford, Illinois, Pekin, Illinois, Shiremanstown, Pennsylvania (on the outskirts of Harrisburg), Philippi, West Virginia…it is common currency that the company that wants to locate has certain legitimate demands to make of the would-be host community. For example: is the tax base favorable? Are the schools satisfactory for our people who will be moving in? Are the police and fire services adequate? These are ordinary requests that all companies study before making a determination on locating a major facility. As all communities wish to appear attractive to new industry, their desire puts industry in a powerful position with which to seek positive social change. That was the rationale in the progressive late `60s which I describe.


Bob Stuart, our chairman, suggested that we apply a social responsibility component to the selection process. This was well before passage of the national fair housing legislation by the Congress. We determined to request of the community into which we were considering to move to provide a demonstration of its social responsibility to minorities which we would take into consideration along with the other advantages. It seemed very logical that a community into which we wanted to locate would have a climate favorable to equal housing opportunity. It so happened that one of our key managers—Bill Hatch—was black and we felt strongly that he and his family should not be discriminated against in housing by a community to which we would supply a good many jobs.


One of the communities we were looking at—and quite favorably—was Danville, Illinois. It had superb advantages, was Midwestern, near bountiful agricultural resources, had good educational facilities, had a good tax base, fine police and fire services with access to excellent higher education. But at that time, in the late `60s, Danville was not different from many other rural-based communities of moderate population. Although its black population amounted to 14% of its total—a microcosm of the nation at that time—it had no open housing ordinance…nor, in its trouble-free orientation, did it particularly wish for one. The drive for civil rights was crucial in Washington and in the large urban areas of the nation—Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D. C., the Watts area of Los Angeles—but not in the smaller towns notwithstanding that proportionately there was segregation in these small towns as well.


Danville was rooted in the older tradition of rural southern Illinois. It had been the hometown and base of conservative Republican, Joseph (“Uncle Joe”) Cannon [1836-1926], a one-time follower of Lincoln, named by him as federal prosecutor, who became inarguably the most powerful U. S. House Speaker who ever lived, tangling with Theodore Roosevelt during his speaker’s tenure [1903-11]. When I worked in the House in the mid-`50s the legend of Uncle Joe still lived. He was indomitable because he controlled the right to name chairman of all committees at the start of each new session, power from which he secured their allegiance for time immemorial on all legislation. Quite by stealth, a group of Democrats and Republicans, among them George Norris of Nebraska, sneaked up on Uncle Joe and when he was nodding got a rule through the House that required a great liberal reform to be instituted—the seniority system, so that with few modifications the ranking member of the majority party would succeed to the chairmanship. Cannon bellowed that there would come a time when the seniority system would be regarded as evil and unprogressive. Right he was—but not until he had long passed from the scene. But Cannon’s intransigent conservatism, on race and other matters, indemnified his area of the state as one of the nation’s most conservative.


With the company looking favorably at Danville, Illinois, I went down there with our chairman and without any previous appointment, walked in on the mayor who was in his office: a part-time mayor, part-time automobile salesman, part-time bible salesman. It is one of the great qualities of Bob Stuart, though the chief executive officer of a blue-chip company, that he had a folksy, friendly, ingratiating way with people—especially people in rural areas—symptomatic of his innately Jeffersonian beliefs about the inherent benefits of small towns and rural areas (laced with some suspicion of the larger, more pressure-packed urban areas). The gracious and friendly manner continues well into this, his 90th year.


We walked in on the mayor and Stuart quite frankly told him that he was thinking seriously of locating a major cereal plant in his town. The guy, working in his shirt-sleeves and loud suspenders, leaned back in his chair and emitted a loud: whoooppeeeee! He had not long before been elected mayor on a pledge to bring industry to Danville—and he hadn’t had the faintest idea of how to do it.


Then came the difficult part. We asked him how felicitous the relations between whites and blacks were in Danville. Misreading us (understandably) this bible salesman leapt up and extolled, “we got no problem with them [implication of a scatological reference to blacks]. They live on their side of town and we live on ours!” We explained gently that we wanted to move our company to a small community that practiced non-discrimination. And to do that, it might well require a fair housing ordinance. His joy evaporated. We added: we are not making passage of a fair housing ordinance condition on our moving to Danville. The community should wish to pass the ordinance freely without constraint.


The mayor tried to restate it so he understood us. “You mean--,” he said after a long pause, “you are thinking of locating a big cereal plant in this town which has not had a lot of industry in many years and which would be a very popular thing to do, right?”


Right.


“But you won’t come unless we have an Open Housing ordinance, right?”


No. We are not making this a requirement.


“But what you’re saying is that if we don’t pass one, you might not come, have I got that right, gentlemen? Is that what I’m hearin’?”


We might not come—but then we might. We would like Danville to see the need of the ordinance without reference to us.


“Well,” he said, “all I would have to do is to tell the council that if they pass one the biggest cereal company in America would be coming in here and they’d pass it.”


That’s the sticky part. We want you to keep this secret—from the council, from anyone. Keep it out of the press, keep it out of the dialogue. Only you know we are here and, frankly, if it were to get out that we were thinking of coming here, we might very well cancel the plans.


He lit a cigar.


“So I gotta—let’s put it in biblical terms—I gotta walk into the council and introduce an Open Housing ordinance to a council populated by my lifelong neighbors just as if I was like the apostle Paul smacked down, out of my chariot, on the road to Damascus where he heard the voice of God Almighty saying Saul-Saul why do you crucify me? And get `em to pass the thing and not tell `em why. And if they were to know why, you’d possibly not come.”


Exactly.


“And even if they’d pass the damn thing—pardon me—the ordinance…even if they’d pass it of their own free will—you might not come.”


Exactly.


“Now, gentlemen, I’m rather sorry you came into the room. When you first come in, I’d like to have kissed you. Now you’re telling me I could end my political career with this. Let me think it over.”

We sat there for a while, had coffee while he looked at us curiously. Then we went home.

When I got home, Lillian said: “The mayor of Danville has been ringing the phone off the hook all evening.”

When I got him on the line he said, “Is this thing on the level?”

Sure is.

He said, “goddamn. I’d like you to come back here soon as you can so we can skull this out together.”

Personal Asides: And the Trivia Winner Is…Now the Next Terry Trivia Question…What I Find Good About the “Sun-Times”

No One.

Terry Przybylski’s trivia question asked this: As the Republicans recently announced they will held their 2008 national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, that state has gone longer than any other state without voting for a Republican for president. Who was the last Republican to carry it? No one got it right. Lovie’s Leather guessed Ronald Reagan in 1980. No, it was Richard M. Nixon in 1972 over George McGovern. On the second one, with JFK being the youngest elected president at 43 and Theodore Roosevelt the youngest president to be inaugurated at 42, who was the youngest Republican nominee for president? No one got it right: Thomas E. Dewey, 42 years old when he ran for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

Next.

This is a tricky one—but it’s very valid. Between Andrew Johnson’s presidency just following the Civil War and Lyndon B. Johnson’s election in 1964, no one was elected president from a southern state. However, there was one southerner president…a man born in one southern state and who lived for a time in another. Who was he? No search engines.

Good About the Sun-Times.

Jack Higgins cartoons (but I say that all the time)…Mary Laney’s columns which is about the only smidgeon of gentle conservatism left along with Betsy Hart on Sundays…Zay Smith’s column QT—liberal though it may be--which is noteworthy for its ingeniously apt comments on news stories, which I never miss and whose one-liners are devastatingly precious…I’m even getting to like some of the front-page graphics ala “Class vroom”…Sneed: who often has the inside…One who I think is the best legal correspondent around notwithstanding he’s not a lawyer: Abdon Pallasch…The sports pages but especially Jay Mariotti…Neil Steinberg’s jokes, especially the one about the astronaut on Mars…the editorials by Steve Huntley, some of which I dislike but all of which take a firm stance which editorials are supposed to do: no, “stay tuned” or “who knows?”

Now after all the hits I’ve given the “Sun-Times,” does this contradict the past? Not at all. Compare the earlier criticisms and you’ll see the pluses and minuses in one package.

Flashback: Dirksen’s Election Night “Concession.”

[Fifty plus years in politics for my kids and grandchildren].

While Charlie Barr was right that Dick Ogilvie had mounted a machine, Ogilvie had succeeded with it getting Nixon elected president and himself governor. Were Charlie alive today he would have to tell us whether that outcome—with a state income tax enacted and a Watergate perpetrated which led to resignation—was justified…along with the assembly line production of lawyer-lobbyist-operatives with no philosophical values spanning Ogilvie-Thompson-Edgar-Ryan administrations (who could fit in anywhere, Dem or GOP) which replaced the old earnest, possibly too self-righteous, but diligent, conservatives. Barr would say the change was not worth the elections of Ogilvie or Nixon. I wholeheartedly agree. I sometimes even think Billy the Kid would as well.

But there was unexpected drama in Illinois on election night—and what looked like terrible news.

While we in Nixon headquarters at the Conrad Hilton were cheering the election of the 37th president due partially to our Illinois squeaker, the tumult was shattered and converted into silence when ABC-TV announced that Everett McKinley Dirksen had been defeated!

The crowd gasped: Lord, we never even thought that was a possibility! Everett Dirksen defeated!

His opponent, William Clark, former two-term state attorney general, had taken a sharp turn to the Left on the Vietnam war and the Chicago Democrats and the state AFL-CIO had held back from endorsing him. But under-funded and running from his gut, Clark, an outstanding public official, had come up from behind very-very close to the old warrior. Now he had won!

We stood and gaped as the announcer said the network had hired a phenomenal vote expert, Dr. Richard Wade, formerly of the University of Chicago. The camera then focused on Wade, who said: “On the basis of projections that I have just made, while Illinois has been instrumental in electing a Republican president, the state has also made a momentous decision. It has defeated the old lion of the United States Senate, Everett McKinley Dirksen. For on the basis of what I see now, with heavy Democratic returns coming from Cook county and a weaker Republican outpouring downstate and a weaker showing in the suburbs, Everett McKinley Dirksen has been defeated. This is truly historic. The dynamics of the entire Senate have changed tonight.”

I caught the elevator up to the Dirksen suite where people were standing around as if in paralytic shock. There was no Dirksen. He was sequestered in a private room with his aide Harold Rainville, the eccentric who wore cardboard shoes because he had perpetually sore feet. There was one connecting bathroom and I ducked into it and opened the other side door which gave me a glimpse of the Dirksen adjoining suite. There were only two men in it. On the floor was a chaos of bags with the bed unmade and a few pillows on the floor. The two in the room didn’t notice my peering. A wheezing, sagging old man sitting on the edge of the bed with a tumbler full of dark amber fluid—bourbon. That was Dirksen with pouchy eyes, a face like Bert Lahr playing the Lion in the Wizard of Oz, in his shirtsleeves, his coat tossed in a heap on the bed. And Rainville, his back to me, on the phone. I paused just long enough to hear the old man rasp, “Rainville? What d’ye hear? Speak!” Rainville motioned Dirksen to hush as he took down the figures. I closed the door discreetly and went through the other door into the larger reception room where people were murmuring to themselves that they had just seen history change.

A television set was blaring about Dirksen’s defeat. Then a loud knock of the door, repeatedly: in the chaos no one opened it. Finally someone did. It was a demur young man from ABC-TV, a messenger, asking for the Senator. A huge camera crew was setting up in the downstairs lobby to interview Senator Dirksen and a huge throng had gathered to witness the concession. Nobody seemed to know how to get to Dirksen and nobody wanted to knock on the door. I knew how to get to him—through the bathroom door which led to the interior room. I went to the bathroom, knocked on the other door and opened it discreetly. Dirksen was still sitting on the bed, the glass of amber fluid now almost consumed, Rainville still on the phone, and Dirksen mumbling to himself.

I cleared my throat and said, Senator? Senator? There was no recognition. Louder: Senator! He turned and looked at me, his face lined like the Phillips 66 roadmap of Vermillion county with red and blue veined lines indicating highways intersecting, grey hair standing on end, thick lips pursed as if in pious utterance. A giant oversized forefinger crooked, beckoned me to him. I said, ABC television would like to interview you downstairs. He said nothing, got up, flung on his coat while Rainville, on the phone, kept saying “uh-huh, un-huh, uh-huh.” Then as Dirksen prepared to leave with me, Rainville said to the phone: “Wait a minute.” To Dirksen: “Where are you going?”

Dirksen: “Downstairs. ABC.”

Rainville: “You can’t go down there. I don’t have all the figures yet.”

Dirksen: “Tell me what you do have, Harold.”

Rainville: “You’re in no trouble. Trouble with a few counties that have had some difficulties with the calculators. You’re in. It’ll be close, that’s all.”

Dirksen cleared his throat and coughed up a lunger into his kerchief.

“Well, Harold, what counties do we have?”

Rainville ripped off a sheet from his yellow pad. With his ear still at the receiver, he said out of the side of his mouth, “These counties you will carry. They’ve been reported wrong. But you’ll carry them. That gives you oh, I would say, 53 percent of the vote.”

We went down in the elevator, he making no notice of me but grumbling as if to himself, “this is what comes from my not coming back to campaign until mid-October. You see, when you become too much involved in governance the political suffers.” And when he came back he had had a lot of explaining to do to the conservatives. He had reversed himself on the Open Housing bill, a bill he had opposed two years earlier—now saying in his oozing baritone “this is an idea whose time has come.” After LBJ, his friend, had announced he would not run again but sent the name of Abe Fortas to the floor for confirmation as chief justice of the Supreme Court, youngish conservative senator Robert Griffin had wanted to fight the confirmation, but Dirksen said he would support it.

Then he reversed himself again and the appointment did not go through. The Senate, including some Republican members, were taking issue with his hard pro-LBJ stand on Vietnam. People were getting the idea the old man was slipping. Consistently he had refused to reveal or discuss his own financial affairs. People got the idea he was enriching himself from his Peoria law firm. More than that, he had emphysema though still inhaled deeply from cigarettes; his heart was enlarged and had a leaky valve. He had experienced congestive heart failure, had a greatly enlarged heart, had to have excess fluid drained from his lungs. He had a persistent bleeding ulcer; never took a vacation. All that plus terminal dandruff that turned his coat shoulders into a snowman. Now Dr. Richard Wade was saying he had lost reelection.

As he stalked through the hotel lobby with me at his side, wearing a suit-coat that sorely needed pressing, trousers hanging at half-mast with a belly protruding over the belt-line, the doughty old warrior gripped people’s hands with his gnarled ones and sank down heavily on a chair while the attendants hooked him up with the lapel microphone. He then noisily cleared his throat in a guttural outburst that sent the phlegm rattling up and down his windpipe which led some of the onlookers to feel vaguely ill. Someone handed him a glass of ice water which he gulped thirstily and noisily. Then he placed his two thumbs in his mouth to adjust his dentures.

Let us say it was far different from today’s immaculate, polished lawmaker TV performances. The director gave an order: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to the ABC network now, to the national hookup. Quiet please!” The entire political nation was watching. Important little with headphones conferred on phones and a mustached little man flung out his arm with pointed finger to the reporter: “five-four-three-two…”

“We’re here with the man who has been called the uncrowned leader of the United States Senate, the Minority Leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois. Senator Dirksen, our election analyst, Dr. Richard Wade, has just declared that you have lost your reelection to the Democrat William G. Clark by a narrow percentage. Do you have a comment on that sir?”

As Dirksen looked at the camera, his huge face appeared to on the portable screen with a closeness that showed the pores in his nose as well as his rheumy eyes that seemed to have seen enough of the human condition to split the planets and make the biblical Abraham an infidel. He began to speak so low that the technician turned up the volume and the deep bass profundo reverberated around the room down the lobby and even into the bar where congregants were watching in silence.

“This morning when I got up I was in Danville, in Vermillion coun-tay. When I arose and refreshed, I drove up here through the auburn fields that had been harvested…through…” and he enumerated all the counties through which he passed on the way to Chicago. The technicians looked at each other to seek meaning from this meandering and the reporter nodded dumbly as the Senator recited all the counties. “I have known all those coun-tays”—a pause while he noisily sipped the water as the camera recorded—“and have seen and known their people and with all due respect to Doctor Richard Wade, let me say that there are several coun-tays including Vermillion in which the calculators have refused to act and have balked—so as the technicians look to their trade and repair them before coming to the right conclusion—you will ultimately find that in the end I will have won by 53 percentage points, not great but sufficient to have won once again the reassurance of the people of Illinois that I may continue to serve them. That in the words of John 8:32 “is the Truth and the Truth shall set ye free.”

He then arose slowly, unfastened the mike, bowed grandly and departed with me in tow, handing the empty water glass to the startled highly paid TV reporter. In our ears rang the befuddled reporter: “Well, you’ve just heard it. Senator Dirksen has refused to concede although Dr. Richard Wade…” The startled crowd gave him a heavy applause to which he tossed the candidatorial wave as the elevator door closed on the scene.

In the elevator going up to his suite, he said—this time directly to me—“I stretched it out as long as I could in order to give the sunabitches heartburn.”

Later that morning, it was ascertained by Dr. Richard Wade that indeed Senator Dirksen had won by 53 percentage points. And so far as I know, Dr. Wade, the peerless expert, never appeared on television again. In his place was a giant computer.

Dirksen went back to Washington to serve his last term. A little less than a year later, a chest x-ray revealed a spot on his lung. While he worked and orated on the Senate floor, his staff scheduled surgery for him on September 2, 1969. In a memorable seeming valedictory to the Senate, he paused, looked at the presiding officer and said prophetically, “my time has run out.” A few days later he completed his autobiography. He entered Bethesda; an operation confirmed the tumor was cancerous and an operation was conducted immediately. He seemed to rally at first, then his heart failed and he died on September 7. In answer to those who thought he had squirreled away a fortune at his Peoria law firm, his estate at age 73 was between $150,000 and $200,000, not much after thirty-five years of service in Congress. So much for a fifteen year rumor that those who wanted to fix legislation would retain his law firm.

Flashback: Nixon Carries Illinois in `68 and With it Wins the Presidency.

[Fifty years plus of memories of politics for my kids and grandchildren].

Just as Charlie Barr was right in his dispute with Billy the Kid (Stratton, the two-term former governor, two term state treasurer and ex-congressman-at-large), he proved to be a Cassandra: one whose analysis, though correct in all particulars, was fated to be pooh-poohed and never listened to. Barr it was who said Dick Ogilvie was embarked on an empire-building crusade, to build not just an administration as governor but to weld a hybrid party from disparate elements of the old ones. Ogilvie as president of the Cook county Board was dead set on running for governor in 1968, after that making common cause with his idol Nelson Rockefeller and taking Rockefeller’s big government thesis to Springfield and ultimately 1600 Pennsylvania avenue. Stratton had insisted Ogilvie do what he—Stratton--who was for a short time a vice-presidential prospect himself—would do…avoid building a machine because to do so would get one into trouble…remain at heart a loner, a friend to all and ally of none, staying flexible for future coalescences.

Ogilvie, recognizing that as board president he was the leading Illinois Republican on the ground (Percy and Dirksen were in Washington) began to survey the prospects of an alliance which would (a) get him in well with a future president and (b) enable him to glide with ease into the governorship in 1968. It would be natural to expect that he would tie in with Rockefeller whose appetite for the presidency had not been quenched by amateurish efforts in 1960 and `64. Ogilvie’s natural ally was Rockefeller but the dour Scottish ex-prosecutor understood that there is political fatality involved in his stealing another man’s wife and convincing her to leave her kids and surrender custody to them in order to marry him: an ego thrust worthy of Henry VIII. Endowed with the coldest eyes in the business, Ogilvie recognized it would be a no-go with Rocky and so he cemented ties early with Richard Nixon. In doing so, he rejected Rocky’s importuning to support Michigan’s George Romney who was the New Yorker’s choice for the nomination.

My own corporate leader, Bob Stuart, chairman of Quaker Oats was an enthusiastic Romney fan but he was restricted by some personal ties. He was friends—close friends—with Chuck Percy, a freshman senator, was hoping to profit from a deadlock between Nixon and Romney—or a three-way if, as Percy suspected (rightly as it turned out) Rockefeller could not resist getting in the fray. He had known Nixon for many years, probably better than anyone in the Illinois GOP save Everett Dirksen and Les Arends, the House GOP Whip. He had given much financial help to Dick Ogilvie in his run for board president which enabled me to scout just what Ogilvie was up to involving the presidency. Avoiding much interaction with the two masters of grunt conversation, Jim Mack and Tom Drennan, Ogilvie’s henchmen, I wheedled a meeting with Ogilvie in winter 1967 when we both flew together side-by-side in coach class to Washington, he to address a meeting at the Urban Institute and I—well, to do the public’s business for Quaker Oats.

“I think a lot of Rockefeller,” he said in his laconic plain talk. “As a governor, that is. Not as a presidential candidate. He’s too sophisticated; maybe what this country will become but hasn’t yet. His choice, Romney, is the other way. A good governor of Michigan but curiously old-hat. Like the 19th century. It’s the Mormon in him. His billboards when he ran in Michigan read: Fight Crime by Rooting out Moral Rot. Com’on, I’m as moral as the next guy but you’re not running for national Pastor here. Watching him go across the country, as he has, is like watching a duck make love to a football.”

As I sat there nibbling pretzels I tried to imagine Romney making love to a duck but could not.

“They’ll send him on an excursion to Vietnam to become an instant expert but that’s not George the way I know George. I’d rather stick with Dick.”

But all the same, I got his drift. Nixon, he believed, might not win the presidency but he was familiar to Illinoisans at a time when Ogilvie would have to run for governor. Also, with Nixon in the mix, it would keep; the insatiably ambitious Percy from making noises which would be a distraction from the governorship and Dirksen, Percy’s enemy, from making counter-noises. Better to be for Nixon early, get it out of the way, keep Percy’s nose to the grindstone in the Senate, keep Dirksen happy for he would be making what was expected to be one final run for the Senate in 1968. Won’t Rockefeller be angered at Ogilvie’s refusal to go along with Romney?

“Oh he’ll get over it in about a year,” said Ogilvie airily. “Rocky doesn’t hold grudges. Romney doesn’t. The only one who does is Nixon and I don’t want to have him mad at me with his connections.” He meant billionaire eccentric W. Clement Stone who under the old finance laws was giving Nixon millions and who was pledged to give Ogilvie the same.

“What’ll likely happen,” he said as he wolfed down the bad airline breakfast (like me already a rotund figure with a disinterest in exercise, his neck straining against the tight collar of his white shirt) “is this. Rocky will start off saying he’s not interested but supports Romney. Then he’ll send in his most expensive staff—Len Hall to run the campaign, Henry Kissinger to give him foreign policy lessons. It won’t work because especially in foreign affairs, George is all thumbs no matter what Kissinger writes. He sounds like an Old Testament patriarch which is from his Mormonism. But he wants to be liked and he’ll try to mix two sides together. So he’ll get blurred. Then sometime down the road when George starts boring the press or makes a mistake, Rocky will likely come in—very late. Then he’ll pull out. Then he’ll get back in. That’s the nature of the beast.”

Which is exactly what happened down to the “t.” Romney took foreign policy lessons from Kissinger and proved an obtuse student, rather like the comic Jack Benny taking violin lessons from the maestro who despaired of him. Romney took to sending drafts of his foreign policy stuff to Rocky direct and Rocky would end up vying unintentionally with Kissinger. Romney was constitutionally a hawk and Kissinger a dove. Romney would try to blend the two approaches together so that it was mush. He was trying to debut as a fresh, independent voice on Vietnam. It came out a hybrid, neither fish nor fowl. When LBJ first read it, he snapped his fingers and said, “I know what I’ll do! I’ll praise it!” He did which took care of Romney with the Republican base. Romney’s poll numbers went down and Percy called Rocky to try to get him off the Romney horse and for himself. No way. Rocky was solidly for Romney and discouraged anyone else from competing. All the while, Nixon was going around the country, speaking in an informal way and getting press reports that ended up in the back of the papers near the furniture ads.

Percy the supreme courtier, whose daughter Sharon married Jay Rockefeller IV, Nelson’s nephew in summer, 1967, flew to New York and told Rocky, his relative through fortuitous marriage: Can’t you understand? We must get off the Romney horse now! No way, said Rocky. Then the Detroit riots of 1967 started Romney on the upsurge again thanks to his firm handling. Rocky called Percy and said: see? I told you! But Romney’s standings dwindled after that to the point that he was tied with LBJ, who was at a low ebb. If the nation thought the same of Romney as it did LBJ, it was trouble, Percy warned Rocky. Still Rocky held firm.

Experimenting on his own, without Kissinger, but with Travis Cross, his new press secretary who came gratis courtesy of Rocky, Romney started to jiggle around with the rhetoric involving Vietnam. Once he had been a hawk. Now he was not sure we shouldn’t just negotiate and get out. Nobody noticed the slight change in direction until August 31, 1967.

Then in August—the 3lst of 1967—with Romney meeting with Len Hall at his Bloomfield office, Romney’s press guy, Cross (originally a Mark Hatfield staffer whom I very much admired) was delegated to speed Hall to the airport to catch the last available plane. Then Romney went to the Michigan State Fair. One of his grandchildren got lost at the Fair which drove the governor frantic. He directed state troopers to canvass the fairgrounds while he thought he was going to have a stroke. They found the kid riding on a ferris wheel and raced him back to his grandfather.

Romney had one more appearance—a TV taping for a show run by one of his old friends, Lou Gordon, a former Midwest garment manufacturer’s rep, a former legman for Drew Pearson who in his own mind was the foremost Detroit TV interviewer—a man who wanted to become the next Mike Wallace. It was to be the debut of his new show that was to air in Detroit, Boston and Philadelphia. Without the sagacious Travis Cross, Romney…out of breath, slowly recovering from the grandchild incident…was not at his best. Anyhow, he believed (wrongly since Travis Cross was not on hand to correct him) it was not a national show but a local one: no great harm, he believed. Besides it was a terrible show which even Cross should not have approved. Gordon was very much an inflammatory self-publicizing agent rather than journalist. Also on the segment to be aired before his and unbeknownst to him, Gordon interviewed a couple from The Swinger’s Club, a national wife-swapping organization. Then on came the Old Testament prophet…square George Romney.



So Romney shows up and his old buddy Gordon asks him about Vietnam. Romney tries out his new position about us not having to fight communism everywhere and at all points on the globe.

Gordon asks: “Isn’t your position a bit inconsistent with what it was and what do you propose we do now?”

Romney: “Well, you know when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there and they do a thorough job. And since returning from Vietnam, I’ve gone into the history of Vietnam, all the way back to World War II and before. And as a result, I have changed my mind…in that particular. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression.”

Gordon believed the most significant part of the story was Romney’s statement that he would not accept the vice-presidency. The Detroit “New York Times” writer buried the “brainwashing” deep in the text. But the “Times” desk caught the “brainwashing” part and four days after the show was aired, the newspaper came out with a story on page 28 with the headline Romney Asserts He Underwent “Brainwashing” on Vietnam Trip. Gene McCarthy, campaigning for president in New Hampshire came through with the comment of the year, saying “Brainwashing wasn’t needed. For Romney, only a light rinse would do.”

Romney was through. Ogilvie was right. Rocky refused to let Romney of the hook, then after Romney goofed up other things on foreign relations and his poll numbers sank, Rocky came in. Later he withdrew. Finally he came in again. Charles Percy, to the minds of many, the man of the future, had not taken a position on the presidency but no one doubted that he would endorse Rockefeller whose family he had strenuously courted in behalf of his daughter, Sharon and whose lineage seemed to bring security to the once poor Rogers Park native. Many Illinois Republicans wondered if Bob Stuart, my political leader, would follow the inclination of his good friend Percy-- Ogilvie particularly. While Percy dawdled with his endorsement, Ogilvie called me and invited me to his Chicago headquarters.

“I can tell you,” he said, “that I’m not worried so much that Chuck will endorse Rockefeller because the Rockefellers mean more to him than anything else--but if would be bad if Bob Stuart would follow suit. He’s far more influential with the Republican base than is Chuck. Do you have any indication?”

I didn’t but I had urged my boss to come out for Nixon because it was sure his nomination would be inevitable given the disorder in the liberal Republican ranks—from Romney to Rockefeller, then Rockefeller pulling out and then re-entering. But I didn’t know. I knew he read and enjoyed my memos but, after all, he had a distinguished lineage in the Republican party, far more significant than was mine. Then rapidly like two gunshots, Percy came out, as expected, for Rockefeller and Stuart as not-so-expected, for Nixon. When Stuart did, I was given credit but I had no way of knowing what he’d do nor did I make any serious attempt to do any more than write a memo urging the Nixon endorsement. Indeed, I was prepared to support my chief any way he would turn, although I had a sneaking hunch my boss would go for Nixon: loyalty to Percy aside, going for Rockefeller at that late stage would be quixotic.

I am told that Ogilvie took credit with Nixon’s campaign manager John Mitchell for Stuart’s endorsement, trying to make the best of things after Percy toppled for Rocky. And I am told that Ogilvie confided in Mitchell that I was responsible for the decision—which emphatically I was not. According to Jim Mack, Ogilvie’s aide, Ogilvie said, “the Stuart endorsement undercuts Percy’s of Rockefeller in a dramatic way.” I don’t believe that but this is how political mythologies are born. Somehow, as none other than Maurice Stans confided when we were on good terms, my name was written in the Golden Book of Nixonia as being responsible—with consequences coming at a later time, the value of which I have always pondered.

But when Percy came out for Rockefeller and Stuart for Nixon, the cards were still face down. However, without saying anything of significance on Vietnam, Richard Nixon emerged as the prime opponent of LBJ and was nominated at Miami Beach. I looked at Percy toasting Nixon’s victory at the convention and wondered what strange confluence had encouraged him to back the decidedly wrong horse: all worth it because the House of Rockefeller had been joined inseparably with the House of Percy. I wondered why it meant that much to Percy who was a multi-millionaire of his own. But as Georgia Dearborn, a wise old Percy aide confided not long later, “it means more than you or I could possibly understand.”

In between time, with the Democratic convention being held in Chicago in 1968, I got a delegate’s badge and happily bar-hopped from suite to suite at the then Conrad Hilton. I had an almost bi-polar time I had slipping between the various Minnesota factions—the one behind Hubert Humphrey where some of my Democratic friends were…and the one behind Eugene McCarthy where most of my St. John’s fellow graduates were. Sipping iced tea (believe it or not) in a small room adjoining Vice President Humphrey’s suite with my old friend-nemesis Jerry Schaller (the old Democratic publicist who vied with me years earlier when I had the same role with the Republicans), I was startled out of my wits to have someone tickle my ribs in a brusque fashion; wheeling around, I saw the jolly, ruddy face of Himself, Sir Hubert, whom I really hadn’t seen since the days of Wanda the Weather Bunny. “Roeser,” he said, “I count myself very lucky that you turned me down when I wanted to hire you. Right now you’d be cavorting with your old buddy Gene”—meaning McCarthy. No, I said, had I agreed to join you, you would now be president.

We doubled with laughter. Later I slipped out and went to the McCarthy suite just in time to follow him over to the unruly group in Grant Park across the street and hear his famed, “so this is the government in exile” speech. On the way back from that talk, with the cameras following him he made the observation, sadly, that being successful in politics is not unlike being a successful football coach. He paused while I thought that one over.

Then he gave the punch-line. “You have to be smart enough to call the right plays but dumb enough to think it really matters.”

Nihilism was always in the foreground with him, the one trait that turned off so many of his followers with the thought that he really didn’t give a damn.

Suffice-it to say that once Humphrey won the nomination and rallied most of the dissenting forces to his side in the general campaign, the inevitability of election which had assisted Richard Nixon all the way began to melt like a snow-cone in July. His once impressive lead had diminished to a vanishing point. As Humphrey labored to heal his party, Nixon’s ratings in the polls was stuck at the 40% mark. Humphrey began to gain, chipping away at George Wallace’s disaffected blue-collar workers in the big industrial states.

On election night, as I watched at Nixon’s Illinois headquarters, the first returns gave Nixon an early lead but not an insuperable one. The third-party threat by Wallace failed in the Border States and justified Nixon’s strategy of appealing to the periphery—appealing to those states while holding the ones he had carried in 1960. He carried Kentucky,Tennessee, Oklahoma, rolled up big leads in Indiana and Kansas. Wallace took Alabama and Mississippi as expected—later Louisiana, Georgia and Arkansas. Humphrey took the District of Columbia, Connecticut, West Virginia. All eyes then looked to New York.

New York went for Humphrey handsomely—480,000 votes. While Pennsylvania was supposed to be up for grabs, it toppled for Humphrey. But the margins were terribly narrow. That meant it was going to be an all-nighter.

By dawn it was clear Humphrey couldn’t win a pronounced victory but the election could be deadlocked if he could take two of three states—Ohio, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas and California. California had to go for Humphrey to deadlock it. With New Jersey squeaking for Nixon (thanks to Wallace who siphoned off 250,000 votes), Ohio teetered, tottered and fell into Nixon’s column. Then California fell to Nixon by a margin of only 1%, due to a Wallace vote of 7% in Democratic precincts. But Texas went for Humphrey narrowly. Then everybody looked at Illinois.

What put him over the top that November night was Illinois’ 26 electoral votes—votes delivered by a combination of forces: Dick Ogilvie’s foot soldiers intent on winning the governorship, Clem Stone’s mega-millions given in formal ways and covert ways to the benefit of the Republicans in the state, Joe Woods’ campaign for Cook county sheriff again floated by Stone’s many millions: in short the thundering Ogilvie machine that Charlie Barr had warned against and which Billy the Kid had dismissed as inconsequential to governance. But even so, with all that work and money spent in Illinois, with more than 92% of the total popular vote counted, Nixon’s plurality was fewer than 250,000 votes out of 68 million cast, slightly larger than John Kennedy’s 119,000 out of 69 million which also depended on Illinois, marshaled by Richard J. Daley.

Personal Asides: What I Like About Romney…Trivia Answer: It’s Joseph Smith…Terry’s Next Trivia Question…Ann Coulter Gets Rapped but Guess Who Doesn’t?

Romney.

Mitt Romney came into the Chicago Club reception room at 7 a.m. Wednesday, smiling but with an inner-steel reserve fitting for an incipient president. I liked him immediately. He’s every inch a take-charge executive. When we sat down around the table, I pulled a piece of paper out of my jacket. He tried to take it from me saying, “that’s for me, is it?” I said: no, it’s my introduction of you. But I liked his brisk way.

So after I introduced him, he fielded a few questions and then a woman sitting to his left and a third of the way down the table, asked him a technical question about an issue in which he has staked out principal interest. Because she was obviously better filled-in than we and he was better-filled in than we, we watched the exchange. It went like this in paraphrase:

She: But why didn’t you do thisandthat?

He: I didn’t because it would have had no effect.

She: Yes, if you had done thisandthat.

He: I’m telling you, it would have had no effect.

She: If you had done thisandthat it would have signaled a great deal and could possibly have had an effect.

He: I researched it; my legal staff researched it. I personally read every paragraph and semicolon and comma of the draft and I’m telling you it would have had no effect.

She: If you had done thisandthat it would have had an effect.

He: [voice rising]. I just said and I say again, I researched it, had the best legal minds I could find look at it and they agreed unanimously it would not have had any effect.

She: But it would if you had done thisandthat.

He [voice at same tone]: Are you a lawyer?

She: No.

He: [voice still at same tone]. I am! I’m a graduate of Harvard Law and I tell you once more it would have had no effect.

She: It would have if you had done thisandthat.

He: [voice still at same tone but now showing more exasperation]. I see there’s nothing I can do to assuage you. Let me say it again, it would not have had any effect. Now, I can put you in touch with my lawyer and lawyers who would verify what I have just said. Would that be sufficient?

She: It would have had an effect if you had done thisandthat.

He: [decided exasperation]. Next question!

Not only was Romney’s temper slowly rising so was the temper of many others in the room because of the lady’s persistence which many may have taken as heckling. But on reflection, as one listener, I am grateful to the interrogator for her persistence which enabled us to see that an incipient president of the United States can get mightily fed up. So often these sessions are cut and dried. Thanks to her, it was not.

The next thought I had was: was he wrong in showing exasperation? Do you automatically lose when you show exasperation after heckling…especially from a woman? My view after turning it over in my mind several times…is no. To cave and play patty-cake would not have been appropriate. Romney didn’t lose it. He served notice that he’s not a wimp. On balance, Romney behaved very well. And if the lady were Hillary Clinton, I would feel he was justified in holding his ground and had not lost it. Did he make a venial sin by referring to his Harvard Law education? At first I thought he had. Now on reflection I think the reference was needed because of the legal nature of the question which would warrant his giving his credentials for making the decision that was criticized.

Anyhow I hope she goes to the next session with a presidential candidate if there is to be one…because she enabled him to show a firmness I admired.

Which shows you how different the candidates really are. McCain is supposed to have the temper but showed very little of it at the meeting I attended. Romney was supposed to be a smooth article, unruffled but clearly wasn’t. I liked his exasperation right from the get-go.

Joseph Smith.

The answer to Terry Przybylski’s trivia question as to who was the first Mormon presidential candidate: Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion. He announced his candidacy for president in 1844—shortly before he was killed at Carthage, Illinois at age 39. George Romney, Mitt’s father, was the next, in 1968. Smith’s announcement for the presidency stirred a huge resentment that helped take his life. After raiding a newspaper in Carthage which was preparing to publish a diatribe on the church’s views on polygamy, Smith was arrested and held in the village jail. An angry crowd stormed the jail and killed Smith while he was supposedly under arrest. The Mormon church split for a time, then re-formed under the leadership of Brigham Young who led the group to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The first—and only—one to get the answer right was Joe Morris who sent it to me by email. Almost all the others picked George Romney.

Terry’s Next Trivias.

This time I’ll use two from the fertile imagination and perspicacious intellect of Terry Przybylski, former journalist, political history expert and Spiritual Son. First: Many know that John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president at 43 in 1960. Second: Many know that Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest man ever to become president through the assassination of William McKinley in 1901—at 42. Now who was the youngest Republican nominee for president?

Republicans recently announced that they will hold their 2008 national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. Ironically, Minnesota has now gone longer than any other state without carrying for a Republican for president. Who was the last Republican to carry Minnesota for president?

Remember: no search engines.

Ann Coulter.

Ann Coulter has been rapped…I say deservedly so…for saying almost as an afterthought in her speech to CPAC that John Edwards is a faggot. But the other day Bill Maher said that if Dick Cheney were killed, the lives of a great number of American soldiers would be saved. Not a single criticism did I hear. Also the other day Michael Medved interviewed the producer and director of the film “The Assassination of George W. Bush” which features mis-applied films of eulogy by Dick Cheney snipped from the Reagan funeral and cunningly applied to the supposed event. Did anyone hear a criticism of this film aside from Medved’s?

Flashback: The Guilt-Free Paymaster Mother of Cook County—or What I Did to Enable Her to Beat Boredom.

[Memoirs from fifty years plus for my kids and grandchildren].

After Father was laid to rest at All Saints cemetery near DesPlaines, Illinois, following the funeral Mass at St. Juliana offered by one of his close friends, Rev. John Ireland Gallery, the retired pastor of St. Cecilia’s parish, Lillian and I—with all our kids—took a vacation trip with Mother to Colorado. It was by automobile and I’ll never forget passing through the state of Nebraska that stank of pigs…which has colored my memory of that state ever since. We were to Vail which was lovely in the summer (none of us skied anyhow). We stayed at the unoccupied home of Bob Stuart, the chairman of Quaker who graciously turned his luxurious condo over to us--and one of the thrills for the kids was riding the ski lifts. Vail is missing a bet by not promoting itself as a summer resort. It was probably one of the most beautiful vacations we ever had. The trip turned Mother into fine spirits after having gone through the ordeal of Father’s month-long hospitalization followed by his death and burial.

When we returned to Park Ridge, every evening after dinner I would drop by the Edison Park house to see Mother and chat. Not too many weeks into the Fall of 1966, she confessed to me that she was quite desperate for something to do. Father had left her very comfortably off—not wealthy but with a mortgage-free home, bank account, car and sizeable nest egg for anything she wanted to do. Did she want to travel? No, she had done a lot of foreign travel when she worked with Father.

She was a 70-year-old woman with a heart condition (she had had a heart attack a few years earlier) but she was intellectually vigorous and not exactly ready for senior citizens’ bus excursions to the Museum of Science & Industry or Brookfield Zoo. She had been a co-partner with Father in his travel office, arranging European trips for clients; beyond that, she had been working since she was sixteen (born in 1896, she got her first clerical job in 1912 and shortly after that had gone to work at J. Walter Thompson, rising through the chairs to become head of its production department by the time she left to marry in 1923). Then she worked for a time immediately following the 2nd World War and while I was at college, as a production manager at Sun Electric, a manufacturer of automotive testing devices; following which she went to work in the travel business as Father’s partner. They went to Europe with tours a number of times in the 1950s and `60s. She was far too vigorous a person to stay home, eat bon-bons and read movie magazines. But she was also seventy years old. What to do?

Everybody at J. Walter Thompson was either gone or transferred out—and the advertising agency business like it is today frowns on elderly workers. Ted Jardin, the mailroom boy who had become senior vice president, had moved to a top position in New York and understandably, since they had evidently meant a great deal to each other before she married Father, she didn’t want to ask him for a job. The restiveness went on for several months. Every evening I saw her, I noticed she was growing more apprehensive about not having anything to do. Then she began to feel ill. Conley told me it was inactivity. She was not one to go to movies or chat with friends. What to do? She frowned on volunteer work. When you’re a veteran of two World Wars and a Depression, the habit is ingrained in an hour’s work for an hour’s pay. Otherwise being a volunteer lady in, let us say, a hospital would keep her busy but there was enough feeling for pecuniary reimbursement in Mother to reject that only as a last resort.

Then, in the Fall of 1966, Illinois Republicans solved my problems by electing Richard Ogilvie president of the Cook county board, electing a Republican to Ogilvie’s sheriff’s post and also electing one as Cook county treasurer, part of Ogivlie’s machine buildup which would lead him to the governorship two years hence. So I began to think about the possibility of getting her a Republican patronage job. I couldn’t quite see her in a GOP patronage job for two reasons: (a) constitutionally and viscerally, she was still an Irish Catholic Democrat, Tom Cleary’s daughter, although the last national Democrat she had voted for was John F. Kennedy—and, of course, Mayor Richard J. Daley whom every good Chicagoan supported (including my Father, a conservative Republican). But (b) while she voted Republican for president after Kennedy, and had voted against Roosevelt…for Landon, Willkie and Dewey agreeing with Father…she was not particularly fluent or interested in Republican partisanship which would enable her to get along with GOP precinct workers who would fill patronage posts under Ogilvie. She constantly called Ogilvie “Oglesby” confusing him with the man who was governor at her birth, having pardoned some of the Haymarket rioters whose son was lieutenant governor in 1908 and 1916.



But, it seemed, patronage would be the only solution because there was—and still is—no limitation on age. But there would be a third reason that it might not work. Mother would not be a typical patronage worker as I understood them to be. A typical patronage worker would be one not so much interested in work as the paycheck, taking time off to work the precincts in election season etc. Mother was of the old private sector not political school—dedicated to hard work at whatever post she would occupy. She was definitely not equipped to take time off from government duties to be a Republican precinct captain, had no interest in that work. She didn’t know her own Republican precinct captain and oft-times didn’t bother to vote now that Father was not around.

But by 1966 I was fairly well known in Republican circles and could be counted upon to get a job for my Mother. But then there was sort of an agonizing ego problem for me. People would ask: why can’t this guy take care of his grey-haired, 70-year-old widowed mother rather than insisting she work? Why does he want this aged woman to work every day at a job rather than take life easy? They didn’t know Mother.

And the fact was that this energetic woman was driving me crazy and I feared that, bored as she was, inactivity might well work against her health. She was spending long hours at home, thinking-thinking-thinking: just the very thing she despised and had talked against all her life. So I pulled up my socks and went on the job search for her. There was a whole field of patronage openings in the Cook county treasurer’s office which was run by Edmund Kucharski, the Cook county Republican chairman and county treasurer.

So I talked with a good friend of mine, Brian Whelan, a top aide to Ogilvie. As soon as the inauguration season began, in January, 1967, he got her an interview with a deputy to Kucharski. The next thing I knew she was hired. And the very next thing I knew, she was promoted up to the auspicious post of paymaster of Cook county…responsible for seeing that all the work records and paychecks matched, for computing extra time and that kind of thing for the civil servants and figuring out the employment records for the patronage workers. She had a desk and office, her name on the door. What impressed her very much was that the pay was far more than she had expected. Neither of us had realized that patronage pay was that good. The paycheck gave her reaffirmation into her own worth at age 70. It added years to her life.

She was ecstatic. I checked with Whelan and told him that, frankly, I was surprised that they gave her such a important job, telling him that I hadn’t expected her to get all that glorious a job. He said that the day she was interviewed, the paymaster quit and they put her in the post temporarily while they looked around for something more suitable as a sinecure for a 70-year-old. But, throwing herself into the work of reassembling chaotic records, she would work well into the evening and had such a clear view of the administrative end by the end of the week that the county treasurer himself, not knowing her, didn’t want her to leave. Beyond that, she got to be buddies with his woman administrative assistant and they huddled at lunch deliberating on how to make the office more efficient. Kucharski was thrilled. It stunned me because I had not been on particularly close terms with Kucharski. I checked around and found that she was regularly being invited to senior staff meetings as a note-taker, production manager and expediter—similar to the work she did at J. Walter Thompson. I was delighted when she told me she was overjoyed and hugely grateful to me for helping her find this important post.

All went well for several months until I got a call from a high treasury official at the county who hemmed and hawed a bit before he could get to the point. As a matter of fact he didn’t get to the point on the phone. I said I’d go over there to see him and on the way I imagined that somehow my aged mother was turning people off in one way or another. Maybe she was failing (although I hadn’t noticed it). Maybe she was touting her old Democratic faith. Maybe the payroll records were getting goofed up and he was going to shunt her off to a lesser job.

When I sat down with him over coffee, I had the damndest time getting him to tell me what was the matter with Mother.

“She’s phenomenal,” he exulted. “Shows up earlier than anyone else except the Treasurer himself. Stays out of office politics; is a peacemaker; is diligent; is popular in getting along with the patronage workers like herself and also the civil service employees—also the Democratic holdovers who can be a real pain in the butt if they start working against this administration. She’s a mainstay on the office bowling team. They have a social club where they go out for dinner once every two weeks and she’s the life of the party so to speak.”

Well, com’on, I said, why am I here? What do you want to tell me?

“Well, I don’t know how to say it delicately.”

Well, then, damn it, don’t say it delicately. Tell me what’s on your mind.

“Well, as you know your Mother is one of the highest paid people here—because she’s gotten a number of merit raises. If she were to quit, we’d be in a bind.”

I command you, I beseech you to tell me!

“All of us are mystified that she has not contributed so much as a dime to the Treasurer’s campaign fund when he has a dinner. Everyone else does. These are $100 a plate things. Everybody else does it willingly. We don’t put the arm on anybody but she always returns the letters of solicitation with a neatly penned note that reads `no thank you.’ What bothers us is that people who earn less than she do. And no one, including the Treasurer, has the guts to ask her. You know, with what she’s getting, a $100 isn’t all that much once a year. And since she doesn’t kick in, people are getting the idea that they don’t have to—although she hasn’t said that to them. In short, Frances is perfect except that she won’t give a bloody dime to the Treasurer who hired her.”

Okay, I said. I get it. I neglected, evidently, to tell her about her political obligations. Don’t worry about it. She’ll be a team-player.

“Well, I feel awful about bringing it up--.”

Don’t. I’ve been around the track in state governments in two states. I’ll take care of it.

That evening after dinner, I dropped by her house.

I said: Mother, how’s the job going at the Treasurer’s office?

She said, “Wonderful. I can’t thank you enough. I’ve gotten two promotions since I’ve been there and am earning more than I even did with your Father. Can’t thank you enough. You want some cookies?”

Yes. Thank you. Mother, you understand you have a patronage job—that you are not only working at a relatively high job in county government, but that you have an obligation to the Treasurer to see that he stays in office…because were he to lose, you’d lose your job when a Democratic state treasurer gets in. You understand that?

“Absolutely. And I intend to vote for Mr. Kucharski and get my friends to vote for him. He’s a good, decent conservative man.”

Good. And you realize that in order to get reelected he has to campaign for the job—which means put commercials on television and radio, have brochure mailings go out to many thousands of households.

“What does that have to do with me?”

A lot, my dear. He has to pay the bills for campaigning. Campaigning costs a lot of money.

“Are you hinting that I am going to be moved to his campaign office?”

Not at all. They like you where you are. But I mean to say just this. You have your job in government but you also should feel that you have a stake in his reelection. That is why many people like you contribute to his reelection.

“Oh. I’m relieved I won’t be moving to the campaign office. And as for contributing to his campaign, well, of course, I cannot do that.”

Will you tell me why not?

“Because where I come from I have an obligation to work as hard as I can every day but not bribe anybody for my job. Years ago the Democrats wanted me to do it and I turned them down. If I can’t do the job, the Republicans can fire me and get someone else.”

Mother, it’s not a bribe; it’s a voluntary payment you make in good faith—in loyalty to the person who gave you the job so he will have the wherewithal to get reelected to keep you in that job.

She sniffed. “Sounds like a bribe to keep me working. Do you mean they will let me go if I don’t pay them to keep me working?”

Not in the slightest.

She said, “well, that’s good. For a while there I thought you were going to ask me to contribute from my salary to his campaign.”

I dropped the issue. And as I ate the cookies, I pondered this very long. It was an axiom of World War I, the Depression era, World War II that a hard worker be rewarded by ample pay and that there is no payoff on the side. She didn’t understand that there is an obligation beyond this to contribute modestly to an elected official. Certainly, she had never understood patronage and was not about to understand it now. Also, if I forced her to recognize the need to contribute she would not feel the same way about the job—that she had won recognition because of her ability. So I let it go.

Before leaving, I said:

Oh, by the way, a Kucharski fund-raiser is being held next Saturday and it just so happens I can get a free ticket for you. If I give it to you will you go?

“Oh,” she said. “I’d be delighted! I was hoping somebody would give me a free ticket at the office but they’re using the tickets they buy themselves.”

Hmmm. Was she purposely obtuse or hugely innocent? I never knew.

So for the balance of her service at the Cook county Treasurer’s paymaster, she went to Kucharski’s dinners on tickets others paid for. First paid by me…and then when I got more familiar with my own job, I discovered that my boss, Bob Stuart, regularly shelled out for dinner tickets which were distributed gratis to any employee who wished to go. So I got on the list, collected the tickets to Kucharski dinners to which no employee wanted to go--and gave them to Mother. Who enthusiastically went.



She had utterly no guilt-qualms about not contributing to the Republicans. Old people, I am told, have their mysterious ways. Now that I am more than two years older than she was when she died, I am told by young peers that on some things I am as still don’t fully understand her unwillingness to do this. But then I didn’t work during the Depression. I wasn’t reared as a visceral Democrat. I was reared in the era of the work ethic but not nearly as rigorously as were she and Father. I pondered as I drove home: was she slipping intellectually so she didn’t understand it? I decided she was not since she was so valuable to them in her responsible post. At age seventy was she—what was the term?—idiosyncratic?

Perhaps. And for the past few years, when on occasion I say something or write something that seems startling to some, occasionally people to look at me queerly I have the feeling that they are attributing to me the same suspicion I had of Mother: saying, “well, he’s 78 and, sure, he’s idiosyncratic but at his advanced age who isn’t? Maybe we will be if we get there as well. Humor the old guy, gently change the subject and maybe with luck he’ll forget all about it.”

But on reflection, I suspect she was not being idiosyncratic at all but canny, born of a lot of experiences in the ways of the world. She trotted out to all the Kucharski dinners, table-hopped and would sip an obligatory martini with her co-workers when her immediate boss treated, enjoying the dinners on “comp” tickets I collected, had a wonderful time, improved her reputation as a working Republican. And not a word to her friends about her tickets being “comp.” They thought she paid. The higher ups understood but since she was getting the tickets from Quaker, they shut up about it. Her quiet discretion made me think: Canny of her.

But also canny of me to scrounge the “comp” tickets and give them to her. In that way, she led me to make a fine art out of scavengering “comp” tickets to give to her. As time went on, in addition to buying my own, I’d hustle for her Ogilvie tickets, Bill Scott tickets, Dirksen tickets (which she loved because she enjoyed his mellifluous language), Percy tickets (which she disdained because, she said, “he’s sort of snooty”) and even Nixon tickets about which she was ambivalent (saying to me once “he looks like he has bad breath”—a brilliant observation). Hustling free ones for her was fun although I had to kick in myself often to Kucharski in order to get her to attend and have fun at his fund-raisers. My tongue is still sore from when I bit it on hearing people say, “your Mom is such a great Republican—attending all those fund-raisers! Is that where you got it?”

Usually parents are responsible for creating lasting guilt in their progeny that is transmitted to the next two generations at least. I have always felt bad when someone I wanted to win, lost—even if I had contributed, thinking guiltily I should have given more.

But that’s my own hang-up. It’s a guilt neurosis I got on my own. Not from Mother.

Personal Asides: It’s Peraica and Stewart Sunday, March 11; Liz Gorman, Cook GOP Chairman and Brad Cole, Carbondale Mayor Sunday, March 18…Tommy Thompson to Speak at Civic Federation-March 15…A Trivia Test from Terry Przybylski…A New Spiritual Daughter.

Peraica & Stewart; Gorman & Cole.

This coming Sunday, March 11, “Political Shootout” will feature Tony Peraica, Cook county commissioner and 2007 GOP nominee for board president and top-notch expert on Chicago and Cook county politics, Russ Stewart, political analyst for the Nadig newspapers. Stewart chalked up a very good record of predictions before the aldermanic and will give his insights on how the runoffs will go. Peraica will be his usual feisty self, criticizing in absentia the new Cook county GOP chairman, Liz Gorman. The following Sunday, March 18, Liz Gorman will be her own fighting self by presumably criticizing Tony in absentia. Tune in on both episodes as you won’t know whom to root for without a scorecard. With Gorman will be Brad Cole, the mayor of Carbondale who is facing a challenge from Sheila Simon, the daughter of Paul Simon who is being positioned by Illinois liberaldom to carry the Simon dynasty forward. I am seeking to get Sheila on a future show. That’s on WLS-AM (890) Sundays at 8 p.m.

Tommy Thompson.

Former Wisconsin governor and HHS secretary Tommy Thompson who is also a dark horse candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, will speak on “Medicaid and State Budgets” on Thursday, March 15 from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (lunch included) at a half-day session co-sponsored by the Civic Federation of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank here. The meeting will be held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 230 South LaSalle. It will feature a good many experts on the Medicaid issue including Matt Powers, an executive with Health Management Associates. The session will answer all kinds of complex questions on Medicaid and will have great relevance to the Illinois budget as well as the budgets of other states. Panelists will include Barry S. Maram of the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services; Eugene Gessow of the Iowa Department of Family Services, Jeanne LaBrecque of the Indiana Family Services Administration and Robin Rudowitz of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

The tab includes $60 for the half-day which includes lunch. No charge for members of the Civic Federation. Here’s the link to the program: http://www.civicfed.org/events/070315 RegistrationForm.pdf You can email them at civicfed@civicfed.org or phone Taka Okubo at (312) 201-9068; other email can go to tokubo@civicfed.org or fax them at (312) 201-9041.

Trivia Test.

Here’s a trivia brain-teaser from one of my spiritual sons, Terry Przybylski:

Mitt Romney, one of the top three contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, is a member of the Mormon church. Who was the first Mormon ever to run for president?

No search engines, now.

Spiritual Daughter.

She is a well-known Chicagoan, brilliant talk-show host and thoughtful analyst who has a wide following for her judiciously-expressed views on public policy…someone I’ve known for many years—Deborah Rowe, the charming, erudite and skillful elicitor of opinions who has been on WLS-AM and other stations for many years. Her opinions are too well-reasoned to be filed away or dismissed just as conservative: in reality they span the philosophies and center on common sense. Welcome her to this select fold as one of the very best resources you can find in the Chicago area!