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Blogs for May 2007
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5/31/2007
Personal Asides: Frank Nofsinger Wins “Nature Boy” Trivia and “Reality” Confirms It…Who Will Fred Thompson Hurt Most in the GOP Lineup—or Will He be a Dud?...Bush’s Legacy Can be Further Enhanced by…Guess.
Frank Nofsinger.
Steady, dependable Frank Nofsinger of Connecticut wins the “Nature Boy” trivia and a new contributor named “Reality” confirmed it. “Reality” added the name of the composer-lyricist, Eden Ahbez. The song was composed in 1948 by Ahbez whom probably never wrote another thing after that. The hit record was done by Nat (King) Cole. The words Frank supplied were “…a very strange, enchanted boy” who “wandered very far over land and sea”. The profound truth supposedly conveyed in the song was “to love and be loved in return.” Congratulations, Frank! “Reality” didn’t cheat with a search engine since he was very familiar with the 78 rpm record-(as was I).
Fred Thompson.
News that former Senator Fred Thompson will announce for president on July 4, prompts speculation. Is he the wonder boy whom so many conservatives are pining away for? Or will he be a dud? Who will he take votes away from among the list of candidates? My view is that he will not be the Great Answer conservatives are waiting for. I don’t know why. Just don’t think so. I will say he did a great U-Tube on Michael Moore…and if his television stays to that mode like a fireside chat, he will strike sparks. But basically, isn’t his persona…repeated through his many films…too gruff, too southern cracker? Or am I wrong. Reagan as an actor had that warm geniality…a twinkling civility…that made you like him. I tend to link Thompson the actor with Wilfred Brimley, the gruff guy we hired at Quaker to extol oatmeal. To demonstrate I’m not a marketer, I never cared for that old cuss with his walrus mustache but I’m told he sold a lot of product.
Your comments.
Bush’s Legacy.
There are no two ways about it, George W. Bush is going to leave the presidency as one of the most unpopular presidents in history…ranking with John Adams (with the Alien and Sedition acts)…James Madison for plunging the nation into war without preparation and for incompetence in pursuing the War of 1812 which saw the White House and capitol burned by the British…John Tyler who was a man literally without a party when he retired…Herbert Hoover, blamed justly for mishandling the economy which worsened the Depression…Harry Truman, blamed for presiding over an era of corruption but heralded just as unrealistically for supposedly supplying more thrust to the Cold War than he actually did.
When he leaves office, George W. Bush will be remembered initially for either being fooled by incompetent CIA intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction-leading to the attack on Iraq and subsequent failure (after a successful invasion) to understand the complexities of pacification of the country. My own personal view is that Bush acted wisely and courageously in invading Afghanistan and Iraq by employing a defensible preemptive strategy-my guess being that the war was wise from the standpoint of the entire Islamic world, showing that we are not fainthearted-which did much to keep further violence from our shores. As for the occupation, there is no doubt that we misgauged the effort and that mistakes were made. I would have to grudgingly concede that a man I happened to have known earlier in his career, Don Rumsfeld, bears the blame for being niggardly in approving troop buildups.
But all the same, wars are untidy things to run as we learned from the Civil War and also…although a number of us forget…World War II. I well remember the disastrous tumble FDR’s, Ike’s and the whole European command’s popularity took during the period of the Battle of the Bulge which began December 14, 1944 and which, before the Nazis were turned back, took 80,987 American casualties. Until history finally rings down the curtain and proves that Iraq was a mistake, I shall continue to believe that it was a wise exercise of judgment and shocked the Islamic world back on its heels…which must continually happen in this global war we are waging.. The view that America is soft and cannot satisfactorily endure a war is the worst thing we have to face now given the Democrats’ insecurities about the War. I think it’s entirely possible that George W. Bush will be rehabilitated and will be viewed, before his ultimate death, as a courageous and far-sighted president. In essence, I think Bush will deservedly be called another Truman, notwithstanding that Truman’s later fame was hyped by courtesan historians.
However, there is no doubt that Bush will descend into ignominy for a time. There is one thing he can do for his country that will not add immediate luster to his name-but which, since he is a man who has resolved to serve his country heedless of unpopularity, he should do. And that has to do with Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has steadfastly denied that he means to build a nuclear arsenal-but at the same time informs the world what he intends to do with it: an obvious contradiction. He intends to “wipe Israel off the map.” That is no cause to go to employ decisive action-but the likelihood of his dominating the entire Middle East, controlling the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, would not mean using nuclear weapons…just intimidation. Ahmadinejad has not hesitated to speculate about “a world without America.”
I personally believe Bush’s 2002 State of the Union was the most powerful statement delivered by an American president in my lifetime-stronger than any of his predecessors. Recall what he said:
“We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons. “
Where I disagree with Norman Podhoretz whom I greatly admire is not that Bush should refrain from allowing Iran to build a nuclear arsenal…he should not…but where I disagree with Podhoretz is that Bush should not take such a decisive step in order to save Israel. I’m sorry but Robert Taft was right in that the principle aim of the foreign policy of the United States should be to preserve the peace and freedom of the United States…which transcends Israel. I support Israel mightily from many standpoints… but for too long have neo-conservatives like myself equated Israel’s well-being as equal to our own, thus falling into the trap of being accused of pursuing a dual loyalty and dual policy. Bush is no different than a succession of American presidents in that regard. Not a single American soldier should be asked to die for any nation but the United States, no matter how we value Israel. Not Britain, nor for western Europe.
Thus if George Bush were to decide prior to leaving office to take the action that will defrock Iran…vowing not to leave office with Iran in possession of nuclear weapons-on the pretext that the only thing worse than bombing Iran would be to allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb…he would belong to the ages. And as I think I know the measure of this gallant man, I believe he will do the right thing for us and all civilization.
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5/30/2007
Personal Asides: Burt Natarus at Least Had a Better Idea…McCain’s Throttling of Free Speech Challenged…Pop Song Trivia: “Nature Boy.”
Burt.
I miss Burt Natarus already. Since smoking has been illegal in public accommodations in Chicago for a year and a half and the Illinois House has approved a similar ban which the governor has promised to sign, there is rampant insanity in this city that sorely needs Burt’s level-headed, common-sense.
There are certain scenes in stage plays that require smoking. One is the great scene in “Streetcar Named Desire” where Stanley Kowaksi strides in with a can of beer and a glowing cigarette to challenge the phony old-world southern concepts of Blanche DuBois. Natarus had the brains to ask for an exemption for artistic purposes in the play but a City Council committee voted it down 4 to 2. A generation ago A. J. Liebling wrote in “Second City” that Chicago was still a bit like Fond du Lac, Wisconsin-unaware of the need for artistic allowances. Which Alderman Ed Smith ratified when he told the press, “It’s an adversity [sic] to people who come to se those plays and the stagehands.” Well, Alderman, it’s an adversity to see Chicago return to equal the rural confines thanks to dopes like you.
Add to this the fact that Doug Sohn, owner of “Hot Doug’s” my favorite hot dog joint, got whacked with a $250 ticket to serving his customers a haute dog containing foie-gras-and-duck sausage with truffle sauce.
What an adversity!
McCain’s “Free Speech.”
While I don’t think John McCain is going to make the nomination because of his role in the immigration mess, he certainly shouldn’t due to his authorship of McCain-Feingold…which was spawned during one of the Senator’s anti-Bush periods where he wanted to punish the president for trouncing him in 2000. Still being considered by the Supreme Court is “The Federal Election Commission vs. Wisconsin Right-to-Life” where even aborton rights supporters are pulling for Wisconsin RTL to win.
That’s because a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Wisconsin could end the “blackout” where advocacy groups are forbidden to run issue ads. Of course President Bush should be equally condemned for signing the measure-hoping the Court would rule it unconstitutional. Restricting grass roots lobbying will silence core political speech that is mandatory for the proper functioning of our government…as the rise of 527s which are being utilized 23 months in advance of the next presidential election demonstrates.
 “Nature Boy.”
Twenty years before the hippie generation…in 1948…a singer with long hair and a beard vaguely reminiscent of Renaissance portraits of Christ…produced a song “Nature Boy.” With no search engines, see if you can answer these questions about this top-rated song.
1. Who was the composer?
2. Who recorded it-which became a hit?
3. Give us the first line beginning: “There was a boy…a very ____ _____ boy.”
4. “They say he wandered very far ____ _______ and ______.”
5. “And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings, this he said to me.”
6. What did he say? It starts: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is…”
A perfect score without search engines gets you a free cup of coffee from me at the “Windy City.”
| | | Flashback: Newman College Comes to an End: Finale of the Great Experiment. [More than 50 years of politics, a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].
After a number of years in which Newman educated two and one-half of our children (Michael attended the school through half his matriculation), the great experiment came to an end. And in an unusual way. While we feared that the eccentric Milwaukee philanthropist Harry John, sole proprietor of the world’s largest Catholic charity, would be alienated by the departure of the college president, the erratic mega-multi-millionaire was having his own domestic problems. First, a description of him and his lifestyle needs to be told.
Harry G. John, Jr. was born in 1919 in Milwaukee. His mother Elise was one of two daughters of brewery founder Frederick Miller. John graduated from Notre Dame with a B. A. in 1941 and was president of Miller Brewery from 1946 to 1947. He was not the ideal executive…was consumed with missionary Catholic spirit almost to excess… and the family replaced him in the corporation shortly. But he kept control of the family fortune. He married Erica Nowotny in 1956 and the couple had nine children.
He lived a life of good works, funding leprosaria in India and camps in Milwaukee for inner city youth as well as seminaries in the Philippines. All these donations were given anonymously. When Miller Brewing was sold to Philip Morris the value of his stock soared to $97 million. He founded the De Rance foundation making it the largest Catholi charity. De Rance was named after Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rance, a 17th century abbot of the Benedictine monastery at La Trappe, France.
Determining to live as a monk, he became religious ascetic, with a religious brother to prepare the food on his estate. A huge chapel had been constructed there for the celebration of daily Mass. After Mass a kind of communal gathering was held for brunch-and lunch centered on vegetables, no meat. He was an exceedingly reclusive and withdrawn individual. His wife and children were allowed to appear for brunch after Mass only sparingly. The trick for eager recipients was to get invited to brunch.
I remember I made several visits to his estate in behalf of a right-to-life organization I headed for some years-“Friends for Life.” The ritual could easily be turned into a hilarious comic novel by Evelyn Waugh. There was scant possibility of talking to him as he was in the chapel saying his prayers. Letters sent to him went generally unanswered. The one shot you had to communicate with him was at Mass at the point in the Sacrifice of General Intercessions. At that point the priest can choose to invite the worshipers to express aloud their request for God’s help. I remember attending several times and at the Intercessions expressing loud enough that the old man could hear it…as he stood with his head bowed…the need for financial help for this particular charity.
The game was that if you made an impression at General Intercessions with your loudly expressed verbal prayer so that Harry John (if not God Almighty) would hear it, you might be invited by a functionary to attend the brunch in company with others. At the brunch you maneuvered delicately to try to get a seat near the Font of all Generosity. I recall thinking that I had almost nabbed a seat next to His Honor only to have it snatched away with a superb football player’s block by a nun who also gave me the elbow which reeled me off balance. As it turned out, she was Mother Angelica, the soon-to-be-world-famous entrepreneur of the cable network “Eternal Word” which made her a household figure in Catholic circles…she building the network, stemming from initial Harry John grants to one of the most powerful religious stations in the country.
As result of this role playing, the financial needs of “Friends for Life” were communicated to the Oracle. He said little, munched his fruit and vegetables…murmured inaudibilities and smiled. One day in Chicago we received an envelope from which, when ripped open, produced a scrawled check for $130,000. Why $130,000? Who knew? With no letter or other visible communication, the next question was: was this a one-time grant or the beginning of more…or how do we plan? Harry John’s responses at lunch were always enigmatic i.e. “God will tell.” We were always grateful for the money but the uncertainty made life a little tense.
While Newman had a far better advocate than I for funds, the college president, I was elevated to the chairmanship of the Newman Board in the dire expectation that as it must to all men, the college president who had the only touch to Harry John might get hit by a bus and the college put out of business. But I was in no danger of rivaling him for the largesse. The college president was by all odds the most successful player at Harry John’s table ever, probably only topped by Mother Angelica. The president had in rapid succession led John to (a) buy the grounds and buildings of an old chiropractic college in suburban St. Louis, (b) build a chapel there, (c) give lavish seed money to hire a faculty and (d) equip a library. The amazing thing about him was that at table the college president spoke tartly, chidingly-even insolently-to Harry John while everybody winced. The old man seemed to enjoy the cajoling.
Thus when I removed the college president was removed for alleged misbehavior, all of us groaned and decided the money tree had withered. This was to be true-but not right away and had nothing to do with the college president’s removal. We hired another president and continued-all the while being despised by the Catholic archdiocese of St. Louis, the Jesuit St. Louis University and a number of other Catholic institutions. I could never for the life of me understand why-but I put it down to two main reasons. First, we were conservative…not reactionary…totally in conformity with Vatican II and the Pope…but which in the 1970s with church liberals inhaling the bogus fumes from the so-called “spirit of Vatican II” made us suspect. We stressed Aquinas and Augustine and not the newer theologians which disturbed the moderns as old hat. Second, we had the Harry John money tree which, I suspect, caused Archbishop John May to be very envious and decide that we were not to be recognized formally or informally as having any connection to the archdiocese.
Eventually…after the graduation of our daughter Mary…news came that there was-of all unpredicted things-a revolution in Harry John’s family. And it had nothing to do with us or my firing the president. It happened that Erica John, his wife and Donald Gallagher, his top aide-and both De Rance directors-had become alarmed at Harry John’s increasingly extravagant expenditure of De Rance assets. A great deal was given away on the merest speculation. One movie producer came to him…shouting at General Intercessions his wish that God would enable him to film the life of Christ…was invited to brunch and walked away with a huge bundle-from which he filmed the life of Christ as a dedicated Communist revolutionary.
There was the case when John commissioned a treasure hunt for sunken ships plus risky investments in gold futures and junk bonds. Mrs. John and
Gallagher filed a lawsuit in Milwaukee county circuit court to have John removed as a De Rance director. After a five month trial, the judge announced the plaintiffs had proven their allegations. John was permanently removed from the board. He divorced Erica (separation and divorce is acceptable in the Church if there is no remarriage) and moved to California. He returned to the Milwaukee area and took an apartment in Brookfield a few years later.
That was the end of our money tree. With the hot enmity of the archdiocese, we had little or no chance of raising alternate funds. But two of our kids graduated from Newman (we sent our son Michael to Ignatius Institute run by the famous Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio who had the same concept as our elderly Jesuit at Newman, Ignatius being an approximate copy of Newman, part of the University of San Francisco). Harry John, incidentally, was found unconscious on the floor of his apartment. He had suffered a massive stroke. The serious illness had him in a coma but his wife and children were at his side when he died on December 19, 1992.
There is a kind of fatal significance to the rise and fall of Newman College. After he was received into the Catholic Church but was regarded as an apostate of the Anglican church (where he had been the leading intellectual light), John Henry Newman (1802-1890) was asked by the Irish Catholic bishops in 1854 to become rector of a dream university that they created-the Catholic University of Ireland. That university was to be on a much larger scale but identical to the concept our venerable Jesuit priest had envisioned for Newman. For one reason or another…mainly distrust from the Roman curia which felt Newman was a double agent…the Catholic University of Ireland failed and went out of existence.
Thus it is highly ironic that the greatest Catholic intellectual and teacher of the 19th century…whose matchless “Idea of a University” essay paved the way for liberal education…who was suspected by one Pope (Pius IX) but loved by his successor (Leo XIII) who made him Cardinal…was unable either to continue at Oxford or to serve as Rector of his own university…and that fatal conclusion carried through to our own very modest wish to build a college in his name.
But Newman College was well worth the experience.
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5/29/2007
Flashback: An Idea is Born: Creation of a New Catholic College.  | | Newman |
[Fifty plus years of politics remembered for my kids and grandchildren].
If your major spiritual wants have been answered already by Almighty God, pray that you be spared the job of serving as mediator between an angry Jesuit priest-classicist and the president of a small college. Such grey hair as I have began when I filled that role of referee.
In the latter sixties an idea was born in the fertile mind of a Jesuit classicist at Loyola University and one of the most outstanding experts on ancient and medieval thought and architecture. Dissatisfied as many of us were with the dumbing down of liberal arts curricula, he sought to get funds for a brilliant experiment: the creation of a new Catholic college which would have absolutely no electives. Regular colleges were substituting technical electives in place of devoting four years to the classics in order to placate those to whom higher education was seen as a conduit to jobs with higher pay and prestige. To the Jesuit, times had changed so that graduate study should be undertaken by everyone. First, he reasoned, should come four years of solid academics and liberal arts education. Then, following that, graduate school should be the place where the professions are learned-law, business, whatever you want. The Jesuit, an academic idealist, believed (a) no one should pursue a technical education without a background in the liberal arts and (b) in undergraduate years, there should be absolutely no electives.
His thinking was very much along the order of Mortimer Adler whom I knew late in his life and Robert Hutchins who reformed the University of Chicago…both of whom inventing the Great Books as a course of study. The Jesuit improved their concept noticeably. He designed a curricula that devoted the first year…the freshman year…to the ancients: ancient philosophy of the Greeks, the study of ancient art, ancient literature with the plays of Euripides and others, ancient history, ancient polity and even the ancient religions that had an impact on the formation ultimately of Catholicism and all Christianity. The second year would do the same with the medieval age…philosophy, art, literature, history, variations that change brought to Catholicism. The third year would deal with the renaissance with all its glories. The final year would delve into modern thought with an emphasis on selecting the right standards for art, polity, philosophy et al. culminating with a great understanding of Catholicism stemming from all four years.
After that the students could…nay should…go to graduate school. He recruited another Ph.D as potential college president--who had a great touch with one Harry John, an eccentric mega-multi-millionaire who was heir to the Miller brewing fortune in Milwaukee.
The idea intrigued Lillian and me and we decided to send our kids to the college which was located in St. Louis and named after an idol of ours, John Henry Cardinal Newman, the former Oxford don who as an Anglican clergyman led the famed Oxford Movement to purify the Anglican religion and make it more authentic to the original formation of Christianity. Newman, one of the most prescient intellectuals of the 19th century, underwent a conversion to Catholicism and was ordained a priest-- for which he was persecuted direly in Britain. He lost great stature as the ranking intellectual-clergyman of his time and was in the center of a storm that shook Britain’s identity with Anglicanism.
Newman was in many ways a martyr for his faith. Not that he was led to the lions but he lost everything-reputation, the love of his fellow dons at Oxford, the followers he had in Anglicanism. Moreover as a Catholic, he sought to create a new Catholic university in Dublin based on the same verities that the Jesuit had imparted to our college that was named after him. Unfortunately, the university in Dublin failed due to irreconcilable differences over Newman’s controversial nature. But his fame as an educator, essayist, homilist and intellectual who suffered for the Church was such that in his old age he was elevated by the Pope from priest to Cardinal. For at least two generations he has been considered for sainthood in Rome. That it hasn’t happened is seen to be caused by the archaic ineffectual relations between the Church of Rome and Anglicanism. But John Henry Newman does not depend upon humans to vouchsafe his sanctity; and his canonization will come some day.
The first year I sent our oldest child, Tom, to Newman College. It worked out and the next year we sent his sister, Mary Catherine. Then we sent our third, Michael to the school. Eventually, I was tapped for the board-which I didn’t particularly need given that I was chairman of Project LEAP, the anti-vote fraud unit in Chicago, president of the City Club of Chicago and working a pretty heavy schedule as vice president-government relations for Quaker Oats. But since the funding was precarious due to the idiosyncratic nature of the prime philanthropist…and since I had had some meager experience with him enabling him to fund the “Friends for Life” organization in Chicago…it was recommended that I take the board seat. There were a number of convivial people on the board. One was a distinguished federal judge from Chicago with a gift of words, deft wit and judgment I have always admired.
The academics exercise went well at Newman but friction kept a number of us up at night. There was the beginnings of a heated disagreement between the president of the school and the venerable Jesuit. Both were scholars and intellectuals but it developed that either the president hadn’t told the Jesuit he was in disagreement with the non-elective nature of the school or the Jesuit hadn’t ascertained the president’s true views. In any event, the chairman of the board was an elderly lady of considerable renown in St. Louis, former Congresswoman Leonor K. Sullivan-Archibald (D-Missouri). She had been the widow of Congressman John Sullivan and served as his administrative assistant when he died in office. She succeeded him and was secretary of the House Democratic caucus. An old-line conservative Irish Catholic Democrat, she was beloved-but having retired from the Congress and married an elderly gentleman named Lee Archibald who urged her to take things easy. He had a point as she was not exactly up to the task mentally to negotiate the sparring between the president and the Jesuit.
The board, listening to the incendiary battles between the president and the Jesuit was at some pains to know what to do. On one hand it was clear that the Jesuit had all the academic grounding to make his point; on the other, the president had a close personal tie Harry John who gave us a massive outpouring of funds for the college. A goal was to move the College away from the precarious point where all our funding was to come from primarily one individual-but that was difficult. The archdiocese of St. Louis was not sympathetic to our mission, the archbishop being an ex-Chicagoan progressive, William May. The archdiocese was clearly motivated to close us out. In the midst of all this, former Congresswoman Sullivan-Archibald decided to step down as chairman but would continue on the board. To my further discomfiture, the board unanimously elected me chairman.
The battle lines formed like this: On one side was the Jesuit who had friends in the conservative Catholic community and had a national reputation in academic circles. He was leaking to The Wanderer, a very influential newspaper that was the nation’s oldest national weekly, allegations that not only was the president violating the original stricture of no electives but had hired some faculty who were less than orthodox on Catholic theology. I suspected the allegations were untrue but I wasn’t in the classes to ascertain whether or not they were. On the other hand was the president who claimed he was hearing from parents of students who wanted their kids to be prepared to make a living in the world and a strict diet of Aristotle and Aquinas, undiluted by today’s realities (which were postponed until the fourth year) was impractical. It seemed our financial angel, Harry John, reposed confidence in the president.
It was truly a dilemma. The board clearly could not proceed without the president’s close relationship with Harry John; but the heart and soul of the Newman venture was encapsulated by the Jesuit. My son Tom graduated and then Mary graduated. Both not only got a great deal out of the college but made lifelong friends. My daughter Mary became engaged to Tom Magnor, who was my son’s roommate. My intention was to (a) seek divergent funds to allow us to diversify from Harry John while (b) continuing to welcome Harry John’s funds and (c) seek to resolve the conflict between the president and the Jesuit. But the intransigence of the Catholic archdiocese negated any attempt to woo donors in the area. Our main donor, Harry John, was not affected by the hostile archdiocese since he lived in Milwaukee.
A great number of people who played roles in this melee are now dead which makes the telling of the story easier-but I still refrain from enumerating the names of the two principal protagonists, the Jesuit and the president. The Jesuit is dead; the president is dead; Mrs. Sullivan-Archibald is dead; Archbishop May is dead. A relatively few others are still alive…but only I am sufficiently alive, as it were, to tell the tale.
What do you do when things seem insoluble? Pray. I had decided I was on the side of the elderly Jesuit but I didn’t want the college to be rent apart in division or to lose its funding. Also I couldn’t see that the curriculum was being watered down as he maintained. He kept saying, “no, no, it is. You are not a classicist. You don’t understand!” True but I was not a classicist but I wasn’t born yesterday so as not to understand the bitterness of academic jealousies where I saw them at Harvard, Princeton, the U of I-Chicago, Loyola and DePaul to make a judgment. So I continued to pray. The Jesuit was pulling all the stops to get the president out; the president was pulling all the stops to get the Jesuit out. The college stood in the balance.
Then, rather than an answer there came more complications. A Newman professor called me in Chicago from St. Louis and told me that a young student at the college was being importuned improperly by the president. This was a serious matter. But as I was told by legal counsel…and wise legal counsel…you have to be very sure that the importuning took place. Students have been known to nurse grudges against college administrators and level charges against them that are unfair. Moreover, it was clear that the professor in question who relayed the charge to me was not in sympathy with the president.
The delicate balance was this. You had to follow up whenever a grave charge like this was made-but you had to be sure that the person named in the charge was not assumed to be guilty…or the college would be hit by a damaging suit. I met with the student and ascertained that the charges did not seem frivolous. But who could tell if malice was contained therein?
So a few of us on the board…the college’s general counsel and the federal judge…not the Jesuit because there was great animosity there…asked to meet the president off-campus.
He came in and was jovial. Then we sat down over coffee and I said, “A serious charge has been leveled against you. Before I outline it, we want you to know that we on the board are entirely `tabula rasa’ on the charge. We do not accept it as truth nor do we reject it as false. We want to give you every possible benefit so you will not be railroaded or even intimidated.”
He interrupted me. He said, “okay-I’m out. I’m out. I’m gone. It’s been satisfying work to lead this college but I’m gone!”
I said: Wait, Mr. President! This charge has not convinced any of us of its validity. We are here to hear your side! Moreover, we have worked with you for years! You have not only every right to denounce the charge but to clarify the record!
He continued: “No. I’m out! That’s it! I’m gone!”
His preemptory resignation convinced us that very possibly if this charge couldn’t be proven, there were others-if not on campus but elsewhere which threatened his reputation which he sorely wanted to protect.
So just like that we had an opening in the presidency. Moreover we had people on the board who were not present…including the very influential Mrs. Sullivan-Archibald…who suspected we railroaded him out the door. Then the Jesuit began nodding and saying, “see? I told you he was a bad apple-worse than any of us ever suspected!”
Then the other side: the great donor in Milwaukee, the close friend of the president possibly infuriated and declaring he had written his last check, this before we had any chance to balance his donations with new ones. And then the archdiocese of St. Louis. Hearing the president resigned under unflattering circumstances, would not this reinforce it’s determination to have nothing to do with us?
What happens now? I wondered. I had a son still in the college. The Wanderer was happy the president was gone-but what about our “juice,” Harry John?
I thought: well, maybe my prayers were answered with the debacle involving the president. It looks like he was a bad guy and if so I’m glad I got him out. At least he’s gone which resolves some of the difficulty. The big problem now was to assuage Harry John that his college would continue as he…and all of us…had wished after I fired his close friend.
You continue praying. This time I prayed directly to John Henry Cardinal Newman. I said, I’m sure you’re up there; a saint. You’ve been through devilish controversy like this-all of Oxford’s Anglicans against you; you losing your post as Oxford Don. Will you intercede Up There and resolve this thing?
The answer came in surprising force-far different than I expected.
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5/28/2007
Personal Asides: “Hit Parade” Trivia Winners…”Opus Dei” Will be the Salvation of the Modern Church…  | | | |  | | St. Josemaria Escriva |
Hit Parade Winner.
Mike Buck has them almost perfect…almost. He got #1 right: The TV cast featured Dorothy Collins; Snooky Lanson; Gisele McKenzie and Russell Arms. He even can call McKenzie’s real name…which I didn’t know, Marie LaFouche. Incidentally, I went to the search engine to check but couldn’t confirm it-but Mike’s memory is usually perfect.
He got #2 right. The TV bandleader was Raymond Scott. And that Scott was married to: Dorothy Collins.
He missed very slightly on #3. The announcer for radio and TV was Andre Baruch. Mike had it Andre LaRouche. He’s thinking of the far-right, far-left wacko who runs for president every four years.
Mike nailed #4: The most memorable feature of the TV show was its opening with the voice of a tobacco auctioneer.
He easily called #5. “Your Hit Parade” changed to “Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade.”
He got conceptually the answer to #6: what killed “Hit Parade” Three words: Rock and Roll.
And wondrously he got #7: what caused the show to be laughed out of existence when a Hit Parade singer dismally sang a song that was identified with a fast-rising phenomenon? This is tough. It was, as Mike described, Snooky Lanson singing Elvis Presley’s “You’re Nothin’ but a Hound Dog.” And Mike signed off with the answer to a question I didn’t ask: the “His Parade” windup song: “So Long for a While.”
In return for an almost perfect score, I bought Mike a cup of coffee where I usually see him after 11 a.m. Sunday Mass at St. John Cantius, at the Windy City Café, the gourmet’s delight. (Incidentally, Mike: this special trivia is just for you because you’re obviously a “Hit Parade” expert. The bandleader, Raymond Scott, changed his name so as not to be confused with his more famous brother who was also a band leader. What was his brother’s name? No search engine help, please. All right, I’ll tell you. Mark Warnow who had a big name then. Hence his kid brother chose Raymond Scott.
Steady contributor Frank Nofsinger got one right, one wrong and gave up after that-but I’d buy him a coffee at the Windy City anyhow were he to come here from Connecticut: he listed Betty Grable and her husband Harry James.
On the earlier Terry Trivia, WPD has it right: The last president who smoked cigarettes in the White House was FDR with a long cigarette holder. Other presidents…Reagan, LBJ and Eisenhower...smoked before the White House but kicked it before election. JFK smoked an occasional cigar.
Salvation of the Church.
Let this fallible believer affirm: sometimes irreverent, irascible, not unduly scrupulous and, sadly, not always meticulously proficient in Catholic obedience, that at this time of crisis for the Church which I love, “Opus Dei” is and will be its salvation. We in my family just observed the high school graduation of Kaitlyn, one of our 13 grandchildren, the graduation observed with Mass, a homily and distribution of diplomas-followed by a Gala attended by Lillian and Kaitlyn’s father, mother and little brother Joseph (which I am sorry to have missed because of my WLS radio gig).
In another city, our elder daughter, Mary, the mother of eight and her husband Tom receive extraordinary spiritual nourishment because of the prelature as have their children. Mary is a “supernumerary” which title is given to those who work hard within the prelature but lead traditional family lives and have secular careers. (The other three classes of member-numeraries, associates and numerary-assistants are celibate and often live in special centers). Lillian and I are “cooperators” which is nothing more than people who do what they can to help as foot-soldiers in the mission of this great organization whose credo is: everyone is called to be a saint and ordinary life can be a path to sanctity. If they can make me a saint, God bless them: my faults are so numerous and obvious as to make it very difficult. But that they have not given up on me is evidence of its divine nature.
“Opus Dei”…literally “God’s work”…was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaria Escriva, a priest who was raised to the level of saint by John Paul II. In 1982 it was made a personal prelature-with jurisdiction not linked to one geographic area but extending to all persons in “Opus Dei” wherever they are. Some ex-members and certain liberal Catholics have argued that “Opus Dei” is cult-like, secretive and highly controlling. In fact the novel “The Da Vinci Code” projects a weird scenario that its “monks” are in league with fomenters of secrecy of the early Church to hide the fact that Mary Magdalen became the bride of Jesus Christ and that the two had a child, starting a blood-line that culminated…voila!...with a beautiful French secret-service-like agent. Well, there are no monks in “Opus Dei” and the theory that this secret was hidden for 2,000 years became a yarn that unfolded for the pecuniary enrichment of the writer, one Dan Brown. The yarn is of great interest to anti-Catholic bigots, to liberationists and feminists who see male-centered conspiracy for two millennia to keep women from realizing their true potential in the Church i.e. becoming priests.
Just as the Jesuits were formed to help the Church propound a counter-reformation…an Order which has fallen, sadly, into some disuse by the influence of modernism (take a look at the anti-Catholic, secular and sacrilegious practices at most “Jesuit” universities including Marquette in Milwaukee and Loyola in Chicago) “Opus Dei” fills a great need today when the church is beset with bad influences outside and in. It has 87,000 members in more than 80 countries-60% in Europe, 35% in the Americas. It runs splendid educational centers throughout the world-in one of which I taught a few summers ago…taught disadvantaged kids from the inner city (I decided I was a failure at that particular type of teaching: far too old to tolerate the natural boyish pranks at large in the inner city; so I retreated back to teach college). “Midtown” is a school available to the poor for a pittance and the education…renewing and refreshing what the public schools don’t do well…is superb.
Then there is “Metro” for girls; “Lexington” which is a hospitality training center on the South Side. These are only a few of 608 social initiatives, schools and university residences, technical or agricultural training, universities, business schools and hospitals. The University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain is a corporate work of “Opus Dei” which has been judged as one of the major private universities of the world. Its business school, IESE, has been rated one of the best in the world by the “Financial Times” and the “Economist Intelligence Unit.”
The best exposition that “Opus Dei” has going for it is a book written by John Allen of the liberal “National Catholic Reporter.” He examines the criticisms the prelature has received in a volume that is not an official history of the Work by any means-and has turned out a first-rate read and exposition. I told more than one “Opus Dei” priest that the book ought to be placed in the Work’s book racks at its many fine retreats-coming as it does from a progressive and independent writer who is by all odds the most informed journalist on Catholic activities in the world-and one who has been a critic of some variants of Catholic orthodoxy in the past…not so with “Opus Dei.”
Why I think “Opus Dei” will prove to be the salvation of the Church
is because the Church is suffering self-imposed wounds struck by careless prelates, weak prelates and those who desperately wish to be regarded well by the secularist media…who have in turn ordained weak, sometimes scandalously decadent priests. There are few resources to which one can turn by “Opus Dei” and Lillian and I will be grateful to the end of our lives that it exists. You cannot imagine, if you are not Catholic, how so-called “Catholic education” has been traduced-most seriously in the elementary and secondary schools where Catholic formation must be impressed. To counter this, “Opus Dei” has created a great many wonderful schools that match the rigorous training in Catholicity that we oldsters had in the golden years of the Church (prior to post-Vatican II chaos) with superb intellectual and educational resources. It is to one of these schools that Kaitlyn graduated from…an all-girls school, “The Willows”…and to which her younger brother Joseph will attend…an all-boys school, “Northridge.”
While the battle inside the Church goes on to reclaim the institutions that have been lost to secularism i.e. DePaul and Loyola…a battle is being won every day by “Opus Dei” to form new institutions and re-sanctify old ones. That is why “Opus Dei” was under attack by scatological novelists and fiction writers-attacks that melt away under the burning laser light of truth.
| | |
5/25/2007
Personal Asides: Immigration Bill Will be McCain’s Undoing. Giuliani Doing an About Face on Issue Smacks of Romney--Who, Incidentally, Seems to be Rising…”Your Hit Parade” Trivia.
Immigration and McCain.
This is a personal take. The Senate immigration bill may well be John McCain’s undoing. What he needed least of all at this time is an issue that separates him from the conservatives of his party. The one issue he is identified with that the GOP base likes is pro-life. Everything else has turned out to be ashes in the mouth of the Republican electorate. The McCain-Feingold act is poison. His failure to support Bush’s tax cuts…pretending that his big objection has been failure to cut spending is not sustainable since he used the Left’s class warfare rhetoric, complaining that the rich got undeserved breaks when any examination of the budget shows the rich pay 90% of the freight. His fore-square support for the Iraq War doesn’t really take off because while the base wants to win the War it is not cheerleading for it. It could well be that what we’re seeing is the self-immolation of John McCain.
Rudy had a pretty good week at the South Carolina debates when he objected to Ron Paul’s presentation. In fact, the best thing that could happen to Rudy has lain at his feet and he hasn’t picked it up. Paul has challenged Rudy to debate the war. That’s a perfect format for Rudy-playing to his strength. That’s a scenario where Rudy can’t possibly be hurt. Paul has some following among the paleos but his priorities for government involvement are such that Rudy could easily knock him out of the park. Unless he’s afraid that Paul might knock him out of the park. If that’s what he’s worried about, he’s too timid to be a presidential candidate-or a president, for that matter.
Now Rudy has taken a sharp turn and has rejected the Senate immigration bill. All of us who were at Dave McSweeney’s fund-raiser where Rudy did so well remember that when I asked him the immigration question, he supported the concepts that he now disowned. I think the abortion issue wouldn’t necessarily kill him if…if he had stuck firm to his pledge to name strict constructionists to the Court. But by declaring that a strict constructionist could also embrace “Roe” as well as oppose it, he nullified himself seriously. There was a time when some of Rudy’s advisers urged him to go the Romney route and embrace pro-life. He could have had a great rationale: that 9/11 brought home to him as never before the fragility of human life. When he was flirting with that option, I felt he had some attraction…for me as well. But holding on to the old pro-abort label, saying that the Constitution gives a poor woman the right to expect federal funding for abortion (ridiculous) and his bobbling the strict constructionist issue looks like downers to me.
The guy who seems to be coming on is Mitt Romney. No reasonable critic can believe that previous positions on social issues should be held against him…given that he was governor of Massachusetts, the most liberal state in the nation and now runs for president. You can say his opinions changed at politically convenient times and they have: along with every other presidential candidate since Thomas Jefferson who espoused strict construction and then consummated the greatest loose construction gamut in history-the Louisiana Purchase. Increasingly I think Romney is running the winning campaign. He may not win the nomination but his campaign is expressing the clearest rhetoric. If you disagree or agree, tell me.
Lucky Strike Hit Parade. Memory, not Search Engines.
No one can legitimately be called an old duffer without knowing something of “Your Hit Parade.” The radio series started on April 20, 1935 when I was age 7 on NBC’s “Red Network” and during the next two years both NBC and CBS carried it until `37 when it landed on CBS Saturdays. Ten years later it veered back to NBC.
The TV version began in 1950 as a simulcast of the radio program. By 1953 the radio version was canceled. The show continued on NBC until 1958; then back to CBS until it was canceled in 1959. Enough of these dull facts. Here are some questions. He or she who gets them all right without search engines will get a cup of coffee from me…free…if and when you collar me in Chicago-either at the Chicago Athletic Club or the Skyline, two of my favorite hangouts. All set? Here are the questions.
1. The TV cast featured-give me their last names: singers Dorothy_____; Snooky ______; Gisele _________ and Russell _______.
2. The TV bandleader was ____________. He was married to _______.
3. The announcer for radio and TV was a famous name with a wonderful voice: Andre ___________.
4. The most memorable feature of the TV show was its opening with the voice of a ____________. (Two words).
5. “Your Hit Parade” changed its name to “The ______ _____ Hit
Parade.” Supply the two words.
6. What killed the “Hit Parade”? (Three words).
7. In that connection, the final demise came when a Hit Parade singer tried to duplicate a fast-rising national singing phenomenon and struck out so dismally that the show was virtually laughed out of existence. Who was the Hit Parade singer, what phenomenon was being duplicated and what was the song? (I happened to see that particular show).
For me, a geezer patriarch these aren’t tough. We’ll see how many real trivia experts there are.
| | | Flashback: The Meeting with Byrne and Both of Us Change Our Point of View. [Fifty years of politics written as a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].
Naturally I brought my new, best old friend Claude Murphy (whom I didn’t realize was so tight with Mayor Jane Byrne) to the meeting in her office on the 5th floor of City Hall. When we walked in, she was at her desk-a tiny, taut woman-talking in no-nonsense style to a 6 foot 4 inch Chicago policeman. Seeing us, she doused a cigarette in an ash tray. I had to step aside as she hugged Claude. “Hi, Claude!” she said. “Who did you bring?” “Oh somthin’ the cat drug in,” he said. Laughs all around.
After we sat down, she lighted a new cigarette, inhaled deeply and said: “Your City Club has been very unfair to me, Tom, saying that I was trying to short-circuit the open bid process on the South Loop. Just today I signed an executive order that open bidding shall begin.”
Wonderful, I said. Now there’s no reason for us to be hostile to each other.
“Claude has been trying to get you to call me for quite some time,” she said, “haven’t you, Claude?”
He chuckled and in his best black ghetto accent (entirely put on) said, “wal, ah was just tryin’ to wait foh de raht time.”
Well, I said, all’s well that ends well, I always say.
She said, “so do I. I understand the City Club is looking for an honoree.”
Yes, I said, and now that you have embraced open bidding on the South Loop there is no reason it shouldn’t be you.”
“What do you think, Claude?” she said. “Do you see any reason why not?”
“No,” he said, “ah t’ink the time’s raht and ah say dat as a frien’ o yors and a frien’ of de Club.”
She said, “when were you thinking of holding this testimonial?”
The sooner the better for the Club’s standpoint, I said.
“Well,” she said inhaling deeply, “do you think people will say you sold out?”
No. Not sold out. Rented out. But seriously, if you and the Club are together on the open bidding, it’s a win-win for both of us.
“O.k..” She looked at her schedule. As she turned the pages and flicked her cigarette ash, I decided that there is a God and he is a little elderly black man with a white fringe of hair, a 140 kilowatt smile who, for some reason-possibly patronizing-has improvised a poor-boy ghetto southern accent.
“O.k.,” she said. “Well, if that’s all--.”
I said: One thing, Mayor. Every dinner has to have a chairman in charge of ticket sales who is close to the honoree. It helps people to understand that when they buy tables through this person, their purchase will be known to the honoree.
“O.k,” she said. “Your chairman is Ron Orner.”
Who?
“Ron Orner. He’s a labor lawyer and friend of ours, isn’t he, Claude?.”
“Yas indee’.”
“Here, this is his phone number.”
Thank you very much Mayor. We’ll see you on the big date if not before.
“If you have trouble or any questions get Claude. He knows how to reach me.”
As we walked out, I said: Claude, you and I are going to be very tight. You can hang around my office all day and all night if you want to.
“Not fer awhile. I gotta go outta town.”
O.k., Claude. But don’t be a stranger.
*************
We hired the grand ballroom of the Hilton & Towers (now the Chicago Hilton). I called Ron Orner a dozen times; finally got through. He was very uncommunicative. So I went over to his office. Very quiet office, walnut paneled on LaSalle Street. Noiseless typewriters, prim, conservatively dressed women clericals. Thin young men studying law books in the library.
“Wh-a-a?” he said. “She said that? I never ran a dinner in my life.”
You don’t have to run it, Mr. Orner. Just sell tables.
“I never sold a table or a ticket to a fund-raiser in my life.”
You don’t have the Mayor’s list?
“The Mayor’s what?”
This worries me.
Days went by and Orner was of no help; not only was he of no help, he was hostile to the event. I tried to get hold of Claude; no answer. I scouted around the South Side for his friends. Our news release went out and got a big bang: Mayor Agrees with City Club on Open Bids on North Loop; Will be Honored at Historic Fest.
Where was Claude? No one knew where he was. I tried to call the Mayor. A stone wall. Seven days before the event-exactly one week to go-and when I finally reached Orner he told me he hadn’t made a sale.
“Of course I haven’t,” he said. “I got a law practice to take care of. You better scrub this event. The little lady rolled you.”
But we had signed an expensive contract with the hotel for filet mignon, a band, a group of serenading violinists, placemat gifts. Now we weren’t just broke we were in hock up to our eyeballs.
Another headline: City Club to Honor Byrne with Big Gala.
Then in my door he comes. “Hah, buddy.”
Claude, Claude. We’re in deep [scatological word for “trouble”].
“Aw yeah?”
Yeah. Ron Orner has had no instructions, no list, hasn’t sold a ticket much less a table. I can’t get the mayor to return my call. One week to go. A huge empty cavern with table cloths, white linen napkins, a band, waiters and no guests. The Mayor arrives and speaks to an empty hall with her echo reverberating. A major news story. Major embarrassment for her, for the City Club. I’m a bum. A disgrace. Outside of that, things are going well, Claude.
He walked over to the phone on my desk.
“Do ah dial nine?”
Yes. Please.
He dialed, cradled the receiver on his shoulder and talked so quietly I couldn’t hear.
He hung up.
“Everythin’s all right buddy. We gotta go see her.”
We did. Another embrace.
“Mayah,” said Claude. “As ah says on the phone, we gotta kind of embarrassment.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You told me. Get over to Orner’s office right now. He’s waiting for you.”
I asked: Do you have a list for him to call?’
“Don’t worry about that. Get over to his office right away.”
************
When Claude and I got to Orner’s office the scene was wildly different. Phones were ringing; the women clericals were scribbling messages; messenger boys were coming in one door carrying envelopes, waiting impatiently to be waited on. The thin young men looked harried, on their phones. Inside his paneled office, Orner was frazzled. His coat was off, tie askew and on the phone.
“Suddenly,” he said to me, “the whole world comes crashing down on me. We have to hire temps to take the calls. Marilyn! Marilyn! She’s my assistant. How many tables have we sold?”
She shouted: “I can’t see you now. I’m on the phone! How many tables-fifty-two in the last 45 minutes! And more coming in!”
He said: “They’re all her friends and contributors. The plumbers union just called me. They want 10 tables up in front where she can see them. How many tables does the place hold, for God’s sake?”
Marilyn popped her head in the door, “The electrical union wants four tables up front. I said they could have them. Is that okay?
Orner said: “I was planning to go out to dinner with my wife but not now. We all have to work. Can you get me a map or something of the grand ballroom? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m saying yes to front tables. I think we got so many tables now we’re going to end up in the hall! I wasn’t even planning to go! Somebody put out the word to every special interest in the city-law firms, unions, United Airlines, American Airlines. Black civic organizations; black churches. Hispanics by the carloads.”
Claude said, “Ron, we gotta go. Don’ wanna bother you now; you’re too busy. But I gotta tell you, you’re the bes’ civic fund-raiser an’ dinner chairman in the history of Chicago!”
One thing more, I said. I want a table for Quaker Oats, Ron. Up front. Okay?
“You’re going to leave us here with this mess, huh?” said Orner bitterly.
No, I said. We gave you a winner. You’re on the way to being the best civic dinner chairman in Chicago history.
“How did I get into this?” he bleated.
Easy, I said. The little lady rolled you.
| | |
5/24/2007
Personal Aside: Pope Adrian VI Had it Right…and Thus it Shall Ever Be. Renaissance Pope Adrian VI (the last non-Italian pontiff until John Paul II) once said of the Roman curia that its deficiencies and sins “were so widespread that those afflicted by the vice did not even notice the stench anymore.” He launched a reformation to cleanse it-which failed.
Journalist Robert Novak who is a recent convert to Catholicism said that while he was considering joining the Church he read a history of its 2,000 years. There were so many rascals running it, high up in it, he said, that the institution has to be divinely incarnated in order to have survived them. While princes of the church were selling indulgences, Francis of Assisi was living in a cave. And Aquinas was teaching.
Their sanctity was the miracle-in the midst of a cesspool.
And so he joined.
Here is DePaul University…which glories in being the “largest Catholic university in the country”…celebrating Gay Pride week. All this while a hypocritical American archbishop in Rome who has the job of re-converting secular Catholic-in-name-only universities doesn’t even answer his mail from Catholic Citizens of Illinois which gives him chapter and verse about DePaul…so pleased is he to have his Episcopal ring kissed by poor dumb baa’ing sheep who think that as he’s in a line leading back to the apostles he’s better than they are. Then he has the unmitigated gall to swing the incense burners and say he wants to return Catholic schools to the Faith.
God help us.
We have an archbishop here who says Hillary Clinton in speaking to the Mercy Home for Boys and Girls was speaking non-politically. Because he himself has two doctorates…is a canon lawyer…and is skilled in parsing language to the point where it has almost lost meaning, he has decided he can get away with this. Mrs. Mary Anne Hackett, the CCI c.e.o., in a letter to him says bluntly, “surely, you don’t believe this.”
Of course he doesn’t.
That’s not important.
He just thinks he can get us to believe it because he’s a Prince of the Church.
And still…and still…it’s my Church and I love it.
| | | Flashback: City Club Leadership Teaches Me a Lot About Chicago. [Fifty years of politics written for my kids and grandchildren].
Involvement in several civic groups helped teach me more about Chicago. One was Project LEAP [Legal Elections in All Precincts] which was a coalition of Republicans and liberal independent Democrats which I headed beginning in 1974…which brought with it a board membership in the Independent Voters of Illinois [IVI] a group of largely left-wing Democrats opposed to the first Mayor Daley. Another was a board membership of the Better Government Association which was formed to investigate city corruption and misfeasance. One venerable civic organization was dying in 1977 which had a long and engrossing history-the City Club of Chicago.
I’m not sure I would have joined the City Club of Chicago when it was formed in 1903 because one of its founders was Harold L. Ickes, a vituperative trouble-maker and trouble-shooter from Wilmette, a lawyer who was starving to death until he figured out a solution to poverty: marriage to a wealthy woman. Thenceforward, living and thriving on his wife’s inherited estate, he became a liberal reformer in the Republican party. Joining the City Club which was supposed to be dedicated to urban and civic improvement, he successfully converted it into a political arm for the 1912 Bull Moose campaign of Theodore Roosevelt.
When that campaign died, Ickes switched to the Democratic party…and as the world knows became Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior in 1933. Ickes brought a lot of liberal Democrats into the Club. The Club prospered in the 1920s and it built its own clubhouse at 315 south Plymouth Court. With members hanging around and plotting fashionable revolutions against the establishment in the 1920s it was exactly the place limousine liberals belonged-bleeding for the poor but sashaying around in a magnificent club building. Then with the Depression, the City Club lost the building. It is now the John Marshall Law school.
The Club eased into the 1930s as a progressive club and probably the only one in town…leading a charge against racism in the police department…becoming the first club to bring in women on an equal basis-which was overturned when the women decided to run their own club. They left and started the Women’s City Club of Chicago at a different location. It sort of meandered along until the election of the first Mayor Daley in 1955. Daley was a member but rarely attended.
Thereafter the Club took several positions that were critical of the mayor and it lost influence. It dwindled from a high point of about 1,000 members to just about sixty in 1977. Original members included Richard B. Ogilvie and Michael J. Howlett. By 1977 the Club’s board was filled with crotchety old types…most of whom were younger than I am now. But its future seemed well behind it. For some reason, Ogilvie did not want the Club to die.
He and others hired Larry Horist, president of L. P. Horist & Associates to provide it with fund-raising guidance and public relations assistance. Horist, whom I had known slightly when we were both in Washington, D. C. with the Nixon administration, thought that I would be a natural for president in that I had keen interest in the city. He asked if I would be interested and I said no because I was just leaving for the Kennedy Fellowship at Harvard. When I came back from Harvard, he asked me again and again I said no. He then asked Ogilvie to call me and urge that I take it. Ogilvie did. There was something persuasive about being telephoned by a recent former Illinois governor and I seriously considered it. I then talked to another former governor, my frequent lunch-mate, Bill Stratton aka Billy the Kid who said that I should definitely take it.
Stratton thought I should take it, build it up and “use it” to run for public office…maybe Congress in the suburbs (although he added: “I hope that seeing the political realities you would revert to your old status as a progressive Republican instead of the right-winger you are”)…but an uncanny atypical wisdom has always caused me to veer from elective office. There was a time when a former governor of Minnesota thought I should run for 4th district Congress in St. Paul, given that Ramsey county was overwhelmingly Catholic and a Catholic Republican might suffice. I took a look at the demographics and the fact that I had a wife and three kids and decided not to.
When Bill Stratton said I should think about Congress he was thinking that I should run in a primary against Phil Crane. But I told him if I ever ran…and that was highly unlikely…I would rather run in a contest where I could put my heart and soul into it…and that would be to oppose Ab Mikva who was in fact my Congressman. But saying that was a lark. I always believed that a guy without great wealth should not fool around with politics. Also, I had the world’s best job at Quaker-and why should I quit it to possibly lose and start the job search all over again?
So when I told Billy the Kid I was not interested in running for office, he said: well, you say you would rather have the fun of participating in public events, why don’t you take the City Club for a year or so and see how it goes?” So I did. For a time I was head of both Project LEAP and the City Club. But after the old mayor died in 1976, it was clear that some of the liberal Democrats were not interested in continuing the battle for an honest vote count since they saw an opportunity for themselves to capitalize on dishonest counts.
The anomaly is that there is no Project LEAP today…not because there is no vote fraud in Chicago or sloppy procedures or criminal misbehavior by precinct captains…but because the second Mayor Daley is a liberal-progressive and the liberal community is entirely happy with his being reelected, no matter how inaccurate and incompetent the vote count is. After all, one of their number, the Cook county clerk, David Orr, presides over the most serially incompetent election process in modern history without a word of serious complaint. Reason: the people the liberals like get elected. Similarly, the Independent Voters of Illinois are not much of a force anymore. Not because there is no need for independence…but because the mayor who presides over the government agrees with the IVI on all major issues. So why fight him?
In an earlier piece I reported that I decided to build interest in the Club by inviting challenging speakers. We had a good number of them-from Jesse Jackson, Sr. to Eugene McCarthy to Paul Simon to Jerry Falwell. Larry Horist was of great help as the executive director whose company managed the Club. Our first fund-raising dinner was in honor of former Governor Ogilvie. Our second was to honor Mike Howlett. Successively we honored key business types from the city (all who happened to be Jewish because a fund-raising consultant was herself and knew them): A. N. Pritzker…Leonard Lavin…Philip Klutznik…on and on. The membership list built up to about 600-but we never, ever realized the enormous financial success that much better stewardship than I could supply has been provided by my successor, Jay Doherty. Under him the Club has truly embraced the entirety of the Chicago business, labor, civic and political community.
It goes without saying that Jay Doherty will be…and should be…president for life of the City Club. He has been a brilliantly wise and astute leader. One thing he did that I didn’t do because of my rather rebelliously maverick background is to tie the Club into the Daley organization and the Democratic party. I think it was a wise thing that he did it. It has surely made fund-raising easier. His luncheons are a civic club treat to behold. The Club under my leadership was involved in controversies that gained it press attention but also significant enemies. Under Jay, the Club is not controversial but a booster for the ruling class of the city.
I don’t think there is a soul in this city who does not like, admire and love Jay Doherty-me included (I have written about him and his wife Colleen a number of times). When I was president it was touch and go whether there were more people inside hoping we’d may payroll or outside hoping we wouldn’t. We had contentious board meetings. I got the Club involved in support for vouchers in education which almost split it. Because I had to spend a lot of time at Quaker…which was paying my bills…I ran the Club with masterly inattention to detail. I am indebted to Paul Green among others for protecting my rear on a number of occasions.
But I will say…with all the controversies we had…running the Club was fun! Great fun! Jane Byrne was in as mayor shortly after I started. Her tenure was about as controversial as Rod Blagojevich’s as governor is now. She campaigned as a reformer, was elected because of a series of snowstorms, and when she took office she made peace with those in the City Council whom she called members of “an evil cabal.” She tied in with Eddie Vrdolyak and Ed Burke and Charlie Swibel (not a city council member) and instantly the “cabal” became the “caballeros.” Then she engaged in sweetheart deals with favorite developers and saw that the rebuilding of the South Loop was given to a favorite.
As the City Club president, I would hold news conferences to blast her to the skies. At the same time I was on a weekly radio talk show run by Bruce DuMont on public radio (more about this later) and blasting the mayor. It was fun to get the widespread public attention but blasting the mayor of Chicago was no way to cause the City Club to prosper. The Club would live from fund-raiser to fund-raiser. There were times when I thought we were sure to be evicted for nonpayment of rent-but, Lord, it was fun. We had what I called “the Monday Morning Forum” held at the M & M Club over coffee and rolls where speakers would show up, speak off-the-record scatalogically and profanely about their work and sometimes engage in what was just short of fisticuffs. One of our most vociferous participants was Kenny Hurst, a dinosaur conservative who through no effort of his own was unintentionally uproarious.
On a number of issues, the City Club…and me as president…zeroed in on Mayor Byrne. Every so often a guy would show up at our luncheons whom few really knew, but of whom I was signally aware. He was a short, bald, 70sh black man-well-dressed--by the name of Claude Murphy. He was, believe it or not, a Republican ward committeeman on the South Side…when Republican committeemen in black wards were hardly worth noticing. But Claude was because he was truly bipartisan. He was also thoroughly involved in one of the more confoundingly complicated games of the day in the black neighborhoods-numbers-which helped make him an independently wealthy man.
In those days before cigarette smoking was banned, Murphy would show up, suck a cigarette down to the size of a half-match which almost singed his lip-line, walk over to me and say in a hardly understood whisper and flash a grin that was 140,000-kilowatts-worth: “hah, buddy.” It was supposed to mean “hi, buddy.” He started showing up when the City Club, having alienated the mayor, was regarded as off-limits by the power structure that needed the mayor’s approbation. We were starting to draw 40 or 43 members at a lunch and the tables we had set up had to be scaled down.
The money was draining off. We had to have one hell of an annual fund-raiser in order to save the Club. I thought eagerly of quitting but I didn’t want to be remembered as the guy who saved the City Club only to steer it into bankruptcy and default. We had to find a sugar daddy to be “honored” by the Club at a luncheon. We had honored every living elderly Jewish philanthropist in town and were looking for some gentiles but many turned us down. No big businessman wanted to be honored by a Club that no matter how much fun it was to be with, was alienating the mayor of Chicago.
Then Claude Murphy started a bad habit. He started popping in to my office, sitting on the sofa and read a magazine while my daily work went on. Sometimes he would beat me to the office, at 8:15 a.m. (I came in at 8:30 p.m) and was leafing through some of my books on the shelf when I’d come in. For about two weeks I forgot about him being there. He was very much like the walnut furniture-and about as talkative. My Quaker government relations work passed over his head, between his legs, over his permanent seat on the couch. My secretary thought he was a cute, little, fat old black man with a rim of white hair-like Uncle Remus. Then one day I said, apropos to nothing at all, “Claude, why are you here? Why are you here every day? Why don’t you take the magazine you’re reading and get the hell out of here? Don’t you have a home, Claude? Don’t you have an office?” The more I continued the angrier I got as I thought about him being with me all morning, all afternoons and so I raised my voice and said, “CLAUDE, DOES A HOUSE HAVE TO FALL ON YOU? GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”
Nothing made Claude mad and this didn’t either. He smiled his 140,000 kilowatts and said, “who ah you going to honor at de City Club, buddy?” That was exactly why my nerves were becoming frayed. I retorted: “I have no one, Claude. No one! Now you know. I have no one? What’s it to you?”
“Wal,” he said in his drawl, “ah think you oughta honor de Mayah.”
I said, “Honor the mayor? Now I know you’re senile, Claude! I’ve attacked her verbally, in the papers, on radio and TV for the last two months. The City Club is calling for her investigation. How can we honor her?”
He said quietly, “wal-ah know but have you ast her?”
“Asked her? Asked her if we’d honor her? We’re ready to go out of business, Claude! You’ve been around here overhearing my telephone conversations long enough to know that! We can’t pay the staff, we can’t pay the rent. She will kick up her heels when we go under which will be next week at the latest! Honor her?”
“Yas,” he said walking over to my desk. “You oughta talk to her.”
“Talk to WHO?”
“Mayah Byrne.” He picked up my phone and said shyly, “do ah dial nine to git outside?”
I said yes.
He dialed, waited ten seconds and then said, “Mayah Byrne. Tha’s somebody ah hope you will talk to. Tom Roeser.”
He handed me the phone. It was Byrne. He had dialed her private number.
She said in her shrill machine-gun rat-a-tat voice: “I was hoping you’d call. Come over this very minute and let’s see if I can help you keep the City Club afloat.”
I hung up and looked wonderingly at Claude.
He was smiling his old 140,000 kilowatt and reading my magazine.
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5/23/2007
Personal Asides: The Immigration Issue Aside—Won’t it be the Death Knell for the Republican Party?...Tony Blair, the Complete Wilsonian—but Abject Political Correctionist as Well.…Terry Przybylski’s Latest Presidential Trivia.  | | | |  | | Blair |
The Republican Party.
I presume that by writing this I shall be regarded as hopelessly shallow, parochial and partisan…but, friends, I am a national Republican, have always been…and given the lamentable state of the Democratic party and its likely effect on the national polity…will always be. Therefore let me share with you my central concern. Don’t be so naïve as to imagine that political consequences have always been at the heart of any major federal program. I frankly don’t think President Bush has any lasting concern about the consequences for the Republican party, so bound up is he in a religious ethos of “compassionate idealism.” In the immediate post-Civil War Republicans wisely saw that an influx of new immigrants could…not absolutely sure but could…help the voting populace of the Republican party.
But then conservative Republicans passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a combination racist and economic blockade against a flood of low-income workers whose employment could throw U. S. workers out of jobs. Interestingly enough, liberal environmentalists who are concerned with undue population growth see widespread immigration as counterbalancing the lower population growth rate, fearing projections showing that largely through immigration U.S. population will reach 400 million by 2050.
The see-saw battle goes on. A Rice University economist, Donald Huddle, has reported that in 1994, legal and illegal immigration drained $51 billion more in social welfare and job displacement costs than immigrants paid in taxes. But the Urban Institute, a liberal think-tank, says immigrants contribute from $25 billion to $30 billion more in taxes than they receive in services.
I cannot imagine that opening the floodgates to legalize Hispanic Americans-given their strong Democratic voting ID-would do anything but solidify this country into a one-party nation. And since the destiny of the West depends on a strong conservative…neo-conservative, if you choose…attitude, I am not exactly thrilled at this prospect. None other than Winston Churchill told Franklin Roosevelt as they discussed the postwar world: “I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British empire.” The fact that the empire faded away came as result of many factors, but not Sir Winston’s intransigence. Few people exceed me in my support of George W. Bush-but I believe his idealism could well stand a corrective.
The political battle over immigration blurs distinctions. Free marketers seem to merge with ethnic advocacy groups; trade protectionists and many labor groups converge. Corporate interests that profit from low wage-earners, supply side economists cite the fact that the U. S. economy would shrink seriously without illegals; Catholic Church leaders support freer immigration on supposedly humanitarian grounds but also to swell their ranks. The polarization has radicalized many; Lou Dobbs on CNN has built a wide following as active critic of permissive immigration. Democratic party activists see a groundswell of voters among Hispanics if they get through the mesh and get legalized. Some neo-conservatives who fear a recurrence of terrorism here link the possibility with wide-open immigration; people active in trying to control illegal drugs see widespread immigration as a serious threat.
So with that said, let me open this up to a plebiscite. As a Wall Street Journal reader, I can well appreciate the good effects loosened immigration will have on business and the economy. What effect will it have on the party that I firmly believe must prosper if the nation is to survive? Living in a one-party city and county…and remembering what it was only a few years ago when Illinois was a swing state…I am not interested in being carried away by non-sectarian idealism. Please: the line is open for your comments.
Tony Blair.
Probably because Tony Blair is a consummately articulate practitioner of the English language, unlike George Bush, we can view his views with a clearer focus than we can the president’s. Conventional wisdom has it that Blair has been a great British leader whose career was diminished by Iraq. But those who say this don’t know much about Blair. It’s like saying Churchill was an empire-builder whose goal was shattered by World War II. Churchill was indeed an fervent empire-builder and his empire was reduced by World War II and its immediate aftereffects but World War II “made” Churchill…and were he alive today would not fret about the dissolution of much of the Commonwealth because it would be his belief…and a correct one…that by reacting properly to the challenges of World War II he saved the West.
Blair is the consummate Wilsonian. He passionately believes in globalization; thus the venture in Iraq was as natural for him to support as participation in World War II was for Churchill. It was here in Chicago in 1999, at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he brilliantly listed all the unifying aspects of globalism that have the potential to weld humanity into one. If any speech was idealistic, it was that one. He listed trade, communications, fighting disease, financial markets, human rights and immigration, declaring, “Globalization begets interdependence and interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work.” Blair, as an intellectual, should be seen as the great rival of Harvard’s Samuel Huntington. Huntington, author of “The Clash of Civilizations,” sees possible disaster in the clash. Blair on the contrary sees not a clash of civilization but, rightly, I think, a clash of civilization…ours…versus the barbarism of an Islam whose religion was never hijacked but is, when fervently observed, an enormous threat to the peace of the world.
George Bush believes that, too, but is not as eloquent…or perhaps as thoughtful…as Blair. Having said something good about Blair the world leader, I am appalled that his domestic policies in Britain have embraced a kind of neo-fascism that punishes freedom of speech. The stupid “political correctness” law threatens the freedom of the British peoples.
A complex man, Blair.
Terry’s Trivia.
He’s b-a-a-a-k! Terry Przybylski has a presidential trivia for us. If you’re not as old as I or Frank Nofsinger (who’s not as old as I either) you may have trouble with this one.
Who is the last president to smoke cigarettes in the White House?
For added credit, name three presidents who used to smoke cigarettes but kicked the habit before they got to the White House?
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5/22/2007
Flashback: Jerry Falwell Remembered…and a Picketing That Helped Immeasurably. [Fifty years in politics remembered for my kids and grandchildren].
The death of Jerry Falwell at 73 stirs some memories…not the least because of an immature cheap shot cheering his death by a so-called “Religion columnist” of the Chicago-Sun-Times. To Cathleen Falsani, hired at the wish of Michael Cooke, the editor who has all the taste of one who wipes his nose on the drapes, the newspaper’s religion writing has sunk to a sophomoric new low. The Tribune was better than the vulgarian Falsani, of course, but still didn’t provide perspective or balance.
It so happens I had a lot to do with him on several occasions; I knew him and visited with him on occasion when we were both visiting Washington…me as a Quaker lobbyist from Chicago, a Catholic, and he as the Baptist chancellor of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia and pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church. Falwell started the church in an abandoned Donald Duck Bottling company plant in 1956 when it had 35 members. It now has 22,000 in a building that seems to go on and on forever. He was the first of the modern television pastors, launching “The Old Time Gospel Hour” carried by stations across the U. S. One of the first things he did was launch treatment centers for alcoholics and those afflicted with addictions of all kinds and a refuge home for unwed mothers. He worked out of the old Carter Glass mansion, the former home of a distinguished Virginia congressman, senator and treasury secretary to Woodrow Wilson.
Jerry Falwell was many things-a good man, a kind man, but one thing he wasn’t was a diplomatic one. He was the son of a bootlegger who fermented and sold illegal whiskey during Prohibition and who was an atheist, who ran illegal cockfights and dogfights in his barn. Jerry had a tough boyhood, was nearly what a later generation would call a juvenile delinquent. He was a star athlete as a kid who was scheduled to give his high school valedictory speech when he was discovered counterfeiting lunch tickets. He explained how that came to be, convulsing us both, but I cannot now for the life of me remember what the point was or why the luncheon that he counterfeited tickets for, was important.
At the age of 19, he became a born-again Christian. We Catholics aren’t acquainted with being born-again…but Jerry and I agreed on one thing: it was very important to be sure that a conceived human being gets the opportunity to be born once. That probably was one of the things that causes Ms. Falsani the religion columnist to hate his guts. Jerry confessed in his autobiography that as a young Virginian he had been a racist. Many others had been but didn’t choose to acknowledge it. Some think he was a homophobe. I can tell you he was not…although some people think it homophobic to criticize homosexuality and try to cherish the sinners.
If either of the two main newspapers here were accurate…not to stress fair…they would have catalogued Jerry’s faults…as he himself did…but also point up a signal fact that changed American history. Traditionally, Baptists and other evangelicals were aloof from participation in political life. Falwell changed all that and they have been changed in the past thirty years. He persuaded millions to participate in politics-and in doing so, created a great avalanche of support for conservative and traditional moral principles which directly resulted in the election and reelection of Ronald Reagan…and which continued to provide conservatism with millions of dedicated volunteers.
That is the most important material thing he did. The most immaterial thing…which will gain him lasting blessing in eternity, of course… was to change people’s hearts and lead them to spiritual peace. His impact could be noticed positively throughout the country at the time of his death, beginning as a fundamentalist and continuing as an evangelical with the Southern Baptist convention. In addition to Ms. Falsani recording her initial exhilaration at hearing of his death and singing inwardly: “Ding, dong the witch is dead,” in San Francisco on the day of his death demonstrators carried a 3-foot high Tinky Winky to Castro and 18th streets, called “the crossroads of Gay America” and cheered “this Bible-beating bigot’s horrible legacy.” In that group, Ms. Falsani will be glad to note, an activist lay down a portion of AstroTurf to represent Falwell’s grave and invited people to dance on it-and many did.
My first contact with Jerry Falwell came when I became president of the City Club of Chicago in 1977. Larry Horist recruited former Governor Richard Ogilvie to ask me to undertake it. I was not overwhelmed by the honor. The venerable Club which had played a great part in Chicago history…in its more progressive history, as a matter of fact…had fallen on evil days and had only sixty members to its name when at one time it had a thousand. But I took it on anyhow. The first thing to do was to reinvigorate the City Club forums which were an integral part of the city’s civic life. To do so I got a number of people to come in to speak-and debate…including former U. S. Senator Eugene McCarthy and a host of political types. I also decided, against the wishes of everyone on the board, to invite Falwell to speak to us when he next passed through town. He agreed to and we rented the old Bismarck theatre as the site.
I was talking with both Falwell and his staff as the day approached and I was dismayed to learn with only a week to go that we had only about seven people who signed up. Seven for the Bismarck theatre. So I called him and asked what to do. He said, “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.” The next thing I knew his news-information network passed the word…in the newspapers and evangelical radio stations…that sounded like this: “Jerry Falwell announced today that he will speak in Chicago at the Bismarck despite the threat of picketing and demonstrations that are devised to mar his speech. He will indeed be there…” and the publicity gave the date and address. Immediately we were drowned with requests from the news media to cover the picketing and “lynching” that they wished to see. The advance promos sent the evangelicals storming into the City Club. And when we announced the evangelicals were coming we were greeted by angry announcements that opponents of Jerry Falwell would be there as well.
I met him at the plane and we drove in from O’Hare together. I told him there was one thing that bothered me, however. He said: what? I said there is a great expectation that there will be picketing and I haven’t heard that there would be any. Not that I want it to occur understand, but…
He said in his southern drawl with a smile, “never you mind!” When we got to the Bismarck the cops were out there directing traffic and sure enough there were a few picketers with placards. Inside the auditorium was jolting with pro-Falwell and anti-Falwell types. We made a good deal of money on that day and the City Club went on from there to new heights-particularly now under my successor as president, Jay Doherty.
Now gay rights activists echo Ms. Falsani in their hoots and jeers. But the most significant thing said about Jerry…better than the kind words of the president of the United States…was this statement: “Reverend Falwell will be remembered for his consistent emphasis on the truth that Jesus Christ loves and offers salvation to every individual regardless of their past.” It was said by Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, one of the largest groups of people who have overcome homosexuality. RIP Reverend Falwell. You fought the good fight, you have finished the race and kept the faith.
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5/21/2007
Personal Asides: On Falwell, Falsani’s Ignorant Insult Proves His Point about the Culture…The Condoleezza Rice Biography.
Falwell & Falsani.
“When doctors pronounced the Rev. Jerry Laymon Falwell, Sr. dead at 12:40 p.m. EST Tuesday, I was sitting in the departures lounge of the Key West airport in Florida with a dozen other journalists who had just attended a three-day conference on religion and politics.
“As word spread-a producer for National Public Radio got the first call-my colleagues scrambled to their cell phones, BlackBerrys and laptops in preparation to write stories and, as was the case with a few, give radio interviews about the impact of the Rev. Falwell’s death.
“…In fact, my very first thought upon hearing of the Rev. Falwell’s passing was: Good.
“And I didn’t mean ‘good’ in a oh-good-he’s-gone-home-to-be-with-the-Lord kind of way. I meant `good’ as in ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’”
--Cathleen Falsani
Religion Columnist
The Chicago Sun-Times.
I yield to no one in disparagement of the immature, early college-kid, bubble-gum snapping know-nothingness of delayed adolescent (age 37) Falsani. But she does prove what Jerry Falwell decried about the debased public taste. Nor is tastelessness hers alone. She was named “2005 Religion Writer of the Year” by the Religion Newswriters Association: which tells you something about the genre of the religious journalist craft. And you should know that her first book, “The God Factor” which explored the spiritual depth of basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon and Al Sharpton among others “won critical acclaim,” her Wikipedia biography says…cognizant of the fact that Wikipedia says often what its subjects hope to believe. But she has signed with publishing giant Zondervan for two new non-fiction books, has left the religion editorship of her newspaper to be its religion columnist and is up for the prestigious Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year award to be announced this September. Were she to win, it would say a great deal about a calling that not long ago featured writers like Kenneth Woodward and the “Tribune’s” Reverend John Evans.
Falsani’s successes lends validity to Falwell’s frequent criticism of a decadent culture…for which as an exhibit in “religious writing” she is indubitably a pinup. He affixed some of the blame for 9/11 on God’s outrage with homosexuality--which was needlessly selective with so many bad heterosexuals around and for which he apologized. Perhaps if he erred, it was not to have spread blame for decadence including to those who decided to fill a once-great newspaper’s Religious Editor niche with people with no absolutes as Falsani, who dignifies her vacuity with bad Camus imitations. You get Falani when you buy the paper for 50 cents which, when you compare the great reportage that comes from Fran Spielman, an astuteness from Lynn Sweet and an extraordinarily good business section edited by Dan Miller, a sports section equal to none, a QT column filled with superb one-liners, equates to about a penny for Falsani’s thoughts. She’s still overpaid but what the hell.
Falsani’s insult to Falwell (although the piece concludes with a wish his spirit finds peace) should be understood since she moved from street reporter to just the agnostic materialistic relativist “religious writer” type Cruickshank and Cooke wanted her to be…a kicky adolescent whose views are wafer-thin. Falsani might grow up one day-but, then, realistically, she very well might not. One article she did on her mother’s illness and Falsani’s trying to cope with it had promise. Since then, nothing. But hold on: she says she was led to God by watching Jimmy Swaggert whom she despised at the same time.
Talk about being screwed up.
Condoleezza Rice.
A late biography of Condoleezza Rice is “Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power” by Marcus Mabry, chief of correspondents and, believe it, the supervisor of the magazine’s domestic and international bureaus. The fact that Mabry is an African-American is touted to give him some freedom in criticizing Rice in the same tones that the far-left newsmagazine does. It is worthless as a read except for her early years which Mabry delves into with some thoroughness.
The final call on Mabry is this, however, and I treasure it because it reflects the anti-Bush mindset prevalent in liberal Washington. After 9/11 Vice President Dick Cheney went to CIA headquarters and probed about himself in the intelligence files. To Mabry the idea of a political official disturbing the immaculate files of the unelected bureaucracy is appalling. But you have to consider the anomaly: that the one man besides the president who was elected to national office had the temerity to push aside career bureaucrats is regarded by Mabry as an offense against established governmental procedures and highly disturbing.
And the interesting thing is that Mabry doesn’t even perceive the ridiculous objection he makes. Imagine: a nationally elected official having the insolence to go over the heads of the bureaucracy. Incredible!
| | | Flashback: Harvard Beckons, then Shakes its Head, then Beckons Again. [Fifty years of political life in a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].
Working full-time at Quaker and teaching part-time…mostly nights…at Wharton and Northwestern led me to perfect a course involving nine constituencies that make up public policy. After a few years, I wanted to try it at a university that seemed hopelessly out-of-range for a conservative-the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard. Shortly after JFK was killed, the public revulsion for the hideous murder was such that many people sent contributions to the Kennedy family. Well, the Kennedy family didn’t need free-will offerings nor did it encourage them--but the money amounted to tens of millions of dollars over the length of time between the Dallas slaying, the long majestic funeral, the pathetic salute to his father’s bier by little John-John, the eternal flame on and on. The Kennedy family decided to turn the funds over to Harvard, where JFK had gone to school, for the creation of a John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics which was an independent entity but pinioned to what would ultimately become the Kennedy School of Government.
Individual fellowships were created-not so much for political scholars as much as for participants. Obviously, given the nature of the Kennedy family and Harvard, the designees were almost always from the political Left. One exception to the rule was my friend John McClaughry, the ex-Percy campaign worker who designed the brilliant Community Self-Determination act…a program that was never implemented, sadly…but which became a kind of model for my own institution called “Medco,” the Minority Enterprise Development Corporation which I submitted to President Nixon and which, though superb in concept due to McClaughry’s origination and Bill Geimer’s legal craftsmanship, got me fired by Maurice Stans. Few other Republicans were named. Those who were happened to be the lefty kind, tokens. There were absolutely no business lobbyists named. Charlie Barr had pined away until his death for a Fellowship but was not rewarded (a pity).
Long about 1975, I decided to try for a Fellowship. I applied, was called to Cambridge for an interview and sat down with a lady who was relatively famous but who since has become much more so-Doris Kearns Goodwin. As a young student she was taken in, so to speak, by a President Lyndon Johnson who pored out his heart to her which she wrote up to national acclaim. She was named a White House Fellow and while she was being considered, it was discovered that she had been a picketing anti-Vietnam student at Harvard and had in fact written a magazine article entitled, “How to Dump Lyndon Johnson.” She expected to be zeroed out of the White House fellowship but Johnson agreed that she be named anyhow. He said, “oh let her come. If I can’t convince her she was wrong, then I’m not very effective.” Thus the old president with a weak heart and a young school-girl spent much time together. He never convinced her Vietnam was right but he converted her to become an LBJ groupie who celebrated his rampant liberalism.
She married Richard Goodwin, the shaggy former JFK staffer who joined Eugene McCarthy’s anti-LBJ campaign and later Robert Kennedys. Now as a Harvard Ph.D she was a top official engaged in the selection of future Kennedy Fellows. Obviously, her politics were predictable-but that didn’t bother me: her instinctive knee-jerkedness did. She came to conclusions viscerally and they were all boilerplate. She saw no reason why a conservative should ever become a Fellow since the fellowships were to remain like a fly in amber, hallowed as 1960 liberalism. I disputed that but I was on the applicant side. So after the first invitation, I was rejected.
The next year I applied again but this time decided to use some of the lobbying arts to reinforce my application. I started a campaign of encouraging Democratic liberals who were my friends to write. Those who wrote were Newton Minow, JFK’s chairman of the FCC who devised the phrase “vast wasteland” to describe his era of commercial television…Paul Simon who has been a Fellow and who was now a congressman from Illinois, hoping for greater things…Abner Mikva, my congressman, a deep-dyed liberal with an uncanny knack of frowning over an issue in supposed deliberation but who always…uncannily…would come after great reflection on the side of the Left…and Andrew Young. The Georgia congressman was expecting a high appointment from the Jimmy Carter administration which ultimately came-that of ambassador to the United Nations.
These letters made a difference. Once again I was invited to Cambridge and once again I was interviewed by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And once again she debated and found me wanting. However I had anticipated her decision and had on one of my Washington trips stopped in to the office of Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Quaker had several plants in Massachusetts and the Kennedys had ties to Chicago, with old Joe buying the Merchandise Mart where Quaker was officing, and Sargent Shriver a close classmate of Bob Stuart (although that was one tie I didn’t want to use). I figured it was enough that I had left Quaker for abortive federal service and it wouldn’t be politick to try to use any leverage to leave again-or I would possibly be allowed to leave imperpetuity.
At Teddy Kennedy’s office, I didn’t see him but a staffer who insisted that Ted Kennedy as the custodian of the Kennedy Fellowships earnestly desired Republican participation. I had a hard time keeping my face straight hearing him say that and I guess he noticed it. He did say something that was very helpful: that Senator Kennedy himself was in the habit of personally interviewing candidates who seemed to make it to the finals. I thought that if I could just survive Ms. Goodwin, I might have a shot at it.
So I encouraged Andrew Young…who by now was UN ambassador… to personally call Kennedy. Young solicited a promise that no matter what…whether I survived Ms. Goodwin or not…Kennedy himself would interview me. I stayed in touch with the Kennedy staffer and found when the Senator would be at his office at the Institute of Politics and deftly…if I say so myself…arranged my interview with Ms. Goodwin to coincide with his presence.
Ms. Goodwin was still unimpressed with me and I must say I didn’t blame her. When I think the die is cast I have a tendency to grow insouciant…as I was when I knew my firing at Commerce was inevitable. We dallied around in a terrible interview and then I said that I was assured, basis the request from Ambassador Young, that I could be interviewed by the Senator. She indicated that this was not the usual procedure because the Senator only interviewed candidates who were approved by her. I again leaned on the Andrew Young card and said, “Madam, would you like to have Ambassador Young call you to verify what I have told you is the truth? He would be glad to.” She backed up, said that would not be necessary and checked the Senator’s schedule. Then a few hours later, I visited with the Senator just before the dinner hour.
I had considered and then discarded a number of approaches to make to him-but concentrated instead on the mission of the Institute of Politics which was to allow candidates with fulsome political experience to be appointed. In describing my work beginning as journalist, political party staffer, campaign manager, assistant to two congressmen and assistant to a governor of Minnesota, I saw that I was making little headway. Then I concentrated on my work at Quaker Oats and the fact that the job had brought me into fairly close contact with the late Everett Dirksen. I saw Kennedy’s eyes perk up at that point. We swapped Dirksen stories and I told him Dirksen’s favorite phrase which he used to describe some incompetents such as the Republican state chairman. Dirksen said the chairman was as “dumb as dog” excrement-only he used the stolid Anglo-Saxon word for excrement.
Kennedy roared with laughter and exclaimed that his two brothers had used that expression and he laughed whenever he heard of it, wondering where they got it. Of course! They got it from Dirksen, a man of whom both were extremely fond…so fond, in fact, that during the Cuban Missile Crisis both men…John and Bobby…requested that Dirksen fly to the White House to consult with them-for the sole purpose of bolstering his lagging campaign for reelection in Illinois against Sydney Yates. Our conversation about the Pundit of Pekin lasted a long time after which Kennedy said, “you’re in!” I said that Ms. Goodwin had placed a veto. He shrugged it off and said he would talk to her. He must have because the very next morning I received a call in Chicago from her which didn’t go into details but filled me in on when I would start and what I wished my teaching program at Harvard should consist of.
I received another sabbatical of sorts from Quaker and flew to Cambridge for six months of what was a glorious experience. The teaching itself was fun but with the Fellowship you got a membership in the Harvard faculty club and the absolute right to call up any faculty member and sit down with him/her. The Harvard faculty was under orders to regard Kennedy Fellows as equals if not a bit superior. So when I called the office of the aged but brilliant John Kenneth Galbraith, then an emeritus professor of the economy, his secretary endeavored when we could have lunch together at the faculty club. The same with James Q. Wilson, the famous professor of government as well as a good number of other faculty people.
That convinced me that all the funny stock of stories I had about Everett Dirksen really paid off. As indeed it did.
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5/18/2007
Personal Asides: Rahm Emanuel’s Dirty Mouth. Rahm’s Dirty Mouth.
The “National Journal” can easily be described as the glossy-papered edition of the “New York Times.” It scours the Washington universe and somehow…just by chance…material favoring the Left is pushed forward in the copy and countervailing information which would be of assistance to the Right is either low-balled or dismissed as irrelevant. But last week in a burst of intellectual candor, the “Journal” reported on one of its heroes, Congressman Rahm Emanuel whom it has steadily portrayed as the most effective Democratic fund-raiser as chairman of the Democratic triple C (House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee” in modern times…forgetting, as it conveniently tends to do, Tony Coehlo, the Democratic whip of fifteen years ago who resigned his congressional post to avoid an investigation into his receipt of junk bonds from a savings and loan in return for expected favors.
The “Journal” reports on a adulatory book, “The Thumpin’” written about the life of Rahm Emanuel written by a star-struck deputy Washington bureau chief of the “Chicago Tribune”-with the semi-pronounceable name of Naftali Bendavid. In order to make Emanuel human, Bendavid catalogs one of Emanuel’s personal habits, his frequent use of a scatological word beginning with the letter “f” that demeans sexual intercourse. In order to get the picture across of a hyper-energetic Emanuel, Bendavid recorded some of Emanuel’s phone conversations which equates with the late Lenny Bruce at his worst.
The picture that comes through is not one of magnetism but that of a foul-mouthed hack who is so poverty-stricken in language that he cannot conceive of communications without usage of the word that insults (a) the act of human procreation, (b) the intelligence of the person on the receiving end of his conversation and (c) Emanuel’s own somewhat hyperkinetic intelligence which is degraded by his juvenile comments. Emanuel uses the Anglo-Saxon word as verb (transitive and intransitive), noun, interjection and explective infix. It’s wonderful to consider that this Sammy Glick is already scaling the greasy pole of opportunism to attain a high post in his party.
To give you a flavor of this statesman’s conversation, let us substitute for the gross and malevolent word four stars **** representing the word.
Emanuel’s phone conversation as reproduced by Bendavid:
Signing off a phone conversation with a candidate, Emanuel says: “Don’t **** it up or I’ll **** you. I’ll kill you. All right, I love you. Bye.”
“In my house, when you say **** you, it’s a sign of endearment.”
On election night, he shouts to a boisterous celebration that “the Republicans can go **** themselves.”
He refers to Washington as “****nutsville” and to an opponent as “knuckle****s.”
To a reporter: “Don’t rat**** me!”
Now it is true that Vice President Cheney in a moment of exasperation told Sen. Patrick Leahy to perform an impossible biological act upon himself…but Rahm Emanuel owns the World Cup on creative use of the word.
| | | Flashback: The Second Stans Breakfast and “Voluntary Giving.” [Memoirs from fifty years in politics for my kids and grandchildren].
To make any sense out of this fragment of the memoirs, you have had to read the preceding…that Maurice Stans, the recently-resigned commerce secretary now Nixon finance chief…decided in late 1971 that he would show us neophytes how he would raise money for Nixon, and so he dictated that precisely one week from our present meeting (at the same hour, same place) we would have the kingpin of the Illinois Democratic party to breakfast, Joseph Block, retired CEO of Inland Steel. Inland was founded by grandfather Block in 1894. The Block cousins, Joe and Philip, had made it an outstanding company, the fourth-largest steel producer (by 1972) in the U. S. and the first to adopt a pension plan for its employees. When Joe Block retired in 1967 he was regarded as a maverick in the steel business, agreeing with President John Kennedy in 1962 that it was not opportune for the steel industry to raise its prices. He was succeeded by his cousin Philip.
To my surprise, as I relayed the invitation by phone, Joe Block said he’d attend. So precisely…all watches synchronized…we gathered at the very same smallish breakfast nook in the Merchants & Manufacturers Club of the Merchandise Mart. Block arrived fashionably late, about five minutes or so behind us.
It’s important to remember where we were in the presidential wars of 1972. When we met, the projected inevitable nominee by media and polling standards was reputed to be Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine) who later self-detonated in the New Hampshire primary of 1972…but when we met Muskie was as sure of the nomination as, perhaps, Hillary Clinton is now.
With a barely recognizable greeting (“Hello, how are you?”) Stans, assuming the leadership of the breakfast for which we were paying, signaled all to sit down. We pre-ordered the breakfast and after it was served, Stans looked across the table like a dignified Boston Brahmin in the play “The Late George Appley” and said this, speaking directly to Block:
“Joe, before I left Commerce for this job, I checked with Bill Ruckleshaus.”
The words struck Block as if a pile of sewerage had been dumped on our clean tablecloth. Ruckelshaus was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the first head. A politically ambitious Indianan, he took the agency created by Nixon and made it a seriously-regarded watchdog and enforcer against pollution.
“…And,” Stans continued, “I happened to take with me when I left
Commerce this report, not for public attribution, that EPA is preparing. I brought it along and thought you might like to skim it as we eat.”
Block took it, read it as he munched. There was an uncomfortable silence among us, as we decided each of us inwardly whether we should remain silent at this embarrassing time or whether we should converse in whispers among ourselves as Block read. We decided to do the former; say nothing. The air was deadly quiet, punctured only by the slight noises our spoons and forks made.
I stole a look at Block and fancied I saw a hemorrhoidal air of slight concern as he thumbed though the document.
Stans said, “I’ve got to have that report back after you read it, Joe.”
Block handed it over and silently considered his grapefruit.
“What the report says in summary for the benefit of the rest of you,” said Stans, “is enough to threaten the economy of the Midwest significantly. It has to do with the heavily industrial area that includes the U. S. Steel plant as well as oil refinery and numerous other industries on which Inland, that fine company that Joe and his brothers run, is located. And it says that ninety percent of the water that passes by as industrial outflow or stormwater overflow is contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. In addition it is filled with polycylclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs and heavy metals.”
Removing his spectacles with a flourish, he said: “The paper from EPA estimates that sediments containing 77,000 pounds of chromium, 100,000 pounds of lead and 420 pounds of PCBs are pouring into Lake Michigan each year through the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, the artificial waterway in East Chicago, Indiana connecting the Grand Calumet River to Lake Michigan, the 45th busiest harbor in the United States.” He added: “Not mentioned in this preliminary report is that Bill Ruckelshaus who ran once for governor of Indiana may try to run again and-though it pains me to say this-and may seek to become the anti-pollution archangel of Indiana.”
Silence.
“Now, Joe. You don’t have to worry about this because while I’m a private citizen, I still retain some influence with the Nixon administration…”
Block’s glum face eased up somewhat.
“…but you can imagine what would happen if Clean Water Muskie were to become president. Joe, we have to keep this country safe for private industry like Inland. And I know Dick Nixon is just as determined as you and I to do that. Realistically, to preserve free enterprise in this country means that we must get involved in protecting the system through our democratic processes. That’s why I left Commerce and am doing this without pay-to serve this country.
“Joe, we don’t want to keep you. You have a busy day ahead even though you are retired-a busy day with all your many civic responsibilities. I just want you to know that when you get back to your office, a lawyer from our Committee to Reelect the President will be sitting in your anteroom to help you and your cousin Phil and your other cousin Leigh-help you decide the proper way to make your contributions. I am quite candid in saying that we will hope that you and your cousins can give a total of $250,000-and there are relatively easy ways to do this which our lawyer will show you, dividing it up so to speak between you and your cousins. Joe, we’ve kept you long enough and I personally know the president of the United States will be very appreciative of your support.”
Having been dismissed, Block shook hands and left like a man who first had been greatly depressed, then relieved and now somewhat sobered at considering the bill to be paid.
After the door closed behind him, Stans said: “Gentlemen, I have just shown you the reality of what fund-raising in this campaign will have to become in order to match the opposition. Now you have a quota of $10 million. I have every expectation that the Blocks will participate and their contribution, roughly $250,000 which is what I’m counting on, will contribute to your quota. There are other similar names on this list I am distributing to you today. In every case, I want to be consulted by you as you go down the list because I have relevant regulatory or governmental data. McDonald’s for instance is worried about a sharp hike in the minimum wage. Well, we’re concerned about that and all you have to do is to consider what Mr. Muskie or any of the other possible Democratic candidates for the nomination will do and sell accordingly.
“But let me make this clear. I don’t want anybody setting up a $1,000 a person club with this list or any list. The thousand dollar club is for small donors. There is no limit in federal law on the size of a contribution as you know although all contributions will be recorded. Now, if you have any questions about how we are to proceed, ask away.”
Well, there were very few questions but my boss decided that he would have nothing to do with the Maurice H. Stans extortion game. At Stans’ direction, we referred certain big names on his list to him for his unique salesmanship. Concurrently we did begin a $1,000 club composed of people who wanted to participate in the Nixon reelection. Later, as result of the Watergate investigation, Stans was indicted on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury. He was accused of trying to influence the Securities and Exchange Commission to favor a $200,000 donor, Robert Vesco. Both Stans and his co-defendant, former attorney general John Mitchell was acquitted of serious charges although Stans pleaded guilty to minor infractions.
One of the “minor infractions” involved was for unknowingly accepting illegal corporate contributions although prosecutors took the position that he acted in “reckless disregard” of the law in assuming such corporate money, received from 3M and Goodyear, had come from an illegal source i.e. the corporation itself. American Airlines’ president, George Spater, contributed $20,000 from proper sources and $55,000 from improper i.e. the corporation. Ashland Oil contributed corporate funds but its lawyer said that the transaction was so complex “six certified public accountants working six months wouldn’t have been unable to uncover it.”
Stans made an excellent point that as he was on the receiving end of the contributions there was no way he could possibly vouch for inside practices that were undertaken to utilize corporate funds as contributions. He is right-but there is no doubt that the pressure he put on business types made it inevitable that some of the weaker-willed ones would be tempted to dip into improper funding to reach the required amount. In any event, Stans goes down in history as the most effective fund-raiser of his time, having raised nearly $60 million for the reelection campaign.
It is disheartening even to me that someone of Stans’ superhuman loyalty to Richard Nixon was treated harshly in the secret White House tapes. The ex-commerce secretary was engulfed in the campaign finance probe after the 1972 election and never was appointed treasury secretary. George Shultz continued to serve, followed by William E. Simon.
The lesson I came away with both while in Commerce and in the Nixon fund-raising concerning Stans was this: Never did one man struggle so slavishly to find approbation from a president and never got it, not fully realizing that the president in question was of low character and inferior in integrity. Notwithstanding this, while both were in private life, Stans ploddingly sought to slavishly impress his old chief, raising $27 million for the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. Stans died in 1998 at the age of ninety. There is no rational explanation for the kind of master-slave relationship between the arrogant Richard Nixon and Stans who allowed himself to be degraded by serving this unworthy master.
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5/17/2007
Personal Asides: Doug Whitley and Ralph Martire on “Political Shootout” Sunday…Who Won the 2nd Republican Debate?...Bloomberg May be the Perot of the Left.
Whitley and Martire.
Illinois Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Douglas Whitley will face Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability on “Political Shootout” and “Sun-Times” columnist next Sunday. Rarely has there been two more diametrically opposed exponents of divergent views on the economy as they on a radio program. That’s at 8 p.m. next Sunday on WLS-AM (890). Whitley has been Illinois director of revenue and president of Illinois Bell. Martire has been probably the most prominent supporter of the so-called “tax swap”-but both are opposed to the Gross Receipts Tax. They will discuss alternative means to be pursued by the state to meet its revenue obligations.
Who Won?
Bob Novak says Rudy Giuliani won. Wrongo. While the New York mayor adroitly rephrased Rep. Ron Paul’s statement that there should be a close look made of why terrorists attacked the U. S. in the first place…implying that perhaps extensive interventionist actions such as the bombing of Iraq night-and-day may have been responsible…Giuliani shrewdly but duplicitously re-phrased the Paul argument to imply that Americans brought the attack on themselves. I am not a Paul guy but com’on, Rudy, that’s not what Paul said. Giuliani showboated it by calling on Paul to withdraw his comments. It was a shrewd move on a par with something Rahm Emanuel would have done, but scoring that punch didn’t mean Giuliani won.
My friend Jeff Berkowitz said John McCain won. Wrongo. McCain was a more candid presenter than he had been earlier, but he is fated to be stuck with views anathema to conservative Republicans…i.e. McCain-Feingold…going easy on eliciting information from captured terrorists at Gitmo…and was a tad too cute in defending his anti-Bush tax cut votes by saying the cuts weren’t accompanied by spending cuts. He obviated his old class-war rhetoric that condemned the fact that “36% of it [is] going to the richest 1% in America” which he reiterated on CNN by complaining that “too much of the cut goes to the wealthiest of Americans.”
The best performer and winner was Mitt Romney. Made no mistakes, handled the issue of flip-flops very well even when he himself was cute when he supported his endorsement of “No Child Left Behind” as a case where the federal government stood up to the teachers’ unions.
Among the lesser lights, Mike Huckabee again scored and was an entertaining presenter; Tom Tancredo was too ineloquent; Duncan Hunter was pretty impressive; Tommy Thompson was flat-out awful only slightly better than he was last time when he excused his performance because he had diarrhea; and Ron Paul may well have seen his name go up in lights as inheritor of the paleo tradition. Winner: Huckabee.
Bloomberg.
As clearly as the nose on Tom Tancredo’s face…or the pockmarked skin of Tommy Thompson’s visage…is the evidence that Rudy Giuliani cannot possibly win the Republican nomination because of his adamant pro-abort position. For comparison one would have to imagine that Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr., a pro-lifer would be the Democratic nominee. Impossible to imagine. Giuliani had one golden chance to finesse abortion if he had done another switch, stuck with his determination to name strict-constructionists to the Court (with strict construction meaning pro-life). Not having done that, he’s a sure loser in the end.
The likely entry of Mike Bloomberg, the New York mayor worth $14 billion as an independent may well duplicate Ross Perot with this exception. Perot’s conservative protectionism stance took votes away from George H. W. Bush. Bloomberg’s urban liberalism may well take votes away from either Hillary Clinton (in New York city Bloomberg is sky-high in the polls for whatever improbable reason) or Barack Obama. If the nominee is, let us say, Romney against Clinton with Bloomberg as the independent, the odds are the winner by an eyelash would be Romney.
| | | Flashback: The Return of Maurice Stans and the Nixon Finance Committee.
[Fifty years plus of politics as a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].
When I was fired by Maurice Stans as an assistant to the secretary of commerce and director of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, I had no occasion to imagine that I would ever see him again. After all, how many times have you ever come into contact again by your old boss who fired you? But that’s not the way it was to be. As this memoir details, I went to the Peace Corps and then returned to Quaker Oats…arriving there in 1972. That was just in time for Quaker’s chairman and CEO Bob Stuart to be named finance chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP)…whose general finance chairman was, you guessed it, the man who resigned as commerce secretary to take the job, Maurice Stans. And it would be my job as the political officer of Quaker and a political assistant to Bob Stuart to help my boss raise money for Richard Nixon…and in doing so, cooperate with my ex-boss who canned me.
Stans, fresh from Commerce, still had not given up on his burning desire to become treasury secretary in Nixon’s next term. Like Captain Queeg whose preoccupation was rolling steel ball-bearings to keep himself calm, Stans, age 64, figured he was position just right for the job in the second term. He was grievously disappointed when Chicago’s David Kennedy of Continental National Bank became Nixon’s choice at the beginning of the first term [1969-71]. Then disappointed again when Nixon picked John Connally as Kennedy’s successor [1971-72] who resigned to head Democrats for Nixon. Anguished yet again when Connally’s replacement turned out to be George Shultz of Illinois in 1972. Stans figured that with the exception of Connally (with whom Nixon seemed to have an almost unnatural attraction) the political charm was Illinois-Kennedy and Shultz. But Stans had lived in Illinois most of his working career, having lived in Kenilworth. Maybe, just maybe…if he did an outstanding job of raising money for the second term-even better than he did for the first term-he would get a crack at treasury.
Raising money was duck-soup for Stans. That’s what he did really well. He pioneered a new style. Rather than ask money to support a free market, he would raise fear among potential givers that unless Nixon were to win, the confiscatory and regulatory policies of the liberals would bankrupt the potential givers. For the 1972 campaign, it was accepted wisdom that Stans would leave commerce for the finance job. Indeed, he has passed the word to those campaign people who were manning the Nixon headquarters that no one…absolutely no one…was to name state Nixon finance chairs until he, Stans, took over the finance command. The only senior official to move into the Nixon campaign headquarters at 1625 Eye street northwest, Washington, was John Mitchell who had resigned as attorney general. Stans had beseeched Mitchell whom he was deathly afraid of not to allow anyone to name finance chairs until he, Stans, took over. Mitchell said okay.
Accordingly, once Stans took over his old berth as finance chairman, he looked at the map and then his records to see who he would appoint as Nixon finance chairs in the states. But he was stunned to see that while all the state chairs on the map were blank, only one state finance job was filled-Illinois…and that was filled by Robert D. Stuart of Quaker Oats. Visibly upset, Stans trotted down the corridor to see Mitchell, the campaign manager and asked him who had named Stuart to the post. Mitchell looked dismayed. He said, “I did. I was told you wanted him, Maury!” Told by whom? “Told by Tom Houser, the Illinois Nixon campaign manager. Houser called last week and said the finance post should go to Stuart and that it was his understanding you approved it!”
Stans had not. How did Stans get that idea? Tom Houser, who had been Percy’s campaign manager, thought that Stuart’s appointment would be a good idea. But then two men were close friends…men who had similar names: Tom Houser and Tom Roeser. Stans trotted down the corridor again to see Mitchell. “Just asking,” he said with forced calm. “The guy who said I favored Stuart wasn’t a Tom Roeser, was he?” Mitchell, sucking on his pipe, checked his records and said, “no-Tom Houser. You know-the guy who was with the Peace Corps.” Stans said: “Roeser was with the Peace Corps.” “No,” said Mitchell, “I know Houser, don’t know Roeser. Houser is the campaign manager. Best in the state. He told me that you wanted Stuart as finance chairman.”
“Well I don’t!” said Stans, but said the hell with it and returned to his office. He called Houser in Illinois.
“Maurice Stans,” he said in his curt way. “I want to know who gave you the idea that I had suggested Bob Stuart for finance chairman. Who?”
“All kinds of people,” said Houser. “Chuck Percy first of all. Bob Galvin, Bob Ingersoll, Art Nielsen. Clem Stone most of all. Stuart’s the national committeeman. Why?”
“It wasn’t a Tom Roeser by any chance?”
Houser feigned a pause. “Who? You don’t want to make a change on that now, do you? Stuart’s name is absolutely golden. He’s the national committee--”
“Never mind,” said Stans. “Never mind. No, he stays. I was just wondering.”
So as he routinely did, Stans got on a chartered plane and flew the rounds to all the key states. He phoned Bob Stuart and said he’d be coming in for breakfast. The meeting would be in a private room at the M & M Club in the Merchandise Mart. 7 a.m. sharp. He wanted to have only a few people there-the campaign manager, Tom Houser, the Cook county chairman, Fred Zini, Clem Stone’s guy, Bob Athey-that was very important--and Stuart. Stuart said, yes and I’ll have our political guy there as well, Maury, Tom Roeser.
A pause. Then Stans said, “okay. Okay.”
So I greeted my ex-boss in the Quaker lobby at 6 :45 to take him in to see Stuart and together we’d go down one flight in the Merchandise Mart to the M & M Club.
“I am sure you will put aside our past disagreements,” said Stans stiffly, as we walked to Stuart’s office, “as I have.”
Yes indeed. Then an uncomfortable silence as we trod down the carpeted hallway to the CEOs office.
Once in the smallish room at the M & M Club, Bob Stuart in good humor said that he was going to check on us to see that we would order oatmeal. Everyone chortled and had comments except Stans who was lost in interior thought. His distance seemed to put a damper on everyone.
Without a word, Stans distributed to all a paper that showed the Illinois quota for contributions to Nixon. It was about $10 million in size but all of us breathed easy because in those days when there was no limits on the size of individual donations, Clem Stone was good for at least $2 million and perhaps more. Bob Stuart commented on this but Stans, sipping his coffee, put it down with finality and said:
“Nope. That’s what I want to tell you. Clem Stone’s not included in this. He and other major givers will be handled by me personally so what he gives is not in your quota. I’ll handle him personally.”
What about, let us say, Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s?
“Not included. I’ll handle him personally.”
Well, Stuart said soberly, that’s a little different than we thought.
“That’s the way it is.”
There was a click of coffee cups and the waiter came in to see if we wanted more. Nope, we said, just leave us alone. Thank you.
“Well,” said Stuart, “I was thinking of starting a $1,000 Club. Every who wants to join contributes at least $1000 to Nixon.”
“No good, Bob,” Stans snapped. “Politics has grown far bigger than that. That was okay way back then. Not now. I want you to do something for me.”
We sat like we were being tutored. Indeed, we would be.
“Bob, I will be coming back here next week at this time.” He checked his watch. “Next week at this very time. We will meet here for breakfast next week at this time. I want all of you to be here-and, Bob, I want you to invite Joe Block to this breakfast. Tell him I’ll be here.”
Joe Block? All of us started. Joseph L. Block was the 70-year-old retired chairman of Inland Steel, the nation’s seventh biggest steelmaker which had consistently outperformed its bigger rivals in return on invested capital and withstood recessions. The only major steel producer in Chicago, Inland dominated the lucrative Midwest steel market, concentrating on itsd huge Indiana Harbor complex in East Chicago. It sold 70% of its output within a 200 mile radius.
Stuart said what was on all our minds.
“Nice try, Maurie but Joe Block is a Democrat. A liberal Democrat. He and his family have been tied to Democrats and to Democratic initiatives for years, since Adlai Stevenson was governor.”
I added: “And Joe Block is not just a Democrat but has been celebrated as a liberal paragon, playing a prominent role in the state’s fair-employment law, pushing a redevelopment program for East Chicago. He and his brother Philip are on the Democratic party’s A-List of high donors.”
Stans looked at us as if we had been babbling irrelevancies.
He said slowly, without a trace of smile, with simple words as if he were talking to retardates. Since I was the last to speak he directed his words to me:
“I-know-who-Joe-Block-is-and-he-knows-me. You-didn’t-hear-me. I-simply-said-invite-Joe-Block-to-breakfast-next week-at-this-very-time. Tell-him-I-will-be-here.”
We were all sickened at being reduced to stenographers but that was it. The meeting was concluded. We broke up and Stans trudged off down the Merchandise Mart corridor to the entrance to catch a cab.
Bob Stuart telephoned Joe Block who wasn’t in. Bob was going out of town so the return call came to me.
“This is Joe Block. Bob Stuart left a message?”
Yes sir. The message is that former commerce secretary Maurice Stans was in today and invites you to have breakfast with him…and us…at the M & M Club at the Merchandise Mart one week from today at 7 a.m.
“Maurice Stans?”
Yes sir.
“Very well.”
Very surprising. I was expecting him to say: Maurice Stans? Why would I want to have breakfast with him?
The week couldn’t pass fast enough for me to see what old Maury had up his sleeve for the patrician of the liberal Democratic party.
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5/16/2007
Personal Asides: Jay Doherty’s Great Mission.
Jay Doherty.
Jay Doherty, president of the City Club of Chicago and probably the most influential Democratic government relations advocate in Illinois, is one of my best friends…and it was to him that I bequeathed the City Club of Chicago when I decided to retire from its presidency after seventeen straight years. Jay insisted I remain active and that I continue as Chairman which I am happy to do given Jay’s marvelous leadership that this venerable civic institution. But it is not of the City Club that I write. Some time ago I wrote about the stunningly courageous and farsighted decision of Jay and his wife to welcome into the world their second child who was born with Down syndrome. One of the most memorable events of Lillian’s and my life was to witness the baptism of the baby and to attend a wonderful christening party at Gibson’s where the crème de crème of city society attended (we would never be included except though Jay’s patronage).
At that event, Mrs. Doherty gave what probably was the most eloquent off-the-cuff sermon on motherhood and parenthood that it was possible to give, saying that every life is truly valuable and that they are indeed blessed to have a child of such beauty and innocence which they were privileged to care for always.
Now there comes via the “New York Times” the news that is truly bad for children with Down syndrome in that it could spur thousands of deaths each year by abortion. Until this year, only pregnant women age 35 and older have been routinely tested to see if their unbo9ren babies have the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. Many couples were given the diagnosis only at birth. But now under a “humanitarian” recommendation from the American College of Obstetricians and gynecologists says “The Times,” doctors “have begun to offer a new, safer screening procedure to all pregnant women regardless of age.”
“The Times” reports that “about 90% of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.”
This means a floodtide of deaths of Down syndrome unborn children if the statistics continue. “Convinced that more couples would choose to continue their pregnancies if they better appreciated what it means to raise a child with Down syndrome, a growing number of parents is seeking to insert their own positive perspectives into a decision often dominated by daunting medical statistics and doctors who feel obligated to describe the difficulties of life with a disabled child,” says “The Times.”
Many parents “see expanded testing as a step toward a society where children like theirs would be unwelcome. The Newsweek columnist George F. Will labeled it a `search and destroy mission’ for a category of citizens that includes his adult son, Jon Will.
Not long ago a group of parents of Down syndrome children called a meeting at Henry Ford hospital in Detroit to insert their own positive perspectives into a situation that they confronted-and to encourage other parents to continue with the pregnancy and welcome the children when they come with tenderness and love. Says “The Times”: “They are pressing obstetricians to send them couples who have been given a prenatal diagnosis and inviting prospective parents into their homes to meet their children. In Massachusetts, for example, volunteers in a `first call’ network linking veterasn parents to new ones are now offering support to couples deciding whether to continue a pregnancy.
“We want people who make this decision to know our kids,” said Lucy Talbot, the president of a support group associated with the hospital. “We want them to talk to us.”
Apart from ending the life of an unborn child with Down syndrome, it means that the population, now reaching 350,000 could mean less institutional support and reduced funds for medical research-and a lonelier world for those who survive.
I write this to again congratulate the Dohertys on their decision and to point out to prospective parents of Down syndrome their great example, as well as to cite that there is a support system out there which is eager to show how important it is to continue human life in every contingency.
| | | Flashback: Legislative Strategy and Teaching at the Wharton School.  | | University of Pennsylvania |
[Memoirs of fifty years in politics for my kids and grandchildren].
If it seems like all I did at Quaker was have fun, engage in my own personal projects and get paid for it, I hasten to say that this was not the case. A full lineup of legislative activities would take me to Washington, D.C. every week…usually leaving on Tuesday and returning on Thursday…with attendant duties in Chicago for the remainder of the days in the week. The only reason I don’t concentrate on all the issues I covered is that items of legislation that concerned Quaker and the grocery products industry thirty-five years ago are not vividly memorable-although to be sure, performing these tasks in the Congress did pay the bills. However one issue was of signal worth and tells much about the reaction of industry to liberalism…a reaction that is not salutary.
Ralph Nader was at his zenith in the early `70s and launched a crusade for an independent consumer protection agency with interventionist powers. In other words, if the Federal Trade Commission were to balk at bringing an action for consumers…or the Federal Communications Commission…or any regulatory body…under the law Nader wanted passed, an independent Consumer Protection Agency would have the power to intervene and take a second bite from the apple.
It was a choice item for the Democratic agenda in Congress and a number of liberal-leaning Republicans such as Illinois’ John B. Anderson were distinctly favorable to it. Support for the independent Consumer Protection Agency marked an increasingly leftward move for Anderson, leading to his co-authorship of campaign finance reform, then running for president, then running as an independent for president and finally joining the Democratic party. (It was the height of irony that Anderson as an independent candidate was hobbled by the restrictions levied by his own campaign finance act).
The job before the grocery products industry was whether to flat-out oppose the new proposed agency or not. The major industry trade association, Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) postulated the theory that it was fatal to oppose the new agency without making a counter-proposal.
So the GMA espoused the idea of the industry supporting a toothless entity called the independent consumer protection agency. I opposed this because I felt it was the height of cynicism-creating a duplicative agency to the 27 others that had responsibility for protecting consumers…and a toothless agency at that which would mean a waste of money. Then there was the danger that the toothless agency would be passed with industry support but an amendment could be offered and adopted that would give it teeth…with the result that the industry would have out-foxed itself.
But the GMA went about its own strategy and I went on my own, viewing the idea that a flat-out opposition was more sincere that the Machievellian creation of an agency that would do nothing at taxpayers’ expense.
In opposing the idea of a new independent agency, I again came into contact with consumer advocate Robert B. Choate, Jr. He had received a good deal of press for testifying that the average ready-to-eat cereal (a) was filled with empty calories and (b) used beguiling cartoon characters to “seduce” (his word) children to pressure their mothers to buy sugar-filled treats in the guise of dry cereals.
He then dramatized the fact that Saturday morning television was filled with cartoons that were heavily advertised by cereal companies…and postulated as a diabolical plot the fact that a cartoon character like “Cap’n Crunch” (our product) was created by Hanna-Barbara, Inc. which had also a hand in creating kid cartoon shows. Thus he unveiled a “Seduction of the Innocent” campaign against cereal companies and against production of Saturday morning TV shows which he called “the Saturday morning ghetto.” There were lengthy hearings before relevant House and Senate committees and the creation by a group of liberal activist women in Boston called “Action for Children’s Television” which rated the shows and aimed to reform them.
Of course Choate was on his high-spirited white horse charger again as Don Quixote…first having begun a vitamin horsepower race in the early 1970s with the baseless charge that the cereal companies were exploiting the young with empty calory-meals…and now seeking to “reform” the cereal companies’ presentations on Saturday morning. His crusade didn’t do much more than get a lot of television coverage for him which was necessary since his crusade was to be funded by foundation monies.
In the middle of the campaign, it turned out that he had to make a presentation at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia…but the Dean wanted someone from the cereal industry to balance the presentation-so Choate asked me to come. I did and it turned out we put on a modestly entertaining performance. Then the Dean asked if we would be amenable to co-teaching a course for the Wharton business students, teaching them the rudiments of how modern business interacts with consumer advocates.
We agreed and in Choate’s office in Washington one day we sat down and scripted a 13 week course called “Influencing the System.” We decided we would ask guests to come. The school produced a foundation grant to allow us to do it. Thereupon I sketched out a list of nine constituencies that affect public policy…which Choate assented to…and we invited representatives of each constituency to come. The foundation agreed to pay them modest honoraria and put them up for the night at a hotel-which, ironically, was the ancient but honorable Bellevue Stratford in Philadelphia which later was to be the site of the infamous Legionnaire Disease, spawned by an inadequate air conditioning system that bred virus.
The course worked this way. I would come in to Washington on my regular Tuesday to Thursday assignment. On Wednesday night I would take a train from Washington to Philadelphia paid for by the Wharton School, stay at the Bellevue Stratford (paid by Wharton) and in an evening session instruct, with Choate, the business students on the guest who was to arrive the next day. Their grades were determined on the quality of the questions they were to ask and a major paper at the end of class where they were to pick an issue in Congress and sketch out the strategy for either defeating it or enacting it.
The guests we had at Wharton were the forerunners of others I would work with at subsequent universities…including former U. S. Senator Eugene McCarthy who would talk about Congress…David Stockman, the top aide to Congressman John B. Anderson (who ultimately became a Congressman himself, and then Ronald Reagan’s head of OMB, then a multi-millionaire investment banker and now, sadly, an indicted entrepreneur awaiting trial for fraud in a federal court).
One of the classes was held on an April 12 which was the anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. About the time I had met James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s postmaster general in New York, I also met, quite by chance on a California trip (where I attended a Conference Board session on corporate advocacy) one Rexford Guy Tugwell who was a senior Fellow at the then potent Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. As an old FDR student, I knew who Rex Tugwell was although I was dismayed to find that my business colleagues did not. Tugwell was a legendary far-left New Deal planner who gave FDR most of the details on his agricultural reforms.
He was along with the better publicized Harry Hopkins, one of the architects of the New Deal. I was impressed that here he was…a little, wizened fellow of 83…and we chatted a good deal about Roosevelt. He ended up being too hot a radical for the New Deal and so they got him out of town by making him the governor-general of Puerto Rico. There Tugwell did what he could to foment an economic statist revolution but it didn’t take. Now he was at the Center swapping great thoughts with, all kinds of other radicals including Robert Hutchins, the famous former president o the University of Chicago and Bishop James Pike, the radical former Episcopal bishop of California who was almost defrocked for his heresy but who was a thoroughly delightful character.
It turned out that Tugwell had received a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania but because of his radical teaching in the late 1920s was thrown off the faculty as a Communist. He regarded this as a great insult. After talking to him, however, I decided inwardly that Pennsylvania was 100% right. While he wasn’t a subversive or a threat to the nation, there was no doubt that Rex Tugwell was philosophically and spiritually a Communist, embodying the belief in state ownership. But I thought he was a great treasure because here at 83 with a cane he was still as radical as he was while a young man with FDR. He asked shyly about Jim Farley one of his great critics but he spoke tenderly about him in retrospect.
I got the idea that for our class on April 12 it would be great to have Rex Tugwell come back to the University of Pennsylvania from which he had been so summarily ejected as a communist…and on the anniversary of the death of his great patron, FDR. The university became excited and volunteered to pay a handsome honorarium. The old man accepted but then called me in Chicago and said hesitantly that he could not accept it. He never told me why. I reluctantly said okay but an hour later my phone rang again and it was Mrs. Tugwell.
She said, “Rex is too embarrassed to tell you this but I will. At his age of 83, he has to go to the bathroom at least once every half-hour. Your class lasts for 2 hours and he is ashamed to give you these details.” Accordingly I called him back and said, “Dr. Tugwell, let me ask you to reconsider but as I do so, I want to tell you about our class. You see the people in the class are young business types who have an attention deficit. Therefore Bob Choate and I usually hold our classes in half-hour intervals so as to keep the attention of the class. That’s the way we run the course. Now having said that, I still wish you’d reconsider.”
You could almost hear the old man emit a sigh of relief. He said he would reconsider; then five minutes later called me and said he had reconsidered and that he would attend…and would certainly respect the half-hour durations of the class. He would lecture for a half-hour…there would be a break…then there would be questions for another half-hour…then a break…then a renewal. We agreed and he flew out there.
I have the tape of his remarks and they were singularly revelatory about the struggles within the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. The Wharton School experience lasted two years; then I took the course to the Kellogg School of Northwestern University. After that: the Kennedy School, Harvard; the Woodrow Wilson school, Princeton; Loyola University of Chicago; DePaul University; the University of Illinois (Chicago) and Roosevelt University.
When news got out in Philadelphia about Tugwell’s forthcoming appearance, I received a call from a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer who wanted to cover the event. He showed such a knowledge of the New Deal that I said sure, come ahead, wondering how old this guy was to have such an incisive knowledge of times long before his birth.
He showed up and had the face and shyness of a boy.
His name: Steve Neal…later to become the White House correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the political columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times who wrote several excellent books on history which were originally researched…including a landmark contribution on relations between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower (which was far what conventional wisdom has held) and a thoroughly enjoyable candidate-by-candidate replay of the memorable Democratic national convention of 1932 which nominated Franklin Roosevelt. He was more than a commentator but a dynamic participative force-exceeding the role of journalist-- for liberalism in Chicago. I am not sure I ever met a man…in academia, journalism or politics… who was more intimately acquainted with more fascinating, unknown pieces of political history than he.
Steve Neal’s tragic death at an early age was a great loss to Chicago journalism. That meeting began a friendship which was improbable…Neal a liberal Democrat and I a conservative Republican…that lasted to his untimely death.
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Nineteen-seventy-two was the year Mother died. She was 76. The photo of us was taken at my Commerce swearing-in. She was in many ways the politician in the family. Born in 1896, she was so eager to get in a career that she quit high school after only two years…getting her parents rather upset. She landed a job as a steno at J. Walter Thompson and quickly moved up to the point that when she left to get married, she ran the Production Department there…which supervised the production of a print ad from the time the Creative Department got the idea…through the writing stage…following through to see that the necessary art was produced…sending the art out for transference to engraving…checking the engraving when it came back…running it by Creative and copy-writing…then out to the publication-this done many times each week.
She was an instinctive Democrat whose party left her. In her seventies, as a widow, she landed a job with the Cook county treasurer as paymaster for the county. I was in Washington, D. C. when she was found dead in her home, the phone off the hook (she was obviously attempting to call us). When Lillian checked, the telephone company reported that the phone was not off the hook but that in fact “the line is in use” which delayed us seeing what was wrong. But autopsy showed she was dead before she hit the floor. She was a natural partner for my father, a gifted writer who was always sure pestilence and disaster was about to strike; she was happy, optimistic, witty, brilliantly pragmatic, a risk-taker. Who do I take after? More her than he, I am told.
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5/15/2007
Personal Asides: A Lockean Flaw in Our Polity Which Means all the Difference in the World…  | | John Locke |
The Flaw.
Later on in this website, I discuss the “Roe v. Wade” decision and a great weakness in our polity that could some day have fatal consequences. The weakness is, of course, lack of adherence to an absolute prescription of Natural Law rather than the John Locke version embedded in our documents. The Locke theory upholds Natural Law that squares with the view of the majority. That is the variant of Natural Law that has permeated the system, not the original view of Alexander Hamilton who believed in absolutes. Basically a skeptic in metaphysics, Locke could not attain certainty in moral philosophy, an extension of metaphysics. His moral philosophy, had he worked it out, would have been a barren utilitarianism identical to that of Jeremy Bentham. If one follows Locke, one cannot say for certain what is right or wrong when the majority says otherwise.
This has explained much about the Supreme Court’s rocking from side to side throughout our history. In the Court’s most recent partial birth abortion decision, the sliding scale came down in our favor. Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who was solicitor general under Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1989 is a conservative who supports “Roe.” When John Roberts was named chief justice in 2005, Fried testified at the Senate Judiciary committee of what Fried said some time later was Roberts commitment to “clarity, consistency and stability in the law-qualities that includes respect for precedent, essential if a Supreme Court is to be the guarantor of legality under the Constitution and not as unnecessary third political branch of government.”
Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked if in Fried’s opinion, Roberts would vote to overturn “Roe.” Fried said he thought he would not because the “Casey” decision of 1982 protected governments from imposing an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose abortion before what the Court had ruled was the fetus’s viability. Then Fried testified similarly for Sam Alito and gave the same assessment to Sen. Feinstein. But it is clear to Fried now that the Supreme Court is moving toward ditching “Roe.” That is good to a pro-lifer like me but in a nation where absolutes are less than perfect, further indication that our government is based on shifting sands, due to the less-than-perfect application of Natural Law by our founders.
In 2000 in a similar case, the Supreme Court stuck down a Kansas partial birth abortion ban because there was medical opinion that sometimes the procedure was less risky for the mother and that the ban posed an undue burden. The federal ban that followed prescribed that the procedure was never safe for the mother. To Fried, Justice Anthony Kennedy doesn’t come to grips with his own jurisprudence, “going so far as to say that because Congress was acting under its power to regulate interstate commerce, it needed only a rational basis to justify its decision.” He cites the continued tendency of the Court to bob and weave, first with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who contradicted positions she had earlier agreed-to, like affirmative action and campaign finance. He wonders if the Court is not up to its own tricks, “simply reflecting its changed political complexion, not reasoning carefully and promoting stability and clarity in the law.”
Fried is entirely right. The fault lies more with our founders, brilliant men but most of whom in the age of Enlightenment, relied on Locke. The philosophy of Hamilton was diluted by others who unlike Hamilton did not regard human law in the context of a divine order knowable to man. Some things are always unjust no matter what a majority will say. Locke did not see things that way; as an empiricist he did not believe he could really know the essence or nature of anything.
Because Locke’s uncertainly governs, it’s why all of us pro-lifers want to win the next presidential election. If we had a Court running on the absolute principles of Natural Law as Hamilton envisaged it rather than Locke, we might not be so concerned. But that’s not the way it is…which is the reason why as Mr. Dooley so rightly said, “th’ Supreme Court follows th’ election returns!” .
| | | January 23, 1973: A Revolutionary Change in Direction for the Country and Me as We Take to the Streets.  | | Justice Harry Blackmun | | |  | | Justice Warren Burger |
[Fifty years of politics written for my kids and grandchildren.]
While creating and running a small federal agency changed my outlook from so-called moderate to conservative…and the defeat of Richard B. Ogilvie which convinced me the best political practice was to be the practitioner of a small, efficient state government that did not duplicate the federal government (as Ogilvie’s did with a separate EPA and various auxiliary branches)…yet another convulsion put me irrevocably on the social conservative side: that was the landmark decision by the U. S. Supreme Court that snatched the issue of abortion from the purview of the states where it belonged and enacted it as a federal constitutional right.
The fact that the Roe decision was written by a Republican appointee, Harry Blackmun of Minnesota and supported by such Republican appointees as Chief Justice Warren Burger of Minnesota made me wonder why-since I had known both slightly at an earlier time (Blackmun who was around Rochester and a supporter when Quie was in Congress and Burger who had been a big shot in the Minnesota Republican party)--I had not perceived their gross insensitivity to (a) the biological facts of life, (b) the genesis of the U. S. Constitution, Natural Law and (c) plain and simple humanity. Some time ago I launched an Internet conversation with some people in Minnesota who knew both Blackmun and Burger better than I. We delved into the strangeness of their friendship…ranging from their early days in St. Paul to Blackmun’s in Rochester as a lawyer for the Mayo Clinic and beyond.
In addition, we know from Linda Greenhouse’s (Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times) valuable biography of Blackmun and Bob Woodward’s “The Brethren” something I in all my years previously had not sufficiently understood. That was the propensity of the human condition to be corrupted by jealousy and flattery which can shape great federal policies…documented further by my contacts in Minnesota.
Why I didn’t perceive this when I had been all my life involved in political negotiations of one sort or another, I don’t know-but my research has satisfied an inner need I had to find out how two people, originally fast friends (with Blackmun the best man at Burger’s wedding) could have supported such an egregious error. At the bottom of it was collusion by mischievous liberals William Brennan and William O. Douglas working on Blackmun’s insecurities at being overshadowed and dominated by Burger and Douglas-Brennan telling Blackmun he was smarter than Burger…not the other way around…and he should rebel against Burger’s autocracy so as to bring out legalized abortion which Brennan and Douglas favored.
By writing into the law a constitutional “right” to abortion, they said, Blackmun would show Berger what’s what and get his attention: no longer would Harry be regarded as a back-bencher on the Court. That and stand tall in Georgetown, the wealthy suburb where liberals abound and where Blackmun and his socialite wife passionately desired to be loved.
We are told that with Brennan and Douglas’ best wishes (“we trust in your scholarship, Harry!”) went with Blackmun as he flew back to his home town of Rochester, Minnesota and researched his opinion at the Mayo medical library.
How could such a miserable job be done researching human biology at the nation’s foremost medical center? Everybody knew -as all of us had learned in high school biology-that a child’s life begins at fertilization, the joinder of the male sperm and the female ovum. After 18 days…18 days…the unborn child’s heart starts to beat. At six weeks, when the child weighs 1/30th of an ounce, he/she has every internal organ he/she will have as an adult: mouth, lips, tongue and twenty buds for his/her milk teeth.
At 43 days his/her brain waves can be detected by electroencephalogram but this does not mean that he/she begins life at that point: he/she has begun life much earlier. At 6 weeks the unborn child has recognizable fingers, knees, ankles and toes. If you could stroke his/her lips, he/she will bend his/her body to one side and make a quick backward motion with his/her arms-a “total pattern response” which involves most of his/her body. At 8 weeks his/herbrain is fully present; a stomach that secretes gastric juices and if you could tickle his/her nose he/she will flex his/her head backward from the stimulus.
At 9 weeks, electrocardiogram recordings of his/her heart can be taken; he/she squints, swallows and moves his/her tongue. If you could stroke his/her palm he/she will make a tight fist. At 11 weeks he/she has fingernails, all his/her body systems are working and he/she sucks his/her thumb. He/she has spontaneous movement without stimulation. He/she breathes fluid steadily, gets oxygen through the umbilical cord. At 10 weeks he/she feels pain. At 12 weeks he/she will kick his/her legs, turn his/her feet and fan his/her tones, bend his/her wrists, turn his/her head, squints, frown, will open his/her mouth and press his/her lips tightly together. At 16 weeks he/she has eyelashes and at 18 weeks he/she cries, although we hear no sound because there is no air in the womb.
At 20 weeks he/she will react to loud noises and his/her mother’s voice. If he/she is given an intrauterine transfusion, frequently two people have to do it; one to hold him/her, to keep him from jumping away from the needle and the other to make the injection.
How did it happen that with outstanding medical research at his fingertips at one of the nation’s premier health centers, Blackmun did not take into account the biological truth? Easy. The guidance Blackmun received from Mayo from a younger cadre of physicians wasn’t biological; it was political, my contacts at Mayo confirm. Such medical authorities whom Blackmun consulted couldn’t deny the biological facts-nor did they. They sublimated them with liberal pragmatic philosophical theory. Doctors and scientists there were, like many in academe, influenced by the residual experience of John Dewey’s “Humanist Manifesto” which has been the foundation of liberalism at its outset in the 1930s--not fully digested by the old liberals such as Hubert Humphreys and others who ran in the post-Depression years but which has sprouted with McGovernism since.
Dewey dictated that “man is a part of nature and he has emerged as result of a continuous process” since “moral values derive their source from human experience.” Thus support for abortion and unrestricted sexual behavior “between consenting adults.” Also, “an individual’s right to die with dignity, euthanasia and the right to suicide.”
Those scientists were not different from many of the intelligentsia educated at modern universities…in scientific laboratories and political science seminars...or in law courses taught by those who had absorbed the identical views of Hans Kelsen…all of whom who were swayed by the dogma of Sir Julian Huxley who said “all belief in absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, the authority of revelation, of inner certitude or of divine inspiration” is subject to intellectual evolution.
Or as Humanist Barbara Wootton has written, “We ask no longer what is pleasing to God but what is good for men.” Thus the physicians and scientists at Mayo…as have modern legal theorists, modern theologians and philosophers... did not deny that human life is present in the womb. They could not. They did deny that what is present is a person. Thus they influenced Blackmun to postulate that an unborn child is not a person and therefore has no right to live. Tax lawyer Blackburn took that down in almost stenographic style. In his decision he said that an unborn child, even in the third trimester of life, is something other than a human person-but has “the potential of life.” What was essential, the Mayo scientists said, was the a woman shall have control of her body. The contradiction is ironic: it was a new absolute to replace the timeless absolute about life…only it dealt with a woman and her body.
How Blackmun could have bought the humanist philosophy cannot be appreciated until one reads his writings, Greenhouse’s commentaries and Woodward’s book…as well as my research…which instructs about his human condition. He was born in tiny Nashville, Illinois and whose family moved to St. Paul where they lived in the poor Dayton Bluff area (I know Dayton Bluff, having lived near there in a rooming house as a bachelor-and it had not progressed much since Blackmun’s time; now, however, it is upscale). Lonely, a young recluse, Blackmun’s only joy was academics; he chafed at his inability to make friends. Indeed by young manhood he had made only one close friend, his old high school classmate.
He was the stronger- willed Warren Burger with whom he went to high school in St. Paul. Burger was the one who dominated basis his having excelled in football, baseball, swimming and track at their high school, who worked building the Robert street bridge over the Mississippi summers and who sold insurance while going to the St. Paul College of Law. Blackmun, the more introverted, who shunned fast friendships except Burger’s, got the more fashionable education, winning a full scholarship to Harvard for undergrad and proceeding from there through Harvard law school. Still all the while he felt insecure before Burger and Burger unintentionally rubbed it in…glorying in his gregariousness, his participation in campus athletics, his growing circle of friends.
Rubbed it in by doing what often a friend should not do-he sought to dislodge and upset Blackmun’s comfortable life by pressuring him to abandon the lucrative tax law career he had initiated and become a federal judge so as to be a colleague of Burger. In fact, goad the brilliant but insecure tax lawyer to become first an appellate federal judge and then join Burger on the Supreme Court. Evidently Burger needed to have Blackmun around to impress…and Blackmun, knowing that he was the weaker of the two, didn’t want to repeat the old stance of being a nebbish who was fated to be impressed by Burger.
Burger did more than entreat Blackmun; he lobbied the White House to appoint Blackmun to the federal district court of appeals. Then after two disastrous appointments to the Court which were voted down, to the Supreme Court where he could work with Burger. Blackmun tried to resist; in fact he pointed out his livelihood was much more affluent than Berger’s. A federal judge’s pay was far below his standard. Burger wouldn’t hear of it and Blackmun gradually assented. First to the Court of Appeals he went and then to the Supreme Court. In fact, the whole tale of one strong willed judge pushing a boyhood friend to join him sounds…well…odd. And the reclusive partner allowing himself to be pushed sounds…well…just as odd. There may be a deep psychological need underlying Burger’s wish to be with Blackmun and Blackmun’s agreement to be with Burger-but I don’t want to think about it now.
Once on the Court, Burger did what he had done in their youth-dominate Blackmun. Their rulings were so identical, the two were called disparagingly by the media, “the Minnesota Twins.” Being junior to Burger may have been all right for Blackmun as the two grew up but now, as a Justice, Blackmun felt the comparison bitterly, believing people thought him by far the junior partner. Now Brennan and Douglas moved like Iagos to Macbeth, whispering treason to the old friendship, telling Blackmun that he was too as good as Burger…even brighter…and that they were confident he would “grow” and “mature” on his own. Essentially this was the serpentine cooing of lascivious praise in Eden’s garden.
The goal was to get Blackmun to take the lead in an issue they knew would come before the court-legalized abortion. Burger had indicated he would oppose legalization and had expected Blackmun to go along as well. Burger’s sole preoccupation was to preserve the political balance, to keep as much unity in the Court as was possible to maintain. Then, in conference, Blackmun astounded Burger by saying he favored legalized abortion. Burger still wouldn’t give up. He did an unusual thing. He said he would join in the decision! Why? Because a Chief going along meant he could name the one to write the majority decision…and Burger named Blackmun with the intention of moderating the decision when it was finally written. Douglas, the Iago, whispered to Blackmun later: He still thinks he can roll you and soften the decision! Blackmun became enraged-but quietly.
Thus to show Burger that he, Blackmun, was a man and his own man, Blackmun in his draft not only circumvented human biology and adopted Huxley’s and Dewey’s humanism as explained by the young doctors--but re-wrote constitutional law as Brennan and Douglas applauded from the sidelines.. The fact that a court, not a legislature, was entrusted to make the decision and to overrule legislatures was unconscionable. Blackmun was repeating the Humanist dogma by stating the Court need not decide whether the unborn child is a human being, he/she is a non-person and therefore not entitled to the right to live. Since then the Supreme Court will be nothing more than a free-floating constitutional convention on the issue of abortion. A convention because of a weakness in the U. S. intellectual framework behind the Constitution. The weakness of U.S. law has always been that there was no room for an external moral interpreter-and John Locke who believed in Natural Law but Natural Law as defined by a majority, is not the source which is God.
Thus are we driven to morality by consensus. When a Supreme Court says unborn babies can be killed, objecting citizens ought to be able to cite a source acceptable to the community as the interpreter of Natural Moral Law. Unfortunately we cannot because of the Lockean influence on our founders. But it is erroneous. Natural Law stands alone and is not what a bare majority says it is. The conclusion: If the state which possesses the power of coercion is its own interpreter of natural law, it is really not subject to it and people are at its mercy.
The decision written by Blackmun in which Burger half-heartedly concurred marked the end of the trail for the two. When Burger died…his one-time best friend, the man who served as his Best Man at his marriage, Blackmun…did not even go to his funeral. Blackmun felt that he had finally shaken off the figure who had dominated him for most of his life.
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Once one makes a decision that the Supreme Court has erred…as it did with Dred Scott…a prudent man will seek to move heaven and earth and do what he can to change it back-at least I did and still do. Just as Lincoln refused to accept Dred Scott and labored mightily short of war…and then utilizing war to undo it…Americans who disagreed with the abortion became enlisted not in politics but a movement, spanning demonstrations…legal briefs…plans to pass constitutional amendments…plans to elect pro-life presidents and congressmen. The U.S. political scene has not been the same since. Where once liberals and conservatives could disagree and drink with each other after hours, the chances grew less likely after “Roe.”
Normally, my inclination would have been to support Republicans or various types and exercise the luxury of endorsing this or that variant of them regardless of shading of legal view. Not now. The situation changed.
The Old Order changeth. Richard Nixon,we are told by Monica Crowley (Nixon’s own Monica), a bitter-end feminist whom I know, that he was in sympathy with “Roe” to the end of his days. Certainly Monica who worked with him in his exile made sure he stayed firm. Gerald Ford was in sympathy until pressure got him to change over the strident objections of his wife. Ronald Reagan signed California’s severe abortion law and changed, over the objections of his wife and her physician father. George H. W. Bush favored abortion and changed over the strident objections of his wife. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were both original pro-lifers and changed. George W. Bush always was a pro-lifer and is so now…over the private objections of his wife. So the fight goes on.
Although I was a the political officer of Quaker Oats, a corporation whose officers normally supported the ruling as a matter of course…and whose wealthy wives were predisposed to it…I did several things to advance the pro-life cause. First, I got active in pro-life activities through education and training sessions on political action. I joined the board of the Illinois Right-to-Life committee and ultimately headed two different groups.. I formed a new group-the Illinois Pro-Life Coalition (IPC) which endorsed candidates. When the IPC went the way of all flesh and disappeared for lack of funding, I joined with a few others and formed Friends for Life, a 501 © (3) with excellent foundation backing which we obtained from a sympathetic heir to the Miller brewing fortune. We went to Milwaukee often to importune him for funds which came through in a huge amount. I even held informal pro-life sessions off-hours to train pro-life volunteers at the Merchandise Mart until we were tossed out on our ear by a fellow officer who was so opposed to the effort he couldn’t contain himself.
Secondly, I formed a specifically Republican organization of grassroots activists, the Republican Assembly of Illinois. While working to reform the Republican party, I found it necessary to support Democrats who were pro-life against Republicans who were not. Sen. Charles Percy was a pro-abort. Normally I would be his supporter. Not any more. So when he ran for reelection in 1972 without making a great fanfare of it, I voted for Roman Pucinski, the Democratic nominee…even though in line of political duty I had to debate Pucinski’s daughter, Aurelia, in the suburbs. In 1978 Percy was opposed by Democrat Alex Seith who while not pro-life was markedly less pro-abortion than Percy: so he it was whom I supported. Third, I served as chairman of Family PAC, a funding mechanism that supported pro-life candidates for state office.
In 1984 I favored State Sen. Phil Rock, a pro-lifer, Democratic leader of the Senate and chairman of the Democratic state party for the U. S. senatorial nomination but as a Republican, I voted for Rep. Tom Corcoran of Illinois who challenged Percy in the primary and the RAI endorsed Corcoran. In the general election when the candidates were both pro-abort-Percy and Paul Simon-I abstained. In 1998 I voted proudly for Rep. Glenn Poshard for governor over Secretary of State George Ryan, having been told from discreet inside sources that Ryan had made a deal with pro-abortion forces to support their cause once he went to the governorship. A good friend of mine, Bob Kustra, started out as a pro-lifer in the legislature but he determined his career would advance more quickly if he abandoned the position and became a pro-abort. He was named Illinois lieutenant governor and the day he was named, he announced his switch.
Before he switched, he phoned me at Quaker and said that despite my earnest advice, he was doing so. I said flatly-more in sorrow than anger-- that I would do everything I could to defeat him…a neighbor whom I once served as finance chairman. We never spoke after that. When as lieutenant governor he determined to run for the U. S. Senate against Dick Durbin, I chaired a meeting in the suburbs…we called it “The Council of Trent”… to find a primary candidate against Kustra. One was found and I worked in a leadership position to fuse conservative grassroots movements together: pro-life, home schoolers, 2nd amendment people, tax cutters, even motorcycle riders who disdained mandatory seatbelts (they belonged to a group called “Abate”). We defeated Kustra with State Representative Al Salvi. We did not win the general. Republican regulars said: “see? Now because of that primary split, you’ve got Durbin who is much worse.” That cuts no ice with a true movement conservative.
Another “Council of Trent” I served on recruited Peter Fitzgerald who went on to defeat the pro-abort Republican state comptroller, the favorite, and to defeat the incumbent Carol Moseley Braun. Fitzgerald’s single term was more accomplishment-filled than many other Senators who have served decades…in that he found a U. S. District Attorney who convicted Governor George Ryan-who angered all pro-lifers by abandoning his position. That’s how movement politics works. The movement takes precedence over the party.
Within the corporation, the going was somewhat difficult because the leadership of Quaker seemed unanimous in favor of abortion rights. I had to tiptoe many times but I never had the feeling that the company was out to punish me for my stand; far from it, it was generous and supportive of me in all my activities. Still, I had to be careful that I was not flying the flag of defiance in the corporation’s face since I was the officer to whom most listened to on political matters.
In addition, I resolved to demonstrate and with Lillian we marched many times in the spirit of the earlier civil rights marchers. To learn how to participate in and lead a demonstration, I called upon my earlier knowledge of civil rights actions and even talked with some local leaders who wondered what in the world I wanted to learn their techniques for. It was both exciting and dangerous since I felt strongly that were I to have been arrested, I might well have had to leave my job. Several times I came close to being arrested-one time when our little regiment was picketing the home of Ruth Rothstein, the venerable pro-abort head of Cook County Hospital who helped move the hospital to practice abortion after the pro-life tenure of George Dunne ended.
It so happened about fifty of us were picketing her luxury apartment building…marching in an orderly fashion down the street, turning at an alley, making a “U” and returning, carrying our placards. I looked up at her window at the 5th floor and saw the elderly lady standing there on the phone, hopping mad and shaking her gnarled fists. I deduced she was calling the cops. Sure enough about ten minutes later the Chicago Police wagon arrived. As it pulled up with a screech, I had just approached the alley where we were to make the U turn. Not me.
I stood there and watched my colleagues being loaded into the police wagon very willingly, but thinking of my job and the support of my family, I just kept on sauntering away, watching the wagon, its lights flashing on and off and its horn blasting, roar away loaded with my friends. Staying out of jail may condemn me forever as coward; it was also a prudent action for the breadwinner of the family. Earlier my reporting relationship at Quaker had switched to an executive not nearly so favorable to my independence of action and I had every reason to think that going to jail, even overnight, would have been the end of my career-with three kids in college to support and a little one in high school.
It was with some strained relations that the next morning, Ruth Rothstein was to appear before a City Club of Chicago meeting at which I presided as president. When an intermediary tried to introduce us, she said tartly, “yes, I feel I know Mr. Roeser very well having seen him in action yesterday when he was directing the picketing of my house…and I marveled as his nimble adroitness as he hop-scotched his way down the street avoiding the police wagon. Jail is where he should be this morning if the police had truly done their work well.” I had no objection because the lady was correct. Hop-scotch is what I did; rather nimbly, too, as she said.
There was other examples of anomaly. I picketed Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge which sanctioned abortion where one of our fellow picketers was Virginia McCaskey, owner of the Bears, no less. Not long after, I was driven there in the middle of the night to have its surgeons operate on me to save my life by relieving pressure from a brain hemorrhage sustained in a fall. Ah yes. And once having recovered, I picketed it again.
I was disturbed at no other aspect of my corporation than its continued donations of large amounts of philanthropic money to Planned Parenthood which has a thriving abortion referral division…and which also receives support from the federal government. How to get the corporation to cut down if not eliminate entirely its donations was the point. My immediate supervisor…the new one…was, of course, in full and passionate support of the contributions to placate his superiors-but he was also frenetic about the orderly process of the corporation for which he was also corporate secretary.
So it happened that a group of pro-lifers came to an annual meeting and raised the roof about the donations. Dealing with a grassroots movement for a corporation is vastly different than with other dissident stockholders or even critical politicians. Intriguingly enough (and I use that word advisedly), I was asked to negotiate with the pro-lifers since alone in the company I was recognized as its only pro-lifer.
After some time spent in meeting with them…interesting because they were all friends who had been involved with me in forming the pro-life group…I returned and reported that there was one way to heal the breach which was that the company refrain from so conspicuously providing large contributions. Was I sure they would calm down if this happened, I was asked. Well, pretty sure but of course I couldn’t guarantee anything. The contributions shut down and the company was not bothered further. I don’t know if my supervisor fully understood that in the negotiations I had switched one hat for another. My sympathetic secretary knew and she murmured within my earshot, “duplicitous little devil, isn’t he?” I murmured back: “Duplicitous, yes. Cowardly, too. But prudent.”
I don’t want this to seem as if I have no political friends but pro-lifers. Indeed, some pro-lifers are so cantankerous they drive me crazy. Other pro-choicers like Jack Franks will always be friends no matter what they run for. But this long article happens to give the only explanation of my politics-because the Supreme Court on January 23, 1973 made me a movement conservative irredeemably… rather than a corporate one.
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5/14/2007
Personal Asides: The Trinity of Eddies…The Eddie Charisma that Attracts Both Women and Men…The Giuliani Factor.
Trinity of Eddies.
Cowboy Wally asks a good question in Reader’s Comments. He says there were three Eddies who were allied against Harold Washington. Indeed there were: Eddie Vrdolyak, Eddie Burke and Ed Kelly…aka “Coach Kelly”…the head of the Chicago Park District and 47th ward Democratic committeeman. Of the three, the first two Eddies were far more potent in opposition to Washington.
The Eddie Charisma.
My support of Eddie Vrdolyak last Friday elicited a good response from readers-but there is more to say about this fascinating man. Nothing I wrote implied that he was infallible in the handling of his politics and ethics. In fact, I believe-and he has acknowledged-that he was wrong politically on the bitterness with which he and the second Eddie handled Harold Washington. On ethics, he agreed to a suspension of his law license, acknowledging that he over-billed on some occasions as a lawyer. Strategically, I think it’s pretty clear that if he hadn’t gone to the Republican party when he had, he could have been considered for mayor and may well have won the nod. Whether he would have been a great one cannot be known-but what can be assumed is that he would have been an extraordinarily memorable one. Still none of the foregoing matches Eddie in élan: he stands alone.
Eddie’s imperishability is linked to the perception of him not as a Democrat but a classic neighborhood political leader categorized as a representative of “Chicago working class conservatives” not withstanding the fact that his law skills made him rich. In Chicago history Eddie is one of those who never became mayor but who was more colorful than many who did. You could list working class conservative John Hoellen, liberal-turned-conservative Bob Merriam, socialist-turned-urban pragmatist Paul Douglas, Vito Marzullo (who had a 4th grade education) in that category; also the brilliant Leon Despres (although Despres, nearing 100 years old now, was and is a liberal and didn’t have the finesse to “get a dog out of a pound” according to Marzullo who assuredly did).
There is a national standard for men like Eddie…with a kind of pirate’s flair and brilliance… as well.
Nationally, I would identify him with John Randolph of Roanoke, the debater and rebel who would stride into the House wearing riding togs and spurs (his horse tethered outside), became a Republican (in the Jeffersonian sense of limited government) and who broke with Jefferson because the party was embracing nationalism with too much fervor.
Probably in urban governmental history, Eddie could be compared with New York Mayor Jimmy Walker (excepting, of course, Walker’s skirt-chasing). Walker, born poor, began as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, became a lawyer, elected to state House and Senate, later Democratic majority leader of the Senate, an ally of Al Smith who became mayor of New York in 1926, winning reelection by defeating both Fiorello LaGuardia and socialist Norman Thomas, lost his popularity during the stock market crash when, although married, he was running around with chorus girl Betty Comden. Patrick Cardinal Hayes, the archbishop of New York, said he was an insult to Catholic family life.
Hayes’ condemnation meant a lot in those days. In the heart of the Depression, the Cardinal said that Walker’s personal immorality as well as his toleration of girlie magazines and casinos brought down the wrath of God on New York! The grossly unfair denunciation saw Walker became an object of church and political opprobrium which led to the politicians of the state, including the governor, FDR, trying to take him down. Forced to testify to the Seabury Commission, Walker resigned. He left the country and married Betty Comden in Europe. No indictments which never came, actually--but it was clear that he offended some public sensibilities in those Depression-somber times. Even today New York legends record that the fun and zest of being associated with Mayor Jimmy Walker is still unforgettable, renewed when Bob Hope played him in the film “Beau James.”
Vrdolyak’s flare for leadership…the capacity to draw others to follow him…can’t be erased because of too abrupt, short-term snap judgments and political mistakes…and if he beats the rap on the Patrick Fitzgerald indictments (as he well may) his name in Chicago politics will not be diminished.
One other thing about his oratorical abilities and phrasing. He is probably the best communicator of his era and has a particular resonance to the working class. When I had a daily show on WLS-AM I once played contrasting audio tapes-one of Frank Sinatra doing an interview and the other of Eddie talking on his own show. The verbal phrasing of both were identical. In fact I played them over again and it was remarkable how similarly they sounded. Both have the very same appeal…Sinatra from Hoboken who mastered a jaunty air, Vrdolyak the same.
When I saw Eddie last week, two days before the indictment was announced, I found him older looking but still wiry and jaunty. I will not name her but some years ago Chicago’s ranking senior woman editor who served on both “Sun-Times” and “Tribune” and who received a Pulitzer prize…a woman not known for entertaining anything less than an orthodox liberal view and who could be counted to look down on neighborhood types like Eddie…went to a City Club function at which Eddie was the speaker. A somewhat sedate, married woman of middle age, she told me that Eddie has a magnetic hold on women (and confessed on herself) and found it phenomenal that among her acquaintances, he had an equally magnetic hold on men. Usually, she said, a man who is attractive to women is not beloved by men. I thought about it and agreed with her.
Very few men whom women admired also appeal to men. Women adored Tyrone Power; men despised him (too pretty; they were right as it turned out); same with Cary Grant. Men like John Wayne; most women feel he was a klutz. Probably the only actor who had an equal pull on men and women was Bogart.
Much has been made in the news media prior to the indictment…a push given by Channel 5…that as his law firm represented Cicero, Eddie made a great deal of money-something like $3 million-representing the village which came from overbilling. That story was given a great push followed by oohs and ahs. I don’t know anything about how he billed Cicero but I do know that this community was awash in legal problems. And I do know, basis my earlier experience in business, that extensive work with law firms doesn’t wash down easily. At Quaker we had an inside corporate law office that cost millions to try an historic cereal oligopoly case along with outside firms that cost millions as well. We were pitted against the FTC which had an unlimited public budget. And the billing went on for years, when court was in session or out. If we were in public life then perhaps someone would have questioned the bills from blue-chip firms.
Maybe he over-billed Cicero although this hasn’t been proven. Certainly he did when his law license was suspended earlier this year and for which he repented. But a TV anchor getting $1.2 million a year for simply reading the news that someone else writes and who feigns disgust at payments to his law firm for undeniable legal troubles besetting Cicero is a little too much for my usually iron-clad stomach.
Vrdolyak assuredly had…and to many still has…that magnetic pull over both men and women. Understand now when I talk about a magnetic pull over men, I’m not talking whatsoever of the fruity kind that engages gushy effeminates-but real manliness qualities. Remember when the great big lumbering Texas transplant urban radical Slim Coleman jumped over the railing of the council chamber and Eddie smiled coolly, raised both fists expertly and said, “com’on ahead, sweetheart!” My colleague Pat Hickey wrote about it very well. That’s the kind of man men instinctively want to recognize and follow…and the same quality that mesmerized the sedate woman Pulitzer prize-winning editor I talked about earlier.
Another story I just heard today deals with his quickness of repartee. Some years ago, Channel 2 featured a two-man anchor team of Bill Kurtis, a nice appearing guy and Walter Jacobson who specialized in purveying a snotty liberalism. Bill Kurtis saved a child from drowning in a lagoon and was awarded a medal for heroism from the City Council. After the mayor bestowed the medal and great praise for saving the kid from drowning, Eddie piped up and said in a voice heard across the chamber: “He ought to get another one for keeping Walter Jacobson afloat all these years!” I’m told that prima-donna Jacobson burned.
That’s what I mean. That’s the fun-quality that will never die.
The Giuliani Factor.
Rudy Giuliani has taken the stance that he will by running on a (a) pro-choice and (b) pro-gay rights charter…and that he will defy the Democrats to match a Republican party which has a tent big enough to embrace pro-life, traditional social values and his own. Well and good. That will allow us to make a definitive choice…and of course that leaves me out of any Rudy campaign until and unless he is nominated which will require another scrutiny at the two party choice.
Several things remain clear, however:
The GOP cannot afford a lot of internecine arguments given the status of its health and the fact that George W. Bush’s low popularity ratings will play a decisive part in determining whether the party wins or loses next year.
There is no doubt that Giuliani, still the poll-leader, has been wandering all over town taking alternately one position and then another on abortion…saying a good number of confusing things-that “Roe v. Wade” being the law of the land, public funding of abortion is a constitutional right. Then when the absurdity of that position became clear, saying that he supports the legal right to the procedure but abhors it. So if he’s formulated a definite stand, all the better.
Given the Democratic party’s stance on all issues that concern me, if Rudy is nominated, I’ll probably cross my fingers and vote for him. But I doubt seriously if he can be nominated with his liberal social views.
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5/11/2007
Personal Aside: Why I’m Soft on Eddie and Why I Think He’ll Beat the Rap.
The indictment of Eddie Vrdolyak on one count of mail fraud, two counts of wire fraud and one count of bribery in an alleged scheme to collect kickbacks in exchange for sale of Gold Coast property means that he’s still officially innocent…and that’s okay by me. Most of the papers say this is his first indictment but that’s not true. One reason why he’s a pinwheel of color in Chicago politics is that when he was a law student he defended himself on a charge of manslaughter and beat the odds. I’m pulling for him this time as well.
Why, do you ask, am I soft on Eddie whom I’ve known for many years? First, because he is not and has never been a liberal, his demeanor has been free of self-eulogization; he’s been non-hypocritical; he presents no bluster, no bravado associated with the worst cons in the game-liberals whose eyes are raised to heaven as they pretend that they’re only interested in “serving the pee-pul.” That’s because Eddie not being a liberal is as straight-talking, as tough, as quippy as seemingly no one else in the political generation t hat has followed his. But that doesn’t mean he’s not compassionate. I’m not at liberty to tell you all the good things he’s done for people who cannot pay him back-good things he did without any hope of recompense…things he sloughs off.
Second-and you’ll have to take my word for this-because he’s an intellectual, an idealist without illusions. I’ve known him for many years, have talked with him often…including just this Monday when I visited his office on a matter that had no earthly benefit, use or relevance to him. For one thing, he’s as unlike another Eddie as it’s possible to be and I count that a great asset. This Eddie grew up in South Chicago and he hasn’t left it…hasn’t regarded himself with awe or surveyed his own greatness. His father had a tavern for fifty-one years, an immigrant from Dalmatia in Yugoslavia, the place his mother came from. Old people in the neighborhood still think of him as Pete’s boy and he’s proud of that. He went to a seminary in the first three years of high school, went to St. Joseph’s College in Renssalaer, Indiana and then to law school. Law school’s an interesting story. Eddie won a scholarship full-time to Harvard on the basis of superb grades. He turned it down in favor of a scholarship to the University of Chicago so that he could be around to tend bar for his Dad who needed him.
The other Eddie, if he had had a chance to go to Harvard, would have taken it in a minute, would have come back, never seeing his old man’s tavern again but to cite his comeuppance to his Harvard fellows with his nose up higher than it is now. As it is when that other Eddie strides up to Communion at St. Peter’s late afternoons in Lent…immaculately attired with flowing green tie and white hair that can be seen even if the lights go out… it’s like he has agreed to consult with God as a lawyer gives obligatory time to a client. Not my Eddie. Where do I get the idealist without illusions part? I have spent more than a half century talking to politicians and other types…poets, cops even some un-canonized saints…in two states and D. C. I ask them different things…things other than issues or politics because I know how most of them-not all--can twist and turn.
I once asked Eddie as we rode along in a car (him driving): what are the basic inclinations of man? Can you imagine if I asked George Ryan that…or the other Eddie…or Rod Blagojevich? Or Richard M. Daley? Or Mike Madigan? Or Emil Jones? Or Todd Stroger? Or Forrest Claypool? Or the Reverend Dick Simpson?
Eddie said, “what is this?” and looked at me. No, Eddie, I said: you’ve been around, you’ve lived: I’ll ask again-what are the basic inclinations of man?
“Well,” he said, looking out the window, “the first is to seek the good.”
What’s that?
“His highest good which is eternal happiness.”
Anything else?
“Yeah. To preserve himself in existence.”
Any more?
“Yeah, to preserve the species-that is to reproduce himself.”
Is that it?
“Almost. Then to live in community with other men.”
Is that it?
“Yeah-no, wait. To use his intellect and will to know the truth…because there is an absolute truth, not what you think is truth or what I think…to know the truth and thereby make his own decisions.”
Why are they put into human nature, Eddie?
“Huh? By God, you dumbbell!”
What you just described is known as what?
“Whatd’ye mean?”
It’s known as what?
“Now you got me.”
It’s known as Natural Law. You’re a Natural Law man, Ed!
“Of course! Enough already. We’re almost there. Shut up and let me find a parking place.”
I don’t know anything about the charges but I think that in the end…I mean in the end where we all have to end up…he’ll come out all right.
All the same, I’ll be praying for you, Eddie.
| | | Flashback: As Ogilvie Struggles for Reelection, Billy the Kid Offers Some Thoughts…and I Do Too, about BDSA.  | | Governor Walker |
[Fifty plus years of politics written for my kids and grandchildren].
It was well into the fall of 1972 when Billy the Kid (aka former Illinois governor William G. Stratton) and I sat down again for lunch in the Merchants & Manufacturers Club of the Merchandise Mart where we both worked. Governor Dick Ogilvie was behind in the polls for reelection; the choice Democrat, the candidate of Mayor Richard J. Daley, Lt. Governor Paul Simon who had cooperated with Ogilvie on getting a state income tax, had been defeated by an insurgent, Dan Walker.
Walker gave every sign of being a nonconformist: having walked the entire state, 1,197 miles zig-zag in 116 days. Downstate, he noticed popular discontent as with Ogilvie’s new environmental agency that thoughtlessly banned the burning of fall leaves which angered farmers and small town residents. Walker agreed with them and railed against regulatory excess. In Chicago he noticed great neighborhood discontent with the proposal to build a Crosstown Expressway so, heedless of antagonizing Daley, he opposed it.
He was charismatic and a lone wolf; he had a reputation of being a reformer-populist, combining elements of conservatism and anti-machine liberalism. He had the required intelligence and drive, rising from a California truck farm with no money for college education to the U. S. Navy, service in World War II on a destroyer, taking an exam for the Naval Academy that was open to all seamen, finishing third in the nation and going to Annapolis.
He put in two additional years in fleet duty, then resigned to enter Northwestern University law school where he edited the Law Review. He moved swiftly to become a lawyer on the Little Hoover commission set up by Governor Adlai Stevenson to reorganize state government, then on to Washington where he became law clerk to Fred Vinson, chief justice of the United States. In the Korean War he was recalled by the Navy for fleet duty but it didn’t last long, got back to private life as deputy chief commissioner of the U. S. Court of Military Appeals.
Back to Springfield to serve as an administrative assistant in the state capitol. Then a litigator with the blue-chip law firm of Hopkins & Sutter in Chicago where he dabbled in free time as a reform Democrat, founding a group that was anti-Daley, the Committee on Illinois Government, a Stevenson legacy. It went out of business so he formed the Democratic Federation of Illinois, a liberal group which Mayor Daley smothered. In 1960 he appeared before Democratic slate-makers, asking to be tapped for state attorney general.
They refused, picking William G. Clark instead. After serving as secretary to Businessmen for Kennedy, he attracted the attention of William (Tom) Brooker, head of Montgomery Ward which had been amalgamated into Marcor; he became vice president and general counsel for that holding company. I talked with him often in the mid-1960s as he would regularly fly to Washington on the early Monday morning red-eyes with me. We often sat together.
Right away I was alternately enthused with, and still terrified of, him. His eyes had a burning mesmeric quality and his diction was practiced even in private conversation as if he were before a jury. Born with no sense of humor and an abiding sense of his own destiny, it was rather like riding above the clouds with an embryonic Adolf Hitler. Occasionally our conversation dealt with Catholic theology since he, a Methodist, had married a Catholic, Roberta Dowse, whose grandfather had been a state rep from Lake county and whose great uncle had been an early president of the Chicago Board of Education. Walker was interested in the hierarchal nature of the Church, the fact that it is not a democracy which plainly mystified him. I take it Roberta was a believing Catholic as they had seven children.
By 1967 Walker had become a senior officer with Marcor and I saw very little of him on the red-eye. Instead, since the company had no objection to his civic activities, he became president of the Chicago Crime Commission and the last chairman of the Illinois Public Aid Commission. Then with the Grant Park melee which ruined the Democratic National convention in Chicago in 1968, Walker got himself named to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, then maneuvered so that he could head up a subcommittee to report on the causes of the disorders at the convention.
In the much-publicized “Walker Report,” he affixed total blame on the Chicago police, saying that the violence there was prompted by a “police riot.” That angered Mayor Daley which was exactly what Walker wanted. He parlayed his celebrity into a national reputation with liberals who sided with the demonstrating kids. But Walker was far from an orthodox liberal. As we flew along together he was very much interested in Ronald Reagan who had been elected California governor.
As I tried to doze on some of those flights before he became a celebrity from the “Walker Report”, Walker would talk about the need to craft a new party in place of the old Democratic one, composed of equal parts of (a) civil rights dedication, (b) anti-tax fervor (c) anti-patronage and (d) to some extent, anti-big corporation (although he represented one) and (e) anti-labor union bossism. I told him that his view fit more neatly into the Republican framework than his own Democratic one but it was plain he wished to stay a Democrat.
I was not surprised when he cobbled together as much money as he could from his savings and the help of others and decided to challenge Paul Simon. Frankly, never a fan of Simon’s who to me was a charade (working very hard to craft a humble-pie image but inside a down-the-line undeviating liberal) I wished Walker well. I still think he would have been in a good position to run for president had he not goofed up the governorship by concentrating on fighting with the legislature, insisting most of them were crooks, fighting with Daley and refusing to bargain as governors are wont to do on legislative matters.
The idea of walking the state, tied to his name Walker, was not his but shrewdly borrowed from Florida’s Lawton Chiles who as an unknown state senator and U. S. Senator wannabe walked the length of Florida-1,003 miles in 91 days in 1970--earning statewide celebrity and the moniker “Walkin’ Lawton.” I remember Norton Kay who became Walker’s press secretary telling me that Walker made a special trip to Washington to talk to then Sen. Chiles to get tips on how to do it.
So wearing a bandana around his neck as a scarf, wealthy suburban lawyer Dan Walker started out as a kind of Johnny Appleseed. Once he got nominated, I bumped into him and for the only time that I can remember he was actually funny, telling me how he would drive off dogs that came running at him from farmers’ yards as he strolled along. As the mutts would roar out of the fields toward him, he remembered how Chiles would do it and would stop…pull his pockets inside out in his dungarees…extend his arms and yell “rrrrrrrororororwwww!” He said nine times out of ten the dogs would skid to a stop, turn tail and roar back home.
****************
When I sat down to lunch with Billy the Kid (former two-time Congressman at large, two-time state treasurer, two-term governor of Illinois who like most governors was mentioned at least as a potential presidential or vice-presidential aspirant), Walker had won the nomination over a disconsolate Paul Simon and was cruising to election. Walker was performing heresy by liberal standards, criticizing Ogilvie for the state income tax. Stratton who knew Illinois’ fiscal condition was beside himself with exasperation, pointing out that Ogilvie had indeed been a good, even great, governor because of the courage he exhibited in passing the income tax.
I said: Why do you think it’s courageous to do what Ogilvie did, Governor-not mention a peep when he ran about his intention to introduce an income tax, springing it on the people after he was elected which resulted in both he and Russ Arrington losing control of the legislature? Why was that courageous?
“Because Illinois government sorely needed more revenue. Listen, I had hoped you would have been the same kind of moderate Republican you seemed to be when you left here and went to Washington to start your own agency. Instead, you sound like Charlie Barr. What is it: `that government governs best that governs least?’”
Yeah. Kinda like that.
“Well to follow that to the logical conclusion it means that no government is the best system of all, right? Where do you get this stuff?”
I got it by being in the federal government. Listen, after I was fired I had a few days time to walk around the Commerce Department still with the rank of assistant to the secretary but with nothing whatsoever to do. One day I came to a door marked BDSA. BDSA. I asked a guy passing by “can you tell me what BDSA stands for?” He said: “Yes. It stands for Business and Defense Services Administration, a division of Commerce.
I then asked him: Hmmm. What does BDSA do? He said it would be rather complicated to describe. I said, go ahead, I have all the time in the world. He said, “well, do you remember World War II when President Roosevelt set up the War Production Board?” I said: yep.
“Well, the WPB as you recall was set up in 1942 by executive order of FDR. It was supposed to regulate the production and allocation of materials and fuel during World War II, rationing such things as gasoline, heating oil, metals, rubber and plastics. To do this, the WPB set up a large bureaucracy to study the industries of the U. S. Like the food industry, for instance but also industrial plants. Roosevelt wanted to be sure that industry wouldn’t continue making refrigerators and cars when it should be making tanks and Jeeps. So the first talk of the WPB was to study all industry in preparation for an even greater emergency when in case we were attacked, the president could take over the direction of the entire economy.”
I said: That’s nice. So we’d have a government-run economy created in the fight against fascism and Nazism similar to the government-run economies of the Axis powers.
“I didn’t say that. You did.”
The WPB. I remember it well. A Chicago Sears-Roebuck executive, Donald Nelson, was hired by FDR to run it. How did it do?
He said: “Depends. We dealt with the three most important industrial materials-copper, steel and aluminum. The WPB would issue regulations that gave priority to wartime needs. For example, we stopped all production of automobiles; we issued regulations regarding clothing. We banned double-breasted suits, vests, cuffs, ruled that suits could only have so many pockets. We banned pleated skirts, long hemlines on dresses and adopted the two-piece bathing suit; we created a new synthetic rubber industry with a 77 -acre plant in West Virginia which produced 10% of the total synthetic rubber. Then Senator Harry Truman came forth with his investigation committee and charged that we were favoring big industry too much. Donald Nelson left and more liberal people came in. That’s what we are today-the old War Production Board.”
But after we won World War II it was dissolved, wasn’t it?
He said: “Technically yes. But all the people and records were tucked away here and we were given the name BDSA-Business and Defense Services Administration.”
Wait a minute. You mean the War Production Board which was created to regulate American industry still exists and it’s here?
“That’s right. And I work for it. I’m the assistant deputy director of the Food division of BDSA.”
And what do you do?
“Well, we continue to research in case--.”
In case the same World War II conditions recur and we’re possibly attacked by German Messerschmitts and Japanese Zeros?
“Now you’re being funny. No, we’re still ready to serve if we are attacked. The only problem is our budget is at a lowly $300 million and we cannot update our files very well. For example, I understand you come originally from the food industry? Well, our research stopped in 1945 and we don’t have the funds to update it so there’s no provision for, say, frozen food like Birdseye which came in after World War II.”
Well wouldn’t that be a good reason to disband?
“You’re being funny again. In government there is no real disbanding. The names are changed, the mission is changed just as every thirteen months or so we get a new name. I can’t even remember all the names we’ve had. Now we’re BDSA.”
Why do you change the names every thirteen months?
“Well, it’s a strategy. On an average we get a new secretary of commerce every thirteen months. We change the name to--.”
You change the name so to confuse the new people so you can--.
“Endure or persist. The bottom line of bureaucracy is `to endure or persist.’”
I told Billy the Kid: Not long ago on a trip to Washington, I dropped by Commerce to see how BDSA was making out. Sure enough, I had to look at the directory and ask a few old hands. I asked `em: where’s BDSA now? They told me. And I walked in and saw the same guy who nodded to me and said, “ah, you found us, I see!”
Billy the Kid said: “Now I understand. The Washington experience radicalized you. That’s a shame.”
I said: yes it did. And no it isn’t.
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5/10/2007
Personal Aside: How the Illinois Supreme Court Blocked a Gubernatorial Recount and Saved Big Jim’s Neck…  | | Adlai Stevenson III |
Big Jim’s Neck.
I have long wondered why the state of Illinois is so bereft of a good history book. My old once adopted state of Minnesota has a number of volumes cataloging its history, its governors and its characters. Illinois seems to depend largely on one sadly out of date book by the late Robert Howard called Illinois and a pop book which was begun by Howard and continued by Peggy Boyer Long and Mike Lawrence which carries the improbable and awkward title The Illinois Governors: Mostly Good and Competent Men. (Were they?). Ms. Long is the editor of “Illinois Issues,” a magazine published by The Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Springfield and Mike Lawrence is famous as the phenomenal press secretary to Governor Jim Edgar who became the conscience of the administration and spoke out at great length on ethical challenges. Lawrence is an excellent newsman and former Springfield bureau chief for the “Sun-Times.” I know him well and admire him.
Notwithstanding that, if there is such a thing as bowdlerizing state history these days, it occurs in Mostly Good and Competent Men. Especially in the chapter about Big Jim Thompson. Thompson, we are told by the authors, won reelection in 1982 over Adlai E. Stevenson III by a very narrow margin-5,074 votes out of 3.6 million-because Stevenson was a lackluster campaigner. Stevenson, unlike his father, says the book was a “dull speaker and had negative charisma.” But it doesn’t answer why the race became so close when Thompson was acknowledged as an excellent campaigner. The reason it became so close…as certainly Mike Lawrence above all must know…is that Big Jim had changed course long about 1978, to move from the status of reformer to big spending pol and the public’s view of him came into sharper focus in 1982.
Pompous, a blowhard, a living miracle with no guts or spine, bereft of philosophy, I am tempted to say Thompson was running out of gas but that’s not so. He was and is a gas-bag. Lawrence-Long say that Thompson ran as “the taxpayer’s friend” that year. Are they referring to that bogus “Thompson Proposition”-as advisory vote thought up by Doug Bailey, that was a hoax on the voters and didn’t hold up…to the extent that even ex-governor Richard Ogilvie condemned the tactic?
Thompson the taxpayers’ friend? In fact, Stevenson campaigned against the excesses in spending and political insincerity of Thompson and may well have made the case. What the book fails to mention is that the spread started at 9,401 votes and was narrowed to 5,000 votes when Stevenson appealed to the state Supreme Court to allow a recount. But the state Supreme Court blocked a recount by vote of 5 to 4.
That fifth vote against the recount came from Democrat Seymour Simon. Strange that a Chicago Democrat, former 40th ward alderman, former Democratic chairman of the Cook county board, would vote against the Democratic nominee who was ready to display all kinds of voting irregularities. Not that Simon should follow knee-jerk what a fellow Democrat wanted…it wouldn’t be judicial and we all know how he respected the law…but it is passing strange that he voted to block a recount which guaranteed a Republican governor’s reelection, is it not? It is passing strange that someone enamored of civil liberties to the extent that he wanted to overrule the death penalty also wanted to shut down a recount when the outcome was not clear, isn’t it?
The fact that as U. S. Senator, Adlai Stevenson had refused to nominate Seymour Simon as a federal judge wouldn’t have had anything to do with it…would it? The fact that Simon refused to disqualify himself for conflict of interest was just an oversight…wasn’t it? The fact that Big Jim had already offered Seymour Simon’s son, John, a job wouldn’t have had anything to do with it…would it? The fact that Big Jim was the chief mourner at Seymour Simon’s funeral is just…well…evidence of Big Jim’s big heart, wasn’t it?
History can and has been bowdlerized. We know that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was the Kennedys court record falsifier and poet. We know that David Halberstam decided that the Vietnam War was lost and set about justifying his amateur conclusion. Has history been either re-written or suppressed in Illinois? I can’t believe it. But all the same, it is passing strange that not only is the current media adept at bowdlerizing but what passes for historians around here seem to do the same. Not only has much of Illinois’ news have been slanted, but its history-writing has evidently been as well.
By the way, my friend Dan Kelley points out an error I had in my last piece about Thompson. He may have built the godawful fey, Helmut Jahn Taj Mahal out of colored glass that was the new state office building but he didn’t name it after himself. It was named the James R. Thompson building by his successor Jim Edgar who wanted to be sure that his own name wasn’t connected with it. I stand corrected.
| | | Daley: “Yer Causin’ People to Distrust an’ Doubt th’ Government!” [More than 50 years of politics memorialized for my kids and grandchildren].
The one-way conversation in the office of the original Mayor Daley went like this. I shall attempt to reproduce it without punctuation because it was delivered with hardly a pause, no periods, sentence structure or respite…but nevertheless it was a brilliant piece of communication.
Yer from Quaker Oats I know Bob Stuart a fine man who don’t…doesn’t fer a second doubt th’ government…but when you cast into..cast into disrepoot the qualities of so many fine men who are runnin’ and puttin’ up wit th’ abuse an an an an th’ attacks an’an’an th’allegations that they stole this election and that election when in fact th’ people voted fer `em and wanted `em…that kind of abuse, that’s not..that’s not..that’s not political discurse you see…that’s that’s that’s abuse of the human person an an an nobody…I don’t care who he is…nobody oughta put up wit’ that now you can you can you can vote fer whoever you want and thank God you can in this country but don’t go after the people have voted don’t go after the people decided sayin’ that there was t’eft, vote t’eft because that makes all the sacrifices unworthy Project whatever, Project--.
Leap.
Project Leap is the thing that…
Colonel Reilly supplied in an attempt to be cute: “Leaps to conclusions.” But the Mayor ignored it as possibly too clever.
That’s all I gotta say because we must go on and get the job done nomatter what but I t’ink you might you might you might reflect. Now I gotta go. That’sall.
Mayor, can I say one thing?
Whatisit?
If I lived in Chicago I would vote for you and I have no doubt that you were elected with a huge majority that you deserved. But--.
Allright it was good seein’ you and he (nodding to Reilly) will show you out.
Reilly said: “He just had to get it off his chest.”
It’s been thirty four years but as I can hear it now, I think I got it right.
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5/9/2007
Personal Aside: Mary Anne Hackett’s Letter to Cardinal George. NOTE: Up to now I thought I was pretty good at slinging the ink but this letter from Mrs. Mary Anne Hackett to Francis Cardinal George says it all. She is, as you know, the president and CEO of Catholic Citizens of Illinois (which I served as Chairman). The full text which was sent to the Cardinal yesterday follows:
Dear Cardinal George:
We were outraged and dismayed that you would permit the Mercy Home for Boys & Girls to invite Hillary Clinton to speak at their fundraiser. The newspapers and various internet sites report that you questioned it but were satisfied that it was not to be a political event. You can’t possibly believe that. We can only hope that your comments were misrepresented by the media.
Hillary Clinton is running for President. Any appearance or speech she gives is a political event. Mrs. Clinton opposes the moral teachings of the Church on abortion, stem cell research, the morality of homosexual acts and the defense of marriage. She has spoken to the Human Rights Campaign, the major homosexual organization in the country and promised that she will advance their agenda “when she becomes president.”
Hillary Clinton’s appearance at a fundraiser for Mercy Home is a disgrace for the Church and a scandal to the faithful. It is a disheartening affront to the pro-life movement that fights on a daily basis for the lives of the innocent unborn and other vulnerable members of our society. It is in direct opposition to the Bishops’ statement opposing awards, honors or platforms for those who oppose the fundamental moral principles of the Church. No wonder Catholics think it is okay to vote for pro-abortion candidates!
Before long you will be taking the leadership of the USCCB. Is this what we have to look forward to? We have already experienced the weakness and indifference of the USCCB on major moral issues. If only all of the bishops would follow the lead of those courageous ones who are willing to take a public stand against such speakers on Catholic property. When can we expect the hierarchy of the Church to step up to the plate and lead the Church Militant into battle?
For the board of directors,
Mary Anne Hackett, President
************
The full board is listed on the letter. This letter is more than just a statement to the Cardinal. Catholic Citizens of Illinois was the first…and only…organization to defend the appointment of Francis Cardinal George from a dissident group of disgruntled clergy that called him “Francis the Corrector.” Catholic Citizens of Illinois was the leader of a group of Catholics who defended the Cardinal after the clergy sexual abuse stories following the saga of Fr. Dan McCormack…by staging a rally on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral in response to those who had demanded the Cardinal resign.
In short, Catholic Citizens is a grassroots group of Catholics who have defended authentic Church teaching time and time again…when, time and time again, certain prelates and administrators have allowed weakness, timidity and the comfort of conventionalism to interfere with defense of Catholic principles…such as this case when those who run Mercy Home have decided it is better to grab the money that comes from an appearance of a pro-abort than not. Speaking for myself, Mercy School for Boys and Girls has received their last annual contribution from me until and unless this transgression is rectified, apologized for and adequate expression given that this will never happen again…which would have to be examined before it is believed. We’ll let Hillary Clinton and her group support it since their favor and political support is so dear to this supposedly non-profit Catholic group.
| | | Flashback: Cook County Vote Fraud and a Call from the Patriarch Mayor. [Fifty years of politics written as a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].
For untold decades…since at least the era of Big Bill Thompson, the last (and heavily corrupt) Republican mayor…vote tallies in Chicago and Cook county have been under suspicion. In the 1960 election it is very clear that had Richard Nixon lodged a formal complaint and pursued a systemic investigation, the country would have been tangled for months in allegations and cross-allegations. Therefore, Nixon gave in not wishing to be responsible for chaos and thinking ahead when he would presumably run for president again. But nevertheless, after that election, Charlie Barr, the old director-civic affairs of the Standard Oil Company, instituted what he called “Operation Eagle Eye” with volunteers trained to go into heavily Democratic and, for the most part, poor black precincts. In some cases, Eagle Eye volunteers came back with stories that curled people’s hair. It was clear that as volunteer poll watchers they had no standing and precinct captains and so-called “bipartisan” election judges ran the count their way.
I first became aware of the enormity of the vote fraud issue when Bernard Carey, a lone Republican, got elected Cook county states’ attorney. His election was an anomaly. His predecessor was Democrat Ed Hanrahan, a likely future mayor and Harvard law graduate, who cooperated with the John Mitchell Justice Department in carrying out a sentence of execution against various Black Panthers. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was concerned that the Black Panthers were a revolutionary body that joined with others…particularly the largely white Students for a Democratic Society (SDSW)…and had the strength of potentially overthrowing the government of the United States. The FBI opened a file on Fred Hampton, a charismatic young black from Chicago who was active in Black Panther activities. It sent out William O’Neal to infiltrate the Black Panther party as a mole. He became Hampton’s bodyguard and even more influential than that, stirring up animosity between the Panthers and the SDS in obedience to FBI orders.
The local Chicago police, particularly the detachment under the control of prominent Democratic aspirant and states attorney Hanrahan launched an all-out war against the Panthers, Hanrahan seeing his own opportunity as an eventual successor to Mayor Daley as a tough law-and-order candidate. The crackdown coincided with the Democratic national convention melee in 1968. Hanrahan’s cops and regular Chicago police cooperated with the FBI in spurring a confrontation with party members on July 16,1968 which left one Panther dead and six others arrested. On May 26, 1969 Hampton was convicted in a dubious case involving a theft in 1967 of $72 worth of ice cream in Maywood. He was sentenced to two years but was out on an appeal bond in August. In early October, 1969 Hampton and his girlfriend Deborah Johnson, pregnant with their first child, rented a 4-1/2 room apartment at 2337 West Monroe to be close to Black Panther headquarters. O’Neal reported back that there was a great storehouse of weapons there.
On November 13, 1969 two Chicago policemen were ambushed and killed. FBI officials determined that the Black Panthers were responsible; they claimed that the Panthers had vowed not to be taken alive and would respond with deadly force. O’Neal provided the FBI with details of Hampton’s apartment including the location of furniture and the bed in which Hampton and his girlfriend slept. A 14-man team of the states’ attorney’ special prosecutions unit was organized for a pre-dawn raid. On December 3, Hampton had a late dinner and was talking to his mother on the telephone at 1:30 a.m. when he fell asleep in mid-sentence, caused by a drink he had consumed at dinner having been laced with the barbiturate secobarbitol, a sleep agent. At 4 a.m. the police team arrived, divided into two units, eight in front of the building and six at the rear. At 4:45 they stormed the apartment. Mark Clark who had been in a front room with a shotgun on his lap was killed instantly after firing off a single round, the only shot the Panthers fired. Two officers were wounded in the shoulder and Hampton was killed by two shots fired point blank at his head.
At a press conference, the police announced that the arrest team had been attacked by the Panthers. Subsequent investigations seemed to show that the attack was initiated by the police and FBI. Hanrahan defended his action with the improbable argument that his attack was provoked and defensive but the black community was so enraged that it was clear he couldn’t run again…and that the Democratic party was a walking dead man if the party sought to run him. Consequently Bernard Carey was the beneficiary of a coalition of conservative Republicans and liberal independent Democrats. For a time it seemed like this coalition could threaten Daley and the future of the Democratic party in Cook.
In order to beat Carey, the Democratic machine pulled out all the stops and initiated widespread vote fraud. Carey told me that he visited some storefront precincts in black areas where the doors were locked to voters and precinct captains were ringing up votes on the then voting machines…the curtains ringing closed and opening over and over again. Notwithstanding this, Carey won. He wanted very much to end vote fraud in Chicago and I was one of several whom he recruited to help start what was called Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts), the name given to it by Don Rose, an independent liberal Democratic strategist who was allied with our group.
The leadership of this non-profit organization was not very good at the outset so in 1974 I was asked to become chairman. The theory of Project LEAP was far different from Charlie Barr’s “Operation Eagle Eye” which relied on volunteers. Under Illinois law, the two parties were empowered to recruit judges of election who would be paid for their service. Traditionally, the Republican judges would be named as Republicans for a day by the Democratic ward committeemen. Now Carey arranged that the Cook county Republican chairman, Robert Barr, should authorize only judges that LEAP would recruit…so they would be honest. Thus we went after a new group of judges which had not been recruited before. I found that among the best judges were Catholic nuns who would not be swayed by intimidation. But we recruited others-business professionals who happened to be Republican, a detachment of anti-Daley liberals associated with the left-leaning IVI (Independent Voters of Illinois) which was the Illinois affiliate of Americans for Democratic Action.
Thus I presided over a wildly unusual coalition…ranging from business types who were conservative Republicans…nuns who generally were non-conservative but determined to respect the process…students with long hair who gloried in giving the finger to the establishment…independent blacks…people who the year before had demonstrated in Grant Park…suburban housewives… a polyglot. We needed to raise money to provide special training services that were not in accordance with the Board of Election Commissioners of Chicago (but they had to take that training as well). To do so, we enlisted W. Clement Stone who gave an awful lot of money but we wanted to diversify so I put on a fund-raising dinner featuring my old friend former U. S. Senator Eugene McCarthy and William Ruckelshaus, a former assistant Attorney General who later became Nixon’s first EPA Director.
Believe it or not, Reverend Jesse Jackson gave the invocation…not what he wanted to do but the role I wanted him to fill since he was warmed up to make his own political pitch that night and take over the event with a cacophony of heroic couplets. I put him in as invoker at the suggestion of my old friend, Congressman Andrew Young who thought that Jesse would have to accept it. Young was right. Somewhere I have the world’s most unusual photo-of a young Afro-headed Jesse Jackson and an old Clem Stone, with patent-leather hair and his Salvador Dali mustache.
For the next few elections we raised so much hell in taming the precincts and got so much ink that I got a call at Quaker Oats with a trembling female voice saying, “Mr. Roeser, hold the line for Mayor Daley.” I thought: oh-oh, we’ve really struck pay dirt. Without saying hello Daley allowed his voice to vibrate over my receiver so much I had to hold it away from my ear. When I got a word in, I decided to add to the experience and treasure a moment to tell my kids and grandchildren, so I said: “Mr. Mayor, would it be easier if I came over to your office and we could meet?”
He said yes and in a few minutes I was in a cab going over to City Hall. Doors swung open wide since everybody from the people downstairs at the information booth to the elevator operators to the people in the front office were waiting so I breezed right through. Within minutes I was sitting like an admonished schoolboy in front of his desk while…improbably as it seems…the only other person in the room was old Colonel Jack Reilly, believe it or not the director of special events who had one eye (with one of his spectacle lenses blacked out which gave him an eerie look).
What Daley said to me and what I said back to him when I was finally allowed to reply, next time.
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5/8/2007
Personal Asides: Jim Thompson at the End of the Trail…er Trial…Mercy! Mercy! Hillary Clinton Speaks at a Mercy Funding Luncheon but Don’t Worry, It’s not a Political Stop says the Cardinal…Mark Kirk Likely Treading the Path to a Primary Challenge.
Jim Thompson.
The “Sun-Times” photo told it all: Jim Thompson sitting dejectedly on a bench outside the federal courtroom waiting to testify in the Conrad Black trial, before he acknowledged that he “skimmed” important documents…admitting he wasn’t told about more than $31 million to Black although Thompson was chairman of the Hollinger Board audit committee…stating that he asked for an industry precedent for executives being paid personally to sign non-compete documents with the buyer and, receiving none, signed off anyhow…acknowledging that in 2002 and 2008 he signed financial disclosure statements that said individual directors had approved $15.6 million in non-compete payments to Hollinger executives from U.S. sales when they hadn’t.
Asked why he signed a document that was not true, Thompson said, “because I didn’t see the paragraph”-noting that he had only “skimmed” the documents although as a director he was paid $60,000 a year…acknowledging that Hollinger International had paid to send Thompson and his wife on an expensive junket to London where they stayed at a luxury hotel.
The questioning was rude and personal. It centered on a charge that may well have spelled the answer, that Thompson was too “dazzled” by serving on the same board with Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle and wanted to look good in their eyes. My own view is that Thompson is incredibly lucky in the whole embarrassing mess-that he should have been one of the defendants in the case. The mystery is how a man once acclaimed-and correctly-as a brilliant U. S. attorney with the intellectual capacity to be a great governor and beyond, including president could have fallen to such a low estate. On my radio program Sunday, Brad Cole, mayor of Carbondale who comes from what would be charitably called the “moderate wing” of the Illinois GOP (Cole was deputy chief of staff to George Ryan and was untouched by the experience as well as brave enough not to stab his old boss in the back to save himself) said that in his estimation it is obvious Thompson’s once keen intellect was failing in recent years.
Others who have known Thompson over the years seem to have devolved another theory. I knew Thompson fairly well as U. S. District Attorney when he cooperated extensively with Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts) on vote fraud cases and spoke often at our briefing sessions and fund-raising efforts.
Then he was rightly seen as more than a formidable candidate for governor but as one who, with superb political, oratorical and forensic gifts, could go all the way…and at least make a powerful case as a candidate for the presidency at a future time. After all, he won a conviction against former Governor Otto Kerner, Jr. for his benefiting from improper influence from the racetrack industry. He tried and convicted many of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s top aides including the enormously powerful and influential Tom Keane, chairman of the Finance committee, on various corruption charges. He made his clean-up bipartisan by convicting the Cook county Republican chairman and Cook county commissioner, Floyd Fulle, state Senator Ed Scholl and supposedly a rising star of the Illinois GOP, William Rentschler. He married late in life …coincident to his first campaign for governor… to lawyer Jane Thompson who had been an assistant to state attorney general Bill Scott, and the couple had one child, a daughter.
Thompson’s debut to the governorship was helped by the Cook county Democrats’ torpedoing of their hated governor Dan Walker in the Democratic primary in favor of stolid machine regular Michael J. Howlett. Howlett was never an effective candidate for governor. Thompson’s celebrity and his ready wit got him elected governor at age 40 with 65% of the vote and reelected in 1978 with 60%.
In 1978 Thompson seemed to come to the conclusion that he would not run for president or vice president although publicly he had been listed as an incipient president-as every successful Illinois governor had been…William Stratton, Dwight Green, Adlai Stevenson, Frank Lowden (Stevenson and Lowden were active contenders). It was an ironic decision to forego the effort since his childhood and early youth seemed to have been bound up in his running for president; indeed his high school yearbook noted that the presidency was his dream. True, 1978 had a pile-up of Republican candidates (Reagan, Bush, Connally, Dole, Baker, Anderson, Crane) but at his young age, 42, Thompson could have been in the running for vice president. Moreover, with Reagan and G. H. W. Bush he could have been considered for the cabinet, say Justice.
Why he seemingly foreclosed these opportunities has never been stated not studied. But it is clear that 1978 was the year he abandoned thought of national office it for personal reasons. Unlike the case with other governors, there were no side trips to New Hampshire, no heavy speculation. The matter of the presidency was a dead issue as was any prospect that he was interested in the vice presidency or cabinet post.
It was at that time that he took on two anti-political characteristics: (a) rather impetuously liberal and un-circumspect, laying aside governmental thrift and efficiency and launching expensive spending projects akin to the Egyptian pharaohs and (b) deciding that he would make the savor the maximum comfort and status of the job and hugely enjoy its luxuries.
In 1978 when his first term ended (of two-years duration as Illinois moved to off-years for gubernatorial elections), he had an easy time cruising to reelection over a nonentity, state school superintendent Michael Bakalis. Four years later after improvident spending, U. S. Senator Adlai Stevenson III challenged him. The race was hot and it bore down on Thompson’s spending, his use of his office as a traditional harbor of largesse, his rather flagrant personal habits in lifestyle, his acceptance of Teamster money which had been delivered in cash which he then turned back. For a time, it looked like Thompson would lose. Stevenson came within 5,074 votes of defeating Thompson. Even then the outcome was not clear and was decided by a ruling of the state Supreme Court where a Democrat, Seymour Simon by casting his vote for Thompson (an odd occurrence that seems to defy an answer) short-circuited the Stevenson case. None other than Jane Byrne, who was mayor, told me that she cooperated covertly to swell the Thompson vote margin. What the word “swell” meant was anyone’s guess. When I asked what she meant, she declined to specify.
Once reelected, Thompson continued to rule sloppily and irresolutely which negated future national attention. He hid the sad shape of the Illinois economy and budget but once returned to power yet again hiked taxes, regarded by most observers as a cynical dodge. Emboldened, Stevenson tried again against Thompson with Mike Madigan as his campaign chairman-but a wild card misfortune entered the play as followers of Lyndon Larouche, a radical sect of paranoid politicians mixing left and right, captured key slots in the Democratic ticket. Stevenson was forced to abandon his party’s ticket and accepted the nomination of a third party, the Solidarity, which guaranteed his defeat. After his reelection, Thompson, according to formula, veered back from his earlier declaration that the condition of Illinois government was sound to declaring that it was now in a fiscal emergency. He asked for and received two state income tax hikes plus an assorted hike in liquor, gasoline and highway taxes. In 1989 in a surprise switch, the unfathomable Madigan, Speaker of the House, rammed another temporary income tax hike through which Thompson signed.
Thereupon Thompson made no pretense of being different than run-of-the-mill liberal governors and relied on his ingratiating personality and campaign skills to accommodate himself. He was mediocrity personified. Throughout his early gubernatorial career, his personal tastes centered on the tony life including collecting art and expensive antiques. His taste in architecture was surreal-ugly, unrealistic, extended to the construction of a garish, glass ultra-modernistic new state office building, initially impossible to heat in the winter and keep cool in the summer without expensive overruns. The building, abstract in the extreme, is fashioned along the lines of the psychedelic with a white doughnut shaped sculpture standing outside which he grandly named after himself in the style of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Sloppy in personal ethical behavior became his identification: he accepted four gold Kruggerrands from a labor leader which he had to turn back, vetoed at midnight a legislative pay raise which he had planned would be overridden (a crass gesture worthy of a low rent ward boss), pushed for his wife’s application for a federal judgeship while he was governor, not willing to admit her legal qualifications were less than sketchy, support he was forced to withdraw when bar leaders objected.
As a political leader, Thompson neglected his party with almost wanton disregard. The entire Reagan Revolution…lower taxes, reliance on middle class virtues, upstanding conservatism…passed without any application in Illinois. There was never a philosophical statement in a Thompson administration other than routine acquiescence to that of regular Democratic practice. He shunned reform, espoused patronage (which he restated at the funeral of his great friend Donald Stephens). Under him, careerists moved from law firms to state posts and back to law firms where they lobbied shamelessly, fitting in the two parties without any ideological differences. When he retired to the Winston & Strawn law firm, Thompson himself set the tone by becoming the state’s most influential lobbyist, taking on clients without much regard for circumspection. He got involved in a questionable deal to benefit a liquor client in Chicago; he contributed funds to Democrats while still regarding himself as a Republican leader.
His last significant Republican action was to steer the nomination and election of George Ryan, his lieutenant governor, as governor. Taking a leaf from Thompson, Ryan campaigned as an all but hollow vessel where he appealed to publics from all sides but mischievously had cut the cards with liberals on key policy issues without telling his old allies. The ruling party philosophy was lurid pragmatism, the jettisoning of social values and concentration on patronage, jobs and contracts.
When Ryan ran into trouble on the issue of commercial drivers’ licenses as secretary of state…in a scandal that maimed his subsequent election as governor…he called upon Thompson to help him. Thompson as chairman of Winston & Strawn allowed more than $20 million of the firm’s resources to be spent on Ryan’s pro bono defense-tying up the firm’s biggest rainmaker almost exclusively on Ryan’s behalf-leading many to question if Ryan was holding something over Thompson’s head for that unnatural act of supreme generosity by the law firm Thompson headed. Thompson continued the pro-bono work for Ryan while in the next gubernatorial election contributing money to the Democratic nominee, Rod Blagojevich. After Blagojevich’s election, Thompson served as co-chairman of the Democratic transition committee. When Blagojevich ran into ethical trouble in his term, his administration hired Winston & Strawn for counsel; Thompson then formally separated himself from any support for Republican candidates. He contributed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and Jane Thompson has been a major contributor to Barack Obama’s presidential effort.
After George Ryan was convicted on major counts despite all that Winston & Strawn could do, Thompson stepped down as firm chairman, purportedly in response to pressure from his fellow partners, yet joking all the while that he had served enough and didn’t want to stick around until he were to be carried out. In the meantime, his service as chairman of the Hollinger audit committee was questioned; sloppiness again was charged as he traveled on behalf of the company but didn’t say a peep about supposed looting of the newspaper’s parent company.
Disillusionment and mysterious abandonment of a goal that he had set early on for himself-the presidency-led to disillusionment that precipitated excess, a love of influence and trappings that have soiled a once brilliant career. If there is any idealism remaining from a once illustrious career, it is hard to visualize. I am sure in Jim Thompson’s private thoughts he feels his potential has been wasted by either unavoidable circumstances or his inability to change them. The mystery of why he abandoned thought of high office which led to his sad denouement is unanswered and will always be so.
Mercy! No Politics Here in Hillary’s Speech!
Democratic presidential aspirant Sen. Hillary Clinton, a fore-square supporter of abortion rights including partial birth abortion (whose ban by the Supreme Court she denounced) spoke at a fund-raising meeting in behalf of the Mercy Home for Boys and Girls Monday as Catholic Citizens of Illinois and other pro-life groups protested. Despite a policy document issued by the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that called on Catholic institutions not to have pro-abortion speakers at their formal functions, the Mercy Home solicited Sen. Clinton to speak “on education.” Fr. Scott Donohue, its president, has been regularly soliciting Catholic donors to support his institution. But Fr. Donohue is not alone in upholding the abortion senator’s appearance. Cardinal Francis George’s office said the prelate asked about her appearance, evidently had some doubts, but approved it because, as his spokesman said, “this was not a political stop.” As often occurs with the cardinal when he tries to reconcile a caving in, the response flies in the face of credulity. Facile of tongue but unfathomable nonetheless, he assumes he can bull it through-but the answer lies in a timidity, a deferral to secular authority that is ingrained through many years of practice and cannot be changed.
If you believe that Mercy is not a political stop…with Sen. Clinton criss-crossing the nation in the company of political reporters, image-makers and commentators recording her effort to win the nomination…if you believe that her appearance at Mercy Home was not a political stop…you have already indicated any pat answer will satisfy you so long as it comes from a spokesman who succeeds in keeping his face straight. A spokesman for Mercy (double entendre intended) said that he is pleased that “a high profile” person as Clinton would address the organization.
What does the flagrant exception to the ruling of the U. S. Conference of Bishops mean? Simply that the archdiocese believes no principle should be allowed to stand against pragmatic political accommodation. It will be of no use to write the Cardinal: letters will go into the parsing machine where sophistry reigns. Rather, I would suggest that those Catholics who read this rather contact Fr. Donohue who has the responsibility for running the place and raising the money to make it go. He is where the problem began in the first place. Tell him that for the time being…maybe for longer than he would imagine…there will be no future contributions from you. The withholding of checkbooks is the only retort he is capable of understanding…and in the last analysis bank balances and deficits will accomplish more than your angry letters to the Cardinal. It is a tragedy that those who will make the sacrifice will be the kids but perhaps it won’t be too long when the message comes home to the accountants and they have to dip into the royal treasury to pay the bills the lesson will be learned.
Mark Kirk.
Congressman Mark Kirk had a tough time getting reelected over the Democratic opponent, Dan Seals who looks like a re-stylized Barack Obama who is a blunter speaking version of Bambi. He frightened Kirk to death last year when he appealed to wealthy North Shore white liberal narcissists i.e. not because they are so liberal but “by supporting Seals people will think more highly of me so that I will be identified more surely with upper social class to which I passionately aspire.” Rather like joining the right country club. For one thing, Seals has something going for him that Obama hasn’t. Seals speaks with firmness and precision, not emitting vaporous dreams of being…let us all grimace to think of it…being black in Hawaii! Being black in Hawaii as Obama was in his youth: how awful!
In order to position himself properly in his socially liberal district, Kirk bought into abortion and gay rights. He was not just for embryonic stem cell but supported creation of a bio-med program for it in his district. Some people were ready to cut him some slack on the issue if it balanced a prudent position on foreign-defense policy. This used to be the case: no more. So frightened was he by his close call in the election that once the votes were counted, Kirk announced he would not support the president’s surge in Iraq. Now he has defected not just from the Bush foreign policy but has signed on as co-author of the politically correct throttling of the 1st amendment, the hate-crime measure passed by the House that extends coverage to people “victimized” by criticism of sexual orientation, “gender identity or disability” which is attracting opposition from Christian leaders-and which the president has promised to veto.
The onus of the Kirk bill is clear. If a pastor dares criticize the sin of homosexuality…and it can be alleged that violence occurred from such a sermon…the pastor can be silenced and a chill of political correctness will descend similar to what has happened in Canada. Kirk says this won’t happen but any allegation can be leveled and the pastor…indeed the Judeo-Christian tenets…can be placed in severe jeopardy. All this because Mr. Kirk is worried about saving his neck and has offered himself as willing token to the politically correct lobby.
The bill passed the House 237 to 180 with Illinois Republicans Judy Biggert and Ray LaHood voting aye; the conspicuously rich Biggert has always been a social liberal; LaHood is slowly turning that way. But no one has moved farther leftward than Kirk who is a proud co-sponsor. He is also very dumb in that he is making the same mistake many overweeningly ambitious Republicans make when they ignore their base…deciding they don’t need conservatives…and are moving heaven and earth to co-opt liberal support. Three wannabe statesmen who yearned to stand tall in Georgetown come to mind-Chuck Percy who ignored his Republican base to woo more exotic groups and who got for himself a costly primary in his last go-round which contributed to his shattered front allowing Paul Simon to triumph…John B. Anderson who veered leftward, picked up costly primary challenges, then became an independent and is now a cranky Democrat in Florida retirement…and Paul Findley who became a wild-card on foreign policy, weeping for the Palestinians so copiously that he resembled Arafat, splitting the base and leading to a national Jewish subscription of funds prompting the rise of arch-opportunist Dick Durbin.
All the factors are in place for Kirk to get tough primary opposition next year-and he has brought it on himself. Not that a primary battle that unseats Kirk would result in one who might beat Seals-but there is something about an incumbent who jettisons principle that produces a chemical reaction in a constituency like Kirk’s that alienates liberal independents as well as conservatives. If this happens to Kirk, he has himself to blame.
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5/7/2007
Personal Asides: Who Won the Debate? Easy: Romney…Alderman Joe Moore Responds in Defense of Obama on Rezko “Slumlord” Charge. Romney.
The smoothest, most practiced and articulate performer in the Republican debate last Thursday was…to my mind…Mitt Romney. Not only from the standpoint of looks but, essentially, he was the fastest thinker in the house. A reaffirmation of a past error was brilliantly sidestepped-his handling of the bin Laden question: is it worth spending billions to get one guy? He had given a flaccid answer earlier, indicating it was not; now his correction was so deft, it created no waves. But he did stumble-although none of the media critics seemed to notice it. In defending his change on abortion, he cited the following who changed-Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and…believe it or not…Henry Hyde! Henry Hyde? If Henry Hyde was ever pro-choice, it was before his service in the state legislature. At least I never heard of it. Anyhow and despite this slip, I give him an A.
Next, I give an B to John McCain who is by no means an eloquent man but who scored highly with his determination to win the Iraq War. Also I thought his views on foreign policy were coherent and well-stated. He is not as poised as Romney nor as articulate.
Rudy Giuliani gets a C in my scoring. One year ago…after I first indicated interest in his candidacy… the Giuliani people were tussling with whether or not he should announce a change of heart and support pro-life; they decided it would tax his credibility and he should stay pro-choice. I think they were wrong. He had the possibility of a golden answer: that the loss of life of 9/11 brought home to him the importance of all life and caused him to re-think the issue. He’s stuck now with an unbelievable dichotomy…including the argument, made a few weeks ago, that since abortion has been defended by a Supreme Court decision, federal assistance to poor women is a constitutional right-a stand he reversed last week by supporting the Hyde amendment.
But since he has hardened his abortion stance, I cannot imagine how he can get elected with a big defection in the social conservative base. For some strange reason he says that strict construction can also embrace support of Roe v. Wade which taxes credulity. When he concentrated on winning the war on terrorism he was good but social issues are his downfall and it was clear last week that he had made a major goof in not realigning his social views. It is too late for him to reverse course.
The lesser lights were all pretty unimpressive to me with the exception of Mike Huckabee the former Arkansas governor. Sam Brownback, it is clear, is going nowhere and the only way he can score is by doing so in Iowa with his Kansas aw-shucks Reagan imitation-which is a distinct long-shot. Tommy Thompson doesn’t belong up there. Congressman Ron Paul is as out of date and as unrealistic by the yardstick of today’s problems as is possible to be; he looks like he should we wearing a colonial frock coat and knee-breeches. Congressman Duncan Hunter spoke well as an expert, based on his former chairmanship of Armed Services, on military power. But I thought Huckabee, the former Baptist minister, is a true portrayal of Americana to belong on the national ticket as vice president. I can see him running with any of the leaders…although it would be an internecine impossibility and politically disastrous for him to run with Giuliani.
I have said this before but in contrast to previous years-even though the GOP is in a downturn-the selection is uncommonly good. Yet I along with many others are waiting to see what Fred Thompson can show us. I can see a ticket of Romney-Huckabee (that would be superb; the world’s most sophisticated drawing-room candidate with un-mussed hair and a drawling, down home potential folk hero, canny Arkansas preacher who lost 115 lbs, McCain-Huckabee (very good). Fred Thompson-Huckabee would probably be too down home…Thompson’s drawl is unmistakably rural as is Huckabees… but America has had two southern fried candidates before, down-home Bill Clinton and down-home (then) Al Gore.
One other observation: all during the Republican debate I was mentally pairing any one of them with Barack Obama and imagining how Obama would do. I can tell you he would be forced to rely on more than dreams of his father or the audacity of hope or vapor-filled rhetoric-but solid facts. The greatest entertainment as well as education would come from a debate between the tall, slender poetical Obama and the grits-chomping Huckabee. All the other GOP majors-McCain, Giuliani, Romney (as well as Huckabee) would eat him for breakfast.
Alderman Joe Moore.
 Alderman Joe Moore, who was my guest on WLS last week, has responded to my comments concerning his stand on Barack Obama. In line with the tradition on this web-site, a reader gets the last word with no further response from me…and here’s Joe’s, who is a great talk show guest and who will be on my show again and again in the future. However you’re welcome to comment…especially on whether you want to see your kids enter politics (as I don’t my own).
My good friend, Tom Roeser, raked me over the coals on his radio show last Sunday night and on this blog for suggesting that a state senator i.e. Barack Obama could be forgiven for now knowing the physical condition of all the apartment buildings in his district. I still stand by that argument.
Unlike a Chicago alderman who functions as a mayor of his or her small ward, a state senator’s responsibilities are legislative and more focused statewide. My state senators, who are all very conscientious public servants, probably could not identify more than one or two of the troubled buildings in my ward nor would I expect them to. It’s not their job.
Tom, you didn’t buy that argument. O.k, I’ll accept that. How about this one? The press got it wrong.
It turns out that while Tony Rezko may have many character deficiencies, being a slumlord is not one of them. After the radio show, I did a little digging around and discovered that Rezko’s company actually did a very good job at acquiring abandoned and troubled buildings on Chicago’s South Side, fixing them up and managing them well as affordable housing.
From 1989 to 2000, when Rezko acquired and owned 30 buildings, a grand total of four housing court complaints were filed against Rezko’s company for building code violations. Two were for problems with lead paint and two were for insufficient heat. All four were dismissed at the next court hearing, which means the violations were addressed and resolved. That’s a pretty good track record for any landlord, especially a landlord who owns and manages hundreds of units of affordable housing.
Rezko turned over his buildings in 2000 and 2001 to one of his financiers, the Chicago Equity Fund (CEF), an entity that performed affordable housing tax credit deals. CEF was great at doing tax credit deals but lousy at building management and soon many of the buildings began to deteriorate and become “slum buildings.” They came slum buildings, however, only after Rezko let go of them.
Fortunately, the vast majority of those buildings have since been turned around and now are once again community assets.
Perhaps you can argue that Rezko knew the properties were losing money and were heading for trouble when he unloaded them and perhaps you can argue that Rezko was a snake for breaking his promise to Alderman Preckwinkle and the city that he would own the buildings in the long-term.
But you can’t argue that Barack Obama knowingly accepted campaign donations from a known “slumlord.” An owner of 30 buildings with four code violations over a period of eleven years cannot be considered a slumlord. Senator Obama’s off the hook on this one.
As an aside, Tom, I was sorry to see you write that you would go into “mourning” if one of your kids entered politics. I certainly understand how you can become cynical after years of observing Illinois politics and politicians. But it seems to me that that is all the more reason to encourage young people who were raised with good ethics, morals and values to enter the political profession. Ther are no angels in politics but there are no angels in any walk of life. The fact that “men are no angels” is what led our Founding Fathers to establish our governmental system of checks and balances.
I firmly believe that while people are not angels, most strive to “do the right thing” most of the time. To discourage idealistic and ethical young people of all political philosophies from entering politics is to resign that profession to those who are just in it for themselves. That certainly would not be healthy for our democracy.
Having just emerged from a bruising reelection battle where all sorts of lies and distortions were offered up against me, one might expect me to urge my two young boys to avoid politics like the plague. To the contrary, I would be thrilled if one or both of them considered a career in public service, either as an elected official or behind the scenes. Of course the profession they choose is up to them and politics is not for the faint-hearted but they are good kids with solid values who would contribute much to government and the political discourse. Tom , I’m certain your children and grandchildren would as well.
Thanks for the opportunity to fill up your blog. I’m looking forward to my next guest appearance on your show!
| | | Flashback: Did a TV Crew with Klieg Lights Work Magic to Elect Young? [Fifty years of politics remembered for my kids and grandchildren].
Late in the afternoon after primary election night, 1972, Democratic nominee Andrew Young and his wife Jeanne met with a number of us to review the congressional campaign thus far. Present in his headquarters were John Lewis, now swiftly transferring from movement activist to politician, running the Voter Education Project, having been arrested more than 40 times and who helped lead the march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma (and who ultimately became Young’s successor as congressman of the 5th district where he serves today); my friend, Hosea Williams who with Lewis led the march on the famed “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, was in jail on a DUI when he was picked up on election night; Julian Bond, a Georgia state Democratic representative (not entirely happy with Young’s election since it postponed what he had hoped would be his own ultimate election to Congress); Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and who had shared Room 302 at Memphis’ Lorraine Motel with King the night before his assassination); and a number of political staff people who worked in the campaign.
After congratulating all on their work-and charting the road ahead for the general which few doubted he would win (which he did heavily)--Young grinned and said that every meeting he went to in the latter weeks of the campaign was enhanced by our film crew, dragging equipment in and hoisting klieg lights which gave the immediacy of importance to the events. “I told Roeser before that I didn’t know if he had any film in the cameras or not but their presence made folk think `wow, somthin’s goin’ to happen or be said here’” he said. Then he said: “when’s the movie goin’ to be made, anyway?” I said that there would have to be an awful lot of editing and re-filming done to make it complete (recognizing that Charles Guggenheim was going to step in and make it a finished project). Bond suggested to the mirth of all that the proper timing of its unveiling should be in two years when Young had to run again.
That having been said, I went back to Chicago. Sadly, I never saw this group again as an entity-including Hosea Williams. I still remember one of the last times we had coffee together, as Williams nursed one of his hangovers. He said what a number then suspected, that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a human being where it came to the question of attractive female pulchritude was concerned. Especially when he became an idol to passionately enthusiastic Hollywood starlets. Williams said one night in Atlanta when they were planning a march, money was low and King’s popularity was sagging (at his death he was regarded by black militants as having been over the hill), he brightened up King by saying a Hollywood songstress was in town-one to become shortly famous-and wanted to meet him. King smiled and said, “oh yeah?” They went to a reception where he was introduced to a gushing Barbra Streisand. As we know, Streisand is multi-talented but no looker.
As they walked away, King whispered to Williams (this according to Williams): “Forget it.”
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Bond’s wry suggestion that the film should be delayed until Young’s 1974 reelection came to pass. Editing took a long time and Guggenheim was doing it pro-bono. And he had to send a crew to Atlanta to dub in some locales. But after it was completed and seen as an historic production if not artistic triumph, we decided what to do with it to herald its coming. Earlier, Quaker had financed a prime-time documentary on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and we had scheduled it to be premiered at Ford’s Theatre. Precisely two years after election, Quaker financed the same kind of premiere before it was shown on television at Ford’s.
We sent out invitations to the entire national congress and many came. Buses were charted to bring dignitaries to the theater; cocktails and dinner were served in the foyer and basement of Ford’s in a splash which cost the company a good deal-but it was an excellent promotion. Because the turnout was free and featured great food and drink, it was the place to go to for Washingtonians that evening. And there was a mix-up that made the Secret Service’s collective hair stand on end-a mix-up I will remember until the end of my days.
You can imagine all the staff preparation it took to print the fancy invitations, have them sent to the entire A-List of Washington…the House…the Senate...key personnel of the White House…the Supreme Court…the media: then the tabulation of the RSVPs, the ticket-takers at the door, managers of the food and drink services with choice seats reserved for members of the Congress-with featured seats for Andrew Young and his wife and friends…also for the Illinois delegation since Quaker was an Illinois company…which meant particular seating for the two senators, Chuck Percy and Adlai Stevenson III; the House Democratic majority leader, Thomas P. [Tip] O’Neill; the House Republican minority leader Bob Michel;
…the chairman of the House Republican Conference, John B. Anderson; the House Ways and Means ranking majority member, Dan Rostenkowski…plus all the assorted corporate dignitaries from the food industry-all packed into the smallish theatre where Abraham Lincoln had been murdered. Present was the Supreme Court chief justice, Warren Burger and a recent addition to the Court from Illinois, John Paul Stevens. Civil rights leaders were there as well.
The premier was held in 1974 and for a time it looked like President Gerald Ford (a Yale university law classmate of our chairman, Bob Stuart) would attend-but then he had to go to the London Economic summit. Then it seemed like the vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, would attend-but he was also out of the country, the first and only time this happened. Congress later passed a resolution that it not happen again and it hasn’t. That meant that the Speaker of the House, the next in succession to the presidency after Ford and Rockefeller, would be regarded with all the majesty of an acting president and would have all the Secret Service protection that a head of state would have. He was Carl Albert, a five-foot four-inch Oklahoma Democrat who had been one of the first to RSVP our invitation. The Secret Service didn’t want Albert to go but he vetoed them; he was definitely coming-as a signal tribute to the Black Caucus.
Two weeks before the premiere, the Secret Service wanted to sit down with me in Washington and schedule where Albert would sit so that its heavily armed protective security officers would be ranged around him. They were uptight because the most recent constitutional amendment-the 25th--had just been implemented, first with the appointment of Ford as vice president following the resignation of Spiro Agnew and then with the elevation of Ford to the presidency following the resignation of Richard Nixon. With tiny Carl Albert as the next in line, the Secret Service wanted no slipups or even the remotest danger to come to him. There was also the specter which the agency hated of precedent: the next in line to the presidency sitting in the very theatre where the first president to be assassinated was struck down. This could motivate some nut to make history. They were very antsy.
So these buttoned-down, thin, nervous lawmen figured out who would be seated around Albert and ordered that all of them be checked out. One was George Koch who was the president of our leading trade association, the Grocery Manufacturers of America. I had to assure them that Koch was not a logical assassin but they moved him to the back rows anyhow. On and on and on. Of course the big question was who would sit at the Speaker’s right hand. The Speaker’s wife would be on his left. It was logical that the person to sit on his right hand would be Robert D. Stuart, Jr., the chairman of Quaker Oats. They even checked out his background and gave Stuart an o.k.
When the evening of the premiere came, the crowds were handled smoothly. The Speaker and his wife arrived and were shown to their box directly proportionate from the historic box where Lincoln had met his untimely end. There was one problem. No Bob Stuart. He was nowhere to be found. We frantically checked and were told that his plane was late at Washington National. The seat remained empty next to the Speaker and the Secret Service was trembling with uncertainty since this had not gone according to plan. Why was the seat empty? Where was Stuart? They didn’t give approval for the program to start until Stuart could be found.
Of course Stuart could not be found; his plane had just touched down at Washington National. So I improvised. I collared a high level Quaker executive, told him he had to play the role of Bob Stuart so that the program could go on. I brought him to the Carl Albert box and told the jittery Secret Service, “here is Mr. Stuart.” They looked relieved, talked into their sleeves and said, “Stuart has arrived-ten-four!” The executive sat down, shook hand with the Alberts, the Secret Service gave the signal and the house lights darkened and the film went on.
Twenty minutes into the projection of the film, the real Bob Stuart arrived. Of course he had to be seated next to the Speaker. So as he approached the box, I whispered to the nearest Secret Service man, “Bob Stuart has just arrived. The man next to the Speaker is not Bob Stuart!” With that the guard lunged forward, grabbed the Quaker executive by the collar and pulled him out of his seat to the aisle while other guards, their hands on their artillery under their coats, scanned the crowd anxiously.
Stuart slipped in to the vacant theatre seat and shook hands with the surprised Carl Albert and his wife, they wondering who the first “Bob Stuart” was and if this was truly the real Bob Stuart. With all its phenomenal checking and counter-checking, the Secret Service had been gulled; believing me that the decoy was Stuart and not checking. It pleased me because in the robotic check-counter-check of the Secret Service one small detail eluded them: a Quaker executive said this fellow was Bob Stuart when he wasn’t and the elite corps believed me. I looked up at the Secret Service man standing by (he was fingering his gun under his coat) with his lips moving silently but unmistakably, calling me a four-word explective that began with the word “son--.”
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The Young film having been widely praised and then used as a training film for community groups (which was my first intention), I returned to the government relations routine for the company. Not long later, a company vice president of advertising, Victor Elting III, an elderly, courtly Lake Forest Brahmin, had capped his long career at our company by being elected chairman of the leading advertising industry trade association, the American Advertising Federation (AAF), a consortium of top corporate ad professionals and ad agency heads. The job was an honorific, a ceremonial function that was to last a year or so Every chairman began his term with an address delivered to a pompously overdressed white tie and tails audience in Manhattan. The question is what Elting would say that would differ from the scores of other near-retirement corporate officers who served before him.
I had been a regular reader of the Crain’s publication Advertising Age, the bible of the advertising industry. Advertising Age featured a columnist who was a far-sighted progressive, one who had been railing against low-quality television and radio advertising which he claimed had been debasing the public taste. While no one wanted government regulation of advertising, it occurred to me that an independent sector self-scrutiny review board which would exert only the discipline of public relations censure for bad taste ads might be acceptable. We got Elting to accept the concept and in his speech he outlined the proposal of a National Advertising Review Board. Advertising Age saw in the Elting proposal a verification of what its lead columnist had been referring to and give it yards of ink. Almost overnight, Victor Elting III moved from another rather forgettable corporate vice president of advertising at a food company to the widely-publicized statesman of the industry, a far-sighted visionary with idealism and intellectual thrust. This he was all too glad to accept as the denouement of his ad career-but the question was how the thing could be implemented which was not government, not regulatory but which carried some sanctions in behalf of good taste.
To sketch out the format of such an institution, I had called on my old former assistant at Commerce, Bill Geimer who was then in the private practice of law. After I had been fired by the secretary of commerce, I landed with my one last good contact in the White House (Stephen Hess, now a senior fellow at Brookings) a job for Geimer as Hess’ assistant. Geimer moved from there to become an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld who had been given the job by Richard Nixon of running the Wage and Price Control agency under Nixon’s ill-advised regulatory scheme to fight inflation. Geimer became a special assistant to Rumsfeld at the Wage and Price Control agency and attended a meeting in the cabinet room with the president and his cabinet in structuring the Commission.. Not bad for an idealistic, conservative, talented kid who had been a patent attorney at a Chicago law firm with little hope of going to the federal government (which he sorely wished to do) until I hired him to come to Washington to work for my agency.
There is an old saying that no good turn goes unpunished-and in this case it was true with Geimer and me. Not only did I use my last chit as a “fire-ee” to get him elevated to a White House staff post earning more money than I earned at Commerce, a slot which propelled him t `o become a top aide to Donald Rumsfeld, a Nixon top adviser (landing him in a secure place where his views are recorded in perpetuity on White House tapes in a discussion with the President on wage and price controls on September 9, 1972)…after which he then landed a secure job at a leading Washington law firm…it turned out he was embittered-get that!-believing I had done him a terrible disservice in getting myself fired so that he would have to undergo the inconvenience of moving into different job slots.
I have never, ever in all the associations I have had before or since understood Geimer’s bitterness. But to the end of his days (he died too early) he believed I, who brought him to Washington in the first place (where he had striven to go), had been very un-thoughtful about his well-being and caused him job dislocation. Notwithstanding his resultant promotion and pay hike. I shall never understand it or these vagaries of his post-Commerce moody temperament. He later got connected with the CIA and became a consultant and part-time operative where he shepherded the return of the highest USSR defector to American life and with CIA help formed and led the prestigious Jamestown Foundation. He was at one time a close friend and always a trusted expert who carried out all the assignments I gave to him extraordinarily well…even when he thought I was not considerate of his well-being by getting canned by Nixon and his people!
This time Quaker paid Geimer and his friend, a philosopher of business, Richard Cornuelle who had written the book, “Reclaiming the American Dream,” to devise an institution in the independent sector, the National Advertising Review Board. Rather than two sectors, public and private, there are three-and the independent sector is very influential: churches, foundations, labor unions, associations and as we invented, a self-regulatory one, the NARB. The institution was devised at Quaker, unveiled in its entirety by Elting who by now was getting accustomed to his role as Grand Vizier and viable conscience of the nation’s advertising industry, lionized seemingly with every issue of Ad Age. True to human failings in which we all share, he became convinced he devised the concept entirely himself and when elevated ultimately to Mount Olympus with other advertising giants like Leo Burnett, he took on the toga of statesman which in his estimation…not necessarily mine… he richly deserved.
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A Chicago political (but nonpartisan) project beckoned next, the leadership of Project LEAP [Legal Elections in All Precincts]. It was designed uniquely to fight Chicago vote-fraud. I was a co-founder but paid little attention to it until its board asked that I become its chairman. It was a coalition of Republicans and independent, liberal Democrats who were critics of the original Mayor Daley…carrying with it a board membership on the IVI (Independent Voters of Illinois) for the chairman. I was now the only conservative ever to serve on the IVI board and convened the one-man (me) pro-life caucus of the IVI. That was fun. What wasn’t was when shortly after, I was summoned to meet with Daley patriarch in his City Hall office. What he said to me-all this later.
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5/4/2007
Personal Asides: Brad Cole and Russ Stewart on “Shootout” Sunday…The Democrats’ Achilles Heel. Cole & Stewart.
I have said this once and will again, often: If Sheila Simon had been elected mayor of Carbondale over Republican Brad Cole, we would never be hearing the end of it from this…ahem…objective major media. Barack Obama, the two Madigans and Dick Durbin had endorsed her as did Governor Blagojevich and Dan Hynes. Can you imagine what the…ahem…objective media would be saying? Something like this:
The law professor daughter of the late Paul Simon (D-IL) won a smashing victory Tuesday to become mayor of normally Republican downstate Carbondale-and immediately speculation turned on the probability that she will run for Attorney General in tandem with the First Democratic Daughter of Illinois-Lisa Madigan, rated as a sure bet for governor. The victory sets up yet another Democratic dynasty-the Daleys in Chicago,the Madigans in Springfield, the Hynes family in Chicago where the former Cook county assessor trained his son Dan to become Comptroller…etc.
Instead, there is all the quietude of a tomb. Nary a peep about the young man who was reelected Carbondale mayor without even working up a sweat, Brad Cole…who was reelected largely with the help of House Republican Leader Tom Cross.
Well, this Sunday join me as Russ Stewart, attorney and able political analyst, interview Brad Cole and toss him some unaccustomed curve balls to throw him off his stride. That’s this Sunday at 8 p.m. on WLS-AM (890).
The Democrats’ Achilles Heel.
It is the very commonplace statement by all the major Democratic candidates for president that they will repeal the Bush tax cuts…which means that they will give this country which is cruising in unheralded but unprecedented prosperity a return to harsh economics and the rhetoric of the class struggle.
My once adopted state of Minnesota just witnessed a huge army of 7,000 voters congregated on the Capitol mall in protest of runaway government and “necessary” tax hikes on “the rich” to accommodate liberal spending programs. I ask you, is there any mass protest planned for Springfield and this governor’s massive tax hike? Or is the Republican party so controlled by Jim Thompson clones that it will lie dormant and allow just a few feeble political speeches being delivered rather than a mass rally?
The word is that Speaker Madigan will dangle the possibility of the Gross Receipts Tax before the populace and then become the hero by pulling it away…with the result that we are supposed to gratefully accept a modest hike in the state income tax. Are we so dumb to fall for this trick?
The prescription to cure an ailing Republican party will not come from anything less than a popular grassroots movement gathering in Chicago and in Springfield. If the major media will not cover it…as they decided not to do in St. Paul…let the word go out that the media more than ever is hand in glove with liberaldom.
So…does anybody have plans for an angry taxpayers’ rally?
| | | Flashback: Andrew Young Wins the Primary and the General Election Despite All. [Memories from fifty years in politics for my kids and grandchildren].
When Andrew Young faced his primary opponent, Wyche Fowler…white, liberal, bright…in a district 57 percent white after Young had booted it the first time (1970) in a Democratic year (with Nixon sweating out a near recession and taking a lot of anger because of the invasion of Cambodia to strike down enemy sanctions on the border) by running as somebody akin to a black nationalist…the odds were he would lose again. In 1970 he had had his golden chance…known as a conciliator between the white Atlanta establishment and blacks…a man with, if not a national identity certainly a national reputation-having truly been standing next to Martin Luther King when he was shot to death (unlike Jesse Jackson who had smeared his shirt with blood and raced off to the TV stations to do a bogus theatrical act). The white portion of the district was largely Jewish, which meant it was trending liberal, sympathetic to the problems of blacks. Against all these advantages, Young had blown it by trying to ingratiate himself with the black poor who had felt he was too elitist for them. Rather than take their guff, had he simply run as a civic leader receptive to whites, he would have won.
But he had made a gigantic mistake. He ran as an angry black man, ripping up whitey in order to grovel for the applause from the pit. Now it was two years later-1972-and a solid Republican year. Nixon had gone to China which had great promise with white liberals, had seemingly (although incorrectly) met the inflation challenge by slapping on wage and price controls which at first blush seemed good (but later was proved to have been disastrous), by creating the Environmental Protection Agency, signing the SALT I agreement, had wooed liberals further with the Consumer Product Safety bill setting up the CPSC. Add to this his rhetoric for law-and-order, the Organized Crime Control Act, the Drug Control Act, the District of Columbia Criminal Justice Act which had a “no knock” provision, authorizing criminal detention for up to 60 days for Washington, D. C. criminals who appeared dangerous.
Nixon was appealing to everybody. Conservatives liked his tough words on Vietnam. Liberals liked his romancing China. Domestic liberals loved his domestic policies which were a variant of the New Deal. He had romanced liberals with the Water Quality Act, the Clean Air Act. All these things and his opponent was George McGovern, the most radical left-winger, peace candidate in militaristic Georgia. Now Young determined to do what he should have done in 1970 and run as a moderate. He now faced an attractive liberal white Democrat who had a track record as the “Night Mayor of Atlanta” for solving city problems. Lots of luck, Andrew.
“What we have to do,” Hosea Williams told me, “is to gin up the black vote.” He was getting ginned up himself pretty regularly. I said: nope; if you listen to me, Andrew Young is out of the black radical business, Hosea. Do it yourself. “Damn chalky,” Hosea grumbled as he sipped, but down deep he knew I was right. I followed Young around the district pretty much and I could see the moderate tone. He went to a lot of youth events and had a gentle sort of easygoing looseness that I hadn’t seen before (and which I see in Obama as he moves among young people). Then I’d come back to Hosea and tell him that Young was scoring well with the whites in the suburbs. Hosea would fly into apoplexy and read me out of the human race. I’d tell him he had received one or two too many raps on the head in that Selma march. “Yeah from your brothers, honky!” he would grin. But he was thinking I was right.
Not long later he told me over coffee as he sobered up (not that he drank so much but his head, having been battered often, swam after two drinks), “I think you’re right. Andrew’s got to go down the middle of the road.” I said: now you’re thinking right. “But somebody has to gin up the folk,” he said. “And I think it’ll be me. He’s got a tough chalky liberal he’s runnin’ against.” So just for fun I would follow him around. Soon he became a great drawing card for black meetings when Young wasn’t around. I rather enjoyed his demagoguery which produced a forest of black fists flying around-but on looking around and seeing that I was the only white with a lot of faces glowering at me, I decided it rather prudent that I make myself scarce. But more than watching the bland Young, I was drawn to the Hosea Williams meetings.
I remember one night in the basement of a Baptist church when he read a quite stirring statement that had been made by Fowler at the same church the night before: an exquisite statement of solidarity with racial justice.
“Ra-ci-al justice!” rasped Hosea Williams. “Racial justice from whitey! Tell me brothers and sisters…” and they all leaned forward to listen as his voice sank to a whisper, “how long has Wyche Fowler been black!” It’s a crummy statement but to be in a hot room cheek and jowl with a crowd, it exploded. Once when he pulled that I really thought I might catch a beating from some of them-but his eyes were always on me to pull my chestnuts out of the fire.
Young defeated Wyche Fowler easily in that primary which was stunning to me. Fowler quickly endorsed Young. The outpouring of black votes did it but Young with his moderation and quiet chuckling good humor carried well in the white suburbs as well. We recorded a lot of those meetings for the film. None of Hosea Williams because I rose above principle and decided the documentary which was to promote racial healing would not benefit with those “how long as Fowler been white?” tirades. Hosea was quite put out. We gave him some of the more virulent outtakes for his files.
The winner in the Republican primary was no easy match either-Rodney Cooke, a kind of Rockefeller Republican the GOP had picked for this district. Cooke started to imitate Fowler in his languid sympathy for black woes. Hosea was eager to start in on Fowler in the same way he had done Fowler, “how long as Cooke been black?”-but after one long night of discussion, I am glad to say I dissuaded him.
I told him that Republican liberals are different from Democratic liberals. Fowler took Hosea’s abuse like a gentleman; Cooke might not. “That’s just the point, chalky!” Williams yelled at me. “Let `im go after me and we got this thing licked.” No, I said: there is a residual Republicanism in this district. After all it has had a Republican congressman for a long time. An angry black militant like you, Hosea, going after a Republican would regenerate the conservative Republican base and help Cooke.
“Why should I take advice from you, chalky?” shouted Williams as part of his strategic amen corner murmured assent.
“Because I know the damage a dumb demagogue like you can do by stirring up white folk,” I said using the singular “folk.”
The amen corner seemed to agree with me. Anyhow, Hosea cooled off and never used that tactic against Cooke.
Once he growled, “how do I know you want Andrew to win anyway?”
I said: you don’t. I got a movie whether he wins or loses. I just had hoped that a man of your education, two masters degrees and all, would be smart enough to see the wisdom of what I’m telling you. If you don’t, go ahead and boot this one away.
He didn’t. Andrew Young was elected as the first black to go to Congress from the deep south in more than a century. And later, I had a blubbering, weeping black man hug me until the breath left my lungs as Hosea told me I had been right all along and he wrong. That was the last time I saw him.
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5/3/2007
Personal Aside: In the Silliest Analysis of the Season, Marin Blasts Dems’ Testosterone Level for Inaction on Illinois’ Financial Emergency…  | | Sigmund Freud |
Marin.
It takes a good deal of neurosis to link Illinois’ financial emergency to male genitalia, but the “Sun-Times’” Carol Marin, a Gloria Steinem vestigial feminist of the `60s who has never moved beyond the era, used the epithet “Testosterone Triangle” in a gender war to explain why the legislature’s Democrats haven’t found new money to meet the pension deficit, new schools, new roads and solve Medicaid and other public welfare needs. Marin, a prematurely orange-haired 50-something feminist with the mien of a secularist, dominatrix Mother Superior would be the first to howl bloody murder if someone used a reference to menopause or “female troubles” in criticizing the first woman U. S. House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. But twice in one story, Marin used the word “testosterone” as a near curse word to describe the leadership of the state which happens to be all male…as it has since its 1818 founding: with men as governor, house speaker and Senate president. Then she used the word “impotent” which, of course, also has male sexual overtones to curl her lips in disgust at the stalled process. The only thing she didn’t do was demand from the state government a seminal performance.
What Marin-so angry she could spit--meant to say, I suppose, was that the male leadership of the state is flaccid and victimized by erectile dysfunction. The imagery was probably influenced in Marin’s mind by the recent visit to the “Sun-Times” editorial board by two overage female vestiges of the past neither of whom have husbands at present-Steinem and Jane Fonda. It was a favorite insult issued by 1960s feminists to ridicule the presence of testosterone which is produced in the testes of men as reason why the world is always at chaos or war. Sigmund Freud has written extensively about such women who, unable to castrate men to purportedly make them equal to females, jab repetitively at males by ridiculing their virilizing effects including formation of the penis and scrotum, deepening of the voice, growth of beard and auxiliary hair. Freud calls this “penis envy.”
Let us acknowledge that Marin stopped short of asking the leaders of state government to undergo a vasectomy reversal-but her bad-tempered “analysis” in addition to being insulting sexism was also ill-considered and impromptu-let us say to continue the metaphors she enjoys, a case of premature ejaculation.
The bizarre anti-male, sexist Marin characterization of Illinois governmental leaders could only be duplicated by a male reporter criticizing Hillary Clinton’s tensed-up and frozen demeanor in debate by linking it to possible postmenopausal temperament which may have caused Clinton’s robotic tendencies through hot flashes, urinary stress incontinence, chilly sensations, dizziness, irritability and sweating. What would feminist Marin say then? Incidentally, isn’t she supposed to have an editor reviewing her stuff for the editorial page? Perhaps if someone is not up to the challenge of dealing with her, it’s him.
Lynn Sweet, where are you? On vacation? Can’t you take over the entire political beat? God, just to have someone with maturity to write this stuff would be such an improvement.
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5/2/2007
Personal Asides: The Attack on Catholics on the High Court…Woodrow Wilson—the Worst Enemy Civil Liberties Had.  | | Wilson |
Attack.
An influential law professor at the University of Chicago, Geoffrey Stone, has attacked the partial birth abortion decision by saying that the five-member majority consisted of Catholics who voted their church’s theological convictions and carried the day. The Catholics: Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Sam Alito. Retired Judge Robert Bork on television last night rebuked Stone’s view and said that it was an insult to the five. He added that jurists have the obligation not to vote their religious convictions in decisions but to apply the strict interpretations of the law. Bork is a Catholic convert of relatively few years duration.
My un-legal opinion for whatever it’s worth is in disagreement with Bork’s-and I tremble at the officiousness with which I have the temerity to say I disagree. Were I a jurist, I would not knee-jerk by Catholicism to make court decisions-but it would be apparent that if one is a philosophical Catholic of the old standard…by which I was reared in a Thomist tradition in the late 1940s…I would be shaped by that philosophy to the decisions I would write. For example, Aquinas’ teachings defeats relativism…read: positivism in legal terminology…at every point. Applying Aristotle’s dictum, Aquinas distinguishes three acts of the intellect: (a) apprehension, expressing itself in one concept or idea; (b) judgment, “the simple cognitive action in which something is known to be in a certain manner or not to be so”; and (c) discursive reasoning or ratiocination i.e. “all men are mortal; John is a man; therefore John is mortal.”
While the doctrine of natural law, knowable to the intellect and higher than the state or the people, is a Catholic belief…at least as it was taught to us in college (1946-50_…it comes from Aristotle who wrote of “natural justice” and Cicero. However for practical purposes, the repository of that conviction is contained in Catholicism’s philosophic embrace of natural law. That’s why Bork’s view that separation of law from religion may be specious. A true Catholic, schooled in philosophic principles as I was, is not able to approach jurisprudence without application of natural law that is endemic to Catholic philosophy. As I recall Bork…who is many things-legal scholar and intellect-was unsuccessful in jousting with Biden during Bork’s confirmation hearings. But then Biden is a quirky politician masquerading as an intellectual while Bork had the disadvantage in television back-and-forth of being a true intellectual. At any rate, he lost.
But attacks on the Catholic jurists for voting their church’s line are inaccurate. For one thing, I doubt if any of them were taught the philosophic grounding we were in our Aquinas classes.
Wilson.
All gratitude to my father who, while shaving while I was a tiny tot, inculcated in me the belief…rooted now in perpetuity in my mind…that Woodrow Wilson was an arch-enemy of our civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln had no recourse in the midst of a civil war and as soon as he overruled habeas corpus he asked for and received congressional approval as mandated by the Constitution. Wilson, who was not challenged by insurrection or anything remotely like it, was savagely uninterested in preservation of civil liberties as can be shown by the book “Savage Peace,” written by Ann Hagedorn [Simon & Shuster: 2007]. Imagine, Eugene V. Debs the socialist, a four-time presidential candidate, tossed into jail for 10 years by criticizing the draft! The “German menace” was listed as a reason; later it was “the Red menace.” Debs was freed by Warren G. Harding…the same Warren G. Harding that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s lefty fellow college profs listed as a stupe while canonizing Wilson as the martyred architect of peace.
This hagiography spawned by Schlesinger found, miraculously, that all Democrats were great presidents: Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ. All Republicans were venal, dumb, corrupt notwithstanding what achievements they chalked up…Harding who resurrected the bottomed out economy and ended insidious price controls Wilson had enacted… Coolidge who gave the nation an enormously effective peacetime prosperity…Eisenhower who understood the tension between waging a decisive Cold War and not plunging into war…Reagan who won the Cold War. Still the lingering effects of the hagiography run on.
| | | THE COMPLEX LINEUP OF CONSERVATIVE INTEREST GROUPS AND HOW THEY REACT TO THE PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION BAN BY THE COURT.
Literalists Don’t See Any Gain; Pro-Republican Analysts Do.  | | Justice Anthony Kennedy | | |  | | Justice David Souter |
At first blush, President Bush’s standing among conservatives should have brightened last week with the Supreme Court 5 to 4 victory over partial birth abortion. Pro-life Republicans were quick to point out that at long last a light is seen at the end of the tunnel thanks to Bush’s two justices-John Roberts and Sam Alito-and the return “home” of Anthony Kennedy. Pro-aborts tend to wail at the decision and prophesy that the end of abortion rights may come if a Republican is elected president.
Pro-life Republican conservatives cite these facts: (a) The ban, they say, is a victory for pro-life; the horrific nature of partial birth abortion which has been recognized by more than 60% of the American people has caused the ban that says this repulsive method cannot be used to end the life of a baby; (b) It is a victory for the legislative process which secured a bipartisan majority for the ban, extended through five different Congresses, survived two presidential vetoes by Bill Clinton and now challenges from several federal courts including a previous Supreme Court ruling; (c) The ban is unambiguously the law of the land as determined by Congress not activist judges, in contrast with the original Roe v. Wade decision which took the matter out of the hands of the states and made it a court ruling.
But there are other pro-lifers, the literalists, those who examine the words of the ban that give sanction to the continued practice of abortion and are still offended. They see no value in the decision at all but for the most part they are more grounded in legal niceties rather than the decision’s political nuances. They include constitutional authority Charles Rice and former Jurist Robert Bork. Both men are renowned legal intellectuals but neither are not known for understanding political atmospherics-least of all Bork, some conservatives say, who damaged his confirmation hearings by playing into the clever hands of Sen. Joseph Biden who twisted him into a pretzel based on some of his colorful but theoretical law school lectures, with Biden painting a portrait of the jurist as an 19th century social reactionary .
Another pessimist on the value of the decision would be Paul Likoudis, the influential news editor of The Wanderer, the oldest national Catholic weekly. (Disclosure: This writer often appears in the newspaper as a political analyst). Likoudis, Bork and Rice say that (a) the ruling may not prevent one partial birth abortion, declaring that both states and the feds can enact future legislation that could ordain restrictions on the surgical procedure that are not unconstitutional; (b) such a ban is so exceedingly narrow that (c) there is no likelihood abortion will be made illegal (citing Anthony Kennedy’s failure to comment on that possibility in his majority decision; Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas did, but Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t).
The difference seems to lie in political analysis rather than literal examination of the decision. Many pro-Republican and conservative activists see light at the end of the tunnel. Some literalists believe too much has been made of the decision by both pro-life and pro-abort camps.
Pro-lifers are sprinkled through all four major groups within the conservative movement but principally center in their own social category where life is unalloyed by other issues. Three conservative groups have been severely critical of Bush.
Here are three groups that have been condemnatory of Bush on major conservative policies:
1. Nationalists, Those who hearken back to the hands-off foreign policies espoused by Ohio’s Senator Robert A. Taft, have been fighting globally-centered presidents since Theodore Roosevelt. TR’s immediate successors were nationalists, those devoted to avoiding what George Washington had originally termed (in an address written by the first ghost-writer, Alexander Hamilton) “foreign entanglements.” William Howard Taft, rren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and, to a lesser degree, Herbert Hoover believed that foreign policies should emphasize non-involvement in wars or disputes unless they impact directly on the peace and liberty of the United States.
However they were by no means isolationists in the pejorative sense of the term. William Howard Taft endorsed “dollar diplomacy,” encouraging U. S. bankers to invest in China and Europe; Harding led a 4-nation pact to encourage global disarmament; Coolidge pushing an idealistic Kellogg-Briand peace pact to “outlaw war” which was signed by 47 nations; and Hoover the London-Naval Treaty of 1930 which further limited arms. But in the Chicago GOP convention of 1952-which I attended as a Taft supporter--internationalists backing Dwight Eisenhower defeated Taft. From that time on, internationalists ran the party including when Barry Goldwater was the nominee in 1964, supporting expanded foreign aid and mutual security pacts.
Internationalism flourished under Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush although the insurgent candidacy of Patrick Buchanan tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the old nationalist cause. But following 9/11, George W. Bush raised the ante with the doctrine of “preventive strikes.” It argued that the strikes were warranted against any nation perceived to be a threat. The Congress approved Bush’s request to make a preemptive unilateral strike against Afghanistan and Iraq. Disappointments in the Iraq War disenchanted many conservatives and is the cause of a major criticism among some of them-Buchanan and others of the nationalist school. There are pro-lifers in this group but for the most part, some analysts believe, nationalism dominates their thinking.
2. Anti-big spending, pro-tax cut, anti-big government conservatives and libertarians. They distrust Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and fought the expanded federal education program “No Child Left Behind” which gave children the right to transfer out of unsafe or under-performing schools but which was also the most sweeping education bill since the LBJ “Great Society” days of 1965. They were horrified at the “Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003”-a gigantic entitlement which Bush crafted with the aid of the American Association of Retired People (AARP). In addition the Republican Congress first elected in 1994 began as a cause, became a business and concluded in some cases as a racket. It gave a bad name to the phrase “spending like drunken sailors.” None of its over-expenditures were vetoed by Bush. The only subset of libertarians who have been pleased with him are the 2nd amendment people, supportive of his record as an opponent of unnecessary gun control. Likewise, pro-lifers are included in this group but many libertarians espouse a “hands-off” stand on this issue.
3. Anti-illegal immigration movement conservatives and anti-free trade activists. They have been appalled at Bush’s initial lenience at over-the-border forays by illegals and his support of a guest-worker program. He has called border Minute Men “vigilantes” and seems to favor some laxity in immigration control which in his words “honors our proud history as a nation of immigrants.” He has since come around to support more border security but embraces a “guest worker” program that rankles some quarters of the political right. In addition, his libertarianism holds that unrestricted free trade benefits the economy far more than trade protectionism which pleases big business because they insist cheaper labor and out-sourcing has boosted the economy to an unparalleled degree-higher in productivity than Clinton’s. But big business is not a political movement. It kicks in cash but to both parties. There are pro-lifers in this group but immigration is a robust movement group that stands on its own.
The sole group that has been consistently loyal to the president and to whom he has been consistently supportive (and for whom he cast the only veto of his career) is the
4. Pro-life, pro-family movement composed largely of conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants. In terms of campaign activities, this group numbering tens of millions along with the pro-gun rights libertarians from the above classification are easily more influential and better organized than gay rights people and feminists are to Democrats (and can probably be compared to African Americans in voting strength). This group identifies almost exclusively with the Republican party since the Democratic party officially endorses abortion.
This is the group that is generally exhilarated because of the High Court decision last week. This writer can be included in this category. We believe the victory was caused by two significant Bush appointees to the Court-Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sam Alito but couldn’t have won without the “coming home” of prodigal Anthony Kennedy. All are Catholic.
(The influential Wanderer now marking its 143rd straight year of publication has supporters in all four groups…nationalists, anti-liberal immigration…pro-tax cut, anti-big government and pro-life-pro-family movement…but has been exceedingly critical of Bush on grounds embraced by the first three groups and now has added criticism from the fourth).
The pro-life, pro-family group generally savors the anti-partial birth abortion ban as salutary but believes it is not the whole ballgame. It hopes for the possibility that five-members can hang together in the future.
***********
Why, with three pro-life Republican presidents appointing Supreme Court Justices, has it taken this long to even begin to make a dent in the pro-abort stance of the Court? Because some appointments made by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were, putting it mildly, flawed.
Reagan may be a conservative hero but there is little doubt that in appointing Episcopalian Sandra Day O’Connor he either winked at her pro-abort stand or was misled by Mike Deaver, his longtime p. r. guru, man-servant and family retainer whose influence centered on his being acceptable to Nancy Reagan, a nondescript Hollywood pragmatist with wafer-thin philosophy, caring only for her beloved husband’s political welfare as an absolute.
I interviewed Deaver some years ago when he came to speak at my DePaul University seminar (after he happily told me in years, months, weeks and days how long he, as an alcoholic, had been sober). He frankly acknowledged that he sold Reagan on the news value of naming the first woman to the court rather than on any dispassionate analysis of her service as Arizona state judge and majority leader of the state Senate. Nancy Reagan was hovering in the background urging O’Connor because of the women’s vote. Deaver and Nancy Reagan couldn’t care less about jurisprudence: they wanted Reagan to get credit for naming the first woman.
Accordingly, O’Connor demurely kept her lip buttoned up on abortion, sailing through the Senate committee confirmation process. She was a stealth decoy, an economic conservative from Arizona, a friend of Barry Goldwater, but as Deaver and Nancy Reagan well knew a social pragmatist. Not all conservatives were fooled by the O’Connor appointment. Jerry Falwell declared “all Christians should line up to oppose her nomination” because it was common knowledge that as a state lawmaker she was a pro-abort. In anger, Goldwater, then in his regular late-afternoon cups which he shared in convivial sessions with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (they were called the Jack Daniels-Jim Beam twins) lashed back. Goldwater, who had been a lonely widower, was once pro-life but, as result of a second marriage to a much younger woman, became a pro-abort and pro-gay rights supporter.
Slurring, the conservative icon senator responded, “All Christians should line up to kick Jerry Falwell’s [posterior].” He received sustained applause from the newly worshipful New York Times to which the old man in his hazy dotage and his wife had become particularly fond.
On his second Court appointment-of Anthony Kennedy who represented himself as a pro-lifer-Reagan, stung by the O’Connor appointment, was frankly betrayed. The vacancy was caused by the retirement of pro-abort Lewis Powell. Reagan sent the name of pro-lifer Robert Bork to the Hill but the Democratic Senate rejected him. Ostensible reason: Bork had a paper trail that was 10 miles in length, carrying his views on everything including old-fashioned values, purported male sexism and other non-legal topics. Then Reagan sent up the name of pro-lifer Douglas Ginsburg, younger than Bork, less voluble. But fearsome liberal scrutiny turned up that he smoked marijuana as a law professor.
Humiliated, Reagan wanted to end the controversy. He named Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic who told the president he was in fact pro-life. Shortly after he got on the Court, Kennedy fell victim to the blandishments of Georgetown cocktail party liberals who gushed that they were sure he would not be an ideologue. He strayed and was rewarded with great praise as a thoughtful legal giant by the New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse. This is known in Washington as “the Greenhouse effect”-the kind of ego massaging that ruined one-time conservative Harry Blackmun (of whom Greenhouse has written an gushing biography).
Striking out with O’Connor and bunting feebly with Kennedy, Reagan hit his high-water-mark with the naming of Catholic Antonin Scalia, a foremost conservative scholar and pro-lifer to replace William Rehnquist as associate while moving the pro-life Rehnquist to chief justice. When Reagan left office to be succeeded by George H. W. Bush, pro-lifers winced since Bush began his public career as a committed advocate of public funding for population control, earning the nickname “Rubber George” when he was in the House.
But Bush had turned completely around overnight from pro-abort to pro-life when he became running-mate to Reagan and despite widespread skepticism he kept the bargain he made with Reagan. Pro-lifers disbelieved it at first but once he came to the presidency, he did nobly in naming pro-lifers to the lesser federal bench, with better appointments than made by Reagan, at least in Reagan’s early first term. With his first Supreme Court pick, Bush named an outstanding jurist, one who in conservative legal circles is regarded as more steady than even Scalia. It was of once-Catholic, then evangelical, , now Catholic again Clarence Thomas who famously differs from Scalia on nuance. Scalia has hinted that a jurist should reflect a popular consensus rather than absolutes. Thomas hangs tough with absolutes among which life is first. He has been by all odds the most conservative pro-lifer on the Court. Liberals try to humiliate him by saying he follows Scalia’s lead but not so: Thomas follows his own drummer.
Where Bush, Sr. erred on pro-life was to trust his pro-life chief of staff, Catholic John Sununu who in turn was gulled by one whom he thought was an ally and friend. Sununu, a well-meaning but bumbling, a brilliant engineer but all thumbs in politics. A former New Hampshire governor often wrong but never in doubt, Sununu leapt at the chance of replacing retiring liberal radical jurist Catholic William Brennan. (Brennan had been named to the Court through a wildly inept process. As an appellate judge, he was asked to read the address of an ill conservative jurist at a bar association. Abortion wasn’t the issue then, of course, but Attorney General Herbert Brownell was told that an Irish Catholic made a great speech embodying conservative values and so ineptitude reigned as the Ike people picked Brennan; Eisenhower hit the ceiling later for being responsible for naming both Earl Warren, who became an instant liberal, and Brennan who always was one).
Now that Brennan was leaving for which Sununu breathed a Deo gratias, Sununu remembered the long tedious inquisition the Democrats gave Robert Bork because of his lengthy paper trail. This time Sununu wanted someone who was loyal but had no paper trail. Who to get? In one of the catastrophic mistakes of modern jurisprudential history, Sununu asked a close friend who had been an ally in New Hampshire politics, an economic conservative, indeed a libertarian, who had served as state attorney general when Sununu was governor.
Privately former U. S. Senator Warren Rudman had a pro-abortion axe to grind. Sununu knew only that Rudman understood the Senate. So he asked for a recommendation, specifying that the candidate should not have written or spoken controversially. Rudman, a wily secret non-Christian, had been the nearest thing to a double-agent the Senate saw since the days of Wayne Morse who slipped into the GOP in Oregon and got elected as a supporter of Ike.
After outraging his conservative fellows, Morse at least had the integrity to switch parties in mid-term from Republican to independent (where he voted straight Democratic)_and ultimately Democratic. Rudman saw no advantage in leaving the GOP when by staying as a liberal plant he could deliciously mislead. He recommended to Sununu the man who succeeded him as New Hampshire attorney general, David Souter. Souter, he said truthfully, had no paper trail.
Sure enough, Souter had no paper trail: in fact it was said of him that he could walk hip-deep in the snows of New Hampshire and leave no footprints. A forgettable nerd, Souter is a classic example of someone you can take a picture of that doesn’t turn out. Dull as a Buddhist monk, unmarried, he lived in the New Hampshire woods in a falling-down farm house with his mother, drove-and still drives-a rattletrap vintage Ford to work, carrying a sack for his lunch (identical to what she originally packed for him in grade school) consisting of rice cakes and an apple.
There is something more duplicitous in Souter’s appointment than in that of other Justices who turn liberal. Rudman sold him to Sununu for his supposed conservatism, as state attorney general, associate jusice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire and associate justice of the state Supreme Court. In this posts he voted properly conservative. In fact at Rudman’s earlier behest, Sununu saw that Bush named Souter to the U. S. Court of Appeals in 1990. Again, his jurisprudence was conservative.
So at Sununu’s recommendation thanks to Rudman, Bush named the shy bachelor rustic to the Supreme Court in 1990. So uncontroversial was he that he was confirmed 90 to 9. From 1990 to `93 he was conservative-leaning; he and Scalia voted together 85% of the time. The turning point came with Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 when Souter leapt over the back fence like a bee-stung colt and re-asserted Roe’s contention that abortion is a right protected by the Constitution. Thereafter Souter has been on the far-left of the Court, even voting in dissent from the majority on Bush v. Gore to decide the presidency. Sununu and Rudman are not close anymore. Rudman has gone on to chart liberal history as head of a Democratic front group called the “Concord Coalition” which wants to raise your taxes and not cut government.
The Democratic Senate confirmed Souter and he became second only to Brennan as a knee-jerk extreme liberal on everything, supporting statist opinions up and down the firmament including pro-abortion. Moreover he became the patron saint of eminent domain, sanctifying that any community can, if it wishes, confiscate private property for its own ends. Two years ago there was an attempt by angry residents of his New Hampshire town to “condemn” his rundown property and take it over, evidence of community scorn for this recluse.
In Supreme Court history the Souter appointment is regarded as the greatest example of bait-and-switch and deceptive packaging in modern times since Dwight Eisenhower goofed on naming William Brennan. But the point of this dismal history is this: Of all the pro-life presidents, Reagan and George H. W. Bush, only George W. Bush has scored a 100 percent batting average in naming social conservatives to the Supreme Court-two men with many years to devote to service on the Court.
Now with Anthony Kennedy conceivably coming “home” to his original intellectual moorings-together with Bush appointees Roberts and Alito-the issue of abortion is of viable political life once again, as the nation begins to visualize the next presidential election. Kennedy cites what he calls “a premise central” to the Court’s earlier conclusion that “the government has a legitimate and substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life.” He has declared the federal ban on partial birth abortion does not create “a substantial obstacle” since the law doesn’t ban the most commonly used method of late-term abortion known as dilation and extraction. But also Kennedy opens the gate for further regulation of abortion by citing an earlier decision that found “government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman.”
The most significant optimistic commentary on Kennedy’s majority decision came from Terry Eastland, a former high official of the Justice Department under Ed Meese and a legal scholar. Eastland wrote last week that “a Court of still different composition-with more Republican appointees-might finally withdraw the judiciary from policymaking in this deeply controversial area and let the people decide what to do about it through their duly elected representatives.” In legal language that is exciting.
All groups understand that even if Bush has another Supreme Court appointment to fill, a Democratic Senate makes it exceedingly unlikely that a pro-lifer would be confirmed. Additionally, all the groups recognize that election of a Democratic president would end the possibility of a pro-lifer being appointed. In addition the crystal ball is cloudy indeed with some aspects of the Republican nominees. Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, is a pro-abort who has recently said that while he would name “strict constructionists,” he would use that designation to apply to pro-aborts as well as pro-lifers. This makes him toxic for pro-lifers to support. Mitt Romney, John McCain and all the other announced candidates can be expected to name pro-lifers to the Court. Former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson is a pro-lifer but there was discouraging news the other day when news services reported that Mike Deaver, Reagan’s old public relations aide, is getting behind Thompson.
Because Deaver had great experience working the media for another actor, it is thought in some quarters he would have great influence with Thompson-in which case you could kiss a pro-life appointment to the Court goodbye.
What has thrilled many pro-lifers is the understanding that with all his faults, George W. Bush has a 100% record for pro-life, a major plank in the Republican platform. But at week’s end, while journalist Pat Buchanan, a Bush-dissenting economic nationalist, anti-immigration crusader and anti-free trader came through with a thank-you, the question remained: will traditional conservatives who oppose him on foreign policy, domestic spending and immigration, , grant him grudging respect for changing the Court to where an important life issue won 5 to 4? With the prospect of even overturning Roe?
It is clear that the answer is no.
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5/1/2007
Personal Asides: Politics—a Fascinating Albeit Dangerous Vocation…The National Journal: Ditch it Not Because It’s Liberal but Crooked.
Politics.
As a political junky, I will always go out of my way to ferret out political news and enjoy nothing more than leaning back and sharing insights on politics with friends. Why, then, some readers ask, did I say yesterday that I would steadfastly resist any of my kids embracing politics as a vocation? Because if in this fading but still recognizable Judeo-Christian world where our first mission is to save our souls, an auxiliary one would be to avoid “occasions of sin” where salvation would be jeopardized. Therefore, to take a very simplified and extreme case, it would be natural that I would advise a daughter not to try to be, let us say, a torch singer in a gambling casino. Moreover and frankly, I would advise my daughters and sons to avoid popular show business…grand opera and concert stage excepted… because of its propensity to corrode spiritual life and endanger their souls.
Likewise, I would advise them not to hang around with gamblers or go out with people who have been skittish with the law. That pertains to politics. While I have been and will forevermore be fascinated by politics and political types, I cannot for the life of me see many ways that a politician or a political staffer can undergo the activity even in a regular context and avoid what theologians of my church since Aquinas have called the serious occasion of sin. That doesn’t mean only taking bribes or winking when high roller contributions come in. It means the kind of compromises that are made to get elected which necessitate bargaining away principle. I think the Jim Merriner story of George Ryan and Henry Hyde is a very good case in point-an episode in which I figured to a minor degree and to which I bear some minor responsibility.
If you take it as a given, as I do, that the paramount issue of our time is the protection and preservation of unborn life, you will do everything you can in a political context to advance it. This I think Hyde has done in his career to a great degree. But in the political game as we all know, tensions exist that require support of those who have countervailing interests. The normal thing for a man of prudence and moral conscience to do would be to avoid giving help to those who are constrained to oppose the principles you hold dear. In the gubernatorial election of 1998, Secretary of State George Ryan was damaged goods-irreparably harmed in the long run by the corrupt operation of his office vis-à-vis commercial drivers licenses.
It is common wisdom that while he was running for governor, Ryan determined to gain the office and turn as sharply left, veering as far leftward as possible so as to ingratiate himself with a number of publics including the major media, which would intercede for him at a later date when an indictment would come. It was also a given…and if I knew it, Henry Hyde knew it…that social conservatives were getting increasingly turned off by Ryan and veering to Glenn Poshard. Therefore, Ryan made a pitch to social conservatives with the only pretext he could since his credibility as a man of truth was far fading. I knew personally…and if I knew it Hyde must have known it…that Ryan was bargaining with pro-abortion and pro-gay rights forces in the campaign. It was corroborated to me; it was simply undeniable although not admitted.
Ryan called a meeting of social conservatives in which Hyde was propped up as Exhibit A as a “fetcher”-for those interested in Hyde’s anti-abortion career continuing when it was in danger of being ended through a redistricting that, it was hinted, a Democratic governor would sign. In that case Hyde allowed himself to be set up as a “fetcher”-no two ways about it-in behalf of a toxic pro-abort candidate (Ryan) rather than a pro-life one (Poshard) with Ryan expected to preserve the Hyde seat in return. Knowing the excreable nature of George Ryan, Hyde allowed himself to be used anyhow due to party loyalty. Ryan’s duplicitous nature would not have guaranteed that he would have signed a favorable map for Hyde anyhow; since with him, it was bargain basement day, anything that was on the shelf was available for selling. Ryan absolutely had the moral tone of a gerbil. But the nature of politics mandated that Hyde do it. A governor would have more options to do bad things than a pro-life Congressman to do good while approaching the end of his career in a Congress that was pro-life anyhow, given that the president was a pro-abort.
I criticize Hyde, but not unduly, for this-because old-fashioned politics for which he was a practitioner sets as a given that a political careerist’s first job is to get reelected. Helping George Ryan get elected in the hope that he would forestall a remap which could cause Hyde to lose was a meager and unrealistic ploy…based as a crass favor to Ryan with not much credibility going for it.
Let me say there have been congressmen who have risked defeat in behalf of principle and have embraced defeat. In my “Flashback” yesterday, I mentioned George Weltner who resigned as Congressman rather than sign the Democratic party loyalty oath that would have made him support Lester Maddox. My experience has been that there are very few Weltners. The proper thing for Hyde to do would have been…if not endorse Poshard (a politically disastrous course)…to refrain from allowing Ryan to use him and to attempt to use Ryan in return. “Not remembering” the situation as both Ryan and Hyde told Merriner is an old dodge used by all politicians and unconvincing to say the least.
Now I have, through many decades as staffer and strategist, participated in very similar things as have all others who engage seriously in the political process. In fact, as a participant in “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” deals like this and worse. Alas, I am fated to continue as a political junky but it’s not too late to keep my kids from this despicable bargaining activity where reelection precedes consideration of countervailing good.
Someone must do it, assuredly-by which I mean participate in politics-but one look at Big Jimbo…a once idealistic and brilliant public servant transformed by ten thousand back scratchings, dozing as auditor trusted by a corporation’s board of directors…spending $20 million of his law firm’s money to defend a dinosaur-sized, snout-nosed old reprobate snuffling noisily at the public trough…Big Jimbo now wiping his dry eyes in remorse for Donald Stephens…is enough. Charles Dickens, where are you when fresh characterizations of Mr. Bumbles need to be drawn?
How corrosive political ambition is was aptly cited by Sir Thomas More. He asked Sir Richard Rich (who testified falsely against him in expectation to be named attorney general of Wales through Henry VIII’s favor): “I can understand why you did all these things, Richard-but for Wales?”
National Journal.
There is one thing worse than an abjectly liberal compendium of facts on public policy-and that it a crooked one. The “National Journal” has long been recognized as a tool of the liberal establishment in Washington, keeping sly books on conservatives all the while allowing free rein on the Democrats. Somehow, feigning objectivity, is just always seems that the Democrats make the best cases, the feature stories determine that liberals are more conscience-directed. That makes it the rough equivalent of “The New York Times” to which I have subscribed and enjoy for several reasons: (a) to find out what liberals believe and (b) because the arts section and reviews are particularly good.
 But since the “National Journal” is not just liberal but crooked, I will stop reading it soon. By crooked, I mean purposely inaccurate historically. The April 14th issue featuring a cover shot of Dwight Eisenhower has a headline that says: “What We Can Learn from Ike.” Immediately I knew what it was: the “Journal” was cagily using a Republican president to go after George Bush. So I turned to the story written by the magazine’s loudest outraged liberal moralist, Jonathan Raush. It turns out that Eisenhower was so docile that he eschewed any attempt to “defeat evil.” A wondrous lesson to President Bush except that it’s not true.
Three examples not cited by Raush’s article which is as deceptive as a Section 527 loophole in McCain-Feingold. First, Eisenhower instituted “brinkmanship” which dared to push the envelope as far as could be done short of war and which older style liberals, roughly equivalent to the “Journal,” decried as warlike.
Second, when the discussions at Panmunjom were stalled and the stalemate appeared likely to go on interminably, Eisenhower passed the word via leak that he was considering using nuclear weapons on China. The negotiators came to agreement swiftly. Third, the “Journal” goes on to further glorify Harry Truman, continuing the hagiography launched early in the 1950s by the courtier historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., of hallowed memory. Schlesinger it was who devised the scenario that Truman, who left office as history’s most unpopular president, was really a Sandow of the intellect in disguise and either a great president or near-great. Ergo Raush: “With two great secretaries of state at his side, Truman ran a more creative and competent foreign policy than Bush has managed to do.” Really now?
Why do I remember that Truman sent one of those future “great” secretaries of state, George Marshall, to China to arrange an ill-fated coalition between Chiang and Mao that failed…leading to the fall of China? Why do I remember that the second “great” secretary of state, Dean Acheson, neglected to include Korea within the perimeter of our defense and thus misled China to foment the Korean War? Why do I remember that the Marshall Plan, inaugurated by the two “great” secretaries of state-enunciated by Marshall but with the script written by Acheson-utterly failed to resurrect nations of Western Europe which held fast against free market (Britain, notably, which received more Marshall aid than anyone else and which didn’t revive until they adopted market reforms?). But not Germany which adopted the reforms and came zooming back on its own? Why do I remember that the superb foreign policy of Harry Truman lost 400 million allies and ignited a preventable hot war?
Because “National Journal” is not just liberal but intellectually crooked, it should be disregarded as a credible source of information.
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