Mellifluous as a late-night deejay on an easy-listening station, the voice on the other end of the line stirred instant recall. After all, it had helped launch a golden career in Illinois and national politics 30 years ago.
“I have to cancel our appointment,” the voice said apologetically. “But I am very much needed for this White House meeting.”
What transpired at the off-the-record briefing later that morning remains a mystery to outsiders. But the personage behind this voice of presidential timbre was easily recognizable: Charles H. Percy, who for 18 years was a Republican U.S. senator from Illinois.
Percy had been invited to the White House briefing not as a guest of Bill or Hillary Clinton but of the Arab American Institute, a nonprofit group dedicated to political empowerment of Arab Americans. The day before, when winter storms had felled the capital, Percy spoke at an institute-sponsored luncheon at a downtown hotel about the need for privatization and open markets in the Middle East.
It has been nine years since Paul Simon defeated Percy, who had risen to chairman of the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee, in a hard-fought contest. Yet like legions of other politicians who failed at the polls or quit, Percy declined to slink back home.
Among those occasionally seen trodding the thoroughfares around the White House and the Capitol are any number of weathered faces whose names were regular fare in the news media. For instance, former Democratic Sens. Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke of Indiana practice law here, as do former Sens. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine), Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) and Paul Laxalt (R-Nev.), and former Rep. Tom Railsback (R-Ill.).
Chuck Conconi, editor at large of Washingtonian magazine and a former gossip columnist for The Washington Post, speaks of those who never go home as “the ghosts of Washington.”
The nation’s capital, he says, is a “cruel place, a lot like Hollywood, where you are no better than your last job.”
Conconi recalls former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s telling a friend he had to leave Washington when his days as a powerbroker were over because he could not stay “without a role.” But, according to Conconi, Percy is somewhat of an exception.
“Percy stays busy and is on a lot of boards,” Conconi says. “He is a man with a purpose who still has a lot of energy. He is also charming, and when talking to you isn’t looking around the room for someone more important.”
Conconi also points out that Percy’s older daughter, Sharon Rockefeller, the wife of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), provides him with an added entree as the highly regarded president of WETA, the local PBS affiliate.
These days Percy, 74, spends his mornings at the Hariri Foundation, of which he is chairman of the board and president. On leaving the Senate, Percy joined the foundation, which provides loans to Lebanese college students and is named after Rafiq Hariri, prime minister of Lebanon and, according to Percy, a multibillionaire who heads the giant construction firm of Saudi Oger based in Riyadh.
The foundation’s offices exude expensive elegance: the furnishings are top-of-the-line and made by the Italian firm Saporiti, which has dolled up executive suites all over Europe, Japan and the U.S.
The muted tones of the walls, carpeting and upholstery have a restful quality, yet Percy needs only a few sips of decaf coffee to rev up. In an instant, as if summoned by a call of the wild, he is demonstrating one of the 30 different ways he can whistle.
An effective life
In any encounter with Percy, it is immediately apparent that the years have been kind to him and he knows it.
“There are three ages in America,” he says offhandedly, “youth, middle age and, `Gee, you look terrific.’ “
Percy still wears his signature hearing aid: He was the first senator to wear the device publicly in the Senate and once advised former President Ronald Reagan to quit tuning out and get one. His reading glasses may be thicker but his waist is not, thanks to a rigorous regimen of exercise.
Percy pedals an indoor bicycle for 45 minutes almost daily, swims one mile four days a week at the Georgetown University pool and does daily calisthenics, including 100 pushups on his knees. The calisthenics were recommended for his back by the Chicago Rehabilitation Institute, where, he notes, his portrait hangs in the lobby (and on the 16th floor) in recognition of his fund-raising activities.
“My life has been extraordinarily effective,” he says. “Take yesterday for example:
“There was a board meeting in the morning. Then I went to the new embassy of Canada for a lecture and sat with the ambassador-designate, Christian Chretien-the nephew of the new prime minister-and his wife. After that I went to the Council on Foreign Relations to hear King Hussein of Jordan, a long-time friend of ours.” Percy notes that Hussein’s wife, Queen Noor, the American-born Lisa Halaby, had been a classmate of Percy’s daughter Gail.
Then there was a dinner with the Bretton Woods Committee, a nonprofit group dedicated to educating the public about international development organizations such as the World Bank.
“The foreign minister of Poland sat with us, and (Indiana Republican) Dick Lugar was there from the Senate,” he says. “Here I am, nine years after leaving the Senate and working.”
A devout Christian Scientist, Percy is a noticeable practitioner of positive thinking. He admits that his political enemies-singling out for mention the Chicago Tribune’s former long-time political editor George Tagge-may have done him a favor by successfully promoting his conservative opponent, the late William J. Scott, in the 1964 Illinois GOP gubernatorial primary.
Two years later, Percy, the long-time chief executive officer of Bell & Howell, was available to run for the U.S. Senate and upended veteran Democrat Paul Douglas. In the 1970s Percy enjoyed a brief interlude as a presidential possibility.
After Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan (“a dear friend of mine over the years”) replaced Spiro Agnew as vice president in 1973, he urged Percy to run for president in 1976. But once Ford became president on Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and decided to run in 1976, Percy supported Ford.
Insisting he has no regrets, Percy says: “Sure, there was a good chance that I could have been president. But you have faith you are going to be doing the right thing. . . . I’ve been so grateful for everything that’s happened to me that I couldn’t possibly spend the time thinking about what might have happened if I would have been president.”
He says one of the first decisions he made on leaving the Senate was not to become a lobbyist, because son-in-law Jay Rockefeller had just been elected to the Senate and “I didn’t want to lobby him.”
Representing a foreign government was not an alternative because, he explains, “I didn’t feel comfortable doing that with all those CIA briefings every morning for 18 years.”
An India specialist
Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz offered Percy the chance to be U.S. ambassador to India, but he declined for family reasons. Percy has long considered himself an India specialist, having known three generations of the ruling Gandhi family.
Promising Reagan “his help at home,” Percy went to work on organizing a committee of the India-U.S. Business Council to promote high-tech sales to the underdeveloped nation. Recently he returned from a business trip he termed his “69th trip to India in 45 years.”
Percy and his wife, Loraine, no longer maintain a home in Illinois, having sold their Wilmette house a number of years ago, but he frequently travels to Chicago to attend meetings of the University of Chicago board of trustees. A university alumnus, he describes himself as “probably the senior member” of the board on which he has served for 44 years.
“I love going back there,” he says. “It takes me back to the part of the city I lived in as a student and where my mother was born (on Calumet Avenue in the Woodlawn neighborhood) and taught violin for 25 cents a lesson.”
Prominently displayed on his uncluttered desk is a soft-back book with a plain white cover and the title “The Story of Elisabeth.” Elisabeth is Percy’s mother and the family matriarch, who is now in her 102nd year and has lived in Seven Lakes, N.C., near her only daughter for the last nine years. (Percy’s father, Edward, died in 1958.)
Family chronicles
Written by Chicago journalist Martha Cleveland for the Percys, the book chronicles the long life of Elisabeth Harting Percy. It explains how devout Christian Scientists, such as Percy and his mother, struggle to correct their “mortal” thinking.
“Evils must be overcome with good; one’s own attitude must be changed by the discipline of clarifying and healing one’s own thinking,” she writes. “If thinking is right, the body will reflect better things.”
In the afternoons, Percy strolls one block up the street from the Hariri Foundation to the offices of his own firm, Charles Percy & Associates.
The firm, of which son Mark is senior vice president, is promoting technological parks in developing countries. The parks, along the lines of those in California’s Silicon Valley, feature commercial buildings, research centers, educational facilities, housing and recreational facilities.
The business often takes him overseas, and by his own account last year he was in India three times, Tunisia and the Mideast (including Turkey) six or seven times, and China twice.
Since the late 1960s, Percy and his wife, who often travel together, have lived in the same house in the city’s historic Georgetown neighborhood and have done little to change its Sister Parish decor. They worry about their grandchildren’s college educations and the increasingly pub-crawling character of Georgetown, where daughter Gail and family also live.
Loraine Percy, who remains active in the Senate wives association, is a vice president of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. Both Percys have testified before the local alcohol beverage control board about what he describes as “the crime, litter, graffiti, dope and alcohol” there.
In the phone book
“I don’t see much control but a lot of expansion,” complains Percy, who admits to drinking an occasional glass of wine.
Although their telephone number and address are listed in the phone book, the Percys have kept the inside of their homes off-limits to cameras-on the advice of the FBI, he explains-ever since the brutal 1966 murder of daughter Valerie, Sharon’s twin, in their Kenilworth home on Chicago’s North Shore.
Valerie, Sharon and their brother, Roger, who owns a media-research and marketing-consulting firm in Seattle, were the children of Percy and his first wife, Jeanne. Jeanne died in 1947 at age 23, having suffered a toxic reaction to drugs used during an operation related to ulcerative colitis (Jeanne wasn’t a Christian Scientist). Loraine and Charles met two years later while on skiing vacations in Sun Valley, Idaho, and were married in 1950. Gail and Mark are their children.
Percy keeps up with current events. He recently wrote to Jesse Jackson, praising him for promoting a new social-values revolution and increased community responsibility for crime. He expresses satisfaction with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Israeli-PLO peace pact.
“I worked with Mayor Daley’s brother (Bill) and other members of the Clinton administration to get (congressional) support for NAFTA,” he says proudly.
And speaking of the Mideast pact, he adds, “I never thought I would live to see the day. . . . The White House invited me to come to the ceremony. It was so thoughtful and nice. And I was in the front row.”
