How come John Porter isn’t more famous?
Dan Rostenkowski is nationally known for his clout. Henry Hyde became “Mr. Right to Life.” Bobby Rush went to Congress as the Black Panther-turned-pol. Even newcomer Luis Gutierrez gets calls from around the nation now because CBS’ “60 Minutes” featured him (dubiously) as a congressional reformer.
But Porter, GOP congressman from the North Shore’s 10th District, has never made the media big-time, though he has been around for seven terms, his district is one of the most influential in the state and richest in the country and he’s the perfect Hollywood image of a congressman.
Granted, his prematurely snow white hair may be a little too sparse to blow dry at age 58, and his clean-cut, high-school-yearbook good looks are somewhat lined and craggy. But Porter still seems the kind of fellow every mother would have wanted her daughter to date (or marry), the kind of non-nerdy straight-arrow who makes both “most popular” and class valedictorian.
He speaks as carefully as he dresses, and that’s always to beautifully tailored pin-striped perfection. His posture, invariably, is what you find in official portraits. His biographical sketch lists his nickname as “John.”
But the Evanston-born former probate lawyer is far from a cardboard cutout.
When other members of his party were falling all over themselves in slavish support of Reaganomics, blithely ignoring the deficit spending that sent the national debt soaring in the 1980s, Porter steadfastly opposed the Reagan deficits and kept calling for a function-by-function freeze in federal spending that he claims would have the nation’s finances balanced by now.
As co-chairman of the Republican Task Force on Congressional Reform, Porter has long fought the continuing resolutions by which a succession of Congresses financed the government in stop-gap fashion.
Appropriations Committee colleague C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) praises Porter for having a real genius for separating pork and grease from nuts and bolts in spending bills. “He’s one of the abler members of the House,” Young said.
In 1988, as a congressional overseer of the Helsinki Accords, Porter went to Moscow with a list of 694 dissidents who’d been barred from leaving the Soviet Union. Within a week, all but one were released.
Still, Porter isn’t widely known.
“I’m famous in my district-and in Hong Kong,” he says, the latter an allusion to his human-rights activities in Asia.
“I’ve never felt my greatest human need was to get my name in newspapers,” he said. “I just came down here to do a job.”
If he is known mostly to his district, which runs from Evanston’s northern boundary up to Wisconsin and west to Arlington Heights and Wheeling, it’s in large part because the North Shore has been his home, personally and politically, all his life, and he’s fixated on that territory, though reapportionment has moved his district’s borders around over the years.
Porter claims to spend a good 30 percent of his time back in his district-an enthusiasm more common to congressional newcomers than veterans. He has emphasized constituent services to an even greater degree than his Democratic predecessor, Abner Mikva, whose constituent-assistance team Porter called one of the best.
In addition to working on routine Social Security, military and veterans problems, his district-office caseworkers have tracked down and recovered the cremated remains of a constituent’s dead husband, which had been missent by the Postal Service to a Congregational cemetery instead of the proper, Jewish one.
That kind of attention produces political results too.
In the past, the 10th has been a swing district represented by moderate Republican Don Rumsfeld, Nixonian conservative Sam Young and the unabashedly liberal Mikva, who beat Porter by 450 votes in the latter’s first congressional try in 1978. Mikva was appointed to the federal bench in Washington a few months later, and Porter won the 1980 general election for the 10th District seat by 61 percent to 39 percent over Democrat Robert Weinberger.
Porter has been challenged by doctrinaire right-winger Kathleen Sullivan in the last two Republican primaries, but held off her surprisingly strong bid in 1992 by 60 to 40 percent and by a ratio of 2-1 last March.
In 1992, George Bush edged out Bill Clinton in the 10th by only 4,000 votes out of more than 260,000 cast. In that election, Porter beat his young, well-heeled Democratic challenger, Michael Kennedy, a 29-year-old Harvard graduate and junior high classmate of one of Porter’s daughters, in another landslide-65 to 35 percent.
This year, no one filed a candidacy in the 10th District Democratic primary to earn the right to oppose Porter in the November general election; the district’s Democratic committeemen subsequently named Andrew Krupp, a 25-year-old Arlington Heights manufacturing executive, as their candidate to run against Porter in the fall.
A vanishing species
Krupp, who is vice president of his family’s Riverside Manufacturing Co., has hooked his campaign to the charge that Porter “is out of touch with the people of his district,” but not all Democrats find him so alien.
“The truth is that John is very representative of his district,” said Highland Park Mayor Dan Pierce, a liberal who is the 10th’s Democratic state central committeeman and who served in the state legislature with Porter in the 1970s. “He’s conservative on things like the federal budget but he’s liberal on things like women’s rights and the environment. He’s very good on constituent services and he’s not aloof. He’s that vanishing species of Republican-the moderate.”
Porter’s chief flaw, according to Pierce, is his party affiliation.
“He’s a ranking member of a party that’s in the perpetual minority and no longer controls the White House,” Pierce said. “It’s not easy for him to get things done for the district.”
Pierce cited Porter’s failure to persuade the Defense Department to convert Ft. Sheridan into a lakefront recreation area as an example of lack of influence. In response, Porter invokes such local successes as bringing about the Superfund environmental cleanup of PCB-plagued Waukegan Harbor and securing federal funds to build three reservoirs along the North Branch of the Chicago River to ease flood problems there.
A love match
The fameless Porter is not an all-work dull boy. In the 1980s he could be seen tooling around the northern Virginia suburb where he lived in sunglasses and a white sports car. He and his wife of 20 years, Kathryn Cameron Porter, left earlier spouses for each other and are one of the great love matches on Capitol Hill. The globe-trotting director of gender and social policy for Conservation International, she was Porter’s first administrative assistant when he came to Washington and has been his campaign manager in all his congressional campaigns.
A Michigan native who worked in George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign (“He hates it when I talk about my sordid past as a Democrat”), she met Porter following his victory in the 1972 Republican primary for a North Shore seat in the Illinois House.
Three of the Porters’ five children-John, David, Donna, Robyn and Ann-are from his previous marriage and two are from hers. They decline to say which are which. “We raised them as ours,” she said.
Porter is perhaps best politically defined by his forthright and ideologically disparate stands on the federal budget, the environment and international human rights.
He has repeatedly been honored by the conservative, anti-government-spending National Taxpayers Union and was one of only six congressmen last session cited as a “Taxpayer Superhero” by the Grace Commission’s Citizens Against Government Waste, the only Illinoisan and the only member of the Appropriations Committee to be so cited. He fought the Reagan administration on what he considered wasteful defense spending, including the swiftly obsolete B-2 bomber, Star Wars research and new binary chemical weaponry, which he argued had repeatedly failed in tests and would not be accepted by all NATO countries.
“My party, in fact, ran away from me,” he said. “My party used to stand for balanced budgets and not allowing the national debt to rise. During the 1980s, my party began to say, `Deficits don’t matter.’ I disagree. They quadrupled the national debt.”
On the environment, Porter has always leaned far to the other side of the ideological fence, and is as outspoken a critic of the despoilation of the world’s rain forests. He has introduced bills to place tight curbs on the unregulated export of waste and encourage recycling. He was a congressional delegate to the United Nations Conference on Environment, better known as the Earth Summit, last year in Rio.
A zeal for human rights
Porter’s zeal on human rights dates to a visit he and his wife made to Russia in 1982, when she was grabbed and strip-searched by the KGB after the two of them had met with Soviet dissidents. Porter then joined with Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) in founding Congress’ Human Rights Caucus, which, with more than 200 members, is the second-largest caucus on Capitol Hill.
Porter was born and raised in Evanston (the suburb was removed from his district in the 1980 reapportionment; he now lives just across the line in Wilmette), and got his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University before going on to the University of Michigan Law School. His late father, Harry H. Porter, was the long-time chief judge of the Evanston Municipal Court and later served in the Law Division of Cook County Circuit Court.
Porter got into politics as part of the so-called suicide squad of Republican candidates for countywide judicial seats in 1970-a time when the old Daley Democratic Machine had a stranglehold on those posts. Though he and the others lost in the balloting, he led the ticket on his slate and won the support of every newspaper and group endorsing in the race.
“Then my father died very suddenly,” Porter said. “If he had not died he probably would have talked me out of any political career and said, `Have a happy life and practice law.’ “
Instead, Porter ran for the Illinois House in 1972 and won, serving three terms. Though he didn’t grab many major headlines, he got 60 bills passed by the House in Springfield, including a ban on leghold traps, government inducements to car pooling, denial of pension rights to any public official convicted of a felony, a prohibition against flammable tents and outdoor-use fabrics, and one requiring disclosure of secret beneficiaries of land trusts involved in business with state government.
Asked if he has plans for higher office, he replied: “I certainly do. I’ve wanted to be president since I was 10 years old. At the moment, I do have to win . . . an election. But we do have Senate seats coming up in ’96 and ’98, and I’m certainly going to look at that.”
The Senate, of course, could make John Edward Porter really famous. But to get there, he’ll first have to make himself as well known in Metropolis, Shawneetown, Quincy and Galena as he is now along Sheridan Road.
