GOVERNOR RICHARD OGILVIE:
In the Interest of the State
By Taylor Pensoneau
Southern Illinois University Press, 293 pages, $35
A short generation ago, Illinois’ richest crop was its politicians. The two most influential U.S. senators in Illinois history–Everett Dirksen and Paul Douglas–were winding down their careers. The state’s congressional delegation included powerful national figures such as GOP Whip Les Arends and future Republican Minority Leader Robert Michel, while the Democrats boasted John Kluczynski, who almost anonymously ruled the nation’s highway programs, and then-young Dan Rostenkowski, the future chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Above them all was the Democratic colossus of Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley.
A quick glance at the names on Tuesday’s primary ballot sadly summarizes the political condition of the nation and state in 1998. On the Republican side there are Secretary of State George Ryan–who is the last of the stair-step politicians to have punched his ticket at every level of state government and who is seeking the party’s nomination for governor–and incumbent Atty. Gen. James Ryan, who is seeking renomination to his post. After that is a collection of people never heard of before and possibly never again. There are two Republican candidates for U.S. senator, but one didn’t want to run and most people never heard of the other. As for the Democrats, incumbent Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun is running unopposed, and the too-familiar Roland Burris is leading the race for the governor’s nomination, which says all that needs to be said about his three opponents.
Contrast that with 1968, when no fewer than three future U.S. senators–Adlai Stevenson III, Paul Simon and Alan Dixon–wanted to run for governor as the Democratic candidate. Imagine any one of them on this year’s ballot. For reasons known only to God and Daley, the mayor, who unilaterally made all Democratic decisions, stuck with Sam Shapiro, who had inherited the governor’s office a few months earlier. As it turned out, what was bad for Stevenson, Simon and Dixon turned out very good for Illinois.
Had any of those ultimately successful Democrats been on the 1968 ballot, Richard Buell Ogilvie might not have been able to defeat him as he did Shapiro, and much of what is good about Illinois state government three decades later might not exist.
In that last charismatic age of American politics, before every officeholder had to account for lust in his heart or in his office, Ogilvie was about the least charismatic politician in Illinois, which was his ultimate undoing. Even as the Republican candidate for governor he was overshadowed in his own party by Charles Percy, who had taken Douglas’ Senate seat and already was being talked about as presidential timber. There also was the popular state treasurer, William Scott, who many Republicans wished had been their gubernatorial candidate and who would later be elected attorney general three times.
But it is easy to say that of all the political figures who painted the Illinois landscape in the 1960s and early ’70s, none of them, save Daley himself, had more impact on the future of the state or demonstrated more statesmanship and courage than Ogilvie.
Ogilvie was born Feb. 22, 1923, in Kansas City, Mo., and raised in Evanston and Long Island, N.Y. He interrupted his Yale education in 1942 to become an Army tank commander in Europe, where a piece of German shrapnel shattered his face, leaving the left side paralyzed in a perpetual frown creating an erroneous but enduring public image of him as a humorless fellow. After the war he finished undergraduate and law school and returned to Chicago, where he became a public figure as a special prosecutor who got crime boss Anthony Accardo convicted of income-tax evasion, only to see an Appellate Court let the mobster off the hook.
He jumped into politics in 1962, winning the Cook County sheriff’s race and, during a period of civil turmoil, rode the law-and-order mantle to the presidency of the Cook County Board in 1966. That launched his 1968 race for governor. Upon winning, he discovered the state was going broke, its highways were remnants of the 1930s, and its bridges were impassable. Welfare costs were soaring and education was in disarray. In his first speech he vowed to do what no governor ever dared, impose a state income tax. He did. He also reorganized every branch of government, created the state’s first environmental-enforcement agencies and used patronage as viciously as Daley to try to build a competitive Republican Party.
Taylor Pensoneau, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who covered Illinois government during Ogilvie’s single term as governor, has written a solid reconstruction of those eventful years. Pensoneau interviewed such Ogilvie insiders as political guru Thomas Drennan, chief thinker and lawyer Jeremiah Marsh and many of the young men Ogilvie brought to state government, many of whom are still key Springfield players. He also talked to Ogilvie’s widow, Dorothy, and his daughter, Elizabeth. The result is a valuable biography, but one that seems lifeless except when Pensoneau discusses some of the media figures he lived with in the Capitol press room or some of the legislative leaders he watched. The fault is not entirely Pensoneau’s: As a public figure, Ogilvie seemed lifeless. But Pensoneau does not make him any more vivid by using broad strokes, such as, “Ogilvie knew he would run in 1968,” when the reader would appreciate some reconstructions of the conversations Ogilvie had with his wife, with Drennan, etc. The same is true almost everywhere. Ogilvie’s awareness that his decision to go for the politically risky income tax might cost him re-election is depicted with little of the angst that must have been felt among his insiders. Pensoneau tells us there was angst, but we don’t hear it.
He is much better, and the book more intriguing, when he describes the machinations of government, the tug and pull of the Legislature and the governor’s office en route to its historic rebuilding of state government and the monumental battle to pass the income tax. This is what Pensoneau covered on a daily basis for four years, and his knowledge and comfort with the subject is obvious and enlightening.
He detours, happily, from the myth that Ogilvie lost his re-election bid solely because of the income tax. He points out, rightly, that many Illinoisans, short-sighted as to the future of environmental regulations, were angered at the first anti-pollution law enacted by Ogilvie, which banned the traditional autumn leaf burning. Downstaters were unforgiving over a tough gun-registration law.
And Pensoneau illustrates how Ogilvie, although only 49 in 1972, had become an out-of-date candidate who couldn’t be or wouldn’t be tailored for the modern era of the media campaign. For those who think Bill Clinton’s weepy brand of sincerity is the epitome of image campaigning, it would be instructive to view the 1972 commercials of Dan Walker, which were among the first to take American electoral politics away from the precinct captains and turn it into 30-second spots. It was the beginning of style over substance, which showed up again four years later when Jimmy Carter paraded across TV screens in blue jeans with a handful of Georgia clay in his hand promising never to lie. And it sold for 14 years in Illinois with James R. Thompson even better, if possible, than Walker.
Alas, Dick Ogilvie was all substance. Half-hearted efforts to portray him, sucking on his inevitable pipe, as a business-like leader fared poorly against tall, handsome Walker, red bandanna wrapped around his throat, striding the length of Illinois.
A minor Pensoneau shortcoming, one that a veteran journalist cannot be blamed for too much, is his hesitancy to say anything he can’t attribute. When he talks about Ogilvie’s legacy he quotes bureaucrats, political scientists and journalists to support the contention that “some experts believe he was the finest governor of the century.”
Perhaps. It is easier to say without equivocation that his four-year term was the most significant of the century and that Illinois has prospered and thrived for three decades because of Dick Ogilvie’s vision and integrity. Everyone who voted against him should still be ashamed.
