Peter Fitzgerald is in a hurry. His loafers are click-clacking across the marble floor of the Statehouse when the lobbyist buttonholes him.
There’s this insurance bill, the guy says. It’s a good bill, good for consumers. Couldn’t Fitzgerald, the state senator from Inverness, back it in committee?
There is evidence that the bill is indeed a good bill, that it would benefit both insurance companies and the policyholders who earn dividends from them. But Fitzgerald’s mind is made up about this bill–and others like it.
They are arcane, dense bills, he says, the kind of bills that make little sense to most but a lot of money for a few. Despite the rules of Capitol etiquette that require courtesy even in antagonistic situations, Fitzgerald cuts the man off.
Consumers not only don’t make out, he says, they could lose $9 billion. He lectures the lobbyist on hybrid forms of corporate ownership, inattentive shareholders, raids on assets. The lobbyist offers assurances. Fitzgerald stops him. As he steps past the man, Fitzgerald tells him, “I know how these things work.”
Here, his admirers say, is a glimpse of the true Peter Fitzgerald: Principled, intelligent, prepared, a rich fat cat who not only does not cozy up to other fat cats but stands up to them.
Here, his critics agree, is a glimpse of the true Peter Fitzgerald: inflexible, unwilling to hear out the other side, an arrogant rich kid less interested in working it out than in making his point.
Who is right? Fitzgerald has no time for such questions. He is not prone to public introspection. He has a schedule to keep.
On this steamy summer afternoon, he must rush from Springfield to Collinsville for a fundraiser. His fellow Republican senators, dozens of lobbyists and GOP hangers-on await his arrival.
Many of them, over the six years Fitzgerald has been in public office, have derided him as too big for his preppy britches, willing to do anything or to roll over anyone in a quest to quench his raging ambitions.
On this night, they applaud him, embrace him, shout their approval. He has given them little choice. Fitzgerald is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, their champion–despite the best interests, and best efforts, of so many of them.
He arrived in Springfield in January 1993, five years behind schedule. He had been trying to get there since 1988, when his law degree was barely a year old.
In launching his political career, Fitzgerald did not wait to be anointed, or even noticed, by party bosses. He did not wait for a seat to open. He simply targeted an incumbent, Republican James Kirkland, and went after him. He only narrowly lost.
Four years later, Fitzgerald considered a similar assault on another GOP incumbent, Rep. Verna Clayton, but switched gears to run for an open state Senate seat instead, a seat he easily won against two challengers.
From the start, Fitzgerald railed against a bloated, wasteful government and the network of “political insiders” behind it all, good ol’ boys who, he said, cared about little outside of enriching themselves and their friends at the state’s expense.
Fitzgerald was among 53 new lawmakers sworn in that January, the largest freshman class ever. But he rose above most as one of five conservative first-time senators who the veterans quickly dubbed “The Fab Five.”
Even among that select group, Fitzgerald found a way to stand out, launching a headline-grabbing assault on riverboat casinos and the power players behind them.
Fitzgerald wanted to put the state’s casino licenses up for bid, a move that would have cost casino owners millions. That and other casino proposals won over newspaper editorial boards and public sentiment, but never the support needed in the General Assembly. All of his bills were killed.
Eventually, Fitzgerald shifted focus from the riverboats to a “sweetheart” multimillion-dollar hotel deal that some of these same power-brokers had gotten from the state.
The developer Fitzgerald demonized was William Cellini, a millionaire riverboat owner with deep roots in the state GOP. Also caught in the crossfire was state Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, a fellow Republican working out a new repayment schedule. He ruffled the feathers of some of the biggest Republican birds in Illinois, but Fitzgerald was winning the publicity campaign.
Fitzgerald stressed his fiscal conservatism in his early years, but he also was pushing a conservative social agenda, making his mark on virtually every issue important to the GOP’s right wing.
He sponsored or co-sponsored bills that restricted abortion, including parental-notification legislation, a ban on late-term abortions and a prohibition on the use of tax dollars to pay for the procedure.
He pushed legislation that shifted public funds away from public schools to private institutions.
He was the chief sponsor of a bill banning same-sex marriages. He backed one bill that altered the way obscenity standards were set in Illinois and another requiring prisoners to work on chain gangs. Last year, he proposed a multimillion-dollar, election-year tax cut.
Most of this legislation was killed by the legislature, even though his fellow Republicans controlled at least one chamber during that time. Several were vetoed by Republican Gov. Jim Edgar.
Fitzgerald has been largely successful in building a solid conservative record, though it is not without contradictions.
He denounces “political insiders” who feed off of government contracts, but is not beyond lobbying the state to help an acquaintance.
In 1993, Fitzgerald wrote to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency urging officials to buy a cleaning product called “Giva Odor-No” from Jim Althoff, a constituent who would later work on Fitzgerald’s campaign. The cleaning spray kills mildew and mold and odors associated with flooding.
“I believe that this product, made and produced in Illinois, would effectively assist the victims of the . . . flood,” Fitzgerald wrote.
Althoff, now retired, said the sales pitch didn’t work, a fact that state officials confirm. “I sold quite a bit of it,” Althoff said, “but I never sold it to the state.”
Fitzgerald advocates local control of schools, but pushed the state to force a local school board in his area to accept a charter school that the school officials had rejected three times.
He declares a distaste for party bosses but fills his Senate war chest with money from the Senate Republican leadership, including $10,000 from Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
Fitzgerald’s friends say his independence as a legislator was borne, in part, by his own ambitions. He did not need friends in the state legislature because he had no plans to stay.
“Since I’ve known Peter I have always known that he wanted to go to the federal level,” said Sen. Steve Rauschenberger (R-Elgin), a member of the Fab Five.
After their first year together in the Senate, Rauschenberger wrote a letter to his fellow Republican lawmakers, saying that, as a candidate railing against the system, he had misunderstood the institution. The work was much harder and the need for compromise often necessary, he wrote.
Fitzgerald, on the other hand, wrote at the end of his first year an essay he entitled “No Longer Green, But Not Yet Jaded.” In it, he says his experiences in office only confirmed his worst fears about special interests manipulating government.
“I’m not sure Peter is more ambitious. We’re all ambitious. But he’s more the iconoclast,” Rauschenberger said. “He viewed his role in Springfield as a means to an end, rather than as the point.”
Fitzgerald first made that ambition clear in 1994, just a year after he arrived in Springfield. Again, no seats were open, no one was calling on Fitzgerald to run. He simply launched a bid for Congress.
His target was Phil Crane, a conservative, 13-term congressman from Wauconda, who also happened to be Fitzgerald’s political godfather.
Fitzgerald worked on Crane’s ill-fated 1976 presidential campaign and interned in Crane’s office. Now he was using $700,000 of his own money to condemn his former mentor for losing the “fire in the belly.”
Crane survived–though barely–and termed the whole affair “a disappointment.” Fitzgerald later dismissed it as “a blow-up in the family,” as he worked to make amends with the party’s conservative wing.
Four years later, when Fitzgerald began running for the U.S. Senate, conservatives were again behind him, though party bosses still stood in his path. Edgar and George Ryan, the party’s nominee for governor, were among those warning voters that Fitzgerald was too extreme to beat Democratic incumbent Carol Moseley-Braun.
But with his army of activists and $7 million of his own money, Fitzgerald rolled over GOP bosses one more time. Today, he is their nominee, not because they had anointed him, but because he insisted on it.
Peter Gosselin Fitzgerald (Gosselin is his mother’s maiden name) was in many ways the typical small town, Midwestern kid. He went to Catholic school, played Little League baseball and, under strict orders, finished everything on his plate.
For a 25-cent allowance, he took out the trash, cleaned up the dog kennel and cleared the lawn of dandelions. His idea of rebellion was to watch television beyond his parents’ one-hour-a-week limit.
His father, Gerald, a public relations man turned banker, was strict. His mom, Marjorie, was thrifty. “My mother would never throw out a ketchup bottle if it had two drops left in it,” he recalled.
The family’s wealth grew along with Gerald Fitzgerald’s chain of community banks. His company, Suburban Bancorp, was aggressive in buying up banks around the Chicago suburbs, though the elder Fitzgerald still found time to dabble in Republican politics. In 1994, Suburban Bancorp was bought out by a subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal for $246 million.
Fitzgerald was the youngest of five. “He was an unexpected caboose,” his wife, Nina, once told a supporters. “You can see the family portraits, Peter is in none of them.”
During a 1979 internship in Washington, he met his future wife, Carmen Nina Kerstiens (Smith, London School of Economics, Harvard Law) at a party.
It would be his first and only serious relationship. They married in 1987 and settled in the Palatine area rather than her home state of Colorado so he could pursue a political career.
They have one son, Jake, now 6, who plays in the same baseball league in which his father played 30 years before.
“I was brought up the way most people in this state were brought up,” Fitzgerald said.
To a point. Fitzgerald was reared and now is rearing his son in Inverness, a pastoral hamlet northwest of Chicago. Its winding roads end in cul-de-sacs, and there are no fences, streetlights, curbs or malls to detract from the ambience.
The average family in Inverness earns $107,203 a year and paid $354,000 for its house. That’s more than double what the median family in Illinois earns or paid.
But even by Inverness standards, Fitzgerald’s standard of living is high. He earned about $1.5 million in 1997, most of it a return on his share of the family’s banking fortune, and paid $835,000 for his house in 1994.
His personal wealth is estimated at as much as $51 million. If elected, that would rank him as the third wealthiest U.S. senator, behind a Rockefeller but ahead of a Kennedy.
Most of Fitzgerald’s money remains wrapped up in stock in the Bank of Montreal.
Fitzgerald and his family are now the largest, non-institutional investors in the Bank of Montreal. And that means Fitzgerald’s holdings could soon surge. The Bank of Montreal wants to merge with The Royal Bank of Canada. Based on current trading, Fitzgerald could make millions, though he said he is too busy with the campaign to calculate his profit.
It was late one crisp March day in Quincy, and Peter Fitzgerald was looking puppy-dog eager as he worked the small crowd in the school gym, shaking hands and asking, in a high, nasal Chicago accent, “How’s it goin’?”
This is a small gathering in a small city a good distance from Chicago’s Loop. It is a typical Fitzgerald event. His campaign has gone to great lengths to ensure that media coverage is minimal. His schedule is largely a secret. Local reporters are told when Fitzgerald is coming, but Chicago media is given no such advance notice.
Fitzgerald’s strategy is to keep a low profile, avoid discussing his conservative record and agenda in places where it would be disparaged–like Chicago. He relies on a barrage of TV ads to ensure that Moseley-Braun’s record, and not his, is the central issue of the campaign.
The crowd on this night is small, but dedicated. They barely knew Fitzgerald, but they knew what he stands for and that was enough.
“This isn’t about a candidate, it’s about a cause,” Fitzgerald tells one group. “This is a crusade.”
Former GOP presidential hopeful Bob Dole called Fitzgerald an extremist while touring the state, but Fitzgerald’s supporters seemed not to care.
“If I knew he was going to lose, I’d still vote for him,” said Pat Schmucker of Wilmington, while watching Fitzgerald work the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan. “You should vote for who you believe in, and not just when you think they can get elected.”
“He holds the values we hold,” said Bob Adrian, one of Fitzgerald’s coordinators in Quincy. “He understands our values.”
Despite his gee-whiz demeanor, Fitzgerald proved himself a hard-nosed competitor.
In the primary, he pummeled his opponent, Loleta Didrickson, with a relentless TV ad barrage. But, taking no chances, he also secretly funded a lawsuit against Didrickson in Cook County Court, charging that she was using the state comptroller’s office to aid her campaign.
The suit, which was dismissed but still hurt Didrickson, was filed under another person’s name. It would be months before the public learned from financial disclosure forms that Fitzgerald had paid the $11,803 in legal fees.
On election night, a hoarse Fitzgerald labeled his campaign “the people’s revolt,” and told the crowd, “The revolution has just begun.”
Fitzgerald had come a long way in the year since he told his supporters and would-be opponents “I will do whatever it takes” to win. And he had proven conclusively that he meant just what he had said.
