ROSTENKOWSKI: The Pursuit of Power and the End of the Old Politics
By Richard E. Cohen
Ivan R. Dee, 311 pages, $27.50
MR. CHAIRMAN: Power in Dan Rostenkowski’s America
By James L. Merriner
Southern Illinois University Press, 333 pages, $29.95
Dan Rostenkowski served for 36 years in the U.S. House, 13 of them as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. His years in Washington spanned nine presidencies, and he played a pivotal role in crafting landmark legislation in the areas of taxation, Social Security, health care, welfare reform and international trade. Although many experts have cited the 1986 tax-reform law as his crowning achievement, he also played a seminal role in deficit reduction in the post-Reagan years.
In these two new political biographies, Richard Cohen contends that Rostenkowski ranks “among the half-dozen most influential members of Congress during the second half of the twentieth century,” and James L. Merriner characterizes him as the “tall bold slugger” of Carl Sandburg’s epic poem “Chicago.” A political giant whose legislative prowess made him a national celebrity, he fell from grace suddenly and painfully. After losing in 1994 to an opportunistic political neophyte who ended up serving a single term in the House, he subsequently spent 13 months in a federal prison for misuse of campaign funds and tax dollars. Rostenkowski has largely disappeared from public view since his release from prison in 1997, but these two books are sure to rekindle interest in him.
A political editor for the Atlanta Constitution and the Chicago Sun-Times who covered Chicago and national politics for more than 20 years, Merriner is a veteran journalist who brings a somewhat cynical eye to the telling of Rostenkowski’s story. He suggests early on that many biographers are guilty of making their subjects’ characters altogether too complicated, their motivations excessively remote, their feelings needlessly opaque. Merriner portrays Rostenkowski as an authentic and candid politician totally unlike the “blow-dried guys” (Rostenkowski’s term) who have descended upon Washington in recent years. No welter of contradictions or conflicting emotions, Rostenkowski simply wanted power and wealth, and he obtained both during his long career in Washington.
Merriner’s Rostenkowski was a seasoned product of the Chicago Democratic machine who worked most comfortably behind the scenes, cutting deals, collecting chits and observing a time-honored code by which a legislator did business face-to-face and sealed agreements with a handshake. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he wielded power unhesitatingly, handed out marching orders to subordinates, paid little attention to the desires of junior House members and dissidents, and took full advantage of the perquisites of seniority. A high-living boulevardier in Washington, he took full advantage of the opportunity to travel to exotic locations on junkets paid for by others. Unlike many of his punctilious colleagues who looked askance at his authoritarianism, he reveled in his power and exercised it enthusiastically.
Merriner’s vivid portrait of Rostenkowski as a larger-than-life figure hinges on his extensive examination of Chicago politics in the 20th Century. The discussions of the cultural milieu of the city’s Polonia, Rostenkowski’s roots in the 32nd Ward and the machinations within the Daley machine provide useful context and help explain how Rostenkowski did business in Washington. Known in the early years of his tenure in the House as Daley’s surrogate in Congress, Rostenkowski devoutly continued to look after Chicago’s interests after the mayor died in 1976. Merriner underscores the connections between Washington and the Windy City and makes clear how much the chairman of the House’s “Cadillac of committees” remained a product of his hometown.
Cohen’s “Rostenkowski” tells essentially the same story but filtered through a different lens. A correspondent for the National Journal and author of several books on Washington’s political culture, Cohen clearly views Rostenkowski’s career from the banks of the Potomac River. Focusing less on the Chicago backdrop, Cohen is more concerned with the protean character of Congress as an institution in recent years. Indeed, one of Cohen’s principal themes is the way Rostenkowski’s rise and fall as a national political figure paralleled the 40-year hegemony enjoyed by the Democrats in Congress. Rostenkowski received his political education at the foot of his mentor, Richard J. Daley, and carried the lessons he learned in Chicago to Washington. These lessons served him well in the congressional climate of the late 1950s and 1960s, even as he quickly attached himself to a new series of mentors, savvy House insiders like Tom O’Brien, Eugene Keogh, Hale Boggs and John McCormack. Rostenkowski’s steady ascent in the House hierarchy occurred at a time when the Democrats enjoyed unprecedented power and influence. He rose through the ranks when legislators on Capitol Hill still played by old-fashioned rules, the House acted as the “forge of democracy” in an era of big government and, in the absence of significant scandal, the people trusted their elected officials. In many ways, Rostenkowski became the perfect symbol for the institution in which he served.
Cohen likewise sees Rostenkowski’s fall as a microcosm of the malaise that gripped Congress in the post-Watergate years. By the time he became Ways and Means chairman in 1981, Rostenkowski could already perceive the rise of contentious partisanship, the dilution of Congress’ traditional power nodes and the vanishing camaraderie that signaled the end of a halcyon era. The byproducts of reform, ushered in by Democrats like Richard Gephardt and David Obey as much as by Republican Newt Gingrich, included decentralization, a heightened sense of partisanship and an aversion to authority. As ideology triumphed over the old-style politics on Capitol Hill, the critics complained that the long-standing Democratic suzerainty enjoyed by Rostenkowski and others owed to an outmoded and corrupt brand of politics. The Republicans’ dramatic takeover of the House in 1994 merely provided the exclamation point to a gradual change that had left Rostenkowski and other veterans increasingly embattled and alienated.
Cohen and Merriner agree that Rostenkowski’s conviction and incarceration resulted from his inability to accommodate to a revised code of ethics prescribed for congressmen in Washington. The kind of behavior commonly practiced by congressional grandees earlier in the century became unacceptable by the 1990s, and Rostenkowski failed to recognize the need to change with the times. To be sure, neither Cohen nor Merriner is an apologist for Rostenkowski, but both note the relative modesty of his peculations. The authors find at least somewhat credible his defense that virtually all congressmen engaged in the activities for which he was punished and that predatory prosecutors singled him out as a particularly inviting target. In an age when Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and James Wright did not go to prison, we might wonder, why did Dan Rostenkowski? In the recently published “Kerner: The Conflict of Intangible Rights,” Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman examine the circumstances under which another prominent Illinois politician, Otto Kerner, went to prison. As in Kerner’s case, the tale of Rostenkowski’s legal travails raises an interesting series of issues concerning the nature of corruption in modern American politics and the standards to which we hold our elected officials.
Cohen and Merriner have written balanced biographies that treat their protagonist with enviable detachment. Both authors strive to be fair and take due note of Rostenkowski’s shortcomings as well as his achievements. Both provide solid accounts of the events in the House from the 1960s through the 1990s, and political junkies will find much to savor in the stories retold here. Neither author offers protracted speculation about the psychological makeup of their subject; these books provide political biographies of a traditional sort.
Most of all, what emerges from these books is the conviction that Dan Rostenkowski, a parochial machine pol with limited imagination but great skill as a negotiator and dealmaker, rose to power at a propitious moment in the nation’s history and applied his considerable political skills to the art of democratic governance. He justifiably prided himself on the ability to get things done. He held the office of president in high regard and, sometimes to the consternation of his more partisan Democratic colleagues, evinced a willingness to work with the executive branch regardless of who occupied the Oval Office.
As these two biographies suggest, the most appropriate epitaph for Dan Rostenkowski’s political career would be simple and straightforward: He legislated.
