George Ryan returned to the State Capitol a few weeks ago for the unveiling of his official portrait and was hailed as a visionary and a man of his word by politicians in both parties with whom he formed a close bond as they crafted policy and cut deals.
But when reporters tried to press Ryan to talk about the federal investigation of corruption that festered under his watch, he fled into the expansive second-floor chambers of the Illinois secretary of state, a place that had long been his personal Springfield sanctuary.
It was also the spot where his personal downfall began.
Through that office, which Ryan ran from 1991 to 1999, armies of state workers were deployed to carry out duties to enhance his electability.
It also was in that office, over a huge wooden table, where Ryan entertained his closest friends–a collection of lobbyists, lawmakers and hangers-on–and discussed the foibles of other politicians while they concocted deals that federal prosecutors now say were designed to use public resources to enrich themselves.
Democrats now control the secretary of state’s office and virtually all of the rest of Illinois government, a byproduct of the public disgust over the unfolding scandals that drove Ryan into retirement after just one term and that left the Republican party in shambles.
Almost five years ago, on the day he was inaugurated governor, Ryan vowed to do his best for Illinois, but he acknowledged that the public would ultimately determine whether his actions and deeds had merit. Too many politicians, he said, sold voters short.
“They can separate right from wrong and they have an inherent common sense and a great sense of fair play and even-handedness,” said Ryan, who spent 37 years in public office. “When my time comes, you, the people of Illinois, will decide and judge my place and my legacy in our history.”
First, however, he will have to face a federal judge and jury.
Culture of corruption
In that inauguration speech on Jan. 11, 1999, Ryan said he recognized that voters might be uncomfortable with descriptions of him as an “old-time pol” and “dealmaker” that had been used by critics to sum up his public career.
Such terms evoked an image of Ryan as a throwback to an era when patronage wasn’t a dirty word and self-dealing by politicians was greeted with a wink, nod and yawn by the public and prosecutors alike.
That may be what people thought of him, Ryan acknowledged, but he was out to change that perception. “I hope very much to be a hero,” he declared.
He was hobbled in that quest not only by the brewing scandal but also by history.
Corruption ran deep in the Illinois secretary of state’s office. Paul Powell, one of Ryan’s predecessors, was found to have hid hundreds of thousands of dollars in purloined cash in shoeboxes before he died. And everyone has heard the stories of how motorists would stash a ten-dollar bill in their car visor to assure passage of the road portion of the driver’s license test.
Indeed, a Tribune poll in the weeks before the 1998 election found more than 60 percent of voters believed a problem with corruption existed in the secretary of state’s office, but more than half said Ryan shouldn’t be blamed for the bad apples that worked in the office.
“It was there when I was there, probably going to be there in the future,” Ryan said of the corruption. “It’s part of the culture, I guess.”
But by October 1999, after less than a year in the governor’s chair, more voters began blaming Ryan for the mess. The following spring, he began a tour aimed at rebuilding his image and regaining the trust of the voters. He promptly got hit by a pie tossed by a disgruntled voter.
By May 2001, the number of voters who had an unfavorable opinion of Ryan reached 53 percent, and it kept getting worse as Ryan maintained his ignorance of the extent of the corruption under his watch.
The politics that nurtured Ryan wasn’t considered corrupt, at least not in his home base in Kankakee County. Ryan joined his family’s pharmacy in the early 1960s and soon became part of the county political machinery run by Ed McBroom, a state legislator, auto dealer and hardware store owner who also was Kankakee County Republican chairman. Rather than just dispense pills at the pharmacy counter, Ryan learned from McBroom how to dispense political power.
Ryan called McBroom “boss” and became his campaign chairman. Ryan also watched McBroom control state patronage at the Manteno Mental Health Center. For some well-placed job holders, the price of employment was a car purchased from the dealership McBroom owned.
Rather than object, Ryan became part of the clout-heavy process. As he grew more powerful through McBroom’s assistance, joining the County Board in 1966 and becoming its chairman in 1972, Ryan found himself becoming more popular among those who wanted a piece of the action.
Friends like that became a common theme throughout Ryan’s career. He often placed himself in the role of broker, sometimes for issues, sometimes for friends. It was not uncommon for Ryan to call legislative leaders and ask them to meet with his agenda-carrying friends as a favor. No matter the office he held, Ryan was hard to turn down.
But if Ryan really wanted to know about the potential for corruption in the secretary of state’s office, he should have talked to his predecessor, Jim Edgar. A review Edgar requested of the office shortly after he took over in 1981 warned that some employees “would accept bribes from people doing business with the secretary of state’s office in order to secure money to pay for [political fundraising] tickets.”
The memo to Edgar was written by Dan K. Webb, a former state police director and former federal prosecutor. Webb is now serving as George Ryan’s criminal defense attorney.
Enduring investigation
When Ryan became governor, he and his top aides never believed that what began as a federal investigation into driver’s licenses exchanged for bribes would have much staying power. They guessed the new administration would take its hits for the first half of Ryan’s four-year term, giving him a solid two years in which to rebuild his image and focus on re-election.
Dubbed Operation Safe Road, federal investigators announced their probe in October 1998, just weeks before the election of a new governor. Then-U.S. Atty. Scott Lassar effectively gave Ryan a political pass by declaring that the Republican was not a target of the probe. It was the last and only time a federal prosecutor made such a pronouncement.
Ryan won the election, overcoming a late surge by Democrat Glenn Poshard, who pounded heavily on the warning that the Republican has allowed corruption to flourish as secretary of state.
Democrats ran ads showing the aftermath of a fiery minivan accident caused when a truck driven by an unqualified Illinois driver who had obtained his license through bribery lost a part of its taillight assembly on Interstate Highway 94 near Milwaukee. Rev. Duane Willis and his wife, Janet, lost six of children in the accident, which occurred on Election Day 1994–the day Ryan was celebrating his victory to a second term as secretary of state.
Poshard was a social conservative who turned off liberals in his own party, and that had more to do with Ryan’s victory than the apparent absolution in the bribery scandal that the Republican had received from Lassar. Still, Poshard’s campaign attacks and the ongoing federal investigation immediately cast a cloud over Ryan’s new administration, one much darker than Republicans had feared.
A probe that began looking at how bribe money paid to buy driver’s licenses was used to buy political fundraising tickets for Ryan quickly escalated into an examination of payoffs for sweetheart deals, influence peddling and state employees working campaigns on the taxpayers’ dime.
Top members of Ryan’s inner circle–his “kitchen cabinet”–were indicted. And his campaign manager and former chief of staff, Scott Fawell, a man whom Ryan had considered to be like a son, was convicted of racketeering and fraud. Ryan’s campaign fund was also found guilty. Like the ladder he had climbed in his political career, from the Kankakee County Board to speaker of the Illinois House to lieutenant governor to secretary of state and finally governor, federal prosecutors were climbing their own ladder of alleged corruption in order to indict Ryan.
In May 2002, upon the indictment of longtime friend Larry Warner, Ryan stood outside his second-floor governor’s office in the statehouse and declared that, if the charges against Warner proved true, he would be “stunned” and “damned mad.”
“If it did happen, if it’s true and it proves to be true in a court of law, then I’ll stand for the responsibility at that time and I’ll answer for it at that time,” Ryan said then.
Now he’ll get his chance to answer.
Policy contradictions
Ryan had always had a gruff and blustery exterior, but that masked deep conflicts that he felt as a leader between his conservative political instincts and his desire to take bold steps.
Never was that more apparent than in his decision to place a moratorium on executions in the state and ultimately, in one of his last formal acts as governor, to empty the state’s Death Row and commute to life in prison the sentences of 164 condemned inmates and reduce the sentences of three others.
Critics immediately condemned the moratorium as a misdirection play by Ryan–an attempt to divert attention from the growing scandal. When he issued the blanket clemency, the same critics contended he was attempting to create a moralistic legacy that would overshadow the taint being uncovered.
Just how Ryan dealt with the death penalty–like any number of issues he considered as governor–appeared to many of his supporters to contradict his past.
He won accolades from conservative groups for his work to block state passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, but he picked the state’s first female lieutenant governor. An abortion-rights opponent, Ryan vetoed a ban on publicly funded abortions for poor women, saying he didn’t think the issue of money should interfere with a woman’s health. A supporter of gun-owner rights as a legislator, he led attempts to ban some semiautomatic firearms while serving as lieutenant governor.
He traveled to Cuba in his first year in office and met with Fidel Castro, saying it was unfair that other countries could trade with the island nation and the U.S. could not.
On the death penalty, however, Ryan’s transformation from strong supporter to crusading doubter may not have been as surprising as it seemed. As far back as 1977, shortly after he had voted as a member of the Illinois House to reinstate capital punishment, Ryan gave an interview in which he already displayed qualms about it.
`A tough vote’
“It was a tough vote. It bothered me for a couple of days after I did it, but I believe that reinstating the death penalty will have an effect,” Ryan, then Republican leader of the House, told Illinois Issues magazine. “… I think the state should have the death penalty again for awhile and see what happens. It may be easy to talk about a death penalty, but it’s a different matter to push the button to vote yes. To vote for a bill like that, I had to think about it very hard, and I was upset about it that whole day. But I feel that I did the right thing.”
Ryan’s transformation on the death penalty may have been an act of conscience, but there were plenty of decisions he made as governor that were motivated by little more than hardball politics. Even on his way out of office, he was working to pack loyalists into state jobs safe from firing by his successor and trying to push the state into buying a rundown building complex near the Capitol to benefit a friend–also recently indicted in the Safe Road scandal–who was a broker on the deal.
To grease the legislature’s wheels and give its leadership more power, he established a secret pool of money that was dispensed for pork-barrel spending. He signed into law a measure to help the liquor business of Blackhawks owner William Wirtz, only to see a federal court strike it down. He said he opposed expanded gambling, then tried to get Rosemont mayor and ally Don Stephens a casino.
Ryan was also the architect of a $12 billion public works program that scattered construction goodies. But as much as he wanted to be remembered as a builder, he may most immediately be remembered for tearing down public belief in the institution of government that he so personally revered.
“Will some of the people I appoint stray off the right path? That is a fear that haunts me. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. We all have been guilty of errors in judgment,” Ryan said on his inauguration day as governor. “But you can rest assured that I will do my very best to honor your trust in me.”
Left in George Ryan’s wake is a Republican Party, diminished in number and power, still struggling for relevance and to escape Ryan’s shadow.
Outside of Illinois, advocates of abolishing the death penalty have accorded Ryan high acclaim as he received calls from world leaders such as Nelson Mandela, saw the Coliseum in Rome lit in his honor, and traveled around the world to discuss capital punishment.
Perhaps, in a twisted way, good-government reformers also should hail Ryan. The tales of corruption that hounded him from office and led to his indictment also fueled a movement for ethics reforms in Springfield.
In the end, Ryan’s 2003 was much like his political career, spanning new heights before rapidly plummeting. He began the year with the nationally televised speech in which he emptied Death Row. He ended the year with a federal prosecutor reading formal criminal charges against him.
At the portrait unveiling in the State Capitol last month, Ryan basked in the adulation he received from both Republicans and Democrats who served with him. Ryan knew he was appreciated better in the Statehouse than outside of it, but it was not a time to show humility or remorse. Or to apologize.
“I was proud of what I was able to do and I was proud of the associations that I had in doing it,” he said. “I feel good about everything that I did while I was in office, from every office I ever held.”
