Fifteen years ago, in the midst of the Arab oil embargo, U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski cut into his busy Washington schedule and flew to Chicago to meet with a half-dozen worried gasoline station owners in his district.
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There was not much the congressman and 32d Ward committeeman could do for the men in greasy outfits who feared their businesses would fold unless they could find some gasoline to sell. But that Tuesday night, amidst the clamor of precinct workers doling out garbage cans, Rostenkowski listened to their concerns and tried to console them.
After all, they were constituents of a ward he had inherited from his father. More than that, they were his neighbors. Rostenkowski`s family had lived in the working-class West Town neighborhood on the city`s Near North Side since before the turn of the century. His grandmother, the story goes, had watched the Chicago Fire from a nearby church tower.
In those days, Rostenkowski ascribed to the old Democratic Party notion that good politics is good government, and when he was first elected to Congress in 1958, he promised the late Mayor Richard J. Daley that he would return to his district every week.
Last week, when Rostenkowski returned to his 8th Congressional District and met with leaders of senior citizens groups, he was a very different man from the one who had pressed the flesh and swapped small talk with the gasoline station owners a decade and a half before.
There was no time for small talk, or even a handshake. The 6-foot-4-inch Chicago Democrat strode imperiously through a small group of senior citizens- virtually his contemporaries, really-who had waited for more than an hour to talk to him about the high cost of catastrophic health insurance.
”All we wanted to do was ask him questions,” Leona Kozien, 69, said Friday. ”We wanted to explain to him that half of us can`t afford this. But he doesn`t have time for the little people anymore. After these people have been in office two terms, they forget. Now he walks over you.”
Rostenkowski, now 61 years old, is one of the nation`s most powerful men. As chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, he shapes the country`s tax law. He rubs elbows with presidents and is regularly wooed by the heads of the world`s largest corporations.
When Rostenkowski decided to celebrate his committee`s 200th anniversary last month, he had no problem raising more than three-quarters of a million dollars to pay for a lavish dinner, as well as a new 4-pound book and an hourlong television documentary about the committee`s history. Guests at the dinner were given commemorative gold cuff links and stickpins.
Twenty-two business organizations, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, gave $25,000 each. The Teamsters Union gave $10,000, as did real estate magnate Donald Trump. Even some companies that were not asked for donations were careful to send in checks.
Rostenkowski has clearly become a man whom the rich and powerful feel obliged to please.
But there were no rich or powerful people at the Copernicus Center for the Elderly and Disabled, at 3160 N. Milwaukee Ave., when Rostenkowski arrived Thursday morning to discuss complaints about the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act.
There were only about 200 senior citizens, most of them getting by on fixed incomes, who hoped to talk with him after he finished meeting with their representatives.
But to their amazement and then shock, Rostenkowski walked away, amid a rising chorus of boos. If he had answers, he did not stay around long enough to hear the questions.
When about 50 people followed him outside and surrounded his car, Rostenkowski left the vehicle, strode up Milwaukee Avenue, cut through a gasoline station, then broke into a sprint to get back into his car, which had finally broken free of the protesters.
All the while, angry people were shouting at him: ”Coward!” ”Recall!” ”Impeach!” ”Rotten-kowski!”
On Friday, Rostenkowski, who was at his vacation home in Wisconsin, refused to take calls from The Tribune. But he agreed to answer questions submitted to a press spokesman.
”I stuck to the original plan we agreed on,” he said through the spokesman. ”I met with the leaders, and they were supposed to report to the seniors.”
Kozien was just one of the senior citizens outraged by Rostenkowski`s conduct. She had become so caught up in the frenzy of the moment Thursday that, as others surrounded Rostenkowski`s car, she wound up sprawled over the hood.
In the quiet of her sitting room, Kozien made the point she had not been able to express the day before.
”You work hard all your life; you finally get to enjoy it a little, and they`re taking it all away,” said Kozien, who counts her polka club and an occasional weekend vacation bus trip as the luxuries of the life she shares with her 70-year-old husband, Ted.
Together they receive $920 a month in Social Security. Ted works part time in the mailroom at Paine Webber to supplement their income.
”It`s getting to where it`s very hard for us to save our money,” Mrs. Kozien said. ”We have to take money out of our bank account. My husband says he likes to save for a rainy day. If either of us gets sick, we`ll be living in the CHA.”
The Koziens, who married five years ago, live in a three-room Northwest Side apartment that rents for $455 a month and is stuffed with all the remnants of raising the five children from their previous marriages.
Kozien and the others who sought to talk to Rostenkowski were upset about the mandatory surcharge on income taxes imposed on senior citizens by the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which was drawn up in Rostenkowski`s committee.
The act, which applies to 37 million Medicare beneficiaries, has triggered a firestorm of objections and questions nationwide. Under the act, every Medicare recipient pays a flat premium of $4 a month, which will increase to $10.20 a month in 1993.
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The surtax adds an additional 15 percent to the income taxes of those who pay $150 or more in 1989, up to a maximum of $800. The figure will rise to 28 percent, up to a maximum of $1,050, four years from now.
Seniors complain that it will make many of them the highest-taxed citizens in the country, but others dispute this and contend that America`s elderly have inordinate expectations for government assistance and already receive far more than their fair share of federal spending.
”I`ll bet 90 percent of the people there wouldn`t have to pay any tax at all,” Rostenkowski`s spokesman quoted him as saying Friday. ”The others simply don`t want to pay their fair share.”
The Ways and Means Committee has proposed changes in the program that would increase monthly payments but reduce the tax surcharge. But many senior citizen groups would prefer to see the act repealed altogether.
On Thursday, as he strode away from the elderly protesters, Rostenkowski told reporters: ”I don`t think they understand what the government`s trying to do for them. I don`t think they understand what`s going on.”
Precisely, Kozien said.
”This is the whole thing, we don`t understand,” she explained. ”These people are afraid. If he`d sit down and talk to us, we`d understand.”
John Oberg, 79, said he had waited several months for what he thought would be a meeting with Rostenkowski Thursday.
”I was gonna tell him: `How come we`re being taxed extra? During the war, we bought war bonds. We did everything the country wanted. And now, they`re pickin` our pockets,` ” Oberg said.
Kozien, Oberg and the others are not through with their efforts to meet with the congressman. Although Kozien promises to stay out of the way of his bumper, she and her cronies plan on making weekly visits to Rostenkowski`s congressional office at Damen and Shakespeare Avenues.
”If we have to,” Kozien said, ”we`ll hire a bus and ride to Washington, D.C.”