When Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) is in the mood, particularly when he has a receptive audience, he is one of Washington’s most accomplished name-droppers and storytellers.
Bill Clinton. Hillary Rodham Clinton. George Bush. Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter. Gerald Ford. He knows or has known them all, right on back to President Dwight Eisenhower, who was in the White House when he was first elected to Congress.
He was the one, he notes, who told Clinton about the dangerous waters of health care, reminding him it would be tough because he would be trying to take something beloved away from vested interests in the medical and insurance industry-money.
And he was the one who approached his friend George Bush when Bush had a 92 percent favorability rating just after the Persian Gulf war and told him, “Mr. President, you better get a domestic policy or you will not be re-elected.”
He was also the one who, armed with a ward leader’s heart, fearsome political muscle and a deep knowledge of the federal tax code, pushed, bought, arm-twisted and cajoled his way through the biggest rewriting of tax law in history, the 1986 Tax Reform Act.
There is a reason why he tells these stories now when there is some question about whether he can survive a federal grand jury probe and a political primary election campaign in the uncertain territory of his redrawn congressional district.
He has become one of America’s most powerful men, with responsibilities that transcend local politics. He can put the biggest businessmen in the country on “hold” and know they will be there when he finally picks up the phone and blasts “DANNY ROSTY” into the receiver.
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At the pinnacle of one of the longest climbs in modern politics, he has come all the way from the grunge of Chicago’s wards, through the anonymity of the state legislature, to subservience as Richard J. Daley’s man on Capitol Hill and, finally, into his own era as chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee.
But now he is at the center of an investigation that is looking at the unseen side-time will tell whether it is the dark and damning side-of that career, centering first on a scandal in the House Post Office, but spreading like a virus into almost every segment of his career.
Because of that, the nation is watching to see what happens in the March 15 primary and to see whether there is an indictment from the Washington grand jury that has been investigating Rostenkowski’s affairs for two years.
Despite pleasantries about the presumption of innocence, an indictment could force him out of the chairman’s job, wreck his reputation and sever an umbilical cord to the federal budget that has shipped millions of dollars back to Illinois over the decades.
Rostenkowski doesn’t say it directly, but what he implies is that Chicago and the nation both have a great deal of time and experience invested in his long political career and stand to lose a lot should it be derailed.
This is an old-fashioned argument, appropriate for a character who seems, at heart, a product of political evolution who never quite escaped the 32nd Ward or the city and its pragmatic, colorful and occasionally felonious history.
It amounts to this: Look carefully at what I have done for you and think about it before you bid too hasty a farewell. I am not a newcomer to politics or to Washington. In a system that thrives on compromise, I am the master negotiator, the dealmaker not easily replaced.
He is as drawn to the wheeling and dealing of politics, with its trade-offs, favors, jobs and hints and winks as his fellow members of Congress are drawn to klieg lights.
It is his strength and his weakness at the same time.
If he can argue that he delivers in the old-fashioned way and claim that as an asset, his challengers and critics can also argue that his old-fashioned way is compelling evidence of the need for reform.
In the era of blow-dried, media candidates eager to decry corrupt politics and stress squeaky-clean behavior, Rostenkowski remains very rumpled, churlish, a little crude about the use of power and more than a little arrogant about his own success.
Consider his assessment of Texas’ short-lived success in getting funds for the Superconducting Supercollider (the other competitor was Argonne National Laboratory in Batavia), a big, unfathomable, expensive, underground physics project that had former President Bush’s Texas blessing, then went the way of Bush himself.
“I don’t find it at all embarrassing for me to say, `Wait a minute, Texas is walking off with just too much here.’ We could have saved the supercollider if it was in Illinois,” Rostenkowski said.
“The appropriations wouldn’t have to have been so great at Argonne. But the Texas delegation, the power of the presidency. If we don’t play that game, the next thing they will be doing is taking all of our water out of Lake Michigan.”
Power politics as gamesmanship has become Rostenkowski’s forte, and everyone in the U.S. Congress knows it. Like sausagemaking, it is a goal-oriented business and doesn’t welcome too much scrutiny.
He had good teachers.
Former Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), noted for his brilliance as chairman of Ways and Means (despite his weakness for the drink and frolicking in a Washington reflecting pond with an exotic dancer), was his mentor. Former Speaker John McCormack (D-Mass.) was his clout. The late Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) was a buddy.
“Every time we had a critical problem for the state we would go to see Danny, and Danny would go do something to solve it within the inner workings of Congress. Everybody needs the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee,” recalled former Sen. Alan Dixon of Illinois, a Rostenkowski loyalist for more than 40 years.
“A lot of times, I would get credit for something, like money for Fermilab. I would go to Louisiana’s Bennett Johnston (on the Senate Appropriations Committee) and I would say, `Look, I need adequate money here, and we have been cut. We are going to have an awful problem. If you can help us, Danny will appreciate it,’ and so forth. Perhaps sometimes we can accommodate you, which was done on regular occasions.”
Rostenkowski’s own measure of his political value is the list, a very Chicago way to say: What I got for you.
Call his office in Washington and what comes in the mail a few days later is: “Accomplishments of Congressman Dan Rostenkowski on Behalf of the Chicago Metropolitan Area (Partial List).”
It goes on and on, from $1.94 billion for “infrastructure” to $51.6 million for “bridges” to $694 million for “highways” to $396 million for “transit,” $249.9 million for “aviation,” $4.6 million for “housing,” $16.9 million for “education.”
It is no surprise that Rostenkowski and his staff would present everything in terms of dollars delivered.
Particularly in Chicago, politics has always involved carving up the pizza of government, and the goal-from the lowest to the highest levels-has always been to cart off the biggest slabs possible then plop them in front of voters in hopes of luring support.
Despite the vastness of the federal budget, the depths of the deficit, the rhetoric of reform and the icing of respectability that comes from working in Washington, Congress is all about the same thing.
It is why it is hard to drive anywhere in West Virginia without running into some tribute to Sen. Robert Byrd, Neptune of the federally subsidized boat ramp, or why the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is spread all over God’s and President Lyndon Johnson’s creation.
Rostenkowski, 66, is almost uniquely equipped to handle this carving up process. It is a craft he began to learn when he was still a kid in politics. It was a different time with different standards: Mayor Richard J. Daley’s time and Mayor Richard J. Daley’s standards.
His roots still run deep in the 32nd Ward where it all began, when Joe Rostenkowski was in charge, the connection between politics and government was cast in iron and the local formula for success was simple: jobs and favors.
“When I was a kid, you would walk over and stand in front of the church. People would walk in and tell you what is wrong with the neighborhood. The precinct worker or the person in public life was kind of respected, and he went out and got the curb fixed or the tree trimmed,” Rostenkowski recalled.
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“You can criticize the old machine or organization all you want, but I think the fact is that it provided a personal link between the voter and the candidate or the public official. That has all been replaced now by the media strategies, the guys that package you.”
Visit the 32nd Ward and talk to the old pols and the Rostenkowski story comes to life.
Norb Bonkowski, 67, lives at Damen and Armitage Avenues and has been in the 32nd Ward all of his life. He knew Rostenkowski’s father as well as he knows Rostenkowski. Father and son, he said, were the same.
“I needed help, I went to Rostenkowski, the father,” Bonkowski said. “They helped me with insurance when I was in the service. With his son, it was the same way. He was very cooperative with people. It rubs off on you. The more you help, the more you are liked, the more likely you will be elected.”
Rostenkowski’s name helped get George Rendon, 44, his first city job in 1975. Rostenkowski was the ward chief by that time, following the same path to power that his father had followed many years before him. Rendon has been a 32nd Ward precinct captain for the last 15 years.
“I was a garbageman . . . . At the time, Rostenkowski was the committeeman. Back then, you had to use your committeeman, take a letter and bring it downtown. They’d consider you a little more,” Rendon remembered.
“(Rostenkowski) could get some jobs. Small jobs. The more the merrier. He’s still the same. But he’s just a congressman. And there’s no jobs like there used to be. Everything is a lottery. You put your name down. You get picked.”
Of course, a lot of people never had to show up for work. That was the way it was for some of the well-connected. But times and standards have changed.
Not showing up for a government job for which you are paid is against the law now, and that is one area of Rostenkowski’s history that is getting a close look.
It has already been disclosed that the chairman’s office lost more than 200 employment records being sought by the grand jury, that some well-connected backers (the wife of a ward leader among them) were paid thousands of dollars without showing up for work and that Rostenkowski turned his congressional office into a little employment agency in a move apparently aimed at skirting House rules designed to keep employment numbers down.
All were accepted practices in the old days in the old ward, but not anymore.
“Assume for a minute that what they are saying about him is true. That kind of stuff was all legal not so long ago. The process changes, and maybe he doesn’t change with it,” says one insider, explaining what may be at the heart of Rostenkowski’s problems.
“You know, not too long ago, if Rosty was at a wake and there was a widow there, he could say, `We can take care of you.’ That’s gone now. Now she has to dial an 800 number and take a civil service test.”