An Interview with Governor Jim Edgar Volume II (Sessions 6-10)
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An Interview with Governor Jim Edgar Volume II (Sessions 6-10) Interview with Jim Edgar # ISG-A-L-2009-019.06 Interview # 6: June 10, 2009 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 DePue: Today is Wednesday, June 10, 2009. My name is Mark DePue; I’m the director of oral history at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I believe this is our sixth session. I could be wrong on that. Edgar: I trust your count. DePue: Good morning, Governor. Edgar: Good morning. DePue: We are with Governor Edgar again, and we just got you to the position of legislative liaison for Governor Thompson. So I thought it was appropriate—and we’ve talked about Thompson quite a bit—to take a step back and have you just discuss, a little bit, his political career and how he ended up being governor; and then we’ll go into some of the specifics about the relationship that you had with Governor Thompson. Edgar: Jim Thompson had grown up in the Chicago area. I think he grew up in Oak Park— Oak Park? DePue: Oak Forest? Edgar: No, it is Oak Park, yeah. I think in that area, on the West Side of Chicago. His father was a physician, and he went to school at... I think he spent a little time at Illinois on the Navy Pier campus, if I remember right, but he ended up getting his degree from Washington University in St. Louis; then he went to law school at Northwestern. Apparently, was a very bright student. Thompson was always very bright—he is very bright. And I don’t know when he started working. He worked in the attorney general’s office under Bill Scott for a little bit, but the guy who was his real mentor was Judge Bauer, who was U.S. attorney. I can’t remember Bauer’s first name. But when he became U.S. attorney—and this would have been during the Nixon years—Thompson went to the U.S. attorney’s office with him. And then Jim Edgar Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-019 VOL II when he stepped down to become a judge—I think this is the sequence—Bauer recommended that Thompson be appointed in his place. That’s really when he burst on the scene and was very visible. But what I didn’t appreciate till I was working for him, was he had spent some time in state government when he was working for Bill Scott, who was a unique character to work for, in many ways. So Thompson had a little bit of involvement in state government prior to becoming governor—because one of the concerns we all had was, Here is a guy who’s never been around state government, never really been in politics, and he’s now governor. And I did not realize he had spent a stint with Bill Scott. But where he got to be known was when he became U.S. attorney. And as U.S. attorney, the case that really brought him to the forefront was he prosecuted Otto Kerner, the former governor of Illinois, and was successful in that prosecution. [He] then went on, and under his leadership—he didn’t do the cases, all of them, himself—several public officials were indicted and convicted during that period. DePue: And when you say “several,” a lot of those folks were people within the Daley administration, were they not? Edgar: [Thomas] Keane, who was the—and again, age is catching; I’m forgetting his first name—most powerful guy in the city council. He ran the budget process, was a big ally of Daley, and he got indicted, convicted—and I think a couple county officials. Keane was probably the most important because he was a real power in the city council, back when the city council had power, and he was also close to Daley. He wasn’t subservient—Daley and he were allied, but in my understanding, Keane was independent in his own right. So that was a big coup for Thompson, as well as the Kerner thing. The Kerner thing is what most people knew him for. So he had this image of being a tough prosecutor. 1 There was some speculation that he might run for mayor. I don’t think that was real serious. But then in 1975, he announced for governor and was elected in 1976. And that was the same year I was elected to the legislature. So on the political scene, as far as partisan politics, he was pretty new. I think he got appointed by Nixon, so he was viewed as a Republican, but he wasn’t an active, partisan Republican running for office. So to go from U.S. attorney into the governor’s office was somewhat unusual; though we’ve had other U.S. attorneys make it to the governor’s office, often there’s something in between. I think Dwight Green, who was governor 1940 to ‘48, came straight from the U.S. attorney’s office. I can’t remember if he ended up being state’s attorney for a while in Cook County, but I think he might have come straight from the U.S. 1 Otto Kerner was convicted in February 1973, six years after resigning as Illinois governor, for accepting bribes, while governor, in the form of horse racetrack stock from Arlington Park manager Marge Everett. See Mike Lawrence, interview by Mark DePue, March 4, 2009, transcript, Jim Edgar Oral History Project, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL, 37-38, for Lawrence’s assessment of Kerner. 272 Jim Edgar Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-019 VOL II attorney’s office. He’s the one who prosecuted Capone. He got elected governor, Republican governor, in 1940, and his administration kind of ended in some scandals. So it’s somewhat ironic that some of these people who came with this image of fighting corruption—their administrations get caught up in it a little bit, too. DePue: I’m curious. Timing is always important in politics. Thompson’s timing is good in the sense that he had done some things that I would think certainly antagonized the Daley administration; but Daley wasn’t in the picture when he— Edgar: Oh, no, he was. Daley was still alive. DePue: But not by the time you got there, at least. Edgar: No, not by the time I got there. But when he [Thompson] got elected, Daley was still alive. But what was more fortunate for him, timing-wise, was that the Democrats had a huge primary; and to this day, it haunts the Democratic Party. We’re sitting here in 2009, and there’s speculation, will we have a Democratic primary battle? And one of their arguments against it is that Mike Madigan still remembers that Howlett/Walker battle and the fact that they then lost the governorship for twenty-six years, or however many years afterwards. So that primary battle was brutal, and many thought that that gave Jim Thompson the opportunity. When Thompson announced, because Howlett and him were kind of buddies, he didn’t know Howlett was going to run. But when Howlett finally got talked into running, everybody thought, The election’s over; Howlett will just win in a walk, because he’d always won the other offices. He’d been state auditor back then, and then he was secretary of state. And he was well-liked by everybody—a lot of Republicans liked him—so they just figured Howlett would win. But, Walker didn’t go away quietly. Walker proved to be a lot more resilient than people thought, in that primary, and that was a pretty tough primary. So by the time Thompson faced Howlett, Walker had bloodied up Howlett pretty much as an old- time politician. So timing was good for Jim Thompson. Timing’s good for anybody who usually wins. And the fact that he’d come off this clean, crime-buster, root-out- corruption-in-government image against Mike Howlett, who, by the time the general election came around, looked like the epitome of an old-time politician. We’ve mentioned before, several times, that picture that had both Daley and Howlett in black hats—which people wore back then, hats—and laughing on St. Patrick’s Day, and their jowls; it just looked like these were old-time politicians. So that helped, I think, Thompson a lot, too. Besides the fact Thompson turned out to be a good campaigner and was a smart guy. DePue: How much did Thompson benefit from the fact that he wasn’t Walker? And Walker had such an antagonistic relationship with the press, with the legislature, certainly, and obviously with the Daley folks up in Chicago. 273 Jim Edgar Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-019 VOL II Edgar: You mean as governor? DePue: Yeah. Edgar: A lot. Walker was a confrontationist, and Thompson; that wasn’t his style. Thompson was very good at getting publicity; and I mean this in a positive sense, because that’s an important part of this process.