Interview with Gene Reineke # ISG-A-L-2009-038 Interview # 1: December 7, 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 Monday, December 7, 2009. My name is Mark DePue; I’m the director of oral history at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I’m here this afternoon with Eugene Reineke, but you mentioned usually you’re known as Gene. Reineke: That’s correct, Mark. DePue: Why don’t you tell us where we are. Reineke: We’re here at my current employer, which is Hill & Knowlton, Inc. It’s a public relations firm, and we’re located at the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. DePue: Which has a fascinating history itself. Someday I’ll have to delve into that one. We’re obviously here to talk about your experiences in the Edgar administration, but you had a lot of years working with Jim Thompson as well, so we’re going to take quite a bit of time. In today’s session, I don’t know that we’ll get to much of the Edgar experience because you’ve got enough information to talk about before that time, which is valuable history for us. Why don’t you start off with a quick reference to when and where you were born? Reineke: I was born in New York City, in the borough of Queens, in 1956. I grew up on Long Island and proceeded to move with my family, when I was about to enter my senior year of high school, from New York to Saint Charles, Illinois. DePue: Let’s spend a little bit of time getting to know who you were when you were growing up in Queens. Now, did you say Long Island you moved to? Reineke: Yeah. We lived in Queens till I was five or six, and then we moved out to Suffolk County on Long Island. It’s all Long Island, but for New Yorkers there’s a distinction between the city and the counties outside of New York Gene Reineke Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-038 City. So I lived there approximately eleven years with my family, in a town called Hauppauge, Long Island. DePue: Hauppauge? Reineke: Hauppauge, which was at that time part of a town called Smithtown. But Hauppauge is now the county seat of Suffolk County. DePue: That sounds like one of the Native American names or something like that. Reineke: A lot of the cities and towns on Long Island have that American Indian heritage in terms of the names. DePue: What were your parents doing for a living? Reineke: My dad was an executive with General Motors, which he did for most of his career, and my mom was a homemaker. There were three of us. I’m the oldest of three children—a younger sister and a younger brother. DePue: Anything we need to know about the years growing up in Queens and then Long Island itself? Reineke: Not particularly. I went to public schools until I went to high school. I went to St. Anthony’s college preparatory school for boys, run by the Franciscan Brothers, for my first three years of high school. Then I went out to Saint Charles High School, which was obviously public and co-ed, so that was an interesting transition for a young man. DePue: What’s the ethnic background of your parents? I assume you’re Catholic; you grew up in a Catholic home? Reineke: Yeah, although we go to Episcopal church right now. My dad’s family was German and my mother’s family was English, French, Irish, and American Indian—and I think a little German thrown in, too. DePue: (laughs) You had a little bit of everything growing up. Reineke: Just about, just about. DePue: Do you know when your father’s side of the family got here? Reineke: I believe it was the late 1800s. My mother’s side, I want to say, goes back to the early 1800s, because several of our ancestors had some notoriety in American history. In fact, if I remember this correctly, my great-great-great- great-grandfather was Winfield Scott, who was the general prior to the Civil War but also the first commander of the Civil War. DePue: The Anaconda Plan. He was commander during the Mexican War. 2 Gene Reineke Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-038 Reineke: Yep. DePue: Tell us a little about your interests growing up. Reineke: A typical childhood. Played Little League, Boy Scouts. Loved to read, always have enjoyed that. I probably had the unusual distinction that early on in my life, when I was something like twelve or thirteen, I just developed a strong interest in politics. Now, both of my parents, particularly my mother, have always been interested in politics. I started reading U.S. News and World Report back then on a weekly basis. I actually subscribed to National Review at that time. I was following my parents’, particularly my mother’s, political persuasion or philosophy, which was more conservative than I eventually became as an adult. I just picked up on politics and enjoyed it. I remember asking my dad in 1966 to take me down to Central Islip on Long Island because Bobby Kennedy, who was our senator from New York at that time, was there, and we got to hear him make some remarks. I don’t remember particularly what they were about. I remember, probably 1967, being in a Boy Scout parade, carrying a flag in the honor guard, and having the opportunity to shake hands with Nelson Rockefeller, who was New York’s longtime governor at that time. Then in 1968, I recall asking my parents again to take us to MacArthur Airport in Central Islip to see Richard Nixon, who was campaigning against Hubert Humphrey for the presidency. DePue: A couple questions here. Reineke: Sure. DePue: I can’t notice too much of an accent. Reineke: Seriously, you can’t? DePue: There was just a tinge of it when you said “Long Island,” I think. Reineke: Certain words. Most of the accent disappeared over the years. You can catch it with certain words: an r at the end, like idear , or horse or coffee . There’s probably a dozen or so words that are hard. I have to slow down. If I start talking too fast, you can still hear a little bit of the New York accent. DePue: I’m wondering, though, growing up and having this fascination—would that be too strong a word to use for your interest in politics at an early age? Reineke: No, I think that’s fair. Yeah, I think it’s an accurate description—that I was fascinated by it. I think the competitive nature of it is what really turned me on. In a lot of ways, it’s sort of like a sports contest, because there’s a time period and then there’s a decision that’s made. Usually you have a victor and a loser at the end of an election contest, just like you do in an athletic game— winners and losers. 3 Gene Reineke Interview # ISG-A-L-2009-038 DePue: But your early years are in some pretty contentious times for American politics. Do you remember the ’64 election? You might have been way too young at that time. Reineke: I remember my parents voting for and wanting Barry Goldwater to win, and obviously Lyndon Johnson was overwhelmingly reelected, but that was before I had any really deep interest. But again, it goes back to the issue of, do parents influence their children. Obviously they do, and that was the start of my political interest, but I think it was just natural inside me to continue to nurture and grow that interest. DePue: And your observations about the ’68 election? I assume you remember that one more clearly. Reineke: Yeah, I do remember. Obviously it was close. George Wallace was involved. Wallace probably pulled some voters away from Nixon. I think the feeling was that Humphrey was really in a bad position, having come off of a divided Democratic Party with Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, and with the assassination, in the spring, of Martin Luther King. Really, coming out of Chicago at that time, Humphrey did represent, I think to most people, the more traditional wing, not the anti-war wing, of the Democratic Party. If I recall correctly, Nixon became infamous years later—you know, the secret plan to end the Vietnam War—and I think there was sort of a feeling that he, regardless of what happened in subsequent years, did offer the country a change in a different way, even though he obviously had prior history and a lot of critics at the time. DePue: Do you recall your own views at that time about the Vietnam War? That was certainly the hot issue. Reineke: Yeah. I think I probably didn’t have a strong view on was it right, was it wrong. I do remember, though, that I used for this report I did, when I was in sixth grade, on politics and the history of the parties, a picture of a soldier fighting.