By Steve Rhodes

On the occasion of his death; relevant excerpts from and for the record. Links added for clarification and background.
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Book: American Pharaoh
Authors: Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
Excerpt: “Before [Martin Luther] King’s Chicago Campaign was over, Dan Rostenkowski would suggest to presidential aide Lawrence O’Brien that the White House find an assignment that would take his friend Daley ‘out of the country for a week or two.’ Rostenkowski was ‘most concerned,’ he told O’Brien, about the toll the civil rights campaign in Chicago was having ‘on the mayor personally.'”
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Book: Fire on the Prairie
Author: Gary Rivlin
Excerpts: “For a time after Daley’s death Rostenkowski was Chicago’s top political figure nationally. ‘A case study of the dangers of getting in over your head,’ the Washington Monthly wrote when ranking Rostenkowski among the country’s six worst congressman based on the views of fellow congressmen, lobbyists, staffers, reporters, and others. ‘Hogs get slaughtered but pigs get fat,’ he explained to a New York Times reporter.
“Yet the local media treated him with an affection and respect that bordered on reverential.”

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Posted on August 11, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

A new book by Rickey R. Hendon (the “R” stands for “Hollywood”) is even weirder than Chicago News Cooperative columnist James Warren lets on.
It is also hugely instructive – as a field guide to door-to-door politics and a window into Hendon’s bleak soul.
It’s not a tell-all, as Hendon warns us early on, but it wants to be. Hendon takes sideways shots at several political figures known and not along the way.
It’s also a psychological portrait of a self-absorbed and paranoid pol who portrays himself as an independent reformer but acts like nothing of the sort.
It’s important because Hendon is the assistant majority leader of the Illinois Senate.
It’s laughable because Hendon preaches attention to detail while misspelling the names of familiar officeholders.
It’s disturbing because this mess is written by an ostensibly powerful member of our state’s legislative body; it’s enlightening in opening a window into the mindset of somebody who came up through a street-level, bare-knuckles culture of acquiring power lacking in the niceties of thoughtfulness about policy. Politics, to Hendon, is only about power and pork.
On the other hand, public relations visionary Hermene Hartman, also the publisher of N’DIGO, also embarrasses herself – and can’t spell the name of our hometown president correctly, as we shall see.
In fact, the best thing this book has going for it is its compact size and inspired cover art (look closely; that flagstaff is a knife, albeit a butter knife).
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a look.

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Posted on August 10, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

With the announcement this week that Ald. Helen Shiller would not run for re-election, I headed for my Chicago bookshelf. Here’s what I found – interspersed with comments from her interview with Carol Marin on Chicago Tonight last night.
Book: Chicago Politics Ward By Ward
Author: David Fremon
Date: 1988
Excerpt:
“Uptown over the years has seen both glamour and destitution, sometimes within blocks of each other. The rich and the poor live here, and it is uncertain which group will dominate the area over the next decade . . .
“Poor people abound in Uptown. The area has been a port of entry and home for transients ever since the first apartment hotels appeared in the 1920s. Conversion of single-family homes to rooming houses during World War II furthered the low-income population. They have been joined by Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, marielito Cubans, blacks (from America, the Caribbean, and Africa), Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong from Laos, among others . . .
“Traditionally, the 46th Ward has been the scene of the closest fights in the city between regulars and independents. That tradition was continued in the 1987 aldermanic race, considered by many a class struggle as much as an election. Helen Shiller, co-owner of a graphics company and a close Slim Coleman ally, won that election by less than 500 votes over incumbent Jerome Orbach. Shiller became the first independent alderman elected from the 46th Ward. Previous ones came from the Regular Democratic Organization, although they at times showed maverick tendencies.

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Posted on August 3, 2010