Dan Rostenkowski Dies

From Greg Heinz at Crain's Blog:

Dan Rostenkowski -- old Chicago at its best and worst -- dies
Posted by Greg H. at 8/11/2010 11:22 AM CDT on Chicago Business
Political insiders are confirming that former U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski — a decades-long fixture of Chicago's power structure — has passed away.

Mr. Rostenkowski, 82, has been ailing in recent months and apparently died overnight in Wisconsin, where his daughter lives, sources say.

Though Mr. Rostenkowski was forced out of office amid a political corruption scandal that resulted in him doing prison time, he remained a hero to Chicago's power elite.
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To get a sense of Chicago politics as they were when Rosty towered over them, here is a video of the normally sure-footed congressman radically misreading the political and media landscapes and running smack into an AARP buzz-saw at the Original Town Hall meeting --



-- and a snippet from a 1994 Tribune article (emphasis added) about his last primary campaign before heading off to the House of Many Doors, and conducted at a time when virtually everyone in Chicago was pretty sure he was gonna to get stomped:

Netsch, Rostenkowski Win
Congressional Stalwart Rolls Over Cullerton
Election '94.
March 16, 1994|By Hanke Gratteau and Ellen Warren, Tribune Staff Writers.

U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski swept to victory in the toughest primary campaign of his life Tuesday, crushing all challengers and fending off, for now, questions about ethics and a lingering House Post Office scandal in Washington.

He did it the old-fashioned Chicago way, with a combination of strength on the street, important connections, a fat campaign war chest and constant reminders of the value of having a House Ways and Means Committee chairman from Chicago.

With 97 percent of the vote counted, Rostenkowski had 47 percent. State Sen. John Cullerton, a threat for a time, but not much of a threat on Election Day, had 29 percent. Former Ald. Dick Simpson got 13 percent; Michael Wojcik, 9 percent; and John McCarthy, 2 percent.

Perhaps more importantly, Rostenkowski made certain that Cullerton was outmanned, outspent and outmaneuvered as Election Day approached. The veteran congressman sent 700 workers into the field Tuesday, dwarfing the Cullerton effort and guaranteeing that every likely Rostenkowski voter knew it was time to go to the polls.

At the victory party, two supporters, Mike Pawlowski, 25, who works for the Sewer Department, and his brother-in-law, Mike Galichio, 32, who works for the Forest Preserve of Cook County, described a 14-hour day in the streets for the Rostenkowski effort.
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Rostenkowski also paved his campaign with constant reminders of the federal bounty he has delivered to Chicago, underlining that connection with announcements that a new federal job training center would be coming soon, along with a Vietnam War-era helicopter for the Fire Department from the Department of Defense.

So how did he win his primary?

Read and learn, kiddies (from Wikipedia):

In his book "Naked economics: Undressing the Dismal Science", author Charles Wheelan wrote “We Chicagoans can drive around the city and literally point to things that Rosty built.”

Dan Rostenkowski did deliver federal funds for Chicago and the State of Illinois. Some of his notable projects include: securing 32 million dollars for the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority which expanded travel from the loop to O’Hare Airport, $450 million to repave and expand the Kennedy Expressway, 25 Million to fix the dangerous S Curve on Lake Shore Drive[11] 4 billion dollars for the Deep Tunnel Project, which was designed to keep raw sewage from entering the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, while also protecting over half a million suburban and city home owners threatened by flooded basements.(Cohen,176)

He followed that with $42.4 million for reservoirs in McCook and Thornton Townships and by O'Hare airport, $16.8 million for downtown's State Street Mall renovation, $3.5 million for the construction of the Cook County Boot Camp, a military-style alternative for first-time youthful offenders. When the Chicago White Sox baseball team was considering moving to Florida, Rostenkowski secured a $150 million bond authority for the construction of US Cellular Field.

Once nearly abandoned and left in disrepair, he ensured $75 million in tax-free bonds for the remodeling of Navy Pier, which today has become Chicago’s preeminent tourist attraction.[citation needed]

To ease erosion that threatened Lake Shore Drive and several harbors and museums along the Chicago lake front, Rostenkowski secured $2.2 million for the Chicago Shoreline Protection Project, and laid the foundation for a coordinated partnership among the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government and the City of Chicago.

He also was responsible for securing funding for the upkeep of Chicago area bridges including the Chicago Skyway, the Division, Cermak, and Roosevelt street bridges.

In January 1983 Plitt Theaters filed a lawsuit to obtain a permit to demolish the historic Chicago Theater. Mayor Jane Byrne and other civic leaders appealed to Rostenkowski to assist them in obtaining a federal Urban Development Action Grant to save the theater. Grants of this kind were being frozen from Chicago by housing secretary Samuel Pierce in reprisal for Rostenkowski's opposition to the Reagan administration's Urban Enterprise Zone bill. Rostenkowski considered these zones a Republican gimmick that would help businesses escape taxes without addressing chronic inner-city unemployment. Rostenkowski called his friend Vice President George H. W. Bush, “If I don’t get that grant,you're going to have one very pissed off chairman of the Ways and Means Committee for your administration's pending tax bill”.[12]

Shortly thereafter, Pierce phoned Rostenkowski to ask if he could come up and see him.

Sure, the congressman replied, just bring the papers for the theater project.

Love it or hate it, this is how things work in the real world, and you don't get to sit in one of the Big Chairs without understanding that right down to your fingertips.

But -- as the senior citizen "Wild in the Streets" clip shows -- the real world is not a static place, and when it changes, dinosaurs can perish fast and without ever really understanding why. From our great chronicler of Chicago clout, crime, politics, BBQ, softball and all things tavern-related, Mike Royko:

The Rules Kept Changing; Dan Rostenkowski Didn't

By Mike Royko

Chicago Tribune

HER name was Mary, and she was middle-aged, worked as a domestic, had little money and no medical plan, and was in need of some serious and expensive life-saving surgery.

But she had lived in her Northwest Side Chicago neighborhood for most of her life. And she knew somebody who knew somebody who knew a politician of considerable importance.

Some calls were made, the most important coming from the office of the politician.

The result was that Mary went to a good hospital, was treated by skilled physicians, was cured and went home with a bill of $0.00.

How the politician arranged this, I don't know. I assume that the hospital and the doctors owed him favors. That's the way things have always worked in Chicago, which can be good or bad. In this case, it was good.

And it wasn't the only time the politician did something like that. Using his political muscle to help people out was part of his trade. That's the good side of what used to be called machine politics.

I like to think of the late alderman Vito Marzullo, who usually placed one or two young lawyers in city or county patronage jobs. And one night every week, the lawyers came to Vito's ward office and handled legal chores for low-income people from the neighborhood. Free, of course.

In Mary's case, the politician who took care of her medical needs was Dan Rostenkowski, whose career in public service has just ended in a most tragic way.

Before anyone leaps for the phone, stationery or e-mail device, let me say that Rostenkowski and I are not pals. Far from it. We've never particularly liked each other, and our longest conversation has been about two minutes.

Many years ago, we sat together at a banquet honoring up-and-coming young Chicagoans in various fields. He was the young politician with a future, and I was the young columnist.

He was aloof and wary of talking to someone who just might stick it to him down the line. Which shows he was smart, because I later did exactly that.

That was a pity, really, because we had a lot in common besides our ethnicity. We came from the same neighborhood. My family once owned a tavern within a short walk of Rostenkowski's house. And his precinct captain never once hustled us for a fast buck.

We have mutual friends and share some of the same bad habits. But when he was grabbed for a DUI in Wisconsin some years ago, he had the good sense to be polite to the cops.
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What I'm stumbling into saying is that nobody should be taking pleasure from Rostenkowski's misfortune. Not unless you have never, ever, broken even a minor law and gotten away with it, fudged a bit on your taxes or violated any of the Ten Commandments.

Only a few decades ago, none of this would have been happening. That's because the rules changed. Most of the things he was nailed for would have been legal and common or, at worst, nickel-dime offenses when he began his career in Congress.

That's the way it is in our society. The rules keep changing. Things we could once say or think are now taboo. And acts that were once considered gosh-awful are now embraced.

Rostenkowski's mistake was not changing. Maybe he didn't notice. Or maybe he didn't see the danger.
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Man, I miss Royko.

In lieu of flowers, bales of money will be dropped from Chinook Helicopter

at this weekend's Air and Water show.