Blagojevich--A Cruel Fate For An Ativism

Poor Rod Blagojevich. He was born too late. In the good old days of Boss Tweed of Tamanny Hall, he would scarcely have been noticed. After all, the Rockefellers and Goulds and Morgans and Vanderbilts routinely bought senators—in wholesale lots.
How else could you avoid running a railroad (as Commodore Vanderbilt so famously said), “according to the laws of the State of New York”? Or any other state or federal entity? Alas, poor Blagojevich, he was born in a time that requires, if not greater honesty, at least greater subtlety.
I remember back when I was in college—during the reign of Richard J. Daley the elder. Now there was a fine figure of a politician. During his regime (50’s and 60’s), it was understood that you did not drive in Chicago without a five dollar bill paper clipped to your driver’s license.
When the cop pulled you over for some infraction, you handed him your license. He mumbled some politeness about a warning and handed you back your license—sans the fiver. The alternative was a long, expensive visit to an Illinois traffic court.
I had a wealthy acquaintance who nearly gave one unsuspecting officer a heart attack. He had clipped a ten dollar bill to his license. When he was pulled over, he handed the cop his license and the poor man nearly choked. That could have been bad—it might have raised the cost of driving for all of us.
While I was in Washington, I developed a working relationship with a man who was known as the hatchet man for his ways of dealing with uncooperative bureaucrats. His claim to fame and toughness came from an experience he had while living in Chicago.
A fire broke out in his building. The fire department arrived, put out the fire, and—as apparently was their custom—looted several of the other apartments. Most citizens accepted this as a normal cost of living—Daley and his police and fire men were not safely crossed.
This guy lived in one of the affected apartments and he objected. More than that, he won his fight. This rarely, rarely ever happened in Daley’s Chicago. Kennedy was so impressed that he brought the man to Washington and used him as bureaucratic muscle.
(Then, of course, there’s always the story of how Daley held up the 1960 Chicago vote tally until he knew exactly how many votes JFK would need to carry Illinois over the downstate Republicans. And, again, there’s the legend of Steve Smith (the Kennedy in-law who managed the family business) who brought a suitcase full of cash to buy votes in the 1960 West Virginia primary.
He stopped for a haircut and accidentally left the suitcase behind. He had to ask Joe Kennedy to send down another case full of ten dollar bills (the going cost for votes in the southern Appalachians back then), which provoked the famous telegram from Joe: “I’m not buying a landslide!”)
A little friendly corruption is (as Rap Brown once said of violence) “as American as apple pie.” The British tried to indict Benjamin Franklin for selling shoddy goods to Braddock’s army during the French and Indian War. Then again there’s the Father of his Country.
With inside knowledge that the new capital was going to be built just up the river from his plantation, George Washington bought up lots in what became the District of Columbia and made a profit on them. The profit he made would be illegal today.
Think what Hamilton did with Revolutionary War bonds. They had lost all value after the war. As Secretary of the Treasury, he had his friends buy them up for pennies on a dollar—and then pushed through a law requiring the federal government to redeem them at face value. Jefferson was so outraged he left the cabinet and created an opposition party.
There is extant a letter in which Daniel Webster duns the lobbyists and interests that routinely made cash contributions to him. They were a bit late in their payments.
In the good old days some of these things often weren’t even thought of as corrupt. I’ve always loved what Nelson Rockefeller said about his grandfather, John D., senior. Asked if his grandfather had been corrupt, Nelson thought a moment and said, “I don’t think grampa broke any laws—but they sure made a lot of laws because of him.”
For decades it was whispered that no one could get elected mayor of New York without Mafia approval. I once owned a Brownstone in that city that needed fixing up. The realtor who sold me the house told me how to handle the city inspectors who had to sign off on any improvements.
“Meet him as he arrives and shake his hand. Have a hundred dollar bill in your palm and leave it in his. Inspection will go much more smoothly.”
You can argue that, after all, I wasn’t selling a Senate seat. But, in the ultimate scheme of things there really isn’t a lot of difference. It’s just that poor Blagojevich got caught out in public with his palm out in a time when there is a certain amount of public indignation at making a good old fashioned crooked profit.
Sorry, Rod—wrong era, wrong game for the time.