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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Some people come to politics after making their fortunes. Others work their way up the ranks, cultivating friends in high places. George Ryan did the first -- rising in politics while making his fortune -- by concentrating on the second. Ryan is from Kankakee County. The county's main city, Kankakee, is only 50 miles south of Chicago, but it is in no way a suburb. Its surroundings are largely rural, and the city stands on its own. While Chicago has long been run by a powerful Democratic political machine, the organization in Kankakee is strictly Republican. At the time Ryan first entered politics, Kankakee's boss was a state senator named Ed McBroom.
Political columnist Rich Miller is a Kankakee native whose Web site, capitolfax.com, follows events in the Illinois statehouse. "When I was a kid," Miller says, "in order to get a job with the county you had to buy a car from a dealership owned by Ed McBroom, who was also the Republican Party chairman."
George Ryan's father had a pair of pharmacies. Upon returning from the Korean War, Ryan went to work in the family business and married a high school sweetheart, Lura Lynn. He later graduated with a pharmacy degree from Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Mich. In 1962, Ryan became McBroom's campaign manager, and McBroom subsequently helped Ryan's brother, Tom, get elected mayor of the city of Kankakee. The Ryan brothers learned how to wield influence from a master: McBroom doled out contracts and favors only to those who were willing to pay tribute.
With a nod from McBroom, Ryan got appointed to the Kankakee County Board in 1966. He was elected two years later. "Ryan became the county board chairman, and his brother was mayor," Miller says. "Gradually they got a lock on power." The family pharmacies boomed, selling prescription drugs to nursing homes, which increasingly became a lucrative government-contract business. With another boost from McBroom, Ryan got elected to the Illinois House in 1972.
"He was clearly a typical, pro-business conservative Republican," says Bernard Schoenburg, political columnist for the State Journal-Register in Springfield.
Five years later, at the age of 42, Ryan was elected minority leader of the Illinois House, in a contest that pitted Chicago suburbanites against Ryan's downstate conservatives. Ryan voted to re-establish the death penalty. "It was a tough vote," he admitted in a 1977 interview with the public-policy magazine Illinois Issues. "It bothered me for a couple of days after I did it, but I believe that reinstating the death penalty will have an effect. We've tried everything else ... I think the state should have the death penalty for a while and see what happens. It may be easy to talk about the death penalty, but it's a different matter to push the button to vote yes. To vote for a bill like that, I had to think about it very hard, and I was upset about it that whole day. But I feel that I did the right thing."
Ryan became speaker of the Illinois House after Republicans regained a majority in the 1980 election. The state was at the center of the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment. After 10 years, ERA proponents had 35 of the 38 states needed to ratify the addition to the U.S. Constitution. Protesters nationwide had descended on Springfield.
"A group of women in chains fasted every day in the Capitol rotunda, sometimes joined by Dick Gregory," Schoenburg recalls. "Ryan was not a fan of ERA." The National Organization for Women put Ryan on its "Dirty Dozen" list.
In what some claim was an inappropriate application of legislative rules, Ryan killed the ERA's chances in Illinois by refusing to allow the House to pass it with a simple majority. Instead he required passage by a three-fifths majority.
Yet today, Ryan isn't remembered as an ideologue. He was a true old-school politician, always ready to cut a deal with his rivals (if they were willing to deal with him). Helen Satterthwaite, a former Democratic state representative from Urbana, opposed Ryan on the ERA, but she remembers him as "a consummate deal-maker ... a man who appreciated the political process in the extreme."
In 1982, in what became the closest race in Illinois history, Republican Gov. James "Big Jim" Thompson barely beat back a challenge from Democrat Adlai Stevenson III. As a sop to the right wing, Thompson had picked Ryan as his lieutenant governor. But Ryan had always seemed to maintain conservative positions on key issues more as a matter of political pragmatism. Under the moderate Thompson, he could afford to veer a bit publicly to the middle of the road. Eight years later he was elected secretary of state, where he proved adept at using the office for self-promotion. There his troubles began.
Whether the misdeeds were his own or arose from the actions of his trusted advisors, it's obvious the feds are currently thinking about indicting Ryan. At the start of Fawell's trial, one prosecutor blamed the Ryan "machine," which sacrificed "the public good on the altar of personal and political greed." While Operation Safe Road began as an investigation into the selling of Ryan fundraising tickets, the government is now alleging that Ryan's aides -- and perhaps Ryan himself -- profited personally from a pattern of influence peddling. The former governor hasn't been charged with a crime, but prosecutors have already alleged Ryan knew that documents were being shredded, that employees did political work on state time, and that his own Jamaican vacation had been paid for by someone who did business with the state.
Said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald: "For the better part of a decade in Illinois, when it came to contracts and leases in the secretary of state's office, the fix was in for a price."
