Untitled Document
Not long after Dan Walker took office as governor, in
1973, I interviewed him in his office in the Capitol. I was finishing a
journalism degree at Northwestern while beginning a job with Lindsay-Schaub
News-papers, in Decatur, that involved covering the Statehouse. He began by
telling me that his office was rather small for a governor, which I’d
noticed, but he didn’t think he needed the big formal room next door
that previous governors had used as an office. Besides, he said, this room
had sentimental value to him because it was the same room he’d used
more than 20 years before, when he ran the governor’s office for
Adlai Stevenson while Stevenson was away campaigning for president. Of course I included this interesting historical fact
in the magazine article I wrote for my journalism class, just knowing that
my professor would applaud my eye for detail. When I got my article back, I
was surprised to see a less-than-stellar grade and a big red comment in the
margin: “Dan Walker did not run the governor’s office while Stevenson was
campaigning for president!” I hadn’t taken into account that my
magazine professor, John Bartlow Martin, had been a close aide to Stevenson
and was even then working on his detailed biography, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, published in 1976. In that
book, Martin reported that in 1952 the 30-year-old Walker had been an
important helper to Newton Minow, whom Stevenson had designated to run the
office while he was gone. I also hadn’t taken into account Dan
Walker’s tendency to exaggerate, especially when it came to his own
importance. He had flaws, but he had courage, too, along with a
determination to succeed and a commitment to excellence that brought more
excitement to Springfield than Illinois politics has seen since. All that
came back to mind as I read his new memoir, The
Maverick and the Machine: Governor Dan Walker Tells His Story, to be published in May by the Southern Illinois
University Press. The only person challenging the Chicago Democratic
machine is U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, and today’s Illinois
politicians seem just fine with that. The old Walker feistiness comes
through in his introduction, where he notes that Barack Obama, on his
overseas tour, criticized the corruption endemic in African nations.
“One wonders what he and the senior senator, Dick Durbin, will say
about the current plague of Illinois scandals when. . . they seek the
support of the Chicago political organization very much involved in those
scandals,” Walker writes. Now 84 years old and living in California
with his third wife, Walker is still the Don Quixote who took on the
machine and, for a short time, won. Illinois vaguely remembers Dan Walker as the author
of the “Walker Report,” which investigated the violence
surrounding the 1968 Democratic Conven-tion in Chicago, famously labeling
what happened a police riot. But it wasn’t until the walk, in the
summer of 1971, that he became a household name. The walk began at the Ohio
River town of Brookport and zigzagged the length of Illinois, a trip of
1,197 miles, to the Wisconsin border and then, triumphantly, into Chicago.
Cynics saw only a campaign gimmick in which a wealthy suburban corporate
lawyer tied a red bandanna around his neck and tried to act like a man of
the people. I was working at the Southern
Illinoisan newspaper, in Carbondale, that
summer. Just before Walker and his walk entourage showed up to be
interviewed, our publisher supplied all of us in the newsroom with red
bandannas to put around our necks. Poor Dan, who had no sense of humor,
couldn’t figure out whether we were expressing solidarity or making
fun. “We just wanted you to know you got it right,” our
publisher told him. “This is what people wear in southern
Illinois.” Gimmick or no, Walker learned a lot on the road that
summer as he listened to people, gathered stories, and shed some of his
stiffness. It’s telling that he devotes more of his memoir to the
four-month walk than to his four-year administration. The administration was a confrontation a minute, but
not only because the Walker people were sanctimonious. They were serious,
not just about politics but about governing too. They schooled us reporters
on the techniques of “zero-base budgeting” and
“management by objectives” as they reformed the mental-health
code, streamlined child and family services, and put muscle into the new
Environmental Protection Agency. Walker comes close to admitting that his
own arrogance kept it from lasting. Rather than make some accommodation for
Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, he taunted Daley to “Bring it
on!” — so Daley sent Michael Howlett and beat him in the
primary. Walker reveals that he was always trying to measure up to the
expectations of his demanding perfectionist father. Each chapter begins with a scene from the federal
prison in Duluth, Minn., where Walker was sent at age 65 after pleading
guilty to charges involving a savings-and-loan he owned. According to his
account, an overzealous prosecutor and an inexperienced judge gave him
harsh and unfair treatment because he had been a governor. The prison conditions he faced, with frequent strip searches
and abusive guards, were shameful; that nongovernors endure worse in prison
every day makes the conditions no less so. Walker was released after
serving 18 months of his seven-year term and now seems to have found some
peace in his later years. Let’s hope so — and hope that Dan
Walker’s memoir allows history to judge him less harshly. At the end
of his book he says he has no regrets for having confronted the Chicago
machine. He writes: “Like my Texas father, whose genes and teaching
are largely responsible for what I am, I hold high an independent head that
has never ‘cottoned to bowing.’ ”
Contact Fletcher Farrar at ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2007.
