I knew from a close aide to Dan Rostenkowski, who died yesterday at his lake
house in Wisconsin, that the man who was among the most powerful to walk the
halls of Congress was battling lung cancer. He kept his illness private, and,
with the exception of one Chicago columnist, local reporters went along.
Rosty had never smoked, but his wife did, and then there were all those
smoke-filled rooms from the days when Lyndon Johnson held sway as majority leader,
president and confidant of Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means
Committee.
He was also close to Bill Clinton, although Rosty told me, during lunch in
Chicago in March 2009 (see the highlights of that lunch at chicagomag.com),
shortly before his cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy, that he considered
Clinton more like a “kid brother.”
It was during Clinton’s first term that Rostenkowski became entangled in a
scandal involving taking cash for postage stamps. That cost him the
chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee just as he was attempting to
shepherd the Clintons’ healthcare bill through the House. (Rosty told me that
he strongly advised Clinton, to no avail, to be more “incremental” in his
approach.) In 1994 Rosty lost to an unknown first-time Republican candidate,
and two years later he went to prison.
Rosty was full of stories about JFK (overrated, but “the press loved him. Jesus
Christ, Walter Lippmann, James Reston, Christ sakes, he could do nothing
wrong.”), Jackie (her husband’s biggest asset), Bobby Kennedy (mean), and LBJ,
whom Rosty seemed genuinely to love and to consider the best president of his
era. Rosty’s voice ranged between gruff and gruffer, but he was almost tender
when he spoke of Johnson.
Her recalled Johnson’s trip to Chicago on April 1, 1968, the day after his
address to the nation that he would not seek a second term.
“I get a call about 10:30 at night and [Chicago Mayor] Dick Daley [a kind of
father figure/mentor to the younger man] says, ‘I’m picking you up tomorrow and
we’re going out to the airport to pick up the president. … He’s coming to
Chicago to speak to the National Association of Broadcasters. … [After the
speech] We got on Air Force One. … He wanted me to fly back to DC and I
wouldn’t go. … We must have talked I’d say for an hour and a half. He was
explaining his reasons for not wanting to run. … He felt that he could [better]
deal by not being president with the Vietnamese. … He was dressed to kill. … He
had a blue shirt on and a rust-colored suit; he was natty. … Daley kept saying
to Lyndon, ‘What does this mean? … Daley thought he had made a big mistake but
Daley [also] didn’t think [Johnson] could win the nomination and the election.
… The demonstrations against the war would have been unbelievable. … I don’t
think he would have won the election. … One thing that Johnson must have said
to me at least five times: ‘I don’t want to be the first president to lose a
war.’ ”
For Johnson, Rosty said, the decision was acutely painful: “Nobody enjoyed
being president more than Lyndon Johnson. He couldn’t wait until he got up in
the morning, put his tootsies on the ground and walked around as president of
the United States.”
Although he would never say it, Rosty’s downfall was equally painful. He was,
after all, a man who had once held court, receiving assorted powerbrokers and
lobbyists, at a table reserved for him at Morton’s in Georgetown. (A bronze
plaque read, “Rosty’s Rotunda.”)
And Rosty was nothing if not proud. House of Representatives deputy historian
Fred Beuttler told me in a conversation earlier this summer that had
Rostenkowski decided to retire instead of run for reelection in 1994, House
rules would have allowed him to convert his campaign cash to his personal use.
Rosty never lost the common touch. In the ’60s and early ’70s, when congressmen
were allowed only one paid round-trip home, Rosty and two colleagues from
Illinois, Bob Michel and Harold Collier, would pile into a station wagon on
Thursday night. They would drive from D.C. to Chicago, taking turns sleeping on
a cot set up in the back. Rosty needed to be back in Chicago on Friday morning
for his weekly meeting with Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley.