to whom city hall destroys first they first made mad
Maverick and the Machine: Governor Dan Walker Tells His Story
by Dan Walker, Peggy Lang (Editor)
ISBN: 0809327562
Pub. Date: May 2007
Out of a dirt-poor, yellow-dog Democrat family in Texas, Dan Walker went up to Illinois to become a successful trial lawyer, business executive, and governor of Illinois and then to the fall that sent him to prison (his savings & loan didn’t lose any depositors any money but the Chicago machine used its connection to throw the book at him.) I learnt of this book while watching C-Span’s Book Notes; Walker described his numbing battle with the Richard J. Daley machine in Chicago.
It is a readable book until he finally gets around to his winning the governorship in 1972 against all odds (dirty tricks of the machine). It was difficult remembering how Illinois, both “major parties,” is a dirty, political State; a fact all Wisconsians know as we look south. Walker married a Wisconsian woman but his book never mentioned if his in-laws ever told him to be careful of Illinois. If he had started his legal and political career in Milwaukee or Madison instead of Chicago I’m sure as a reform and independent Democrat he would had been the next Proxmire: Wisconsin loves its mavericks - - Illinois gets even with its.
The book probes the inner sanctum of the governorship. Walker tells of his gutsy 1,197-mile campaign walk that led to upset victory as Governor as a non-kowtowing Democrat toward Daley, which were followed by a four-year fight to make state government more fiscally responsible, honest, and transparent. Most telling is his outline of his fight with Mayor Richard J. Daley’s vaunted Chicago machine, the powerful incumbent Richard Ogilvie, and Jim Thompson’s fear of Walker’s return to power.
He seem to know little of other States (e.p., his claims of the radical line-item veto in Illinois as the only one in the nation. Wisconsin has a very liberal line-item veto of which Governor Tommy Thompson created new laws with deletions and additions in Bills.) While he begins at the end of his story to realize he was being targeted forever for destruction by the machine, ever the loyal Democrat he lukewarmly spoke of other “independents:”
“A rising on the political horizon in Illinois U.S. senator Barack Obama, who has raised hopes that he can restore luster to the land of Lincoln. He opened his campaign for the presidency with generous praise for Mayor Daley, carefully sublimating the existing Chicago scandals in his statement. This was in striking contrast to his hard-hitting attack on the corruption in Kenya when he was recently in Africa. Is the Kenya corruption worse than that involving more than 120 criminal indictments, which helped label Chicago “the most corrupt city in the nation”? Regrettably, Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Illinois “independents”: Democrats before him who ended up kowtowing to a Boss Daley. If Obama quails before a political boss in Chicago, how will he as president deal with powerful major malefactors abroad?” [sic] (Ibid., pages 323-324.)
At Barnes and Noble the Hardcover prices are Online $29.95 or Members Pay $23.96 But it is Free at Libraryj. I recommend the latter.
