Once-Powerful Congressman Experiences Surreal Final Days of Freedom

It was a spring day made in hell--rain mixed with snow, fog hanging so low it made the Sears Tower look like a low-rise--and Dan Rostenkowski didn’t look much better when he lumbered out of his office at the back of the worn and fraying 32nd Ward headquarters on the northwest side.

Rostenkowski, who for 14 years ran the feared and formidable House Ways and Means Committee, is going to federal prison, and even though he said he finally accepts his fate, it all seems more than a bit surreal. Sometimes when his phone rings, it’s a probation officer, and sometimes it’s one of the more famous or powerful people in the world--President Clinton, former President George Bush, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

“Danny, how are you?” was Clinton’s opener, on the day Rostenkowski pleaded guilty in Washington to two felony counts of official corruption.

“I’m fine,” the once-powerful chairman barked, like old times. Then came the real answer: “What the hell, Mr. President? I’ve got problems.”

“Look,” he said in the middle of a long interview recently, “I liked being the guy who could walk in the room and light the room up, the guy everyone was waiting for. That’s what I was. Then, all of a sudden, you don’t care to mingle. You’re not yourself. This woman [U.S. District Judge Norma Johnson, who sentenced him to 17 months] is putting me in prison? I’ve been in prison ever since the first accusation.”

For most of his 36 years in the Capitol, Democrat Rostenkowski was at once quintessential Washington and unique to Washington. No politician was more blunt, or more instinctual, about the quids and quos of political deal-making than the man who learned at the feet of the Daley machine in Chicago. Nor were many as unapologetic about golfing with CEOs or dining with lobbyists, even after the public mood turned virulently on Washington and its insider culture.

He was as blunt and unapologetic after pleading guilty on April 9, declaring outside the federal courthouse that he had been “singled out, to be held up by law enforcement as an example.” After friends and former aides beseeched Rostenkowski to bow his head--at least a bit--he forswore being unrepentant (“I don’t want to sound like sour grapes”) but stopped well short of repenting.

In the interview, he said he pleaded guilty after his lawyers persuaded him that a jury could find him guilty of a crime for using his account at the House stationery store to buy gifts for friends and supporters, including wooden armchairs emblazoned with his name and a sketch of the Capitol. (He repaid the store the cost of the gifts: $80,000.)

He said the same was true of the other charge to which he pleaded guilty--having “ghost employees” on his payroll--adding that the “ghosts” included college students who worked briefly and used the money to help pay tuition. (The 14-count indictment named many others.)

“It’s not easy admitting things,” he said. “But you look at what they charged me with and what they found me guilty of and see if you can tell me they won, except for putting me in jail. I’m comfortable.”

But prosecutors said Rostenkowski’s crimes were serious and of his own making, and “defrauded” constituents of “their right to Mr. Rostenkowski’s fair and honest services.”

Nancy Luque, a former prosecutor who represented Rostenkowski’s office manager in the probe, said she reviewed most documents in the case and agreed with him, describing the behavior as sloppy but not criminal.

“It’d be criminal if they could prove he knew he was not supposed to use the money for the purpose he used it,” she said. “They never could have proven that because it simply wasn’t true.”

Rostenkowski said he has spent $3 million on lawyers, exhausting his political campaign fund and a legal defense fund set up by friends and supporters, and still owes his lawyers $1 million. He also paid the legal fees of his staff and family, all of whom were subpoenaed for what was expected to be a four-month trial. He said he couldn’t have afforded a trial even if he wanted to fight.

“I’m 68 years old. Do I go through this until I’m 75, and at the end of every month, get another bill? How does one take on the government that has a bottomless pit and survive?”

It was a curious question coming from a man who for so many years was the government, the Powerful Chairman of the Powerful Ways and Means Committee, as it was always called, who held sway over who paid taxes and who didn’t for 14 years until he was defeated by an unknown Republican in 1994 because of the scandal. The fruits of his power were everywhere on a driving tour of his old district that he gave to a reporter.

“I put this highway in,” Rostenkowski said as he zoomed down the Kennedy Expressway, past the exit for the Polish Museum of America, toward the house where he has lived for 68 years. He was in the state Legislature when the road was sited, he said, and was in Congress when much of the money for it was appropriated. He said he made sure that it didn’t plow through the St. Stanislaus Church, the anchor of his old Polish neighborhood that stands across the street from his house.

“My grandmother watched the Chicago fire from the steeple of that church,” he said. Across the street is Pulaski Park, where he played as a boy, and which features a vast red and brown pavilion. “It’s the largest building under one roof in the Chicago parks system and I made it a historic site, so nobody can touch it,” he said.

By the time that Rostenkowski reached his three-story, sand-colored brick house at the corner of Noble and Evergreen--the house his grandfather built--the weathered and beaten figure who had emerged from the ward headquarters was replaced by someone resembling the old Powerful Chairman. He threw open the door on a vast study lined with pictures of presidents, first ladies, House speakers, Senate majority leaders and, of course, the Powerful Chairman.

There was an artist’s sketch of the Sept. 26, 1960, Kennedy-Nixon debate in Studio One at the Chicago CBS building. “There weren’t more than 30 people in the studio. I was one of them,” he said.

There were many pictures of him with George Bush, his friend from days together as young members of the Ways and Means Committee. “Hey Rosty,” Bush inscribed one showing the two of them in a golf cart, “hell with sequester, reconciliation, capital gains, catastrophic, Sec. 89 and moving the previous question. I’m talking friendship. May your life be full of birdies.”

There was also a memento of Clinton’s inauguration, signed by both Clintons and both Gores. Hillary Clinton inscribed it, “To THE chairman.”

And there were pictures of Rostenkowski with former President Ronald Reagan and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), during the debate over the Tax Reform Act of 1986, Rostenkowski’s proudest achievement that dramatically lowered tax rates and closed loopholes in what was billed as a much fairer tax system.

The credit that Rostenkowski received for passage of that bill marked the pinnacle of his career. All his life, he had worked to outgrow his beginnings. He was the youngest member of the state Legislature, then the youngest in the state Senate. But everyone knew he owed his start to his father, Joe Rostenkowski, the committeeman and alderman of Daley machine fame. Even in Congress, Rostenkowski was called “Mayor Daley’s man.”

The taint was still there in 1985 when tax reform landed in his court. He already was credited with helping rescue Social Security in 1983, but this, he said, would show Washington and Wall Street that he was more than a Chicago machine pol who never finished college. He wanted to graduate to statesman. In 1992 he decided not to use a loophole that would have allowed him to retire and keep a $1-million campaign war chest. Rostenkowski feared--in retrospect, ironically--that it would taint him.

As Ways and Means chairman, Rostenkowski often arranged to meet CEOs at his 32nd Ward office, which his father opened decades earlier and Rostenkowski never updated. Its aquamarine carpet is patched with duct tape, and florescent lights flicker and glow eerie yellow.

This is surely where he will return after his prison term, and where precinct workers, local alderman and former staffers will drop in to see him.

“It didn’t end up like he wanted it to,” said attorney William Daley, son of the former mayor and a Rostenkowski friend. “But he knows he can come back and be very well accepted among his friends.”

And probably receive phone calls from the famous and powerful.