How much is enough? A few steak dinners? First-class flights to better fairways? A million or more in undeclared cash? What if even that is not enough? What if there is no enough?
Randy "Duke" Cunningham needed at least $2.4 million, according to recent news accounts. We'll never know how much more he might have required. The California Republican was forced to resign his seat in the U.S. House after fessing up to bribery. Still, Cunningham lived, as my grandmother would say, pretty high on the hog while it lasted. He managed to get defense contractors to bankroll a lifestyle that is unimaginable on a public salary.
Next to him, Paul Powell was little more than a church mouse. Not that the late Illinois secretary of state couldn't have matched Cunningham dollar for dollar. But Powell was raised on some basic Midwestern values my grandmother could understand. He was not so much a spender as a hoarder. No putting on airs in front of the neighbors for him. Then, too, in his day, a chit was stored in the head and sealed on a shake. And settled, whenever possible, in cash.
True or not, I imagine Powell sitting each night in his hotel room in downtown Springfield, out of the sights of tax agents, uncrinkling and recounting 10s and 20s before storing them lovingly in a cardboard box. He left nearly a million of those dollars unspent. But never mind, the getting and the counting may have been satisfaction enough. We'll never know. The Democrat was still at the top of his game when he died in 1970.
What would be enough? Jetting off to tee up in Scotland? Being seen with wads of cash? Calculating the mean value of personal and political tribute?
Which brings us to George Ryan, the bookkeeper. Illinois' former Republican governor was charged in 2003 with tax fraud and with getting benefits for his family and himself, including free vacations, mostly during his tenure as secretary of state. As we send this to press, we don't know what the jury will decide in his long-running federal trial.
"To me avarice seems not so much a vice, as a deplorable piece of madness." - Sir Thomas Browne
But we do know Ryan was famous for carrying wads of cash, and that he seldom made withdrawals from his personal account. And we know (his lawyers told us) that each Christmas Ryan's employees put together a bundle of money that came to as much as $4,000. We also know that Ryan had a compulsion to track these tributes in what amounted to a handwritten ledger. And that he wrote checks (prosecutors told us) from his campaign kitty for at least one of his workers, a janitor. At deadline, prosecutors had fixed no interpretation to this exchange. But it's fair to say Ryan received cash gifts that are hard to trace, while his janitor got larger amounts in a form that is easy to trace.
We know Ryan is creative. As are his lawyers. The Christmas giving "tradition" by loyal employees was entered as a plausible explanation for those wads of cash. And how could anyone fully gauge the fallout from this strategy? What could be, and was, seen as personal greed was a key defense against a charge of public graft.
In fairness, there is precedent for this. Another former Republican governor was acquitted on tax evasion charges that also involved wads of cash. William Stratton, tried in 1963, also argued that money arrived unsolicited, stuffed into Christmas and birthday cards. David Kenney wrote in A Political Passage: The Career of Stratton of Illinois that the late governor said he got a thousand or two a year, "some from people [we had] never even heard of."
Apparently, money was pressed on him at every turn. Kenney wrote that John W. Lewis, the state House speaker, finished his turn as a defense witness by offering $50 "to do with as he sees fit." Kenney noted: "Taken by surprise (perhaps), Stratton asked, 'Your honor, may I have your permission to accept this? ... It's my 51st birthday.' Judge Will smiled and said, 'I don't control contributions.'" After U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen argued politicians need to keep up appearances, meaning new dresses for the wife and fancy lodging, the jury found Stratton not guilty.
Times have changed. But the game, and the need that drives it, hasn't. This poses endless challenges to reformers, as well as prosecutors. Over the years, Illinois has made strides in putting limits on the most egregious "perks" that attend political power. We detailed that progress in last month's issue. And, as we report in this issue, congressional reformers want to do the same.
This is necessary work. And some admirable folks continue to do the heavy lifting. Barack Obama pushed ethics reform in the Illinois legislature before he went off to the U.S. Senate and agreed to head Democratic efforts in Congress. Among others, Republican state Sen. Kirk Dillard is still at it back here. As is Kent Redfield, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Cindi Canary of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.
But we miss something if we look only to the scope of graft or the means of acquiring it. A 17th-century English doctor was on to this. Sir Thomas Browne wrote essays reflecting on the human condition. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles turned to him for this entry: "To me avarice seems not so much a vice, as a deplorable piece of madness.
In this light, we might reconsider Orville Hodge. The Republican embezzled a couple of million dollars as state auditor of public accounts. It's unlikely he would have stopped on his own. But it's also unlikely that he looted the treasury simply because he could. Perhaps he believed he was entitled. And perhaps he was filling some endless hole in himself.
Everett Dirksen is credited with saying, "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." He was referring to public budgeting. But the bottom line on political greed never adds up. It is never enough.
George Ryan's
political career
He was, David McKinney wrote inIllinois Issues, "Paralyzed by scandal, yet one of the most active Illinois governors in recent memory." And that was just one paradox in the public life of the Kankakee Republican. Ryan served one term, which ended in January 2003 with federal prosecutors close on his heels. A jury may have decided his fate by the time you read this. McKinney's biography of Ryan, published in Illinois Issues' November 2002 edition, offers a balanced picture of the state's 39th governor. Go to http://illinoisissues.uis.edu. Click on the News page, where we also provide the evidentiary proffer for United States of America v. Lawrence Warner and George H. Ryan, Sr.
Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, March 2006
