Men's Journal

He’s “Blago” to you by now, but back in college, Rod Blagojevich was a prank-pulling, leather jacket-wearing Reagan worshipper. Photo credit: courtesy United States Congress

During college, Rod Blagojevich loved to make crank calls to radio stations, remained true to Elvis, worshipped Reagan, identified intensely with Nixon, and was already honing his craft.

By Bill Powell

I used to go yo-hoing with the most disgraced politician in America. After a night carousing in Chicago, when we were both undergrads at Northwestern University in the late 1970s, a group of us would occasionally end up at a 24-hour diner called the Gold Coin, where we’d have a very early breakfast. And once or twice, just for hoots, we would “yo-ho.” That was our term for running out before paying the bill, thus stiffing some poor waitress working the overnight shift out of a five- or 10- dollar tip. In our youthful, drunken stupor, we thought this was hilarious.

God, we could be such assholes. To this day, 30 years down the road, it makes me shudder just thinking about it.

He’s “Blago” to you by now, the heretofore little-known politician with the unpronounceable last name and the funny head of hair. His hair, we’ve been told for the last several months, is ridiculous. To me it’s the same hair he had in college. I didn’t think it was particularly weird then, and I don’t think it is now. But that’s the thing about this American freak show that I’ve watched unfold from afar: The plethora of Blago hair jokes is the least of my confusion.

Occasionally, someone we know well becomes famous. Sometimes it happens for good reasons. Friends of “Sully,” the US Airways pilot, were delighted to tell stories about the guy they know after he landed a plane in the Hudson River. Then there are cases like Rod’s.

Rod and I weren’t just casual friends. Not “Hey, how you doin’, how ’bout those Cubbies?” type friends, but someone you think you know cold; you know what motivates them, and frightens them, and pisses them off, and makes them laugh. Some of my fondest memories are of spending weekends at his parents’ house on the west side of Chicago when we were at school. Rod’s father, a Serbian immigrant and retired steelworker, had a deep, booming voice, and laughed heartily around the family’s kitchen table. He did have a temper, though he didn’t speak a word of English so I had no idea what the hell he was going on about. Rod would translate in fluent Serbo-Croatian as we ate dinner, downing the occasional shot of slivovitz. Once in a while his father would start hollering about the damned Croatians. Rod would gently try to shush him.

Rod was hardly the typical Northwestern student. He was a working class kid in a world of preppies who commuted each day from his insular, ethnic enclave on the west side, either driving or taking the El to campus each day. He wore leather jackets and black T-shirts, while the rest of us wore khakis and button-down shirts. He was different, and he knew it. While the rest of us played “Born to Run” as loud as we could in our dorm rooms, he remained the die-hard Elvis fan, cranking “Blue Hawaii” and singing along in his room at home.

And, oh yes, lest I forget: He did comb his hair a lot.

Rod and his friends from the west side were fun to hang out with, and were for me a refreshing change from the standard-issue upper-middle-class white suburban kids at Northwestern. They provided entrée into parts of Chicago — bars, blues clubs, restaurants — I’d probably never have seen otherwise.

Rod loved to wind people up. Not in malicious ways — yo-hoing aside, his humor was rarely cruel — but in juvenile, faintly subversive ways that were often funny in the moment. He and his friends used to try to get crank calls past screeners on talk-radio shows, and they succeeded more often than not. Doing his best to sound Hispanic, Mike, Rod’s closest friend from the neighborhood, would call up a show, hosted by a guy named Dave, on Chicago’s WIND. “Allo, Dave, this is Rico La Verga here,” he would say. “Hello, Rico!” Dave would respond jovially, and we would all dissolve in laughter. Mike had just gotten on the air calling himself Rico the Dick.

Another time, on St. Patrick’s Day, the same show asked listeners what they loved about the Irish. Rod called, making sure to use a word that the host wouldn’t understand.

“Hi, Dave, this is Bert from the west side.”

“Thanks for calling, Bert. So tell me, what do you think about the Irish?”

“Well, Dave, I think they’re a bunch of sloths.”

Pause. “What?”

“Sloths.”

Click.

Rod was so proud of these calls that he made a tape of them. He called them “The Classics.”

We never had steady girlfriends, so we used to chase girls in bars and clubs in the city. There was the occasional one-night stand (Rod was charming, and — this will come as a shock — a little brash), but he wasn’t relentless about it. He was much more inclined to collect people, to befriend those who seemed as odd to him as he did to them. One of them was an accounting major at Northwestern business school named Rob who began hanging out with us. This guy was everything you would expect an accounting major to be, which is to say he was about as nerdy as you get. Why, suddenly, he was part of the group was a mystery to me. But I remember once at a Bulls game, Rod spent the entire first half trying to convince Rob that a player wearing a protective device over his nose — which he’d broken in a previous game — actually had no nose.

“Seriously, Rob, this guy has no nose. Can you believe that? That’s an artificial nose the guy’s playing with.” The accountant never bit, but Rod was having a fine old time trying his damnedest to convince the guy. And it hit me that he thought poor Rob was just a sap, who could be told any thing and be made to believe it — if you were sincere and convincing enough.

Which is to say, he was honing his craft.

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Watch Blago’s appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman:

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The thing of it was, despite these occasional antics, we were serious kids back then. We had to be. Our older brothers and sisters were the Vietnam, counterculture, get-stoned and get-laid generation. We were the generation of Jimmy Carter, double-digit unemployment, and no fucking future whatsoever unless you got into med school or law school. The social event of the week at Northwestern — and I am not making this up — was the nine o’clock break on Friday nights in the library.

So Rod, like the rest of us, was a motivated student. But he wasn’t just a grade grubber. Rod cared deeply about his studies. I’ve heard various chat show hosts in the last few weeks chortle about how “shallow” the guy is, after he’d gone on television defiantly quoting Tennyson or Kipling. After all, he must have learned those lines the night before, so as to impress the boobs watching on TV.

On the contrary. Rod was the kind of guy who would stay after class to talk to professors; to get recommendations for outside reading, which he would then actually do. This wasn’t brown-nosing; he was really into it. He loved Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt. As a junior in college he could quote verbatim the famous “Man in the Arena” speech that TR gave at the Sorbonne in 1910. (“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.…”)

He always loved politics, and it was always clear he would follow that path. The funny thing, though, was that Rod, who got elected governor of Illinois as a liberal Democratic reformer, was a thorough, true-believing Republican. His two modern political heroes were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. (Look at any clip of Rod giving a speech. He mimics Reagan beautifully. The head bobs, the pauses; there are times when he even tries to match the timbre of the voice.)

We used to give him endless grief about it, but he never backed off, and we would just shake our heads. The reason for that speaks to who Rod is.

He identified intensely with Nixon, the up-from-nowhere guy who busted his ass to get where he is. (Remember, at Duke Law School they called Nixon “Iron Butt” because he studied so damn hard.) To him, Nixon was a guy who did what he had to do to get ahead in the cutthroat world of politics — a guy who had nothing handed to him and had to work harder than anyone else, but was also held to a different set of standards. If you brought up Nixon’s crimes, Rod would insist that the Kennedys were worse.

Though Rod was confident, a bit brash, he was neither a bragger nor an idle dreamer. He would never say, ‘I’m going to run for President some day.’ He was smart enough to know how foolish that would have sounded when we were so young. But if you listened to him expound on the “great man” theory of history, on how individuals can shape history and make it their own — you knew what he was thinking: Anybody could be president in America. Why not him?

We stayed tight after graduation, for a while anyway. I’d gotten a job as a junior correspondent based in Pittsburgh, and often I’d fly to Chicago for weekends, staying at Rod’s place. He was in a rage in those days because the Northwestern Law School had turned him down. He hadn’t done particularly well on his law boards, but, Rod being Rod, the snub was about being a working-class kid with a name like Blagojevich. “Guys like us are supposed to go to DePaul for law school,” he would sneer, sounding almost Nixonian, “not Northwestern.”

He ended up hitting the beaches of Malibu for his legal education, going to Pepperdine. He never had any intention of practicing law, at least not for long. He would return to his hometown, and to politics.

How does a Nixon-loving, Reagan-imitating, ambitious young man get ahead politically? In Chicago, there was one way, and one way only: by joining the machine — Richard J. Daley’s machine — that had stolen the presidency from his hero in 1960. We had taken a political science course in college about American urban political machines and read the classic book  Don’t Make No Waves — Don’t Back No Losers, about Chicago politics. Rod knew what he had to do. He became a Democrat and worked his way up the ladder ­— running first for the state legislature, then Congress and the governorship. It was the triumph of ambition over ideology. He married Patti Mell, daughter of a big-time alderman, which is what they call city councilmen in Chicago. None of us were surprised.

It was around then, in the mid-1980s, that we grew apart. I was sent abroad, to Tokyo, as a correspondent for Newsweek; he became a rising star of the Chicago machine. We exchanged letters for a while but gradually fell out of touch, save for the occasional note or Christmas card. I remember being bemused but sort of proud when Time identified him as one of the young comers in Washington after he’d been elected to Congress. Rod was a young comer, and we all knew what that meant to him. It meant everything. And it meant — we were positive about it — that he did want to run for president some day. Even if his last name was Blagojevich.

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I knew Rod was in trouble — all of his friends did — long before the arrest. Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had been building a painstaking case about corruption in his administration for a few years. Last year, as the national political press focused on the trial of Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko and what it might mean for the presidential aspirations of Barack Obama (Rezko had cut a sweetheart deal for Obama on his south side house), we knew that the trial was aimed not at Obama, but squarely at my old friend.

I froze at that point. I didn’t know what to say to him, and still don’t. Fitzgerald convicted Rezko. The noose tightened on Rod. And then the freak show unfolded. Obama — Rod’s peer and former underling from the Illinois state senate — took the White House, and everyone who was anyone in Illinois politics was in Grant Park for the victory party on election night. Except Rod. He was, I am reliably told, deliberately not invited.

I’ve been asked a hundred times how this could have happened. How did a smart, ambitious politician become so brazen, so evidently corrupt? Believe me, we, his friends old and new, have talked about this. Sad to say, no one has come up with an overarching theory, no “unified field theory of Rodness,” as one of his Northwestern buddies put it. Except for his long ago fascination with Richard Nixon, there isn’t much in his background to suggest that this was coming. So we all just sort of shrug. His Republican predecessor’s in jail, and Rod may join him. To play in Illinois, you have to pay.

I still don’t think Rod is stupid — absurd, possibly criminal, but not stupid. Still, I’m stunned to a fair-thee-well that someone who idolized Richard Nixon is enmeshed in this kind of petty corruption. As one friend said, “Just because you idolize a guy doesn’t mean you have to become him.”

The real guy, the guy who I know, went on his national barnstorming tour in late January —succumbing to the vacuities of Larry King and the like — with two things in mind. At some level, I don’t think Rod minded stepping into the limelight during Barack Obama’s first weeks in office. Rod wanted to be Barack, and, I’m told, has been driven to distraction by the mainstream press’s fawning over him. All the names of the people close to Obama whom Rod wanted to testify at his impeachment trial in Springfield (Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, Jesse Jackson Jr.), reminded people, not so subtly, that he and Barack have more in common than anyone might care to think.

The last media blitz before his impeachment also showed Rod being exactly who he always wanted to be: the man “in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” but who is still striving and who will never quit.

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