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BOOK REVIEW By WILLIAM L. DAY

Thompson as Oedipus

Robert E. Hartley, Big Jim Thompson of Illinois. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 223 pp. including index, photos. $9.95 1979.

GOV. JAMES R. Thompson "appears psychologically ready for the presidential pursuit," but, if he is ever going to win the nomination of the Republican party, he needs to win primaries and score a "convincing victory in his own state" in lining up convention delegates. So Robert E. Hartley sees it in Big Jim Thompson of Illinois, a political biography that begins with Thompson's childhood years and takes him through the 1978 reelection campaign.

Ironically, the fact that he is a governor may be an obstacle. Hartley points out that Sen. Charles H. Percy considers the performance of President Carter, a former governor, has "soured voters on the ability of governors to administer the federal government." Hartley himself questions whether a governor of Illinois can take time away from Springfield to campaign in distant primaries.

Hartley focuses on Thompson's White House aspirations in the opening and closing chapters of the book, but, of course, it is this possibility that is the occasion for his book. The author sets the stage in a preface which places Thompson along with Carter, Brown of California and others in a school of "modern politics" (Hartley's phrase) that is more concerned with image than with issues and whose practitioners are "master manipulators of media."

Hartley draws heavily on media sources and personalities, supplemented mainly by interviews, and much of what he relates will be familiar to those who follow Illinois politics. But the material on Thompson's childhood and pre-prosecutorial years was new to this reviewer. Also, in retelling the story of Thompson, the U.S. attorney who sent Gov. Kerner to jail, Hartley seeks to deal with the critics of Thompson's pro-secutorial tactics. And Hartley's accounts of the 1976 and 1978 campaigns bring a new depth to those events.

The description of Thompson's first two years as governor, 1976 and 1978, is fairly tedious at times, perhaps because in this two-year term the governor seems to have concentrated on a balanced budget and Class X crime legislation and not much else. A good deal of space is given to a rehash of episodes that brought media criticism down on Thompson; an example is the "free trip [for the Thompsons] to the Kentucky Derby as guests of the Chessie System, a railroad holding company with lines in Illinois." But on the whole, Hartley feels that in Thompson's first year in office, the media did not turn hostile (as it did with Carter, for example) but was neutral. In one chapter, "The Media," he cites at length from editorials to document this finding.

The book is not an in-depth analysis of the performance of Thompson, the chief executive. Considerable prominence is given to budget balancing, but little mention is made, for example of the growing state debt (the legislature, with Thompson's approval, added $351,750,000 to bond authorizations in fiscal 1977 and 1978). Relatively little is said of state government reorganization; it is not even an item in the name-studded index.

But Hartley has written a political biography, and in it he raises a political problem of vital national importance. He writes in the preface: "We have learned from watching Carter as president, and Brown and Thompson as governors, that the qualities of rising to the top of the political pile in these times are not necessarily the qualities of leadership. Having sought and attained power, they are reluctant to use it unless there is a survey of public opinion in support." And so on.

While the case so stated faults Thompson and the others for failing to lead, it may also occur to the reader of Hartley's book that it is the system and our demands on public figures that is at fault. Have we — the media and the various conflicting elements that make up the public — become like the ancient Sphinx of Thebes? This monster, you may recall, propounded riddles to all who passed by and strangled those who gave the wrong answers. Who, in our times, has the answer to the riddle of how to provide better public services along with lower taxes? Or the riddle of inflation? In the case of Thompson, his second term as governor runs until 1983. If presidential lightning does not strike in 1980 (and that seems unlikely), he has more time to think up the answers. Oedipus became king when he solved the Sphinx' riddle.

Unfortunately, Hartley won't be in Illinois to write the sequel to the Thompson story since he has left his editorial post in Decatur to assume the executive editorship of the Toledo (Ohio) Blade. But he has provided an excellent base for another biographer.

William L. Day, editor emeritus of Illinois Issues, has worked in slate government for over 25 years.

18/February 1980/Illinois Issues


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