A forthcoming biography of Kerner should be a welcome edition by Peggy Boyer Long

Illustration by Mike Cramer Thompson

"I would not," Otto Kerner told the room full of admirers, "wish to my worst enemy those things that have occurred to me in the last few years."

That was September 3,1975. The former Democratic governor was addressing a banquet held in his honor in Springfield. Among the guests were many of the state's movers and shakers, including one other former governor, Republican Richard Ogilvie. The evening was bittersweet, though, because the friends and supporters — more than a thousand of them packed into one of the capital city's hotels — had gathered to welcome Kerner home from prison. And in less than a year, he would be dead from lung cancer.

Kerner's comments to the gathering are preserved in Rich Bradley's tape collection. Bradley is news director of WUIS/WIPA, the public radio station at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He was a young reporter during Kerner's last days, and the testimonial banquet made a lasting impression.

For good reason. Not a few former Illinois governors have faced tragedy and disgrace. But Kerner's story seems especially poignant, partly because his life was integral to the history of two Illinois political dynasties (the Cermaks through marriage and the Daleys through association), and partly because his was the story of a patrician and promising young man who rose from governor to judge, then stumbled.

Kerner had managed to capture national media attention and the love of voters back home for his appeals to their better natures, for his ideas about race and social equality. In the end, he was convicted for the basest of political crimes: benefiting from his position in public power.

But this story also has a Hollywood-style twist. The young prosecutor who won that conviction in 1973 was James R. Thompson, who went on to become governor himself — in no small part because he had prosecuted Kerner.

There are still those who ascribe dark political motives to Kerner's indictment (which played little role in developing). But of interest to two of our essayists in this month's issue of the magazine is a shift in the public's mood after Kerner's prosecution.

Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman argue, beginning on page 32, that the "conservative consensus on civil liberties still holding sway in Illinois" owes much to Richard Nixon's law-and-order message. "But the prevailing sentiment was dramatized and enhanced by the careers of two men, Otto Kerner, the last Democrat to be elected to two terms as Illinois governor, and James R. Thompson, who was elected governor four times." That provocative analysis is explored further in a forthcoming book on Kerner, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.

Their's will be the first biography of the state's 33rd governor. And, by our count, only the 14th full-scale, creditable biography of Illinois' 38 governors, including recent biographies of Republican William Stratton, written by David Kenney, and Democrat Daniel Walker and Ogilvie, written by Taylor Pensoneau. Robert Howard also wrote a compendium of profiles on the Illinois governors, up through most of Thompson's tenure. That book, Mostly Good and Competent Men, was published in 1988 by Illinois Issues and then-Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield. UIS, through the Institute for Public Affairs, is updating and reissuing that book.

Meanwhile, the Kerner biography should be a welcome edition in this body of literature about Illinois governors. By understanding the people we choose to lead us, we can better understand ourselves. 

4 July/August 1998 Illinois Issues