Favorite son: Paul Simon

Photo by John Konstantaras ©1987

Paul Simon once told the story of a federal judge who resigned his post to take a lower paying job as chair­man of what was then the state's Toll Highway Commission. People wondered why the man changed jobs and soon found out. In charge of the road agency, the former judge had formed a "contractors' club," with members who wanted a safe route to state business required to kick in $1,000.

An inquiry was clearly called for, but none was ordered until the new chairman made a derogatory remark in a Springfield bar about a legislator. An inquiry was voted the next day, and the chairman was forced to resign.

The lesson was clear, according to Simon. "Like other legislators, Illinois lawmakers will overlook many things, but never an affront, real or fancied, to the legislature's 'dignity.'"

It was ironic that Simon put the lesson quite that way, for the story of the judge and the Statehouse reaction were both part of an article by Simon, as told to writer Alfred Balk, in the January 1964 issue of Harper's magazine. "The Illinois Legislature: A Study in Corruption," it was called, and it named some names and told of mob and racetrack influence at the Capitol. Worse yet, Simon agreed with an assessment that "one third of the members accept payoffs."

Simon, then in his fifth term in the legislature but his first in the Senate, learned firsthand the lesson he had preached. "He was a pariah for that whole session," recalls Abner Mikva, then a House member and now a federal appeals judge in Washington, D.C. "That line [about one-third of the members] just was used to beat him over the head. . . .It was a very bad session for Paul because he obviously couldn't prove that one-third of the legislature was corrupt." Mikva agrees that corruption was rampant, but he thinks Simon learned from the experience: "If he wanted to be an effective player in the political arena, he would have to go after causes, not people."

Simon wrote a follow-up Harper's article the next year, and he still called for a "new moral climate" in state legislatures. But in a political career that has since taken Simon to the lieutenant governor's office, the U.S. House and Senate, and now the Democratic presidential primary campaign trail, he seems to have made few personal enemies.

That is not to say that he has no critics. He has been called a hypocrite. For instance, while he decries the need for negative campaigning and political action committees (PACs), he uses them, and while he claims to avoid gimmicks, he appears to have taken care in building his image, including his ever-present bow tie. He also ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1972 with the endorsement of Chicago Democratic boss Richard J. Daley, who was supposed to be the enemy of reformers like Simon.

"If the question is victory or principle, he takes victory," says H. Carter Hendren, chief of staff for Illinois Senate Republicans and the 1984 campaign manager for U.S. Sen. Charles Percy, who was defeated by Simon.

But many political friends as well as enemies give Simon high marks. "I would put Paul Simon's record and standards and values against any candidate," said U.S. Rep. Dick Durbin, a Springfield Democrat and longtime Simon ally.

Simon was born November 29, 1928, in Eugene, Ore. His parents, Lutheran Rev. Martin Simon and his wife Ruth, had just returned from two years of missionary work in China. Ruth Simon, now a resident of Collinsville, recalls that Paul and his younger brother Arthur, now a minister and executive director of an anti-hunger group in Washington, D.C., were well behaved despite limitations imposed on all families by the Depression. "They didn't have a lot of toys, and they had to make the best of what they did have," she said.

She remembers that by age 4, Simon seemed to be on the right track. He was not defiant, but one day he surprised her by saying "no" when asked to do something. It was just after he had received a tricycle for his birthday. "When father came home, he said [to Paul], 'What do you think we should do so you remember not to say 'no'?' He thought a while and said, 'Dad, put my tricycle away until Christmas, and I won't ride it until then.'" The punishment, Simon's father would later tell his mother, was tougher than needed. But it was the boy's idea, so it stuck until Paul was let off the hook Christmas Eve. And then, his mother says, "He ran like mad to the. . . store-room to get his tricycle out."

Simon also got more worldly messages from his parents. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps, Rev. Simon spoke out against it on local radio in Eugene. "Our family was given a fairly hard

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time about that for a while," Ruth Simon said. But Paul ended up siding with his father, and candidate Simon often mentions the story to show that the right choice isn't always the popular one.

In 1945, at age 16, Simon entered the University of Oregon to study journalism. When his parents moved in 1946 to the small southern Illinois town of Highland to give them a more central location to publish their magazine, Christian Parent, Simon transferred to Dana College in Blair, Neb., four miles from the Iowa border. He left at 19, without a diploma, and used a $3,600 loan backed by local Lions Club members to buy the Troy Tribune, a weekly. He went into the Army in 1951, but his newspaper thrived and grew into a chain of 14 weeklies. He claims to have been the youngest editor-publisher in the nation, and he was a crusader. His investigations into gambling connections among public officials in Madison County led Simon to visit Gov. Adlai Stevenson, who ordered police raids that shut down several establishments.

Simon turned to politics after returning from two years in Europe with the Army. Though he had backed Republican Thomas Dewey over Democrat Harry S. Truman in a 1948 editorial, he entered a local Democratic primary and went on to win a seat in the Illinois House in 1954. He was reelected three times and then won three terms in the Illinois Senate.

Despite receiving a "Benedict Arnold" award from his Senate colleagues for his Harper's article, Simon's office says he received "best legislator" awards from the Independent Voters of Illinois during each session he served. He sponsored 46 major pieces of legislation, including the state's first open meetings law and the creation of a commission that rewrote the state's adoption code. Simon also fought for "pay-as-you-go" financing of state capital projects, a forerunner to his proposal in Congress for a federal balanced budget amendment.

Despite his deep Lutheran roots, Simon on April 21, 1960, married Jeanne Hurley, a Roman Catholic. She was a seatmate from Wilmette in the Illinois House. "He made up his mind and that was it," recalls Simon's mother. "The thing that I think bothered him was that my husband and I were criticized so severely for it" by members of his father's congregation. "One day Paul finally said to his dad, 'Now, Dad, you know if I married another Lutheran, she could be the worst drunk in the country, but if she'd have been Lutheran, that would have been OK.' I think that sort of shut up his dad."

The Simons' son, Martin, 23 (they also have a daughter, Sheila, 26), recalls his parents as subdued entertainers. "Their social activities always had some educational bent to them. They were very fond of having dinner parties where they'd invite experts on one particular issue, and they'd sit around the dinner table and discuss that issue." Martin also says he doesn't remember ever hearing his father raise his voice.

Simon didn't fight back against personal attacks by Dan Walker in the Democratic primary for governor in 1972 and lost by 40,000 votes out of 1.5 million cast. The race taught Simon a lesson, says spokeswoman Terry Stephan. "He discovered that if people start coming after you, you can't just stand there and take it. You have to fight back." Walker had put Simon on the defensive, charging he was a lackey to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Simon had forged the odd alliance with Daley, and he had also kept the door open to a tax increase, while Walker railed against taxes.

After his defeat, Simon mixed journalism and politics by helping form the Public Affairs Reporting program at Sangamon State University in 1973. (As many as 18 master's degree candidates a year work with Statehouse news bureaus, and Illinois media outlets are peppered with the program's graduates.) He never lost another race.

Simon has written 11 books, one called The Glass House: Politics & Morality in the Nation's Capital. In it he wrote, "Money too often warps the decisions of even the most nobly motivated." But in 1984, the year the book came out, he received more than $900,000 from political action committees. "You can't play in the political game on a serious basis if others are taking from PACs and you are not," says his Senate press secretary Jim Killpatrick.

In a 1987 book, Let's Put America Back to Work, Simon outlines an $8 billion New Deal-type jobs program. That's one reason Democratic presidential contender Richard Gephardt said at a debate that "Simonomics is Reaganomics with a bow tie."

Simon later said he would reduce military spending by 6 percent, or $20 billion, and the 1.5 percent drop in unemployment he hopes to achieve would save $45 billion.

Hendren is one who does not think Simon gets enough scrutiny. "The image is not the man," says Hendren, who tags Simon a hypocrite. He called Simon's fiscal proposals "a joke." He also admits that he is still bitter over 1984 campaign tactics used by Simon. One particularly "vicious" example was the use of Simon's picture with black children in the background on one brochure, while using the picture with the children cut out on brochures sent to Chicago's white ethnic northwest side. Killpatrick said Simon first learned of the issue when shown the brochures by a reporter during the presidential campaign. The cutout picture worked better on the second brochure, Killpatrick said, so it appeared to be a "design decision." Simon and his wife both used to list NAACP memberships among their political credentials, Killpatrick added. "He [Simon] has never been one to duck his civil rights record."

Simon also criticized Percy for too much foreign travel, even though Simon's 1984 book chastised members of Congress for not traveling enough before dealing with world issues. And before Illinois Senate President Philip J. Rock (D-8, Oak Park)

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entered the 1984 primary race for U.S. Senate, he was assured by Simon that Simon wouldn't run, Democratic sources say. The pledge was later broken, and Simon won over three other candidates for the right to take on Percy.

One of Simon's books, The Tongue-Tied American, espoused the need for U.S. schools to provide better foreign language instruction, with benefits in commerce and international affairs. Hendren thinks Simon's emphasis on communication is part of a naive world view. "He wants everybody to kiss and make up," Hendren says.

U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde, a respected Republican from suburban Chicago, also thinks Simon's economics show "a surprising naivete," and his view that better dialogue will solve world problems is "a little too Mary Poppins for the real world." Hyde does credit Simon with being "a very decent man with high standards and a fine set of principles." Hyde says, "Without doubting his principles, he is very unrealistic."

But others express no doubt that Simon can deal with anyone, including Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. "I think Paul Simon is one of the sharpest, shrewdest political figures I have ever run across in Illinois," said U.S. Rep. William Lipinski, a conservative Chicago Democrat who is not backing Simon for president because he likes Gephardt's social issue views better. "I don't think he's naive at all."

It may not have been so shrewd of Simon in 1983 to cosponsor an amendment in the U.S. House to allow a checkoff system where people could opt to have none of their tax money go to the military. It has opened him up to wide crticism, but he says it was a protest measure to wake up a free-spending Pentagon. "Here's a guy who has the long-term foresight of making national defense optional," says Hendren. Even under the plan, the military would have had its appropriations funded and would not have suffered, but politically it was probably a bad move for Simon.

Simon no longer seems likely to open himself up to such easy shots, though some would put his jobs plan in the same category. These days, if he takes what is perceived as an unpopular stand — and he does take them willingly — he uses the fact to illustrate his strong will. Simon was one of the first to say that Lt. Col. Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame was no hero. He said it before a group of Midwestern local officials who might have thought differently, and his campaign literature now touts his political courage with his North remarks as one example.

He has also traveled to about 80 countries and pledges, in words reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, to seek a foreign policy "that renews our commitment to fighting for human rights around the globe." He says, "I want a foreign policy that sends economic and humanitarian aid, Peace Corps volunteers and diplomatic possibilities to Central America instead of weapons and despair. He has criticized human rights violations from the Soviet Union to South America. While he personally worked diplomatic channels, telephones and the press in the quest to gain release of Soviets who want to leave their country, he would be likely to ease the "evil empire" talk that President Reagan has used even in the era of the summit.

Even if Simon was a Tom Dewey man, his Depression-era roots, which keep alive the view that big government can be good government, would be reflected in the actions of President Simon.

His writings and speeches show that he would go into the Oval Office intent on changing priorities. Massive social programs would not be automatically shunned but actually sought as a means to social ends, like getting people back to work. He would not be shy about raising taxes if needed to pay off the federal deficit and to make sure the programs he presents are funded – "pay as you go" as he puts it. He has already agreed in principle to a number of possible taxes if needed, including higher cigarette taxes, an oil import fee, even a surcharge tax on the rich — those making over $100,000 if they are single and $193,000 with a family of four. The surcharge would take from those who benefitted from Reagan's tax restructuring, he says, though the idea also helps court populist sentiment.

In a recent campaign speech, Simon said his first priority would be to spend more federal money on education to fight illiteracy and develop "human potential," his second would be to put people back to work with his plan for government jobs, and his third would be to better fund Social Security to make sure the promised pot doesn't go empty for members of the expanding elderly population. A half percent increase in the Social Security tax would probably do the trick, he said.

Despite the questions some raise about how consistent Simon's actions are with his pronouncements, few consider him sinister. He is most often seen as someone with a vision of what government should be doing, with the ability to articulate his goals and with the political realism to make some concessions along the way to get results.

The writing in a sampling of Simon's books is not literary or flowery. In plain English, his writing speaks to common people, about their common problems and ways those problems can be dealt with. In a way, his writing style relfects the author: not flashy, but functional, if you buy the plan he proposes. When he speaks to groups, Simon is very pedantic. He slowly spells out the problems he wants to solve, using plenty of anecdotes about old Joe on the farm or the guy in the unemployment line. Paul Simon enjoys getting his message across quietly, but strongly. If he won the presidency, the days of the fireside chat may come back — with the addition of a prominent bow tie.

Bernard Schoenburg is a former member of the Statehouse press corps now working in Chicago.

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