Jim Thompson, R.I.P.

Former Govenror Jim Thompson has died at age 84.

James R. Thompson in 2008.

He served four terms, three full terms and one two-year term, making him the longest serving Governor in Illinois history.

In the run-up to the campaign. State Rep. Tim Simms of Rockford was the first legislator to endorse his candidacy.

I was the second.

Thompson was the great hope for reformers, coming off a series of successful prosecutions of crooked politicians.

They included pretty much all of his potential opponents, Illinois Attorney General Bill Scott, Cook County Commissioner Floyd Fulle and Fulle’s attorney told me the scuttlebutt was that former Governor Richard B. Ogilvie was to be indicted, but on that day President Gerry Ford named Ogilvie his Illinois Campaign Chairman.

Folder for Jim Thompson’s 1976 campaign.

The legislature was in session the day he announced for the office. In the Springfield stop of his fly-around, I gave him his first reportable contribution.

Whenever I was in Chicago on legislative business, I stopped in at his office.

Thompson was put on the payroll of Winston and Strawn at $50,000 a year during the campaign, my sources told me.

His first case was one in Elgin’s Appellate Court defending a local government in a tax protest suit.

Dundee attorney Boyd Gates won the case.

Thompson had no experience in retail politics.

His first county fair was in Boone County…back when there were dirt, instead of asphalt paths.

He and I worked the booths and those attending.

As soon as he announced, I ordered joint buttons.

The next time our paths crossed was at the Kane County Fair.

“You don;t have to be 6″6′ to stand tall.

It was the day U.S. House Judiciary member and our Congressman Bob McClory announced he was going to vote for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

This Skinner button was the first with Thompson’s name.

By that time, he had gotten a dog.

Greg Baise was the aide walking the animal.

When Thompson saw my button, he expressed disapproval.

He hadn’t yet learned that politics is a game of addition, not subtraction.

He noted that he was better known that I.

Small 1976 JRT button.

I pointed out that in the Boone and Winnebago County part of my district, I was better known than he.

As the campaign progressed, I stopped in the campaign office every time I was in Chicago on legislative business.

The first time, the receptionist was a young woman whom I married, Robin Geist.

Her role in the campaign evolved to being Thompson’s photographer.

“What’s that clicking down at my knees” is what he wrote on a post-campaign photograph.

Thompson beat Secretary of State Mike Howlett in the fall, Howlett having beaten Dan Walker in the Democratic Primary Election.

When I went to Europe during September, 1976, on my only overseas junket, I put this sticker on the suitcase so I could find it.

After Thompson was elected, he was asked whether he was going to us the Ford that Governor Walker had used.

I was listening to my radio near the Capitol when I heard the answer to a reporter’s question:

“Nah. What do you think this job is all about?

That’s when my “Knight in Shining Armor” image of Thompson was tarnished.

Thompson complained his legs wouldn’t fit in the back of a Ford.

He bought a Checker Cab, which he used until he felt secure enough to use a limo.

Nevertheless, we were allies while he was in office, my then-wife was one of seventy-two people who were on the list for jobs.

When our daughter was born at Prentice Hospital, Thomson sent flowers and a teddy bear.

When Thompson came to the Play Day at the McHenry Country Club the next year, Robin got our daughter to say, “Thank you for the teddy.”

I was working in Springfield.

“Jim Thompson, A good Governor”
1978 Thompson Proposition button.

In 1978, the Governor, running against Michael Bakalis, decided he wanted an advisory referendum about property taxes on the ballot.

He wanted to piggy-back on California’s meaningful Proposition 13, passed in June.

He called it The Thompson Proposition.

At the time, the Lake in the Hills dam was in dire straights.

It was a meaningless proposal that would put purported to put a lid on state spending.

LITH “Give a Dam” button.

My father, who was on the County Board, and I and, even one night with Congressman Robert C. McClory showing up, held nightly meetings at the Lake in the Hills American Legion Hall.

We gathered signatures for The Thompson Proposition.

If someone were not registered to vote, we registered them.

When we had a large number, Thompson decided to helicopter in to accept them.

Fast forward to 1982.

When he was looking for someone to fill the Comptroller spot on his statewide race, he recruited me.

I was running for State Representative in a Woodstock and points west district that Mike Madigan didn’t know I had moved to, his having gerrymandered me into a district with my replacement Dick Klemm after I ran a losing campaign for Congress against McClory.

I thought the Comptroller could be a quite powerful office, based on the first Comptroller Crystal Laker George Lindberg’s successful voiding of the improper bidding of lottery tickets by the Dan Walker Administration.

I bit.

I was wondering how high an office one could win without selling one’s soul. (Conclusion: state legislature.)

There were two interactions that might be of interest.

We had a rally in Carbondale which all of the statewide candidates attended. A joint photo was taken.

That was the day that the St. Louis Globe-Democrat daily newspaper that went out of business endorsed me, along with the other Republicans on the ticker.

“Even Skinner got endorsed,” Thompson said jokingly as we were lining up for the photo op. (Baise was now the candidate for State Treasurer.)

I gave a speech in which I asked the audience, “Is it more likely that Adlai Stevenson or Jim Thompson will raise the income tax?”

Stevenson was my clear implication.

“Beg State, Big Job, Big Jim ’82”

I had checked on revenue projections every month with the Deputy Budget Director and things looked OK. (The economy didn’t tank until October and I didn’t check both my BoB contact in early November.)

Our paths crossed again at the huge DuPage County Republican Play Day at St. Andrews Golf Course.

As he was coming down from the specially-constructed wooden platform, he said. “Give the income tax speech.”

I did.

After that election, Thompson proposed increasing the income tax.

I was Manager of the Central Management Services Bureau of Benefits by then, my reward for running a spectacularly unsuccessful campaign against incumbent Comptroller Roland Burris.

Thompson ran and won a fourth term in 1986.

When I heard the news on my way into work, I immediately figured out the pitch being made, that increasing the income tax from two and half percent to three percent was “a half percent increase” was a blatant lie.

During my break that morning, I wrote a press release for my friend State Rep. Bernie Pedersen pointing out that it was a twenty percent tax increase.

My little red Honda was the only car in the employee parking lot with a bumper sticker saying, “No More Illinois Taxes.”

I soon got assigned a parking spot in a place farther from the Stratton Building where I worked.

James R. Thompson before introduction.

And, that fall, I lost my job.

The last time I saw Thompson was at the John McCain rally at the Odeum in DuPage County.

He had not been introduced and clearly felt slighted.

After Master of Ceremonies State Representative Jim Durkin was prompted, Thompson was introduced.


Comments

Jim Thompson, R.I.P. — 13 Comments

  1. I heard of Thompson’s passing early this morning on WBBM radio, the first brief eulogy was from JB Pritzker, the second was from Jim Durkin, Big Jim was his hero.

    Knowing that Birds of a Feather Flock together, his funeral will be interesting.

    I would not be surprised if the Dishonorable “dick”, the dim-witted dolt Durbin gives the Eulogy.

  2. **Nevertheless, we were allies while he was in office, my then-wife was one of seventy-two people who were on the list for jobs.**

    LOL.

    If Jack Franks wrote this instead of Cal, people would be going crazy over this line.

  3. Thompson was just another gay blackmailee, like so many others….. Sen. Pell, Speaker Hastert, Sen. Lindsey Graham,Sen. Mark Kirk, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Souter and soooooo many others.

    That’s how these rats got in on the first place.

    Wake up people.

    He was supposed to be Bush the Elder’s VP until even Deep State Bush saw the FBI file on Big Jim….. that’s how Quayle was picked at the last minute during the convention.

    But Jim was still of useful service to the Deep State.

    He was the cochair of the phony 9/11 commission.

    And a notorious sauna and steam bath predator at the East Bank Club.

  4. Nice rundown.

    This connected a lot of the dots for me concerning Cal’s career.

  5. I remember the televised Gary Dotson rape deal that Big Jim officiated, the first time in the world DNA exonerated an innocent person.

    https://www.injusticewatch.org/commentary/2019/the-worlds-first-dna-exoneration-the-rape-that-wasnt-and-a-lesson-unlearned/

    At the time, sixteen-year-old Cathleen Crowell Webb made up a rape allegation to explain to her foster parents her pregnancy concerns so she could obtain contraception[8] after having had consensual sex with her boyfriend the previous day. After her 1985 recantation, she described herself as an “emotionally disturbed” foster child and revealed that she had been sexually active since the age of 12.[9] Crowell later admitted her fabrication was based on a scene from a 1974 best-selling bodice ripper romance novel, Sweet Savage Love.[4][10]

    The hoax began the night of July 9, 1977, when a police officer happened upon her standing beside a road not far from the shopping mall in the Chicago suburb of Homewood, where she lived[9] and where she worked in a Long John Silver’s seafood restaurant. Her clothing was dirt-stained and in disarray.

    Crowell tearfully told the officer that, as she walked across the mall parking lot after work, a car with three young men in it ran towards her. Two of the men jumped out, grabbed her, and threw her into the backseat. One of them climbed in beside her, and the other joined the driver in the front. The man in the back tore her clothes, raped her, and scratched several letters onto her stomach with a broken beer bottle.

    Crowell was taken to South Suburban Hospital, where a rape examination was performed. She identified Gary Dotson, according to her, under pressure from police based on the resemblance of his mug shot in the mug book to the composite sketch of an assailant she described. Even though there was no sign on Dotson of the scratches Crowell claimed she inflicted on her assailant and, unlike the smooth-shaven assailant Crowell described, Dotson had a mature mustache, he was arrested.

    Recantation[edit]
    By 1981, Crowell Webb had become deeply religious.[9] In 1982, Crowell married a high school classmate, David Webb, and they moved to New Hampshire.[4] In 1985 she confessed to her pastor what she had done, but when she tried with his assistance to correct what she had done the prosecutors would not take action. Dotson sought post-judgment relief based on Crowell Webb’s recantation, but the trial court found her recantation to be unbelievable and refused to free him.

    The lawyer next contacted the media (leading to the “How about a hug?” moment during CBS Morning Show from anchor Phyllis George).[11] The resulting public sympathy caused the original trial judge Richard L. Samuels to release Dotson on $100,000 bond pending a hearing one week later. At that hearing, Judge Samuels rejected new evidence discrediting the forensic evidence given at the trial, called the recantation less credible than the original testimony and sent Dotson back to prison.

    Dotson’s attorney also petitioned the Governor of Illinois, James R. Thompson, for clemency on April 19. “Big Jim” Thompson, formerly a federal prosecutor, responded to the media attention by declaring that he personally would oversee three days of public hearings on Crowell Webb’s recantation. The hearings lasted three days, from May 10 through May 12, 1985. Twenty-four witnesses were called to testify at the just-opened new State of Illinois Center in Chicago which Thompson had built, and which is now named after him. The sexually graphic proceedings were televised, creating a nationwide crime drama at a time when cameras in the courtroom were unheard of. Viewers were shocked when a “gigantic” projection of Crowell Webb’s stained underwear was projected onto a massive screen on the wall, and when she and her boyfriend recited details of their sexual activity.[12] Nearly a quarter-century later, the Thompson Dotson hearings were still described as “circuslike,” a description widely used in 1985.[1][13]

  6. IIRC, there was talk of sanctioning him when he was US Attorney because of the brazen way he courted publicity.

    He used the resulting notoriety to launch a political career.

    He also gave us the annually compounded 3% cola on pensions that is bankrupting this state.

    I hope we never see the likes of him again.

  7. If only Fred Flintstone was one percent the leader Governor Thompson was!

  8. Are the rainbow flags at half mast?

    This rat was also on board of directors that approved Conrad Black’s rip-off expenses for which he went to jail!

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