Golden (14 page)

Blagojevich asked Cini to join him, but Cini declined, not wanting to deal with Blagojevich's pressure tactics. Instead, Cini took a job with Mell
doing constituent services, a move that upset Blagojevich so much the two wouldn't talk for years.

As a freshman congressman of the minority party, Blagojevich received a poor office assignment: fifth floor of the Cannon House Office Building. One of his first assignments for his staff was to find out if it had been occupied by John F. Kennedy when he was in Congress, but they never got a definite answer. Staffers soon discovered the same Rod Blagojevich that those in Springfield saw: a somewhat flaky person who was surprisingly conservative.

He stuck with hot topics in his district. He proposed pilot programs to fund “community prosecutors” to fight graffiti, pitched plans to curtail gun-running from the south, and introduced legislation to ban anyone younger than twenty-one from possessing a handgun. He also voted with Republicans on a failed effort to install term limits in Congress, on rewriting public housing laws that some said were anti-poor, and on renaming Washington National Airport in honor of former president Ronald Reagan, a move that stuck a finger in the eye of the air traffic controllers' union.

When staffers presented briefing papers on issues for upcoming votes, Blagojevich skimmed them, tossed them on his desk, and decided his time was better spent quizzing them about the topics at hand.

“I'm not a detail guy,” he'd continually explain.

During staff meetings, Wyma, Devine, and Chris Davis explained all the pros and cons, almost all of which were already in the briefing papers. He'd also call up his old friend from law school, Lon Monk, and Ascaridis, as well as Axelrod and Kupper. And he would dial home to seek Patti's input.

In Blagojevich's mind, each of them fit into a specific political category or voting bloc. Wyma and Davis were DC people examining the issues; Devine was a Chicago suburbanite (even though he actually grew up in the city); Axelrod and Kupper were purely political; Ascaridis was a blue-collar guy from the neighborhood; Monk was a smart guy who wasn't political; Patti was a woman and mother. If Patti liked an idea but Ascaridis didn't, their opinions weighed on him as he decided how to vote. It'll piss off the neighborhood guy, but women support it.

Blagojevich often had these bull sessions on his speakerphone while he examined suit swatches fanned out carefully across his desk. Since leaving Springfield, Blagojevich had graduated from Armani to Oxxford.

The new congressman was quickly becoming a clotheshorse. He felt the Armani suits he wore in Springfield were a little too flashy and slick. Oxxford
was more conservative and classic. A Chicago company headquartered in a nondescript factory in the West Loop, Oxxford Clothes was the preeminent clothier in the nation. Over the years, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and Joe DiMaggio bought suits from Oxxford. Individual suits, always tailored perfectly by hand, cost Blagojevich $3,000 to $5,000 each. And Blagojevich began purchasing a half-dozen or more per year. It wasn't something he advertised much to the outside world. It went completely against his “I'm a man of the people” routine. But when back in Chicago, he visited the headquarters on Van Buren, just west of Racine, religiously, always showing up for a fitting with expert tailor Rocco Giovannangelo or asking him for more swatches.

Before Blagojevich's DC meetings began, male and female staffers sitting in front of him would have Blagojevich toss a suit swatch in their laps to see how it looked. “What do you think of that? Looks nice or not so much?”

It wasn't just suits that distracted Blagojevich in DC. Between meetings, he constantly complained about wanting to “get a run in.” He was training for the Chicago Marathon that October. But more importantly, running kept him in shape and looking fit. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” he would say aloud, quoting Ecclesiastes and recognizing he too was victim.

Blagojevich was clearly becoming obsessed about his appearance. After media press events, he consistently asked staffers how he looked. He recorded any television coverage of his press conferences, watching the videotapes over and over, studying them to perfect his mannerisms and speech-making. He played the one-minute speeches he gave on the House floor, rewound them, and played them again. Inevitably, while watching the tapes with others, he'd ask, “Do I look fat?”

Before speaking to crowds, Blagojevich had to psych himself up. Even though he ended up being good at it, aides noticed it took a lot to get him out there. Before events, he described himself as “fundamentally shy, not very smart.” He would say it almost as a mantra. Once he got out there, he was great. He could be almost transparently manipulative. But in a political setting, people found it charming.

One time, speaking before a group of mostly Italian voters in Melrose Park, Blagojevich stuck out like a sore thumb, looking like a yuppie amid a sea of men in Sansabelt pants. Still, he won them over. “My wife is one-tenth Italian, and today that's the part I love about her most!” It was clear pandering but the crowd laughed and went wild, finding him funny and charismatic as Blagojevich laughed along with them.

Blagojevich spent as little time in DC as possible. When Congress was in session, he flew in to Washington on Tuesday mornings and got on the first plane out on Thursday night. While in Washington, his days were filled with constant activity, though it was always disorganized and random. He was a whirling dervish in the halls of Congress, bringing up one issue with a staffer standing next to him and then calling another staffer five minutes later about doing something else. All the while he needed constant attention. He couldn't go to his meetings or votes by himself, demanding a companion, usually Wyma or Devine.

The only consistency to any of his thoughts was finding something to distinguish himself to move up the next step on the political ladder. When someone suggested he could be congressman for decades like Rostenkowski, Blagojevich bristled. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “I hate DC.”

His frustrations stemmed mostly from his inability to get anything done, though that didn't stop him from voting himself a raise. He backed a bill to increase legislators' $133,600 annual salaries. But when Basil Talbot of the
Chicago Sun-Times
asked Blagojevich about it, he argued the 2.3 percent increase wasn't what it looked like. “It isn't a pay raise,” he insisted. “It's a cost-of-living increase for federal employees.”

His staffers, including Devine, Wyma, Axelrod, and Kupper, were mortified about the comments but Blagojevich was just happy to see his name in the paper. “We're in the mix!” he insisted. “It's fine. We're out there. People are talking about us.”

In December 1997, Blagojevich found another way to get into the headlines.

The US Navy had to dispose of twenty-three million pounds of Vietnam-era napalm. It was in California, and they wanted to get rid of it at a facility in East Chicago, Indiana. To get it there, they planned to ship it on a train that would travel through parts of Illinois, including the Fifth District.

Blagojevich immediately sensed an opportunity. This was a safety concern. He fired off a letter to Defense Secretary William Cohen and held a press conference in a rail yard at Canal Street and Roosevelt Road. The navy insisted the jellylike mixture of gasoline and chemicals was not the “napalm bomb” Blagojevich described it as being. Not only would it be shipped safely, they asserted, but it was far less explosive than other chemicals being
transported through Chicago every day. It was probably safer than most gasoline shipments.

But Blagojevich didn't let it go. The following day, he said the amount of napalm being shipped was enough to cause “an eleven kiloton explosion,” sparking visions of Hiroshima. Some in Congress and even environmental officials shook their heads at the stunt they felt Blagojevich was obviously trying to pull, scaring people for no reason other than to make a name for himself. Still, he got Illinois's two senators, Carol Moseley-Braun and Dick Durbin, to write letters to Cohen seeking a meeting.

For weeks, the story stayed alive as the navy contemplated what to do. Naval officials held public hearings to calm fears after national television stations picked up the story, portraying Blagojevich as an environmental hero.

Amid the political pressure, the East Chicago waste-recycling company, tired of the bad publicity, decided to give up. It wouldn't accept the napalm and agreed to forgo $2.5 million.

Blagojevich had his trophy—and in less than a year in office. He also got his first—and what would become his only—piece of legislation passed by the House and Senate. It renamed a post office on Kedzie Avenue north of Addison in honor of slain Chicago police officer Daniel Doffyn. Although Doffyn was killed in the line of duty answering a burglary call on the West Side, outside the Fifth Congressional District, Blagojevich selected a post office in his district, just down the block from Mell's district offices.

Despite the modest successes, Blagojevich remained bored in Congress. He wiled away the hours running and cracking jokes and occasionally even pulling pranks on his fellow congressmen. In the early mornings he ran as much as five or six miles regularly with Jim Littig, a retired army colonel who served two tours in Vietnam. Littig had become a Washington, DC, lobbyist focused on military funding, so when Blagojevich was placed on the House's National Security Committee, Littig invited Blagojevich along to join him and his four or five running buddies. Littig and Blagojevich became fast friends, discussing national and international issues while on their runs around the Army Navy Country Club in Virginia, where President Eisenhower and later President Clinton often retreated to play eighteen holes. Sometimes, Blagojevich ran the full route around the golf course and then, when the others stopped, turned around and ran the course the other way.

Littig was impressed by Blagojevich's ability to recall certain facts and details about various issues, including later the war in Kosovo. Blagojevich
always seemed starstruck, saying he was impressed that Littig had “five hand-to-hand combat kills in Vietnam!”

“That guy's a badass,” Blagojevich would say, often repeating himself to aides who had heard the tales numerous times before. Years later, Littig demurred when asked about his service record. “I'd prefer not to talk about it. My basic rule was to kill [the enemy] from as far away as possible.”

The one thing Blagojevich did expend energy and time on was fund-raising. For him, it was like exercise: do a little every day. Blagojevich carried around a yellow legal pad with names of donors and others he thought should be donating. He wasn't afraid to cold call businesspeople and see if they wanted to meet or have lunch. He found it was always difficult even for successful men and women to turn down an offer from a sitting congressman—even a backbencher like Blagojevich. When they finally did meet, Blagojevich's disarming charm always did wonders. Inevitably strangers soon became donors.

National Democrats saw Blagojevich's skills and asked him to help the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, seeing if he could raise some money for the organization, which would then be divvied among the Democratic candidates around the nation in an effort to win back the House. Blagojevich bristled at the request. The DCCC hadn't helped him much during his campaign, so why should he help them?

He was at war with the world. He disliked his fellow Democrats and wouldn't help others in the Illinois caucus either. Yet at the same time, his fellow congressmen liked him personally. Face-to-face, he was funny and friendly, and his charisma and personality allowed him to avoid burning bridges.

Still, he sometimes took votes on bills simply to make a point that he wasn't owned by anybody and to show his independence.

“Rod never was very good with authority,” Axelrod recalled. “He didn't get along with Madigan in the legislature and he didn't particularly get along with the leadership in the [US] House. He's not the kind of guy that likes to be told what to do. And so every once in a while he'd want to cast votes just to make a point, and sometimes they didn't make sense. He would do it just to say ‘fuck you' to the leaders.”