Golden (5 page)

High school graduation was just around the corner, and Rod Blagojevich was trying to figure out what to do with his life.

He wanted to aim high for college and go to Northwestern or the University of Chicago, but he had scored just an 18 on the college entrance ACT exam (out of a possible 36) and received a D in an algebra class—“a classic
case of grade inflation,” he would joke years later as governor. So he followed his brother to the University of Tampa, where Rob had tried to walk onto the school's baseball team but didn't make it due to his injured bicep.

By this time, Rade Blagojevich was working nearly year-round in Alaska on the pipeline, bringing in enough money for Rod to be able to go to college. On the witness stand decades later—a place where he never would have wanted his father to see him—Blagojevich still glowed as he talked about his dad. Blagojevich was strategically spinning the tale of his life story for the jury, but he was genuinely proud of his upbringing. He believed his parents had propelled him to high office through their actions while he was growing up and even from heaven after their deaths.

“I mean, your parents will, you know, they'll do anything for you,” he testified. “So my dad—you know, it was hard for my dad to have to leave us. And he was the janitor up there. There was nothing fancy about the job that he had. He made beds and swept floors, ten hours a day, seven days a week for the next three years from the ages of sixty-three to sixty-six or sixty-seven, and he came home once a year, and we'd see him on what they call R & R for maybe a week during the Christmas holidays, and then he'd go back. It was what parents do. It's what we do. We love our kids; we sacrifice for our kids.”

As Rod's graduation from Foreman approached, Rade told his youngest son there were jobs for him in Alaska, too. The money was good, more than ten dollars per hour. And he could work there all summer.

Rod had to move quickly to get the highest spot on the union list. So after the last day of school but before graduation, Rod traveled to Fairbanks. But he never got a job on the pipeline that summer because he wasn't high enough on the list. It would be the following year when he got a job but learned he wouldn't be working on the pipeline itself. Instead, he had to clean the pots and pans used to make food for the pipeline workers. He'd be stationed at Pump Station Six, about two hours north of Fairbanks, right by the Yukon River.

It was the middle of nowhere, Rod would say, a gorgeous landscape with nothing around him but mountains, trees, and water. It was nothing like Chicago, and Blagojevich was one of the youngest men in camp. He would later describe it like “a minimum security prison … because you're in the middle of nowhere and you can't go anywhere.”

Blagojevich worked seven days a week that summer. When he wasn't cleaning pots and pans, he would clean up some of the portable offices set up
around the pump station. He worked the night shift, starting at ten o'clock at night until eight in the morning. Rod was struck by the sunlight that still streamed across the landscape even late into the evening, with nighttime lasting from only two to four in the morning. One night, while cleaning the offices, he opened up the doors to air them out from all the dust that had gathered. Leaving the doors open, he walked over to the kitchen to complete his other tasks before heading back around four in the morning to close up the offices after their airing. As Rod walked back, he ran into another employee who asked Rod if he had seen the boss around. Rod hadn't. “Why?” Rod asked.

“Because some fucking asshole left the doors open to the offices and there are two bears in there,” the coworker said.

Rod walked over and saw the bears tearing apart the offices scrounging for food and making a complete mess. Security guards stood outside throwing rocks at the bears, trying to scare them off. But it was mostly useless. By the time the bears were done, they had demolished everything.

It was Rod who had to clean up, but he didn't answer the question about which idiot left the office doors open.

As a politician, Rod Blagojevich spoke with pride about the hardscrabble neighborhood where he grew up, his immigrant father, his working mother, and the five-room apartment where he was raised. But as a youngster, Blagojevich was looking for a way out of Cragin. Test scores shut him out of a high-end university, and he wasn't going to be playing point guard for the Bulls or center field for the Cubs. Blagojevich feared getting sucked into the neighborhood's lifestyle and locked into a working-class job and common life.

At the University of Tampa, though, he began to gain some traction. He got good grades and dreamed of coming back to Chicago to make a life for himself—possibly in politics. Back home for winter break in 1976, Rod Blagojevich got absorbed along with the rest of the city with the news that Mayor Richard J. Daley had died. Daley had been mayor for twenty-one years, and his death caused a vacuum of power. One of the city's black aldermen, Wilson Frost, declared he would be the city's acting mayor, based on his reading of the city charter and the fact that he was president pro tempore of the city council. But Chicago wasn't ready for a black mayor—at least the white-majority city council wasn't—and they refused to allow Frost into the mayor's office. They said the keys to the office couldn't be found.

For several days, Frost's supporters and white aldermen debated and argued about whether Frost had the right to become acting mayor. It was a fascinating spectacle befitting the city. Already developing a negative attitude toward those in power, Blagojevich sided with Frost. So he
and Ascaridis fashioned some makeshift stickers reading R
ETAIN
W
ILSON
F
ROST
for mayor, passing the stickers around Cragin in a small sign of protest. A few days later, the city council made a decision. Michael Bilandic, the white alderman from Daley's home ward, the Eleventh, would be mayor.

While the excitement of the city was drawing Rod Blagojevich back home, Robert Blagojevich felt no such pull.

In his freshman year, Robert met a young coed from the South in his Western Civilization class. Her name was Julie Thrailkill. She was beautiful and charming and came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Walter, owned restaurants around Nashville, Tennessee, most notably a popular establishment called Arthur's.

Robert was beginning a new life without Rod. He had won a competitive military scholarship that paid for three years of tuition, launching an army career that lasted well into adulthood. He'd retire years later as a lieutenant colonel with the army reserves.

Soon after graduating, Robert and Julie married in August 1977 in Florida. Although the military scholarship and ROTC program required Robert to finish four years of active reserve, the newlyweds planned to move to Tallahassee where Robert would be attending graduate school in Eastern European studies at Florida State University. Robert and Rod were going their separate ways in life. Rod had just finished his sophomore year at Tampa, and with his big brother leaving and Chicago calling him home, he decided to transfer. He applied to both Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Because he had a respectable grade point average at Tampa and didn't have to take the standardized tests at which he was clearly dreadful, Northwestern accepted him. Finally cutting away from his older brother, Rod was going to move back to Chicago and enter Northwestern as a junior majoring in history.

Blagojevich moved back home with $3,500 in his pocket, hooking back up with friends Mike Ascaridis and Dan Stefanski. He also met new friends at Northwestern, guys from other parts of the country and wealthier families. Tuition at Northwestern was high, so Rod lived at home with his parents and Millie's oldest sister, Helen. He delivered pizzas in his 1971 Dodge Dart for a neighborhood joint named Abondanza Restaurant and Pizzeria, where Stefanski also worked.

Though back in Chicago, Blagojevich felt out of place at Northwestern. A city kid, Blagojevich took public transportation or drove through much of the city to the stately Evanston campus, appearing in class wearing a black leather jacket and white T-shirts he bought at stores near Milwaukee Avenue and Division Street on the near Northwest Side. His Izod shirt-wearing classmates looked every bit the part of the preppies populating campuses all around the nation. While Rod listened to the King, they listened to Bruce Springsteen.

“I always felt that these kids at Northwestern, you know, they came from wealthier families, they came from better schools. I always felt a little bit intimidated that they were a lot smarter than me,” is how Blagojevich put it on the witness stand in 2011. “And I hadn't been able to get in the first time, and so when I got there, I was afraid that, you know, maybe I wouldn't measure up to the other kids.”

Still, Blagojevich's amiable personality enabled him to make friends and traverse the two distinct worlds. Among the friends he made at Northwestern was Bill Powell, who soon joined Blagojevich and Ascaridis carousing around Chicago, picking up girls and “being assholes,” as Powell recalled. After some late nights, Blagojevich, Powell, and a few other friends wound up at a twenty-four-hour diner on the border between Chicago and Evanston called the Gold Coin. They called it the Cold Groin. Once or twice, Powell recalled, the young men would run out of the diner without paying the bill just for laughs. They called it “yo-ho”ing in an apparent pirate reference.

Blagojevich constantly talked sports, history, and politics. He played the field with girls but didn't have anyone steady. And he talked about his brother constantly. “He idolized Rob. That was key to Rod,” Powell said.

Powell sometimes spent weekends in Cragin with Rod, sleeping over at the Blagojevich family apartment. Powell quickly realized the same thing Rod knew—he really didn't fit in at Northwestern.

“I think in some ways he reveled in sticking out on campus,” Powell said. “He had such a chip on his shoulder, and he knew he had to do the work to be a success.”

In addition to the obvious differences like taste in clothes and music, Blagojevich had adopted many of the conservative philosophies his father had embraced after coming to America. Because of what he saw the Soviet Union do to Yugoslavia, Rade Blagojevich deeply hated communism and embraced the Republican Party in America for their hard-line stance against
reds. His conservative beliefs usually upset Millie, a New Deal Democrat who witnessed America's progress under FDR, and didn't match up well with the relatively liberal kids at Northwestern.

But Rade's influence and passion rubbed off on both Blagojevich boys, especially as they attended college during the tumultuous Jimmy Carter years. Studying politics and history, Rod gravitated toward men who made something of themselves from humble beginnings. He admired Alexander Hamilton, born poor in the West Indies, so much that he would later describe having a “man crush” on him and claim he memorized several of the Federalist Papers. Rod also identified greatly with Richard Nixon, confiding to friends a certain kinship with the shamed ex-president who had to work harder than everybody else to succeed.

In the post-Watergate era, it was more popular than ever on college campuses to be a Democrat. But Blagojevich went out of his way to debate his classmates and always took the conservative side. What the Kennedys did was just as bad as Nixon, he said dismissively. Nixon was a true American success story. His background and persona resonated with Blagojevich, who embraced the same chip-on-your-shoulder, up-from-nowhere attitude Nixon carried with him throughout much of his life. Blagojevich was embracing his role as outsider.

His uncanny ability to memorize always helped in his campus debates. Trying to sound smart, he'd recite another famous speech from Republican Teddy Roosevelt, declaiming verbatim Roosevelt's famous “Man in the Arena” speech.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”