The Man With the First-Class Body

Coldren, a Jim Thompson appointee, had been wondering when Edgar would get around to replacing him. Obviously his number was now up. So Coldren, who was following events by phone during a vacation, called in February 5 and resigned.

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Coldren’s downfall was his girth. He is very fat. When questioned–and he was questioned frequently over the years in appropriations hearings, which is why if Edgar didn’t know Coldren’s transit habits he might have been the only person in Springfield who didn’t–he always explained that he was simply too big for a coach seat. This reply never satisfied Senator Ted Leverenz of Maywood, who calls Coldren “Slim” and who told us, “I’ve been chasing him since 1981” (when Leverenz sat on the House Appropriations Committee, which he chaired for eight years in the 80s, and Coldren was deputy director of the Criminal Justice Information Authority’s predecessor, the Illinois Law Enforcement Commission). Leverenz told Coldren that if all those meetings he flew to were really so important he should send “a skinny guy with a video camera.” But Jim Thompson was governor, the state was not yet destitute, and Coldren did not heed the advice.

“Poking fun at a person with a disability–that’s exactly what they were doing,” Maltz went on. “What they were doing was mocking a person who has what’s obviously a disorder. Anyone with a grain of sense who’s spoken with him or seen him knows this is the case.”

“It’s just unfortunate people at his level don’t pursue such things” as civil rights suits, Murray goes on. “Had it been a subordinate of his, his agency could have been liable.”

Forgiving? A few days later the Tribune set forth a second editorial, largely, it seemed, to demonstrate it had thought better of the first one: “In 1992 . . . it may be hard to recall and appreciate the moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War and the enormous pressures faced by young men of draft age.”

But while Quindlen adored Clinton’s 23-year-old letter to his ROTC colonel–“I would have been proud to have raised a child capable of writing it”–Vietnam vet Walter McDougall, a professor of international relations writing in the New York Times, called the same letter “as cynical a document as I’ve read in some time.” Said McDougall, “If that is my generation’s notion of Honor, then we’re not worthy to govern after all.”