When I began this story, I saw Neil Hartigan as a wimp, a dull boy, a party hack. The story that I proposed was one describing how this hack worked his way through the ranks of the Democratic Party, machine and postmachine, until he reached the top. I knew only the bare bones of Hartigan’s story, but they seemed to spell that tale.
The houselights dim, the young honor guard in red-and-white Hartigan T-shirts lines both sides of the aisle, the spotlight shines on the candidate, the band plays “Twist and Shout,” and to passionate applause Neil Hartigan comes down the long aisle of the Prairie Capitol Convention Center in Springfield, grinning, shaking hands, saying hello, occasionally kissing an old friend. Fifty-two years old, he is today at a crowning moment in his 30-year political career. Here at the Illinois Democratic convention, he is formally accepting his party’s nomination to be governor. At this date in mid-August, polls put Hartigan ten points behind his Republican opponent, Secretary of State Jim Edgar. But Hartigan is confident, and a month later he and Edgar will be neck and neck. The only election he’s lost in 25 years was his 1976 run for lieutenant governor, when Jim Thompson and the Republican ticket swept away the faction-ridden Democrats after the hapless administration of Dan Walker.
Neil Hartigan spent 5 of the last 25 years as a banker. He’s been in politics and government all the rest of his adult life and at the center of Democratic Party politics since he was born. His father, David L. Hartigan, served several terms as deputy city treasurer, briefly was treasurer, and was twice elected 49th Ward alderman.
Drymalski’s son, Raymond D. Drymalski, followed his father as a leader of the party’s Eastern European bloc. Ethnic slating was even more important in those days than these. City posts were divvied among the various blocs in each election. In 1943 Raymond Drymalski was slated for city treasurer. After he won, he summoned David Hartigan from the Board of Tax Appeals to become assistant treasurer and attorney for the office. In the years that followed, the city treasurer’s post was assigned to Joseph Baran and William Milota, and David Hartigan served under both of them. He was, his son explains, “the professional who really ran the office.” Well, of course, but he also had to be a loyal party man. In 1954, Hartigan got his turn at the top. Milota was elected Municipal Court bailiff, and Mayor Martin H. Kennelly named Hartigan to the treasurer’s job.
But Hartigan was already thinking about politics–serious politics. In 1960, after returning to Chicago from Georgetown, he’d gone to work in the 49th Ward Democratic Organization in Rogers Park. He wasn’t exactly welcomed into the fold by the committeeman there, who had once been his father’s opponent. But it wasn’t easy to squeeze out Hartigan completely–his family was too well known and liked. So the committeeman made Hartigan captain of the toughest precinct in the ward, the one that brought in the lowest party vote.
I have heard from more than one person that Hartigan does indeed tend to see himself on “a mission from God”–to quote an adversary–and that he takes very seriously “the legacy of his father to do good”–to quote a friend. But Mayor Daley would also have noticed that young Hartigan had skillfully handled himself at the Board of Health for five years and at the age of 27 been elected president of his ward organization. Reading through the newspaper clippings about Hartigan for the last 25 years, talking to him at some length, and watching him on the campaign trail, I find it hard to imagine him botching such an important interview, or truly believing that Daley hired him only because of the answer he gave to that final question.
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Those who have worked for Hartigan over the years call him a hard taskmaster. Without complaining, as if they even enjoyed it, his staff members speak of working two and three days straight through on a project. Richard Kateley, who was Hartigan’s staff assistant in the Lieutenant Governor’s Office from 1972 to ’76, says, “I think political people have their batteries charged up by those 20-hour days, seven days a week, whereas most of us would be depleted. You can watch them gain strength as the hours go by. It is tangible. You can feel it.”
