Sunday, September 12, 1999
Rhodes at 90
Very little in Ohio he didn't have an impact on
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
James Rhodes campaigned with Vice President Nixon in 1954 ordered National Guard troops onto the Kent State University campus in 1970. Four students were killed.
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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about James A. Rhodes, the four-term Ohio governor who turns 90 on Monday, is that it is so hard to find political foes to poke holes in his legend.
Most of them are dead and gone, one-time giants whose names were known to all Ohioans - names like Frank Lausche, Mike DiSalle, "Jumpinš Joe" Ferguson.
Now, they are all grainy images spinning on microfilm reels in libraries, of interest mostly to historians and students.
Not James A. Rhodes.
The man whose political career ran from the deepest days of the Great Depression to the second term of Ronald Reagan is alive and well and, his friends say, still sticking his nose into Ohio politics.
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RHODES TIMELINE
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• Born Sept. 13, 1909 in Coalton, Jackson County, Ohio
• Attended Ohio State University, where he opened a campus restaurant
• Elected to Columbus school board, 1937
• Elected Columbus city auditor, 1939
• Became Columbus mayor, 1943; re-elected, 1947
• Elected state auditor, 1952-1962
• Lost race for governor, 1954
• Elected to first term as governor in 1962. He laid off 4,000 state workers, cut budgets and embarked on massive construction of parks, colleges, airports, roads and bridge.
• Re-elected to second term, 1966.
• Lost Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, 1970
• Ordered National Guard to Kent State in 1970 to quell student protests of U.S. invasion of Cambodia in Vietnam War. Guardsmen killed four students.
• Elected governor in 1974, after four-year absence due to term limits, in upset of incumbent John J. Gilligan.
• Defeated Lt. Gov. Richard Celeste in 1978 for a second term. He was at the helm as Ohio went into a deep recession and the state lost manufacturing jobs, closed schools and ran a deficit.
• Made ill-fated run in 1982 for yet another term as governor, losing to Gov. Celeste.
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"He calls a lot," said Ohio Treasurer Joe Deters, one of a bevy of young Republican politicians the former governor has taken under his wing over the years. "When somebody like that talks to you about politics, you listen."
Today, Mr. Rhodes, a widower, lives in a retirement home in suburban Columbus.
Tonight, at the James A. Rhodes Exposition Center on the Ohio State Fairgrounds - a dusty little country fairgrounds that Mr. Rhodes built into a sprawling entertainment complex - about 600 of his friends, Republican and Democrat, will gather for cake and ice cream to celebrate the 90th birthday of the man who spent more years in the governoršs office than anyone in Ohio history.
"People have been good to me all these years; every office I ran for I got elected to three or four times," Mr. Rhodes said in an interview Saturday. "These people went out in the snow and rain for me. This party's for them."
The birthday party was put together by Phil Hamilton, a Columbus businessman who was a cabinet member in the Rhodes administration.
Since 1982, Mr. Hamilton has been organizing semi-regular "cabinet meetings" for Mr. Rhodes and former administration people at
Der Dutchman in nearby Plain City. The restaurant, run by an Amish family, is the former governor's favorite place to dine.
No one has served longer as Ohio's governor and no one, both his friends and foes say, did more, for good or ill, for Ohio than Mr. Rhodes.
"He was the most amazing political figure of the last half-century in this state," said Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. "He was the consummate politician."
Those who worked with him and against him agree that he was so popular because he was what he was - a sometimes charming, often funny, and always shrewd and calculating Southern Ohio hill country politician.
"Jobs and progress" was his personal mantra through both of his stints as governor. The way to win elections, Mr. Rhodes believed, was to deliver what people wanted most - decent-paying jobs and a good education for their children.
"We had a motto as governor - a diploma in one hand and a job in the other," Mr. Rhodes said.
He was old-fashioned, his critics say, because his emphasis was on saving and creating "smokestack industry" jobs; he pooh-poohed those who said Ohio had to become more of a service economy.
"We can't all be cutting each other's hair," Mr. Rhodes often said. "We need people to work in factories, too."
Most observers of Ohio politics and government give Mr. Rhodes good-to-great marks for his first stint as governor, from 1963 to 1971, and mediocre-to-poor ones for his comeback years in office, 1975 to 1983.
But, by the time Mr. Rhodes finally won the governor's office in 1962, defeating incumbent Democrat Mike DiSalle of Toledo, he had already been on the political stage for nearly 30 years.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his first term as president in 1934 when a 25-year-old coal miner's son from the dirt-poor hills of Jackson County, Ohio, made his first mark in electoral politics - on the bottom rung, as a Republican precinct committeeman in his adopted hometown, Columbus.
Three years later, he was elected to the Columbus Board of Education; and by 1943, with World War II in full swing, he had become the "boy mayor" of Columbus, presiding over the city's post-war explosion in growth.
Frank Lausche, who defeated Mr. Rhodes for governor in 1954, was elected Ohio governor five times, but some of those elections were in an era when Ohio governors served two-year terms, so he ended up with fewer years in the office than Mr. Rhodes.
But many believed that Mr. Rhodes' attempted comeback in 1986 at the age of 77, when he was beaten badly by incumbent Democrat Richard Celeste, was, in large part, an attempt by Mr. Rhodes to tie Mr. Lausche's five-election record.
"In his first term, he was the best governor of this half-century," said State Rep. Robert Netzley, R-Laura, who was first elected to the Ohio House in 1960. "After that, he got worse."
The first eight years of Mr. Rhodes' governorship were marked by a flurry of activity never seen before or since.
He convinced Ohio voters to pass massive bond issues and, throughout the 1960s, embarked on an unprecedented building program. He expanded the state park system, created new state universities and two-year colleges, built county airports, prisons, bridges, highways, state office buildings and a network of joint vocational schools.
"Never build anything underground," the governor would say, "because you don't get credit for it."
And he did get credit - there is hardly a city of any size in Ohio that does not have a public building or a piece of infrastructure named for the former governor. Here, there is Rhodes Hall at the University of Cincinnati; and the stretch of Ohio 32 from Eastgate to Athens that cuts through his hometown of Jackson is the James A. Rhodes Appalachian Highway.
For most of his time in office, the Democrats held control of the Ohio General Assembly, meaning that Mr. Rhodes had to form alliances with politicians on the other side of the aisle. Politicians of both parties who were on the scene during the Rhodes years say there was never anyone better at deal-making.
"He could work with anybody," said former Ohio House Majority Leader William Mallory, a Cincinnati Democrat. "He always had something he wanted and he was willing to trade for what you wanted."
The governor, Mr. Mallory said, would use humor to "soften you up." One time in the 1970s, Mr. Mallory said, he was in the governor's office when State Sen. Morris Jackson, D-Cleveland, was trying to talk Mr. Rhodes out of putting a prison in Hough, a tough inner-city neighborhood in Mr. Jackson's district. Mr. Jackson wanted to know what would happen if prisoners escaped and ran amok in the neighborhood.
"Morris," Mr. Rhodes said, "You and I both know that after five minutes in Hough, they'll all run back into jail."
Mr. Rhodes said Saturday he was successful in getting things done because he was "never a hater."
"I never hated the people on the other side," Mr. Rhodes said. ". . . You can't hate. Next week, you might need something from that person. And, in politics, people have memories 84 miles long."
Toward the end of Mr. Rhodes' second term, in 1970, he ordered National Guard troops onto the Kent State University campus, and four students were killed. At the time, he was running in the GOP primary for Senate against Robert Taft Jr. of Cincinnati, who won the primary and went on to win the Senate seat.
Four years later, Mr. Rhodes stunned national political observers by running for governor and winning in the wake of the Watergate scandal, eking out an 11,000-vote victory over Democratic incumbent John Gilligan of Cincinnati.
But by the time Mr. Rhodes came back to the governor's office, it was evident times had changed. In November 1975, despite Mr. Rhodes' campaigning, Ohio voters rejected a borrowing program for rebuilding Ohio's cities.
Economic conditions in the state worsened, a fact Mr. Rhodes blamed on President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats in Washington. And, in Mr. Rhodes' second eight years, the school funding crisis that Ohio is still struggling with reared its head, with school systems all over the state running out of money and closing their doors.
"In his last two terms, his administration didn't have a handle on what was going on: Things just seemed to run out of control," Mr. Netzley said.
But, the governor's contemporaries say, the record book of his 16 years as governor is tilted in his favor.
"There's very little in this state he didn't have an impact on," Mr. Mallory said. "Wherever you look in Ohio, there's Jim Rhodes."
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