Word: simonized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Simon spent the Korean War as an Army private in West Germany, interrogating East German defectors. A diary he briefly kept during this period tends toward the prosaic: "Attended Easter Service in downtown Stuttgart. Went away very much uninspired." Back in Troy, he mounted an uphill campaign for state representative in 1954 "to show that you could beat the system." By dint of his innate friendliness and the hard work of shaking 30,000 hands, he succeeded...
...reform legislator in a machine-dominated state, Simon found life in Springfield lonely, until a few like-minded colleagues were elected in 1956. One of them was Jeanne Hurley, a liberal Democratic lawyer from the Chicago suburb of Wilmette. "Long before Paul and I fell in love," she recalls, "we were working together as colleagues." Simon proposed on their second date. This being the 1950s, Hurley reconciled herself to giving up her legislative seat, though even today one can hear hints of regret over abandoning her dream of becoming a judge. Their respective religions were a more serious problem...
Paul and Jeanne Simon were married in 1960, and their daughter Sheila, now a lawyer, was born eleven months later. Over the next several years Jeanne had five miscarriages; the family adopted their son Martin, now a photographer. She has accepted that her husband, for all his other accomplishments, will never earn a college degree. Jeanne remembers mentioning the credentials problem to Martin Simon in the mid-1960s, only to be told gruffly, "Paul's doing fine without...
Elected to the state senate in 1962, Simon remained stubbornly resistant to the "money talks" morality of the legislature. In a gesture that he considers the most courageous act of his political career, he finally went public with his complaints in an article in Harper's titled "The Illinois Legislature: A Study in Corruption." Along with a legislative colleague, Anthony Scariano, now an Illinois judge, Simon followed up by testifying to no avail before an Illinois crime commission. "As a result, we were pariahs," Scariano recalls. Simon developed a bleeding ulcer. The only good thing to come...
Amid a Republican landslide in 1968, Simon was elected Lieutenant Governor under Republican Richard Ogilvie and thus became the top Democrat in the state. In his bid to become Governor four years later, he won the endorsement of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. It was a rare miscalculation for Simon: not only did this marriage of convenience sully his reform reputation, but the Daley machine failed to deliver. He was upended by Maverick Dan Walker in the primary...