Former Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan, who twice ran unsuccessfully for governor, dies at 76
Former Illinois attorney general Jim Ryan had success in politics despite never really being comfortable with the glad-handing that goes with it.
Ryan’s career was an example of the old saying that timing is everything in politics. After 10 years as DuPage County’s top prosecutor, he moved to the attorney general’s office, winning an open seat contest in 1994 on a Republican ticket headed by Gov. Jim Edgar as the GOP swept all statewide offices and took control of the General Assembly.
Only a month after Jim Ryan won a three-way Republican primary for governor, federal prosecutors unveiled a sweeping corruption indictment against George Ryan’s top aides. George Ryan would be indicted more than a year later on federal corruption charges. He was ultimately found guilty by a jury and served five years in prison.
Jim Ryan said it was the corruption issue that added to his reticence to approach voters, once saying he found it “presumptuous” to go up to strangers and glad hand. But his second bid was clouded, in part, by Blagojevich’s scandalous reign. Stuart Levine, a classmate of Ryan’s at Chicago-Kent College of Law who was Ryan’s top career donor, was found to have attempted to profit from influence-peddling, and eventually pleaded guilty. “Obviously, there was another side I didn’t know about,” Ryan said of Levin.
Edgar said he always thought Ryan “could have stayed forever and I think, continue to do a great job.”
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