Lois Wille open and clear

Ronald Reagan was “the Teflon president because he could brush away scandals with the sunshine of his smile,” says Daily News and Chi Trib veteran Lois Wille, now retired, in a Chi Trib op-ed.

He said he never knew the details of his administration's illegal weapons sales to Iran, didn't know it was illegally shifting the profits to anti-Marxist rebels in Nicaragua.

He seemed blissfully unaware of the mounting AIDS crisis, the soaring deficits and the corrupt activities of senior aides. And he got away with it.

That said, and it must have felt good to say it, she goes on to consider Mayordaley II as teflon also, thanks to his “strong relationship with legions of Chicagoans,” counting herself among them: she herself applauded one of his fairly recent dominative, we may say boss-like actions, his tearing up Meigs Field in the dead of night, decapitating our lakefront control tower in the name of protecting us from airborne terrorists. 

Why did she applaud?  Because he was “atoning for what he did to the lakefront when he OKd the Soldier Field renovations,” which is what I would be tempted to say if I’d also written a book about the lakefront.  I hope not, however, because it imparts a tentative quality to a column that might have given substance to the teflon part.

Maybe not, because on further reading, the column is a paean to Daley, even as it’s an angry indictment of racist others who committed more “social crimes” than she has space to relate, though she does list quite a few.  But more than that, for Chicago newspaper readers it’s a look at Wille’s unalloyed leftism and her anger at what racist others have done to ruin things such as mere editorials could not provide over her many years of writing them.