Editor’s Note: Shortly after the publication on Amazon of my memoir Riots & Rockets, the distinguished Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan asked me to join him in talking about the book on his WGN-720 AM radio show, After Hours with Rick Kogan. I have long admired Rick as he plays an important cultural role in Chicago similar to the pioneering example set by author and interviewer Studs Terkel.
Rick explored the book’s main themes in our conversation and then posted the audio recording on his WGN website with the “fascinating life” title. In retrospect, if I’d known it was going to be fascinating, I wouldn’t have slept a full third of it away.
Above you’ll find a video of the complete interview, together with English and French subtitles, chapters to help with navigation, and a searchable transcript. A full copy of my interview with Rick, together with some illustrations, is below. You can read or download a .pdf copy of the interview transcript here.
The Fascinating Life of Bill Bowe
After Hours with Rick Kogan
WGN-720 AM
Transcript of Rick Kogan Interview with Bill Bowe
5:00 p.m., Sunday, July 28, 2024
Introduction
Welcome to the latest edition of After Hours with Rick Kogan. This entire first hour is devoted to a friend of mine, but also a noted author with his first book. You had another book, Bill, but this one is your story. It’s titled Riots & Rockets, A dash of the army, A dose of politics, and A life in the law. Welcome.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
There’s so many things. We went to the same high school. You went to the University of Chicago. My father went to the University of Chicago. You were married to my great friend, your first wife Judy Royko. You spent a lot of time working politically in the 43rd Ward. That’s where I was born and raised. You went to Encyclopaedia Britannica, about which my father wrote the history. We kind of like brothers.
Like many people, you had retired and suddenly the pandemic arrives and you had some time on your hands. This book is one of the manifestations of that time, is it not?
It is. It begins, as not all stories do, with a terrible self-realization. I was becoming crabby early on in the lockdown and I thought in March of 2020, I thought this is just plain unfair to the dogs, and if it’s unfair to the dogs, it’s for sure unfair to my wife Cathy. At first, I thought the solution was to build a website. I had fooled around trying to learn how to build a website maybe 20 years before, very early on. I didn’t get very far, but I did register a simple name for the website back then that I kept. And so I got back at that.
What did you want to do that for? What did you want a website for?
Mostly photographs. I’ve taken photographs all my life and I had thought for many decades that eventually, at the way in which databases and computing was developing, it was certain that the images would someday be able to be stored and accessed electronically.
Of course, and we’ll get to all of this, when you worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica, you were really in on the early pioneering levels of what eventually became this vast world known as the internet.
Absolutely. Yes, my time there really overlapped with the era of what they call “Big Iron,” the big IBM mainframes that were needed in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, both in the university communities and in businesses. Of course, there were no personal computers until the early ’80s.
So how was it trying to start your website?
Well, I was delighted because the tools were better as I looked around. Important tools were free like WordPress. The underlying structure is a complicated piece of software, but it’s fairly easy to begin to get to get to know. So, the tools to actually do something are better And I discovered that I was able to upload all these family trees that my mother had created that I had digitized. She’d been a great genealogist. So, I got it all up on the website when a cousin said, “You know, this is terrific for the family, there’s so much stuff here, you ought to talk to somebody that can help you build a better website.”
So, you had done writing in your in your legal career. You’ve done a some— most lawyers do a lot of writing, but you’ve done some writing that was not legally based. You had done some writing during your life.
Yes, and I remember having one of the best periods of learning how to be a better writer. I recall when I took a leave of absence from my law firm to work on Bill Singer’s campaign against Richard J. Daley back in the ’70s, the fellow running the PR at the time for the campaign was a Channel 2 news reporter.
What is his name?
Don Ramsell.
Yes, I remember.
He’d been a street reporter for television Channel 2, and then he was editing. I was doing, position papers and speeches, and he was the only person around to edit it and make sure it was going out properly. And the grand lesson that he taught me with his red pencil was when he attacked and murdered lots of my adjectives. He was good at finding one word that could replace three other words. My learning was the skill to compress the writing and not be wordy. I got a great postgraduate, post school education from that television editor, because he was writing succinctly for the TV news.
So it certainly paid off when you decided build this website and after gathering all these pictures, you said, “Wait a minute. I may want to tell my own life story.”
When I ran out of family trees —and I have to give thanks to my mother’s work back in the ’50s and ’60s—I had 47 families that I pretty well covered.
Good Lord!
But when I ran out of the family trees, I was still kind of stuck in the lockdown that was still going on. I thought, “Well I’ve got a lot of pictures from my strange period in the Army ’68 to ’71. I’ll write just a short history or framework for that.” And once I just started that it just kept going and going and when I said, “Well that that does it.” I had about 12,000 words.
Wow! Yes, the book covers that period intensely and it gets into all the other periods and Bill Bowe’s fascinating life. The website he is talking about is wbowe.com. The book is titled Riots & Rockets. You can get it on Amazon. We will continue on. We barely touched on what you did. I mean the Army stuff is fascinating. Working for the MacArthurs is fascinating. Working for United Press is fascinating. Working in politics— you were in politics in one of the most vibrant, riotous periods in this city’s history. We’ll carry on after a short break.
Don Evans is the founder of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He reviewed my guest Bill Bowe’s book. It’s William Bowe on the cover of the jacket. He’s Bill to me. Don has written:
“An intriguing tour of 20th century American history from a lawyer who by happenstance sat in the first row of our most harrowing dramas. Bowe seems to have been the Forrest Gump of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and even on. He was a young intelligence officer during Vietnam. He was not spying on Viet Cong, but homegrown radicals like law school classmate Bernardine Dorhn. He then came into politics in his attempts to reform the machine. Then he was in on the demise of the United Press International’s wire service, the super-rich MacArthur family, and an invention of the internet.”
That’s a nice review. I know Don knows you, but yes, he’s right. about all this. You went to Latin school for high school. Where did you grow up, Bill?
I grew up on Elm Street on the Near North Side. Okay.
My parents lived there, and my father’s brother and his family also lived in the same building.
So a little compound. Yes, very good street and you went to Latin which was nearby at the time.
Yes. I’ve always been indebted to the school because I had a scholarship as I went through.
That’s great and it was a block or so away.
Yes, and I was close by.
Enlisting in the Army’s Intelligence Branch
Then you went to the University of Chicago for law school. Then where’s your… I’m trying to look… I’ve got… you should see this book. It’s got like a million notes here. When did you decide to join the Army if that’s the right word, it was at the height of the Vietnam War. Were you scared about getting drafted? I find that very interesting. Very few people I know– you’re a little older than I– but very few people I know said, “Hey, it’s 1968. I think I’ll join the Army.”
You’re right. It was the height of the War.
And the protests against the War.
Yes, and they were picking up the steam shortly after I entered the Army after enlisting. The draft was one of the things that was uppermost on my mind. Women weren’t being drafted then, and this was pre-lottery, so I was at risk. But the problem was not just for me, but for everybody– this pool of draft age men was [about 27 million] over all the Vietnam years.
Wow!
That was the pool of males of the day that could be called. But the requirement to call wasn’t that close or remotely that close. There were only about two million, about ten percent of the [27] million, that were actually drafted. So how did it happen that they were the lucky ones that had a chance to lose their life?
The answer was, as you may remember, is that there was a whole series of complicated draft deferment categories. I found myself protected as a graduate student because the War really started when I was in the middle of law school. So they weren’t yanking you out, but I could have been drafted right after.
You grew up in a family where there was an older bunch of soldiers.
Yes, including a great-grandfather, father, brother and uncle. I was a late child, so my father was young enough to go to France in World War I. He was in the Illinois National Guard. He’d enlisted before the Great War I came along and went over with the doughboys. He lost part of his foot, so that amputation got him home after the War was over. He was in a hospital in France. It wasn’t enemy fire that did him in. He was trying to get on a troop train, and he slipped.
But also, one of the fascinating things is that later in his life his nurse from the War came to visit.
Yes, so here’s his nurse in Orleans, France who cared for him for about a year, and the healing was a terrible problem, very lengthy in those days. And she turned up as an old woman in Chicago and I met her. And my father had just died the year before she shows up. She’d missed him, but she’d come to Chicago to kind of get reacquainted.
So what did you expect when you enlisted. What did you expect to get out of the Army or to do in the Army?
Well, I thought I could go in as a lawyer. I was through law school and had a year of practice right before I enlisted. Because there was a war on, that was regarded as a safer choice. You could be a lawyer,r but you had to sign up for four years.
Right, right, right, right, right.
If you were drafted, you’d be in in for two years, but you might be in Vietnam. So that was not on my list of to-dos. I found kind of an intermediate choice. I enlisted for three years in the Army’s Intelligence Branch. I thought that was probably going to be more interesting, whatever it turns out to be, than the infantry or an artillery position. So that’s kind of what brought me in.
Civil Disturbance Planning & Operations Directorate
It did turn out to be interesting— being a word with a big umbrella under it. Talk about the “what” you did. What were you charged with doing, Bill?
Well, after basic training and the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, I got assigned late in 1968 to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. This was part of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the Army at the Pentagon. When I finally figured out where their offices were because it wasn’t obvious—
Yes, right, right, right because there wasn’t a big sign out front “Army Intelligence, Come On In.”
They needed a counterintelligence analyst to support the newly established Department of Defense joint service group called the Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations Directorate. The group arose from what they’d learned from the race disturbances in Detroit in ’67, and then Chicago. But after Detroit, the Secretary of the Army took a look at what happened in Detroit. The Army was not remotely prepared at that time for the domestic civil disturbance control mission where they’re getting involved because not only the local and state police, but also the state National Guards can’t control a situation.
Exactly.
And after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April of ’68, suddenly the National Guards in Baltimore, Washington, Chicago were insufficient and federal troops, which is an extremely, historically an extremely rare intervention, came into Baltimore, Washington, Chicago all at the same time. So in the after-action report, the Army people responsible for the mission thought they’d better reorder their thinking in a big way, because this was a problem that was not going to go away.
I just happened to get there at the time this new organization was set up. They wanted a flexible organization that would only expand once there was a problem. So, you had a central group of managers at the Pentagon that I was assigned to support, DCDPO. The Pentagon has got more acronyms in it than any place else.
Did you enjoy your time?
Well, the work was absolutely fascinating because the job was. And this wasn’t the only thing I did. Most of the job, most of my time, was reading the internal security production of the day. The Army had its own problems. There were new draftees that were trying to organize unions in the Army, which the Army never thought was a very good idea. So, they were trying to keep track of that kind of thing internally in the organization. Mostly though it was external agencies, non-military agencies like the FBI and other federal agencies.
Were you happy to get out?
After three years, are you kidding? No, I was delighted. I was not ever cut out to be a lifer.