I had followed his career for more than 50 years. Twelve years my senior, he was my mentor. I was his student in graduate school at Xavier University. I worked the press in his Senate campaign in 1968 and his gubernatorial campaign in 1970.
In the Statehouse, he was my boss. After his single term as governor, we were partners in a small business while he pondered another campaign for the U.S. Senate. I’m a trustee of the Gilligan Institute, a non-profit formed to showcase his place in Ohio history.
I knew him as an outspoken, redheaded Irish liberal with a quick wit and a sharp tongue. Jack believed in social justice and reached out to the needy and underprivileged.
An active Catholic, he was a scholar with high moral standards and values that made Notre Dame’s Father Theodore Hesburgh proud. Father Hesburgh appointed him as the first director of the International Institute for Peace Studies and came to Cincinnati to preside at the funeral mass for Jack’s first wife, Katie.
I first heard of Jack Gilligan as a young political reporter for The Journal Herald in the early 1960s. He was a leader among Cincinnati Democrats before he ran and lost an at-large campaign for Congress in 1962.
I watched from afar as Jack ran against Carl Rich in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District in 1964, the Goldwater year. Jack was elected the first Democrat from Cincinnati’s East Side since the Civil War. In response, the Ohio Legislature added 10,000 more Republicans to his district.
Undaunted, he ran for re-election in 1966. David Broder, then a New York Times reporter, called it the best congressional campaign in the country. It was an Irish intellectual running against the son of Mr. Republican in the heart of Taftland. Robert Taft Jr. won.
Still covering politics for The Journal Herald at the time, I was invited to participate in a series of seminars titled “Politics and Piety,” sponsored by an Antioch University center. It drew participants from both Cincinnati and Dayton to Sunday evening meetings at a mid-way motel on I-75. Jack was a resource person and I was happy to meet the public figure about whom I had read so much about.
In 1967, I enrolled in his class at Xavier and we got acquainted as he was being drawn into the 1968 primary campaign for the U.S. Senate against Frank Lausche, a mighty former five-term governor and two-term senator, a Cleveland conservative who had a hold over the Ohio Democratic Party. I left the newspaper and joined his campaign. Jack beat Lausche in the primary but lost to William Saxbe in the fall.
Two years later, he ran for governor of Ohio and I went back to campaigning, traveling the state with him. “We can do better for our children and grandchildren,” he said. He pushed through a progressive income tax and Ohioans did better in schools, prisons, mental institutions, as consumers and environmentally.
George W. Knepper, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Akron and a past president of the Ohio Historical Society, thought highly of Gov. Gilligan’s record in the Statehouse. Pushing the state income tax through the legislature, Dr. Knepper once told me, “was the single most courageous political act in the history of Ohio.”
In recent years, Jack was fond of looking back at his gubernatorial administration and felt “we had changed the direction of state government.” The office was the peak of his career. That’s how he would like us to remember him.
In his 80s, he spent eight years as a member of Cincinnati’s school board, trying to improve the education of kids in the inner city. In his late 80s, he would get a ride to a Lifelong Learning Institute schoolhouse, hobble behind a walker into the classroom and preach about the Good Society.
He was “the man actually in the arena” that Teddy Roosevelt talked about. Jack Gilligan’s face was marred by dust and sweat and blood. He was the one who strived valiantly, who spent himself in a worthy cause. He dared greatly and his place was never with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
May he rest in peace.
Bob Daley, a former Dayton newspaperman, was assistant to the governor of Ohio from 1971 to 1975. The Dayton resident also worked as the Kettering Foundation’s director of communications and public affairs until he retired in 1994, and continues to work as a part-time associate with the foundation.
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