Rumsfeld’s hit has reached homes in the suburbs

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Charles “Chuck” Loebbaka, a former Glenview trust and an old North Shore newspaper, described Donald Rumsfeld in the same way many recognize him.

“Very business -minded, very impressive, brilliant, strong,” Loebbaka said.

“It’s been like that his whole career.”

A 1950 New Trier graduate and resident of Glenview in the 1960s, Rumsfeld, 88, died June 29 in Taos, New Mexico.

Loebbaka, an editor for Glenview Advertisements and for the Evanston Review who graduated from 1963-68, first entered the local political turmoil as a journalist then as a spokesman on political campaigns.

He oversaw the successful campaign of Evanston resident William Scott for Illinois attorney general in 1968. In 1972, Loebbaka became press secretary for the unsuccessful re -election campaign of Governor Richard Ogilvie, whose resident of Northfield lost the election to Dan Walker.

A Glenview village manager from 1973-83, Loebbaka was professionally aged at a time when the North Shore was a Republican bastion.

Rumsfeld, a long-term Illinois member of Congress from 1963-70, was part of it.

As the Daily Herald does today in political careers, Loebbaka and his colleagues have conducted endorsement interviews with candidates running for political office.

That was his first exposure to political confidence. Loebbaka eventually met him in a relationship for Republicans in the Chicago area, he said without paradox.

“I met him going to the meeting,” Loebbaka said. “He introduced me to his chief of staff. We didn’t chat, we just shook hands.”

That chief of staff was Dick Cheney, who would be George W. Bush’s vice president.

As Loebbaka said, Rumsfeld was impressive, enough for Richard Nixon to put him as part of his White House transition staff when Nixon won the presidency in 1968. Part of Rumsfeld’s responsibilities after his inauguration in 1969, Loebbaka said, was to coordinate candidates and make taking positions in the White House.

Loebbaka wrote Rumsfeld in a letter: “I would like to be considered for a position in the White House news office,” it said in part.

“I got a letter. It said, ‘I’ve passed it on to the appropriate people for consideration.’

“I’ve never heard of it. After the White House gamble, that was the last time I would deal with Rumsfeld,” Loebbaka said.

Like Loebbaka, local institutions have pieces and pieces of Rumsfeld posted on their shelves and archives.

Kimberly Schlarman, consultant librarian and genealogy expert of the Glenview Public Library, excavated a 1964 article in the Chicago Tribune written by Margaret Mohan discussing Rumsfeld’s two possessions in Glenview and Chevy Chase, Maryland, when Rumsfeld was a freshman representative.

“Here in Glenview, it’s more at home,” Mohan told Rumsfeld’s wife Joyce, his high school sweetheart.

The article identified the Rumsfeld home as a “small, early-American home on Hunter Road.”

“I love this neighborhood, it’s so quiet,” former Joyce Pierson said. “It’s a fun neighborhood to relax, and there’s five acres of woodland in the back.”

Ever since 1964, Schlarman has dug up an old Glenview Advertisements article that Loebbaka himself could have written, even without a byline.

“Donald Rumsfeld to Address Library Association Meeting” was the topic. The clip stated that the emphasis of Rumsfeld’s speech was the closing day of the 88th Congress.

That contains a parallel to a more contemporary thinking about national defense: “He was the … proponent of a bill to create a House Select Committee on a national space posture and goals. In addition, he was member of the Task Force on Space. “

Mary Trieschmann, executive director of the Winnetka Historical Society, found a postcard in 1959 created by former Chicago Tribune cartoonist and friend of the Rumsfeld family Joe Parrish, who is also a resident of Winnetka.

“Joe makes a custom greeting card for the Rumsfelds each year,” Trieschmann said.

Nicole Dizon, director of communications for New Trier’s Northfield campus, sent a copy of Donald Rumsfeld’s admission to the New Trier Alumni Hall of Honor.

Along with detailing political achievements such as being the sole U.S. secretary of defense on indefinite terms, and his 1977 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the article said he was vice president of New Trier’s Tri- Ship leadership and service club, one of the oldest schools. club, and became a member of the Trevians ’football and wrestling team. (He was fourth in the state at 145 pounds for the New Trier state championship team in 1950, and went on to wrestle at Princeton.)

This is correct in Loebbaka’s description of Rumsfeld as “strong.”

“He was a Winnetka man, a man from New Trier, who was preferred by almost all Republicans in the area,” Loebbaka said.

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