He Twice Won Office Because The Frontrunner Fell Ill

On Jan. 27, 1986, Rep. John Grotberg, an Illinois Republican running for reelection in the 14th District, lapsed into unconsciousness during cancer treatment.

He had been expected to easily beat his Democratic opponent, county coroner Mary Lou Kearns. As the coma stretched for months, his family and aides insisted he would recover, and party leaders waited.

Dennis Hastert, who would later serve as House speaker from 1999 to 2007, built his early career on moments like that, by being the reliable man nearby when a better-positioned man could not go on.

It had started two decades earlier at Yorkville High School, not far from where he had attended school himself. While still finishing his teaching degree at Northern Illinois University, after assisting with freshman football at his old school, he asked about an opening and was quickly hired.

In his autobiography, he said he arrived in street clothes and was whisked into an interview. He called himself a live body, hired because the school needed one, and he also became coach of a wrestling program that had started only a year earlier.

On a trip to Washington before classes began, he found that wearing a suit let him walk into the Senate chamber. He sat in on a debate over missile programs between Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield.

He entered politics the same way. After collecting 600 signatures on a petition backing him for the Illinois statehouse, he drew the attention of county GOP operative Phyllis Oldenburg, who became his first political mentor.

Oldenburg later recalled that he knew nothing about politics. Hastert ran in the 1980 Republican primary and lost.

Then the winner, state Rep. Al Schoberlein, was stricken with a fatal illness and withdrew. Party leaders gave Hastert the nomination, in part because he had run credibly, but mainly because he seemed reliable and relatively unambitious, someone who would do as told.

Dallas Ingmanson, a Kendall County Republican operative who helped select him, later said, "I never had to question Denny. It was clear he wasn't just out for himself."

Six years later, Ingmanson turned to him again. While Grotberg lay in a coma, Ingmanson quietly gathered a small group to plan for the likely vacancy, and Hastert, then a state legislator and a member of that group, emerged as its preferred replacement.

That choice did not settle it. After Grotberg resigned on May 22, Hastert still had to win a Republican contest against several rivals, with lawyer Tom Johnson as his toughest opponent.