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DAZE WORK: Praise for Ken Bode not politically incorrect
Two things stand out that I’ll always remember about Ken Bode, the national TV political correspondent and inaugural head of the DePauw University Center for Contemporary Media who died June 2 at Charlotte, N.C., at age 83.
The first is how he allowed the Greencastle All-America City Committee to utilize Media Center expertise to shoot a video that accompanied the committee’s pitch before a panel of judges selecting 10 winners from among 30 finalists at San Antonio in 1991.
Bode even narrated the piece and was never on camera until the very end, when standing in front of his Greencastle residence, he proclaimed, “This is Ken Bode reporting from my new hometown in Greencastle, Ind.”
It certainly didn’t hurt city efforts to bring home that coveted All-America City honor.
Later, after Bode had left DePauw and Greencastle for the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, he returned to DePauw for a second act and then moved back to the East Coast. However, he never lost his thirst for politics. As I sat in the Banner Graphic newsroom the night of one subsequent election, writing about local winners and losers, my phone rang. It was Bode. He wanted to know how the local election came out and applied his keen political insight as to how the winners evolved. No Bushes, no Clintons involved, just local names, but he was interested enough to make an election call to our newsroom to keep abreast of the outcomes.
Stories about Ken Bode, who came to DePauw in 1989 initially, have been shared across the country the past few days. But we went to the horse’s mouth to find out if the story of Bode’s decision to leave Washington and come to DePauw were true.
None other than former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels insists it is.
“It’s absolutely true,” now-Purdue University President Daniels told us Thursday via phone during a break in the Purdue Board of Trustees meeting.
Acknowledging he was still heartbroken to hear of his friend’s passing, Daniels said he had known Bode in D.C. while serving Sen. Richard Lugar and President Ronald Reagan.
Daniels said he and his wife Cheri always wanted to raise their daughters at home in Indiana, and were able to do that “on a second try” when he accepted the CEO position of the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and in 1990 took a position at Eli Lilly, ultimately becoming president of the company’s North America Pharmaceutical Operations.
Sometime in 1988 or 1989, Daniels recalled receiving a phone call from Bode, who wanted to know about the transition, asking, “How’s that going?”
“It was the best thing we ever did,” Daniels told him, recalling how Ken and Margo Bode had the same thought about raising daughters Matilda and Josie in Indiana rather than Washington, which “we didn’t think was the best environment for raising a family.”
Bode soon learned that somewhere in Indiana a college was looking to launch a media center. He asked Daniels to find out about it for him.
“It didn’t take 10 minutes,” Daniels said. “I knew (former DePauw President) Bob Bottoms, and I called him and said, ‘Call off the search, there’s a guy that’s perfect for you. He’ll bring luster to your school and bring important people to campus. He’s got all the academic credentials necessary if you can talk him into it.’”
He recalled advising Bode, “It’s a great school, a beautiful town and a great place for Matilda and Josie to be. It was very positive all around that he was just right.”
Daniels acknowledged Bode “had a certain pedigree,” having been involved in the George McGovern campaign and serving as a research director for the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which developed rules to revise the party’s nominating process for the 1972 Democratic convention.
“But he was such a consummate professional and held people in public life to high standards, while also realizing they are human beings” that he won respect from both sides of the political aisle, Daniels said. “It’s easy to say he was universally respected and liked.”
As a newsman, Bode had his boots on the ground, reporting from the trenches, “none of this sitting around googling things,” the former governor noted.
Recalling a visit to a farm the Bodes owned in Delaware, Daniels said they were all shooting baskets when he sat down in front of a barn for a break. Behind him were a bunch of Democrat political posters on the barn wall. Bode couldn’t resist taking a photo of his Republican friend in that moment.
“He thought that was so funny,” Daniels said. “I still have that picture in our front hall, and it’ll stay there.”
Also reflecting on the loss of a friend and colleague was former DePauw Public Relations Director and longtime Indianapolis TV newsman Ken Owen, who posted a video on Twitter about their relationship.
“When people pass away,” Owen noted, “a lot of incredibly rich stuff goes with them. Ken Bode was an incredibly rich guy in terms of his friends and his experience and his impact.”
As an NBC and CNN political correspondent, Bode “was a friend of many world leaders, including the presidents he covered, not always their best friend because Ken could be tough and at times adversarial, but he understood the role of a journalist was to ask the tough questions and leave the nice-guy stuff for side conversations at cocktail parties.”
Owen praised that Bode was “foremost a journalist and wanted people to go into the world and become fact checkers or truth tellers or questioners or inquisitive citizens.”
After his first encounter with Bode, Owen said he thought to himself, “‘My God, DePauw has landed a plum.’”
It wasn’t long after Bode started at DePauw that he arranged for old CNN colleague Bernard Shaw, fresh from covering the bombing raids of the initial days of the first Gulf War, to speak in Greencastle. It started a parade of celebrities from across the political spectrum, including Mitch Daniels as the seated governor. He even brought a presidential candidate, Paul Tsongas, with him once to play cribbage at Jerry Hecko’s garage and get a trim at Dick’s Barber Shop.
“Ken, on top of being sometimes irascible, sometimes argumentative was always curious, always probing, always challenging and a funny guy,” Owen characterized.
A native of Hawarden, Iowa, near the state line with South Dakota, where he attended the University of South Dakota, Bode “really cared about America,” Owen added, “and a lot things about America really ticked him off. And he wasn’t slow to point them out to people.”
“Sometimes it wasn’t fun to be around Ken Bode,” Owen continued, “because he would challenge you. One of the things I admired the most about Ken Bode is he kind of never took off his journalist cap in all his interactions.
“He so greatly influenced his friends with his intellect, his wit and his sense of humor.”
Bode strove to always ask the tough questions and “keep asking questions when you don’t get answers.”
“He certainly made this nation stronger and better,” Owen added, because of the person he was. “As a friend, I will always carry these great memories.”
“We lost a good man in Ken Bode,” he stressed. “We need more Ken Bodes.”
