Neal, Chicago Columnist, Dies Suddenly

By: Mark Fitzgerald

He'll be missed.

That's how Steve Neal would have started this appreciation. That was his writing style, anyway: Start with a simple declarative sentence stripped of any proper nouns, and make a strong point that nevertheless is initially elusive about its subject. What was not his style was invoking the personal pronoun to write about himself. As fiercely as he expressed his opinions, there was no ""I"" in a Steve Neal column.

Neal, political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, died suddenly at 54 in his suburban Chicago home Feb. 18. The Sun-Times reported this morning that earlier this week he had been hospitalized overnight for a heart problem. The paper quoted Hinsdale, Ill., police as saying they had responded to a ""carbon monoxide alarm"" at his home Wednesday afternoon.

His death is a loss to political journalism in Chicago and Illinois. No one writing in Illinois newspapers knew more about history of Prairie State politics, and few cared as deeply. He could be an implacable enemy in print. For instance, he repeatedly blistered Illinois' Republican U.S. Senator, Peter Fitzgerald, seeing arrogance where the senator's defenders saw independence, and weasel words where other columnists saw principled stands.

His passion and erudition were especially valuable in the last few years as the state reeled through the accelerating revelations of corruption in the administration of former Gov. George Ryan.

It was easy to pound Ryan on the obvious and odious misdeeds of the governor and cronies, and there were plenty of newspaper columnists who confined themselves to that task. Steve Neal dug even deeper, and showed how Ryan was trying to use the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, then under construction in the capital of Springfield, as a sort of retirement home for his operatives as his administration came to its miserable end. It's no exaggeration to say that Neal ensured that the library dedicated to Illinois' First Citizen is managed not by political hacks, but by the respected historian Richard Norton Smith.

Neal himself was a respected historian, author of what is widely considered the best biography of Wendell Willke, ""Dark Horse."" In ""Harry and Ike: The Partnership That Remade the Postwar World,"" he wrote about the relationship between Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and punctured many of the myths that had grown up around that critical presidential succession. He was entrusted with editing the correspondence between Eleanor Roosevelt and Truman.

Neal brought a rigorous integrity to his work on the newspaper and in historical non-fiction. Doubleday once signed him to a contract to write about Woodrow Wilson, but Neal withdrew when he concluded during his research that others had already captured the subject. ""My view is, if a subject has been done before, there's no reason for me to do a book on it,"" he told me.

Neal was acutely aware of the faults of journalism and, in recent years, of popular historians -- and he was determined not to contribute to any decline in standards. For a story I was doing on plagiarism, he talked of the damage best-selling authors can inflict on all writers, using the example of Stephen E. Ambrose. ""I do think his reputation has been seriously tarnished,"" he said. ""That's a shame because when narrative history is popular, that's good. For all writers.""

Both major Chicago dailies were enlivened by his presence, as contributor or competitor. A 1971 graduate of the University of Oregon, Neal's first journalism job was at the Oregon Journal. He worked from 1972 to 1979 at The Philadelphia Inquirer and then became a Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. He was the paper's White House correspondent from 1981 to 1983.

Neal joined the Sun-Times in 1987. He leaves his wife, Susan, and two daughters, Erin and Shannon.