Former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the Chicago Democrat who became the leading architect of congressional tax policy in the Reagan era but later went to federal prison for corruption, died Wednesday, a family friend said. He was 82.
Rostenkowski was born and raised in the old "Polish Downtown," a blue-collar neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. Born to a political family, he was a product of the Chicago machine, serving in the state legislature at age 24. A few short years later, with the support of his close ally Mayor Richard J. Daley, Rostenkowski was elected to the U.S. Congress.
He was present in Chicago for the famously disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention, and his association with that event sidetracked his otherwise meteoric political rise. By 1981, though, he had risen to sufficient prominence to become the Chairman of the influential Ways and Means Committee.
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