Sweet: Ab Mikva — a somebody

Follow @LynnSweet

WASHINGTON — Besides the consummate mensch, Abner Mikva was a mentor, the gold standard for integrity in the often dirty world of Illinois politics, a talent scout, liberal icon and an activist, with his last important cause trying to help to confirm U.S. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mikva’s endorsement was highly sought by Illinois Democrats involved in primaries who wanted to convey their liberalism and anti-Machine independence. At one time, the Illinois trifecta were nods from the late Sen. Paul Simon, the late Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch and Mikva. Mikva’s death on Monday, at 90, closes out that era.

Mikva operated on local and national levels, and though he was in Washington for many years when he was a lawmaker, a judge and in the Clinton White House, he was more like a Chicagoan on assignment — with a place in the Dunes Mikva and his wife, Zoe, returned to each summer.

President Barack Obama said in a statement, “When I was graduating law school, Ab encouraged me to pursue public service. He saw something in me that I didn’t yet see in myself, but I know why he did it — Ab represented the best of public service himself and he believed in empowering the next generation of young people to shape our country.”

Follow @LynnSweet

When Obama awarded Mikva the Medal of Freedom in 2014 at a White House ceremony, the president retold, with great relish, the most famous story about Mikva being turned down for a job by an 8th Ward Democratic Machine flunky because he was “nobody nobody sent.”

Then there is this overlooked gem Obama used to tell to donors at fundraisers, as he did on April 4, 2013 at an event in Atherton, California.

“A close friend of mine, Abner Mikva, who was White House counsel — he was a longtime congressman from the Chicago area — he used to say that being friends with a politician is like perpetually having a child in college. It’s like every few months you have to write this check and you’re thinking when is it going to be over. With elected officials, it’s never over.”

Many people who marched through Mikva’s long life turned out to be somebodies.

Garland popped up early on Mikva’s radar.

Sandy Horwitt is a writer who visited with Mikva last Wednesday, while he was in hospice care at Rush University Medical Center.

Horwitt got to know Mikva starting when he volunteered for his 1974 congressional campaign. Another person working in the office of the Committee to Re-elect Mikva in the summer of 1974 — at 4016b Church St. in Skokie — was Merrick Garland, then a Harvard undergrad from Lincolnwood.

Senate Republican leaders are blocking Garland’s nomination, and last May, Mikva was to travel here to be one of the star witnesses at a Senate Judiciary Committee forum on Garland hosted by the Democrats. Mikva canceled because he was not well enough to travel, Horwitt said.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan clerked for Mikva when he was an appellate judge. He took her to the Clinton White House as a deputy general counsel when he was Bill Clinton’s White House counsel.

“Mikva gave me my first job — and my first chance — in the law. For that alone, I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. But far more important, I am thankful to him for modeling, for me and so many others, how to live a life dedicated to public service,” Kagan said in a statement.

Mikva “never wavered in his commitment to civil rights and civil liberties,” Bill Clinton said in a statement.

Back in the day, Mikva attracted youthful, idealistic supporters who would wear their distinctive Mikva! T-shirts with pride.

Said Democratic activist Dan Lauber of suburban River Forest, “I still have it to this day.”

Tweets by @lynnsweet