Part One: Dennis Hastert: The Longest-Serving Republican Speaker of the House

0:05 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And to talk about a very special piece of shit who sadly has recently, not so sadly, has recently departed this mortal coil. We have someone who's still alive, the great Miles Gray. Welcome back to the show, Miles. Congratulations on being alive, unlike our subject today. How are you doing? Thank you. Thank you.

0:28 I'm great. I'm great.

0:29 Thank you so much for having me back.

0:31 I love being on the show.

0:33 I love the anxiety that I feel prior to you telling me who we're going.

0:37 To talk about.

0:38 And this is really the best part of the show is I'm just trying to figure.

0:42 Out how dark How dark are we going today? Who are we on? What rocks are we turning over today together? Sitting with bated breath to hear the name of our subject this week, which I should probably just give you now. This week, we're talking about Dennis Hastert. Oh, Denny Hastert, the disgraced Speaker of the House. The longest serving Republican Speaker of the House. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

1:06 And maybe showed us a thing or two of the darkness.

1:09 Showed a few people a thing or two. Yeah.

1:12 Speaking of showing us things, do you want to tell people about the several podcasts you host? Yeah.

1:19 Before we talk about this pedophile, Miles. We're doing that up front. How are you doing?

1:23 We like to talk about disgraced pedophile speaker of the house.

1:27 Danny Astert.

1:29 I mean, with Behind the Bastards, we like to get the plugs in up top because by the end, people are a little bummed.

1:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. Let's see.

1:36 If you like, well, there's three shows. If you like daily news and politics, I used to be a lobbyist and then I gave up because I became so jaded that I just wanted to be funny. Check out The Daily Zeitgeist. I do that every day with Jack O'Brien. If you like 90 Day Fiancé, I do that with Sophia Alexandra, who's been on this show a few times.

1:55 That's called 420 Day Fiancé.

1:57 And also, I just started talking recently about my favorite sport, which is the Premier League English soccer football. That's a new show called Ain't It Footy. And that's with Jamel Johnson and Chris Martin.

2:10 Yeah. Sweet.

2:11 I have no alliance in that league, so I just root for Arsenal for you.

2:17 Thank you.

2:18 And see, Sophie, that's why I know you're one of the decent people out here in podcasting.

2:23 Thank you. Your blind allegiance to my soccer team.

2:26 Yeah. I got your back.

2:34 Now, Miles, you mentioned that you used to be a lobbyist. We're going to be talking a lot about lobbyists today. Because one of the things Dennis Taster did was kind of revolutionize how congressmen were corrupt vis-a-vis lobbyists. Or at least he was part of a wave of that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I noted, Dennis, you called him Denny. So did all of his friends. Every article you find about him will note that his friends called him Denny. It's always Denny, yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:57 Yeah.

2:58 Dennis Hastert was the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House. He was in office from 1999 to 2007, so basically pretty close to the entirety of the Bush years. That's not the only thing he was, though. As some, but not all, of the obituaries after his October 3rd, 2026 death noted, he was also a serial child molester. In between those two points, he played a key role in advancing the cause of corruption in Congress and making partisan bickering even worse. And he also did a bunch of other shitty stuff. There's so much other bad stuff, not just the pedophilia and the Dennis Hastert story. That's the promise I have for you. Thank you for that guarantee.

3:34 I appreciate it. You're welcome. In his 2004 autobiography, Hastert's autobiography, which was titled Speaker, Lessons from 40 Years in Coaching and Politics... Hastert opens chapter one, Just Call Me Denny, with a quote from Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, who also had a hobby of taking naked pictures of little girls. He's not known to have molested anyone, but it's very likely he was in love with Alice Little, Lytle, the inspiration for Alice from the book, and her sister.

4:02 Alice was 11 when they broke contact, and that's not super relevant, but just given that about a decade after this autobiography comes out, Hastert is exposed as a child molester. He's like, oh, okay. Interesting quote to open your book with there.

4:16 Yeah.

4:16 Of all of the people.

4:18 He's like, yeah, the pull quote on the back was from R.

4:21 Kelly.

4:21 He was a real wild book rollout.

4:25 Was he a big Lolita fan?

4:27 No, but that was not his. I mean, he picked a very different gender in terms of his predation. So maybe Lolita didn't have what he was looking for. Oh, no. So John Dennis Hastert, I guess you could call him a J.D., was born on January 2nd, 1942, which he notes in his autobiography was right around when the Japanese took Manila and the New York Times announced the start of war rationing in the United States. He was born 7 pounds 11 ounces, and his aunt declared him a chubby baby. He's going to be a bigger guy his whole life. 7 pounds 11 ounces is so normal. What are we doing? We're talking right at the end of the Great Depression. All right. That's big. That's big for a baby in a country where everyone had been starving

5:13 very recently. Fair enough. Dennis was the first of three sons. The Hastert family moved to the United States from Luxembourg in the 1860s, making the accurate prediction that the next 80 years or so of European history would be better off avoided. The family lived in the Chicago area for a while, but moved to the Illinois countryside by the time Dennis was born. His parents met in Jolette and his dad became an embalmer and did that job until 1940, about two years before Dennis was born. At that point, he moved to Aurora, Illinois, and started a farm supply store.

5:45 His dad's going to go through a few businesses. They'll run, when Denny is a teenager, he'll work at his dad's restaurant, right? His father is a workaholic and seldom home, so when he's a very little kid, it's mostly his mom, Naomi, who is kind of in charge of things. They have a small four-laker farm in Oswego, Illinois. The war years made little impression on a boy so young. He's like three when the war ends. and his first solid memories would have then been the post-war boom that ran from the late 1940s on through the 50s. Once Dennis was old enough to help his dad, he went with him on delivery missions all over the area in their unheated 1936 truck to drop off, like, feed for livestock. Hastert

6:25 fell in love with old trucks as a result of this, and he's going to collect antique fire trucks and shit later in life. He talks about that stuff all the time. I don't find it particularly interesting next to the other things he does. Um... He writes in his autobiography, which was published during the height of his career before any scandals hit. And one of the things that's interesting about it is that there's bits in it that might be true and are probably at least partly true, but they're also clearly framed and crafted to make a political point because he's a Republican writing his autobiography while he's still the Speaker of the House. So these anecdotes shouldn't be seen as literally what happened, but what Dennis thinks is

6:59 thought was politically handy for you to believe happened in his life. So here's one of those stories. I'm not going to give you an allowance, Dad said when I was in the third grade, but if you want to earn some money, I'm going to give you 20 chickens. You have to take care of them every day. We had a little hen house, and the chickens were mine.

7:15 I went to pick up those eggs three times every day. I could sell them for about 30 cents a dozen and earn a few extra bucks each week. When you collected eggs, the chickens would peck at you. Bravery for a kid, I decided then, was sticking your hand in a chicken's nest, knowing she's going to peck at you three or four times, and extracting the egg without breaking it.

7:31 And I've had chickens. I don't know why he's getting attacked so much by them. I mean, like that's not like a necessary part of the chicken process.

7:40 Your vibes are so bad that even chickens are like, get the fuck away from me somehow. And also, yeah, I love this like myth, self-mythologizing too.

7:49 And it didn't matter. I persevered. I got, I went in there and stole their young. For commerce. My dad wouldn't give me an allowance. I don't take handouts. He taught me to work for my money. I got pecked three to four times. Yeah, they have. He writes that. I don't know how big this farm gets because he's he repeatedly says that, like, the family didn't have much, but they, you know, they had enough. But also he mentions vaguely at one point that, like, in addition to the chickens, he was taking care of. They had like a thousand other chickens, which is like a sizable number of chickens. That's like a lot of like you would be getting pecked some just by sheer volume of chickens. Yeah, yeah.

8:24 There's some bad eggs in there. Yeah, Dennis also helped– that was good. Dennis also helped bale hay and knew most of the other farm chores that you would expect from a farm kid. His political interest was minimal as a youth. His family seems to have been fairly comfortable. He claims they didn't have time for vacations and then immediately after that describes a week-long vacation they took. He also– there's a couple weird passages like that where he talks about how we didn't have much money. We never got new things. Then he talks about his dad getting him a new bicycle. And I think he was trying to be like this was the one time it happened. But just the way he wrote it is just very like– Yeah,

8:57 it doesn't come off that way. He just said you didn't have this.

9:00 Yeah, aside from you saying we didn't have much, everything else says you had much.

9:05 Yeah, yeah. I don't know about much, but he's, like, middle class, right? They're not, like, you know, desperate.

9:10 Or more in the sense of, like, yeah, the descriptions of his childhood betray just sort of, like, the broad statements of being, like, you know, we were destitute.

9:18 Yeah, and it's just very quickly within those, like, we didn't go on vacations. Here's a vacation we went on. Right, right. Most of the profiles of Dennis in newspapers and magazines read something like this line from a 2008 article on him in the Daily Herald. Quote, You'll hear that a lot. That when he's a teen, he has this like moment and he gives himself up to Jesus. Obviously, like. That's not impossible to believe, but the actual story he gives for how he got converted to Christianity as a kid who was born and raised as a Christian, right? Being born again means that it really stuck this time, right? No, no, I swear. Like, I got way more into it as a teenager. I super got into Jesus now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

9:58 But the specific story he gives feels like it was crafted by a consultant. I have trouble buying it. All right, let me hear it. I was a pretty serious kid. And in my early teenage years, I can remember feeling a great uneasiness. I was just unsettled and needed to have something happen to me. Sure enough, it did. We were in a cabin by a lake camping out overnight.

10:16 Some kids might have produced a six-pack of beer or a pack of cigarettes. My friend Jarman pulled out a Bible. Suddenly, I had a yearning to accept Christ as my savior, and I did. Almost instantly, my uneasiness disappeared. Later, I joined Jarman at the Claim Street Baptist Church in Aurora, where his parents sang in the choir. This experience isn't something I discuss publicly, but it really changed my life.

10:35 And again, it brought up in every interview about his life. And also just like, oh yeah, the beer. That really made you fear for your soul, and you had to accept Jesus? Yeah. A six-pack?

10:45 100% written by a consultant just in the description of the things that he rejected. I'm surprised it wasn't like, they had beers, cigarettes, and a copy of Das Kapital.

10:57 And I said, no. The Communist Manifesto was in there, too. I will choose the Bible. Oh, you don't know this, Miles, but back in the 50s and early 60s, every sixer of Schlitz came with a copy of the Communist Manifesto. It was a weird, weird marketing promo, to be honest. Worked on some people. Anyway, we know his parents were not supposed to be like crazy religious, but they went to church. He was going to church from a young age.

11:21 So I think this, I don't know how much I believe this is the moment that he gave his soul up to God or if he was just like looking for an explanation that sounded better than, well, I've just always been Christian, right? Which I think is more accurate.

11:33 You definitely get points for being like, no, and then I actually made, it wasn't just by default that I became a Christian. I intentionally chose at this age in my life. But also for me, like I remember growing up, And the kids that, like, kind of, like, would fit in the mold of born again, they were just, like, horny for some, like, girl in the church youth group.

11:51 So they just started going to church youth group.

11:53 And then one thing turned to another. And then they're like, actually, I've been– I am part of the Borg now.

12:00 Yeah.

12:01 So– Maybe that's, I don't know if maybe there was some other reason, but it sounds like bullshit anyway, just to be like, yeah, I re-upped my Christianity as a teenager.

12:09 And his friend, Tom Jarman, who is the guy he says brought the Bible out in lieu of the beer, doesn't give that, like gives a very different story in that interview with the Daily Herald. Everybody worked, said Jarman. They talk about the 50s being innocent. Hell, there wasn't any time to get in trouble. I don't think there was anything virtuous in not drinking in high school. We just didn't have the time. And so the way his friend is like, what is that Bible story? No, we just literally didn't. We were working all the time. What are you talking about?

12:35 He's like, did you tell the story about how he could smoke the most cigarettes and drink the most.

12:38 Beer out of any kid we knew? Oh, no. Oh, never mind. Oh, man. So about the most exciting moment of Hastert's teenage years was the time his dad got him nine pigs to raise for a 4-H fair. And he says his hogs grew into the largest pigs in the competition and he should have won, but then he gets fucked out of it. And here's how he explains that in his autobiography. A 4-H leader from Yorkville, Illinois, jumped up. My pigs were too big, he objected. They couldn't have been born when I claimed they were. Therefore, they didn't deserve first place. The judge heard him out and dropped me down to fourth place. My dad was outraged.

13:12 And he claims this is when he first learned about, like, political influence. I don't know. I can't say Dennis cheated, right? I have no idea. I will say he's going to grow into a professional liar, cheat, and child molester. So maybe the guy from the 4-H club in Yorkville was on to something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

13:32 And to the point where even the judges were just like, hmm. It's not like there was like a whole lobbying effort. They're like, the guy's paying for the judge's RV, and that's why he's on his side.

13:44 This isn't a Harlan Crowe situation. Yeah, you're right. Pigs don't get this big, you know, this fast.

13:51 The guy goes, yeah, how old did you say this was?

13:53 One years old. Yeah, no fucking way, dude. No, you're full of shit.

13:58 I like the takeaway for him is like, so that's politics.

14:03 So that's how politics works.

14:04 It's learning how to fucking cheat, but then make sure you don't get caught or changing the rules around you when you brought a five-year-old.

14:11 Pig to the fucking competition. That is how politics works. Yeah. His chief mentor at school was the football coach, Ken Pickerel, who Dennis called the most influential person in his early life. Hastert also got into wrestling, which Ken coached, as well as football. But during his junior year, he suffered a shoulder separation that would hurt him for years. He had surgery several times, and it got infected, but he still played on it. You know, it's one of those stories about, like, I was injured, but I kept playing. In his autobiography, Dennis used this to argue that students who complain about getting injured during sports are cowards. I learned from the experience that when bad things happen, don't complain. Wow. Which is, again,

14:49 quite a sentence from a guy who as a coach molested his students.

14:53 Right.

14:53 Dennis.

14:54 Wow.

14:54 Yeah. Maybe dropping some hints in 2004. When Hastert graduated high school, he and his best friend Tom Jarman were accepted to Wheaton College. One day during finals week, Dennis and Jarman were screwing around in boxing, something Jarman's parents forbade him to do. Hastert got his nose broken, so they covered up the boxing gear and went to the doctor.

15:14 Jarman claims Hastert made their physician promise not to tell. I mean, Denny was quoting the law to this guy. And that's interesting, too, that even this young with at least so far, it seems like zero interest in politics and presumably no crimes under his belt. Although, you know, we don't really know. Young Dennis knows the law well enough to be prepared to use it as a threat against a medical professional to cover up that he was doing something he wasn't supposed to do. That's like a really kind of telling moment for him.

15:40 Yeah.

15:41 How old is he there? He's like 18, maybe.

15:44 Like you can see how like He's learning how to coerce, you know, at a minimum, right? It's just like, okay, there are ways to like even make a doctor do something, but I sure as hell don't know what that weapon is.

15:57 Yeah, and he's willing to do it on the doctor. He's not going to be willing to do it on his mom. Per a 1999 Chicago Tribune article by Bob Kemper, the boys paid cash, so no bill would be sent home. But months later, a bill did arrive. A clerk had made a mistake. Jarman and Hastert were in the kitchen table when Naomi Hastert turned to them. She said, I know that if something happened and I asked you about it, you wouldn't lie, would you? Jarman recalled. And I said, no, Ms. Hastert, if you had asked, we wouldn't have lied. Then she looked at Denny and it was all over. He just blurted it out, right? So he's going to learn to be a better liar than That's his character arc during the story. It's also, again, always at a very early age,

16:34 think about how do I cover up the evidence from this? I got to make sure they don't send me a bill. That's also going to be something we'll hear about in part two, after trying to cover up a bill.

16:42 We're seeing a lot of aversion to accountability just develop in a very distinct way.

16:49 Yeah. Look, his life is a great example of what you do in good screenwriting, right? You know, you drop little hints or little teasers and then you pay them off in the last act, right? And that's the Dennis Hastert story. Very well written. Right. During this period, all Wheaton College students had to sign a pledge. Wheaton is like a super conservative evangelical university. All the students had to sign a pledge and promise not to smoke, drink, gamble, dance, or watch movies.

17:14 Yeah.

17:16 I love that old-timey shit. No dancing or watching a movie. No dancing or movie watching, period. I actually looked into it. These rules were initially laid out in 1860. And they also, like, students had to pledge to avoid, quote, propagating infidel principles. Man, it's been a while since I've heard of, like, evangelical Christians using the word infidel. That's a fun little slice of history right there. How do they mean that they're just any sort of influence that is un... An influence that's not their little corner of Christianity. Yeah, yeah. I think specifically their weird little corner of it. So no yoga, other infidel things like that. You're not doing yoga at Wheaton in this point in time. Oh, you mean infidel gymnastics?

18:02 Yeah, yeah.

18:02 That's infidel gymnastics. That's yoga. We're not doing that. Um, that's actually a good name for a yoga studio. Anyway, this was, uh, Hastert nearly a man majored in religion during his early years. He recalled, I was trying to take old Testament and new Testament and theology classes. And I was competing with all these preachers, kids, and missionaries kids.

18:22 It was tough. In other words, because it's the school where all of like the missionary kids go to, he, he just kind of realizes like, oh, I'm kind of in out of my depth here when it comes to religious studies. Hasterwood later praised the religious grounding Wheaton gave him, claiming, It gives you direction, the perspective where you hold yourself.

18:39 I'm not saying I'm a humble person. I wouldn't blow my own horn on humility, but I certainly think that a lot of things I do are certainly guided by my faith. Interesting. We'll see where the guidance of his faith takes him. As a right-wing evangelical institution, Wheaton missed the most exciting parts of the civil rights movement that is occurring the early stages of it while he is in college. Kemper's 1999 profile points out that there were no sit-ins at Wheaton, and in Hastert's senior yearbook, there was only one picture of a protest. Quote, It shows clean cut men holding signs reading, could Abe Lincoln graduate from Wheaton and don't ban the beard. They were protesting the school's no beard rule. Oh, my God. What the fuck?

19:18 What year is this?

19:19 You said this is during the 60 what?

19:21 This is 64. Oh, my God. This is 64 or 63 or 64. And I should note that in 1963, the year before Hastert graduated, fired men were photographed turning their hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham during the March from Selma.

19:33 Right.

19:33 I'm sure the beard stuff was important, too.

19:35 You know?

19:36 Yeah, yeah, yeah. One hundred percent. But our beards.

19:39 I mean, I wonder if they that was their way to sort of acknowledge the civil rights movement by by winking at Abraham Lincoln, the liberator.

19:45 I don't think that's what they were doing. I don't think that's what they were doing. Yeah, I know they were.

19:52 I mean, I wonder what do you think is like at that school and they like read the news and they're like, wow, you think LBJ is going to sign this civil rights act or something?

20:00 He's got to be way off. Oh, I think I think reading the news is probably one of the things you're not supposed. That's one of the infidel infidel activities. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just read the Bible. That's the only thing you need to read up on. Bible's the only good news you need. Hastert played football while he was in college, and he also got into wrestling. His shoulder injury is apparently a problem, but it also apparently doesn't trouble him enough to stop him from playing contact sports. But here's something really weird, Miles. He's able to continue playing football, and he's able to keep wrestling with this injury. But then when it comes time to go to Vietnam, ah, ah, my shoulder. I can't, I just can't. Oh, I want

20:41 it so bad. It just too hurts. I mean, I can tackle a guy on the gridiron, but I just couldn't go to war, you know?

20:49 Sure, you saw me playing rugby earlier in a scrum. It was, I don't know, that was, I was healed.

20:55 Yes, I bench pressed 375 pounds, but no, I couldn't, I'm not fit enough for Nam, obviously. You saw a pushup? Yeah. Shit, I don't know. My shoulder, my shoulder.

21:05 Was he, did he come, was that enough of an excuse or did he have, like, did class insulate him enough? Oh, okay, so clearly he was able to just rely on the injury.

21:14 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's, yeah, that is my understanding. That's what's written in Kemper's article. Sure. Kemper also notes that his college roommate, a guy named Parmelee, did get sent to Vietnam and became the first Wheaton graduate to die in Vietnam in 1965. He was killed by friendly fire from an American mortar. In that Chicago Tribune piece, Kemper adds, Too hurt to go serve his country, but willing to use the name of his dead roommate to tell people not that they shouldn't have a freedom. Yeah.

21:49 You damn right I'm going to score rhetorical points at the lectern over this guy's death and leave that shit right there.

21:55 Yeah. I think I have something to say. Yeah. And look, I'm perfectly pro people getting out of serving in Vietnam if they don't go on to support every single war this country has ever been in since. Yeah. Right. Precisely. Since he couldn't go to NAMM, he decided he wanted to teach high schoolers about politics. He got a gig helping coach freshman football at his alma mater, and he starts taking teaching classes at Northern Illinois University. And he's working on his degree, but you only have to do a portion of your degree before you can start teaching as long as you finish your degree while you're teaching.

22:28 So while he's finishing this second degree, he takes a job at Yorkville High School, just a few miles from his own former high school. In his autobiography, he claims he shows up to an interview at Yorkville High School in street clothes. He was just trying to ask about an opening, and to his surprise, he's whisked into a brief interview. Quote, I was a live body, and they needed one. What's interesting about this, that's not a crazy story in teaching. A lot of schools are understaffed. As long as you're qualified, that happens sometimes, right? This is also the entire story of Hastert's political career, is he just shows up and like, we need a live body.

23:00 Get in here. Get in here. Get in here. Like, now you're the speaker. Well, this will become increasingly clear later. But it's funny how consistently this is how this guy gets everything in his life. Yeah, just forced gumping it through everything. He is really gumping his way up the ladder. So he's hired, and he also gets the job coaching the wrestling team. I guess they just didn't have a wrestling coach. They'd only started the program a year earlier.

23:23 Before the semester began, he takes a trip to see his aunt in Bethesda. And since he was going to be teaching politics, he decides to visit D.C. for the first time while he's there. One thing he notes that's of interest is that, quote, back then, if you wore a suit, you could go anywhere. So he just walks into the Senate chamber and sits down to listen to Barry Goldwater argue with Mike Mansfield about U.S. missile programs. Apparently, that's how Congress used to work. He just walked in. Oh, my God. That easy. Are you a white guy in a suit? Oh, step right in. Come on. Clearly, you belong in Congress.

23:52 Yeah, you're here for this debate about missile policy?

23:56 Of course, of course. You know, you're technically fifth in line to the presidency right now just for showing up. Yeah, right. Oh, man, the 60s. Speaking of the 1960s, you know what probably will sell you acid? The sponsors of this podcast. That was a good pivot.

24:15 You know who's not fifth in line to the presidency?

24:18 I don't know that, Sophie.

24:19 We don't. We really don't. We have no idea what could pop up.

24:23 You line. And we're back. So after Hastert visits D.C. for the first time, he also, before he starts teaching at Yorkville, he goes on a YMCA-backed trip to Japan. Weirdly enough, one of the people who's on this trip with him is Tony Podesta, the former lobbyist and brother of former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. That doesn't go anywhere. It's just weird. Yeah.

24:52 Okay.

24:54 Like he and Tony argue about politics. But I was just like, well, that's kind of, didn't expect a Podesta to show up in here. On a YMCA trip? On a YMCA trip to Japan.

25:04 Didn't know YMCA offered trips.

25:08 I don't think that's how they work anymore, Sophie. Right, right.

25:12 The YMCA of old is very different than the ones we have now where I take my kid to learn how to swim.

25:17 Yeah, I was going to say, that's like where my niece.

25:18 Is learning how to swim and it's lovely.

25:21 It's a great experience. So Dennis started teaching and coaching at Yorkville in late 1965 while he was still finishing his teaching degree. In 1971, when he was six years in, a woman named Jean Call started teaching P.E. there. The two started dating and eventually fell in love and got married. She spoke to the Tribune for that 1999 profile, and here's a quote from that. The most striking thing about him, she recalled, was how he tuned out the rest of the world during wrestling season. If it was during wrestling season, he's a different person, she said. He's very focused. In between sports, he was a good guy to be around. Now, this was written almost 20 years before we knew that Dennis Hastert had been molesting kids as a wrestling coach,

26:04 but wow. That's terrifying. He's a different person. He's a good guy to be around in between sports. Just when not the sports is happening.

26:13 I'm sorry, what is happening during the sports then?

26:16 Yeah, what's he like during the sports? Wow.

26:20 Okay.

26:21 Oops.

26:21 99.

26:22 So yeah. Now we're going to talk now about what he does as a high school wrestling coach. But again, I need you to know that this doesn't come out until like the 20 teens, right? So this is all happening in the 70, I mean, the late 60s up through 1980, but none of this is going to come out until really not all that long ago, right? So people don't know this at the time, what I'm telling you, other than his victims. So Yorkville had only started its wrestling program the year before Hastert arrived. Ed Ewolt, an Illinois state wrestling historian, notes that his first move was to have his kids compete against the schools with the best programs. His philosophy was you only learn by wrestling the best. That is probably a good philosophy because it

27:03 really works, right? Like he's an effective- Yeah, humbles you too. Sure, yeah. And it gets you like working with kids who you're gonna learn things from, right? Um, this works very well. And in terms of his ability to coach a wrestling team to victory, Hastert is very good at his job. Most articles from before the allegations dropped will laud him for having taken on every other job around for the team.

27:25 He drove the bus. He did a lot of the cleaning. He would take the kids on special trips to learn from other coaches. He was an incredibly involved coach and was like doing the work of multiple adults to run the wrestling team. Incidentally, this meant that Hastert was often the only adult with these boys. An interview with his former boss at Yorkville High School from a different and much later Chicago Tribune article notes, reached at his home, Garnett told the Chicago Tribune he remembered Hastert's commitment to his athletes, whom the coach often took on road trips to wrestling camps or to compete with larger suburban school districts and non-conference wrestling meets. So he's like, I never knew.

28:02 I thought he was a great coach. No one ever said anything bad about him. He was always taking the kids out of state or out of the area on his own. Oh, we don't know precisely. Yeah, sorry.

28:14 We say no, no, just like it's it's it's so funny how often like there's always like these like child molesters and like sports programs things because it just like sort of it's so much easier, I think, for people to let their guard down because they think like, well, they're there to do sports and nothing else. And yeah, it's not even like thinking much of like. They went on that trip where I think they were learning football stuff or wrestling or gymnastics or whatever it was.

28:39 Yeah, a lot of trips. Like, he was a really dedicated coach. He's always taking the boys away. Yeah, yeah, right. Taking them off our hands. We don't know precisely when Hastert started molesting his wrestlers. We do know that ultimately five people would come forward to the authorities, obviously as adults.

28:57 And in one case, it was the relative of a person who had been molested by Hastert but since died. And we know that at least one of those five people claim to know other victims who chose not to come forward, right? So there are more than five victims by every credible account, right? But we don't know how many.

29:14 My guess would be he probably didn't start molesting kids year one. I just assume it's the kind of thing he would have, like, worked up to. But I don't know, like, exactly when he started. The first evidence of him molesting a student is in 1971. I should also note that he marries Jean in 1972. I don't know if that was cover or what, what he would have thought of in terms of that relationship. he and his wife are generally apart after he finishes teaching right they seemed like not that there's any evidence publicly they had a bad relationship but like she won't follow him to Washington which is interesting The earliest victim we know of– sorry, I said 1971. The earliest victim we know of was Steve Rainbolt,

29:57 who was the student equipment manager of the wrestling team in 1970. Steve died before he could come forward, but his sister Jolene talked to the press once allegations from other victims had been publicized. He'd come out to her as gay in 1979, years after graduating. A friend of Steve's also confirmed that Steve had told him that Hastert had molested him in 1974. For an article in ABC News written by Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz, and John Capple, quote, I asked him, when was your first same-sex experience? He looked at me and said, it was with Dennis Hastert, Jolene said. I was stunned. Jolene said she asked her brother why he never told anyone, and he just looked around and he kind of looked at me and said,

30:36 who is ever going to believe me? She explained that her brother expressed having been traumatized by the abuse. He took his belief in himself and his kind of right to be a normal person, Here was the mentor, the man who was, you know, basically his friend and stepped into that parental role, who was the one who was abusing him. He damaged Steve, I think, more than any of us will ever know. We'll hear more from Jolene later.

30:58 That's horrible. Yeah. One of the other victims that we know by name is Scott Cross. In the fall of 1979, Cross was the wrestling team captain. The Chicago Tribune talked to him after he testified when all this goes to court, and I'm going to quote now from an article by Christy Gutowski based on that interview. As a young boy, I wanted to be part of what Coach Hastert had created, Cross said. I was a small guy with a lot of ambition, and wrestling seemed to be the perfect sport for me. He was a key figure in my life as a coach and a teacher. Late one night after practice his senior year, Cross stayed afterwards to try to lose some weight for an upcoming match. Hastert suggested a massage could take some pounds off. But instead, Hastert, quote,

31:40 pulled down my shorts, Cross testified, and touched him sexually. Stunned, Cross got dressed and ran out of the locker room immediately. He never told anyone. As a 17-year-old boy, I was devastated, he testified. I tried to figure out why Coach Hastert had singled me out. I felt very alone and tremendously embarrassed.

31:56 I felt intense pain, shame, and guilt. Today, I understand that I did nothing to bring this on, but at age 17, I could not understand what happened or why. Now, both of these guys are abused when they're 17. which is not at all okay. I think there's at least one that was abused at 18, but at least I should also note one of Hastert's victims claims the abuse, which included forced oral sex, began when he was just 14 years old. So we know that there were more than five victims. and the ones we know ranged in age from 14 to 18. We don't know if there were any younger ones. I mean, he was at a high school, so maybe not, but right. We just don't have a comprehensive understanding. One could argue, even if he

32:39 didn't actually physically touch all of his students, that entire teams that he coached were victimized, even though many of them would not have realized what was happening. I'm going to quote again from that interview with Scott Cross, and this is This is the fucking kicker, folks. He also recalled Hastert's habit of sitting in a recliner in direct view of the shower stalls and watching the teens while they showered. But Cross said, I had accepted this because I trusted him and my teammates appeared to as well.

33:06 Oh, shit.

33:09 I that's just that really that's a different time because I have trouble today if someone's saying, yeah, the coach sits in a recliner and watches us through the open shower stalls of anyone not being like, what the fuck?

33:20 Yeah, and I think this also speaks to that era of not even understanding what is appropriate, what's inappropriate, your ability to consent, or even knowing that's like, well, I'm just taking a shower, so you're not thinking of it as some kind of sexual thing. Meanwhile, this guy's got a fucking Barca lounger pulled up to just fucking observe the team.

33:40 Like, that's fucking terrifying. A recliner. Like, fucking hell. Longest serving Republican Speaker of the House. There isn't like a more intentional seat than a recliner. No, a recliner. It's not a folding chair.

33:52 It's not a fucking stool or a fucking milk crate.

33:56 You brought a fucking recliner? A recliner. Yeah, the dirtiest of all the dirty old man chairs. So that's what we know about what Dennis Hastert did to his students. He clearly didn't set off alarms for most of his students because When this all first comes out and it's kind of unclear like what Hastert has done, just that he's being blackmailed by someone who says that he abused them because that's how this initially breaks. There are news articles with a bunch of his former wrestlers. I'm not going to quote from them, but there's a lot of quotes like, I thought he was a great guy. He was my mentor. I never saw anything. So clearly many, if not most of his wrestlers did not notice what was happening.

34:32 Yeah.

34:34 And under his leadership, the team did historically well, which may have something to do with everyone's rosy memories, right? The fact that they were champions. Between 1974 and 1979, they finished in the top three state teams five times. They won the state championship in 1976, and Hastert was named Coach of the Year, which he would later claim to be one of his proudest accomplishments. He started a wrestling newspaper called The Word and helped organize and then lead the National Association of Wrestling Coaches. In his autobiography, Speaker, Hastert claimed to have looked back to his old coach as a model for how to behave, which does make me wonder about his own high school experiences. Here's what

35:12 he said. Huh.

35:13 Odd. Yeah.

35:13 Yeah. a lot of dignity and enrolling a fucking Barker lounger up to the open shower stalls.

35:33 Again, I mean, I think it's, it's clear just even from like his early age, like he's the Machiavellianism like in him is so clear that like, it's, You could take the things he says at face value, or you could be like, this guy is trying to play three moves ahead with every single thing he says and does too.

35:53 And it works. So all of the articles about him when he first becomes speaker are like, he's like a quiet, plain spoken man, a humble country guy with no ambition, right? Like no, we'll talk about that more. By the end of the 1970s, Dennis was starting to chafe at his position, teaching, coaching, and molesting. There are two different claims about how and why he decided to get into politics. The folksy, homespun, PR-friendly version was given in that 1999 Tribune article. Hastert has a story he likes to tell when asked how he got started in politics. He says he was on a lobbying trip to Washington with a wrestling group when he realized that the congressmen were just like anybody else and that maybe he, too, could do the job.

36:31 Oh, boy.

36:32 He just goes for some wrestling thing and he's like, well, they're all people just like me. I could be in Congress. In what way? Yeah. Yeah. In what way are they like? I mean, I can tell you one way in terms of some of the people he's going to work alongside. In my research, I found a different, more believable story as to why he decided to go into politics. After he left office, this is after he finishes being speaker and he leaves Congress, he gives an interview to The Hill.

36:57 And this is while he's working as a lobbyist making a million dollars a year. And he tells them, I needed money. I asked for a raise. The school said we can't pay you anymore. You're already at the top of the scale. They offered to make him a high school vice principal, but Hastert said he didn't want that kind of headache. I read in the paper that our state representative was resigning and I decided I can do that.

37:16 So by that account, he just wanted more money. He just wanted money. That's why he got into politics is fucking money. And he's going to make a lot of money.

37:24 Yeah.

37:24 What about that job? Well, that guy, that's a different position. Well, I want, well, is he leaving?

37:29 Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'll do that then. I'll take that job. I'll take that job. Oh, okay. And he is going to get that job the same way he got his last job pretty much. Dennis gets 600 people to sign a petition saying he'd make a good state representative, and eventually he gets a call from a county GOP operative named Phyllis Oldenburg, who acted as his first political mentor.

37:48 Oldenburg recalled later, he knew nothing about politics. He will be the first to own up to that today. It has been the most beautiful time to watch him grow. I sit in awe of the whole situation. That quote came out before the scandal. Dennis ran in the GOP primary for the Illinois Statehouse. So he runs in the primary and he loses, right? This is in 1980. This is his first campaign and he loses. But, you know, maybe this would have dissuaded him from continuing in politics.

38:15 But then it turns into a win because the guy who had won the nomination, who had like won the primary, incumbent representative Al Schoberlin, falls ill with a fatal disease. I forget exactly what it is, but he gets like deadly ill and he drops out suddenly. And party leaders pick Hastert. Because of the other people who'd been in the primary, he'd done pretty well, and he seemed reliable, and most importantly, relatively unambitious. They thought he was someone, if we tell him to do this, tell him to do that, he'll do what we say, right? Dallas Ingmanson, the Kendall County GOP operative who helped pick Hastert, said this to Bob Kemper. There are some people who want to get into this political business who I have no

38:53 question why they're there. I never had to question Denny. It was clear he wasn't just out for himself.

39:00 Sure.

39:01 The same pattern is going to repeat itself in weird ways throughout his career. Hastert gets where he's going by being reliable, not making waves, seeing like a safe dude you can park somewhere without worrying about his ambition causing issues, right? Like he's not going to fuck things up for you. He'll do what you tell him. In short order, Dennis establishes himself as an arch conservative. The moral majority inducted him into their state honor role. Per that Tribune profile, one of Hastert's first efforts in the statehouse was to help block passage of the equal right Interesting. Years later, while serving in the real Congress, Hastert would protest reforming Title IX, which requires equal access for women in college

39:45 varsity sports. His justification was that the law undercut men's sports because some schools were cutting out programs entirely to avoid starting them for women. And he's like, well, we just need to not have Title IX then, right? If it's going to endanger men's sports. Yeah.

40:14 Sounds like we should exclude females then.

40:17 Right. Yeah.

40:18 Okay.

40:18 Yeah. His votes in the statehouse were not all perfectly conservative. He voted against giving tax credits to parents to take their kids to private schools and And he voted against using public school buses to transport private school students, which I think are pretty good votes. He won't stay consistent on this when he goes up to big people Congress.

40:36 But there's some evidence that he had minor principles that outweighed party politics for a little while. Like he's going to be super anti-union as like a big boy congressman. But he was like the head of his local teacher union for a while. And so he doesn't immediately roll on unions. It's up until he gets to like the federal level pretty much that he starts fucking on unions, I think.

40:56 Well, I think it's like at that point, the incentives aren't as big to completely, you know, betray your fellow working man.

41:03 Yeah, yeah.

41:03 At that level, maybe, yeah, you have the political capital to sort of like vote your principles.

41:10 But then, yeah, when you get to the show, the money is too much. The money is the money, yeah. During his time in the statehouse, lawmakers were petitioned to call the Constitutional Convention and pass an amendment demanding a balanced federal budget. He told advocates for the convention that he didn't think it was a good idea to require a balanced federal budget. Interesting. From the start of his political career, Hastert started finding jobs for his friends and family.

41:35 That Chicago Tribune piece from 1999 has one particularly fun example of this. One day in 1985, Hastert got a letter from another government office promising to hire a man he had recommended. At the bottom of the letter, in black ink, Hastert wrote a note to one of his staff. Carol, check this out. Did I write a letter for this guy?

41:51 Next to his inquiry, in red ink, Carol responded, yes, this is my cousin. Thanks.

42:00 Cool.

42:00 Cool stuff. I love politics. I should note that Hastert also used his time in the statehouse to oppose bills banning discrimination against gay people. He also supported a mandatory seatbelt law, but then voted to repeal it after a backlash saying that he just saw too many people driving without seatbelts and realized the law didn't make sense. Well, because too many people were ignoring it? Because people aren't wearing their seatbelts. He's like, well, this is a bad law.

42:26 People hate seatbelts. It's out of my hands.

42:29 I wish that logic was applied more where it's like, well, no one's obeying this one law that's completely restrictive.

42:35 I guess we better drop it. Look, people love heroin. Yeah. All right. We got to sell it at the grocery store. What are we going to do? Tell them to stop? I think we got this whole thing wrong. Look, Americans love nuclear weapons. They should be available at the store over the counter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like flu medicine. Also, flu medicine should be over the counter again. I want to play a flute made out of plutonium. That's right.

42:55 That's right. Speaking of plutonium, do you know where you can buy some plutonium? Maybe from our sponsors. I don't know. We don't vet them. And we're back. So my favorite story about Hastert's time as a state representative comes from that Chicago Tribune piece from 1999. He once had the State Department of Transportation place parking restrictions around an adult bookstore in his district to make it harder for patrons to park, though he quipped to a constituent that parking offenders may not even notice the signs since it seems that patrons of the bookstore only want to read a certain kind of material. Cool stuff.

43:38 Anyway.

43:38 A certain kind.

43:40 Yeah.

43:40 When he campaigned for the state, I just also love the being anti-porn after like being a serial child molester. Yeah, that really scans. Yeah. Yeah. Very Republican.

43:49 Well, it's all because, of course, everything's about their appearances and like.

43:52 Yeah.

43:53 So it's not about actual harm to people. That doesn't matter. No, no, no.

43:57 If anything, like the, you know, the most consistent thing you can pray for is like, oh, I understand this person's self-hatred being projected outward.

44:05 Yeah.

44:06 I think is just their their principle in terms of the legislation. Yeah.

44:09 Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. When he campaigned for the statehouse, Dennis had promised to stay in the job as state representative for at least 10, ideally more like 15 years. He claimed it like, well, there'd been six representatives over the last 12 years, and my voters want stability, right? So that's my job. If they elect me, I'll give them stability. But as soon as he's in office, he helps pass term limit legislation just in time to jump ship for a better opportunity after six years in office.

44:38 I'm pro term limits, but it's just very like scummy and self-serving pretty consistently. On January 27th, 1986, incumbent Republican representative for the Illinois 14th District, John Grotberg, who was in the process of running for reelection, fell into a coma while being treated for cancer. Grotberg had been basically guaranteed to win against his Democratic opponent, the county coroner, Mary Lou Kearns. But his coma lasted for months, and the party waited with bated breath to see if he'd recover and drop out or try to, like, run somehow, right? Like, this coma lasts, I forget how long, but it lasts a while. And people are like, well, what do we do?

45:13 And his family and his assistants are like, no, he's going to be fine. He's going to be fine. Okay. Old John's going to beat this. Okay, Elaine, ciao. Oh, yeah, for sure.

45:22 Yeah.

45:22 Well, this is all going down. Kearns wins her primary and starts campaigning against a basically dead Grotberg. Okay. Now, while Grotberg's people are like, he's going to snap out of it, Ingmanson, who is, again, the guy who helped get Hastert into the state role that he has, gathers a small group of people together to work out a plan to deal with reality. Hastert is one member of this small group, and it's decided by Ingmanson that Hastert will take over for Grotberg. Grotberg resigned on May 22nd, but Hastert still had several GOP opponents, the most serious of which was a lawyer named Tom Johnson. So And a bunch of people back and Hastert probably has the most backing. But once Grotberg's out, a lot of other

46:03 Republicans are like, well, I think I could be, you know, in Congress. A dirty tricks campaign gets cooked up by Hastert and his backers to fight Tom Johnson. They had Jill Zwick, a Republican state representative, write a letter depicting Johnson as a religious zealot enthralled to the moral majority who held bizarre beliefs. She called him a radical right-wing fundamentalist Christian. I showed you how different the parties are.

46:25 This is how he attacks a guy who is right.

46:28 Beware the radical Christian.

46:31 Beware the radical Christian. You don't want them. And Hastert's like, that's not me. I mean, the moral majority gave me a perfect rating, but I'm a compassionate conservative. I'm not like a right-wing fundamentalist. I'm a compassionate conservative. And he won. The next step was to run against Kearns, his Democrat competitor.

46:47 Per the Chicago Tribune, in an attempt to rally his fractured party, Hastert laid claim to the mantle of Ronald Reagan, declaring at a Washington, D.C. press conference that his campaign was really the last time voters will get to vote for the Reagan agenda. Back home, his campaign sent precinct captains questions on which Reagan's name was misspelled. Real chat GPT vibes from 1986.

47:09 R-A-Y-G-U-N.

47:09 Yeah.

47:10 I really want.

47:14 To know how they spelled that. In September of 1986, Kearns was campaigning at Northern Illinois University when she encountered a student in the crowd, a young man who accused her of destroying his family. It turned out that in 1978, she'd gotten engaged to a man who, like she did not know, had not yet divorced his first wife, who was this boy's father. And that guy may have just come up to her genuinely because he was pissed, but Hastert's campaign seizes on this moment, and they send an anonymous mailer to 10,000 voters repeating the claims this kid had made about Kearns that she's a homewrecker, right? And this seems to work. Dennis wins by fewer than 7,000 votes.

47:52 So it's like not a blowout election, right? So this may have shifted it, right? Wow. Yeah, but he wins, and he is now going to be in Congress. In 1987, he will be the state– or he will be the representative from Illinois' 14th district in the United States Congress. So we'll talk about that and what kind of things old Denny gets up to once he's in Congress because if you thought– I mean everything we've talked about today was really bad, but it's– I mean– He just what he's done in this episode is the most like morally directly bad, like the most individual like cruelty that he's like to a person. But he's going to hurt more people in Congress as a result of his being a congressman. Yeah, we'll talk about that and so much more in part two. Miles,

48:44 you got anything to plug up in the P zone before we roll out of here?

48:48 Just everything I said in the beginning. Check out Ain't It Footy.

48:51 Check out Ain't It Footy.

48:52 Where we're talking about my favorite sport.

48:55 My favorite sport. Soccer. And you know the rest.

48:58 Go Arsenal.

48:59 Hey.

49:00 Data Zeitgeist and 420 Day Fiancé.

49:01 I love soccers. Yeah. There you go. Sock them up. Yeah. Sock them up.

49:06 All right. Listen to Knowledge Fight Country. The newest podcast on CZM.

49:10 Yeah. Listen to Knowledge Fight Country. We've got a new show.

49:13 Yeah.

49:13 There you go. Bye now.

49:16 Bye. Bye. the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.