‘I’ve lost a friend’ says former Illinois Governorpublished at 16:17 GMT
16:17 GMT
Bernd Debusmann Jr
White House Reporter
Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption,
Rod Blagojevich knew Jesse Jackson for years.
I’ve just got off the phone with former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich – a man whose own history intertwined with Jesse Jackson’s on numerous occasions.
While the pair originally met early on through Illinois Democratic circles and through Jackson’s son – a Congressman – Blagojevich and Jackson are perhaps best known for the travels to Yugoslavia in 1999, where they negotiated the release of three US soldiers captured during the Kosovo War.
“I feel like I lost a friend…he will always have a special place in my heart,” Blagojevich tells me. “His legacy is there with Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass.”
The last time he saw Jackson, he recalls, was the summer before last.
“He was heroically and courageously facing the terrible Parkinson’s disease,” he recalled. “He needed assistance from an aide to even get out of his chair. But it was amazing to see someone so strong and forceful deal with that kind of burden.”
Blagojevich, who served as governor between 2003 and 2009, was in 2011 convicted in a federal corruption scandal and sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.
In 2020, President Donald Trump commuted his sentence, and fully pardoned him last year. Blagojevich credits Jackson with helping convince Trump to commute that sentence.
“I called him literally the moment I was released from prison, where I’d spend 2,896 days – one month short of eight years,” he says. “It was ironic. In 1999 the two us went across the ocean and, he, with a little help from me, freed US soldiers.”
“Who would have thought that one day he would be doing the same thing, but playing a role in freeing me,” Blagojevich adds.