When James Thompson tossed his name into the Illinois race for governor in 1975, the rookie Republican had little political savvy. “I announced my candidacy at a hotel in front of zebra-print wallpaper,” says Thompson, now senior chairman at Winston & Strawn. “It’s the weirdest photo you’ve ever seen.” But it didn’t take long for Thompson to get the hang of things. He won the 1976 election with the largest margin of victory in state history: 1,390,137 votes. Thompson clinched the next three elections and became Illinois’s longest-serving governor.
In his early years, Thompson worked at the state prosecutor’s office in Cook County, Illinois, and the state attorney general’s office, before being appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in 1971.
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