Street smarts: A future White House adviser gets his political education, Chicago-style.

Photo by Chris Walker

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Sidney Blumenthal in front of his childhood home on Birchwood Avenue. His mother still lives there.

FOR RELEASE MAY 25, 2003

Excerpted and adapted from "The Clinton Wars" by Sidney Blumenthal, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright (c) 2003 by Sidney Blumenthal. All rights reserved.

Sidney Blumenthal's Chicago childhood was the beginning of a political and generational odyssey that led to his serving as senior adviser to President Bill Clinton during his second term. He also has written for various newspapers and magazines and is the author of six books, including "The Permanent Campaign," on the shift in American politics from old-style machines to media-savvy consultants. In this excerpt from his memoir, "The Clinton Wars," Blumenthal describes his political awakening as a 12-year-old during the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy.

I grew up in Chicago on Birchwood Avenue, a tree-lined street, in a brick and stone house like almost all the other houses in the neighborhood, inhabited by middle-class families like mine. I was the oldest of three children. My best friend lived next door. We played baseball in the spring and summer and touch football in the fall in the street. I collected baseball cards, played board games about military battles that went on for weeks with a friend who had had polio before there was a vaccine, rode a Schwinn racer bicycle, and endlessly read history books and biographies.

We lived on the North Side. My mother had lived there her whole life. I attended the same high school that she had_Roger C. Sullivan High School (named after a local politician). My father had grown up on the West Side, the old Jewish neighborhood encompassing the peddlers' Maxwell Street (where my grandfather sold shoes), Jane Addams's uplifting Hull House (where Benny Goodman was taught to play the clarinet), and Colonel Jake Arvey's clubhouse (where he became chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party). Paul, my father's father, had left Russia alone at the age of 11, became a traveling auctioneer, and owned a shoe store that went bankrupt during the Depression. He…