Jill Morgenthaler, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was Illinois’ homeland security chief under former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and a 2008 Democratic challenger to GOP U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam, died on a scuba trip Saturday in the Dominican Republic, according to friends.
Ms. Morgenthaler, 64, who was awarded the Bronze Star for leadership in Iraq and was assigned to U.N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, also was an author and a popular public speaker.
She was “a true American hero who touched thousands of women through her leadership book,” according to a Facebook post by her brother Jeffrey Morgenthaler, speaking of her work “The Courage to Take Command (Leadership Lessons from a Military Trailblazer).”
“She came into politics as a political outsider who had amazing experience in the real world, and her enthusiasm inspired women. Her strength gave them the courage to believe that they could do anything,” said her former spokeswoman Kitty Kurth, who confirmed her death.
Another friend, Maureen Cunningham, said Ms. Morgenthaler had been visiting the Dominican Republic to celebrate the birthday of her husband.
“She had finished the scuba dive, and she was on the boat, and she said she didn’t feel well, and she fainted,” Cunningham said. “They could not resuscitate her.”
After writing her book and becoming a speaker, she “just never stopped achieving her dreams and helping other people understand they could achieve their dreams as well,” Kurth said. “And she was a badass. She was a badass with a good heart.”
In her book, Ms. Morgenthaler–who ran the media center at the trial of Saddam Hussein–described a staredown with the Iraqi dictator. He was leaving court in 2004 when he saw her stationed nearby.
“Even though I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and long skirt, he looked at me as if I were a bimbo just waiting to serve him,” she wrote. “I could tell he was mentally stripping me naked.”
Though she wanted to avert her eyes, she wrote: “I caught myself. The way you look at a person can be an act of power or a sign of submission. . .I wasn’t going to let Hussein have this small victory at my expense.
“I stared right back at him and straightened my spine while planting my combat boots firmly into the dirt. I made sure to relax my shoulders to let him know I wasn’t intimidated. My message to him was, ‘Not this woman, buster. And guess what? You’re going back to solitary.’ At first, he just stared back at me as if I were an alien. I don’t know how many women had stood up to him in this way. Finally, he broke eye contact and snapped out a command in Arabic that caused the guards to burst out laughing.”
When she asked the guards what he said, they told her: “Kill her.”
“It turns out Saddam Hussein used to execute people who dared to stare at him,” she wrote.
Ms. Morgenthaler grew up in different spots around the country as a daughter of a Marine. She went to Penn State University and the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Cunningham said.
She served 30 years in the Army, where “She was one of the first women to enter an experimental class for women in the U.S. Army ROTC and train as an equal with men,” according to her website.
Ms. Morgenthaler described the lonely and sometimes harrowing experience of being a “first” in a speech. “In that experimental bootcamp, there were 83 women heading to a military post of 50,000 men,” she said. The men slung obscenities at them. One knocked her aside.
After the victory of surviving boot camp, she said she was ordered–over her protests–to appear in a “Miss Foxhole 1975” beauty pageant. When she strode onstage in a blue cotton dress–the only dress she had–she followed other women contestants who’d danced and sang in front of 5,000 hooting men. She said they started grabbing her legs and commenting on her body.
“I had gone from being a member of the squad to just a bunch of body parts,” she said. “Now I’m pissed. . . .There’s no way I was going to dance for them. There’s no way I was going to sing for them. I stepped to the front of the stage and I flipped them the bird. I flipped off 5,000 men. And then I did an about-face. I marched off the stage.” A male soldier dressed in drag wound up being crowned, she said.
And, she added: “There never was a Miss Foxhole 1976.”
Ms. Morgenthaler chalked up many firsts while working in military intelligence and other operations. She became the first woman military intelligence commander on the border between North and South Korea, according to the Pritzker Military Museum & Library. And she rose to be the first woman battalion commander of the 88th Division and the first woman brigade commander of the 84th Division.
Later in life, she worked at Argonne National Laboratory for 14 years in divisions including electronics and computing technology.
Ms. Morgenthaler lived in the northwest suburbs with her husband, friends said. She is also survived by two children.
