Besides Obama, Chicago produced a second president and he’s about to turn 100

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Valdas Adamkus is one of the most beloved political figures in his country, serving as Lithuania’s president for two separate five-year terms in a transformative period just before and after it joined the European Union and NATO.

He’s turning 100 in the fall, and commemorations are already being planned around the country. But on an April morning inside the living room of his stately home on the outskirts of Vilnius, he asks, “How is the Deep Tunnel?”

The question about Chicago’s Tunnel and Reservoir Plan — created to protect Lake Michigan and contain the city’s flood water — is logical. Adamkus spent nearly half his life in Chicago and ran the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 office from 1981 to 1997.

He commuted to Chicago from Hinsdale with a mission to keep the Great Lakes clean, including keeping raw sewage out of Lake Michigan. Even now, some Lithuanian Americans — among an estimated 60,000 in Chicago — like to boast that Adamkus cleaned up the lake.

When he first ran for president in 1998, his critics said he wasn’t Lithuanian enough.

But he was the man for the moment: An Americanized Lithuanian who led the country toward the European Union and NATO, in the decade after its 1990 independence. Lithuania joined the EU and NATO in spring 2004, following Adamkus’ first five-year term.

Documentary filmmaker Audronė Bielinienė says Adamkus’ American spirit made a big difference on the world stage.

“The way he represented Lithuania abroad, that was very different, and that was very important,” she says.

Rymvydas Petrauskas, historian and rector of Vilnius University, says Adamkus was the right man for a time when Lithuania was still “deeply wounded” after years of Soviet occupation. The country then faced a rapid and wrenching transformation to a free market economy and democratic political system.

“He’s still the most popular and trusted political figure in Lithuania. And his authority and moral leadership comes not only from his very successful political career but also from his posture, from his attitude, from his principles. And he was able to show it in a very familiar, very direct, very open way,” Petrauskas says.

Adamkus sums up his career more modestly.

“I believe I have done what I, elected as president, could do, with fighting for the better future,” he says.

He was born Valdemaras Adamkavičius — a name he would later legally shorten — on Nov. 3, 1926 in Kaunas.

As a teenager, he joined the Lithuanian resistance during World War II, then fled with his parents to Germany, when the Soviets solidified their occupation of Lithuania in 1944.

He immigrated to the U.S. in 1949, getting a job in Chicago in a car parts factory. He went on to work as a draftsman for an engineering firm, and in 1961, he earned a civil engineering degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Bronzeville.

Though he was firmly in Chicago and a naturalized U.S. citizen, he stayed tied to his homeland and was active in several diaspora organizations.

He married Alma Nutautaitė, his sweetheart from when they were refugees in Germany, and they settled in a Lithuanian enclave in Marquette Park, later moving to Hinsdale.

Adamkus joined the EPA in 1970 and was named regional director in 1981 by then-President Ronald Reagan, overseeing Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin until 1997. He used his government position to travel to Lithuania and push for Lithuanian independence whenever he could.

“It was always on our mind,” he says. “I had the opportunity, personally, to approach the highest levels of the government, and my contact with the congressional delegation definitely was very close.”

In meetings with U.S. presidents, “we talked not only about the environment. I had the opportunity to explain when the president asked, ‘How is Lithuania doing?’ And that was the opportunity, really, to discuss the issues,” he says.

When he first visited Lithuania in 1972 after more than a quarter-century abroad, Adamkus says he was stunned by the effects of Soviet repression on the Lithuanians he met.

“Instead of meeting in a normal situation, when you can discuss the issues, the culture, the funders, I found a community which did not speak, did not communicate,” he says. “People were walking, looking at the sidewalk. Believe me, as a man who grew up in a free society, it was a shocking experience.”

When, at 71, he decided to run in Lithuania’s 1998 presidential election, he cited wanting to rid the country of corruption and old Soviet ways and gain closer ties to the West. He told The Associated Press at the time that “a generation grew up in a strict one-party state, was told what to do and what not to do. I am bringing experience of openness and individual initiative, which is unknown in this society for 50 years.”

But he had to overcome two obstacles.

The first was getting a court’s approval to run for president, as there was a residency requirement. Even though he’d obtained his Lithuanian citizenship again in 1992, he had lived in the U.S. for most of his life.

The second hurdle was convincing Alma to move.

“She was very, very strongly against that idea,” he says.

His wife, who died at 95 in 2023, wanted a quiet retirement filled with travel and hobbies. But supporters in Lithuania were pressing him to run, and he says he became convinced that he should try.

“I have to admit that a lot of tears were shared about my decision,” he says. “But finally I can say that Alma was such a good soldier.”

He ran as an independent and won by a margin of about 14,000 votes. Adamkus credited diaspora voters in the Chicago area with helping him eke out his first victory.

He lost reelection in 2003 to Rolandas Paksas, who was later impeached and removed after a corruption scandal involving a Russian businessman and campaign funder.

Adamkus was reelected in June 2004, serving until 2009.

“He’s photogenic. He’s able to speak in several languages. He knows how to work both the small talk and the high-level talk,” says Arūnas Pemkus, who grew up in the Chicago area and worked for the U.S. Department of State in the late ’80s and early ’90s. As a politician, “he was a fish in water.”

Former ambassador and current parliamentarian Žygimantas Pavilionis says Adamkus, like other diaspora people of his time, “was the incarnation of something that was preserved and saved in America.”

“We still love him the most, I would say, because of his American spirit — because it is also the old Lithuanian spirit, the spirit that [the diaspora] saved in Chicago,” Pavilionis says.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., says Adamkus’ example lives on in Lithuania’s support for Ukraine and for democratic activists forced to flee Russia and Belarus.

“President Valdas Adamkus has committed his life to the Lithuanian people and the fight for democracy,” Durbin says. “My mother, a Lithuanian immigrant, would be proud of her birth country — thanks to my friend, President Adamkus.”

When asked how he sees his own legacy, Adamkus paused, saying it’s a difficult question.

“I believe there is no need to wish how to be remembered,” he says. “You should feel if you really have contributed with your life. And I personally believe that when I ask myself, have I done what I wanted? Have I done properly?

“I can honestly say I am happy that I had an opportunity to contribute and gave my best.”