TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062689/06268900.010

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.3 KB | 237 lines

                ╓Tö                                                              PROFILE, Page 60

A Bright, Broken Promise


Washington's MARION BARRY, once mockingly dubbed "Mayor for
Life," sinks slowly into a quagmire of scandal, corruption and
incompetence

By Michael Riley

    Many years ago, there lived an emperor who was so
excessively fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on
them. One day clever swindlers came to town promising to weave
him the finest garments. But they never did. Instead, they
tricked the emperor into believing himself finely clad as he
paraded naked through town. His subjects, afraid to speak out,
praised his invisible suit, until a young child finally told the
truth: "The emperor has no clothes." But the emperor marched on.

    -- Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes

    Like a preening tom turkey, chest puffed out and tail
feathers held high, Marion Barry struts into the auditorium. As
the TV lights flash on, he glances up, a smile curling around
his puffy face. But the crowd does not smile back. Instead, it
quietly studies his imposing 6-ft. 1-in. frame, burdened now by
a slight paunch and a balding pate. A hint of disdain darkens
some eyes. Though the mayor of the nation's capital arrived at
this town meeting to discuss safety barriers on a bridge, he
acts more like an emperor holding court. Or, some might say,
trying to hold his court together.

    Rebellion is in the air. Midway through the debate, an
architect blurts out, "Is Marion Barry going to take the heat?
Who calls the shots here? Nobody else." A stony silence ensues.
Searching for words to cap the crowd's venom, the mayor
hesitates, then answers, "I'm a heat taker. I'm of the Truman
philosophy. The buck stops at my desk. If you can't stand the
heat, get out of the kitchen."

    Once a man of soaring eloquence, the Barry of 1989, under
fire, can muster only cliches from Harry Truman. His retort
reveals the magnitude of his decline after ten years of calling
all the shots: he is exhausted, unimaginative, besieged. Yet he
has got one thing right: these days, his kitchen is hotter than
hell. His clout is ebbing, and he teeters on the brink of a
palace coup.

    What prestige remains he relishes. When he departs from his
sumptuous office near the White House, he strides down the hall
as if he owns it. Security guards and harried aides tag along
as he munches on a bag of junk food. He nods slightly to his
lieges, who nervously stand aside.

    Barry is one of the nation's most powerful black
politicians, overseeing a $4 billion city-government budget and
almost 50,000 workers. And although a City Paper columnist
dubbed him "Mayor for Life," a mocking comparison with Haiti's
corrupt Papa Doc Duvalier, Barry, 53, is no tyrant. He just
knows how power works. Says an insider: "He is a consummate and
quintessential big-city boss."

    Soon he must decide whether to run for a fourth term as
mayor of the nation's capital, but a cloud of questions hovers
ominously over this former civil rights leader, long known for
his passion for the powerless. His once loyal subjects, largely
black voters, are angry. More than 60% of the city's residents
call him an embarrassment, and nearly three-quarters label his
government corrupt, according to a recent Washington Post poll.
While he fends off the scandal of the month or the latest grand
jury probe, the homeless litter the sidewalks, and drug toughs
kill each other over rocks of cocaine, giving Washington the
ironic title of the nation's "Murder Capital." Tiny babies die,
and the poor remain powerless. Worse yet for Barry, a new force
threatens his reign: Jesse Jackson may have his eyes on the
kingdom. Although the former presidential candidate says he
would not run for mayor against Barry, his longtime ally, many
see Jackson as this city's savior.

    Once Barry tried to play that role. He stormed into
Washington in 1965, donned his trademark dashiki and began
raising money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). He had momentum, passion and the aura of an achiever.
The son of a Mississippi Delta sharecropper, he had taken a long
road to Washington. His father died when he was four, and the
family moved to Memphis. In his neighborhood, recalls Barry,
"nobody went anywhere except reform school or jail."

    But Barry had talent and drive. He learned knot tying,
earned a passel of Boy Scout merit badges and soon became an
eagle scout. He hustled money by hawking newspapers, waiting on
tables, picking cotton. He even joined the choir at a church
whose minister offered each member 25 cents a week for bus fare.
Barry walked and spent the quarter at the ice-cream parlor. His
income brought the trappings of status. While in high school he
bought a $50 suit from a store on Memphis' fashionable Beale
Street. "You really had arrived when you had a tailor-made
suit," says Barry, who now favors Christian Diors off the rack.

    In the 1950s the world was beginning to tremble,
particularly for a young black man in the South. As a teenager,
Barry tossed cups at whites from a movie-theater balcony and sat
in the front of the bus. At Memphis' Le Moyne-Owen College, he
emerged as a civil rights leader, waging a fight against a
college trustee and trying to desegregate the zoo, the buses,
the lunch counters and even the county fair.

    After Le Moyne-Owen, Barry headed for graduate studies at
Fisk University and became the first national chairman of SNCC,
a job that took him to the national political conventions and
in 1960 to McComb, Miss., a major civil rights battlefield. A
few fellow activists began to question his motives even then.
"He's enamored of the perks and privileges of position," says
former SNCC worker Charlie Cobb. "I see very little difference
between him now and 20 years ago."

    But his detractors were few when he moved to Washington. He
started the Free D.C. Movement and organized a "mancott" of
city buses. Militant and charismatic, he railed against the
police as an "occupation army." In 1967 he established Pride
Inc., which found jobs for unemployed black youths. Says former
aide Audrey Rowe: "Marion was somebody who really deeply cared."
This compassion helped Barry build a political base, and he soon
hung up his dashiki to run successfully for the school board.
In 1974 he won a city council seat.

    Supported by blacks, Hispanics, white liberals and gays,
Barry won his first mayoral victory in 1978, defeating two
Establishment blacks. He balanced the city's budget, fostered
a downtown building boom and founded a successful summer
youth-jobs program. But by his second term, the climate had
changed; Barry became more arrogant and less responsive.
"Whether you want it or not, a divine-right monarchy sets in,"
says an adviser. Scandals erupted, convictions flowed, an
imperial mayor was born.

    His personal vulnerabilities became more obvious. A
constant element in the Barry saga has been his eye for pretty
women. To discover the real Barry, a SNCC friend advises,
"cherchez les femmes." Old friends marveled at his audacity. "He
got his face slapped a lot," says college buddy Kenneth Cole,
"but he also got dates" -- and a reputation for womanizing. More
recently, speculation about drug use has hounded him. One grand
jury probed his links to a convicted drug dealer but turned up
nothing. Another grand jury is investigating his ties with
convicted cocaine dealer Charles Lewis, whom he visited
repeatedly at a downtown Ramada Inn last December. During one
visit, a police stakeout of Lewis was aborted. Barry dismisses
suspicions: "It hurts some with all the good work I've done.
It's McCarthyism. There's no substantiation."

    Beyond these questions, there are enough scandals to spawn
a TV mini-series. Two deputy mayors and ten other top city
officials have been convicted of corruption. The mayor's second
wife served time for misusing federal funds while at Pride Inc.;
Barry himself was not implicated. (Barry's first wife divorced
him in 1969 on grounds of abandonment.) Once he visited a
Washington topless club to solicit campaign contributions.
Another miniscandal broke after he pulled up in his Lincoln Town
Car to the Capitol Hill apartment of a 23-year-old model and
strode to her door, walkie-talkie in hand, wearing a jogging
suit and a cap emblazoned with MAYOR.

    During his second term, Barry carried on a "personal
relationship" with convicted cocaine dealer Karen Johnson, who
never implicated him. Johnson now works for the city, as does
Barry's second wife. More fundamentally, an insider claims that
minority business contracts, about one-third of the city's $140
million contract treasure chest, fuel the sleaze. "The
contracting process is the conduit by which the resources of the
city are funneled into a revenue stream that constitutes the
lifeblood of Barry's invisible empire," says a city official.
"What you've got is a bunch of guys who don't mind wasting a
million bucks to make sure one of theirs gets $200,000."

    Despite these imbroglios, Barry, like a weighted inflatable
punching doll, keeps bouncing back. Boasts the mayor: "If I ran
tomorrow morning, I could beat anybody in this town." As for
the allegations of dishonesty, "If all this corruption was going
on, I should be in jail." Some of his staunchest supporters now
see the emperor without his clothes. For 15 years, Washington
power broker Max Berry, a wealthy international trade lawyer,
raised money and campaigned for Barry. Berry used to defend him.
Today he gripes, "It's just a matter of time before the next
thing hits. It's hard not to like him, but he's a rascal, and
he ought to be thrown out."

    Apparently oblivious to his predicament, the mayor tries to
remain playful. As he strolls through his city, cars honk,
supporters yell, tourists gawk. A car pulls to the curb and a
woman shouts, "I see you're still throwing up bricks!" a
reference to a game of hoops he played with Jesse Jackson for
the TV cameras. He grins, turns back toward the car, bends his
knees and launches a mock jumper. The form is bad, the
follow-through is strained, but his fans cackle with glee.

    Until recently, few city leaders dared to criticize Barry
publicly. Many blame the divisive question of race for the
silence. "What he creates is a Teflon coating," explains
Washington Post columnist Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the
Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. "If you're
white, you can't say it. If you're black, you can't say it. In
this town, who does that leave?" Race has helped and hindered
Barry. Explains friend Carl Johnson: "He's always operating off
the backdrop that he's a black male, that he's not supposed to
amount to anything." Notes Williams, who is black: "The ultimate
irony is that if this guy were white, black people would be on
their hind legs screaming."

    What happened to the promise of Marion Barry, the
fire-snorting civil rights leader? Some say the promise never
existed, that all along he was an opportunist obsessed with
power. Others shrug and wonder if he simply traded in his civil
rights merit badges for the good life. Perhaps the passion for
power simply overwhelmed his compassion for the powerless. Yet
he bristles at talk of promises lost. "I reject all of that
because the things I was fighting for when I came into
Washington were justice, equality, fairness, for blacks to get
into certain positions of responsibility, to make decisions
about people's lives. What's the power here, except the power
to help?"

    Once Barry wowed critics with a sharp mind, penetrating
questions and a phenomenal recall of names, faces and dates.
Now his steel-trap mind is rusty. In a recent interview,
Barry's fatigue overwhelmed him. His face sagged, his eyelids
drooped. He talked haltingly, stopping often to gaze at the far
wall of his cavernous office. He mixed up dates and forgot a
name. At one point, a pitcher of ice water in his hand, he
poised haltingly over his coffee cup as his face betrayed
mounting confusion over the disappearance of his water glass,
which he had earlier placed behind him. "It's just like an
airport novel," muses a city official. "It's like the poor
country boy who fights his way to the top and then becomes
everything he's been fighting against." Like the emperor, Barry
blindly marches on.