PROFILE, Page 60A Bright, Broken PromiseWashington's MARION BARRY, once mockingly dubbed "Mayor forLife," sinks slowly into a quagmire of scandal, corruption andincompetenceBy 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
