home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME: Almanac 1990
/
1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
/
time
/
082889
/
08288900.045
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1990-09-17
|
2KB
|
42 lines
NATION, Page 12Late HonorsIn death, Mickey Leland won allies he rarely had in life
The roar of an airplane engine is one of the few things that
bring hope to the Fugnido refugee camp, a desolate stretch of
Ethiopia where 57,000 survivors of Sudan's civil war subsist. But
on Aug. 7, Fugnido's residents listened in vain for the sound of
the Twin Otter carrying Texas Congressman Mickey Leland, 44, who
had visited five times before. His plane had crashed nose-first
into a mountain 30 miles away, killing all 16 aboard.
When searchers located the disintegrated plane last week, the
late-night vigils in Leland's Capitol Hill office ended, and the
Washington practice of canonizing its own began. Leland, who in his
life had difficulty dragging colleagues away from junkets to Paris
and Bermuda to join him on trips to Appalachia, Africa, Indian
reservations and migrant camps, finally in death found allies for
his cause.
Although Leland had managed to persuade the House to create
the Select Committee on Hunger and make him its chairman in 1984,
famine lost its luster once the strains of We Are the World faded
and the television lights went off. There is little money or
prestige in hunger. Leland earned $22,650 in special-interest
speech-giving fees in 1988; Illinois Congressman Dan Rostenkowski,
chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, earns nearly
ten times as much as that. Laying guilt trips on colleagues until
they provided $800 million for starving Africans during the
sub-Saharan famine in 1985 did not ease Leland's entry into the
insider's club. When he spent a night with Washington's homeless
in the winter of 1987, it was criticized as a publicity stunt.
Leland's successes came in part because he was hard not to
like, and he would not give up. The dashiki he wore in the Texas
legislature gave way to Armani suits, the clenched fist to working
within the system. After persuading New Jersey Republican
Congresswoman Margaret Roukema to join him on a trip to Africa in
1984, Leland got in to see Ronald Reagan, who then agreed to
support more foreign food aid and order ships loaded with grain to
head for Ethiopia. Leland leaves his wife Alison, who is two months
pregnant, a son -- and a world less hungry than it would have been
without him.