Bookshelf:: Mayor for Life

Sam Smith - If you learned your politics a long time ago in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, you learned not to expect sainthood from politicians, just good services. The bad stuff was certainly part of the story, but when you went into the polls the major question was: what's this guy done for me lately? Now image has replaced service as the favored campaign tool. Which is why I sometimes call Marion Barry the "last of the great white mayors."He learned his politics in EH Crump's Memphis.

So I wasn't surprised when I picked up Barry's memoirs - Mayor for Life - to find him making his case again:

At forty- two, I was not only black, I was also one of the youngest mayors in the country to run a major city and probably one of the most ambitious mayors. ,,,   Like my campaign, my first cabinet was very diversified, with plenty of professional blacks, women, gay and lesbian administrators, many of whom hadn't had the opportunities to By 1982, we dropped from a deficit of $400 million in 1980, down to $224 million. The D.C. government allowed for these great gains by stringent financial control and new downtown revenue. In my first term as mayor, I found that we had an atrocious child mortality rate in the District, one of the highest in the country. Far too many babies from African American mothers were dying as infants, mainly due to a lack of quality prenatal care, proper medical treatment and overall awareness. We went to work on providing more prenatal care information, distributing thousands of brochures, making them available at the free clinics, and cleaning up the general lack of execution and lack of policies at the hospitals that served impoverished areas. These young and mostly poor mothers were not getting the quality prenatal care and follow- up that they should have been getting. Overall health and wellness of the community was another priority of our urban revitalization movement. And in just a few years, we brought our infant mortality rate down to one of the lowest in the country.

... In 1986, I proposed a $240 million construction budget to improve the city streets, aging bridges and buildings, and improve conditions at Lorton Prison in Virginia. I wanted to make sure that in the next twenty to fifty years, the city of Washington was not falling apart and that sewer lines would not be breaking all over the city because of poor street conditions. I also wanted to improve the conditions of District housing and the prison system. With these new city construction needs and minority contracts, I had secured black firms and workers with nearly half of a $2 billion a year corporation, while producing seventy- four new buildings all over downtown and throughout the District. Black people were suddenly getting a major piece of the economic pie

Barry also got summer jobs for some 25,000 youths. But you don't hear about any of this these days, at least in the white city. Despite the fact that DC probably made more progress during Barry's first term than at any point since the city got an elected mayor, he is now mainly recalled as the mayor who got arrested during a drug bust in a Washington hotel.

And Barry's book, co-authored by Omar Tyree, takes a dramatic turn at this moment - from campaign argument to AA confessions:

In my second term— not that I was perfect in the first, because no one is ever perfect— I started to make more personal decisions that may not have been the right thing to do for me politically. Without ever addressing my drinking as a problem, I would drink a lot of alcohol at these parties and events. Effi noticed that early on in our relationship and she would always warn me about it. “Don’t let them give you too many drinks tonight.” I would go to many events and pick up a casual drink. I didn’t realize it, but it would be one event after another, where I would be offered complimentary spirits. That’s what you did at a lot of these events; you would drink and socialize and drink some more.

I think in a lot of ways I was still a quiet man from the South, but I would force myself to step up and to meet with the people I had to meet with. I had that battle going on all the time between the private Marion Barry and the political Marion Barry. The personal Marion Barry was quiet and soft- spoken, but the public Marion Barry was known for being the fire- breathing hell- raiser. I always had those two sides of me. So I would use these social events as opportunities to reach out and get across to the people what was needed ....

This is the best part of the book. After all, how often do get to read a mayor's view of life in prison? His flaws come out more clearly - his betrayal of his wife,  his judgmental incapacity. And the inadequate way that he dealt with it all. 

There is no doubt that he was set up for his drug bust, but then it might have happened somewhere else by design or coincidence.  What doesn't get mentioned when Barry's addiction is discussed, however, is that he was arrested by a government that was causing thousands of deaths and the pointless incarceration of hundreds of thousands Americans in a war that to this day has been a drastic failure. In DC alone, Reagan's war on drugs led to some 350 more annual murders by the year Barry was arrested than had occurred ten years earlier. Barry is still roundly castigated as the deadly drug warriors are still ignored.

As far back as the mid-ninties, a Rand Corporation study found that treatment was 23 times more effective than the war on drugs. And more recently the Drug Policy Alliance reported:

• Amount spent annually in the U.S. on the war on drugs: More than $51 billion
•  Number of people arrested in 2012 in the U.S. on nonviolent drug charges: 1.55 million
• Number of Americans incarcerated in 2012 in federal, state and local prisons and jails: 2,228,400 or 1 in every 108 adults, the highest incarceration rate in the world
• Proportion of people incarcerated for a drug offense in state prison that are black or Hispanic, although these groups use and sell drugs at similar rates as whites: 61 percent
• Number of students who have lost federal financial aid eligibility because of a drug conviction: 200,000+

There's another inconsistency: how the media and Democrats ignored the state of Arkansas during the same period that Barry was on drugs.  Here are a few Progressive Review clips about that state in the days of the Clinton machine :

Roger Clinton develops a four-gram a day cocaine habit, getting his stuff from New York and Medellin suppliers, based (as one middleman will later testify) on "who his brother was." Sharlene Wilson is one of his dealers. Dan Lasater will give Roger work and loan him $8,000 to pay off a drug debt.

Sharlene Wilson will testify in a 1990 federal drug probe that she began selling cocaine to Roger Clinton as early as this year. She will also tell reporters that she sold two grams of cocaine to Clinton's brother at the Little Rock nightclub Le Bistro, then witnessed Bill Clinton consume the drug. "I watched Bill Clinton lean up against a brick wall," Wilson reveals to the London Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in 1995. "He was so messed up that night, he slid down the wall into a garbage can and just sat there like a complete idiot." Wilson also describes gatherings at Little Rock's Coachman's Inn between 1979 and 1981, where she saw Clinton using cocaine "quite avidly" with friends. Drug prosecutor Jean Duffey will say that she has no doubt that Wilson was telling the truth.

In the 1990s, Genifer Flowers tells Sean Hannity's WABC talk radio show: "He smoked marijuana in my presence and and offered me the opportunity to snort cocaine if I wanted to. I wasn't into that. Bill clearly let me know that he did cocaine. And I know people that knew he did cocaine. He did tell me that when he would use a substantial amount of cocaine that his head would itch so badly that he would become self conscious at parties where he was doing this. Because all he wanted to do while people were talking to him is stand around and scratch his head. ...."

Two Arkansas state troopers will swear under oath that they have seen Clinton ''under the influence'' of drugs when he was governor.

Far more important though was the fact that Bill Clinton was a look-the-other way governor of a state that was one of the largest importers of illegal drugs. A few more items the conventional media chose to ignore:

Major drug trafficker Barry Seal, under pressure from the Louisiana cops, relocates his operations to Mena, Arkansas. Seal is importing as much as 1,000 pounds of cociane a month from Colombia according to Arkansas law enforcement officials. He will claim to have made more than $50 million out of his operations. As an informant, Seal testified that in 1980-81, before moving his operation to Arkansas, he made approximately 60 trips to Central America and brought back 18,000 kilograms.

In 1996 the Progressive Review will report: "The London Telegraph has obtained some of the first depositions in ex-CIA contract flyer Terry Reed's suit against Clinton's ex-security chief - and now a high- paid FEMA director - Buddy Young. According to the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "Larry Patterson, an Arkansas state trooper, testified under oath that there were 'large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns.' The subject was discussed repeatedly in Clinton's presence by state troopers working on his security detail, he alleged. Patterson said the governor 'had very little comment to make; he was just listening to what was being said.'"

Roger Morris & Sally Denton, Penthouse Magzine:  Seal's legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative, extensive, and brazen operations in the history of the international drug trade, and that he did it with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan's administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George Bush's administration, and under the usually acute political nose of then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. . .

Yet the mainstream media and  Democrats  buried or ignored these stories in creating the Clinton myth even as they were making Marion Barry out to be a worthless junkie. 

Like his life, Barry's book is flawed and frustrating, but if you want to understand modern politics better, it's well worth a read.  

Sam Smith 2006 - Marion Barry and I split over a quarter century ago. I can't remember the exact issue, but it was one time too many that Marion had promised one thing and then done another.

I first met Marion in 1966. We were both in our 20s and he was looking for a white guy who would handle the press. He had just organized the largest local protest movement in the city's history - a bus boycott - and I had participated and written about it. The typical twenty something doesn't get over 100,000 people to stop doing something for a day. I gladly took on the assignment.

We hit it off and remained allies even after the day Stokley Carmichael walked into SNCC headquarters and said that we whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. Barry would later describe me as one of the first whites who would have anything to do with him. I backed him when he ran for school board and in his first two mayoral bids. And in those days, I have to say, he got pretty good press.

But even by the time of the second run for mayor I was feeling queasy. A couple of friends and I held a fundraiser for Marion but our wives would have nothing to do with it. I introduced him by listing the reasons why people might be ambivalent about Barry and then add, "On the other hand. . ." Marion pointedly wiped his brow.

I was already becoming aware of Marion's addiction to that most dangerous, if legal, drug called power. Later, I would be listening to a talk show discussing a book about cocaine in the executive suite and suddenly realize how similar the two addictions were and how I could no longer tell which was affecting Barry more.

I saw less and less of him. We had lunch one day but I told him some things he didn't want to hear and he later told a reporter, "Sam's a cynical cat." In 1986 I told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "He's basically done to ethnicity what Ronald Reagan has done to patriotism. He's turned it into a personal preserve." About the same time Marion told a reporter doing a feature on me that "Sam and I go back a long way, and over the years he's become more radical, and I've become more conservative."

But I still saw that it was a complex story. At one point, Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly, asked me to do a piece on him. I told him that I would be glad to but that I wasn't going to trash Barry. And I suggested a headline, "Failing the Faith." A few days later, Peters cancelled the lunch at which we were to discuss the article and never got back to me. The next thing I knew, the Washington Monthly ran an article by Juan Williams trashing Marion Barry and using a variety of the headline I had suggested. Williams was on his way.

When Barry ran for mayoral reelection the last time, I took the position that I was all in favor of redemption; I just didn't see why you had to do it the mayor's office. I broke up one talk show host by suggesting that Barry follow the example of a recently disgraced Irish bishop and go help the Indians of Guatemala.

On another talk show, Barry said that the press was always blaming him for all the city's problems. I said that wasn't fair; I only blamed him for 26.7% of the city's problems. "I'll buy that," Marion replied. . .

Yet I also knew that Barry - like other urban ethnic politicians - had far more to blame than himself. Whatever his faults - he knew he had been granted dispensation because - like a feudal lord - he provided significant favors in return. Barry had lived in Memphis and I often suspected he had learned his politics from Boss Trump. For he understood the quid pro quo of traditional urban corruption that had helped the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles break down the worst corruption of all - that of an elite unwilling to share it power with others. It was far from a perfect deal but in the interim before the "reformers" seized office again on behalf of their developer and other business buddies, more people would get closer to power than they ever had or would again. It happened in Chicago, in Boston and in Washington.

And now the reformers are back. The young gentrifiers who think the greatest two moments in the city's history is when Barry went to jail and when they arrived in town. And their politicians, who don't feel it necessary to even tithe to the people. The last time I saw Marion was at a public dinner. He had first run into my wife and asked, "Where's that sonofabitch?" But when he saw me we hugged because despite all our differences we both know we are still kin in a too tough world. I'd just lucked out better.