THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406020497
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: C2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY HAYDEN KEITH MONROE
DATELINE: 940605 LENGTH: Long
Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C.
{REST} HARRY S. JAFFE AND TOM SHERWOOD
Simon & Schuster. 352 pp. $24.
\ \ TO HEAR Marion Barry tell it, he was lost but now he's found. As the world knows, the three-term mayor of the District of Columbia was videotaped in a sting. He was smoking crack in a hotel room with a woman not his wife. He was convicted and sent to jail where he got religion. Now he's back in D.C. politics and has just announced his candidacy for a return to the mayor's office.
Those tempted to be taken in again by Barry had better read Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. Though the title makes it sound like a wide-ranging look at the nation's capital, it is really nothing more than The Marion Barry Story as told by two D.C. reporters who followed his exploits for years.
Some have seen Barry as a sad case of great gifts squandered. Here was a young civil rights leader and community activist turned path-breaking big city mayor who succumbed to the temptations of life in the fast lane. But the evidence here suggests Barry was deeply flawed and on the make from the beginning.
His civil rights activism may have been his first hustle. As the authors tell it, he was always around to catch the limelight, rarely around to do the heavy lifting. He quickly abandoned the crowded civil rights stage for community activism. His first act as a D.C. agitator was to run, in effect, an extortion scheme - peace in the streets in exchange for government grants.
According to Jaffe and Sherwood, money was never the chief motivating factor for Barry. He wanted power and respect; he wanted heads to turn when he walked by. In pursuit of those goals, he engineered the transition from outside activist to inside power broker with astonishing aplomb. While spouting the rhetoric of the street, he apparently was cutting deals behind closed doors with the pols.
Achieving high office opened the doors to richer deals and bigger opportunities to attract women, score drugs and get his daily publicity fix. Along the way he took on The Washington Post, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, many of the city's savviest, most prosperous business leaders and several presidents.
But the record of his actual time in office is dire. For starters, there were the coke and the crack and the cognac and the women, including several this book alleges he raped. According to the admirable Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, as far back as the civil rights days, Barry, who is now in his fourth marriage, was known as someone who liked to smack women around.
Just as bad as these personal failings was Barry's corruption of public office. For years the largely black District was treated to second-class citizenship, managed by neglectful and contemptuous Southern segregationist members of Congress. When home rule was finally achieved, there was a chance for renewal. But under Barry's stewardship, the District government was a travesty:
He once took a junket to the Virgin Islands for a drug and sex party at government expense, ostensibly serving as a consultant to the island government on setting up a personnel management system.
Second wife Mary Treadwell went to jail for skimming $600,000 from a program to help the poor that she and Barry started.
His top aide went to jail for embezzling $190,000 in city funds.
Over 2,000 city jobs went to friends despite their non-performance of duty.
Bond issues were floated for developer pals, and land deals that enriched other cronies were made at public expense.
Millions in tax dollars were distributed to churches and other community institutions in exchange for turning out the vote.
Contracts for city services were given to minority firms that committed the affirmative action of overcharging the city - $13 for cornflakes for school breakfasts that had cost $8 under the previous supplier; school heating oil at a 25 percent markup.
All of this, and more, was going on while it took a half hour for ambulances to arrive, while schools and social services declined, while streets in winter went unplowed.
Under Barry, the city government spent twice the per capita national average and employed more city workers per capita than any other U.S. city. Yet the budget for schools was reduced, the dropout rate hit 40 percent and, in a time of rising crime, police manpower was cut by 30 percent.
Dream City is a damning, detailed book. If it has a flaw it's in sticking so resolutely to the surface. Though it relentlessly shows Barry in action, it leaves the reader with two unanswered questions.
What made Barry run? Aside from the self-destructive self-indulgence that brought him down, what motivated Barry? There are hints of deep self doubt and insecurity, but the mayor remains as enigmatic at the end as at the beginning.
Perhaps even more perplexing, how did Barry manage to take in so many for so long when he was so flagrantly violating their trust? That may speak to the dismal state of relations between the races. It seems both blacks and whites, for reasons of pride and guilt respectively, were willing to turn a blind eye when the District's first important black leader crossed the line.
But that's mere speculation. The authors don't offer much help in solving the mystery. What they do offer are ample good reasons why Barry should never be given a position of public trust again. Will the voters of the District agree? by CNB