A Bright, Broken Promise

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.