Feature

Barry Censure sobering but necessary

By Gary Tischler

March 2010

History isn’t always made with thunder and lightning, loud speeches and drama. Marion Barry, a political legend in his own time, four-time mayor and sitting Ward 8 councilman, was censured unanimously by all of his colleagues on the city council on March 2 and stripped of a committee chairmanship and membership on another without fanfare and clamor, accept for the almost pleading voice of Barry himself as he tried to unsuccessfully stave off the actions of the council.
 
It was quiet in there. Barry was the only one to speak against the action which was brought forward on a prosaic, long day of legislative activities that seemed, reading them on paper, to be mostly ceremonial, detailed and required activities. Before the sanctions, which occurred between the hours of 3 and 4 p.m., the council chamber was a scene of mostly comings and goings, discussions and whispering.
 
After the votes, one man who had watched on the screen monitors outside in the hallway shook his head. “That was hard,” he said. “Real hard. But it was necessary.”
 
If you lived here for a long time, you lived here in the Marion Barry age because while Barry was mayor of the District of Columbia for 16 years, he seemed at times to live in your head or on the local newscasts constantly. The crack cocaine sting, the Vista Hotel, the trial, the jail trip was history in the eye of the storm, but so were the memories of his days as a young upstart, organizer, activist and his peerless political gifts.
 
But now, on this Tuesday afternoon, Barry was about to be sanctioned after a special investigation by noted Washington attorney Robert S. Bennett. The investigation, launched at the behest of the council, was pro bono on the part of Bennett and came in the wake of accusations that Barry had steered a contract to his then-girlfriend and taken a part of the money, which he said was a repayment of a loan. At the time, it was yet another unseemly, vulgar, high-profile controversy involving Barry, who was already trailed by troubles with paying his income tax and other rumors.
 
This one stuck, because whether you call it a loan or a kickback, the money matters surrounding the contract were serious enough to for possible prosecution and serious enough to lead to the unprecedented sanctions. What this means is that no sitting city council member had ever been sanctioned by his colleagues before throughout the relatively brief history of home rule. It was also a powerful moment in the recent political history of the District.
 
Barry had held the city in a kind of thrall with his political skills, his charisma, his brash confidence, his brand of populism that no amount of scandal and controversy, not even a jail term, could seem to dent. Barry was always as politician who could fill a room until it was about to explode, with his mere presence. Every one that ever challenged him politically pretty much got swept away.
 
But that wasn’t the case on the day of censure. Just before the council gathered together, Barry and his colleagues Kwame Brown, Yvonne Alexander and Tommy Wells shared as joke on the dais their heads held back in loud laughter. A man approached Barry with the time-honored greeting of “Mr. Mayor.” Other council members gathered around a just-arrived Channel 9 reporter. A woman moved through the seats handing out a business card for a Recall Fenty Web site.
 
Things got very quiet when council Chairman Vincent Gray convened the afternoon meeting to take action on the sanctioning of their colleague Marion Barry. Gray reminded everyone of the seriousness of the matter — he at least seemed to have a sense that this was unvisited territory for the council. “We are here to take action against Mr. Barry, who was a four-time mayor, who has served this city for many years,” he said.
 
The votes went by so swiftly, you weren’t sure you heard them. When Gray called for discussion on the sanctions against Barry based on the recommendations of Bennett’s report, there was no discussion. When he called for discussion on stripping Barry of his chairmanship of his committee chairmanship and membership in the finance committee, there was none. Nor were there any contrarian murmurs from the chamber, which was only three fourths filled, nor were there demonstrators on the steps outside. Barry was alone.
 
There was, in the end, only the initial roll call of yeas and nays. Half the council members appeared to vote yea, but the result was the same. Some were emphatic in their response, others mumbled or lowered their heads There were no nays. There was just Barry, trying to explain himself, pleading, speaking softly, but with some passion and it was hard to listen to. He called Bennett’s findings unfair, inflammatory, accusatory. “This isn’t justice,” he said. “That’s not due process. You expect that in Russia, in Iran, somewhere else.”
 
He spoke at some length after both motions, to no avail. He seemed often reduced to being a pleading plaintiff in a cause he knew was lost. He said that the report “reduced Marion Barry 40 years of service to a petty thief … to a Southeast hustler.”
 
Listening to the 73-year-old Barry speak was to hear the muted roar of a lion in winter, a man suffering from what many would judge to be self-inflicted wounds. It was a kind of diminishing no more so than when he told Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser that he had first seen her as a seven-year-old girl. Near the end of his last defense, he looked at Gray, and said “you don’t want to be known as the person who took away Mr. Barry’s due process away from him. You’re too good a person. I know you better than that. I love you.”
 
There was no reply to that. There was just silence, the call of the vote, the next thing.
 
Reaction was muted. He was defended in Ward 8, and by people who remembered the considerable good he did as well as the divisive, racial collateral damage he often caused. Mostly, people shook their heads, and few suggested the action was not deserved or legitimate. In Adams Morgan, one long-time defender and admirer of the former mayor had little to say.
 
“Times change,” he said.
 
Barry himself, who might yet face legal action, said that this would make him an even better councilman for his constituents.
 
Who’s to know? Drinks and money have been lost counting Barry out or betting against him.

But time will tell and times have changed.

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