The Man Who Would Be President

The answer, like everything else in Liberian politics, is vigorously disputed. The overheated charges that the candidates and their supporters fling at one another make U.S. election rhetoric seem excruciatingly restrained by comparison. In Liberia's constant spin cycle, misperception is reality, and it's nearly impossible to sort out who is telling the truth and which candidates, if any, are honest. And many of the foreign observers who pay attention to Liberia are unwilling to be quoted on the record, for fear of seeming to meddle in the election. One of them says that Brumskine "was starting to get in trouble [with Taylor] as early as '98 . . . The rumors were, even then, that [Brumskine] was afraid for his life. And probably rightly so. Taylor wouldn't hesitate to kill people he considered enemies."

Tiawan Gongloe is a Liberian human rights lawyer who was arrested without charge and beaten nearly to death in 2002 by members of Taylor's National Police, he says. He is now a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. Although no fan of Taylor's, he's skeptical of Brumskine, too. He says Brumskine was a much closer ally to Taylor than he cares to admit now, and Gongloe casts doubt on the whole idea of a breach between them: "If Taylor wants to kill you," he says, "there's no way [Brumskine] would've gotten out through Roberts International Airport."

Charles Brumskine freely acknowledges that he wouldn't be where he is today without Charles Taylor. "The thing is about my association with Taylor, generally, it's the best thing that happened to my political life," he says. "I am the only presidential candidate today who has been in government . . . and come out with a clean slate." Taylor came to prominence in the early 1980s, with a reputation as one of the most corrupt men in the Liberian administration at the time, which is really saying something. But he had a falling out with the president, left the country, and on Christmas Eve 1989 invaded Liberia with a band of fighters, setting off years of factional fighting that devastated the country. Taylor and his men began the war with the best wishes, and funding, of well-meaning Liberians who wanted to see the oppressive previous regime ousted. But that changed as Taylor's army splintered into rival gangs that attacked civilians, kidnapped young children to use as soldiers and devised ever more gruesome ways of killing. The war continued long after the old regime fell, as Taylor and competing warlords fought to control the country's wealth. By 1997, as many as a quarter-million people had been butchered by all sides.

For years, Liberia was chaos set against an exotic backdrop of rain-forested mountains and pristine beaches. Hundreds of thousands of refugees flew in and out of the bush like so many flushed birds, returning to their homes only to be affrighted again and again.

Brumskine and his family lived on the move. He had grown up in a locally prominent family: He is a descendant of Liberia's original American settlers (possibly of a 12-year-old slave from Culpeper named Walter Brumskin, who arrived in Monrovia in 1843, freed by a former U.S. congressman from Rappahannock County), and his father was a member of the National Assembly. Brumskine worked after college for a wealthy Western corporation in Liberia before setting up a prosperous legal practice. After a coup in the 1980s, the Brumskines left Liberia and lived for several years in Texas -- their younger son was born there -- before returning home. When the war broke out in 1989, the Brumskines were just putting the finishing touches on their dream house in the Monrovia suburbs. As the fighting pushed toward the capital, Estelle and the kids got out, eventually settling in Alexandria, not far from some family members, in 1996; she's now a CPA for the American Chemical Society. For years Charles practiced law out of a suitcase, bouncing between Liberia and the United States. The Brumskines did well enough to send their children to elite American private schools: Charlyne, the oldest, to Foxcroft School in Middleburg, and her brother Charles to Fork Union Military Academy near Charlottesville; later, the last-born, Walker, would study at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

By 1995, a peace process was underway in Liberia, leading to new elections two years later. Taylor and other rebel leaders were allowed into Monrovia, and Brumskine was asked by mutual friends to moderate a town hall meeting where Taylor was introduced to the city's public. The respected lawyer and the feared warlord had met before -- it's a small country -- but that night, they seemed to hit it off. Gongloe was in attendance and says that Brumskine continuously referred to Taylor that night in 1995 as "Mr. President," two years prior to the elections. Before long, the two men had officially teamed up.

By the time of the election, Taylor controlled about three-quarters of the Liberian countryside and could use his military units to deliver rice to villages to buy votes. He as much as said he would restart the war if he didn't win. Crowds flocked around him with the infamous cry, "He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, and I will vote for him!" -- a chilling campaign slogan even if it was the macabre creation of his own fighters and loyalists.

Of his fateful decision to ally himself with Taylor, Brumskine says he was convinced that Taylor -- good, bad or ugly -- was going to dominate the voting. "I knew, like everyone else who had any amount of sense, that Taylor was going to win the election," he says, "and my going in was to ensure that there was a voice of reason in the country." He describes it as an "opportunity of history" to serve his country: to represent his home county in the Senate, where seats would be apportioned according to a party's showing in the presidential race.

By supporting Taylor, Brumskine says, he saw a chance to lead an independent legislature, something Liberia had never really had, with the backbone to stand up to Taylor when necessary. There's no way to ask Taylor about Brumskine, since he went into exile in Nigeria in 2003 and is forbidden to speak to the press. But in Brumskine he may have been looking for a more respectable image and a shrewd ally-at-law. Brumskine could also help deliver votes from his native Grand Bassa County, and he proudly played host to Taylor on a campaign trip there. Brumskine says he was certain that after so many years of war, Taylor knew it was time to do something for their country.

Against a badly divided opposition, Taylor's party rode his massive landslide to a majority in the legislature. Brumskine took a seat in the Senate and became Taylor's majority leader. On election night in July 1997, Taylor told observer Jimmy Carter that he wanted to be "a Mandela."

To outsiders at least, it looked like Brumskine was part of Taylor's inner circle. Wherever Taylor went, Brumskine was welcome. When Taylor met French President Jacques Chirac in Paris, he invited Brumskine to join the delegation. He called Brumskine "cousin," and they worked together day after day.

Today Taylor is accused of having treated the government as his personal crime machine -- pocketing state funds, using the police and armed forces as his private enforcers -- and fomenting the same terror and thuggery across the rest of West Africa. When Brumskine looks back on those times, he says he feels he was one man trying to hold back a flood. "There were indications from day one that it was not going to be an easy battle for me, but I was committed to the fight," says Brumskine. "I was hoping that, along the way, I would've been able to change some of my quote-unquote colleagues in the Senate to make a difference. Had I succeeded in doing that, we would've been able to control Mr. Taylor and change the direction of our country. But many times, whenever I got the Senate in the direction where I had my quote-unquote colleagues feeling good about themselves, [Taylor] would call a meeting of the leadership and threaten those guys and intimidate them, and then they would back down."