McMansionizing History

After Lighthizer and I pick up Krick up at the park's headquarters, the three of us stand at the point where the sprawling housing developments and strip malls of greater Fredericksburg rub up against Chancellorsville Battlefield.

In the spring of 1863, swaggering Union Gen. Joe Hooker launched an ambitious assault on the Confederates. He sent part of his army across the Rappahannock just south of Fredericksburg. A second wing of the Union forces swung north and west, crossed the river, came down through the scrub woods known locally as the Wilderness and arrived behind the unsuspecting and outnumbered Rebels, halting that night at a 70-acre clearing at the small country crossroads called Chancellorsville. Hooker was jubilant. "Our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him," he told his troops.

Lee responded by dividing his army and attacking Hooker on his own ground, as the Union general had predicted. On the morning of May 1, the armies clashed at the Zoan ridge, where, after a spirited battle, the Union general inexplicably ordered his men back into the Wilderness. Recognizing a psychological advantage, Lee divided his army again and sent Stonewall Jackson on a sweeping march around Hooker's right flank, which ended in a surprise Confederate assault at dusk. The shock of the attack sent the Union forces reeling back to the river, though it cost Jackson his life -- he was shot by his own troops in the chaos and gloom. The fighting at the Zoan ridge was the opening act in what historian Shelby Foote called "in terms of glory {lcub}hellip{rcub} the greatest" of all Confederate victories.

"The fighting through here was not Armageddon {lcub}hellip{rcub} but it was very significant because it pushed Hooker back," Krick says. "And all of this land would be paved or covered with houses today, but Jim Lighthizer saved it."

Lighthizer came to the preservation movement as a sportsman. He is a lifelong hunter, an Ohio boy who put himself through Georgetown University law school by selling typewriters for IBM. Inspired by John F. Kennedy, Lighthizer ventured into Democratic politics and won a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1978. He was elected Anne Arundel County executive in 1982 and inherited a budget seeping red ink. He capped wages for Anne Arundel's teachers and other public employees and encouraged development to grow the county's tax base. By the end of his first term, he was able to cut property taxes and introduce a "smart growth" plan that satisfied the public yearning for containing sprawl. It had the added benefit, he says with a smile, of pressuring developers to donate to his campaign. He faced no real opposition for reelection.

Anne Arundel County is famed for its Colonial capital, Annapolis, and for hundreds of miles of shoreline on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Historic preservation, environmental protection and "quality of life" are huge issues there. Awash in revenue, Lighthizer let the conservationist in him blossom in his second term. He spent millions of dollars buying parkland on the rivers and bay. A lasting legacy of his tenure as county executive is the $17 million Quiet Waters riverfront park, near Annapolis, on 340 acres that he snatched from developers.

Lighthizer had a reputation for cockiness, fueled by the embarrassing disclosure that, as his second term ended, he had spent more than $100,000 of public funds on a glossy, 96-page, self-aggrandizing booklet titled "The Lighthizer Years." Nevertheless, when he left in 1990, limited by law to only two consecutive terms, he was viewed as a potential candidate for higher office.

As state transportation secretary, he presided over the arrival of Southwest Airlines at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, a development that tripled flights and transformed the airport into a big-league operation. He won praise from conservationists for exploiting a clause in the massive 1991 federal transportation bill and using highway "enhancement" monies for battlefield preservation. At Antietam and other battlefields, the state spent more than $16 million to acquire land and conservation easements. The money, coupled with other open-space efforts, left Antietam, site of the war's single bloodiest day of fighting, one of the nation's best-preserved battlegrounds.

Then came a time of personal and professional ordeal. After Lighthizer became transportation secretary, state and federal investigators began scrutinizing several land deals that had been sanctioned by his administration during his time as county executive. Though no charges were filed, the investigations were an embarrassment.

They were followed by something far worse. In February 1993, a state trooper found Lighthizer's son Robert, named in honor of Robert F. Kennedy, dead in a state park. The 23-year-old Army veteran, and former all-county lacrosse player, committed suicide. His son's death "took a tremendous amount out of me," Lighthizer says. "I went, in the course of a year, from thinking of running for governor to getting out of the business. I just decided I didn't want to do this anymore."

Instead Lighthizer went to work as a lobbyist in Annapolis, representing Southwest Airlines and other clients for the Baltimore law firm Miles & Stockbridge. He quickly came to detest his new duties. "If you want a lesson in humility, go from being county executive and transportation secretary to chasing state legislators up and down the hall," he says. "I hated to go to work. I was making more money than I ever made in my life, and I was less happy, professionally, than ever. And in the end, I didn't care if they got a comma in the tax bill."

Lighthizer seemed on course to become just one more Maryland political hack. It was his obsession with the Civil War that rescued him from that fate.