Chapter Four: 1981-90
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 18, 1995
Three days before Christmas in 1981, the mayor's Lincoln Continental was idling outside a topless bar on 14th Street NW. Inside, police reports said, Marion Barry was either snorting cocaine or watching others snort it.
It took more than a year for this strip-joint adventure to wiggle its way out of police files and into the newspapers. When it did, Barry was ready.
"There's a theory that you hear from time to time . . . a concerted effort on the part of either the federal government or local government to assassinate [the character of] black leaders," the mayor said. He warned reporters to bring forward some "hard evidence" about cocaine or "stop talking about it."
When members of Congress were writing the Home Rule Charter a decade earlier, they envisioned that the District's chief executive would be a rather less confrontational guy.
Rep. Charles Diggs, then-chairman of the House District Committee, said members wrote the law for a noncombative mayor such as Walter Washington, then a shoo-in to be the first elected mayor. By education a Howard University Law School lawyer, by marriage a member of the city's old-line black elite, by style a cautious bureaucrat who played down race, Washington was a man with whom Congress felt it could reason.
Assuming the mayor always would be a "Walter Washington-type," Congress granted the mayor sweeping authority to spend money, as well as to hire and fire. Members of Congress felt that a powerful but accommodating mayor would simplify their oversight responsibilities.
The strong-mayor system worked like a charm during Barry's first term, when Congress found him to be both accommodating and exceptionally competent. Then, however, the mayor began checking out of his job, occupying more and more of his evenings with assorted intoxicants and women. But even in his season as the self-described "night-owl" mayor, even after many of his sharpest advisers had jumped ship or gone to prison for corruption, Barry kept a vigilant eye on the electorate.
"I may not be perfect, but I am perfect for Washington," Barry told supporters in 1986, after his third election victory.
As the demographics of the city evolved, so did the mayor, changing constituencies, changing policies and changing his persona. For the first-term mayor, a prodigious ability to synthesize the details of municipal government made him credible with skeptical white businessmen. For today's fourth-term mayor, a much-advertised capacity to triumph over prison has made him credible with constituents who have fought similar battles.
The most fundamentally divisive change in the mayor's style occurred early in his second term. It went on public display at the news conference when he defended his night at the strip joint. Barry suggested that criticism of him was part of a white vendetta against blacks.
As the mayor stumbled through his second and third terms, he was pursued by white-owned media, including this newspaper, and by white federal prosecutors. Repeatedly, the mayor found it politically expedient to haul out the against-me, against-my-race method of damage control. That device, and the responses to it, helped to widen the distance and the antagonism in the city between whites and blacks.
When Barry finally was caught smoking crack in 1990 in a federal sting operation, the notion of a white conspiracy against the mayor was entrenched deeply enough in the city's black community to mitigate videotaped evidence.
The protean Barry—a former Eagle Scout, former doctoral candidate in chemistry, former civil rights leader, former schmoozer with white developers—prepared himself well for governing without much white support. He courted black preachers, parceled out contracts, handed out city jobs and fattened up city services—steps that eventually enabled him to secure a black electorate that was becoming more dependent on government help.
With each of his four victories, the mayor revealed the city to itself as more starkly divided along racial lines. After his astonishing rebirth at the polls last year, blacks and whites could look at Barry and see two radically different men. Eight of 10 blacks were confident he would be good for the city, and three of four said he was a good role model for children, according to a Washington Post poll.
Whites, by the same overwhelming percentages, felt precisely the opposite.
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