Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1964-1994. - book reviews

National Review, July 11, 1994 by Aram Bakshian, Jr.

The humorist Irwin S. Cobb had a sound piece of advice for potential nut cases: If you want to go crazy, do it in Washington, where nobody will notice. Cobb died in 1944, but the flood of loonies to the nation's capital has, if anything, swollen. By 1984 it was so bad that former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne M. Burford characterized Washington as, "Too small to be a state but too large to be an asylum for the mentally deranged." Nowadays - and, as a seventh-generation Washingtonian who has spent most of the last fifty years in the city of his birth, it saddens me to say so - the lunatics are running the asylum.

And what a hash they've made of it! The result of thirty years of internal self-government has been a degree of corruption, folly, race hatred, and sheer lunacy unequaled anywhere else in urban America, which is saying a great deal. As journalists Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood point out in Dream City, Washington, D.C., has more municipal-government employees per capita than any other city, including New York, Chicago, and Detroit. It also has the highest homicide rate of any major American city and a Third World infant-mortality rate. About 30 per cent of its dwindling population (down from more than 800,000 in 1950 to less than 600,000 today) is on the dole; and, while the population is still over 70 per cent black, in recent years thousands of educated, upwardly mobile blacks have joined the white middle-class flight to adjoining suburbs in Maryland and Virginia.

The highest-paid city council in the country is a mockery, and D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, formerly a "two-fer" community-relations executive with a local utility company, gives a good speech but is incapable of governing. Her Honor is best known for her extravagant office-decorating budget and for using the bankrupt city's funds to pay for her personal make-up artist. She has, however, presided over at least one historic racial first. In May 1991, Washington became the first American city to experience a brown-versus-black race riot, with Hispanics rampaging against the alleged racist brutality of an overwhelmingly black police force.

Another first may have been achieved this past April when the District of Columbia's senior ethics official was busted for buying crack cocaine, perhaps inspired by the example of former D.C. Mayor Marion ("The bitch set me up") Barry, who is now out of jail, back on the City Council, and threatening to run for mayor again.

If any single person embodies the thirty years of rot that have accompanied home rule for Washington, it is the utterly shameless Mr. Barry. His character, or lack of it, dominates most of the pages of Dream City. The sordid story of D.C. home rule resembles the post-Civil War Reconstruction era in reverse. Mr. Barry, the college-educated son of a Delta sharecropper, was one of many Southern black carpetbaggers who flocked north to Washington in the 1960s, displacing the traditional, civic-minded local black leadership and mobilizing the poorest, least educated, and most violent elements of the local population. Since his arrival coincided with the flood of mindless spending accompanying LBJ's War on Poverty, Mr. Barry, after mastering the art of walking, talking, and misbehaving like a genuine street dude (he actually took lessons from a local gang leader, one Rufus "Catfish" Mayfield), started a long and successful career of Mau-Mauing the flak catchers.

In their meticulously detailed account of Barry's rise and the city's fall, Jaffe and Sherwood uncover the fingerprints of an amazing number of the usual liberal suspects. Barry's first $250,000 slush fund was authorized by Willard Wirth, LBJ's Labor Secretary, in the hope of buying off potential rioters. When the big riot did come in 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King (this reviewer personally saw the smoke-silhouetted Capitol Dome from a comer window of the Longworth House Office Building), Barry curried favor both with rioters and with the establishment, alternately playing the peacemaker and haranguing the mob. Whole city blocks were looted and torched as police and soldiers stood helplessly by, under orders not to shoot. Besides such predictable wimps as Ramsey Clark and Joseph Califano, those pushing or implementing LBJ's policy of paralysis in the face of criminal violence included two/future Secretaries of State: Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher. Long shelf-life seems to be one of the hallmarks of liberal faintheartedness.

The evidence marshaled by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood is all the more credible and devastating since both authors are liberal journalists and one of them, Mr. Sherwood, actually favors statehood for the District of Columbia, a happily unlikely development which would add more layers of corruption to the present municipal mess and guarantee the left wing of the Democratic Party at least four rotten boroughs in the Senate and the House.

Perhaps in spite of itself, Dream City is less a plea for District statehood than an argument for putting Washington into some sort of federal receivership under strong congressional supervision until such time as it restores solvency and reconstructs a competent police force, school system, and civil service. Once civic sanity has been recovered, the District of Columbia could be reduced to a small federal corridor stretching from Capitol Hill to the White House, while the remaining business and residential bulk could be restored to the State of Maryland, which ceded the land to the District of Columbia in the first place.