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

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Two years after he emerged from a federal penitentiary, Marion Barry is back. Decked out in African regalia, with a new wife at his side--his fourth, who is, like his second, a convicted felon--the former mayor plots his political comeback. From the D.C. Council he holds forth in his endless quest for respectability.

In their new book on the Barry era, Dream City, Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood remind us of how much damage Barry did to his adopted city, and especially to the poor he claimed to champion. Sherwood, who has covered him for nearly 20 years, first at The Washington Post and then at WRC-TV, and Jaffe, a writer for Washingtonian magazine, provide the first comprehensive political history of both the former mayor and the District of Columbia.

Along the way, the authors dish out some juicy tidbits. According to the book, Barry's own lawyer, Herbert Reid, said privately of the mayor, "If it walks, Marion fucks it. If it doesn't, he ingests it." Dream City is filled with stories suggesting Reid understood his client well. Once, Barry's second wife apparently got so tired of Barry's philandering that she put a pistol to his head, saying "Nigger, I'm tired of this shit. I'm gonna blow your fucking brains out."

But Dream City is more than a compilation of Barry's tawdry exploits. It is also a history of local Washington--black Washington-and its forgotten pain. The book weaves back and forth between the history of the city and the rise and fall of Barry, arguing that "Barry's descent... eerily mirrored the city's own decline." It's a compelling metaphor, but the authors never develop it, apparently unable to decide whether Barry's Washington is uniquely flawed or the victim of problems that afflict all of urban America.

The book's strength is the simple and real human drama of its story. It follows the "Chicken Express," the railroad cars that brought blacks north during the great migration from the South after World War II. Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, Marion Barry was part of that migration. He began his life picking cotton in the Delta just as his slave ancestors did. He wore cardboard shoes. He never knew his father.

Barry's journey north took him first into the civil rights movement in Tennessee. About this time, his first wife divorced him, saying he "disappeared" and left her "impoverished." But Barry moved on. He adopted "Shepilov" as his middle name, after a Soviet propagandist. He became the first head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, although his colleagues there say Barry ducked the Freedom Rides. In any case, political liberation became personal liberation for Barry, and he channelled his inchoate rage in a way that gave his life purpose.

In 1965, Barry moved to Washington and took over the city's fledgling civil rights movement. His "Free DC" campaign---hitting up white businesses for donations with the promise of protection from picketing--was virtually a shake-down racket. He used the same approach to set up Pride, Inc., the job training program underwritten by Lyndon Johnson's Labor Department after Barry maumaued the administration with threats of riots. "I'm going all the way to the top," Barry vowed at the time. "I'm going to control this city."

Not yet. Even some respectable Washington liberals thought that was still a job for whites only. Sherwood and Jaffe cite Joseph Califano, an LBJ lawyer and advisor who later represented the Post, who wrote that when the time came for District home rule, Post publisher Katharine Graham and her then-managing editor, Ben Bradlee, met with Califano to suggest that a white should be appointed mayor. Who did they have in mind? Averell Harriman, Edward Bennett Williams, Nelson Rockefeller, Dean Acheson, or Sargent Shriver. It was only after Roger Wilkins, then a young White House aide, pointed out how silly it would be to pass a home-rule bill and then name a white man mayor of a majority-black city that Walter Washington, a black, was appointed.

Meanwhile, Barry exercised his power from the street. He baited the police, fomented his own arrest, and then exploited it to make himself a hero in the black community. Soon, he was trading in his dashiki for a suit, winning election to the school board and then the city council.

District Crime

His drug use also allegedly began during this time--first marijuana with his movement buddies, then cocaine at swank bars. His political stock soared when he was shot by Hanafi Muslim militants in a siege at the District building in 1977. Afterward, in his hospital room, a catfight nearly erupted between his current wife and his steady girlfriend at the time, Effi Cowell. Barry married Effi shortly thereafter. (His advisor Ivanhoe Donaldson insisted on it to clean up Barry's image for his upcoming mayoral bid.)

In 1978, Barry was elected mayor in an upset, largely thanks to a series of election-eve endorsements by the Post. "He was a bit of a roughneck," said editor Phil Geylin, "but... I thought Barry could take people who might run amok, who might be hostile to society and to the government, and lead them in a healthy direction." Gracious in victory, Barry credited Graham with being "the lady that made me." "Yes, Marion," Graham reportedly replied, "and don't you forget it."

Barry didn't forget it--nor did he forget the rest of the white business community. "In return for financing his campaigns, for withholding most criticisms of his government, and for including Barry's friends in their deals," Jaffe and Sherwood write, "Barry would give the businessmen almost a free hand in developing Washington's downtown business district." One developer, Jeffrey Cohen, godfather to Barry's son, got millions in tax breaks and deals from the Barry administration. In February 1985, for example, the city paid Cohen $11 million for land it valued at only $6.7 million. And Cohen set up a dummy corporation to give Barry a secret 10 percent partnership in a million-dollar office building in Massachusetts.

It was much the same when it came to awarding city contracts. Here, Barry sold out for mere pennies on the dollar--"crumbs," as one former city official put it, of women and drugs. As a lobbyist for the Greater Washington Board of Trade said, "a little sleaze will never stand in the way of economic development."

It was this kind of sleaze that came at the expense of the city's poor. As Barry's first term wound down, there were reports that his first wife, Mary Treadwell, with whom he had run Pride, Inc., had diverted the program's federal funds to her own bank account. Barry said he had suspected nothing, even though Treadwell drove a Mercedes, had bought Barry a Volvo, and paid for art, jewelry, and trips to the Caribbean--all on a $23,000 annual salary. The feds also charged Treadwell with defrauding the government of money intended for Clifton Terrace, a low-income housing development. (In 1983, Treadwell was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.)

Under Barry's mayoral regime, infant mortality was up, welfare checks were late, emergency ambulances never showed up at all. It's not that there wasn't enough money; Washington's taxes are among the highest per capita in the country. Rather, too much money went to too many cronies, and the money that did get into the system was wildly mismanaged.

For example, the aptly named Pitts welfare motel charged taxpayers more to rent a room to a homeless person than it would have cost to rent a suite at the Watergate. Millions of dollars that Barry could have collected from the federal government to build public housing was lost because his administration failed to file the proper paperwork. This all happened in the mid-eighties, when public housing waiting lists were double what they were in 1974 and a HUD audit found that apartments remained vacant for an average of a year and a half--plenty of time for vandals to destroy the chance that one of those 13,000 people waiting (some for as long as 10 years) might get a decent home.

Just as bad, according to the book, was the way Barry corrupted the city's police, promoting officers based on their willingness to ignore or cover up his own drug crimes. Time after time, honest cops were punished for trying to investigate the numerous reports of the mayor's drug use. Some police, acting as bodyguards, even accompanied Barry on his nocturnal prowling; "the dog is running" was the code-phrase they used over the police radio. At the same time, Barry slashed the number of officers and lowered minimum standards to the point where convicted felons were being hired as cops.

Gangster days were at hand. "We call it Hoovering," Barry is said to have declared at one party as he sucked up cocaine like a vacuum cleaner. Three times he allegedly overdosed in the capital. In Los Angeles, while a snowstorm paralyzed Washington, he apparently overdosed at a Super Bowl party; an ambulance picked him up as he sat on a street curb. Jaffe and Sherwood write that when cocaine got Barry too high, he used Valium to bring himself down; when Valium was too weak, he tried Xanax. Barry's speech slurred; sweat poured from his brow; he had perpetual nosebleeds. He missed morning meetings and had to be roused from bed by his bodyguards. His friends and staff, led by Carol Thompson, his chief of staff, covered for him.

The District's city council--puppets of Barry's nicknamed the "Marionettes"--did little to stop the damage. In part, the problem was the city's limited home rule, which as Jaffe and Sherwood point out, stunted the city's local politics by attracting only mediocre talent to an arena that has no potential reward of national office. The press was part of the problem, too. The Post, perhaps cowed by white liberal guilt, never turned its full investigative spotlight on Barry's corruption and misgovernment. Yet the authors do not discuss Sherwood's role in this coverage even though he was then the paper's main reporter on the story. In fact, Post writer Juan Williams' articles gathering the evidence--as originally reported, piecemeal, by local television stations, the Post, and The Washington Times--and presenting readers with a pattern of incompetence were published not in the Post but first in the Monthly in 1986 and later in Regardie's and The New Republic. The Post editorial page was deafeningly silent on Barry's exploits and failures, continuing to endorse him through the eighties. So the District's sores festered, and Barry's power went unchecked.

Finally, Rasheeda Moore turned Barry in during the Vista Hotel FBI sting. She later testified about how Barry hid cocaine in the cuff of his pants and under the rugs of an apartment where they met for trysts. She told of coking it up with Barry in her basement, then coming upstairs to chat with her mother, who asked Barry for advice about what to do with her drug-addicted son. The answer, said Barry, still high on coke, was treatment.

Such ironies fill this book. Another, as Jaffe and Sherwood point out, was that even if Barry had wanted to get treatment, he would have had a difficult time, since his administration had opened so few drug rehab centers; most of those that were around were poorly run, turning addicts away for weeks and months. Not that Barry ever seemed to want such help. Even after his arrest, the blame always fell elsewhere. "The bitch set me up," he cried as he was handcuffed at the Vista. Later, to a sympathetic TV interviewer, Barry said, "that was the disease talking .... I was a victim." The more he came under attack, the more he waved the bloody shirt of race, embracing Louis Farrakhan, and polarizing the city along racial lines. When it finally came time to confess his sins in a tearful Sunday morning church service, he admitted only that, "I spent so much time caring about and worrying about and doing for others, I've not worried about or cared enough for myself."

Such self-serving excuses are artfully exposed in this book, but the authors seem unable to explain Barry's psyche. One of his poker-playing buddies calls Barry a "sociopath." An ex-wife says he "had no center." Chief of Staff Thompson calls Barry a "child." Thompson, a light-skinned beauty, says Barry told her that "You're one of the black people who's going to be successful. I was never meant to succeed. I'm from a poor background .... White people will never accept me."

How ironic, and how sad. It wasn't the color of his skin that brought down Marion Barry; it was the content of his character. In fact, it was the white-owned Washington Post and the white voters of Ward Three who provided the essential margin to elect Barry mayor in the first place. But as Jaffe and Sherwood note, the publicly defiant Barry "in his heart yearned for [white] approval, and believed that it would never come. The strut, the late entrances--even the women and the drugs--were an expression of that essential conflict between what Barry needed and what he knew he could never have." Except that he did have it, and he threw it all away; convinced that his destruction was pre-ordained, he insured that it was.

Mark Feldstein, a correspondent for CNN'S Special Assignment investigative unit, covered the Barry Administration from 1984 to 1990.