Charlie and Me

by Eric Freedman
September 16, 2010

Those were heady days when a young, anti-war state legislator could knock off a powerful incumbent in the U.S. House — even if the margin of victory was only 150 votes in a five-way primary. Yes, the successful challenger was a high school dropout-turned-federal-prosecutor and a decorated veteran of the Korean War, but he was tackling a political legend, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Those were heady days, indeed, when a goateed, long-haired — scruffy, to be candid — anti-war, freshly minted college graduate could land a summer gig with a Washington newbie and in a few months rise from intern to caseworker to legislative assistant without being from the congressman’s state, let alone district.

Those were tumultuous days, too. The Watergate scandal was still a few years down the road, but winds of discontent were gusting through the nation, evident in anti-war protests, urban disorders and Cold War tensions.

The time was 1971, and the young Harlem lawmaker couldn’t predict that it was the dawn of a four-decade — and likely longer after securing more than half the vote in his six-way primary this week — career on Capitol Hill. The young intern-on-the-rise wouldn’t stay on the Hill for as long, leaving the House staff and politics after four-and-a-half years for a career in the equally honorable — if not always honored — field of journalism.

Like other newbies, the seniorityless congressman initially landed on standing committees dealing with topics arguably of national import but of little interest to him or Manhattan: space and public works. With heroin and the fear of violent crime besetting his district, fortunately he did find a home on the Select Committee on Crime.

By the summer of 1974, public works and space were off his plate and he was one of three African-Americans on the Judiciary Committee — alongside Detroiter John Conyers Jr, and Texan Barbara Jordan — with the impeachment of Richard Nixon at the top of the panel’s agenda. “This president,” the congressman said in opening remarks at Nixon’s impeachment hearings, “held secret the knowledge that he had participated in the most bizarre criminal conspiracy ever recorded in the history of the United States.”

The next year, the third-termer moved to the Ways and Means Committee with the backing of Speaker-to-be Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. The intern-turned-staffer, naïve in the ways and means of congressional power, considered the switch a bad idea. After all, Judiciary handled nifty hot issues like gun control, crime and immigration — not that boring tax, Social Security and tariff stuff. [In the interest of full disclosure, had the intern-turned-staffer’s view prevailed, the ambitious congressman wouldn’t have risen to chair Judiciary because Conyers had more seniority.]

As noted, the intern-turned-staffer left the government payroll and joined the ranks of ink-stained wretches. He kept in touch periodically with his old boss, and the congressman graciously responded to occasional letters from the ex-aide’s father, a retired roofer [and non-constituent] in Massachusetts. And the congressman was a surprise visitor at the ceremony for the ex-aide’s Pulitzer Prize, won for The Detroit News coverage of the House Fiscal Agency corruption scandal in Lansing.

The intern-turned-staffer-turned-journalist-turned-professor has no knowledge about the merits of the pending ethics allegations against the congressman or of the investigation’s partisan machinations and curious pre-election timing. He merely knows the congressman as a compassionate, passionate, impassioned and committed public servant, as a mentor willing to trust a goateed, long-haired, anti-war kid and as a lawyer who could undoubtedly have made far more money outside Congress.

He also knows about the senior congressman’s longevity of principle on issues that matter. For example, legislation he still pushes — doomed, as always, to suffocate in the quicksand of committee — to reinstate the military draft. The proposal has morphed over the decades and now would apply to both genders and would permit alternative service.

The young aide, no fan of involuntary servitude, opposed the concept from the start but respected the congressman’s intent to highlight the social and economic disparities between many of the men and women who volunteer for the military and the disproportionately under-uniformed better-offs. The still-goateed but much-older professor still respects that intent.

Similarly, in the congressman’s first re-election campaign in 1972, the “End the War Now” button referred to the Vietnam War. He could wear the same button today, fighting for a 21st term and against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Every political career will come to an end, including mine,” the congressman wrote in his 2007 memoir. “And if St. Peter’s not overly impressed with my legislative record, then I’ll just have to tell him that I did the best I could.”

Eric Freedman worked for U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel from 1971 to 1976 and now teaches journalism and directs Capital News Service at Michigan State University. Freedman and Dome columnist Stephen Jones are authors of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History, and the forthcoming Presidents and Black Americans: A Documentary History, to be published next year by Congressional Quarterly Press.