D.C.’s Phantom Mayor : His Honor’s in Dishonor, but He’s Still Running the Show

Marion Barry may be 900 miles away at an addiction treatment center but you’d never know it from his loyalists in the District Building or from the way people here obsessively talk about his troubles.

In fact, he may as well still be swiveling in the big comfortable chair in his office. Who’s in charge of the nation’s capital? The phantom mayor is.

When he left he handed the reins of the city to Carol Thompson, a young super-administrator who has all the confidence of her colleagues and the good organizational habits that the mayor lacks.

But at meetings and in the hallways of the rambling District Building, Barry’s starched lieutenants talk about him as if he was just down the hall or on the phone. “The mayor presented a budget today . . . ,” they declare. “The mayor urges. . . .” “The mayor’s philosophy is. . . .”

Two, three times a day he calls his staff--checking in, calling the shots, leaving instructions.

“Marion is attached to the phone, the way other people are to their pets,” a former staffer confides. “But don’t use my name on that,” she quickly adds, herself whispering into the phone. “You can’t count him out. He’s still The Man.” The three-term popular mayor was working on a fourth when the FBI caught him allegedly smoking crack cocaine with a girlfriend. The mayor was stung, so he went to church and wrung his hands, and then went to a Florida treatment center to clean up his act.

Thursday, a grand jury indicted Barry on three felony counts of lying to a federal grand jury and five misdemeanor charges of cocaine possession.

But since the day he left the District, 600,000 residents have been riveted by the mounting dilemma over the city’s political future and its mayor.

Will Marion run? Who will succeed him if he doesn’t? If he goes to jail, who will go with him? Can the city survive more reports of crime and corruption? What comes next?

And there’s always THE question: will Jesse run?

Over the past few weeks a parade of friends and former girlfriends who may or may not have seen the mayor use drugs, and may or may not want to talk about it have marched into the prosecutor’s office to be questioned about the mayor’s habits. In this week’s episode of the Barry saga, the U.S. attorney has been demanding urine samples from D.C.’s chief executive. Barry won’t give them.

For Ed Woodland, a union representative for 8,000 city workers, there is a sense of unreality to all this.

“You have to understand what Marion Barry means to us,” says Woodland, tugging his green jacket around himself protectively as if to keep out questions. “We’re in our jobs because he put us there. This is supposed to be our showcase city and he’s our mayor. He’s got to come out of this.”

Woodland was over at the District Building the other day listening to the City Council members rail at Barry’s staff about the mayor’s proposed budget. “Listen to them,” says Woodland. “They all want to be mayor and they all want our support. But the consensus of the unions is we’ll stick with Marion Barry until he calls it quits.”

But what of Carol Thompson, who is at least technically in charge?

We’ve heard about Barry’s paramours, we’ve seen his taut-faced wife, Effi, at his side, but City Administrator Thompson is the woman he left behind to tend to business. Homicides. Tax increases. Decrepit schools. Mounting corruption charges.

Most people agree that Thompson is quite capable of managing the 53,000 district workers and multibillion-dollar budget until the mayor gets back.

But if his treatment lasts more than the 28 days, which is likely, many people worry that having an appointed leader won’t be enough to hold the city together.

Already, City Councilman John Wilson is balking. He refuses to hear Thompson present the 1991 budget. “It’s lousy,” he complains. “The whole city is on a merry-go-round. We don’t know who we’re dealing with.

“I’ve always had the privilege of talking to the mayor and I’m not going to talk around him,” Wilson adds. “We’ve had some pretty vicious fights and we’re not the best of friends, but I refuse to fight with a bunch of bureaucrats. I’ll wait for the mayor to return.”

Thompson calmly fields the feisty councilman’s concerns and those of her critics who say that while she may be smart enough to get power she doesn’t know how to execute it.

Under the klieg lights in a small conference room she opens a press conference about the proposed budget with schoolmarmish instructions. “This will be a single-issue press conference,” she says. In other words, don’t bother to fish around the mayor’s personal life.

Then, in a monotone, she reads a lengthy prepared statement about the city’s financial future, announcing that the mayor wants to raise taxes almost 10%, and steps back to let the finance men flanking her answer the questions.

Except one.

To what extent are the policies of the absent mayor reflected in this budget? she is asked. Wrapping her precisely polished red fingernails around the edge of the podium she looks directly at a mass of reporters.

“We are here today presenting Marion Barry’s budget,” she says. “Period. It is based on his policies and his philosophy.”

What is remarkable about Carol Thompson and Marion Barry is that they are so different yet get along so well. If Thompson is Felix Unger, Barry is Oscar Madison. She is methodical, cautious and pragmatic. He is a carefree risk-taker who has all the charisma and flare of a politician/rogue. He gives all-day interviews. She won’t grant a five-minute audience.

Carol Thompson was born 38 years ago in Washington, the oldest of six children. Her parents ran an insurance company and wanted the very best education for their daughter. While she was graduated from Washington public schools--in fact, from the same high school class as Rasheeda (Hazel) Moore, the woman who was part of the Barry sting--she went off to Smith College in Northhampton, Mass., to study French.

Thompson arrived at the District Building in 1979, the year after Barry was elected. He was mayor; she was a lowly administrator. But Thompson quickly worked her way up the ladder by consolidating departments and streamlining the tangled systems. In 1984 she designed a simplified process for getting a building permit and won an award from the National League of Cities.

“The mayor noticed her because she was good and she had a lot of the attributes that he needs,” says Annette Samuels, who was the mayor’s press secretary when he elevated Thompson to his chief of staff in 1986. “She’s the type who dots the i’s and crosses the t’s. He’s not. But he recognizes smart people and he let’s them do their job.”

Why she stuck with him while other high-level administrators have left is unclear. Apparently she has had job offers outside government. But her loyalty, says Samuels, has a lot to do with her commitment to the city where she grew up and where her parents live and where she is active in her church.

“Carol’s her own person and a very private one at that,” says an admirer who doesn’t want to be identified. “She has her own reasons for putting up with Marion Barry and they have a lot to do with her commitment to a city of mostly blacks run by a black mayor. It was her dream, too, you know.”

Which may explain the bunker-mentality that is pervasive in the District Building these days.

“They’re all hunkered down waiting for the mayor to make his next move and hoping they won’t get caught in one of his land mines,” says a district worker who works a few floors below Thompson. “I just hope I’m not in the building when the bricks start tumbling down.”

Meanwhile, the phantom mayor is trying to hold his own.

Besides calling the District Building daily, Barry has been said to be at work on a speech about drugs while he goes through the program at the Hanley-Hazelden Center at St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach.

But in his first public appearance since he began treatment, last Sunday before a congregation of 500 people at a Riviera Beach church, he preached about his problems with alcohol.

Experts in substance-abuse treatment say while it is not unorthodox for the mayor to be attending church or to city business while he’s receiving treatment, his success at it will depend primarily on how seriously he takes it.

“A lot of people have some contact with the outside world,” said Dr. Robert DuPont, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Georgetown University and the first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Rockville, Md. “If he’s spending a half hour on the phone that leaves 23 1/2 other hours for him to get well. And part of what he has to do is make amends for all the painful things he’s done to hurt people. We’ll see if there’s any honest remorse. I didn’t hear that before he left. The question is what is he going to do and say when he gets back.”

A senior Barry aide says the earliest he can leave Florida is Wednesday, but he isn’t expected back in the city for several weeks. He is, however, already planning a press conference with the National Press Club immediately after his return to avoid being dogged.

In fact, the media has been all over him.

In the first two weeks after Barry’s arrest the story of his troubles in the nation’s capital appeared 13 times on network television news shows, according to officials at the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which keeps track of such things. The mayor was also fodder for a “Saturday Night Live” skit as well as 25 jokes by late-night television jokesters Letterman, Leno and Carson. Here’s one from Leno: “Remember the good old days when it was a good thing to be called a crack politician?”

But the details of the district scandal have been nowhere more prominent than on local television, which has been in a nightly heat during the February ratings period to cover Barry’s predicament. They have even used clips from Barry stories to cut promotional ads.

At one point the local NBC affiliate had an exclusive interview with Karen Johnson, a woman who went to jail rather than talk about her involvement with Barry. The interview was fascinating as she described her time in jail, made oblique comments about her friendship with the mayor, and talked about the young child she had to leave while she was behind bars. But the soap opera element of the district’s dilemmas was never so apparent as when the station followed the interview with a clip of Effi Barry calmly suggesting that Johnson find another city to make her home. It had a distinct get-out-of-town tone.

While coverage of Barry’s problems has been hyperventilated, the four other mayoral candidates have received little attention.

In fact, a respected Washington Post columnist was recruiting for the job last week. William Raspberry suggested that if one of the four candidates couldn’t break out of the pack, Jesse Jackson should take over D.C. Rep. Walter Fauntroy’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and Fauntroy should run for mayor. “Aside from a small core of die-hard Barry fans and, one suspects, Barry himself, there’s little doubt that the embattled and disgraced incumbent has to go,” Raspberry wrote.

Which goes back to what is on the minds of many Washingtonians these days as they read daily accounts of their mayor’s mishaps and tune in nightly to D.C.’s version of “Nightline” called “City Under Siege,” a half-hour show featuring the homicide of the day. While people here witness daily cameos of their ravaged city, the question that won’t go away is how Marion Barry is using his time these days: As an opportunity to become a new person, or as a chance to hone a new political persona?