The Failure of Barbara Jordan's Success

...The Quick Fix Jordan came to Congress in 1973, and well before her last term, I’m told, she was a woman bored with her work...

...At that age, this is a most natural reaction...

...She was hustling: “I continued to go around to speak and meet people and testify before committees in the Texas Legislature on pending educational bills that would benefit blacks...

...She needed to get beyond looking at herself as a symbol-‘‘1, Barbara Jordan”-but she refused to do so...

...The House floor is a reactive place, where one votes upon the work of others...

...It has never been any secret that Barbara Jordan was ambitious-she herself made no effort to hide it, telling reporters “offtherecord,” for example, that she would have liked to run for the Senate if she thought she could have won...

...She spoke in particular about the regulatory agencies, how difficult it was for an ordinary citizen to poke his nose into the business of the Atomic Energy Commission, for example, how the rules were stacked against it, and the expenses were too high...

...How many more...

...It was, of course, and the rest is history...

...I deserve it.’” And losing...

...Her issues, however, left something to be desired...

...We want to be in control of our lives...

...Having overcome obstacles to gain entrance in the club, she seemed to want nothing SO badly as to be able to adapt to her new surroundings, to be accepted by the congregation...

...In a very short span of time she had become a genuine n a t i o n a l s u p e r s t a r , a household name, and one of the most admired people in America...

...She granted a lot of those favors by doing what she did with Mahonmaking appearances and speeches...

...With all she had going against her, 1 don’t think she would have ever gotten here if she hadn’t been single-minded about it,” says Rep...

...But taken in their entirety, six years is a long time to sit in one place...

...The glory days of impeachment had come and gone, as had the initial exhilaration of being elected to Congress...

...Those few times she did get involved in something-as during the debate over the Voting Rights extension, when she played a key role in getting Texas included under the act-she was, everyone agrees, brilliant, persuasive, and forceful...

...They were trying to stretch her too thin, she thought, always asking her to sign onto some letter to the president, or to join them in a press conference, or to speak out on something on their behalf...

...It is total...

...To name but one, Jordan was in a unique position in the House to bring some sense to the question of energy prices...

...How many honorary degrees do you want...

...The last six months of her congressional career, even her staff had a hard time seeing her because her co-author, Hearon, had become a de-facto administrative assistant, practically running the office while the two of them wrote the book...

...Her political instincts are supposed to be superb, and when she argued oneonone, she may well have been the most persuasive person in Congress...

...Quickly she had become a star-she was perhaps the best known person in Congress by the end of her first term-and it seemed difficult for her to keep motivated after that...

...a black woman head of HEW couldn’t do a thing that would be of interest...

...1 decided: I don’t need to stockpile favors at the White House, so I won’t go to New Jersey...

...Her description of the event reveals a lot about why Barbara Jordan was such a disappointment as a public official...

...NOT THIS TIME...

...Afterwards, there was a pirty in the VIP lounge, and Jordan was the star there too...

...She used to like to regale folks with stories about how she talked someone like Omar Burleson [until he retired, one of the real arch-conservatives of the Texas congressional delegation] into switching his vote on something after a little nudge from her,” says one person who has heard her tell some of those stories (and who, like most of the people interviewed for this article, agreed to talk about her only if guaranteed anonymity...

...By talking to both sides, s h e c o u l d have brought some rationality to our energy mess...

...How much longer, how much longer will people tolerate a network of illusions and vacuous rhetoric...

...She was not unlike the converted Catholic who becomes more d e v o u t t h a n t h e Pope...

...And we declaimers and debaters felt self-important with the little box of three-by-five-inch index cards on which we kept our notes...

...That’s just politics . ” Collecting Pens Jordan left Congress last year without looking back...

...As a freshman congresswoman, Jordan came to Washington to interview potential staffers and asked them what they thought she should get involved in...

...On the other hand, having the extra seat on the aisle turned out to be quite a prescient move, for Jordan was often visited by her colleagues, particularly fellow Texans and Southerners, many of them the hard-rock conservatives Jo.rc.ph Noceru I S un editor of‘ The Washington Monthly who throughout her political career have felt most comfortable with her...

...It had voted to give me an honorary doctoral degree at its June commencement...

...If making friends with the right people is one part of this success story, then ambition is the other...

...That she could have done so-easily-was obvious to just about anyone who ever came into contact with her...

...When she first came to Congress, Jordan told her staff that she would be spending much of her time on the floor so she could familiarize herself with the intricacies of the rules and begin cultivating the people who had real power...

...Indeed, one of the first lessons usually learned in Congress is that much of the time spent on the floor is time wasted...

...What comes through most strongly in this book, however, is how singleminded h e r ambition was, how overwhelmingly important a force it was in her life...

...Barbara Jordan was a symbol and a hero at a time when America yearned for someone like her...

...The Voting Rights Act was a nice bit of work, but it didn’t come close to tapping the immense potential of Barbara Jordan...

...While working in Congress can be an essentially thankless, anonymous task, the business of speechmaking brought with it an immediate gratification...

...But like a lot of America’s best and brightest, Barbara Jordan came to see Making It as its own reward...

...What she wouldn’t see is that the caucuses, and the Harris County Democrats, were full of people working towards something, committed to some set of goals...

...During the heady days of impeachment she had played an important role on the Judiciary Committee, for chairman Peter Rodino trusted her instincts and had consulted her practically daily...

...I didn’t want HEW...

...As the congresswoman from oil-rich Houston, she had the trust and support of the oil and gas industry, who yearn for ever-higher prices...

...By 1962, she had become their best speaker, and that year she ran for public office for the first time as a candidate for the Texas House of Representatives...

...And 1 hadn’t called in any of those chits at that point...

...And that is SO why it seems to pain people to classify her as -just another ambitious politician,” when in many ways that is an accurate description of her...

...To her, writes Hearon, “the idea of a cabinet post seemed to offer nothing more substantive than another First Time...

...What she did want was Attorney General...

...Once in a while she would drop a bill into the congressional hopper and there it would die...

...She had the talent to pull off something like that...

...it just didn’t sparkle with the right kind of First Time...

...Of her time in the Texas Senate, William Broyles of Texas Monthly has written: “This first black state senator had not a single item in her platform designed to benefit blacks...

...How many pens do you want...

...Here would be another notch to her belt...

...It is complete...

...You can hear better on the center aisle,”she writes in her new book, Barbara Jordan: A SelfPortrait, (Doubleday), “and you can catch the eye of the presiding officer better on the center aisle, as you are in his direct line of vision...

...1 can leave any time...

...A number of times, after particularly bad days, Jordan would storm into her office and announce to anyone within earshot: “I don’t need this place, you know...

...Bob Eckhardt, a fellow Texas liberal and generally an admirg of Jordan’s...

...To her it didn’t matter that HEW touches the lives of all of us...

...She quietly made a few overtures to the House leadership in an effort to get on the House Rules Committee at a time when the leaders were trying to make the committee less independent and more subservient to their wishes...

...Retrenchment and reform...

...Why hadn’t she done anything to help Americans take more control of their lives...

...My faith in the Constitution is whole...

...And the reason for that, quite simply, is that Barbara Jordan never got around to doing very much...

...I could have gotten a j o b at John Hancock Insurance Company [in Boston] as one of the hundreds of lawyers they have doing various claims and things...

...In the six years she was in Congress-until she retired last year-Jordan rarely spoke out on the floor, preferring instead to spend her time reading her correspondence and briefing papers, or listening to the often deadly-dull debates...

...had she the inclination she could have helped cut through the hyperbole and the rhetoric surrounding the issue...

...She was the one person both sides trusted...

...In her efforts to Make It, she had corne to see life as a collection of awards, of milestones to be achieved and then abandoned for newer heights...

...It is, instead, her version of “making it” in a world dominated by white males...

...Jordan has always insisted in interviews that she was a professional politician first and foremost (as opposed to being, say, a “professional” black or liberal or woman), and it is from that seat that she did most of her politicking...

...She made it a point to joke and work with those who had been around those institutions longer, to show them she was safe, that she wasn’t some wild-eyed radical out to do them in...

...Rocking the Boat Barbara Jordan: A Self-portrait is going to disappoint a lot of the people who found her so inspiring during the impeachment hearings and at the Democratic Convention...

...So I answered myself Well, that’s one you take...

...Why hadn’t she tried to make it easier for people to intervene in the proceedings of the Atomic Energy Commission if that is what she thought important...

...Again, we listened in awe to the flights of her oratory...

...Once in the book she lets us know that she understands that the desire to serve is supposed to be the point of getting into politics in the first place...

...She just sat and listened...

...Jordan was determined to make these white males like her, so she sat and watched, learned the rules, formed alliances with the most conservative of them, and generally spoke to them on their own terms...

...Well after he was elected, and his Cabinet firmly in place, Carter again asked Jordan to campaign, this time for Brendan Byrne in New Jersey...

...Certainly, HEW would have been a difficult place to manage, but it didn’t help that Barbara Jordan wasn’t even willing to try...

...The reaction to me was what turned me on...

...After Carter was elected, Jordan began looking for new milestones...

...That would have been all right with Jordan, who would have liked working for the leadership, thus putting them in her political debt...

...I decided maybe it makes more sense to go home where people will be interested in helping you...

...All that whole bit in order to get my name wellknown...

...When, once the session began, her new staff tried to push her in directions they thought she would be interested in, she would usually say, “1’11 think about it,” and the matter would never come up again...

...I tend to doubt that, but even if I’m wrong, that hardly seems enough...

...The speech that day, given in her usual ringing, inspiring tone, was about the lack of citizen participation in government...

...Whether we are jungle fighters, craftsmen, company men, gamesmen, we want to be in control...

...HOW much longer...

...And Jordan adds: “I knew lots of things I didn’t want to do...

...This she did in part by bestowing friendship (“8arbara never formed friendships, she bestowed them,” said one longtime observer) in the Texas Senate and Congress...

...This required some reconsideration...

...She also strongly supported limits on oyster dredging, and played political expediency with welfare...

...As such, it became something she did often (and profitably-Jordan usually made in the neighborhood of $12,000 a year in honoraria...

...She turned him down...

...The people want in,” she said...

...And certainly she had gone far, but for what purpose...

...the chance to be special, whether it’s a$ an athlete, a scholar, or even a delinquent, is a key motivator, and Barbara Jordan was as susceptible as anyone...

...She joined the Harris County Democrats, a group of Texas liberals who ran slates of candidates for public office (and usually lost...

...Then the rumors began that she would be the vice-presidential nominee, and later, that she would be a cabinet secretary or the next Supreme Court justice, and it wasn’t too long before it became part of the conventional political wisdom that if a black or a woman was ever going to be elected president someday, it would surely be Barbara Jordan...

...in her climb for the status and glory of being someone special, somewhere along the line she lost sight of what should have been more important...

...Certainly she was bored by Congress (and certainly Congress can be a boring place), but it didn’t help much that she looked at the passage of bills as a chance to collect pens from a President-which is precisely how she looked at it...

...How many times do you keep presenting a bill and getting it passed and getting a President to sign it...

...The people in those caucuses were boat-rockers, and Barbara Jordan didn’t rock the boat...

...If that sounds a bit harsh, contrast it with her attitude towards those whom she believed could help her: “When Congressman [George] Mahon, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, interrupted her on another phone call to ask if she would sing with him at the West Texas Chamber of Commerce meeting, she was jocular and glad to oblige,” writes Hearon...

...She became embittered, feeling she had been used because of ’her speaking prowess to help elect other Harris County Democrats, (including Eckhardt), and that they all secretly knew she would lose...

...She was a symbol, in the most uplifting sort of way, of how far blacks and women had come in this country...

...So 1 decided that is where I would always sit, leaving one seat next to me on the aisle vacant for those people who might want to stop and visit from time to time...

...Barbara felt that from the time of the Brown decision to the Ross case nothing else had happened [to eliminate segregation...

...She may have been absent at subcommittee meetings, but she never missed a meeting of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, a group of Democrats who decide who is going to be on what committee and perform other “political” functions...

...It is that 1, Barbara J o r d a n , am a keynote speaker...

...Two years later, when she was a keynote speaker at the Democratic Convention, J o r d a n again was overpowering...

...This was an interesting time for Jordan...

...She graduates from Texas Southern University and later, Boston University Law School, where she fiqds that she can cope and succeed in the white world, and then it is time to decide what to do with her life...

...And I had done of lot of those [commencement addresses...

...Surely,” he said, “her impeachment speech will be recited by schoolchildren for generations to come...

...And when the government erodes that control, we are not comfortable,” she said...

...Throughout her career, she gagged at being called a symbol, yet she rarely made any effort to rise above her symbolic importance...

...There was a great deal of talk about her becoming a member of the cabinet, but Most of it didn’t interest her...

...She made her famous speech at the Democratic Convention at the request of fellow Texan Robert Strauss (add another political chit) and glowed in the warmth of the nation’s applause...

...It was another milestone...

...She remembers running for “Girl of the Year,” because “all of the clubs and organizations give you g gift...

...She showed the kind of respect for their institutions that they appreciated and played the game by their rules...

...It was a solid, traditional political platform...

...As it turns out, Barbara Jordan didn’t have much need for catching the eye of the presiding officer...

...1 mean if you’re talking about the one person who is able to get just anybody to stop and listen to what she has to say and convince them that she’s right, then you’re talking about Barbara...

...So the question begs: what did she do with all her gifts-her eloquence, her political abilities, her intelligence, her unquestioned powers to cajole and influence...

...I thought: Now, look-true the air is freer up here, true the opportunities are probably greater, but nobody in Boston, Massachusetts is interested in the advancement of Barbara Jordan [emphasis added...

...I thought about them, and I decided: That will be my campaign theme...

...It is often said in her defense that Ehrbara Jordan was not the kind of Person willing to stretch herself too thin...

...Again, the motivation was to bring home the medals: “Then we would have a ceremony and a presentation of the trophies tQ the school...

...The answer, implied throughout the book and borne out by talking to people who watched her or worked with her in Congress, seems to have been not very much at all...

...Charles Wilson of Texas, purportedly her closest friend in Congress, once told Texas Month1.v that she was “the most influential member of Congress...

...It didn’t seem to matter whether the debate was over some sweeping national concern or whether it was a minor parochial dispute, whether there were hundreds of people milling around or whether the chamber was deserted, Barbara Jordan would be there on the floor of the House of Representatives in her self-appointed seat, three rows back near the middle aisle...

...I don’t remember in which era of Texas government it was, but some governor talked about retrenchment and reform, and I liked the sound of those words...

...Doing favors was part and parcel of the ongoing business of doing business in the Congress...

...BFor all of us who have heard her speak-and that probably includes a majority of Americans-the idea of her being especially influential undoubtedly rings true...

...Her relations with the congressional black caucus were chilly at best, and with the women’s caucus non-existent-she went to great lengths to disassociate herself from both groups-and this f u r t h e r endeared her to the congressional establishment...

...She forgot she had been elected to serve...

...The milestone had been achieved...

...So I thanked him very much and left...

...Another Milestone’ L Barbara Jordan’s story begins in Houston’s Fifth Ward, a large black section of the city, where she was born and raised at a time when segregation was still the law, and where she iealized, at some point during her high school years, that she had the ability to stand out...

...Before leaving Congress, she made one of her last major public appearances at a Harvard commencement, where she gave the address...

...According to the legend of Barbara Jordan (and it is a part of the legend she nurtures in the book), this seat is where she spun a lot of her special magic...

...But when the personnel person said that I could have a job and took me down the hall to show me the office I could have had, it was one of a row of little cubbyholes all divided by plywood...

...The men who sat next to her loved it when she joshed with them, and listened when she counseled them...

...had been awarded, at that juncture, twenty-two doctoral degrees, including one at Boston a n d one s c h e d u l e d a t Princeton...

...Once she wrote a bill to outlaw employment discrimination and it passed 30-1...

...By far the bulk of it is about making it-winning the oratorical awards and Girl of the Year, getting into the Texas Senate and being Governor for a Day, coming to Congress and making the famous i m p e a c h m e n t s p e e c h , a n d t h e convention speech, and finally making that trip to Harvard...

...Then I got a letter from Harvard University...

...Even in her first year, there were portents of this...

...Unlike so many of our other politicians similarly swept away by the glamor of their own stardom, Jordan was one who could make a difference when she wanted to...

...The sense one gets upon finishing this book is that Barbara Jordan was a person who derived her g r e a t e s t s a t i s f a c t i o n s from each additional honor, each new step on the way to stardom...

...And yet...

...By her last year in office she had another, more personal reason-painful calcium deposits on her knees made it difficult for her to get from place to place...

...After the second loss, she says, “The first order of business was to decide: Is politics worth staying in for me...

...But she never had the inclination...

...And so, the white male club elected her Outstanding Freshman Senator, and she, in turn, called them all her friends...

...It is not an inspiring book...

...The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport,” she said...

...She could always bring down the house, no matter what the audience or the topic...

...Perhaps...

...By the end of her third year, she had but stopped pushing for bills she wrote or offering amendments...

...All Jordan could see was that she, Barbara Jordan, was being asked to perform a favor, for which she personally would get nothing in return...

...But by the time she entered Congress years later, most vestiges of that kind of idealism had gone...

...So that’s what she did, setting up a small law office in Houston, where she began to dabble in politics...

...she never saw the potential for doing good with her talents...

...She had only one legislative assistant, so she wouldn’t have to feel badgered by a half-dozen assistants all Pushing her in a half-dozen different directions, and she spent a lot of her time simply studying the various bills coming up on the floor...

...Change continued to be incredibly slow,” writes co-author Shelby Hearon (the book, by the way, is part autobiography, written by Jordan, and part biography, written by Hearon...

...The only way to move things along, she concluded, was to get into a position where you could implement the laws...

...What Jordan never lost her taste for was the politics of the House...

...s h e a s k e d the audience at the Democratic Convention...

...She campaigned for Carter at his request (another political chit), and recalled: “I don’t know whether Carter ought to thank me for campaigning for him, or I ought to thank him for sending me to these places to campaign because I was having a ball...

...Another part of the reason may well have been her health, which has been rumored for years to be worse than she will publicly admit...

...They don’t know you...

...How many commencement speeches do you give...

...Jordan lost races in 1962 and 1964, because in those days all candidates had to run countywide and no black in Texas was about to win an entire county...

...But later she would not go out of her way even to attend her subcommittee meetings, and when she did, she had nothing to offer...

...The crowd, of course, was in awe, and what no one thought to ask was what had Barbara Jordan done to make government less a spectator sport...

...Her bill had no teeth...

...In 1965, Harris County was forced to reapportion its legislative districts after the Supreme Court ruled for “oneman, one-vote.’’ Jordan this time ran as a black woman-“She would sell Barbara Jordan,” Hearon writes“and even though her opponent had impeccable liberal credentials, she crushed him by asking: “CAN A WHITE MAN WIN...

...As the congresswoman from the largest ghetto in Texas, she was revered by the poor, whose need for cheap energy is just as pressing...

...These were our badge of superiority wer those others who could not do things like t h a t . ” S h e wins an oratorical award and tells the local black newspaper: “It’s just another milestone I have passed...

...More immediate, and therefore more real to her, was the campaign trail with its familiar thrill of bringing audiences to their feet...

...She was never seriously considered for the post, particularly a f t e r her one m e e t i n g w i t h the Carter people turned into a debacle-they were stunned and angered by her refusal to even listen to any offers other than Attorney General...

...And dreaming: “One day 1 went to Austin to testify, and when I sat up in the House gallery and looked down at [one] desk I thought, ‘1 ought to be in his place...

...Part of the reason is that she had gotten from it all she wanted-the fame and recognition...

...So, for the first time, she began to think seriously about politics...

...There wasn’t any reason for her colleagues to worry that it would actually do anything about employment discrimination, however...

...since her retirement from Congress last year and the publication of her very revealing book last month, something nags, and it gets back to that seat in the middle aisle...

...she was trying hard to be seen not as a black woman symbol but as a concerned citizen who cared about issues...

...One more...

...It was a quick fix-a reaffirmation of her stardom...

...it’s just the beginning...

...she said...

...So I was thinking: Well, maybe I don’t need to do any more of those...

...It was easy to become bogged down in the minutiae of committee meetings and settings and roll call votes and quorum calls and spend many hours doing things that you really had no interest in doing,” she writes...

...She came out for traditional bread-and-butter liberal issues...

...She began spending more time than ever on the House floor...

...It was also a pale reflection of her extraordinary rhetoric and presence...

...Barbara Jordan was a reactive congresswoman, willing to vote with the liberals almost every time out (except on important oil and gas votes-she was, after all, from Houston), but unwilling to take initiatives herself...

...The One Speech Legacy - “What is different about tonight...

...I thought: Now here are two nice, fine words...

...When, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she talked about impeaching Richard Nixon, she electrified and stunned us with the eloquence of her words...

...Attorney General wouldn’t just be any First Time...

...If the ainutiae of legislation bored her, there were plenty of other things she could have done...

...They were all kissing my ass, that’s all 1 can say about that time...

...And I began to work them into my campaign speeches after I had announced for the House of Representatiyes...

...Ultimately, her vision was too limited...

...Barbara Jordan: A Self: Portrait tells a lot about how she became that symbol, and almost nothing about what shedid when she got there...

...She was easily frustrated by the workings of Congress, quickly annoyed at how long it took to get anywhere...

...Recognizing around that time that she had a gift for public speaking, she began participating in oratqrical contests...

...she had no further need for Congress...

...Before leaving the Senate, she was named Governor for a Day, a purely symbolic title yet one, the book makes clear, in which she reveled...

...I asked one Texas politico whether he thought she had left a legacy...

...That is also why she resented the black and women’s caucuses...

...While it is never spelled out in the book, the sense one gets is that she felt HEW was the kind of cabinet post that a Pat Harris might be named to, but only Bctr-hara Jordan could pull down Attorney General...

...Her accomplishments in Congress, for someone of her stature, are consequently painfully thin...

...As with the Harris County Democrats, she felt they were trying to “use” her for their purposes...

...I had done my thing for Carter at the time of his campaigning and helping with the election,” she writes...

...that is not where personal or national agendas are formed, not where the “issues” are framed, not where laws are written...

...Here, too, the liberals soon became resigned to the fact that Barbara Jordan would invariably side with the conservatives...

...Because of her charisma, she led people to expect that she would set things right, and they didn’t have oyster dredging in mind...

...Congress had already lost its luster...

...What’s remarkable about her book, 1 suppose, is its underlying admission of that failure...

...I always liked to have some award or something,”she says...