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He should be remembered as a man of the people. To me he was “The People’s Prodigal Prince.” I reported on his ups and downs. In the end, I believe his good outweighed the bad.
One day you’re writing about Barry touting his summer youth jobs or senior’s housing assistance programs, or passing out Thanksgiving turkeys to the poor. Another day you’re reporting about Barry surviving a gunshot wound at the hands of terrorists, or writing about him shouting outside a woman’s apartment, begging her to let him in, or unraveling the complexities of law and order after the mayor has been busted for smoking crack.
The night Barry was caught in an FBI sting at the Vista Hotel, Jan. 18, 1990, my Washington Times colleague Vincent McCraw and I were about to eat at an Adams
Morgan restaurant where journalists and government folks hung out. Just as soon the waitress put the food on the table; she asked if we wanted to wrap the food up to go. Why, I asked? “Because the Mayor’s just been arrested,” she said. She was right; not only did I not eat that meal; I also didn’t go home for nearly two days.
Uncertainty was the exciting thing about covering Barry. You just never knew when, or what, or where, or how the next moment would unfold. It was its own kind of adrenaline rush. That rush you get when you think that this is it, this will be the BIG STORY you’ve been waiting for. And, he delivered.
But covering Barry kept you on your toes. You had to be prepared. Barry was no dummy; he was,
after all, once a doctoral candidate in chemistry. He knew the D.C. budget like the back of his hand. He could befuddle the press corps with statistics. And, he loved to toy with reporters, especially ones he didn’t like.
You learned you could never ask Barry an open-ended question: he’d talk for 10 minutes and still not answer it. Sometimes you couldn’t even ask him a simple closed-end question; his statements were totally off-point if he didn’t want to answer the
question asked. For example, when he was being barraged with questions about his nightlife, he launched into a soliloquy about how well the city was running.
Once, when everyone else was focused on his treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, I asked him if he’d ever sought treatment for abusing the women in
his personal and professional life. He was clueless, or pretended to be. Psychological abuse did not occur to him. “No one has ever accused me of abusing women,” he said, and then went on to name all the women he had appointed to high positions in his administration.
Then again, Barry was known to call up his favored media folks to drop tidbits, to the consternation of his communications team, which included a succession of press secretaries, including Lurma Rackley, who had been a former Washington Star colleague.
Though he’d deny it, Barry was a chauvinist who surrounded himself with attractive and capable women. He did, however, treat women journalists differently. He would cajole men as if they were frat brothers. With
Marion Barry, dancing here with his wife, Cora Masters Barry, was frequently sighted in D.C. party scene. (Photo courtesy of bisnow.com)