07 November 2007

The President from Big Pink



The Honorable Carl Albert, D-3 OK

You can understand why Speaker of the House Carl Albert selected Big Pink as his residence after the riots in 1968, the days of his greatest power. The lobby is as elegant as the one in front of his office under the Capitol Dome, where he summoned the powerful to stand before his desk.

The floor is highly-buffed pale marble that gleams after the porters buff it in the morning, and the dark oak paneling is the most elegant and expensive that Frances Freed could find.

The concierge desk is as well appointed as a fine hotel, which was the look that Frances was trying for, and flowers graced the elegant Georgian table smack in the middle, seasonally appropriate. There are some elegant formal couches that flank the tall glass entrance doors.

The Speaker knew the Buckingham area well. In later years, when he moved out of the District to set up camp in one of the three bedroom units on the east side the of the building, he was high up enough that he could see the garden apartments linging Route 50 with the Washington Monument towering in the background.

Speaker Albert was a little guy, actually born in a log cabin near McAlester Oklahoma. His path to greatness turned on his gift of oratory; he won prizes for his elocution in High School, and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar to study at Oxford, where he won bachelors degrees in Law and Civil Law.

When he returned to the States in 1934, he stopped in Washington to help the other idealists in the New Deal, and worked for the Federal Housing Administration for three years. He would have been aware of Allie Freed's grand dream for the creation of the garden apartments at Buckingham, since the preparations for the development began in the second year of his tenure with the FDA.

He left town shortly before ground was broken on the first phase of the Buckingham development east of Glebe Road and went home to make some money as an oil and gas attorney in Oklahoma, but the dream of affordable quality housing must have made an impact, since this is where he returned when Big Pink was completed and opened for business in 1965.

Carl Albert got out of the Army as a Lt. Colonel after the war. He intended to go back to the practice of law, but instead decided to run for Congress. He squeaked through his first election in Oklahoma's Third District, but after that, he never looked back. He was an efficient and energetic legislator, and the power of incumbency worked it magic for the next fourteen general elections he won.

He had a distinguished career, and could have been the only US President to live in Big Pink. I'll get to that in a second, since memory is weak, and it is hard to remember just how crazy things were in his time in the House.

He served on the usual list of committees in his early years in the House with such effectiveness that he was chosen as majority whip or the resurgent Democrats in 1955. He served under the legendary Speakers Sam Rayburn and John McCormack, succeeding the latter as Majority Leader in 1962 and as Speaker in 1971.

In the process he shepherded LBJ's Great Society package through the Congress, which amounted to a massive bribe to the underclass to stop burning the cities.

Majority Leader Albert had a first hand look at how serious the situation was in the District, and one of his answers was to relocate to Big Pink, safe on the hill in Virginia.

The 1968 riot in Washington left scars on the city that are only now healing, and a residence across the Potomac in Frances Freed's new luxury building made a lot of sense.

President Johnson had to dispatch over 13,000 Federal troops to put down the rioting, and federalized the District Guard to back them up. US Marines mounted machine guns on the steps of the Capitol, which made it inconvenient for the Members to get to their offices, though doubtless if made them feel a little more secure.

On April 5th of that awful year, rioters got within two blocks of the White House, right in front of the Army-navy Club on Farragut Square. By the time order was restored, there were twelve dead, eleven hundred injured, and thousands arrested. Twelve hundred buildings were torched, and that completely destroyed the economic base of the downtown. Residents of all races accelerated their departure for suburban Virginia and Maryland, and that is how the Speaker came to live in Big Pink.

A friend of mine was getting his degree at George Mason University out in Fairfax in the early 1970's, when Mr. Albert was at the apex of his power. He used to trudge up past Big Pink from his apartment on South Glebe, which was a great location for his young wife who could walk across the street to her job at the new Defense Intelligence Agency at Arlington Hall Station.

They could only afford one car in those days, like a lot of Americans, and it made sense for Tony to catch the bus on Route 50. He says he used to see the Speaker's long black limo waiting for him right outside the international-style glass front door.

Mr. Albert would emerge from the lobby with a cup in his hand. Tony always wondered if it was coffee or an eye opener. He says it was well known that the Speaker had a drinking problem at the time, just like a lot of his other colleagues.

There were some pretty wild parties on the east wing of the building in those days, and at least one fatality, before the center of party gravity moved over to the west side when the leadership of the International Concrete Workers moved into the building in the 1980s. We have kept it there since.

I would be interested in seeing one of the old Red Books, the logs of disturbances in the building that the concierges are expected to keep in case of legal consequences stemming from actions of Big Pink's residences.

The Speaker might have snagged any evidence, but it is hard to tell. His papers take up several hundred square feet at the library at the University of Oklahoma, and I have not had a chance to look through them.

Tony is charitable about old times, though. He and his wife moved over into one of the brick box houses in The Forest for a while, and he has a saying that our good Lord used: “Let he who is amongst you without sin cast the first stone.”   He had a feeling that there would not have been many stones thrown in the House or Senate at that time.

Drunk or sober, Mr. Albert was an exceptional public servant. He chaired the tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, when the police rioted for a change, and was Speaker of the House during Watergate.

If he was not a public-spirited man, he could have had some real fun with that.

In 1973 and 1974, the Speaker found himself making historic decisions. After Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation, he was second in line for succession to the Presidency. Democratic members of Congress were shouting for Nixon's immediate removal. As Speaker of the body that would actually try the Bill of Impeachment issued by the Senate, Mr. Albert could have made himself President of the United States.

The Speaker preferred to proceed cautiously and judiciously, and Gerald Ford was installed as Vice President, where he did the right thing and got Mr. Nixon on the helicopter out of town.

Of course, Mr. Ford had to leave his house in Alexandria to move to the White House, and I suspect that is part of Speaker Albert's thinking on the matter.

He would have had to leave Big Pink, and who in their right mind would have wanted that?

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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