02 March 2006

Mr. Chairman

It was a star-studded day at the Phone Company, the sort of day that makes you forget about nuclear deals with the Indians, and the President's big adventure in South Asia. We were about to be bathed in the glow of reflected star-power.

It started when The Turk called breathless from the office at the Shopping Bag building our in Tysons Corner.

“They are upstairs right now, in the Tower Club! He is not nearly so big as he looks on television. And she is hot!”

That is not how it translated on the phone, though. Ivana was working the phone. She is a pale Russian woman who might have been of minor nobility in some other century, and she was a rescue project from some other wave of corporate lay-offs. She is tough, in her way, and though she currently serves as a receptionist, it is important to approach her with the appropriate deference, should there be a sudden regime change.

The Turk was talking about the muscular Governor of California, and his lovely wife, the patrician social x-ray of the Kennedy dynasty, Maria Shriver.

Neither the Turk not Ivana knew why the sitting governor was standing in their building, waiting for the elevator. I suspected it might have something to do with going to lunch. But still it was a reflected thrill to hear about it, and how close it might have been to encounter the celebrity, had I been attending a meeting in the big room with the round table we have nick-named Camelot.

I imagine the Turk would have edged into the room and passed us a note that The Governor was outside, and between viewgraphs depicting sales forecasts, we might have had the opportunity to see the famous couple.

But I was downtown, and the glamour was elsewhere. I sighed and went out the glass doors of the West Tower to head for the men's room, the one that requires a key for admittance.

It was serendipity. I normally use the back door to the East Tower, where no key is required. I don't know why the threat assessment regarding the two facilities is different, and no assessment regarding it has crossed my desk.

So, I was startled when I saw a tall figure emerge from the very alcove toward which I was heading. Another figure emerged behind him, and they advanced down the corridor toward me.

There is not a great deal of traffic on the sixth floor, and they have warned us to be alert for strangers in the building. My eyes traveled up the well-tailored suit, to the rich café au lait complexion and the neatly trimmed beard. My mouth opened in astonishment.

“Mr. Dellums!” I exclaimed. It was really him, on the sixth floor, the former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and arguably the most powerful American socialist since Eugene V. Debs.

The Chairman smiled his best politician's smile. He seemed to appreciate being recognized, since he left Congress in disgust after fourteen terms in the House. He never got used to the Republican Ascendancy.

I worked up there when he was Chairman, and I had the opportunity to see him at work. He was always elegant, and courtly in his manner in dealing with the both the mighty and the pilot fish like myself. I told him that, gushing a bit as I clasped his hand.

He looked remarkably youthful for a man who served his hitch in the Marines in the mid-fifties, signing up right after high school to get the GI Bill college benefits. He was from the gritty streets of Oakland, across the magic Bay from San Francisco, where the towers glittered.

After he got out and trained as a psychiatric social worker, he became an activist in the loony local politics of Berkeley. He was a friend of the Black Panthers, and ran on a platform of Black Power to his successful election to the City Council in 1967.

The youth revolt was in full flower then, and on the Oakland side of the Bridge, it was not flower power. In the city of docks and radical politics, it was guns and revolution.

Mr. Dellums spoke at Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton's birthday party in 1968, the year things began to really get nuts. Huey had been convicted of killing a policeman, and it was the same the Panthers called for the assassination of President Richard Nixon. That was about the time they started to die.

Despite the controversy, Mr. Dellums openly supported the Panthers in his run for Congress in 1970. His political life was a sort of Sinn Fien political wing of the revolution. When he won the democratic primary, upsetting liberal incumbent Jeff Cohelan, he clenched his fist and raised it in the Black Power salute.

He was the man for his times and for his district. He was a freshman Congressman in 1971, and n 1972 he was selected to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Miami, the one that nominated George McGovern to tilt at the Nixon windmill.

Mr. Dellums was no McGovernite. He had other causes to support in the smoky rooms that still connected the Miami Convention to the grand old days of party politics. It was not the sanitary affair we see choreographed on television today. The young Californian maneuvered with Texas Democrat Shirley Chisholm and DC power-broker William Fauntroy on issues of race and war and poverty.

Back in Washington, he began to make new and powerful friends. They helped him gain a seat on Armed Services in 1973, where he systematically opposed every weapons system that came before the panel. In 1975 he was selected to join the new House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

That year, back in the district, he made a speech saying that "We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail."

Mr. Dellums rose steadily on the Armed Services Committee, and by 1993, he was the senior Democrat and became the Chairman. That is when I saw him in action, in the vastness of the committee chamber named for Carl Vinson, the congressional father of the two-ocean Navy.

Mr. Dellums was an accomplished parliamentarian, and despite his personal agenda, delivered a Defense Bill from his committee on time and within guidelines of his party's leadership.

He just wouldn't sign it. Parliamentarianism aside, he never abandoned his principles, and regardless of where he sat, he preferred Fidel Castro to Carl Vinson.

I asked him what he had been doing since he left Congress in 1998. His aide looked impatient but resigned. “I have been speaking, and trying to influence the process.” I nodded, thinking of what those causes might be.

“What is next for you, Sir?”

“I have been persuaded by some friends to run for the office of Mayor of Oakland.” I wished him the best of luck, and marveled how full the turn of the circle can be.

Among the people who befriended the young radical congressman in Washington was Sargent Shriver, founder of the Peace Corps, and Kennedy Clan insider.

He also was the father of the young girl who one day would marry an Austrian movie star. Then she would become the Republican First Lady of California, and go to lunch near the Phone Company offices in Tysons Corner.

Copyright 206 Vic Scotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window