Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Read online

  “If I as an interrogator feel that the person in front of me has information that can prevent a catastrophe from happening,” she says, “I imagine that I would do what I would have to do in order to prevent that catastrophe from happening. The state’s obligation is then to put me on trial, for breaking the law. Then I come and say these are the facts that I had at my disposal. This is what I believed at the time. This is what I thought necessary to do. I can evoke the defense of necessity, and then the court decides whether or not it’s reasonable that I broke the law in order to avert this catastrophe. But it has to be that I broke the law. It can’t be that there’s some prior license for me to abuse people.”

  In other words, when the ban is lifted, there is no restraining lazy, incompetent, or sadistic interrogators. As long as it remains illegal to torture, the interrogator who employs coercion must accept the risk. He must be prepared to stand up in court, if necessary, and defend his actions. Interrogators will still use coercion because in some cases they will deem it worth the consequences. This does not mean they will necessarily be punished. In any nation the decision to prosecute a crime is an executive one. A prosecutor, a grand jury, or a judge must decide to press charges, and the chances that an interrogator in a genuine ticking-bomb case would be prosecuted, much less convicted, is very small. As of this writing, Wolfgang Daschner, the Frankfurt deputy police chief, has not been prosecuted for threatening to torture Jakob von Metzler’s kidnapper, even though he clearly broke the law.

  The Bush administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter. Candor and consistency are not always public virtues. Torture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced. Those who protest coercive methods will exaggerate their horrors, which is good: it generates a useful climate of fear. It is wise of the president to reiterate U.S. support for international agreements banning torture, and it is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work. It is also smart not to discuss the matter with anyone.

  If interrogators step over the line from coercion to outright torture, they should be held personally responsible. But no interrogator is ever going to be prosecuted for keeping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed awake, cold, alone, and uncomfortable. Nor should he be.

  POMPADOUR WITH A MONKEY WRENCH

  JUNE 2004

  I wanted to write about the 2004 presidential campaign, and looking at it a year in advance it was shaping up to be uninteresting—a shoo-in for President Bush. Sharpton’s candidacy was hardly vital, but I figured it would at least be colorful. Following his campaign would give me a less-traveled angle on the political year. As it happened, winds began to blow differently, the Democratic primaries turned out to be hotly contested, and, as of this writing, the general election was still very much in doubt. Sharpton’s futile campaign proved to be very revealing about him, and demonstrated some significant changes in the nature of African-American politics.

  “How does a movement-based political agenda sustain itself in the face of the success that it itself has wrought? It doesn’t. It becomes farce.”

  —Debra J. Dickerson, The End of Blackness

  The Democratic primary race was well under way last year when I went looking for Al Sharpton’s national campaign headquarters. It was a hot late-summer day in Washington, D.C., and steam rose from the streets as I drove south from downtown toward Fort McNair, looking for the address given me by Frank Watkins, Sharpton’s campaign manager.

  I had met Watkins and his candidate two months earlier, on a day when they were shopping for office space. At that point they were just getting started. Sharpton had formally announced his candidacy only weeks before, and the primary season wouldn’t begin until January. He strolled noncommittally behind Watkins through a spacious second-floor location over a big Greek restaurant off DuPont Circle, listening with his head tilted and his eyes at half mast as his campaign manager described how each space might be used, where phone banks and computers might be set up, where volunteers might stuff envelopes or unpack posters and pamphlets. I had pictured the place, months ahead, alive with the industry of democracy.

  Now the race was on. The nine candidates had already met for several televised debates, in which Sharpton’s cheerful pugnacity had made him an early audience favorite. He was clearly the most entertaining politician on the stump. His name showed surprising strength in some initial polls. Of course, no one really thought the notorious Harlem rabble-rouser could be elected president, but Sharpton was already an undeniable force in New York City politics; and if he could rally black voters nationwide, the way Jesse Jackson had in his two 1980s presidential campaigns (both involving Watkins), he might arrive at the party’s convention, in Boston, with real clout. To accomplish that he would have to score big in the District of Columbia’s otherwise insignificant January balloting. It was an unofficial and nonbinding event, but because it was the first actual tally and a majority of its voters were African-American, it would gauge Sharpton’s core strength—or lack of it. This was one reason why he wanted his campaign headquarters here.

  The address Watkins had given me was nowhere near DuPont Circle; evidently, they had decided on a different place. I found the street in a neighborhood lined with tall apartment buildings, but as I was counting down to the right address, the street abruptly ended. Before me was a small park, and surrounding it were blocks of two-story row houses. I parked my car and went looking on foot.

  It seemed an unlikely place for a political office, so I stopped a man on the sidewalk and asked for help. He made a face that mirrored my doubts. “There are no offices here,” he said. “Just homes.”

  When I found the right number, I was standing before a simple residence. A dusty old motorcycle, long unused, was parked to one side of the front door. There were no posters or festive bunting. I double-checked the address and rang the bell.

  Watkins opened the door. A dour man with thinning hair, he wore shorts, bedroom slippers, and a red T-shirt over his small pot belly. Noting my surprise at the surroundings, he executed a slight bow and swept his arms wide. “Welcome to the Al Sharpton for President National Campaign Headquarters,” he said.

  For me, it was like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy glimpses the man behind the curtain. I hadn’t expected a juggernaut; Sharpton was at best a minor candidate. But even the most rudimentary campaign has an office and a staff. Watkins was running this one from his living room.

  He wasn’t happy about it. In fact, just a few weeks later, as the primaries were about to begin, he would resign. This would leave the Sharpton campaign moneyless, virtually staffless, organizationless, and—as the primaries would show—supportless. The campaign had only one thing.

  A candidate.

  BOOKER T. BELLBOTTOMS

  Of all the details I learned about Al Sharpton while sifting through the alp of stories devoted to him since he bellowed his way to notoriety more than fifteen years ago in New York City, the one that struck me most was this: he was in grade school when he began calling himself “Reverend.” After evincing a precocious aptitude for preaching, Sharpton was “ordained” by his pastor, a precipitate step in his Pentecostal church that required no education, training, or certification.

  Picture him behind a classroom desk, a fat, imperious ten-year-old boy, inscribing his name at the top of an assignment, gripping his pencil mightily, practicing the dips and curves of his new honorific. Picture him standing his ground before a surprised teacher, or proclaiming his sudden eminence to the other children on the playground, where he excels at none of the contests that earn respect in a boy’s world. These are the images that came to mind last June, when I saw Sharpton in person for the first time, a fifty-year-old man arriving to give a speech at a political conference at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, in Washington.

  He briskly and commandingly crossed the lobby, head up, eyes forward, heedless of
the fuss stirred by his arrival—camera lights, shouts of “Reverend!” and the sudden coalescence of a small mob. Sharpton in person is theatrically aloof. “Rev” (as he is called by his intimates) is said to have lost a hundred pounds in recent years; he once topped 300, and favored pastel leisure suits and a heavy gold cross around his neck. He is still a long way from passing through the eye of a needle. When he walks, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, he leads with belly. These days the gold cross is gone, and he’s attired in conservative, well-tailored suits. His famous helmet of conked hair, which used to descend in stiffly contoured waves to his shoulders, is graying now, and has been trimmed to form a bob that protrudes a good six inches from the back of his head, a ballast for the great round expanse of his outthrust jowls and chin.

  He was late. He is often late.

  Awaiting his arrival in the hotel ballroom was an army of supporters: leftist movers and shakers; Winnebago-hipped block captains with megaphone voices; tangle-haired young anarchists with tattooed necks and bejeweled noses; gray-stubbled men with thinning ponytails in patched jeans and T-shirts that read IMPEACH BUSH and SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT; big-armed unionists fed up with corporate power; confrontational lesbians; New Age grandmas; militant vegans; eco-guerrillas; international antiglobalists; fierce pacifists—in other words, the Democratic Leadership Council’s nightmare, an agglomeration of fringe believers 1,500 strong from all over America, ready to act up in almost as many directions, any one of them guaranteed to make your average suburban middle-class white voter hastily lock the doors of her car. But these were the kind of people who live their politics, who really work: organizing, marching, phoning, fund-raising, cajoling. Assembled here for a morning session of the Take Back America conference, planned by the Campaign for America’s Future, they were venting, plotting, and enjoying a three-day carnival of leftist affirmation, all calculated to drag the stubborn centrist donkey bequeathed to them by Bill Clinton back into the turbulent world of “progressivism” (the word “liberal” having been jettisoned after years of conservative abuse). If anybody could think boldly enough to imagine Al Sharpton in the Oval Office, it was the people in this crowd.

  Six of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates were scheduled to address this conference in person, but for most of the field the event was dangerous. A mere nod in the direction of gay marriage or taxpayer-funded universal health care, for instance, would be ballot-box suicide. Of the then front-runners, the centrist candidates Joe Lieberman and Bob Graham had decided to avoid the event altogether, and Dick Gephardt had opted to speak from an antiseptic distance, by video. But what did Sharpton have to lose? It would take a strenuous act of God for him to win anything. Most people regarded him as a troublemaker and a demagogue, if not a buffoon. After swimming for more than fifteen years in Manhattan’s media shark tank, Sharpton was both shameless and resilient; he had survived gaffes, betrayals, and attacks from all comers, including a would-be assassin who stabbed him in 1991. ( Jesse Jackson unkindly commented that Sharpton’s life was spared because the blade was so short and the flab so thick.) No, this candidate was damage-proof.

  Outrage was Sharpton’s milieu. He came wrapped in such a blinding aura of controversy that he could blithely make faux pas that would be disastrous for other candidates. For Sharpton this Take Back America crowd was pure opportunity. His root political argument, the rhetorical centerpiece of his campaign, was that over the past fifteen years the party had drifted disastrously from its ideals in its search for mainstream voters; it had been co-opted by centrists to the point that “real” Democrats—the folks in that ballroom—had been nearly pushed off the playing field. Two terms of Bill Clinton aping the conservatives, and then…what? The party had lost the White House and Congress. It had become worse than powerless; it had become purposeless. On this sunny morning in June he planned to meet precisely the people who could help him change that. He needed people and he needed money. He still hadn’t raised enough to qualify for federal matching funds, and he would need some kind of organization in the primary states, if only to get his voters to the polls. If ever there was a crowd he needed to work, this was it.

  But Sharpton doesn’t work crowds. He makes appearances.

  His entourage that morning consisted of Watkins, dressed in black and looking typically glum. Together they camped in a large side room across the corridor from the ballroom. Sharpton paced in the empty space, hands clasped behind his back, gathering his thoughts for the performance, while Watkins shooed away the press and the curious. “Not now,” he said sternly.

  Sharpton entered the hall to a standing ovation. He moved with ease and purpose, seizing the energy in the room and revving it higher. He quickly showed how good he is at the fine political art of preaching to the choir. “Too many of us have been intimidated into apologizing for being right!” he said. Of the party’s shift to the right, he said, “Not only is it morally wrong and politically cheap, but it doesn’t even work!” Loud cheering. “We’re coming out of a war that we still don’t know why we went in,” he said. “Where are the weapons that the secretary of state brought evidence of before the UN?…If you could find the weapons before the war, how come you can’t reveal the weapons now?”

  Laughter and cheering. He turned his full-throated scorn on President Bush: “He can’t find [bin Laden]. He can’t find [Saddam]. We have come out of a war with weapons we can’t find. Everything Bush has gone after, he can’t find. I shouldn’t be surprised, because I can’t find the votes in Florida that made him the president in the first place.” Wild cheering and laughter. There are “too many leaders of the party who have been elephants running around with donkey jackets on,” he said. “And they think we don’t know what they are!” Laughter and applause. His speech jumped lightly from topic to topic, punch line to punch line, all stand-up comedy and no substance, but well honed and full of tested material. “Don’t get confused; they may be the Christian right, but we’re right Christians.” Laughter and applause. “George Bush is talking about Iraq being our fifty-first state; well, I say, what about the fifty states that you already occupy?” Cheers. Sharpton summarized his vision for his campaign: “I’m not asking for your help now; I’ve always been there. We can’t win unless we build a movement. We’ve got to go to the streets, go door-to-door, get the disaffected, the disenfranchised. We’ve got to get America back so we can take America back!” Then his voice suddenly dropped to a hoarse whisper. “My grandmother is from Alabama. And one time I asked her how to handle a donkey. She said, ‘Well, a donkey is stubborn…but if you slap the donkey, you can make the donkey respond.’…I’m not here being divisive; I’m trying to slap this donkey!” More laughter and cheering. “If I can wake this donkey up, it will kick George Bush out of the White House!”

  The finish left them still standing and cheering wildly. But instead of staying to shake hands, to move from table to table, to take names and phone numbers, to marshal some of this excitement for that “door-to-door” movement he had envisioned, Sharpton abruptly strode from the ballroom and the hotel. Those inspired to support his candidacy were left to fend for themselves. There was no Sharpton campaign outreach or follow-up. Lloyd Hart, an effusive and somewhat easily impressed activist from Martha’s Vineyard, who had been swept off his feet by the speech (“I was amazed by his substantive grasp of policy!”), chased after the candidate. He wanted to corral him for a TV interview and to share an idea he had for raising money. Watkins tried to shoo him away, but Hart was persistent: he got his interview and he managed to leave his name and phone number. He was the only one who did. Sharpton was gone minutes after finishing his speech. He had enlivened, entertained, and even inspired some people, but when he left, all of that energy went with him.

  The Take Back America conference was in Washington for three days, but Sharpton’s appearance was the only effort there from his campaign.

  As colorful, quotable, and provocative as he is, Sharpt
on is a lousy campaigner. A self-proclaimed man of the people, he doesn’t appear to have much time for actual human beings. Writers enjoy writing about him because he’s fun, unpredictable, and unafraid of being flamboyantly wrong. Cameras and crowds respond to him because he comes fully to life before an audience, his low growl blossoming into an orotund baritone. He lives for his moments onstage. But one-on-one it’s as if he isn’t there. A skillful politician working a crowd will make each three-second handshake seem like a deep and permanent connection. When Sharpton meets people, he tends to stare off into space. If his cell phone rings in the middle of a conversation, he’ll abruptly walk away and take the call—more important business. When strangers approach, Sharpton’s first instinct is to escape.

  He is disorganized and inconsiderate. It is not unusual for him to simply not show up for a scheduled event. In Los Angeles in July he failed to appear after scores of people had gathered for a planned campaign stop at a soul-food restaurant. In Denver in August he stood up a panel discussion titled “Blacks in Government.” He abandoned two scheduled events in Wilmington, Delaware, one morning in September when he decided at the last minute, and without informing anyone, to travel to Tennessee instead. About a thousand people were gathered to see him last fall at Friendship United Methodist Church, in Nesmith, South Carolina, a state where in February he would face his most critical primary test. He never appeared. In the spirit of Christian forgiveness, Pastor Leonard Huggins rescheduled the event, and this time the candidate came; but the crowd was only about a tenth the size it had been before. Sharpton pulled out all the stops in his speech anyway. Afterward, according to the Washington Post reporter Hanna Rosin, he accepted donations (a “love offering”) from the audience but stayed aloof from the people who had come to see him, eating lunch on a dais with the pastor and church elders, speaking briefly to reporters, and then exiting “out the side door.”