The death at 94 this morning of Congressman Charles Rangel reminds us of what we’ve called one of the most enjoyable breakfasts in a long newspaper life. In 2007 we’d received a call from the district attorney of New York County, Bob Morgenthau, to ask whether we’d met the new chairman of Ways and Means. We confessed we hadn’t. Morgenthau replied that if we were going to edit a newspaper in New York, it would be a good idea. 

So a few days later we were haled to the Hotel Carlyle to join the district attorney and his friend for breakfast. When the Ways and Means chairman arrived, we got up to give him the middle seat in our booth. We admired his colorful bow tie, bid him a good morning, and asked him how he was doing. He got organized in his seat, asked the waiter to promote a cup of coffee, and turned to us and replied as follows: 

“Back in Korea, I was lying in an icy ditch. Ninety percent of my unit had been injured or killed, some lying frozen not far away. I prayed I might get out of there alive, and I haven’t had a bad day since.” At that point, Morgenthau said that he’d had a destroyer shot out from under him in World War II and was bobbing around in the Mediterranean when he made his own deal with the Almighty, and he hadn’t had many bad days since, either.

So we said that we were lying in the mud of the U Minh Forest of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. It was pitch black and suddenly enemy tracers started snapping overhead and hand grenades going off, when we, too, swore that if we got out alive, we’d walk the straight and narrow. And we, too, haven’t had many bad days, either. Then the three of us had an appreciative chuckle about good fortune and settled down to a memorable hour and a half breakfast.

We wrote about this in a column called “Rooting for Rangel.” It appeared in the Sun in 2008, in the early months of a scandal that ultimately got Rangel censured in the House. One thing he was accused of was using his office to help establish a modest center at City College to help boost, among others, minority students to public service. It would be called the “Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service” and house, among other things, his public papers.

It happens that we were way to Rangel’s right. Yet we quickly grasped that he was a brilliant man and could talk tax policy like Shakespeare. Although we never got to know him well personally, it was a newspaperman’s education to hear him talk, and we defended him best we could. One thing we kept thinking during the months of scandal is the illogic of faulting a public official for aiding a public institution in raising private capital.

Plus, too, Rangel was happy with his political lot. Others might covet a bigger job. Rangel made it clear that he had, in his post in the most powerful legislature in the Milky Way, the job he wanted. It was a tragedy, in our view, that his fellow Democrats in the House launched an investigation of him. They never found enough to oust him (he served in the House until 2017), but he was censured, standing silently in the well while Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced her colleague.

We thought Rangel deserved better, though the congressman himself suggested, the Times reported, that he took the day of his censure as an exception to his happy boast that he hadn’t had a bad day since Kunu-ri. That’s the town in Korea from which Rangel led a group of fellow GIs through enemy lines in the midst of a fierce battle at 26 degrees below zero. The future chairman of Ways and Means was decorated with the Bronze Star — with V-Device, for valor.