Rooting for Rangel

The one time I met Charles Rangel I took an immediate liking to him. The introduction had been set up by the district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, who felt the chairman of Ways and Means was someone a new newspaper editor in town should know. So a breakfast was set up at the Carlyle. Mr. Morgenthau and I got there first, and at the appointed hour, Mr. Rangel joined us in the booth. As he settled in, I nodded a greeting and said, “Good morning, chairman, how are you this morning?”Mr. Rangel looked at me and said: “Back in Korea, I was lying in an icey 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, Mr. 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 hasn’t had many bad days since, either.So I said that I was lying in the mud of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, with enemy tracers snapping overhead and hand grenades going off, when I, too, swore that if I got out alive, I’d walk the straight and narrow. And I haven’t had many bad days, either. Then the three of us had an appreciative chuckle and settled down to one of the most enjoyable breakfasts I can remember.Later I told my colleagues that one of the things I enjoyed about Mr. Rangel was that he didn’t covet anything. One often finds in politicians that they are angling for the next opening, a chance, say, to step up to senator or governor or president. Or a job in the private sector. But Mr. Rangel wasn’t going to run for the senate. He wasn’t maneuvering for speaker. He had the job he wanted, and it was clear that he loved it.I’ve been reflecting on that encounter since the flurry of stories about Mr. Rangel’s rent-controlled apartments and his fund-raising for City College. The rent-control story strikes me as one of those only-in-America scandals. Only in America could a hue be raised over the fact that the man who is arguably the most powerful figure in the legislature of the most powerful country in the world is getting a below market rent to live in modest means in the heart of his original constituency with the woman he’s been married to for more than four decades. In Europe, they’d have given him a castle and a realm.The flap over his fund-raising for City College is more ironical still. It centers on Mr. Rangel’s efforts to help the college establish the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service. The vision for the center, according to City College, is to help prepare students in public administration, “particularly underrepresented minority students” for “leadership positions in public service.” The center would house the archives Mr. Rangel has accumulated over more than 40 years in public life.City College used the word “urgent” to describe the need for the program, citing statistics showing that but 6.5% of senior managers in the federal government are black or African-American and 3.73% are Hispanic. It called the Rangel Center “fully consonant with what City College has done for the past 161 years, as we strive to bring needed talent into all spheres of public and private life.” This is a tradition our immigrant communities understand down to the ground.One thing Mr. Rangel did was to steer public funds to the center. He earmarked $1.9 million for scholarships and internships, and helped gain two grants from the Housing and Urban Development totaling about $700,000. The public money is not for a private institution, as so many of the scandalous earmarks are; rather it is for a public university. None of it goes, either directly or indirectly, to Mr. Rangel.The ethics complaint Mr. Rangel has asked for would look into whether he violated House rules by using Congressional letterhead to write to private individuals — David Rockefeller, for example — to tell them about the Rangel Center and effect an introduction to City College’s leadership. The letters don’t seem to ask for private donations outright, though the implication is certainly there. The worry seems to be that private individuals might feel undue pressure to see such an letter on Congressional letterhead.But even if Mr. Rangel had written to Mr. Rockefeller on private letterhead, it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Rockefeller would have failed to realize that it was the same Mr. Rangel who heads the Ways and Means Committee. And what is the logic of faulting a public official for aiding a public institution in raising private capital?None of the liberal papers would object if the government used its taxing power to force people to pay. So what in the world can be wrong with seeking to cajole philanthropists to do so voluntarily? My own views on policy may be different from Mr. Rangel’s, to put it mildly. But if we live in a time when our young people need heroes, whose name would be better than his over on the lintels of a school of public service in the heart of Harlem?——–* An account of what happened near Kunu-ri, how Mr. Rangel led a group of GIs through enemy lines in the midst of a fierce battle at 26 below zero, is included in the congressman’s memoir, ” . . . And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since.” He was decorated for valor.

Rooting for Rangel

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