Rangel wrestles with God

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/12/2010 (5431 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON — The condemned man wore a lilac tie and a smile to his execution. He came out of a room marked ATTENDING PHYSICIAN and I asked him, “How do you feel?”

“How do I look?” he asked.

“Not bad,” I replied. This was true: the suit was pressed, the shirt two-toned, and the folded handkerchief perfectly matched the pale pastel cravat. Not bad at all.

“Eighty years old!” the fashion plate said. “The doctor said I’m good to go.”

“What about your head?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” Charlie Rangel said with a chuckle. “I didn’t check with the psychiatrist.”

We were the only two people in a side corridor of the United States Capitol. A sign said, “No Tours Past This Point.” The walls were painted the colour of cream, and on them were 19th-century paintings of American coastal fortifications.

It was a perilous hour for Old Fort Rangel, who has represented the people of Harlem in the House of Representatives for exactly 40 years.

In hours, he would be called before his colleagues to be either censured publicly or reprimanded in writing for 11 counts of unethical conduct that included tax delinquency, failure to report rental income from a villa in the Dominican Republic, acceptance of a free trip to the Caribbean from a charitable foundation, and misuse of official congressional letterhead to solicit money — from Donald Trump! — for a college building that will be named in Rangel’s memory, should he ever actually die.

Censure is considered the most demeaning recourse available to the House, short of outright expulsion or a term at the infamous New York City prison on Riker’s Island, which, fittingly enough, is located in Charlie Rangel’s congressional district.

After all, even Rangel’s prosecutors had accepted his rather far-fetched demurral that he didn’t keep a dime from the deeds in question. (He paid more than $2 million in legal fees in unsuccessful pursuit of absolution.) Furthermore, the unpaid taxes amounted to only $10,800, a mere bag of shells compared to the $29,847 that another New Yorker named Tim Geithner was compelled to repay in 2006, and Geithner is now the Secretary of the Treasury.

Whatever was going to happen to Charlie Rangel on the floor of the House of Representatives, the voters of Harlem didn’t seem to care. They had just sent him back to Congress for his 21st term with 80 per cent of the vote, while more than 60 other Democrats had been ousted from the House in the Great Uprising of 2010.

The man in lilac was in an expansive mood. He invited me to accompany him along the statue-lined corridors of the Capitol, into a padded freight elevator, down to the basement, and onto the clattering, open-roofed little subway car — barely changed since 1909 — that spares America’s soft-bodied Solons from having to hike 300 or 400 metres from their offices to the parliamentary hall.

“On Nov. 30, 1950,” Charlie Rangel said as we rambled along, “I was on the Yalu River in Korea, surrounded by tens of thousands of Chinese. I told God that if He let me out of this mess, I’d never complain about anything again.”

This was the battle of the Ch’ongch’on River, in which Private First Class Rangel of the all-African-American 503rd Field Artillery Battalion led dozens of his men out of the enemy encirclement and won the Purple Heart.

“Hey!” he exclaimed now, in the same pungent New York accent that I was able to shed 40 years ago. “November toidy-it’! Dat’s today!”

The tale resumed.

“God stopped by to see me again a few weeks ago,” Charlie Rangel said. “He says, ‘Remember me? We had that little talk 60 years ago.’

“Then He says, ‘Have you been complainin’?’ I say, ‘Yeah. I think this whole thing is unfair.’ He says, ‘What did I tell you 60 years ago? You better remember it.’|”

We got off the train and Rangel punched the button for an elevator marked “Members Only.”

“Why don’t you retire?” I dared to say.

“My wife asked me the same thing,” Charlie Rangel said with a smile. “She said, ‘Promise me you’ll retire in Florida.’ I told her, “I’ve made a lot of promises in my life, but dat one I’m not keepin’.”

Two days after our conversation, Rangel stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and pleaded for sympathy. A line of supporters echoed him; “Where is the criminal intent?” implored a fellow Democrat. Then the House voted, 333 to 79, for full censure. “In my heart, I truly feel good,” the condemned man made himself say

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.