When he was elected to Congress in the Democratic landslide year of 1964, John Conyers was a charismatic, 35-year-old Detroit lawyer, an Army veteran of Korea, and one of a handful of African Americans in the House of Representatives. He had served as an aide to Michigan’s veteran Rep. John Dingell and so, when he arrived in Washington, got a plum assignment on the House Judiciary Committee. Great things were expected of him.
Conyers’ long tenure on the Judiciary Committee, including a turn as chairman, meant that he was the only member of Congress to have served on the committee during the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Longevity, in fact, became Conyers’ chief distinction. He was the longest-serving black member of the House and the last member to have served during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. When he died in late October in Detroit, at age 90, he was the sixth-longest-serving member in congressional history.
But his long career ended in resignation and disgrace. In 2015, a member of Conyers’ staff complained that she had been fired because she had rebuffed his advances and was then paid a $27,000 settlement from public funds. Two years later, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, two more women came forward to accuse Conyers of sexual harassment, and in November 2017, the House Ethics Committee launched a formal investigation into other accusations of misconduct. At first, the wagons were circled around him: House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared that Conyers was “an icon” and resisted calls for him to step down. But as other harassment stories and testimonials emerged, Pelosi and then-Speaker Paul Ryan asserted that the charges against Conyers were “credible” and demanded that he quit.
Conyers did resign, but he never admitted to any wrongdoing and always expressed puzzlement at the multiple accusations. This was a familiar reaction. Conyers had promoted and guided the political career of his wife Monica, who was elected to Detroit’s city council in 2005 and briefly served as its president. When, a few years later, she was tried and convicted of bribery, and subsequently served 37 months in prison, her husband was careful to explain that his involvement in her activities was limited and that he had no knowledge of her crimes.
Of course, in a half-century and more in Congress, even the most complacent member leaves a mark. Conyers was one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus and introduced the first bill to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday. A lifelong jazz fan, he promoted federal funding for orchestras and projects. At his prompting in 1987, Congress proclaimed that jazz is “a valuable American treasure.” He also earned a place on Nixon’s famous “enemies list.” Accordingly, while he dismissed the impeachment of Clinton as “denigrating the rule of law” at the time, Conyers regarded the impeachment of Nixon as imperative “to restore … the proper balance of constitutional power.” Some of his old radical proposals are now Democratic orthodoxy: In 1989, he introduced the first bill to study financial reparations for descendants of slaves and in 2003 an Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act.
Yet jogging in place for 53 years took its toll as well. Conyers ran twice for mayor of Detroit, was badly defeated each time, and in later years was partial to conspiracy theories. A reliable critic of American foreign policy during Republican administrations, he was entranced by the Downing Street memo, which purported to reveal a secret U.S.-British agreement on “pretexts” for the Iraq War, and an admirer of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. In 2005, Conyers produced a congressional study that claimed President George W. Bush had been reelected the year before thanks to “voting irregularities” in Ohio. The following year, he issued another report — The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retributions and Cover-ups in the Iraq War — which needs no further description.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
