Longtime D.C. Council member Jim Graham died last week at 71. He started his career as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. He ended it as a shill for a Petworth strip club.
There may well have been more to Jim Graham; there was certainly a lot less. His obituaries so far have hewn to the image that he himself worked hard to cultivate: pioneering civic leader from a time when being “openly” gay was a transgressive act, hyper-vigilant ward boss, a “colorful” figure right down to his bowties and tortoise-shell glasses.
It’s true that Graham led the Walker-Whitman clinic here in D.C. during the worst years of the plague of AIDS; it was also true that when he left it the clinic’s finances were in shambles. It’s true that he was among the first openly gay politicians to win an election; it’s also true that he was the second — behind Republican David Catania. (Yes, D.C. has long been a gay Mecca; but it’s also long been a gay conservative Mecca.) It’s true that Graham prided himself on his rapid response to constituent needs; it’s also true that he was an earmark artist par excellence who didn’t blush when his colleagues coined and gleefully circulated the word “Graham-standing” as a synonym for demagoguery.
All of the foregoing might well be chalked up to the inevitable contradictions from the long littleness of life (or, if you’re particularly grumpy, to what Phil Ochs famously described as liberalism’s “lesson in safe logic”). Graham himself worked hard to cultivate his foppish mien and didn’t mind being considered slightly absurd.
The problem is, the silliness concealed something sinister. When Graham’s chief of staff got caught shaking down cabbies for bribes, for instance, Graham lied baldly and promiscuously, denying any knowledge of anything, ever.
His darkest chapter came near the end of his political career. Graham had spent years on the board of D.C.’s publicly subsidized Metro rail system (years, we know now, when the system was rotting to its core). When D.C. took steps to rid itself of its corrupt and compromised lottery program, Graham tried to rig bids in two places by demanding that the winner of the new lottery bid give up a separate contract he had with Metro. It was tacky even by D.C.’s standards.
It got worse. The D.C. contracting official who oversaw the lottery bid, Eric Payne, a former star in the Clinton administration, refused to knuckle under to Graham’s demands. Payne swiftly learned just what happened when Graham’s genial smile faded and the eyes behind those tortoise-shell glasses darkened. Payne was unceremoniously demoted and then fired, and spent a decade in exile. Literally: Payne and his family were evicted from their home and his wife had two miscarriages from all the stress. The only job he could find took him and his family to Saudi Arabia.
It took nearly 10 years of litigation, but Payne was finally vindicated and taxpayers have now handed over $3.5 million to make him whole. I have it on good authority that Payne’s first deposit was made on the same day that Graham died. So the Fates, at least, have a sense of humor.
Time passes all of us by and few of us can rise to any occasion, let alone all of them. But when Jim Graham lies in state at D.C.’s city hall this week, he deserves to be remembered for more than just being “colorful.”
Bill Myers lives and works in Washington, DC. Email him at [email protected]. He tweets from @billcaphill.
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