Mayor Willie Herenton‘s “press briefing” with the
assembled local media last Thursday can fairly be called a bull session — in
more senses of the term than one.
Though the news media themselves were among the targets of Herenton’s
j”accuse– along with federal law enforcement and the local business
establishment – the media members who sat in the Hall of Mayors for upwards of
an hour with the mayor would acknowledge among themselves later on that they
never had a better time.
For all his impassioned accusations of a serious conspiracy to bring him down,
Herenton was in high good humor – a case in point being his implied threat, at
the very end of his discourse, to run again. “I was thinking of retiring, but I
must be doing something right,” he jested, enjoying the tease as much as the
reporters themselves did.
And there’s the simple fact that Mayor Herenton makes for good copy. Nobody does
it better – whether it’s alleging a sexual blackmail plot against himself
(election season 2007) or declaring himself a major prophet ordained for special
vengeance missions by the Lord (January 1, 2004, and various points thereafter)
or warring against his city council (for much of his fourth term) and the city
school board (at various points from the second through fifth terms) or
challenging a city council member to “step outside” a conference room (Brent
Taylor in 2004) and a former heavyweight champion to step inside a
boxing ring (Joe Frazier in 2006) or dancing a lively two-step in church
that would be memorialized on YouTube or…
But there’s no getting through such a list. And these, after all, are just some
of the latter-day highlights from a public career that goes back for a turbulent
half-century, through extended tenures as mayor, as schools superintendent, as
teaching cadre and principal, and as a youthful Golden Gloves champion who still
boasts, “Once I got my growth, I never got beat.”
For better or for worse, Willie Herenton has become a figure of the first rank
in Memphis political history. Arguably even the pre-eminent figure,
out-shining his historic foils in the Ford family, together or singly, and
rivaling even the great Ed Crump.
The mayor is now engaged in his most audacious effort ever – to revise history
both backwards and forwards. At his Thursday media event, he made the
extraordinary claim that he had never resigned – despite the incontrovertible
and highly public evidence of his mid-March letter formally notifying CAO Keith
McGhee of his intent to resign as of July 31.
Herenton maintained on Thursday that his statement had been
qualified by “conditions” having to do with his opportunity to direct the
affairs of Memphis City Schools, though no such conditions nor any reference to
MCS are contained within his letter. The fact is, for a vital day or two,
Herenton’s interest in the vacant school superintendency had been a matter for
speculation only, along with other hypothetical reasons for his departure.
Ultimately, the mayor made it clear that – the school board willing – he did
indeed want to crown his career of public service by a triumphant return to MCS.
His lobbying of board members and of local CEO’s (whom he prevailed upon to endorse
his candidacy for school superintendent) was an open and obvious affair. The
problem was that, with the singular exception of maverick member Kenneth Whalum
Jr., the board wasn’t willing. Miami educator Kriner Cash,
ungraciously dismissed by Herenton as a “third-rater,” was hired instead.
The result? Herenton began to insist, as he did again on Thursday, that he had
never even sought the school job!
His primary task on Thursday, however, was more pointed. Charging that the
recent federal prosecutions of his former protégé Joseph Lee and others were but
political assaults on blacks in general and himself in particular, Herenton was
clearly organizing his base in advance of a rumored future indictment relating
to city contracts awarded to mayoral associates.
In essence, the mayor was daring the feds, who have just lost two
public-corruption cases in a row, to proceed in the face of a daunting political
scenario he has now prepared in advance. Having altered the past, Herenton has
now gone to work on the future – revising the circumstances of reality in two
directions at once.
The ancient Greeks had a word for that – hubris. You can look it up. In
the lexicon of history, it keeps close company with that well-known biblical
warning about the pride that goeth before a fall.
