Congress Has No Ears For Her Truth

Anyone who talks of Barbara Jordan starts with The Voice. Those great, deep, booming tones filled your soul like a Bach masterpiece thundering from a cathedral organ.

If you were so lucky as to hear Jordan electrify a Democratic convention, you were struck by the same cliche:

“That’s what God must sound like.”

If true, the deity must be a busty, righteous black woman from Texas who talks in the cadences of a Baptist preacher.

Good enough image for me.

I think Texas columnist Molly Ivins first put the metaphor into print: “If they ever cast the Great God Almighty, they’ll give the part to Barbara Jordan.”

People who can’t forget The Voice at political conventions or Watergate hearings marvel in Old Testament terms, as though Jordan were a female Moses out of Houston’s meanest ward.

Said ex-Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen: “Barbara Jordan speaks from tablets of stone.”

But when Jordan died Wednesday at age 59 of a galaxy of illnesses - pneumonia, leukemia, multiple sclerosis - something beyond her magnificent voice sprang to mind.

I thought what a stranger she would be to the petty nastiness of the U.S. Congress now.

When Jordan was in the House in the mid-‘70s - the first black woman elected from the South - it wasn’t only her Olympian voice that awed people. It was her ferocious insistence that justice isn’t only for the rich and powerful.

Richard Nixon’s troubles were bubbling when Rep. Peter Rodino, D-N.J., assembled the House Judiciary Committee. A few minutes after he had met Jordan, Rodino said, “I’ve got to have that woman on the committee.”

She quickly became its star. She never piled on Nixon personally. She spoke of the Constitution as though it were holy. I still can hear Jordan’s words, precisely enunciated as she had learned from her preacher daddy:

“I am not going to sit here as an idle spectator to the DIM-inution, the SUB-version, the DES-truct-ion of the CON-STI-TUTION.”

When the committee moved to impeach Nixon, Jordan gave the moment closure. Slowly, peering with hooded eyes over her glasses, she said: “‘We the People.’ I thought for many years that somehow George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had left me out by mistake. Now I feel I’m included in ‘We the People.’ My faith in the Constitution is whole …”

Of all the Watergate hearings I covered that hot summer, Jordan’s presence alone sticks in my memory.

Sure, she was a ham who loved the theatrics, the yells, the adulation - “it turns you on.” The country really saw her electricity at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Keynote speeches are forgettable mush, but Jordan stunned New York’s Madison Square Garden into silence with Lincoln’s words, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master …”

We were galvanized, as though Winston Churchill had been reincarnated as a black woman from Texas.

There was a boomlet to make her Jimmy Carter’s running mate. But that moment in the Garden’s smoke and TV lights was Jordan’s zenith.

She left Congress to teach at the University of Texas. She still fired up that mighty voice at the 1988 and 1992 conventions, but times had changed. Jordan was lost in the TV buzz. In her last appearance, she spoke from a wheelchair: “The American dream isn’t dead - but it’s gasping for breath.”

Democrats ignored her, no longer eager for sermons about justice and race from a thundering matriarch.

And now? If Jordan were in Congress, I suspect she’d be an ostracized misfit disgusted by the spitball bickering.

I can imagine Jordan, whose idealism shone like a lighthouse, grimacing because a senator was disgraced for fondling his staffers. Or because a House speaker cleaned up $4 million on a book, then shut down the federal government because he had been dissed on an airplane.

Jordan’s eloquence came from her love of the last word. How she would be repulsed by a Congress where the language sinks to “fag” and “homo,” “fascist” and “Hitler,” where a president is called “a womanizing draft dodger” and acrimony leads to fisticuffs.

As a Watergate veteran, she’d be amazed at an Arkansas land deal and a first lady’s truthfulness blazing into a major scandal.

Above all, Jordan would be appalled by 1996 politicians’ hellbent drive to cushion corporate welfare while hurting the poor, the old, the powerless.

“She was always on the side of people who didn’t get a fair break,” said Ivins.

Oh, sure, were Jordan in Congress now, she’d be making angry speeches. She’d be fierce and eloquent, denouncing young Republican bean counters, defending the poor like a megaphone from heaven.

But nobody would be listening. People would shrug and snicker.

Face it: Barbara Jordan’s voice - those booming phrases that gloried in the Constitution, brought down a president and thrilled the convention mobs - is a song from our past.

We have tuned out its spirit. But oh my, what a voice we have lost.

xxxx