Seen and Unseen

Growing up, I didn’t understand how important my father was until I was eight years old. Next door, the Dad in the family was a dentist, the Dad in the family across the street had a dry cleaning store, and next door to them, the Dad was a conductor on the New York Central Railroad. And we kids all played in the street every day.

But I knew my father had a very different job: He had to work on Sundays, talking to thousands of friends in church. And for four months of the year, he commuted to Washington, DC, to work there. (Those days, Congress was only in session from mid-January to May, when it became hot; that changed when the Capitol was air conditioned. The day they turned on the AC, David Brinkley ended that night’s Huntley-Brinkley report on NBC by saying, “Lock up your daughters; Congress will now be in session year ‘round.” My father, reaching to turn off the TV, said, “He’s right.”)

My first clue to Dad’s importance was in April of 1955, when he made his first and only trip to Asia. He showed me on the globe in his home office where he was going: Indonesia. I don’t believe I had ever heard of Indonesia, let alone realized that it was a huge country with a large population.

His destination was Bandung in West Java, to the conference of non-aligned nations, African and Asian countries representing a majority of the world’s population. Dad said the State Department didn’t want him to go, because the entire conference agenda would be to bash the United States. But he told me, “Ike said it was OK – but don’t tell anyone.” He could not go as an official representative of the U.S. So instead, he said, he would pay his own way (was that a wink?) and attend as… a journalist. He obtained press credentials and even filed a few stories for Black newspapers, easy work for Dad, as he had owned and edited a weekly newspaper, The People’s Voice, also known just as The Voice (this was years before the Village Voice).

Once he made it clear he was going, he told me, the CIA gave him a tiny camera, because the agency didn’t have any good pictures of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, with whom he was going to meet. After he returned to the U.S., he said, he was going to give the agency the films but keep the camera and tell the CIA he had lost it. Which is exactly what he did.

(PS: I still have the camera: After returning from Asia, my father accidentally dropped it while we were fishing, and it slid into the ocean. I jumped over the side of the boat and swam down to the camera as it was floating toward the bottom, grabbed it and went back to the surface. My father thought the camera was ruined by the salt water, and he gave it to me as a souvenir. When we were back in New York, I took the camera down to a shop on 14^th Street, where, for five dollars, they cleaned it, and it was good as new. It worked for more than 40 years, until the “clutch” that advanced the tiny film broke. Perhaps most memorable was my use of the camera in the Soviet Union; the Soviets searched my bags looking for anything incriminating, and if they had found it – or the four 50-exposure rolls of film I had shot – I would have been Moscow’s guest for an extended visit. But they never searched where the camera and film were: in my coat pocket. I always wondered for whom I would have been exchanged in a spy swap. But more of that later.)

Back to April of 1955, and my father’s return to the U.S. I was allowed to stay up late to watch the eleven o’clock news because he might be included in the broadcast. And indeed he was:

We were watching channel four, where NBC’s local anchor was the pompous and much parodied John K. M. McCaffery, who also hosted TV game shows. Every night he began his broadcast by saying, “What kind of day has it been? It’s been a day when. . .” and he would plunge into his lead story. That night, he began, “What kind of day has it been? It’s been a day when Adam Clayton Powell returned to Washington to a hero’s welcome…”

Wait, what? Dad is at the beginning of the newscast? Even at age eight, I knew that was a big deal.

And so it was: To the surprise of most of Washington, Dad had taken on America’s critics at the conference, arguing publicly with heads of state from Beijing, New Delhi and other Asian and African capitals. In one film clip from Bandung, he said that the USSR was as racist as the US, but unlike the USSR, Americans were tackling and trying to change racist beliefs and behavior.

So now I knew my family was different: The other Dads weren’t on the eleven o’clock news. That was almost as good as being the only Brooklyn Dodgers fan on the block when they won the World Series, also in 1955; I made a point of wearing my Dodgers jacket for weeks. But Dad always said no one was better than anyone else, so I never made a point of talking about what he had done. It would have been, to use a word Indian industrialist and philanthropist Ratan Tata used exquisitely in a conversation with me on a very similar subject, unseemly. (More of that later.)

From my perspective, Washington DC was a place I only visited for spring vacation. Growing up, when I was there, spent most of my time in my father’s office, where they put me to work addressing envelopes. There was an enormous mountain of mail every day, and not just from Harlem: People all over the country were writing, some asking for help, others merely offering support. Dad was not just the Congressman from Harlem; I could see from the mail that he was the Congressman from Black America.

My assignment was to type the envelopes for press releases. Most went to newspapers - New York City papers, of course, especially the tabloids, the Daily News and the New York Mirror, read by far more of his constituents than the New York Times. Most important of all, though, were the Black Press, national publications including Jet and Ebony and the big city newspapers, the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Afro American and of course Harlem’s Amsterdam News. There were more, many in the National Press building, but we sent so many press releases to the local papers and the Black Press across the country that I soon memorized their addresses. And that is also how I learned to type, on the big electric typewriters in Dad’s Washington office. For typing envelopes, he gave me 25 cents a week. (Did that make me a relative on the payroll?)

He also gave me a Hermes portable typewriter, a “Rocket,” very small and lightweight. I took it everywhere and it lasted through college. I may still have it somewhere; the old classic Rockets are still much in demand, fetching $200 or more on eBay.

There were also the plain white envelopes. One day when I was sitting in the office with my father, another Congressman burst in holding a plain white envelope. He opened it and partially withdrew a bunch of $100 bills, bragging about how much he had just been paid. “How many?” asked Dad. He held up five fingers. “Good work, my man,” my father said. And then he left.

“What was that about?” I asked. “One of his constituents wanted to get her son out of the Marines.” “But why does he do that? Why take her money? His family is really rich!” Dad just shrugged.

That was the only time I saw it in person, but I often heard talk of the plain white envelopes. And there was a rumor that my father kept track of payoffs to different Congressmen, and who did what for how much, recording it all in a loose-leaf notebook. I never saw the notebook, but his staff said it was in his office safe, with a combination only Dad knew. Whether the notebook was real or not, the rumor was enough to carry a lot of weight. There will be more about that notebook in a few decades; keep reading.

Dad didn’t think many Congressmen were that bright, calling them “my esteemed colleagues” – at least in public. In private, he called some of them “slim hicks.” But there were a few, on both sides of the aisle, and he especially liked, including Sam Rayburn, the longtime Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic leader in the Senate, both from Texas. In the 1960 election, when Kennedy and Nixon were the candidates, my father loved telling stories about how both JFK and Nixon arrived in Congress after he had, and that he had schooled them both, telling them how things really worked on Capitol Hill.

Sometimes other Members came to my father for advice. In 1973, Barbara Jordan arrived in Congress, representing Houston, Texas, and one of the first two African Americans elected from the old Confederacy (the other was Andrew Young, elected the same year from Georgia). She came to my father’s office and asked for tips on how to play the DC game.

There are 535 members of the House and Senate, he began, and each one wants to be a star. To stand out, you need a gimmick. One thing you have, even without any seniority, is your voice. Make that your trademark.

And she did. Jordan’s deep, resonant voice made her a fixture, especially on television, and she was prominent in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on Watergate just months later.

“What’s your gimmick?” Jordan asked my father.

“Oh, I’m smart.”

For me, it wasn’t all work and sightseeing: There were other kids in the hallways, and my best childhood friend was the daughter of Congressman Hale Boggs from Louisiana, a good friend and sometimes secret ally for my father. She was a few years older than me, Corinne Boggs, nicknamed Cokie. You may know her by her married name, Cokie Roberts. Years later, Cokie reminded me of our days roaming the marble halls of what was then called the Old House Office Building (now the Cannon Building) and that she had nicknamed the two of us “the Hill Brats.”

Decades later, when I was at CBS News, Cokie called and told me she and her husband, Steve, were going to Athens, where Steve would be based for the New York Times. CBS needed a stringer in Athens, so I said she could go, try out and see how it all worked, starting with radio. She was terrific. One night, she even had a story on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite (“and Cokie Roberts in Athens”) and then her career took off.

P.S. A decade after that, Cokie was at National Public Radio, and she called me in the middle of the night urging me to accept NPR’s offer to serve as the network’s first ever Vice President for News and Information programming. Even though I was then living on the West Coast, NPR CEO Doug Bennet assured me, “We can work this out,” and I finally accepted the offer, commuting every week between California and DC (hey, Grant Tinker had done that for NBC, I said to myself, so how hard could that be? Besides, United Airlines upgraded me most weeks, so usually I was next to Nancy Pelosi and across the aisle from Barbara Boxer.) But that was decades later; back now to the 1950s:

Sometimes Dad would take me with him to the House of Representatives, stationing me in the Democratic Cloakroom, a Members’ hangout at the back left corner of the House floor as you face the Speaker. The Cloakroom also had a snack bar, but most Members seemed to prefer the hard stuff.

When I was older (ten? twelve?) and the House floor was mostly empty, he would bring me onto the floor. But usually I was watching the proceedings just off the floor, leaning on the brass railing outside of the cloakroom.

Often my father was leaning on the railing, too, scanning the House floor looking for votes. He could count cards, and he could definitely count votes. Later, in the 1960s, after he became Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, he was commended in a letter from President Lyndon Johnson, who wrote that he was the most effective committee chair on Capitol Hill. The reason: Every bill Dad introduced – and he introduced very many – was passed. Fair employment practices. Aid to higher education. They all passed.

As far as I know, no one has written about his tactic that always worked. He had a sports jacket tailored for him that was two sizes too large, and in four inside jacket pockets were as many as four pieces of legislation he wanted to introduce. In his head, Dad would keep track of how many votes he had for each bill. And he never brought any legislation to the floor until he had enough votes to win passage.

Once when I was watching, he was looking left and right around the floor. You look worried, I said. He told me he was three votes short for a key job training bill. He had pretty good Republican support, but southern Democrats were a problem. Looking around the floor, he suddenly smiled and walked down the aisle toward another Congressman. He offered him a cigar, they chatted, and he came back to stand next to me behind the railing.

“Now I’m two votes short.”

Then he identified another Congressman, “my good friend” (sometimes a true friend, sometimes not). And he went out once again onto the floor, returning one cigar less but with another vote.

“Now I’m one vote short.” And this was tough: He couldn’t see anyone he could swing to vote yes.

But then he brightened: “My good friend,” he said, pointing to a southern segregationist. I shook my head. You’ll never get him to vote for anything that benefits Negroes (or “Niggras,” as the segregationists called us). He winked and walked out onto the floor.

The other Congressman refused an offer of a cigar. He kept shaking his head. No way, I thought. But Dad returned to my spot behind the railing, and said, “Deal.” Really? I was skeptical. That guy is going to vote for this bill? “No,” Dad replied, “but he has agreed to go off the floor.”

And with that he strode down the aisle toward the House Speaker, demanding attention.

“Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce H.R. [number], and I call for an immediate vote!”

It passed by one vote.

What most people forget is that Education and Labor was not my father’s first chairmanship. Blocked for years from becoming chair of Education and Labor by its chairman, Graham Barden of North Carolina, Dad advanced in his other committee assignment, the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Eventually he had enough seniority to become chairman of a subcommittee, Mines and Mining.

Back in Harlem, I remember reporters asking my father about his new post. He claimed ignorance, saying the only mines he knew were the IRT subway tunnels under Lenox Avenue. The reporters all laughed.

But that wasn’t exactly true: His father, my grandfather, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., before becoming a Baptist minster, worked as a coal miner in West Virginia and then in Renville, Ohio (Mr. Ren owned the mine). My grandfather wrote about those years in his autobiography, Against the Tide. So my father had grown up listening to accounts of mining coal – and helping to organize miners.

With that background, Dad wrote the first national legislation addressing Black Lung, a disease that afflicted many coal miners. And he surprised his colleagues by becoming an energetic, active chairman. Several times he told me that writing laws seen as “helping disadvantaged white miners was a way of helping Negroes as well.”

Decades later, I met an elderly woman who had worked for John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers, and for one of his successors, Tony Boyle. She told me the word at the UMW headquarters was “Give Powell whatever he wants. He’s one of our best friends.”

Now the news: Dad loved being on television, because it was “the truth.” TV had to show what he actually said. And he knew what television wanted and needed, and he was more than happy to deliver. My favorite example was one afternoon when we were leaving the House of Representatives, and he paused at the top of the steps leading down to the street.

“Why is he still here?” asked Dad, looking at a reporter and camera crew at the bottom of the steps. “He’s almost past his deadline.” My father knew how long it would take for the crew to get back to the office – M Street for CBS, Nebraska Avenue for NBC – and then how long it would take to develop and edit the black and white film (color and videotape came years later).

“What are you going to do?” I asked. Dad replied, “I’m going to give him a story.” Then we started walking down the steps. Getting closer, we saw the familiar CBS eye logo on the reporter’s microphone, and Dad walked up to him.

“My man, I’m going to give you an exclusive!” The camera rolled, and the reporter positioned his microphone in front of Dad. “Tomorrow, I am going to introduce…” and he gave him a perfect 30-second description of the bill he planned to introduce the next day, and how many people it would affect.

The reporter thanked my father, then he and the crew packed up, jumped in their car and sped off. Later we watched on TV, and of course the film made the evening news.

Then there was the social life. Dinner with friends and a friendly competition of who made the best collard greens. White House events were too late for me, but I could go with him to embassy receptions early in the evening. My father tried to go to each country’s independence day celebration, which of course featured elaborate buffets; he later told me that after the first embassy reception I attended, I had said, “This is better than food!”

In my social life, I started going out later with friends my age, most of them Black, and I overheard one girl telling another I was “nice.” Nice? I thought, Me? Nice? What must they expect on dates? Then there was a night that cemented in DC a reputation I already had in New York. It was icy and sleet was pouring down. A friend was driving, and next to him was his date; I was in the back seat with mine. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a car running a red light, sliding on the ice and speeding toward us. I was on the right side of the car, where impact was imminent. I enveloped the girl next to me to shield her face from the shattered glass and kept talking, calmly, so she would not be alarmed. The car did indeed slam into us, sending our car spinning. When the car stopped, my date looked at me and asked how I could be so calm. There was no point in becoming alarmed, I replied, and my main task was to keep her safe and calm. She looked at me and said something along the lines of “that’s weird.”

By then I had the reputation in school in New York of being (a) “the brain” (that’s what the girls kept calling me), and (b) phlegmatic, utter unflappable. One classmate even detonated a thermite bomb next to me to try to get a reaction; I paused a second or two and then chastised him for engaging in such a dangerous prank. Years later I met a school friend who said there was a new TV series about me, called “Star Trek.” I have nothing I common with Captain Kirk, I replied. No, she said, “You’re the science officer. You’re Spock.”

But back to Washington DC: Dad also took me along when he visited Ike and then JFK in the Oval Office. Eisenhower was friendly, incredibly impressive - and direct, no nonsense. In 1956 Dad bucked the Democratic Party and supported Eisenhower because, he said, Adlai Stevenson is a good man but he is controlled by the southern segregationists. Ike would be better for civil rights. (Go look at the results: the “Negro” vote went Republican in numbers that would be incredible today.)

To let them work together to make progress on civil rights, Ike and Dad had a back channel that was invisible to the outside world - and that preserved their deniability if anything of what they were doing became public. His name was Maxwell Rabb, assistant to the President who later would be named by President Reagan to be America’s Ambassador to Italy. I personally heard many of the telephone calls my father made to “Max,” and how Dad could point to actions Ike had taken to advance civil rights – “but don’t tell anyone.”

(Shortly before he died, Charles Rangel, who succeeded my father as Harlem’s Congressman, called me to say he had just met Rabb. “Is all this stuff true??” Charlie asked. I told him it was.)

The Democratic Party was furious, of course, that Dad supported Ike. They spent a great deal of money to try to defeat him in the 1958 primary in his Congressional district. When that election was held, I was in Paris with my mother; in those days you could not book a transatlantic phone call easily, so on election night, my father sent Mom a telegram with a very short message: “The people won, three to one.”

Back to the Oval Office: Again, I thought Ike was impressive. He had held the coalition together that had staged the largest naval invasion in human history, which led to the allied victory and kept 20th century history from going the wrong way. (To see what the wrong way would have been, watch “The Man in the High Castle” on Amazon or Netflix, depicting a Nazi victory in World War 2 and a United States occupied by Germany and Japan. It could have happened.)

The rules, I was told, were that visitors do not repeat what Presidents of the United States say in the Oval Office. How quaint: Today everyone runs to the New York Times and writes a tell-all book. But those were the rules I was told, so I will not repeat what Ike told me about history and how I should plan my future (my father hoped I would go to West Point, but more of that later).

Years later, visiting President Kennedy in the Oval Office was very different. He remembered (or had good staff work to remind him) that he and I had met years earlier on the SS United States, when he and I were both confined to adjacent staterooms. We were both ill, and he gave me chocolate ice cream in exchange for my father’s Cuban cigars, a trade that my father thought was quite fair. My hope is that JFK would forgive my violating the rule above by quoting his Oval Office advice to me about how I should plan my future:

“Remember to get good grades, and make a lot of money, so you can support your father in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.”

But our lifestyle in Washington DC was pretty modest: We had a tiny house – actually two tiny houses – in what my father affectionately called “my slum.” It was in Gessford Court, one of the most rundown neighborhoods in the District. He bought an entire row of houses, gutted them, renovated them and kept two for himself. We lived in one, and he rented the other to a friend, a taxi driver. Dad sold the other houses for, if memory serves, $1,500 each.

Dad loved it because there was no way any white visitors, including reporters, would venture into the neighborhood. But he could hold meetings there, knowing no one would see who was coming or going. One that I witnessed was a quick meting with two members of the Senate to hammer out some language for a civil rights bill that had to pass both houses.

My father was many things, but gourmet chef was not one of them. Dinner was often hamburgers, spinach and ice cream, which was fine with me. But with the two Senators, as we set up our usual dinner arrangement – folding chairs and folding card tables – my father opened the oven and called out to the three of us, OK, who wants the Salisbury steak, who wants the fried chicken and… Yes, he had four Swanson TV dinners in the oven. He and the Senators also split a bottle of scotch; I think I had milk. Our visitors were Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater. The bill passed.

But we did have one unexpected visitor. One morning, shortly we set off in the Jaguar for the House office building, Dad remembered he had forgotten something, so he turned around, and we drove back to Gessford Court. Turning the corner, I thought I saw a bird in the corner of the downstairs window. But getting closer, I saw it was not a bird: Someone had punched a hole through the window.

“Oh, God,” my father said. He knew what had happened.

When we finally reached Dad’s office, he walked through the door and said, “Get J. Edgar Hoover on the phone.” A few minutes later, one of the secretaries said, “Mr. Hoover is on the line,” and my father punched a button and put him on the speaker, so I and others could hear.

“J. Edgar, my man. Your boys were at the house this morning.”

“Yes, Congressman, we had a report of a threat to your life that we had to check out.”

“I keep telling you, my man, the key is under the mat. Tell your boys that don’t have to break in.”

Click.

And that I how I learned the FBI was breaking into our homes in Washington and New York and tapping our phones. For our protection, of course.

My last visit to the House of Representatives was in January, 1967, when the House voted to exclude my father from Congress. Later it was overturned by the Supreme Court, but on that day, as my father said as we walked down the steps from the House of Representatives, “It means your father is not a Congressman any more.”

I had watched the vote from the House Radio TV Gallery, courtesy of my three summers as an intern at CBS News, and I was sitting with CBS Chief Congressional correspondent Roger Mudd. Many viewed Roger as prickly, and maybe he was, but he really knew what was going on: On another occasion, he showed me copy fresh from his typewriter and asked, “What do you think?” I replied that both he and I knew what had really happened in the House that day, and what the deal was that enabled that bill to pass. He looked at me incredulously. “Of course. But I can’t say that on the air! I’d lose all of my sources.” Ah, I thought, of course….

The exclusion vote was expected to be close, but it wasn’t: Dad lost 307 to 116, and many of his best friends voted against him.

After the vote, I ran down from the Radio-TV Gallery and met my father as he walked off the floor through the inner lobby. Congressmen were walking by him and stuffing pieces of paper into his jacket pocket.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he replied.

We kept walking, out the door and across the street. He started to fish the pieces of paper out of his pocket, and showed them to me.

“We’re with you, Adam” said one. They were from his friends who had voted against him. He crumpled them up with disgust and threw them in a trash can, and we walked back to the office.

Now, you may remember the rumor of a black loose-leaf notebook with the record of the cash bribes? Members of his staff were convinced he had it, secured in an inner safe inside of the walk-in safe each Congressman had. “Release the book!” one shouted. Others joined in, yes, release the notebook. Dad shook his head. “This is not the moment.” He saw what was coming: he would seek a remedy from the U.S. Supreme Court.

My one and only visit to the Supreme Court while it as in session was for the argument of Dad’s case at the Court. I started to take notes, but a guard walked over and told me that was not allowed. You can read all about it, so I have little to add, except that he and his law team thought it had gone extremely well.

Later we learned from one of the Court clerks, in a quite improper breach of Court rules, that Chief Justice Warren was trying to make the ruling in Dad’s favor unanimous. Not quite: Justice Stewart wrote that the case was moot, because by then Dad had run again, won a sweeping and decisive election victory, and had been seated. Stewart’s was the only dissent.

A final note, about our tiny houses: A few years ago, the Washington Post did a story about Gessford Court, and one of the residents told them Adam Clayton Powell used to own all of the houses. So the Post reporter contacted me, and I visited our house at Gessford Court. Today that block is in the trendy Eastern Market district, and the street outside of those houses is lined with BMWs and Mercedes. The one house I entered had been one of ours, and it had not been renovated since Dad owned it.

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