TAKING A STAND: Rangel busted in ’ 99 during a protest of the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, and announcing he’ll challenge Adam Clayton Powell in ’70 (above, with wife Alma and son Steven). (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
(New York Post)
Charlie Rangel might have been New York’s ultimate political insider, but his rise began a world away in the frozen hills of Korea.
There, the high-school dropout of lowly Army rank found himself at the helm of an all-black infantry unit surrounded by Chinese troops as US forces retreated in the waning months of 1950. Wounded by shrapnel from an enemy shell, Rangel led more than 40 men to safety and returned home with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star on his chest.
Today, Rangel faces a much different battle: 13 devastating ethics charges that threaten to bring his storied career — his transformation from an upstart giant-killer to Harlem power broker — to a humiliating and ignominious end.
Rangel burst on the Harlem political scene as a self-styled reformer in the mid-1960s, determined to shake the grip of the machine bosses that still controlled city politics.
With help from the GI Bill, he put himself through New York University and secured a scholarship to St. John’s Law School. He met and his wife, Alma, on the Savoy Ballroom’s dance floor and claims he fell in love at first sight.
Rangel worked briefly as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District and later joined the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, marching on Selma and Montgomery, Ala., before winning an Assembly seat in 1966.
Manhattan Democratic chairman Keith Wright recalls as a young boy being captivated by Rangel, who worked as an intern in his father’s law office.
“He was this figure that was larger than life,” Wright said. “Charisma was oozing off of him. When he walked into a room, when he walked into a grocery store, into a drugstore, you could tell he was a person of tremendous impact.”
Rangel’s moment of glory came with his David-versus-Goliath defeat of legendary Harlem Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1970.
The young assemblyman had been sent by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to coax Powell out of exile on Bimini. Rangel, annoyed by Powell’s disinterest, suggested he might challenge the aging congressman.
“Do what you have to do, baby,” Powell replied with a patronizing pat on Rangel’s cheek.
Rangel won by 150 votes.
Over the next 40 years, he soared the ranks of the House Democrats and the powerful Ways and Means Committee, helping to establish the Congressional Black Caucus and authoring countless bills and steering untold millions in federal dollars to New York City.
All the while, Rangel’s influence also grew at home, where he and three other prominent black Democrats became known as the Harlem Gang of Four for their lock on black political power in the city.
Rangel sharpened his tone when Republicans took control of the House in the mid-1990s and he became the top-ranking Democrat on Ways and Means.
He passionately defended President Bill Clinton during the impeachment fight and later loudly denounced President George W. Bush’s plans to “privatize” Social Security.
Former US Rep. William Archer, a Texas Republican who led the Ways and Means Committee for much of that era, said that Rangel’s bluster was reserved for the cameras and that the Harlem Democrat was more congenial behind the scenes.
“Publicly, we had a good bit of friction,” Archer said. “Charlie always liked to make rhetorical exchanges in public, and he was very good at it, but privately he was a very enjoyable person to be around.”
The congressman reached his peak with the Democrats’ return to power in 2007.
Ironically, the sun began to set on Rangel’s reign — as well as Harlem’s status as America’s capital of black politics — when Barack Obama won election in 2008 as America’s first black president.
The two Democrats — old-guard Rangel and “change” agent Obama — traded a series of slights and snubs during the presidential primaries.
Rangel backed fellow New Yorker Hillary Rodham Clinton and famously dubbed some Obama comments about Martin Luther King Jr. “absolutely stupid.”
The avalanche of ethics questions that engulfed Rangel during the campaign only encouraged the Harlem-Chicago spat.
Obama’s Democratic National Committee denied the congressman a speaking slot at the party convention in Denver and rejected a $100,000 check from Rangel as “lobbyist money.”
The embattled congressman had long been sidelined by House leadership when he “temporarily” relinquished his cherished Ways and Means perch after the House ethics panel admonished him for improper Caribbean junkets.