In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  Archbishop Hannan, it turned out, was not only on the Catholic University of America board, but had the authority to award a scholarship each year to any student of his choice. With his support, I went off to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1978 as a freshman at Catholic U. By then, I had a premonition that I would be a lawyer; but my interest in theater still ran deep, and Father Gilbert Hartke’s program was remarkable, to say the least. Catholic U. operated under a pontifical mandate from the Vatican. It attracted students from more blue-collar and middle-class families than Georgetown University across town, which was run by Jesuits and had many students from comparatively affluent families.

  CUA worked well for me. I liked the fact that classes were comparatively small. Norman Ornstein was my adviser in political science, and remains a friend. He’s now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and go-to interviewee of the media on issues relating to Congress and national politics. The tennis coach at Catholic U was Marty Dowd. (His sister, Maureen Dowd, was a 1973 CUA graduate just breaking in as a reporter with the Washington Star, starting on the road that led to her becoming a New York Times columnist.) I approached Marty Dowd on the tennis court and told him I wanted to join the team.

  “Did you play in high school?” he asked.

  “I’ve been playing for years but I wasn’t on a team,” I shot back.

  “I have been recruiting for months and didn’t see you. You really have to leave.”

  “Look, who’s your best player?”

  He motioned to a guy at the far end of the court.

  “If I beat him, can I be on the team?”

  “Go try,” he challenged.

  I took the set and made the team, though I was the least talented player. Catholic U was small enough to allow someone like me to pursue overlapping interests without the pressure that exists in a major university, where being an athlete was like a full-time job when you weren’t in class or studying. I took voice lessons, became involved in student politics, and got rare insights on Washington through Father Hartke. He was close friends with Helen Hayes, and had been a mentor to John Slattery, who went on to become a star in Mad Men, Will and Grace, Sex and the City, and many other shows.

  I was carrying a full academic load, but when Father Hartke asked me to be his driver, I readily agreed. We would head downtown in a blue station wagon to Duke Zeibert’s restaurant, a hub for power lunches. Father Hartke would make the rounds, glad-handing with guests to raise funds for expenses to send his kids on USO tours, performing for the American military in foreign countries. Bob Hope was a mainstay of USO shows and was close to Father Hartke. In the summer before my junior year I tried out for the USO and was accepted. I was also chosen to join a group of CUA theater students in partnership with a drama program in Poznan, Poland. I taught the history of American musical theater.

  Being a part of entertaining the troops and traveling in Europe was a glorious experience, exposing me for the first time to the architecture, museums, and living legacy of Western civilization. I also saw the boot heel of Communism in Poznan. Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope, was a national hero in the country that the Nazis invaded, and that after the war began a dark night of the soul under Soviet Marxist rule. The communist economy hindered market growth; a secret police had tentacles reaching deep, arresting people who dared to question the system. The regime forced newspapers to toe the party line, and otherwise muzzled free speech. I befriended Polish students, who conveyed their frustration in sometimes cautious ways. I had never felt so strangely privileged.

  The streets were tense. Soldiers with automatic weapons were on patrol. Lech Walęsa, the founder of Solidarity, the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain, was driving a movement for greater freedom, in frequent trouble with authorities, and an inspiration to the Polish people for it. I met students who thirsted for freedom. These kids were smarter than we were, they spoke languages we didn’t know, they sang along to American rock songs in perfect English at Polish nightclubs. They wanted American jeans. It was startling and a bit humbling to realize how much we took for granted, in the abundance of American life and in our basic freedoms, which these kids craved.

  I was accustomed to a robust media, raucous political campaigns, and liberty in artistic expression in drama, film, and literature, all elemental to American identity. I saw how much Polish students my age hungered for these freedoms and how much the repression stunted the country’s growth.

  That summer in Poland, an inner voice kept telling me, You have to go to Auschwitz, where the Nazi death camp had been preserved. I am not sure how that voice originated. New Orleans was home, a place of love for me, yet I had also seen there hatred in a grinding, personal way, including in my father’s struggles to bring African Americans into New Orleans politics and the ugly blowback our family endured.

  I am not sure anyone is ever prepared to visit a museum created by genocide, whether it’s in Germany, Rwanda, or Cambodia. These places exist because of the evil incarnate in our lives, and because a basic morality insists that we remember the victims and that we resolve to work against the poisonous hatred that uses mass murder as a weapon of politics. I was barely twenty when I visited Auschwitz. I clearly remember the suitcases stacked high bearing the names of people gassed to death, men and women and children who never knew that their meager belongings would one day signify their lives. The mounds of hair, hairbrushes, false teeth, prosthetics, the stacks of eyeglasses, they carried a moral weight heavier than anything I had ever felt. To read about the Holocaust from afar is to get a grasp on history and that unspeakable horror. It also allows denial to creep in—That was then, this is now. It is not us. This can never happen in the United States. But when you stand in the very place where so many human beings were murdered in one of the world’s worst atrocities, you wonder how a group of people could become so cruel. And then to see the ovens. My God—the ovens.

  We were taught, growing up, that man was basically good, but that evil is a force that must be resisted. Although you learn about the Holocaust in school, how is a kid supposed to come to grips with the notion that human beings could be so evil as to trap and incinerate millions of their fellow human beings? This is not a rhetorical question; the answer is far from simple. The Nazi ideology dehumanized Jews to such a point that the industry of mass murder relied on numbed obedience. Did Hitler’s volcanic hatred seep like acid into the soul of the Nazis who ran Auschwitz and other death camps? How did mass brainwashing happen? My head felt like it was exploding. The message of the museum, “Never again,” kept reverberating in my mind. We can’t let this happen again.

  And then the realization came that we had done something like this in America with slavery. The systemic evil of Nazism was the closest thing to the Southern society that relied on slave labor. I was torn by the connection between these two realities of history, different in time and place, but with a common root, a warped sense that some people are superior to others, a supremacy trapped in its own frozen heart.

  The Civil War that I rarely thought about had ended more than a century ago, yet in 1979, I knew the seeds of hatred were still fertile back home, the anger and prejudice still alive. I remember my heart growing a bit colder that day, my vision clearer, the proof of man’s capacity to do horrible, wicked things in what my own eyes had seen. Hate unchecked knows no bounds, and when it rises up it must be confronted and rejected or it will spread like an endless cancer. I had not yet thought about why there were no markers of the atrocities committed on our land, in our city. Why no slave ship markers? Why no plantation histories told through the eyes of the enslaved Africans who worked them? That would come to me later.

  Auschwitz laid a foundation, a building block, in my mind, not only for how evil humans can be to one another, but also for how we can reckon with and learn from our past so as to not repeat the same mistakes in the future. That day I prayed that if I was
ever tested by the power of evil, I would have the courage to stand for what was right.

  * * *

  —

  In 1979 President Jimmy Carter offered my father the position of secretary of Housing and Urban Development in his cabinet, and the year and a half Dad spent in Washington overlapped with the middle of my undergraduate years at Catholic University. I was glad to be away from home, experiencing life in a new place. Washington had several major theaters; I was making strides as a double major, in political science and theater. Still, I missed my family, so it was nice to spend time with my father. One night he confided that although running HUD was demanding, “it’s a lot easier than being mayor.” The federal bureaucracy moved at a much slower pace. After meetings with mayors and city or county officials to work out agreements for federal assistance in major building projects, the applications added another layer of time for internal review on a given contract. Nothing happened fast, whereas governing a city meant responding to people daily on issues that affected their lives.

  My mother stayed in New Orleans, with a house full of my younger siblings to manage. My dad flew home most weekends; he rented a condo on Seventh Street, in Southwest D.C., not far from his office. I spent occasional evenings with my father, and from time to time visited him at the HUD office. But although I followed the 1980 presidential campaign through the Washington Post, I avoided Capitol Hill and had a more abstract interest in politics that was satisfied by certain courses I took.

  Near the end of my undergraduate years, I spent an Easter break on campus, working on my thesis on affirmative action. (I had done another paper for my drama course on Arthur Miller, focusing on Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and All My Sons—plays that were prescient on issues of culture and the white working class that were relevant to today’s politics.) On a break from the writing I played a pickup game of basketball in the gym, two-on-two, with three guys I didn’t know. My teammate was white, the other pair African Americans. The game got a little rough, a couple of elbows collided, and I went down on the hardwood floor. A black guy stood over me and called me “a blond-haired blue-eyed devil.” I looked up at his face and had a mental flashback ten years earlier to that woman calling my father a “nigger lover” on the steps of the Jesuit gym. It hit me that this courtside slur was the first time anyone had challenged me solely on the basis of my race.

  Picking myself up, I said, “What are you talking about? You don’t even know me. It’s just a basketball game.” We went ahead and finished, with no more words exchanged, but the moment shadowed me for days. I’d spent my first twenty years with white buddies kidding me that I was more black than white, and African American friends embracing me as a straight shooter without racial prejudice. Now in a college pickup game of basketball, race becomes a player? I had played hundreds of basketball games in my backyard with black boys and no one ever spit hate-eyes like that guy did at me. And then it hit me. I learned that day that black people can be blinded by race, too.

  As college graduation neared, my father offered to cover the law school tuition at Loyola if I returned to New Orleans. I still wanted to make a go of it as an actor. “I don’t want to say you can’t succeed,” he said gently. “But it’s a hard road. With a law degree, you can get a job and raise a family.”

  I promised to think about it. I made a trip to New York. I had a few friends and some contacts through the network of Catholic alumni working in theater. I showed up at an audition with two hundred guys who looked taller and more handsome than I. It seemed unlikely that a director would somehow pick me. As the realization sank in, I thought about the hard life of young actors and actresses, waiting tables, hustling from one audition to another, searching for a break—not just the big break, but any break leading to steady work. My confidence sank as I thought about what it would take to launch a career in theater—a lot of hit-and-miss work. I knew that at some point I’d want to marry and have kids. New York is one of the most exciting places in the world, a city I have loved since the first of many visits in my college years. But for me at twenty-one, pondering the crossroads, the idea of a struggling artist’s life fast lost its appeal.

  * * *

  —

  On the first day of classes at the Loyola law school in fall of 1982 I met a girl named Cheryl Quirk, who had a killer smile but politely responded to my interest by letting me know she was wholly unavailable.

  I was living at home again, raking leaves as part of the deal, wishing I had enough to take an apartment; but with my dad paying the tuition, and no charge for my mother’s meals, the deal was too good. I was spending lots of time in a study group and at the library and, of course, back at the Beverly Dinner Playhouse, where I’d gotten my first professional gig.

  One morning as I was about to push off to school, my father said that Jimmy Carter was coming to town to hold a fund-raiser for his presidential library in Atlanta. Just before the appointed day, the major donor who was hosting the event had a heart attack. My dad had been working hard to line up guests. Mr. Carter said, “Moon, can you do it at your house?” Ever the loyalist, my father said of course. This threw the home into chaos. My mother, who still had no interest in fine china or wine stems, was suddenly going to host a former president at our house on South Prieur Street with the endless bedrooms and still some bunk beds. My oldest sister, Mary, had been elected to the legislature and helped with the emergency organizational details. In the middle of the preparations—with four of the nine children still at home, we had to ensure that everyone was on time and no one brought friends home for supper—the Secret Service arrived to sweep the house. I went with my father to the airport and was delighted to see that effusive Jimmy Carter smile. The event went off well, and at the end of the evening Mr. Carter accepted my parents’ invitation to spend the night. I was a little amazed that he didn’t want to stay at the Royal Orleans or a major downtown hotel. Surrounded by a small army of Landrieus, he sat on the couch, slipped off his shoes, and talked away like a visiting uncle.

  My parents had moved their bedroom to the basement, next to the room where my late grandparents had lived. When he was ready to turn in, I escorted him downstairs, and asked something that had been eating at me all night: “Sir, of all the people you worked with, who was the greatest?”

  “Anwar Sadat,” he replied. “The world will never fill his shoes.”

  Mr. Carter was a runner. The next morning he got up early to jog and invited me to join him. The limousine headed quietly to Audubon Park where Times-Picayune editor Charles Ferguson, a friend of Dad’s, met us with a photographer and reporter. I did a lap of the park, jogging with Jimmy Carter. Then we drove back to the house; he took a shower, thanked us all, and left. The Secret Service picked up their equipment, and within twenty-four hours it seemed almost as if nothing had happened. I went off to law school in a daze.

  During my final year of legal studies I persuaded Cheryl Quirk to take me seriously, and we were soon wonderfully in love. After graduation we both got coveted law clerk jobs, she for the state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal, and I for Louisiana Supreme Court justice Pascal Calogero, my dad’s old law partner. In short order, Cheryl and I were married and I began a law practice. I hadn’t really thought much about getting into politics, but an opportunity came up that I found too tempting to pass up. Mary had graduated from Louisiana State University in 1977, became a real estate agent in 1979, and ran for the seat in the state legislature that included the Broadmoor neighborhood where we had grown up. It was the same seat my dad had held in the dark days of Jimmie Davis and Leander Perez. Mary went door-to-door throughout the area and won the election at age twenty-three. Eight years later, in 1987, she advised me that she was going to give up the seat to run for state treasurer. Besides offering my support to her for the new position, I decided to run for the seat she was vacating.

  When you grow up in a political family, particularly one as large as ours, n
eighborhood campaigning becomes a regular social ritual. Knocking on the doors of people you know, asking for support, is a way of reminding them that yes, you remember them, as they say, I saw you back when your daddy was running and you were way little! Handing out flyers, talking with people on sidewalks and shopping malls is a great learning experience. You learn that your older sister did a good job of contacting people and responding to their needs. Some faces light up, people who are delighted to talk. You also spot people half a block ahead who put their heads down, signaling that they want no eye contact and, God knows, they certainly don’t want to talk. Is it because I’m a Landrieu, or because they just don’t like politics?

  My dad’s popularity and my parents’ long presence in the district, which included more affluent Uptown neighborhoods across South Claiborne Avenue from our house, was a tremendous advantage to Mary in her first race, and to me when I began mine. But it’s daunting to run to fill your sister’s legislative seat. If you lose, shame on you, boy.

  Cheryl had not grown up this way. Her upbringing in Metairie was upper middle class, much more conventional and far less political. Her parents were conservative, but welcomed me as lovingly as a son-in-law could want. Cheryl jumped into the campaign with zeal; she was pregnant with our first daughter, Grace (just as my mother, Verna, had been carrying me when Dad won the district in 1960). Cheryl walked with me several times, standing beside me as I rang bells, asking people for their support, giving them campaign literature, hoping they embraced the message.

  The district was 55 percent white and 45 percent African American, yet my only major opponent was white as well. The white sections of the district were more affluent. We were generally well received; however, after several weeks, Cheryl said, “The poorer people are more open and invite you into the house. They even offer us food.”