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Back on his own terms
Former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke has enjoyed being out of the public spotlight, but he's not above returning to make a political point.
 
By Joe Burris
Sun reporter

December 27, 2005

After six years spent largely outside the public spotlight, former Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke was suddenly back - in one of the more remarkable images that followers of local politics have seen in recent years.

There, in a photograph on the front page of The Sun on Oct. 21, was Schmoke and his longtime nemesis and predecessor as mayor, William Donald Schaefer, flanking the man who finally got them on the same side of a political issue: Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, who was announcing his candidacy for governor with their support.

Schmoke's endorsement immediately triggered speculation: Was the former mayor, who took office with such promise but left it 12 years later to much disappointment, back in the game? Was he himself going to run for office, maybe as Duncan's running mate?

Schmoke is quick to head off questions about a political comeback with an emphatic "No."

No, he's not interested in being lieutenant governor.

No, he doesn't have his sights on the U.S. Senate.

No, he's not trying to gauge his following among local voters.

In fact, Schmoke wanted "no" understood before he would even consent to an interview.

"I certainly wasn't announcing my return to elective office," he said, "so the subsequent [speculation] I saw suggesting I might be a lieutenant governor candidate has no basis in fact. I can put a nail to that one."

That his support of Duncan would cause such a buzz is testament to the lingering curiosity about Schmoke, even now that he's reached the settled age of 56. He seemed, from his high school days on, destined for high public office, and his election as mayor in 1987 was considered just the first step.

But instead, he left office in 1999 with the city's murder rate skyrocketing - more than 300 people were killed in Baltimore every year in the 1990s - the schools that he vowed to improve in disarray and the sense by many that he never realized his political potential. Although he remained personally popular with voters, he retreated from public life, and three years ago became Howard University's law school dean.

"He was mayor during a very difficult time, and I think he learned as he went along," said Michael Cryor, a Baltimore political consultant and veteran of Schmoke's campaigns. "I didn't get a sense he enjoyed it. I got a sense he felt a responsibility to it.

"He was a real statesman and a great professor. But just the real world of politics, I just got the sense at times that it was not his natural world, but a world he was willing to operate in on behalf of his community."

Today, he seems more at home in his current job. His office on the Washington campus is filled with his favorite artwork, snapshots taken with U.S. presidents, a bobblehead doll of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and a photo of his Rhodes scholar class.

"I'm on the second row in the photo, and there's [former Fannie Mae CEO] Frank Raines standing behind me," said Schmoke with a soft smile. His attire is Harvard Review meets Gentlemen's Quarterly: gray designer slacks, cool-blue dress shirt and magenta suspenders.

The one time during the interview that Schmoke's soothing voice ventured above nightly news level was when he was asked what he missed most about being mayor.

"I miss the car and the driver," he said. Then he reared back, tightened his eyes and roared with laughter at his own punch line.

"Seriously," he said, back in his more businesslike mode, "I do miss the opportunity to make improvements in people's lives."

He still believes he can do that, without being in office himself.

"I'm interested in [Duncan] as a candidate because I know him as an elected official, as a friend," said Schmoke. "I know there is real substance and integrity about the guy, and I think he would make a great governor."

He says his endorsement shouldn't be viewed as a criticism of Mayor Martin O'Malley, who is also running for governor, and who, as a city councilman, was among those frequently critical of Schmoke during his tenure as mayor.

Schmoke aims to make Duncan more visible in Baltimore's black communities, and to that end he has canvassed black barber shops and beauty salons with Duncan in tow. He plans to become more involved with Duncan's campaign in the spring.

Beyond that, he says, "I have not talked about my being lieutenant governor with Duncan, other than to let his senior staff people know that I am not interested and that they shouldn't even hold that out as a possibility."


Time in office
Six years has given Schmoke plenty of time to reflect on his political career and move on, and he has done both. He talks candidly about his tenure as mayor, about the joy that came with the opportunity to better the city, but also about things he wished he had done differently.

Among those regrets is the issue that brought him nationwide fame: his controversial stance on drug decriminalization. He argued against setups and stings to nab drug criminals and penalties that, in his mind, didn't curb the escalating drug problem.

Rather, he advocated a public health approach to the problem, a stance that garnered him national attention. But it came at a time when a crack-cocaine epidemic - and the violence associated with it - was spreading across the country, and popular opinion favored tougher measures.

"Kurt proposed the decriminalization of drugs and was pilloried. He wanted to start a national discussion, and he got national condemnation," said Herbert Smith, a political science professor at McDaniel College.

Schmoke believes he was right in tackling the issue publicly but regrets that he didn't have an effective and immediate course of action.

"I remember now that [former New York Governor] Mario Cuomo had a great quote in his diaries," Schmoke says. "He said, 'Politicians have to distinguish between ideas that sound good and good ideas that are sound.'"

Schmoke's drug-decriminalization stance was largely viewed as intriguing intellectually but a hard sell in a city where the growing drug culture seemed to fuel the rampant crime. Some viewed Schmoke as too cerebral and distant to handle both problems - a perception due, in part, to the fact that his approach followed the flamboyant, do-it-now mayoral style of Schaefer (with Clarence H. Du Burns serving for about a year as mayor in between).

"My critics said that I was too much of a policy wonker," Schmoke says. "You can't be a mayor without critics, and I had some, but I never agreed with those who believed I was a policy wonker."


Ripe for success
Yet there was no doubting that he had a background that seemed ripe for success in politics: After graduating from Baltimore's elite City College high school, where he was both the quarterback who led the football team to a state championship and the student-body president, he went on to Yale and won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. From there, he would graduate from Harvard Law School and join one of the city's most establishment law firms, Piper & Marbury, before going to work at the White House on President Jimmy Carter's domestic-policy staff.

He returned to Baltimore, however, to get involved in local politics - something that he was groomed for even in his youth, when he joined the Lancers Club, a Baltimore organization that provided mentors for youths and groomed them for civic leadership.

Schmoke was mentored and introduced to influential officials such as U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes by the club founder, the late retired Baltimore Circuit Judge Robert I.H. Hammerman.

Schmoke was elected state's attorney in 1982 and was on his way to becoming Baltimore's first elected African-American mayor.

With his trademark room-brightening grin and cross-racial appeal, Schmoke won over an often divided city.

"As we often say, he was every parent's desire," said Cryor, the political consultant. "A wonderful human being as well as someone well credentialed."

Everyone figured Schmoke would stick around in Baltimore long enough to heal all that ailed the city and then run for Senate. Yet many of the issues plaguing the city didn't get better under his tenure - particularly the failing schools and the murder rate - and his tenure as mayor ended Dec. 7, 1999.

"I think that conventional political wisdom was that there were high expectations with Mayor Schmoke going in," said McDaniel's Smith. "His tenure as mayor on a whole was disappointing, particularly with the continued deterioration of public schools and a substantial increase in crime."

Schmoke, not surprisingly, views his term much differently.

He points to his success, for example, in replacing high-rise and high-crime public housing with more humanely scaled, mixed-income homes. Seeing the towers imploded, he said, was one of the highlights of being mayor.

"It's hard to do anything that fulfilling in a short period of time in other jobs," Schmoke said.

He accepts that being mayor means "every day you make a decision that half the people like and half the people dislike.

"Generally, for both me and my family, the good days outweighed the bad days, and that's why I did it for 12 years," Schmoke said.

But nothing could have braced Schmoke for the toll the job took on his family: He said that when his daughter, Katherine (now an actress living in Los Angeles), was in sixth grade, she endured the wrath of a teacher who questioned whether Schmoke was fulfilling salary promises made to the teachers union.

But his wife, Patricia, an ophthalmologist, said that even the strain on the family didn't keep Schmoke from enjoying his work.

"I think Kurt really loved his job, he did very well and he was always upbeat," she said. "Even though the problems of cities at that time were difficult, he felt the positive work was worth the personal sacrifice.

"I run into people who ask, 'Are you going to let Kurt run again,'" she added. "They think I'm placing heavy pressure on him, but that's not true. I think he's always going to be civic-minded and a person who wants to do things for other people, but he knows there are other ways besides politics."

The couple met on a blind date during a summer break when he was at Harvard and she was at the University of Florida.

"He had me laughing the whole night on our date," she said. "But he wasn't intimidating or full of himself. He was just a real, down-to-earth person."

The former mayor, who grew up in West Baltimore, and his wife live in Ashburton and enjoy going to restaurants, like the Black Olive in Fells Point, and traveling abroad. With their children grown - son Gregory is an independent filmmaker in Albuquerque, N.M. - they've taken up still-water kayaking.


Life after politics
Judging from his high-pitched laugh and the way he greets students at every turn on Howard's campus, Schmoke's life after politics is good.

Before taking the Howard post, Schmoke worked for an international law firm and ultimately set up the campaign that helped the president of Madagascar, Marc Ravalomanana, get elected. He also taught at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

The Howard job began before the war college job ended, and for a while he made the trek back and forth to both duties.

Nowadays, he's only heading to Washington: His commute is nerve-wracking, except for the last 20 minutes, when he drives through scenic Rock Creek Park, gazing at flowing streams and deer scampering in the woods.

That he has landed at the historically black Howard takes him full circle, in a sense. Schmoke's father graduated from another such institution, Morehouse College in Atlanta - which produced such leaders as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Julian Bond - and it was assumed he would follow suit. But coming up at a time when the Ivy League was more accessible to African-Americans than previously, he chose Yale.

Now, he's at Howard and as proud of its historic role as if he'd been there for decades.

"When I first arrived, my secretary, who's been with me since I was state's attorney, was about to move some portraits from behind my desk," said Schmoke, pointing to the portraits that included one of Charles Hamilton Houston, the legal strategist who laid the groundwork that led to the landmark school-desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.

"Just then a professor comes in my office, clears his throat and says, 'Deans come and go, but those portraits remain,'" said Schmoke, laughing. "So they're still where they were before the deans before me. It gives me a real sense of history and legacy of the place when I come in each day."

Since his appointment as dean, Schmoke has implemented a financial-assistance program for those who cannot pay for a bar-exam preparation course and teaches a course in American elections law and policy during congressional election years.

When the school recently won a prestigious mock-trial competition for the first time, Schmoke got a call of congratulations from comedian Bill Cosby.

Still, he doesn't expect to limit himself to academia. There is the Duncan campaign to work on and his desire to remain involved in the public arena.

"I learned a great deal as mayor; certainly I tried to implement a number of my own ideas," said Schmoke. "I think you try to build on your life lessons and use them to effect other experiences."

joseph.burris@baltsun.com
Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun