I'll Never Forget It: Memoirs of a Political Accident from East Baltimore. Marvin Mandel with Jeremy Lott. The Maryland Public Policy Institute, 2010.
Baschert is Yiddish for a concept that literally translates as "destined" or "inevitable" and it can be positive or negative. There is no one to whom baschert is more applicable than Maryland's first and only Jewish governor, Marvin Mandel, the subject of this collection of anecdotes -- some amusing, some disarmingly wise, a few even poignant -- that will have to serve as his biography while a work of greater depth, detail and gravitas begs to be written. But when some Hopkins or University of Maryland scholar undertakes that formidable and worthwhile challenge, this slim volume in Mandel's own unequivocal words will be an invaluable source.
Mandel clearly has no qualms about describing himself as a "political accident" and actually relishes recounting how he stumbled into, rather than gloriously ascended to, progressively higher offices in a political career spanning nearly three decades.
It all began when, following his discharge from the army in the wake of World War II, Mandel began practicing law in Baltimore. He was approached by a city councilman about running for one of the then three seats on the Fifth Legislative District Democratic State Central Committee. Assured that the job was like being on a corporate board of directors "where you don't have to do anything," with classic Mandelian deadpan and a touch of Groucho Marxian syntax, he replied: "Okay, if I don't have to do anything, I'll do it."
He was subsequently elected to the committee, which basically functions to recommend to the governor individuals to fill vacancies left by elected Democratic officeholders should they occur in the district. Two years later such a vacancy occurred. But there was a problem. Mandel's two fellow committee members were beholden to rival political bosses, each of whom had his own candidate for the coveted open seat in the Maryland House of Delegates.
The decision was now Mandel's to make. But not wanting to antagonize either of the political leaders, he abstained. And he continued to abstain until an editorial in the Baltimore Sun took him to task for ill serving the Fifth District by denying it full representation in the General Assembly.
The committee called a meeting to settle the matter once and for all. Consequently, Mandel made his first ever visit to Annapolis: to take the oath of office as the newest member of the Fifth District's delegation to the lower chamber of the state legislature.
Soon afterward, Mandel's baschert kicked in again. The Speaker of the House named him to the powerful House of Delegates Ways and Means Committee, which holds hearings and evaluates each bill requiring an expenditure of state funds, then reports them favorably or unfavorably to the full House of Delegates.
In due time, Mandel joined a coup to depose the chairman of this major committee. The coup failed and Mandel's punishment was his removal from the panel. He told me later that the committee to which he was then assigned had not met in something like three years. It was then that the accidental delegate from East Baltimore set into motion his lifelong political credo of not getting angry but getting even.
Each bill introduced by the Ways and Means chairman promptly had an amendment attached, courtesy of Mandel. Amendments require a bill to be held over for 24 hours. On the next day, the chairman's bill would have another amendment to be considered. The chairman got the message and invited Mandel to rejoin his committee. Mandel humbly accepted.
When the committee chairman was elected Speaker of the House, Mandel succeeded him as chairman of Ways and Means, which, of course, could not have happened had he not resorted to his endless amendments ploy during his exile.
A succeeding house speaker was indicted by a grand jury in connection with information he had allegedly withheld regarding savings and loan companies he represented that had become the targets of an investigation. Governor J. Millard Tawes had someone in mind to serve as the new speaker. But House Judiciary Chairman Thomas Hunter Lowe called the governor's attention to a parliamentary rule mandating that a speakership vacancy be filled by the Ways and Means chairman. Mandel's baschert had shifted into overdrive.
On January 7, 1969, Mandel was the beneficiary of the crowning baschert of his political career. On that day, Ted Agnew, Maryland's hands-down most notorious political accident, resigned the governorship to assume his duties as Vice President of the United States under Richard Nixon. At that time, the Maryland Constitution had no provision for a lieutenant governor to succeed a governor who had resigned or was incapacitated. The document instead decreed that the new governor was to be elected by a joint session of the Maryland General Assembly. The legislature proceeded to do what would have been highly improbable had there been a statewide election: the lawmakers overwhelmingly elected Marvin Mandel Governor of Maryland.
To be sure, Mandel's extraordinary political journey had its share of negative baschert. There was his bizarre decision to announce by press release that he was seeking a divorce from Barbara Oberfeld Mandel, whom he had married when he was 21 years old and was the mother of their two children. The release was issued on an Independence Day weekend, perhaps suggesting Mandel's penchant for irony. Barbara proved that she, too, knew a thing or two about getting even rather than angry by refusing to move out of the governor's mansion. It was the governor who sought lodgings elsewhere. Though the new living arrangements of the state's first couple might have violated the state constitution, Maryland's attorney general had no stomach for pressing the issue.
And there was the matter of Mandel's indictment, followed by Maryland's trial of the century, his conviction and sentencing to a federal lockup in Florida -- all stemming from the "crime" of "mail fraud and racketeering," which the Supreme Court of the United States later ruled did not exist. Mandel is quietly adamant that most of the public outside of the legal community may not comprehend that there is a clear distinction between a pardon and a commutation of a sentence. President Reagan commuted Mandel's sentence; he did not pardon the former governor. "By accepting (a pardon), you are admitting you have broken the law, which I did not do," Mandel writes. "That's why Gerald Ford always insisted that by pardoning Nixon, he was passing judgment."
In sum, when Mandel adds up his lifetime score of positive baschert and subtracts the negatives, despite the torment and anguish associated with the latter, over breakfast in an Annapolis bagel emporium, the 90-year-old former governor tells me, "I've had a good life."
When the definitive biography is finally written, it will show that the kid from East Baltimore -- so shy that he delivered his bar mitzvah speech from halfway up the stairs inside of his family's Oakmont Avenue home, then immediately ran to his room rather than face the celebrants downstairs -- spearheaded the transition of a state long dominated by its rural outreaches into perhaps the most progressive political entity below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Future state historians may find themselves bewildered by how much was achieved by this quiet, confident politician's politician who emphatically was not cast from the mold of such legendary progressives as Teddy Roosevelt and Fighting Bob LaFollette. Mandel had more in common with the title character in Woody Allen's film, Zelig, who always just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Moreover, Mandel eschewed ideology and seemed to believe first and foremost in two precepts: that politics is the art of the possible, and in his own ability to see that the possible happened.
By taking salient parts from the failed draft Maryland Constitution, crafted in 1967 by some of the best minds in the state, Mandel led the effort to overhaul a creaky state government into a streamlined modern paradigm. Though he is East Baltimore to the core, he did it with his strongest support coming from the state's rural bastion of conservatism, Maryland's Eastern Shore.
Marvin Mandel will be remembered by those who served with and under him in the legislature and as governor, as well as the press that covered him, for getting things done; he was the quintessential pragmatist. In today's climate, when straying from the party line is viewed as heresy, when camaraderie, cooperation and compromise have been replaced by the politics of polarization, there are many worse things to be called.
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