A description of one of the characters in Great Expectations would apply to Doug Wilder, the nation’s first elected black governor: “A sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.” Like the half-god, half-man, L. Douglas Wilder boldly goes about his many labors, consistently defying the odds and oddities of politics. He is admired for his conquests, respected for his intellect, adored for his charm, and feared for his fearlessness. Wilder is one of the few in politics entitled to believe his own clips.
That speaks to the human side of this Virginia deity. Like Hercules, Wilder is prone to hubris, angered by perceived slights and insistent of attention. These frailties can get him in trouble; he seems not to care. Over a half-century in politics—and to his delight—Wilder achieved mythic status among a generation of African Americans, white liberal malcontents, and reporters eager to promote an anti-Jesse Jackson. Warned by his mother against getting a big head, Wilder says in an end note to this slim, breezy memoir: “It was observed many times that I was not the retiring kind—and that was certainly true.”
There was no doubting Wilder’s indelible place in history on the bitter-cold Saturday in January 1990 when he was sworn in as the 66th governor of Virginia. More than 30,000 people swarmed onto the grounds of the state capitol to hear Wilder, the grandson of slaves, declare in his inaugural address that he was a “son of Virginia.” The appellation was intended to convey that, the color of his skin notwithstanding, Wilder represented a continuum that reached back to Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, men whose declamations on liberty did not always apply to him. Wilder was a Richmond native, a successful trial lawyer who had held elective office 20 years before achieving the governorship. In other words, he was a member of the club.
Son of Virginia is intended to place Wilder where he has spent most of his professional and political life, even when he wasn’t invited: at center stage. He remains there in the twilight of his career because he seems willing to say or do whatever is necessary to extend his viability. These days, that means Wilder is critical of Barack Obama, chiding him as timid: “Too often, he was a president whose main goal seemed to be not making anyone mad. As a result, he achieved the opposite.” Never reluctant to infuriate others, Wilder was virtually alone in urging Obama to dump Joe Biden for vice president in 2012. And as if that weren’t enough, he refused to endorse Obama for a second term. This gets Wilder the attention he demands: It may be negative attention, but it is attention nonetheless—and it can trivialize him.
There’s nothing Cincinnatus-like about Doug Wilder. He would never voluntarily surrender power; instead, he finds new ways to exercise it. A decade after his governorship he became Richmond’s first popularly elected mayor in a half-century, spending his single term in combat with the city council. Now Wilder teaches a class at a state university program that is named for him, and, as an occasional contributor to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, lobs criticism at those who attempt to ignore him, such as the incumbent Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe. Wilder turned 85 last month, and the governor who should be venerated as a statesman has become a gadfly.
As a black politician emerging in the South of the late 1960s, Wilder had to rely almost entirely on himself, taking great risks that often yielded great rewards—including playing the race card. He has gone further than many white politicians who had the advantages of money and organization. A complex man with a gift for communicating in simple, evocative terms, Wilder has been well served by cunning and guile that he sheaths in poise, elegance, and wit. All that comes through in this little book—one, unfortunately, rife with sloppy errors and selective recollections. (Among other things, Wilder gives the incorrect date of his inauguration as governor, misspells the name of the advertising consultant for his historic 1989 campaign, and affixes the wrong title to one of Virginia’s leading Republican politicians.)
Recalling his life as the seventh of eight children raised in “gentle poverty” by an insurance salesman and homemaker, Wilder pursued his goals—college and graduate school, the law, politics, and score-settling—with clearheadedness. He is not given to uncertainty: He knows exactly where he wants to go, how to get there, who he’ll have to schmooze, and who he’ll have to skewer. Mr. Dooley said that politics ain’t beanbag; the real-life Mr. Wilder practices it as a knife fight.
Surprisingly, he is sympathetic toward one of his most frequent targets, Chuck Robb, the former governor and senator. The two battled for more than a decade, and their relationship hit rock bottom during Wilder’s governorship when it was disclosed that Robb operatives had obtained a secret, illegal recording of Wilder chortling in a mobile-phone conversation over what everyone in Virginia politics knew to be true: that Robb’s political career had been irrevocably damaged by his dalliance with a beauty queen. Within Robb’s circle it was believed that voter distaste for Wilder’s gamesmanship would trump disgust over Robb’s conduct: The recording was a means for bringing Wilder to heel. But Wilder was correctly furious over the violation of his privacy, and a federal criminal investigation followed. Robb aides copped pleas to eavesdropping; a grand jury nearly indicted Robb himself.
And yet Chuck Robb emerges here as a charitable figure, keen on Virginia’s shedding its intolerant past and doing so by giving minorities and women a full voice in its affairs. Wilder suggests that Robb’s political skills are no match for his, but he praises him for engineering the appointment of Roger Gregory (Wilder’s law partner) as the first African American on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In 1982, Wilder threatened to stand for the U.S. Senate as an independent, a move likely to bleed black votes from the Democrat and ensure a Republican victory. The condition for his retreat: that the putative Democratic nominee withdraw, having offended Wilder for invoking the name of the ex-segregationist incumbent who was vacating the seat. Then-governor Robb had worried that a racially charged, multi-candidate campaign would revive black-white tensions in Virginia, reversing progress toward reconciliation. The episode established Wilder as the state’s preeminent African-American politician and a force neither party could ignore.
“Now I was a politician with the stature to go toe-to-toe with the governor,” he writes. “People were a little more cautious about saying no to me, and in many cases were looking for ways to work with me.” What Lord Palmerston said of England might apply to L. Douglas Wilder: He has no permanent friends or allies, only his own permanent interests.
This is the great paradox of Wilder’s success. Two decades before Barack Obama and the demographic shifts that helped lift him to the presidency, Wilder was forging coalitions that spanned race, ethnicity, gender, and ideology. But having achieved power, Wilder usually refused to share it and rarely hesitated to exercise it in ways that had more to do with distaste for some individual than disagreement over policy. One instructive example: Rather than approve the assignment of prized two- and three-digit license plates to his predecessor’s allies, Wilder blocked their distribution. He wanted to make clear he was in charge and would brook no intrusion on his prerogatives as chief executive.
Wilder refused to raise taxes to balance the state budget in a recession, relying instead on deep cuts and fiscal sleight-of-hand. His Democratic base fumed but he won over conservatives who had voted against him for governor—and their favorable response emboldened Wilder to think bigger. Not halfway through his term, in 1991, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. The exercise spoke to the cynicism with which he can view politics: Since Jesse Jackson was not running, Wilder guessed he would corner the black vote and appeal to large numbers of moderate white Southerners who might be considering another governor, Bill Clinton of Arkansas. Wilder’s support of abortion rights, the marquee issue of his gubernatorial candidacy, would be a magnet for women, and, once nominated, his fiscal record would draw Republican voters angry with President George H.W. Bush.
Of course, the campaign was a disaster; even Wilder acknowledges as much. It also confirmed for Virginians that Wilder would put personal ambition ahead of public responsibility, and it further alienated the legislature, undercutting Wilder’s ability to manage state business.
Wilder prefers to think of himself not as a black politician but as a politician who happens to be black. He is sensitive to the aspirations of the poor and working class, yet embodies upper-middle-class sensibilities, down to his baronial house on the James River, a gleaming Mercedes sedan, ducal tailoring, and fastidious housekeeping. These distinctions have ensured him an enduring flexibility that can simultaneously engender support and outrage. Wilder, the legislator who unsuccessfully fought to discard the state song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” because of its bigoted lyrics, was also the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor photographed in front of a Confederate battle flag. Wilder, the governor who won a first-of-its-kind law restricting handgun purchases to one a month, refused to support his party’s candidate for the same office 16 years later because the rural Democrat had opposed the measure.
In the end, it’s better to have Wilder as an enemy than a friend; you’re not surprised when he turns on you. Or in the words of a veteran Virginia journalist: “Doug Wilder will always break your heart.” Yet the fact that L. Douglas Wilder is emblematic of the grubbiness of politics is no less a reminder of his heroic standing. Hercules had his flaws, too.
Jeff E. Schapiro is politics columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
