I first met Wayne Barrett 30 years ago at the old Varick Street headquarters of the NYC Board of Elections during my first NYC political campaign, trying to sell him on a southern Brooklyn insurgent trying to make a campaign issue out of Westway.
He told me that that was Joe Conasan’s department.
I got to know Wayne pretty well during the 80s, when I was working for Carolyn Maloney at the Council and we lived within a few blocks of each other in Brooklyn’s Holy Name Parish. His tenant was an old Senate Dems staff colleague, Mike Webber, and we used to see each other at the “Hello Love Newsstand” or when he took his son Mac for Pizza on PPW.
Lots of animated discussion; not so much agreement.
Once during a budget all-nighter at City Hall, Wayne gave me a ride home, and we shared the pleasure of watching a stampede of about 200 rats cross a street in Chinatown.
I also was glad to drop a dime now and then, giving Barrett the story of how Yehuda Levin used City matching funds in a City Council race to pay for a vacation bungalow he called a “Catskill Campaign Headquarters.”
Usually, we disagreed in a friendly and respectful manner. I was a bit too regular for Wayne, but I note that I was the one who supported Dinkins. “That’s because you’re a reformer Wayne; I’m a liberal.”
I won’t get all misty-eyed over Barrett’s independence and impartiality. I think that often in his early days, Wayne sometimes acted as a political operative with a press pass when dealing with his friends (as they were then) in the Coalition of Community Empowerment.
And, I think Wayne always had a blind spot in the matter of his old employer, Mayor Owens, and those associated with him (and a permanent hard-on about those who opposed Owens in his early days, whether they be basically decent public servants like Jeannette Gadson or scam artists like Al Sharpton).
I remember as late as 2001, discussing with Barrett where Owens would go in the Borough President’s race. Barrett found all three candidates highly unpalatable, but when I suggested Major might go with his old nemesis Gadson, Barrett said he would have to call Major.
Hardly the posture of an independent reporter
I also think Barrett was late in seeing the truth about the Federal prosecutor who gave him his best seller, “City for Sale.”
But Wayne more than made up for that lapse with his reporting about Giuliani‘s administration, and his books, “Rudy” and “Grand Illusion.”
Truth is Barrett grew over the year. He became less partisan and less ideological. He became a better, fairer reporter, though one no less savage upon his targets. He acquired a rather wicked sense of humor, with his brilliant pieces where he wrote interior monologues outlining the secrets thoughts of some major public figure.
Barrett became indispensable, both for his institutional memory and for his willingness to apply it into new and unfamiliar areas.
In 2006, I expressed my outrage the first time the Voice fired one of my cultural icons, Robert Christgau. But truthfully, Christgau was long past his prime.
Barrett, by contrast, is getting better and better, smarter and more nuanced, all the time.
Worse, Barrett’s departure is a double whammy, coupled as it is with the voluntary resignation in protest of Tom Robbins, who I only recently hailed for his intellectual honesty.
I sort of owe Robbins an apology for my refusal to go on the record about, or even confirm, some act of political perfidy I once witnessed, because of my fear that, should it have ever gone public, I would have been blamed, even if I wasn’t the source of the story (which I was not).
I must say he was far more gracious about it than I ever would have been.
There are a lot of good reporters covering the political beat in NYC, but there is really no one who combines the intellectually honest investigative reporting and analysis offered by Barrett and Robbins.
And it seem unlikely that we will see their equivalent any time soon.
Our City has just become oh so much poorer.