Truth, Justice, and the (Un)American Way
It seemed nothing could stop CLARK KENT ERVIN, who lifted himself out of Houston’s Third Ward and became a go-to appointee for two presidents Bush. But when the former inspector general for homeland security blew the whistle on his department, he found that superhuman ambition is no match for the politics of Washington.
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AMBITION, LIKE THE HUMAN BODY that harbors it, is at once divine and pornographic. Back in his youth, Clark Kent Ervin cheerfully laid out for a Houston Post reporter the path he had charted for himself: congressman, then U.S. senator, and finally, by 2008, occupant of the White House. When I reminded him of this, 28 years later, Ervin laughed as the two of us sat in his brand-new, and thus unornamented, D.C. office furnished by the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank where Ervin had been recently installed as the director of its Homeland Security Initiative. “You know, I saw that article at Christmastime at my mother’s house,” he said. “I dug it out. It’s sickening, in retrospect—the kind of thing you say when you’re twenty that you’d never say when you’re forty-five.”
But hadn’t he recently indicated his desire to be CIA director? “Well, down the road,” Ervin allowed. “Ultimately. But in the immediate short term, the next thing would be to be an ambassador somewhere. My plan, if all went well, was to stay in the inspector general slot for two or three years, and, presuming the president would be reelected . . . well,” he winced a smile. “That was the plan.”
Ervin’s plans for himself have always been audacious. As a teenager, his breezy self-assurance bordered on the supernatural. Maybe it came from his brother eleven years his senior, who had done the honor of naming the baby after a comic book hero. Or from his father, who found it within himself to roll out of bed every morning for 42 years to lay bricks and saw wood for Atlantic Richfield. Certainly he was buoyed up by his mother, who drove him every morning from the bleakness of the Third Ward to the burnished grounds of the Kinkaid School, in the Memorial neighborhood, and then back home again—and who once told a Kinkaid teacher who saw her waiting in her car: “Oh, it’s just fine. Clark will only be around the house for a few years, and I treasure the time I can be with him and help him.”
There were benefactors along the way, but by and large Ervin was his own affirmative action program. By the age of five, he was playing the piano. By junior high school, he was anchoring a Houston television news program for kids, scrapping the snippets about the newborn zebra at the Houston Zoo in favor of updates on the coup in Chile. In 1974 People wrote about the fifteen-year-old black newscaster who intended one day to be president. He was a celebrity at Kinkaid, where he slid easily into the required navy-blue blazer and khakis. One of the boys felt obliged to greet Clark daily by calling him a nigger. Clark pretended not to hear. Years later, while campaigning for U.S. Congress, he hit up the boy’s rich father and received a substantial contribution.
His halo of congenital sunniness burned brighter as the odds grew longer. Ervin’s parents had never attended college, but that was too low a bar. He had to go to Harvard. Then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. The more he achieved, the less inclined he was to relate to the Struggle; he officially became a Republican while attending Harvard Law School in the company of liberals whose views he considered zany. One of his black classmates labeled Ervin a “protective mammy integrationist,” which Ervin figured to be an insult of some kind. In 1985 he returned with his law degree to Houston, though not to the Third Ward. Over lunch one day in the late eighties, he confessed to a former colleague at Vinson and Elkins that it had always been his ambition to work at the White House. The other lawyer, Rob Rowland, grinned and told Ervin, “Hell, George W. Bush is an old friend of mine!”
How could he not be optimistic?
But now it was January 2005, a month into his new role as administration castaway, and no one could blame Ervin for feeling wistful. From his new office on Dupont Circle, it was a brisk walk to the White House, where the bleachers still stood from the inaugural ceremonies. Ervin had not attended. His BlackBerry, that indispensable tool of the Beltway multitasker, lay silent beside his folded hands. Ervin’s hair was now quite gray, and decades of earnest attention-paying had lacerated his forehead with wrinkles. And yet he remained the cuddly, somewhat undersized charmer I’d remembered from our days as rival geek-warriors in the gritty subculture of high school debate. He still flattered his counterpart with “Well, that’s a very good question” and called attention to his own mental agility with “Let me say three things about that” or immediate declarative responses followed by long and florid elaborations. Then there was the voice itself, soothing as a clarinet and untainted by time or place, in the manner of a Midwestern anchorman. It hummed the implicit melody: My BlackBerry WILL ring. And I WILL answer the call!
“So good to see you again!” he had sung out in greeting that afternoon. “Thanks so much for coming!” And later: “I always look forward to your articles with great anticipation!” That deluge of effusiveness threw me back into the slipstream of yesteryear. It was the fall of 1974, and we were pitted against each other in the semifinals of a Houston debate tournament. The black teenager with the dapper vested suit, beatific smile, and velvety diction concluded his opening speech with a grand “And so I can only ask for affirmative acquiescence in today’s debate.”
My partner and I nearly sobbed with laughter. Affirmative acquiescence? Who was this cretin? In the ensuing hour, we proceeded to bury Ervin and his partner in a nuclear winter of shrill rebuttal, all of which he sunnily ignored as he continued his oratorical tap dance and his ever-so-polite urgings of affirmative acquiescence. We emerged from the room 100 percent convinced that we had creamed the little twit. When the three judges returned a unanimous decision in his favor, I felt the fulcrum of my adolescent consciousness undergo a tectonic shift. Life was so unfair! Thereafter I bonded with other acne-scarred colleagues who disdained Ervin the Unmarred. The implicit effort that went into being a black superachiever in a world rigged for whites went right past us. Hey, Ervin! we wanted to call out. Quit looking so damned blissful! Sweat a little, why dontcha!
Needless to say, none of us would have envisioned Ervin as America’s consummate watchdog. Nor could we imagine him failing. But Ervin had assigned himself an impossible trajectory, and when he shot for it, he missed badly. In 1991 the U.S. Census report awarded Houston a new congressional district. Here it was, an open seat—the veritable springboard. Friends wondered what Ervin was thinking, running as a Republican in a heavily Hispanic and black district. Those weren’t his people! But Ervin amiably ignored them and the odds. He rang up his wealthy white friends for money, hit the hustings, spangled the Twenty-ninth District with his stellar oratory, and, in November of 1992, got his ass handed to him, garnering only 35 percent of the popular vote.
Two years later, after another failed campaign (this time for state representative), Ervin took a hard look at himself and, optimist that he was, still saw great promise, only of a different kind. “I decided I’m more of a Jim Baker/Colin Powell—type guy,” he said later. Though the Democrats had retaken the White House, by the following year a Bush had seized the statehouse. Ervin moved to Austin and became Secretary of State Tony Garza’s deputy. When Garza resigned in 1997, Ervin marched over to the governor’s office with résumé in hand. George W. Bush received him warmly—“I’ve followed your career for years,” he remembers him saying—but gave the job to Alberto Gonzales instead and sent Ervin a chin-up-kid note. After Gonzales left in 1999 for the Texas Supreme Court, assistant secretary Ervin figured his time had come. Instead, the top job went to Elton Bomer—a state representative, and a Democrat, no less—with no consolation letter to follow. He was forty now. The light was dimming.
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