This book, written by a fervent admirer and “authorized” (read edited) by the queen herself, is a hagiography that blithely skims over Norton’s faults and dwells on her unparalleled energy, the justice of her fights, and her lifelong pursuit of equality.
The writing of a balanced book aimed at assessing how much Norton helped society with her good and great qualities and how much she hurt her causes and herself with a vile temper and an attack mentality will have to wait.
But in the meantime, Norton, as is her wont, has seized the stage and taken the deserved opportunity to record a life which has gone from success to greater success in public service; from an unusual D.C. childhood through Yale Law, the ACLU, the post of commissioner of human rights in New York under Mayors John Lindsay and Abe Beame, first woman chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Georgetown University law professor and now D.C. delegate. As Norton says, “The story is not over.”
To give the author full credit (she termed the writing of the book “exciting— and terrifying”) such an enterprise, in partnership with its subject, tosses objectivity overboard at the beginning of the voyage.
Yet Lester has tried to probe every aspect of Norton’s remarkable career and left no subject untouched, to the limit, to be sure, of what Norton herself allows.
Thus, there is a full treatment of the remarkable 1990 election that brought Norton to Congress, a contest she could not have lost. But she tried hard to lose it all the same, as most of us here remember. Norton, it will be recalled, somehow “forgot” to pay taxes to the District on her six-figure salary for seven straight years, a fact that came to light a few days before she was to go to the polls in the Democratic primary against a well-liked city councilwoman and Norton’s Hill neighbor, Betty Ann Kane (D).
Norton somehow laid the blame on her distant and nearly invisible husband, Edward, and in her inimitable way, made the story stick (with the help of Donna Brazile, then a fledgling campaign wizard). It was the final blow to an already fragile upper-middle-class marriage, but also the beginning of a remarkable congressional career. If there was ever a mind made for the give-and-take of Congress, the one step back and two forward, it is Norton’s. As most local Democrats recognize, she can have the job until she no longer wants it.
Perhaps a restless spirit such as hers will at last tire of fighting for a city that Congress cares so little about — and which can give members so little in the way of political payoffs in return.
Less detail comes through about her personal life, her failed 25-year marriage and her family. But Lester gives revealing insights into the little-known world of upper-crust black Washington, a world of style and snobbery uncannily like its white counterpart in upper Northwest.
Norton was born into just such a socially conscious family, one which counted every step up the ladder to acceptability and status, and God help the person who slid backwards. Never forgetting that her grandfather was a slave on a Virginia plantation, Norton’s family settled in Washington 150 years ago and was well-established here by the time she was born in 1937, the daughter of a taxi driver and a printer’s assistant at the Bureau of Engraving.
From early youth, Eleanor, the eldest of three daughters, aspired and learned to make things happen. One prescient incident is told of her seventh birthday; Eleanor wanted a large party of 12, but her parents equivocated. She skirted their authority and announced to her grandmother that the party would happen. And it did. Life, she decided then “is a matter of will.”
So it proved as she moved on through Antioch College, that nurturing ground of American reformers, through Yale Law School where she adapted to the white establishment, and into government, where she proved a difficult and perfectionist boss, but one who never lost her compass. That lodestar was ever pointing toward improving conditions for black Americans and routing out injustice wherever she found it. Along the way she knew, and was known by, all the great names of the civil rights movement.
But there was something different about Norton. She fought more fiercely than most others and was savage in diatribe, often causing deep wounds. There would be doors slammed and screaming fits. And then she would forget all about it. Perhaps her most important lesson in this essential state of mind, most necessary in Congress, was the famous attempt to unseat the racist Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1964. Although the effort was only marginally successful (Lyndon Johnson feared alienating powerful white Southern committee chairmen), and Norton was at the time unbending in her bitter rejection of compromise, she learned that in politics, power and not principle is “the name of the game.” Resentment had no place.
How will Norton fare under a Republican hegemony in the House, Senate and White House? Much as before, one concludes, save that her long-held dream, for a congressional vote for herself and statehood for the city, remains even more remote.
On the other hand, an underdog fight is what she likes best. After all, no one thought she could get the new Department of Homeland Security to locate in her city. She railed about it for months. And it happened.
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