officers - The Black Vault

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twas a good day. a full and prosperous day. in
the Rodney King trade. Across Los Angeles.
the politicians, the preachers. the journalists,
the Hollywood compassion-and-healing crowd,
the lawyer~. the agitators, the T-shirt peddlers,
the con artists and charlatans. all rose
early and stayed late. They worked the charred
and empty comers of the town, and they
worked the gleaming, moneyed, undisturbed
comers too, seeking photo ops, easy money,
production deals, a new angle, an audience, a
sanctimony fix, and finding an abundant yield.
Angela ~ing, Rodney's aunt, was up at four that morning,
ten days after the explosive not-guilty verdict for the cops
who'd beaten her dead brother's son. A local politician sent a
car to Angela's home, behind a storefront in the starkly delineated
black section of Pasadena, to chauffeur her through·
a busy schedule. She was in a TV studio at five A.M., then
moved on to a Baptist church in South-Central, where she
met George and Barbara Bush, and from there went to a drug
rehab center for young women, where she gave a little talk­
Aunt Angela is wanted for public appearances now.
The president and his wife had gotten up early, too,
leaving the Bonaventure Hotel downtown for a tour of the
devastation, along the way passing hawkers of bootleg Rodney
King T-shirts, and swindlers working cons in the first
flush of the rebuilding effort. Bush showed that his speechwriters,
at least, had heart-"To truly help, we must understand
the agony of the depressed," he told the South-Central
church crowd, and "You can't solve the problem if you
don't feel its heartbeat.,. For those law-and-order voters, his
thirty-one-car motorcade stopped at an L.A.P.D. station,
where he sympathized with the cops: "It's not easy times."
Bush's newly rediscovered urban-policy man, Jack Kemp,
was invited along for the ride.
Across town, in Studio City, Pat Buchanan told a prayer
breakfast that the rioters were not motivated by deprivation
or a sense of injustice but were the products of misguided
liberal policy, including public education. "They came out
of schools where God, the Ten Commandments, and mor;1l
instruction have been expelled," Buchanan said, "and sex
education, 'values clarification,' and condoms have been put
in.'' Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, was out in Orange County
talking about the rioting with high-school students.
Over in his law office at the edge of Beverly Hills, Steven
Lerman told a Spanish television network that he was much
too busy to fly to Madrid for an appearance. Lerman, a
longtime "P.I." (personal injury) specialist, was preparing
Rodney King's civil-rights suit against the city of Los Angeles,
seeking $56 million-$) million for each blow-or $83
million, or maybe $94 million, depending on which estimate
you took on which day. A receptionist told at least one pr