Representative Charlie Rangel ate and slept politics and was always ready to whip up a story from his vast catalogue of insights, anecdotes, alliances, rivalries, and little-known deals that reveal how power works in New York and Washington, D.C. In nearly all of his accounts, Rangel portrayed himself as a plain but street-smart everyman from Harlem trying to make sense of the world. That was partly true, but mostly a gimmick: In reality, the Lion of Lenox Avenue served 46 years in Congress because he was a brilliant, talented organizer with ego, audacity, and charm to burn, and dedicated those gifts to improving his beloved Harlem.

Even cherry-picking one achievement per decade from Rangel’s remarkable public life shows a man who thrust himself into the center of American politics over and over. In 1950, as an Army private who’d dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School, Rangel took to ordering people around, posturing like sergeants he’d seen in the movies. “Somewhere along the line, I found out that you could assume the virtue if you had it not,” he told me. “I don’t know where I heard that, but I know from the time I went into the army, if you really acted like you were somebody, nobody really knew that you were nobody.”

Rangel, a “nobody” quoting Hamlet, became a decorated Korean War hero after his unit, the all-Black 503rd Artillery Battalion of the Second Infantry Division, was trapped in a horrific ambush at Kunu-ri, surrounded by Chinese troops that wiped out two of the........

© Daily Intelligencer