Jon Hilsenrath writes in the Wall Street Journal how he met his wife Cristina covering Washington, DC Mayor Marion Barry’s crack possession trial 24 years ago.

Barry signed a picture of himself for their wedding with the following inscription:

For Jon and Cristina,
The bitch set us all up!
Congratulations.
Mayor for Life,
Marion Barry

David Remnick on the late Washington, DC Mayor Marion Barry:

“Give him this: Marion Barry was the most vivid local politician in the history of the District of Columbia. Like Earl and Huey Long, of Louisiana, he was a kaleidoscopically strange and contradictory political beast: a man of civil rights, a man of fallen character, a cunning operator, an arrogant hack, a builder, an underminer, a spokesman for the dispossessed, a bullsh!% artist.”

Jeff Smith notes that other than “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Barry contributed perhaps the most memorable quote to the political scandal lexicon when he realized that his ex-girlfriend had videotaped him smoking crack cocaine: “I’ll be goddamned. Bitch set me up.”

New York Times: “Marion S. Barry Jr., a sharecropper’s son and civil rights pioneer who became a flamboyant and polarizing mayor of Washington, went to prison on cocaine charges and then recaptured City Hall in one of the most improbable comebacks in the history of American politics, died early Sunday. He was 78.”

Washington Post: “Charismatic, irrepressible and engaging, Mr. Barry always seemed to get up again.”

[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]I saw the tape: Bitch set him up. [/speech_bubble]