“Okay,” I answered, hesitating for just a second.
The first union construction worker approached the standing microphone. I don’t remember his question, but I nervously answered as best I could. And then as soon as he sat down, the next construction worker stood at the microphone and fired another accusation. That’s how it felt, not like I was being questioned, but that I was being accused. I could feel my cheeks burning and my voice shaking, but oddly, as person after person stood at the microphone, I began to shake less and my nerves were replaced by a rising anger at the misrepresentations being thrown my way.
This is how I remember one exchange: “I build elevators, and if this law passes, elevators are going to be unsafe,” the newest questioner said.
I straightened my shoulders and looked the man at the microphone right in the eye. “Do you have a license to build elevators?” I asked.
“Well, uh, yeah.”
“And do you have to be trained and pass a series of requirements to get that license?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“And will the fact that you have to be licensed and pass a series of requirements to build elevators in this state change in any way if this new law passes?” My questions came rapid fire, the injustice of his purposeful inaccuracies fueling my newfound courage of conviction.
“Well, no, I guess not.”
I don’t remember how the exchange ended or how the next several went except to say that afterward I felt, well, different. It’s not that my shyness and soft-spoken manner disappeared after that, but it was more that, inside, part of who I was moved over a little to make room for a growing confidence.
As it turned out, we lost that referendum campaign, with a simple slogan “Question 2—Bad for You” on every union worker’s bumper overcoming a more complex policy argument, another political lesson learned. But as the 1990 gubernatorial election approached, the trade association remained politically active and it endorsed an unusual pairing of Republicans, then state senator Paul Cellucci and a relative political newcomer named Bill Weld.
I volunteered on their campaign and joined it full time in the last few months when Cellucci received a recommendation from my then boss Steve Tocco, who was advising the campaign, that the candidate should expand his core staff. “Can I have Ginny?” Cellucci asked. So I spent the remainder of the campaign at a small desk in the corner of his chief adviser’s office stuffing press kits and planning media stops around the state.
Unexpectedly, the two won, the first Republicans to hold Massachusetts’s top offices in twenty years. I went with them into the State House, serving first as an assistant press secretary. With my father’s unspoken mantra—work hard—in my head, I arrived at the office at about five o’clock every morning to cut out and copy the relevant newspaper stories that the interns would deliver to the governor, lieutenant governor, and their senior staff, a full-circle movement back to when I had first caught the political bug.
Slowly, my duties expanded. I traveled to press events, primarily with Cellucci, fielded media questions for the administration, wrote press releases and op-eds, booked editorial-board visits and radio interviews. Each morning I’d stand with a small group of junior staff members in Weld’s impressive, ornate corner office, him at one end of the table and Cellucci at the other, the senior staff sitting in between, making the decisions of governing.
I was young, twenty-four, yet I began to sense I had strong strategic instincts, advising Cellucci and increasingly Weld about how to answer media questions and position their policies about the pressing topics facing them daily. I also grew close to the governor’s deputy legal counsel David Lowy, whom I worked with on many projects. We fell in love, got engaged in 1993, and married a year later.
At twenty-nine, I was promoted to press secretary, joining the governor’s senior staff and sitting at the conference table during the morning meeting. Then, after winning a landslide reelection victory, Weld turned his sights to the US Senate and took me aside and asked me to manage his campaign.
Polls showed the race against incumbent senator John Kerry close until the end, but we lost, and while licking my wounds at home, I was called by Weld and asked to come see him at the State House.
“Will you come back as my chief of staff?” he asked. At thirty-one, I took my place at the table to his immediate left. I loved the broader management role. No day was the same, as I juggled meetings with cabinet secretaries and agency heads seeking guidance on policy development, oversaw the work of the governor’s executive staff, and continued to serve as the governor’s chief adviser on a myriad of complex issues. David and I had by this time moved out of the city and commuted in together each morning and back home in the evenings. He had left the governor’s office for a role as a prosecutor in the Boston district attorney’s office. We both were exhilarated by our jobs, feeling alive and engaged and certain the future held limitless opportunities.
Weld resigned in mid-1997, automatically rendering Cellucci governor under the state constitution. Cellucci asked me to stay on as his chief of staff. I happily accepted, managing the transition between the two leaders and tackling Cellucci’s priorities. When I became pregnant with our son Jack, I worked up until his birth, and there was no question that I would come back to the State House after maternity leave.
While at home caring for the baby, I indifferently followed the front-page stories about a scandal embroiling Massport, the agency that operated Logan Airport. When the scandal led to the agency’s leader getting fired, though, it was not long before the first call came from the governor’s chief personnel secretary asking if I would be interested in the job. I flatly said no. I loved being chief of staff and didn’t want to change jobs while juggling being a first-time mother.
But after being asked twice more, including personally by Cellucci, I finally acquiesced. I wanted to help the governor, a person I respected deeply, achieve his goals. I knew I had the public administration background for the job and could help the agency’s aviation and shipping professionals achieve their own operational goals by navigating the politically charged interactions with neighboring communities and political leaders. I could help the governor change the much-criticized culture at the agency and help him win approval for a new runway to aid the economy.
Once it was announced, my appointment was criticized in some quarters given my role at the State House, a critique I felt was fair game, but for the most part I was hailed in the media as just the kind of reformer the agency needed.
***
A little more than seven years later, I found myself defending my role again, with far more at stake than a career change. After taking a short break, the deposition resumed. A technician ensured the camera was still tightly focused on me at the head of the table.
Did you know the FBI thought it was only a matter of time before there was a terrorist attack?
No, I didn’t.
I didn’t know.
Chapter Two
Before
(Some of the details in chapters two and three are paraphrased from The 9/11 Commission Report.)
Summer 2000—Newark International Airport, Newark, New Jersey
Three of the 9/11 pilots arrive in the United States between May 29 and June 27. All three begin flight training in Florida.
Summer 2000—Logan International Airport, Boston
“Bitch,” I said under my breath as I slammed the phone down. I looked over at Jose Juves, Massport’s media director, waiting expectantly in my office doorway.
“How’d it go?” he asked, casually leaning against the doorframe.
“How do you think it went?” I answered. “She threatened me.”
A shadow passed across Jose’s eyes. We were about to issue public report cards on airline customer service. My brief conversation about the plan with Carol Hallett, the head of the Air Transit Association (ATA), the
trade association representing commercial airlines in the US, was tense. Poor customer service by airlines was such a hot issue that Congress was considering passing a passenger bill of rights. But no airport operator had taken it upon itself to publicly rate an airline’s performance as a means to prompt improvement as we were about to do.
“So what’s the bottom line?” Jose asked.
“She said if we went forward she’d announce the ATA is against the new runway,” I answered.
“No way, really?” Jose looked genuinely surprised. He moved farther into the office and sat on the arm of one of the two leather couches facing each other in front of my desk. He understood, as I did, that if the airlines announced that a new runway at Logan was unnecessary, the project was dead.
Adding a fifth runway (some say a sixth, counting a little-used smaller runway) had been the subject of a political impasse for nearly thirty years. The airport’s neighbors and their elected leaders vehemently opposed it. The business community and the governor were strongly in support because of the effect of Logan’s notorious delays on the regional economy. Back in the late 1960s, the fight became a part of the local political lore, in a city rich with it, when a group of mothers—later dubbed the “Maverick Street Moms” after their East Boston neighborhood—blocked the Boston Harbor tunnels connecting East Boston to downtown in protest while pushing baby strollers.
I looked past Jose, through my floor-to-ceiling window at Boston’s inner harbor. A trawler was making its way along the water’s edge, scooping up floating trash, a project we had helped fund. Just beyond the trawler, I could see the East Boston neighborhood of Jeffries Point. I wrote myself a note to check on the plan to move the massive green dry dock that was half floating, half sinking into the water off the Jeffries Point waterfront.
The dry dock looked like a carnival funhouse version of Fenway Park’s left-field wall, so we’d nicknamed it the “Green Monster.” It had broken away when it was being towed from a nearby Boston Harbor marine repair facility. Massport didn’t own the dry dock or the marine repair facility, but if something impacted the neighborhoods around Logan, it usually became our problem to solve.
I placed the note in my in-box, on top of a copy of a newspaper editorial I kept in it.
The Boston Globe had published the editorial a few weeks after my appointment to the agency in 1999. Headlined “Buckingham’s Tasks,” New England’s most influential media outlet laid out what it thought ought to be my priorities:
Better manage airport traffic
Improve taxi service
Build a new runway
Replace a parking lot with a park
Modernize two Logan terminals
I kept the editorial on my desk as both a reminder and a point of pride. Just a year into the job, I was well on the way to completing all my “tasks.”
“So what are you going to do?” Jose asked.
Oh, right, back to today’s problem, I thought, or at least this morning’s problem.
“Get to my next meeting or I am going to be late,” I answered.
Early fall 2000—Afghanistan
Senior al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan started selecting the muscle hijackers—the operatives who will storm the cockpits and control the passengers.
Early fall 2000—South Boston
I hurried to the front door of Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant on the South Boston waterfront. I glanced to my left and saw the large black Town Car parked in its usual spot. Yup, he’s already here, I thought to myself, walking faster. He’s going to be annoyed I’m late.
I greeted the maître d’ at the hostess stand. He grimaced in seemingly silent agreement that tardiness with this particular lunch partner was a bad idea.
“He’s waiting for you,” he said.
Congressman Joe Moakley was seated alone. A couple of waiters were busily moving around him. One poured more water into his glass. The other checked to see whether he wanted to order without me.
Moakley was the longest-serving member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation and former chairman and ranking member of the powerful House Rules Committee. No legislation moved through Congress without his okay. He was also a frequent Massport critic, admonishing the agency about noise made by low-flying aircraft over his South Boston neighborhood. Moakley’s latest fight with us was about the proposed new runway. It would send additional air traffic over the heads of his neighbors, as well as his beloved neighborhood church.
I settled into my seat across from Moakley, grinning at his gruff hello.
“Hi, Mr. Chairman,” I said warmly. Moakley had been ill recently, but I thought he looked great. He had on a charcoal-gray turtleneck and he’d grown a beard. It was gray-black like his distinctive bushy eyebrows. I’d heard some wise guys around the office crack that he was doing a poor imitation of an aging Sean Connery, but I found his effort endearing.
“Whaddya want to eat?” he asked, relenting, just a little, on maintaining his irritable posture. “You like swordfish?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Then have the Harborside cut. Nothin’ like it.”
I ordered as he instructed and settled back in my chair as Moakley launched into some of his favorite stories. He started, as always, with how he’d come down to the Southie railroad tracks as a boy. “We’d eat the watermelons that fell off the freight cars,” he said.
I’ve heard this story so often I can tell it myself, I thought, smiling at how he told it each time with the same obvious relish. As he talked, my mind wandered to the first time I’d met with him. How unlikely it was then that I’d ever be sitting across from him as his lunch companion.
When I accepted Governor Cellucci’s offer to be put before the agency’s board as his choice for the new CEO of Massport, I couldn’t stop myself from weighing in.
“You’re going to get killed for this,” I said, instinctively continuing to play the role of his closest adviser.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I’m thirty-four, I’m your chief of staff, and I’m a woman,” I answered.
Sure enough, after I was appointed, the media sought out Moakley to get his comment. The governor gave the job to “some girl sitting in the next office,” Moakley growled.
The comment was red meat for members of the media, who immediately sought a response from the governor’s administration. Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift, who herself had made news by running for office while pregnant, jumped to my defense. Cellucci chimed in a few days later. Critics of both me and a woman recently appointed to lead the state’s highest court were uncomfortable with women in power, he said. They “should get a life.”
As soon as I started at Massport, I knew I had to try to make peace with Moakley. The runway and all federal grants the airport relied on needed his blessing to go through Congress. I asked for an appointment, and as I entered his office, I took a deep breath to ease my nervousness. I could feel my cheeks burning as I sat down across the massive desk from him. “Mr. Chairman, I learned my politics at the knee of Bill Weld,” I began. I knew Moakley, despite being an irascible Boston Irishman, adored the Yankee, Long Island–bred former Massachusetts governor. Weld had first suggested the new Boston federal courthouse we now sat in should be named in Moakley’s honor.
Moakley’s demeanor softened, slightly. “You know, I didn’t mean anything by—” he started to say. I interrupted him before he could finish, even though I wasn’t sure what I was going to say in response.
“I know, Mr. Chairman. Actually, my dad, who’s exactly the same age as you, told me that the media should lay off because, in his eyes, I am just a girl!” My dad had, in fact, said just that during the media dustup. I murmured a silent thank-you to him for the last-minute inspiration.
***
Oh, how Moakley loves that story, I thought, smiling, as I refocused my attent
ion on my lunch companion. He repeated it in my presence almost as often as the watermelon story. “You know what her father said,” he’d begin, speaking to anyone within hearing distance. “That I was right; she is just a girl!”
The thick pieces of swordfish were placed in front of us. As we dug in, the waiters came back to fill our water glasses. The clinking ice was no competition for the rumble of jets flying directly overhead.
Fall 2000—Saudi Arabia
The majority of the Saudi muscle hijackers obtain US visas in Jeddah or Riyadh between September and November of 2000.
Fall 2000—Mayor’s office, City Hall, Boston
“Talk to the neighbors. Go into their livin’ rooms. Just talk to ’em about what you’re doin’,” Boston’s mayor Tom Menino said.
Menino had built a political reputation as a “neighborhood” mayor. I’d come to his City Hall office to ask his advice about resolving a long-simmering issue involving neighborhoods abutting Logan.
At the end of one of Logan’s most active runways was a wooden and concrete blast fence. It had been built years earlier to protect nearby private homes from jet-engine noise and pollution. Over the years, as aircraft were built larger, the jet engines came to sit higher than the top of the fence and its utility dwindled. At the same time both pilots and Logan’s aviation team grew concerned that the fence was a danger. If a jet overran the runway upon landing, it could crash into the fence, causing a catastrophe. The Boston Globe had published a prominent exposé on the runway hazard in 1996. Shortly after, Massport officials vowed to remove it. Their decision, made without neighbors’ input, incited a political backlash. Menino denounced the airport’s management for failing to include the community in the decision. Some community leaders, distrusting Logan officials’ motives, contended removing the fence would allow even larger jets to use the runway, disrupting their neighborhood even more. The two sides were at an impasse. Four years later, the fence remained in place.
On My Watch Page 2