Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  In deference to that cause, the TPF entered South Boston rather hesitantly at first. “But after the third or fourth rock,” one patrolman explained, “you tend to forget the righteousness of their position.” Relations deteriorated rapidly. The TPF took some of its worst abuse out of the beery taverns along Dorchester Avenue, especially a cramped and flyspecked bar called the Rabbit Inn. On Friday night of Columbus Day weekend in 1974, someone heaved a rock through the windshield of a TPF car parked outside the bar. When a lieutenant and two sergeants captured a suspect, a dozen patrons charged from the Rabbit Inn and assaulted the officers. The next night, the TPF returned en masse and, after removing their badges, went in to even the score. In a matter of minutes they reduced the cigarette machine and jukebox to twisted rubble, demolished several shelves of bottles and glasses, and sent twelve customers to the hospital with assorted head injuries. Henceforth, throughout the resisting white neighborhoods, “Rabbit Inn” was invoked to denounce the TPF as “mad dogs,” “the goon squad,” and “Garrity’s Gestapo.”

  Such enmity posed special problems for patrolmen from the affected neighborhoods, forced to confront their own friends and neighbors. When the TPF was summoned into Charlestown on the first day of school in September 1975, a lieutenant approached Gene Simpson, the only Townie in the unit. “Gene,” he suggested, “why don’t you stay down here at the foot of the hill and watch the cars.” It was a tempting offer. Gene hated the idea of marching up Breed’s Hill to impose busing on other Townies. A disaffected Democrat who had voted for both Goldwater and Nixon, he regarded busing as a tragically misconceived policy which could only drive the races further apart. But he was a police officer; he enforced the law. Seven years before, he’d impassively accepted injury from a flying rock in the riots following Martin Luther King’s death. Two years later, on the most memorable day of his life, he’d marched into Harvard Square to confront a bunch of berserk radicals. Surging up the avenue six abreast, the TPF had bellowed “God Bless America,” telling the world how fervently they believed in what they were doing. But Gene knew it couldn’t always be that easy. If you upheld the law against Communists and anarchists, you upheld it as well against God-fearing conservatives. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Lieutenant,” Gene said, “but I think I ought to go up there. I’ve got to face them sometime. It might as well be today.”

  The lieutenant agreed and Simpson took up his position in the skirmish line thrown across the top of Concord Street, only six doors from his house.

  Among the demonstrators facing him were three women he’d known all his life.

  “You’re on the wrong side, Gene!” one of them shouted.

  “Traitor!” hissed another.

  Flushing red beneath his visor, he stood his ground, hoping the women wouldn’t rush the line.

  In the months to come, the same scene was repeated a dozen times, but Gene never grew accustomed to the anger in his neighbors’ eyes. Once as he took a seat at his neighborhood tavern, a guy he’d known for years got up, grumbling, “I don’t drink with the TPF.” Later, his daughter reported that her best friend’s father had forbidden them to play together because Gene was with “that damned bunch of goons.”

  Gene could understand why some Townies felt that way. The TPF weren’t like other cops. They didn’t perform routine police tasks such as walking beats, checking locks, making arrests. They were there for only one purpose: to intimidate people. Their very appearance had been carefully calculated to deter opposition: jumpsuits and combat boots reminiscent of the Green Berets, leather jackets and black gloves to hint of a Central European police state. They were trained to inspire dread with Grand Guignol theatrics: rapping their riot batons rhythmically on cars and light poles as they advanced, emitting guttural roars when they charged. Many a demonstrator had thought to himself: Oh my God, these guys are really nuts! And when sheer terror didn’t do the trick, the TPF could swing their clubs with fierce resolve, reinforcing their fearsome reputations.

  Alice had been raised to “respect the uniform.” She had real affection for Nick Minichiello and a few other Charlestown detectives who’d kept a stern though kindly eye on her children over the years; she’d developed a sneaking respect for Captain MacDonald, whom she regarded as a tough but dedicated professional; she tolerated the Metropolitan District police, who, when they drew Charlestown busing duty, seemed to resent their distasteful task. But the TPF! They were the only ones who profited from this whole mess, many of them working thirty hours of overtime a week at ten dollars an hour. Alice had heard of one TPFer who built himself a home he called “Phase I,” a boat he called “Phase II.” No wonder they enjoyed their work so much!

  On the streets they reminded her of wild animals. One night, as she was coming home from the Powder Keg office, the TPF charged up Bunker Hill Street, enforcing a 10:00 p.m. curfew. Alice ran for home, but two officers of the canine squad cornered her and several other women in a project courtyard. She didn’t know which were more frightening, the German shepherds baring their fangs or the leather-jacketed cops growling obscenities. Even after the women ducked into a friend’s apartment, the TPF kept their dogs at the door, potent reminders of their determination to control the streets.

  If there was anyone worse than the TPF, Alice thought, it was the Mobile Operations Patrol, the motorcycle cops often employed, like cavalry, to charge unruly groups. One Saturday night, she was searching for her kids along Bunker Hill Street when she heard the MOP squad gunning their motors in Hayes Square. First came a single cyclist, moving slowly to make sure the kids hadn’t strung chicken wire across the roadway. Then a wedge of eight cycles swept up the street and through the protesting crowd. Watching from the sidewalk, Alice thought: It’s as if we’re Jews in the ghetto waiting for the storm troopers. All of a sudden, she couldn’t stand there any longer, silently witnessing the violation of her town. Leveling her finger at the advancing motorcycles, she shouted, “Here come the Nazis! Here come the Gestapo! Heil Hitler!” At that, a helmeted cyclist veered from his course, jumped the curb, and came jouncing along the sidewalk toward her. She fled, but the cyclist pursued relentlessly, shouting as he came, “Garrity’s whore! Get home, you goddamned trash! You’re nothing but a white nigger!” Shaking with fear and rage, Alice finally took refuge in the Red Store.

  Through the winter of 1975, the TPF—and, by extension, the MOP squad—became Charlestown’s principal grievance. “The most brutal men I’ve ever seen,” Pat Russell called them. “We’ve had it with the TPF. We want them out of our town.” An ad hoc panel of community leaders denounced “excessive police presence and, in several instances, an overreaction on the part of the TPF. The TPF should be removed from Charlestown or, at least, held in reserve to be used only as a last resort.”

  But the TPF was already just that—a last resort, called into emergencies where ordinary police methods would not suffice. To those responsible for maintaining order, Charlestown that year seemed a permanent emergency, one which required extreme measures. The Town’s protests were brusquely rejected, and the TPF’s banshee yell went on echoing along Bunker Hill Street.

  Feeling manhandled by the police, misused by City Hall, and oppressed by the courts, Charlestown now fell back on the process which in years past had often produced a redress of its grievances: an appeal to its United States congressman. Few American communities could boast the formidable array which had represented the Eleventh (now the Eighth) Congressional District—among them John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, James Michael Curley, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. Each was a Democratic sachem known for his savvy, clout, and capacity to collect and dispense favors. And none of them practiced the fine art of political quid pro quo more skillfully than the incumbent, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill.

  For years, O’Neill had been widely regarded as just another Kennedy retainer. When John Kennedy advanced to the Senate in 1952, he helped to ensure that Tip, t
hen Speaker of the Massachusetts House, would inherit his congressional seat, and O’Neill returned the favor by rallying House Democrats and big-city Catholics behind Jack’s presidential campaign. Once Kennedy was in the White House, O’Neill faithfully supported his legislative program.

  But theirs was never more than a marriage of convenience, for they had utterly different political styles. Raised in New York, accustomed to the cosmopolitan good life, Jack Kennedy early set his sights on a national constituency, assiduously avoiding entanglements with most Massachusetts politicians, for whom he harbored an undisguised contempt.

  O’Neill was dedicated to the opposite proposition: “All politics is local.” His was the ethos of the Corner—Barry’s Corner on Rindge Avenue in heavily Irish North Cambridge, where he hung out from adolescence through early manhood with guys named Beefstew McDonough and Blubber Sheehan. That clapboard hutch served successively as a grocery, barbershop, pool hall, and eventually as a clubhouse called the Stumble Inn. For years, its worn wooden steps were the center of Tip’s existence—a place to lounge on a hot summer’s day gulping 3.2 beer; a table on which to play nickel-ante poker; ultimately a recruiting ground for his political organization. Long after he went to Congress, he remained deeply involved with Barry’s Corner and the network it spawned. He was fond of quoting another political canon, attributed to Boston’s celebrated boss Martin Lomasney: “The politician who thinks he can get away from the people who made him usually gets what is coming to him: a swift kick in his political pants.”

  For a quarter century, Tip stalked his district on Saturday afternoons, picking up his own laundry, pumping constituents’ hands. Each tour produced a dozen appeals—to get a kid into college, push through a federal loan, or get an elderly woman into a housing project. Often pictured as a liberal dogmatist, O’Neill had little in common with the issue-oriented ideologues of the sixties. His was the politics of personal response, of care for individual constituents.

  By late 1975, Tip was the second-ranking Democrat in the House, about to replace the ineffectual Carl Albert as Speaker. As he grew in stature, he became a familiar figure not just in Massachusetts but across the nation, a shambling bear of a man in rumpled suits, a shock of yellowing hair folded across his forehead, and a bulbous nose which lit up his jowly face like a neon tavern sign. He was an engaging raconteur, never better than when he launched in his gravelly voice into the story of Jake Bloom.

  Jake ran a grocery store on Boston’s Blossom Street. After his wife of forty years died, he got a hair transplant, lost fifty pounds, and took his new girlfriend to Miami Beach. But one afternoon, a lightning bolt rent the heavens and Jake was dead.

  “Oh, God!” he cried. “I’m Jake Bloom from Blossom Street. Why did you do it?”

  “Jake!” God replied. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  This oft-repeated tale suggested that while others might change, Tip remained the same—an old-school politician, a man you could rely on.

  Tip’s district was an urban hodgepodge, embracing the state’s third-largest city, Cambridge; comfortable suburbs like Arlington and Waltham; grimy working-class districts like Charlestown, Somerville, and East Boston; elegant enclaves like the Back Bay and Beacon Hill. But Charlestown held a special place in his affections, perhaps because the Townies had rallied strongly behind their fellow Irishman in his most difficult moment, the ferocious 1952 contest against East Boston’s Mike LoPresti. In return he served up ample quantities of patronage, worked hard to provide federal subsidies for Charlestown’s hard-pressed port facilities, and battled in vain to exempt the Navy Yard from Richard Nixon’s vengeance against Massachusetts.

  Long after Alice McGoff had lost faith in Ted Kennedy her confidence in Tip remained undiminished. He was a kitchen politician who got things done without all the Kennedys’ posturing. She felt sure he could get the TPF off Charlestown’s streets, eventually even lift the burden of busing from their shoulders.

  In March 1975, O’Neill lent credence to these expectations when he told an anti-busing delegation he would ensure that a proposed constitutional amendment restricting court-ordered busing came to the House floor for a vote. Two days later, he went still further, pledging to vote for the amendment, although he had opposed similar measures in the previous session. His apparent reversal stirred consternation among blacks and liberals. By the end of the week, O’Neill was backpedaling, indicating that although he would vote for the amendment if it reached the floor, he would take no steps to get it there (a puzzling position since, without strong pressure from O’Neill, the amendment had little chance of emerging from the Judiciary Committee). By then, everyone was thoroughly confused. Some thought that was precisely what the canny Majority Leader intended. Others believed that the series of apparently contradictory statements indicated that O’Neill, trapped between liberal supporters in Cambridge and working-class whites in Charlestown, was genuinely ambivalent, susceptible to persuasion.

  O’Neill’s latest change of position came only two days before many of his constituents were to descend on the capital for a ROAR-sponsored March on Washington. Modeled on Martin Luther King’s 1968 extravaganza, the march was attracting thousands of anti-busing activists from all over the country for an intensive round of workshops and lobbying, culminating in a massive rally on the Capitol steps at which ROAR planned to announce formation of a nationwide coalition to campaign for the constitutional amendment. Alice McGoff welcomed the event with undiluted enthusiasm: here was precisely the kind of dignified but forceful demonstration that would win them recognition. ROAR was developing into a white NAACP, a national alliance of white neighborhoods. She was so excited about the march that she took time off from the telephone company and sent a note up to Charlestown High so Lisa could accompany her. The trip cost them $57.50 apiece, but to Alice it would be well worth it if they could force Tip O’Neill off the fence.

  In the dim pre-dawn hours of March 18, Powder Keg’s delegation boarded three silver buses in City Square. The trip took twelve hours, but inside bus No. 62 the Townies were in a festival mood. Early in the evening, creeping through Washington’s crowded streets, they let out a wild whoop as the Capitol’s illuminated dome came into view. Pulling into the Quality Inn near the Pentagon, they were exhilarated to find the parking lot crammed with other buses, the lobby bursting with demonstrators. Some estimated that there were 10,000 marchers in town, others said 50,000. As Alice and Lisa collapsed on their beds, they felt caught up in a remarkable moment in American history, a gathering of oppressed people petitioning for restoration of their inalienable rights.

  They awakened the next morning to a fierce thunderstorm lashing their windows. At breakfast in the motel dining room, a ROAR official announced that, because of the weather, those who wished to skip the march would be bused directly to the Capitol. “No busing for us!” shouted Powder Keg’s Bobby Gillis. The Charlestown contingent cheered wildly.

  Reaching the Washington Monument, they were dismayed to find barely 1,500 demonstrators—90 percent from Massachusetts—huddled on a grassy oval now reduced to a quagmire. Some marchers sheltered under umbrellas while others had improvised rainwear from green trash bags. But those who showed up that morning were determined to make their point despite the weather. Shortly after 10:00 a.m. they set off up the avenue, each neighborhood arrayed behind its own flag or emblem. The seventy Powder Keg representatives marched four abreast behind a huge banner reading: “Charlestown Against Forced Busing.” Some wore tall Uncle Sam hats, others the revolutionary tricorns popularized by the Charlestown Militia. Many brandished small American flags.

  Lisa didn’t give a hoot about the weather. Snug in her hooded yellow slicker, she was grateful for a couple of days off from school, avid for her first look at Washington. Sloshing along beside her friend Beth Burton, she brandished a cardboard placard reading: “Here We Go, Boston!”

  Alice was wearing her blue Powder Keg windbreaker and a green-and-white tam-o’-shanter, which soon
felt like a sodden sponge around her ears. Within minutes the rain had destroyed her makeup. She was afraid she looked even worse than the hippie demonstrators who’d filled this same avenue through the sixties with their long hair and Vietcong flags. She’d dismissed them as a bunch of nuts. Who would have thought she’d be out here herself a few years later with mascara streaking her face like Apache war paint?

  But, of course, there was nobody to see her—the rain had kept potential spectators away. The only others in the street that morning were the District of Columbia police, many of them black, who conscientiously patrolled their flanks. But it was too wet for violence. The only hint of it occurred outside the FBI Building when a South Boston parade marshal pointed at a car stopped at a traffic light. “That nigger gave us the finger!” he shouted. A few of the marchers turned menacingly and one of them yelled, “Hey, nigger, get out of the car and do that!” Just then the light turned green and the car sped off.

  Reaching the Capitol at 11:00 a.m., they assembled on the glistening steps. Louise Day Hicks struck a lyrical note. “The tears of those affected by forced busing,” she said, “have flowed just as hard as the rains that came today.” But there was little consolation for the marchers that morning. Only one member of Congress showed up: Marjorie Holt of Maryland, author of the anti-busing amendment.

  Where the hell were the guys from Massachusetts? Alice wondered. Where, in particular, was Tip O’Neill? Mrs. Hicks explained that a special meeting had been scheduled that afternoon between ROAR’s executive committee and the Massachusetts congressmen; Tip would be there, she assured them. But when the meeting convened several hours later in a drafty hearing room, only four of the state’s twelve representatives showed up, and when a dozen ROAR members sent an urgent note to Tip imploring him to join them, the Majority Leader declined to leave the House floor.