Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  “You covered that first day like a police reporter,” Phelps chided. “The real story was that seventy-nine out of eighty schools were completely peaceful, but you focused on the one that had trouble.”

  “Sure,” Kifner shot back. “If 3,000 jets take off on a given day and all but one land safely, you don’t write, ‘2,999 Airliners Arrive at Destinations,’ you write ‘Jet Crash Kills 200.’ ”

  “But airliners land safely every day,” Phelps retorted. “This wasn’t a routine event, it was an important test. If you test 100 missiles and 99 of them perform adequately, you don’t write, ‘One Missile Crashes,’ you write, ‘99 Percent Hit Targets.’ ”

  There was something to be said for each position. But nothing could exonerate the Globe in the eyes of Boston’s embattled Celts. A decade of liberal causes—civil rights, Vietnam, the youth culture, women’s liberation—had irrevocably eroded the Irish neighborhoods’ faith in the newspaper they had once called their own. The paper’s positions on birth control, abortion, gay rights, pornography, and the like eventually led the Massachusetts Council of the Knights of Columbus to condemn its “irreligious attitude toward all things Catholic.” And now Globe editorials were hammering relentlessly at the resisting white parents, warning them that their anti-busing position was not only illegal but immoral. Tom Winship had the final word on editorial policy, but most of these dissertations were the work of a determined Yankee named Anne C. Wyman. The Globe’s one true Brahmin (her C stood for Cabot), she lived on a Cambridge hillside from which she viewed the busing issue in starkly moral terms. Hers was the “Cotton Mather position,” by which she meant, “If it’s right, it’s right. Once you embark on the course, there’s no turning back.”

  But it was less the paper’s editorials that nettled South Boston and Charlestown than the abstraction with which the Globe covered such communities, rarely capturing their gritty intensity, their sense of turf, their smoldering resentment. Traditionally, the Globe approached its fragmented city through a corps of emissaries. Eager that every racial and ethnic community feel represented in its pages, it used society writer Alison Arnold to address the Yankees, Leo Shapiro the Jews, Dexter Eure the blacks, Bob Healy the Irish. For years Healy took this responsibility seriously, arguing that the Globe’s essential constituency was “Joe Six-pack,” the Irish Catholic father of six who lived in a Dorchester three-decker, attended his parish church, drank at the neighborhood tavern. But once Healy got a Nieman Fellowship, began lecturing at the Institute of Politics and playing squash at the Harvard Club, he eagerly shouldered all the liberal banners. Nobody could be as tough on his co-religionists: “If they don’t like integration,” he’d say, “we’ll shove it down their throats.” Joe Six-pack might find solace in the Globe’s more conventional micks—Dave Farrell, a shrewd practitioner of clubhouse politics, and Jeremiah Murphy, a sentimental raconteur of Gaelic legend—but most of the street-wise Irishmen left on the paper were aging veterans shunted aside by Winship’s youth movement. The young Ivy Leaguers who now filled the newsroom were ill at ease in the Irish neighborhoods, unable to belly up to the bar with longshoremen and truck drivers. The handful of reporters who still lived in the city had long since removed their children from the public schools and could feel little connection to families still trapped by those dismal institutions. Desperate for someone to cover the thankless “anti-busing” beat, Phelps had turned that summer of 1974 to a New York Jew named Bob Sales, widely regarded as one of the paper’s savviest reporters. But Phelps and Sales were temperamentally incompatible. By September the Globe had nobody assigned full-time to cover ROAR and its allies.

  One of the few staffers at home in Southie’s taverns was columnist Mike Barnicle, an engaging young Irishman hired directly off the political circuit, where he had written speeches for John Tunney and Ed Muskie. On the first day of busing, Barnicle stationed himself across the street from South Boston High, blending easily with a crowd of angry whites, some of them brandishing sticks and bottles. That afternoon he wrote a vivid column filled with quotes like “Goddamned niggers! Why don’t you go to school in Africa!” Fearing that such unvarnished realism would only inflame the situation, Winship killed the column. Later he dropped three more commentaries and two Szep cartoons in an effort to stem the angry tide lapping at the Globe’s doorstep.

  But it was too late. Anti-busing leaders kept the movement’s wrath focused on the Globe, State Senator Billy Bulger denouncing its “paternalism” and “contempt for the Boston resident,” School Committeeman John Kerrigan labeling it “a corrupt and immoral newspaper,” its reporters “maggots of the media.” After several reporters covering South Boston were threatened by angry crowds, the Globe removed the paper’s name from the side of staff cars and developed a special SOS—“Bulldog!”—which could be shouted across its walkie-talkie network. Though editors did not sanction subterfuge, some reporters when challenged said they worked for the Christian Science Monitor. But no stratagem could deflect Southie’s rage. For weeks the Globe received bomb threats almost nightly, causing lengthy searches and evacuations. Other callers threatened to kidnap several Taylor children, to break one reporter’s kneecaps, to kill both Phelps and Winship.

  ROAR sought to harness this anger to a city wide boycott of the Globe. In mid-October, three men made the rounds of South Boston newsdealers warning that if they continued to carry the paper, their stores would be firebombed. A police investigation produced no arrests, but several dealers refused to stock the Globe and newsstand sales in the neighborhood fell off sharply. Meanwhile, anti-Globe graffiti sprouted on walls and roadways: “Print the Truth,” “Mash the Maggots.” Over the next few months the paper’s circulation in the city declined by 15,000, about 12 percent of its Boston readership, though barely 3 percent of total sales. Although some of this decline stemmed from a simultaneous rise in subscription prices, the boycott probably cost the Globe 7,000 readers. A modest loss, scarcely threatening the paper’s preeminence, it might have been larger were it not for the immense popularity of the Globe sports pages in the very neighborhoods most angered by its busing coverage.

  The boycott, the gunshots, the hijackings and threats were alarming evidence that the Globe was terribly out of touch with part of its community. That fall Bob Phelps submitted a memo to Davis Taylor analyzing the newspaper’s dilemma. “The Globe does not know the people and the neighborhoods of Boston the way it should,” he wrote. “We are part of the establishment that has lost close touch with the people that we used to have. There are others in Boston who have also lost that close touch—the business and professional community. It’s time for all of us to learn more about our neighbors.”

  Soon readers got their first intimation of the debate splitting the Globe’s executive ranks. On October 12, Crocker Snow expressed in a column some of the doubts he had voiced in memos to Winship and Davis Taylor. Opening with a lyrical description of ducks silhouetted against a scarlet sunset near his North Shore home, he noted that “twenty miles south as a duck flies, the same setting sun glints off the hoods of burning cars at Mission Hill and the blue plastic riot helmets of the TPF…. It is all in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy, like a horrible quicksand drawing the city down.” His portrait of a city straining in the yoke of an unworkable court order was hardly calculated to ingratiate him with Tom Winship. Placed in the front office as an advocate for the editorial outlook, Crocker seemed now to be lining up with the business side. That evening Winship wrote him a note: “I thought the first thing you learned in journalism school was to substantiate your charges. The kind of patent generality included here is worse than nothing.”

  One line in Crocker’s column which particularly irritated Winship was a suggestion that opponents of busing were appealing to a “higher moral calling, a personal one, like the war resisters and draft evaders [whom the liberals] cheered all the way to Sweden.” That was a persistent theme in the Globe’s painful reappraisal that fall: how—some in-house critics
asked—could a newspaper which so enthusiastically supported civil disobedience against Southern segregation and the Vietnam War condemn Boston’s mothers for using similar techniques against a court order they considered unjust? As the staff debated, Bob Phelps had a reporter put the question to sixties activists, who proved similarly divided. “God, it’s terribly hard to judge these women,” replied Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, who had spent two nights in a St. Augustine jail in 1964. “I still think that what Martin Luther King said was right—that you could disobey the laws of the land if you had to, if you did so openly, and were prepared to take the punishment.” But Jonathan Kozol, who had gained national attention in 1967 with his indictment of Boston’s schools, said, “We’re seeing today not civil disobedience in its classic sense—moral action taken by choice, driven by love, devoid of fear—but mob terror and decades of miseducation, stirred by demagogues, preplanned by those who feed on hate.”

  This, in turn, raised the troubling issue of class. Some critics contended that in passionately supporting middle-class draft resisters, the Globe had failed to note that it was working-class youths who fought—and died—in Vietnam. Now those same observers argued that, in vehemently backing Garrity’s busing order, the paper was once more putting the burden on those least prepared to bear it.

  One Globe man who rarely overlooked class was Mike Barnicle. Cultivating a Breslinesque rhetoric (“He was of politics, this Patrick J. McDonough. He was Irish. He was Catholic. He was Democrat. He was human”) and his own brand of pugnacity, Barnicle loved to attack the establishment, particularly such symbols of Yankee privilege as Harvard, the First National Bank, orange Volvos, Earth Shoes, and wine lists. There was a certain irony in all this, for Barnicle himself was anything but proletarian—for years he lived in the suburbs, drove foreign cars, hobnobbed with Cambridge literati. But one of his suburban friends was Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and author, who had been pondering the class dimensions of busing. In mid-October, Barnicle did a lengthy interview with Coles, who boldly defied liberal orthodoxy. “The busing is a scandal,” Coles said. “I do not think that busing should be imposed like this on working-class people exclusively. It should cross these lines and people in the suburbs should share it…. The ultimate reality is the reality of class. And to talk about [busing] only in terms of racism is to miss the point…. [Working-class whites and blacks] are both competing for a very limited piece of the pie, the limits of which are being set by the larger limits of class which allow them damn little, if anything.”

  Tom Winship—who agonized over his paper’s suburban orientation and supported the notion of metropolitan busing—devoted the entire op-ed page to Coles’s interview, stirring up a storm of protest in liberal circles. Yet, regarding the city through thick panes of bulletproof glass, Globe editors saw little choice but to seek an understanding with the white working class. In mid-October, a curious item began appearing regularly: “The Boston Globe wants to receive suggestions and ideas as well as information about events and incidents related to the city’s wide-ranging school busing program…. All letters will be read by a Globe editor. The information will be considered in the paper’s coverage of this complex and controversial subject.” Bob Phelps and assistant executive editor Jack Driscoll visited South Boston, Charlestown, and Dorchester for “coffee klatches” with parents, while Tom Winship invited ROAR’s Virginia Sheehy to lunch, then published two of her feisty pronouncements on the op-ed page.

  In the following months, the Globe intervened still more directly, using its power in a determined effort to ease the city’s agony. Bob Phelps and Tom Winship held off-the-record sessions with Judge Garrity. Healy and Winship called on Cardinal Medeiros, urging him to mobilize the “moderate Catholic middle.” Winship lunched with attorneys for the black plaintiffs, suggesting that they accept the Masters’ Plan. And at one critical juncture, Winship telephoned Kevin White to propose a city-sponsored Procession Against Violence. When the Mayor accepted the suggestion, the Globe—without disclosing its own role in the matter—urged Bostonians to turn out for what “could be the most important show of faith and unity this city has ever witnessed.” Two days later, the Mayor appointed Davis Taylor to a thirteen-member Committee on Violence “to delve into the causes of racial violence and find ways to reduce the hostility.”

  Despite the Globe’s best efforts, the violence only intensified, drawing the paper further into the contradictions of its “balance” policy. Once, when a white man was dragged from his car and severely beaten by a gang of black youths, the Globe buried its three-paragraph account on an inside page. Almost immediately, the switchboard lit up with outraged calls, many of them noting that, two weeks before, the Globe had given banner headlines to a similar attack by white youths on a black man. The Globe responded with severity, demoting the responsible editor, publishing an abject mea culpa on page one: “The Globe’s policy is to report the news as fully and fairly as possible, without manipulating or slanting of any kind. But there can be many a slip between policy and practice. And this is what happened here. Poor judgment prevailed … and it cannot be excused.” Yet this merely drew a salvo from the other camp, which charged the Globe with “exaggerating black violence.”

  In its frantic efforts to offend no one, the Globe somehow managed to offend everyone. Gradually the clamor from all sides took its toll. Skittish and defensive, the paper retreated to a mechanical evenhandedness, keeping a running count of column inches devoted to “pro-black” and “pro-white” stories, trying to keep them approximately equal. Afraid that its news judgment wouldn’t be trusted, it no longer sought to reach a consensus on each day’s events, relying instead on a thorough recapitulation of the police blotter. Diligent in its collection of data, meticulous about covering all angles, it trusted that somehow the truth would emerge from the welter of fact.

  On May 5, 1975, the Globe was rewarded with the most prestigious of all journalism awards, the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Meritorious Public Service, given for “massive and balanced coverage of the Boston school desegregation conflict in a bitterly emotional climate.” The jurors concluded that the Globe had “withstood pressures from both pro- and anti-busing forces to put the issue into perspective and inform the public impartially.” To Tom Winship and Bob Phelps, the prize came as splendid vindication, an exquisite compensation for months of anguish. But there was no celebration in the newsroom that afternoon. Editors and reporters alike agreed that the Globe must not seem to be profiting from the city’s ordeal. As Davis Taylor issued a sober statement acknowledging Boston’s travail, the newspaper did everything but apologize for its award.

  That evening, several of the Globe’s unreconstructed Irishmen, victims of the youth movement and utterly cynical about the Winship regime, adjourned to their favorite watering hole, a noisy Italian restaurant called the Venetian Gardens. After numerous drinks and irreverent toasts, one of the newsmen, gazing deep into his shot glass, pronounced a private epitaph on the day’s events. “That’s not a Pulitzer Prize,” he concluded, “it’s a goddamn Purple Heart.”

  25

  Twymon

  When Alva Walker was nine years old, a brother took her Raggedy Ann and stuffed it in a pot of greens simmering on the stove. By supper-time, the doll was a shriveled crone.

  Growing up in a family of eight children, Alva had to watch her playthings carefully. She begged her parents for a dollhouse in which to keep her treasured possessions, and her father, who could do almost anything with his hands, hinted that he might build her one. Her mother said she’d try to get one from the Cooper Community Center. But Christmases and birthdays passed without a dollhouse.

  When she was fifteen and had outgrown such childish things, Alva went off to spend a year with her uncle Moses Baker in New Haven. A meticulous man who maintained a spick-and-span establishment near the Yale campus, Moses insisted on having his plates warmed before each meal, his pictures hanging just so on the walls. From him, Alva learned to appreciate the good
life.

  Gradually her childhood yearning for a dollhouse gave way to an adult obsession with a house of her own. In her dreams, it was a white clapboard cottage with green shutters, a big elm tree on the front lawn, and a white picket fence; in such a house, she would be secure from the vicissitudes of city life. But Alva realized that she would have to labor for such rewards. When she was sixteen, she quit high school to work at Schrafft’s candy factory in Charlestown, remaining there for eighteen months until she married Vernon Kinch and went off with him to Waterbury, Connecticut. But the marriage didn’t last; in 1959, while Alva was pregnant with her second child, Vernon left her.

  Back in Boston, she went to work at the Goddess Bra Company, where her mother and sister had also been employed. But Alva had no intention of getting trapped in a subsistence-level job. Determined to break into “high tech,” where the real money was, she began wiring computers at an RCA plant in suburban Needham while studying computer programming and getting her high school diploma at night. Meanwhile, she had begun seeing an amiable North Carolinian named Otis Debnam. In 1962, Alva and Otis set up housekeeping in a five-room apartment on Calder Street. In 1965, they had a child, Otis Jr., and when Alva’s divorce became final in 1973, they were married.

  Relentless in their pursuit of better things, the Debnams worked around the clock, each holding two jobs. Otis worked as a bank courier during the day and for a rubber company in Newton at night. In 1974, Alva became a computer operator at Gillette, while doing data processing at night for the Boston School Department.