Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  Beginning that March, the Mayor held a series of secret Parkman House breakfasts to brief campaign workers and city employees on his new political organization. At the peak of the pyramid was a “Committee of Five,” composed of five trusted political lieutenants (all full-time city employees). Under them would come 22 “ward coordinators” supervising 252 precinct captains, who, in turn, would direct the activities of 2,000 block workers. Each block worker would be responsible for 25 citizens, soliciting their votes and acting as their intermediaries with Kevin White’s regime.

  White told the breakfasters that the new organization would gradually replace his Little City Halls, which had “failed to deliver” politically. Henceforth, strict political criteria would prevail for the delivery of most city services. If you were a “KHW Positive” (a term from the previous fall’s polling operation, meaning a Kevin Hagan White supporter), you’d get your pothole fixed; if you were a “KHW Negative,” you’d bust an axle.

  In the months that followed, city employees were drafted wholesale into the new organization, compelled to attend weekly planning sessions, required to canvass voters, distribute literature, or work the telephones—often on city time. Even the highest-ranking officials weren’t exempt: the City Auditor was spotted one afternoon holding a sign for a White-endorsed candidate on Columbus Avenue. A few balked. When an assistant press secretary declined such “demeaning” tasks, her precinct captain warned: “You better look out! You’re among ten or twelve people who are being watched.” Such pressures intensified when the Mayor used a referendum on property tax assessments as a training exercise for his troops. Those who “put out” during the purely political effort were rewarded with promotions and raises; those who merely performed their municipal duties received no such favors. Pressed to justify this fusion of political and governmental service, the Mayor seemed to echo his brother’s judgment of years before. His bright young advisers, he said, “had no roots. They were not out in the neighborhoods. So I said, let them have twenty-five people each. They should know what it’s like to try to get a favor done for each of the twenty-five…. I did it more to develop them than to save me.”

  Although Richard Daley had provided the model for this operation, several City Hall officials detected more than a trace of Richard Nixon in the Mayor’s new style. One evening in April 1976, White attended the Boston premiere of All the President’s Men. The next morning, at a meeting of his senior staff, someone asked how he’d liked the film, triggering a fifteen-minute tirade on the lessons of Watergate. The President, White said, had been brought down by “a pair of young punks” who didn’t know their ass from their elbow about government (one listener was certain that the Mayor was thinking as much of Curt Wilkie and Mary Thornton as of Woodward and Bernstein). Nixon hadn’t deserved to be hounded out of office; he hadn’t done much more than they’d done right there in Boston—except get caught. At that, several aides felt like crawling under the table.

  White had always been fascinated by the exercise of power. For years he played a game with his staff. He’d ask whom they regarded as the most powerful man in Boston, by which he meant “the guy who can do whatever he wants to you, but you can’t do anything back to him.” They would tease him by tossing out names—Cardinal Cushing, Tom Winship, mob leader Gerry Angiulo, longshoremen’s boss “Red” Moran—but sooner or later they’d say, “Oh, you, Kevin,” and he’d beam. He always said there were only three political jobs worth having—mayor, governor, and President—because they were the only ones in which you could get anything done. When Tully Plesser tried to interest him in a cabinet post, White said, “You mean sit at a table and when you speak you hold up your hand and they say, ‘No, we’ll tell you when you can speak’? You got to be kidding!”

  In late 1976, White made an audacious bid to consolidate his power by tacking a proposal for partisan elections onto a charter reform package. Since 1909, Bostonians had chosen their mayor through a non-partisan contest, with the two highest vote getters in the preliminary facing each other in a runoff. Reintroducing partisan elections, the Mayor claimed, would increase voter participation and “revitalize the two-party system.” But critics contended that the principal beneficiary would be Kevin White himself. With the prerogatives of incumbency and his new political organization, White would almost certainly win a partisan primary; then, since the city was overwhelmingly Democratic, he would be the odds-on favorite to swamp any Republican opponent. If the proposal succeeded, Kevin White might be Boston’s mayor-for-life. In public, White vehemently denied such considerations. In private he was blunt: “Don’t you see,” he told skeptical aides. “This is the Congress of Vienna! Afterwards it’ll be a breeze.” At the last moment, the plan was killed in the state legislature.

  Only momentarily fazed by this setback, the Mayor worked out a full theory of executive power. “There is a growing timidity of chief executives in the exercise of authority, influence, and command,” he told any audience which would listen. “Born of an overreaction to Vietnam and Watergate, political reformists are tying the hands of elected officials as the Lilliputians tied Gulliver, in an effort to prescribe good government by imposing restraints. If the presidency is in trouble as an institution it is not so much because it has become too powerful as because it has become increasingly dysfunctional. Power is to be exercised, not husbanded.”

  Increasingly he insisted on the trappings of power as well. No longer did the Mayor appear in public with coat over shoulder and sleeves rolled up (“It became a mannerism,” he told one interviewer. “I consciously keep my coat on these days”). Years before, he had refused to use the massive limousine inherited from John Collins, buying a Ford station wagon instead, and often riding up front with the driver. But by the mid-seventies he was back in a limo (which, by tradition, bore the numbers 576, the number of letters in the names James Michael Curley). Although he earned only $40,000 a year—the legacy of a bitter standoff with the City Council—he traveled in style at city expense. On one trip to Washington seeking financial assistance from the Carter administration, he and his party were met at National Airport by a caravan of chauffeured limousines (the Admiral Limousine Service charged Boston $1,567.50 for two days). On a trip to New York, the Mayor stayed in a $250-a-night suite at the Hotel Pierre. The press dubbed him “Kevin de Luxe.”

  He justified such expenditures by calling Boston “a world-class city” which required “a certain level of dignity” from its chief executive. “When I’m in Washington I’m not treated like some kind of donkey. I do it by knowing my place, without trying to strut. I know the President is the President, Tip is Tip, Teddy is Teddy. They can kick the shit out of me in private. But publicly, no. I think that adds to the city.” When told that New York’s Mayor Ed Koch had taken a city bus to his own inauguration, White hissed with contempt, “One of these days some guy is going to do something like crawl. I will never crawl. I will stand and kick, but I will not crawl.”

  He worked in handsome surroundings, a sumptuous suite looking out through tinted windows at Quincy Market (“You don’t need to run for President,” Ed Muskie told him. “You already have the nicest office of any public official in America”). But he wasn’t satisfied. Soon he outraged the City Council by announcing plans for a $90,000 dining room and kitchen. Meanwhile, with every passing year, he spent more time at the Parkman House. For an Irish boy, born in lower-middle-class Jamaica Plain, reared in lace-curtain West Roxbury, and settled at the shabbily genteel base of Beacon Hill, the great mansion on the hilltop was the consummation of his fantasies, a house from which he could actually look down on the Brahmins. In the spacious dining room lined with eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper of pink-red birds and butterflies, he served his guests—at city expense—such specialties as Strawberry Gantoise and Chicken Vallée d’Auge. Sometimes as he strolled the cornflower-blue rug, warmed his feet by the American Empire fireplace, or dashed off a note at the mahogany secretary, he couldn’t believe his good fortu
ne. Completing an interview with a Philadelphia newsman, he paused at the door, gazed up at the graceful, curving stairway, and said, “It’s got to be the loveliest staircase in America!” One spring evening another reporter was driving along Beacon Street when he spied the Mayor on the wrought-iron balcony surveying his city. When the reporter saluted, the Mayor responded with a papal blessing.

  In all of this, his mother’s patrician tastes were evident. At a reception in his City Hall office, an Irish commissioner examined the volumes of history and literature and rasped, “Nice books. Who chose them for you?” To which Patricia Hagan White responded imperiously, “I did, Commissioner.” Patricia also had a hand in selecting the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington—on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—that graced one wall, the Beethoven sonatas that played softly on the stereo system. With Joe White dead and Terry in self-imposed exile, Patricia was often her son’s principal adviser. He showed her his speeches, sought her advice on books and journals, consulted her about the broad lines of public policy. He named his three successive golden retrievers after her political heroes—Jeff (for Thomas Jefferson), Andy (for Andrew Jackson), and Adlai (for Adlai Stevenson). When he presented gold medals to seven “Grand Bostonians,” her sensibility informed the selection: poets Archibald MacLeish and David McCord; historian Samuel Eliot Morison; conductor Arthur Fiedler; banker Ralph Lowell; physician Paul Dudley White; and only one politician—and one Irishman—former Speaker of the House John McCormack.

  Like his mother, Kevin was determined to cast off the image of music-hall Irishman worn by the departed husband and father. When an opponent called Kevin a “Boston pol,” he said that was “the worst thing anybody ever said about me.” When a black aide asked whether he planned to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, he said, “I feel about that the way you do about a minstrel show.” Mindful of his father’s thralldom to the bottle, Kevin was a virtual teetotaler who occasionally took a glass of chilled white wine. He never joined the Knights of Columbus and kept his distance from the Church, declining to kiss the ring of the aging Cardinal Cushing, offering little more than civility to Humberto Medeiros.

  He demanded deference from the WASP world. And never had he seemed so happy as on the summer day in 1976 when Queen Elizabeth visited Bicentennial Boston. Escorting her about his domain, he positively preened, as if to say: Here’s the Queen of England with a thousand years of imperial history behind her paying a call on the grandson of Irish immigrants! He loved to quote Mayor Thomas Lynch’s remark, made at his 1836 inauguration, that the Irish were “a race that never will be infused into our own, but on the contrary will always remain distinct and hostile.” Well, the Mayor seemed to say, smoothing his gray flannels and blue blazer, do I really look so different?

  But he was different. Beneath his J. Press wardrobe, Kevin White was anything but a tight-lipped, buttoned-down Yankee. A cauldron of insecurities and resentments, of black Irish rages and Celtic depressions, he personalized everything—my city, my police chief, my tax rate. That left him immensely vulnerable, unable to differentiate between a glancing blow and a fatal wound. No matter how he might aspire to the accouterments of the upper class, he was most at ease with landsmen like Vice-Mayor Eddie Sullivan, State Treasurer Bobby Crane, Speaker Tip O’Neill. At eleven o’clock at night, when you kick off your shoes, you do it with men who share your cadence, not your concepts.

  In truth, White privately detested the Brahmin bankers and businessmen with whom he was compelled to traffic during the day. Through all his years in office, he never established cordial relations with the powerful Vault. For a time he chose to deal with his own counter-Vault, a handpicked coterie of pliant merchants. His only intimate friend in Boston’s commercial world wasn’t a Yankee at all, but a Canadian-born Jew named Mort Zuckerman, who made a fortune in Boston real estate before buying The Atlantic Monthly. Like White, Zuckerman was an outsider, the object of Yankee condescension and obstruction. And, like the Mayor, he had beat the Yankees at their own game.

  As the seventies drew to a close, Kevin White won his fourth consecutive term—an unprecedented feat in Boston, rare anywhere in the nation. Except for six-term Henry Maier in Milwaukee, he had served longer than any other sitting mayor of a major American city. His substantive achievements were not inconsiderable: innovations like Little City Halls, “Summerthing,” and community schools; the halting of superfluous highway construction and airport expansion; a massive capital improvements program, producing dozens of new schools, libraries, parks, fire and police stations; recruitment of superior public servants; a new reputation for Boston as one of the most vibrant and livable cities in the land.

  But that reputation was derived from a narrow swatch of the city—a square mile of new office towers, hotels, restaurants, and shops along the fashionable fringes of the Boston Common. The longer the Mayor remained in office, the more he betrayed what aides called his “edifice complex,” a craving for monuments to memorialize the Kevin White era. No place so symbolized this imperial Boston as the development which the Mayor admired through his tinted office windows. The handsome granite warehouses of Quincy Market had been converted into a massive cornucopia of America’s consumer culture, brimming with crystal, china, books, records, stereos, and tape recorders, not to mention shrimp, oysters, kebobs, crepes, bockwurst, pepper Brie, spinach pâté, salad Niçoise, popovers, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, and chocolate-chip cookies. Among the multitudes which surged along its corridors and piazzas, one searched hard for a black face, even a stray visitor from nearby Charlestown or South Boston. The market was an incongruous memorial to a mayor who had come into office promising to reverse his predecessor’s emphasis on downtown development in favor of the long-neglected neighborhoods. In his first term White had done just that—but problems of the neighborhoods were systemic, rooted in intractable dilemmas of race and class, while downtown could be treated with quick infusions of cash and chic. Gradually, the Mayor took the easy way out.

  Nowhere was his retreat from the tough issues more evident than in the area of race. Once he had failed in his initial efforts to “broker” the busing crisis, he largely abandoned his attempts to resolve Boston’s chronic racial tension. Periodically—as in his 1979 inaugural address—he proclaimed some new crusade on the matter, but before long it would grind to a halt for lack of leadership. When blacks complained of his vacillation, the Mayor accused them of ingratitude. After he told one group, “You wouldn’t even be in this room if it weren’t for me,” neighborhood activist Percy Wilson snapped, “Don’t give us this master-slave thing.” Such exchanges made it difficult for blacks to function in the White administration. Year by year, the highest-ranking black at City Hall, Deputy Mayor Jeep Jones, found his influence further circumscribed. After a series of racial incidents in Dorchester and East Boston, he exploded during a meeting with the Mayor, demanding that White take vigorous steps to halt such attacks. “Black people must be able to move about this city without fear of assault,” he shouted. “We are taxpayers, voters, human beings. When is all this going to change?” The Mayor shouted back, charging Jeep with disloyalty. Soon afterwards, Jones resigned.

  By then the commitment to social change which had characterized Kevin White’s early years in office had largely ebbed away. That commitment had coalesced over the issue of race in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and it dissolved over the issue of race in the busing crisis of 1974–75. No longer very interested in such matters, the Mayor seemed increasingly obsessed with his own political survival.

  He dreaded the prospect of losing public office. For more than two decades he hadn’t had to worry about finding a parking space or getting tickets to Fenway Park. Looking out his office window at the forest of anonymous skyscrapers, he shrank from the idea of renting space in one of those towers and practicing law for a living. One day, as the Mayor was walking down the street, a guy in a windbreaker yelled at him, “We’ll get you, Kevin, the way we
got the Governor.” Wheeling on his tormentor, White shouted, “Shut up, you son of a bitch. I’m going to survive because I’m going to beat the shit out of you!”

  But the political organization designed to ensure his survival suffered from the same liabilities that beset most of his public programs: his moodiness and short attention span. The Mayor could be eloquent when enunciating grand philosophical principles, but he was terrible on the details. He just couldn’t be bothered. One day, somebody asked him what the city budget was, and, unable to remember whether it was $50 million or $500 million, he just made up a figure. But a political machine requires infinite attention to detail. Richard Daley thrived on such painstaking diligence; Kevin White did not. “You run the machine,” Daley used to warn, “or the machine runs you.” As time passed, it often seemed as if White’s machine was running him.

  For years he had boasted that none of his people had ever gone to jail. Then, in a matter of months, two senior operatives—his Ward Thirteen coordinator and a ranking redevelopment official—pleaded guilty to extortion charges and received substantial prison terms.

  At about the same time, some 1,500 members of his organization were invited to a birthday party for the Mayor’s wife at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The workers were informed by their superiors that a “gift” of at least fifty dollars was expected from each. Coming just when many municipal employees were being laid off in an “economy” drive, the request had teeth. In the end, 401 persons contributed a total of $122,000. Investigators later determined that many of these people had deposited cash in their personal accounts in the same amount as their “gifts.” This suggested that the event may have been designed, in part, to launder illegally raised money (although one of the party’s organizers was later acquitted of that charge).