Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  On Thursday afternoon, it budged.

  That morning, passing bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling the streets, I arrived at the cathedral before the president. Sitting alone in a basement room, I had time to think. I sensed the public mood falling. Alarmed that the bombers were still at large, people were losing confidence in the investigation. They were also shaken (I know I was) by graphic media accounts of amputations. I wanted to do something—anything—to raise morale, even if only for a news cycle. But what?

  I don’t obsess about comments in the media. Usually. But a statement to a reporter from a local professor had stuck in my craw. Referring to my retirement at the end of 2013, he said, “It is unfortunate that one of the last impressions people will have of his mayoralty is him in a wheelchair, almost sidelined at a time of crisis.” The phrase “in a wheelchair” got to me. Hadn’t FDR led the country through depression and war in a wheelchair?

  At the interfaith service a succession of speakers mounted the pulpit to address the audience. A separate microphone, adjusted to the height of my wheelchair, was set up for me. When it was my turn to speak, my son whispered to me, “Dad, I’ll wheel you over to the microphone.” Suddenly, I knew what to do. “Tommy,” I said, “I’m the mayor. Wheel me to the pulpit. I’m going to stand up.”

  If you watched the service, you saw the struggle I had doing it. I could feel the president and Mrs. Obama and the two thousand people in the cathedral rooting for me. With Tommy tipping the wheelchair forward, I put my hands on the arms and pushed. It was no good. I tucked my elbows further back and pushed harder. Biting my lower lip against a twinge of pain, grabbing the lectern for balance, I stood up. The enclosed pulpit hid the line connecting my catheter to the bag on the wheelchair.

  “Good morning,” I said, as the sun lit the stained-glass windows.

  “And it is a good morning because we are together. We are one Boston. No adversity, no challenge, nothing can tear down the resilience in the heart of this city and its people. . . . I have never loved it . . . more than I do today.” I described the acts of caring that unfolded within seconds of the bombing, and then I remembered the dead: “We say goodbye to the young boy with the big heart, Martin Richard, . . . we’ll miss Krystle Campbell and celebrate her spirit that brought her to the Marathon year after year . . . and we mourn Lu Lingzi, who came to the city in search of education, and found new friends.”

  Boston’s worst moment, I said, was the beginning of Boston’s finest hour: “Even with the smell of smoke in the air, and blood on the streets, and with tears in our eyes, we triumphed over that hateful act on Monday afternoon. . . . Because this is Boston, a city with courage, compassion, and strength that knows no bounds.”

  Governor Patrick followed, moving me when he said, “Mayor Menino started Monday morning frustrated he couldn’t be at the finish line this time as he always is. And then late that afternoon, checked himself out of the hospital to help this city, our city, face down this tragedy.” His last line—“We will rise, and we will endure”—picked up on my gesture. Reporters are suckers for symbols. A Los Angeles Times headline was typical: “Mayor Menino: Symbol of a Resilient Boston.” The story described the reaction to my speech—“He pulled himself from his wheelchair to the loudest applause of the day”—and noted that “in some ways, the mayor has become a potent symbol as a wounded Boston tries to heal.” It quoted one young woman visiting the makeshift Copley Square memorial to the bombing victims, and, boy, did she get my message! “He can’t even walk and he’s here to comfort all of us,” she said. “It shows how strong our leaders are here—how strong the people are—that if anything were to happen . . . [we’d] drop what [we’re] doing and . . . take care of each other.” People still tell me that speech lifted their spirits.

  On Friday morning I reversed the stand I had staked out on Monday afternoon: Terror must not be allowed to disrupt daily life. Boston had nothing to fear.

  Boston had plenty to fear that Friday morning. The release of the store security videos panicked the bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, into running. They didn’t get far, about a mile from their Cambridge home, when they stopped to ambush a twenty-six-year-old MIT policeman, Sean A. Collier. In a bungled attempt to steal his gun, they snuck up behind his patrol car and shot him five times. Crossing the Charles River into Boston, they carjacked a Mercedes SUV in Allston. The older brother, Tamerlan, waved a silver pistol at the driver and said, “I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.” And for nearly ninety minutes, the brothers made him, a young Chinese immigrant-entrepreneur named Danny, drive from one ATM to another emptying his bank account. When they stopped for gas back on the Cambridge side of the Charles, Danny bolted and alerted police.

  In the SUV, the brothers led cruisers on a chase that ended in the early hours of Friday in Watertown, near the Boston line, in a shoot-out that left one officer, Richard H. Donohue Jr., critically wounded. Tamerlan was killed. Dzhokhar, the younger brother, escaped. After searching for him till dawn, police thought he might have got away. He was a dangerous kid. In the Watertown gunfight, the brothers threw pipe bombs at police.

  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wasn’t all Boston had to fear that morning. There were reports of a man carrying a suspicious package near the federal courthouse in the Seaport District, of another suspicious package in a cab at Charlesgate, of pipe bombs buried in Kenmore Square, of a dangerous character on an Amtrak train . . . Governor Patrick ticked them off in a six A.M. call. Monday’s question was Friday’s: How big could this get?

  The security people recommended a lockdown of Boston and municipalities bordering it. Not a state of emergency, Patrick said. A million people would be asked, not ordered, to “shelter-in-place.”

  On Monday I vowed, “We will not let terror take us over.” The reports streaming in on Friday morning—earlier in the week we had refused to be panicked by such rumors. I doubted the brothers had confederates. I still believed they acted alone.

  Danny, the owner of the carjacked SUV, said they discussed driving to New York to bomb Times Square. Suppose Dzhokhar was still in Watertown. Only one measure could prevent him from seizing another car and carrying out their plan: stopping all travel so any moving civilian vehicle would stand out. That was my reason for going along with shelter-in-place.

  “Do it,” I said.

  “There is a massive manhunt under way,” the governor announced at a press conference. “To assist that . . . we’re asking ­people to shelter-in-place, in other words to stay indoors with the doors locked and do not open the doors to anyone other than a properly identified law enforcement officer, and that applies here in Watertown where we are right now, [but] also in Cambridge . . . and at this point, all of Boston. All of Boston.”

  Without detailing them, Police Commissioner Ed Davis, speaking next, emphasized the reports that justified the lockdown: “Within the last half hour we have received information that I have communicated to Mayor Menino. . . . Mayor Menino asked me to come here and to tell you . . . that the shelter-in-place recommendation has been extended throughout the City of Boston.”

  Shelter-in-place was an overreaction. That was clear Friday evening, when, minutes after the governor called it off, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found. After being confined to his house all day, David Henneberry, who lived on Franklin Street in Watertown, less than a mile from where Tsarnaev ditched the SUV, went outside to get some fresh air. He noticed two paint rollers on his lawn. He figured they had fallen from the cover on his boat. When he’d wrapped the Slip Away II in white plastic in the fall, he’d put paint rollers under the bottom edge of the wrap to protect the surface of the boat. He climbed a stepladder, peeled back the cover, and looked inside.

  Minutes later an officer’s voice came over the police scanner: “We’re getting a report from Watertown of 67 Franklin Street. They have a boat with blood in it. . . . I’ve got the owner of the house here. He says there’s a body in the boat.” Absent shelter-in-place, Henneberry might have discovered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
earlier.

  I was in Watertown with my team in the city SUV when Commissioner Davis walked over, leaned his head into the vehicle, and said, “We got him.” Dot Joyce’s tweet—“We got him, we got him. Thank God, the search is over”—was the first the world heard of it.

  The scanner came alive with chatter. I picked up a microphone. To the hundreds of officers who had worked around the clock for five days to bring the bombers to justice, I said: “People of Boston are proud of you. Especially the mayor of Boston. I’m very proud of what you’ve done.” Silence. Then the scanner crackled and a voice said something I won’t forget: “We did it for you, boss.”

  That night thousands poured into the streets to cheer convoys of police vehicles. When I returned to the Parkman House, the city-owned townhouse on Beacon Hill where I was staying since leaving the hospital, a crowd of young people were celebrating on the Common. I rolled down the window. They were singing “God Bless America.”

  Ed Davis called. “The kids are celebrating in the Fenway,” he said. Should the police begin to shut it down? “Let ’em blow off steam,” I said. “They’ve been sheltered-in-place for twelve hours. They deserve to whoop it up.”

  Governor Patrick and I were both retiring at the end of our terms. Our timing was perfect. If we had run for reelection, the lockdown would have been used against us. Attack ads would have depicted Boston as a scene from Planet of the Apes: the “eerily empty” downtown streets, the traffic-less highways, the shuttered train yards, the closed businesses, universities, and courthouses, the locked City Hall and State House. The ads would contrast what I said all week with what I said to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week two days after Dzhokhar’s capture:

  ME: These terrorists want[ed] to . . . hold the city hostage and stop the economy. . . . Look at what happened on Friday. The whole city was on lockdown, no businesses open, nobody leaving their homes. . . .

  GEORGE: Well, let me ask you about that lockdown. Because some have suggested that it was an overreaction to lock down the city—that it was actually giving the terrorists exactly what they wanted.

  George spoke my Monday lines to indict my Friday decision.

  Yet if shelter-in-place was a miscalculation by elected officials, it was a triumph for citizens. “We asked,” Governor Patrick said a year after the bombing. “Frankly, it was an amazing thing . . . that people . . . complied.”

  Not everyone saw it that way. “The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Ron Paul argued. A military-style occupation? “There has been no law mentioned,” a police official said, “or any idea that if you go outside [you’ll] be arrested.” People stayed home voluntarily.

  Paul again: “This unprecedented act should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.” Really? Should it “frighten us” that to contain a common threat, citizens did what their government requested? That by depriving terrorists of the option of hiding in the crowd, they took responsibility for public safety? That Bostonians consented to limit their individual freedom in order to preserve their civic liberty? This unprecedented act should make us curious why, for thirteen hours on a fine April day, 650,000 Boston residents put community before self, and how their city came to inspire their loyalty. Trust in government is at an all-time low. Perhaps the Boston story holds lessons on how to regain it.

  After five terms as mayor, I left office with an 80 percent approval rating. That is not a tribute to me but to a style of governing that bridges the gap between the citizen and the city. I paid attention to the fundamentals of urban life—clean streets, public safety, good schools, neighborhood commerce. I listened to what people said they wanted from government. Call my City Hall and you never got an answering machine. People trusted government because it heard them. Because they could talk to it. Because it kept its word. And because it was credible about things people could see, they accepted its judgment on important things they couldn’t. In an “amazing” show of self-government, all of Boston acted as one on April 19, 2013. This book tries to explain why, as I told George Stephanopoulos, “Boston did a great job that day.”

  Chapter 1

  From Hyde Park to City Hall

  I want the city of Boston to be for everybody what Hyde Park was for me.

  —from my first inaugural address, 1994

  I GREW UP in a good world. Neighborhoods were safe. Union jobs were plentiful. Parents fought but rarely split. There was a basic security to life. It wasn’t like that everywhere in the 1950s, not by a long shot. But it was like that for me coming of age in Hyde Park.

  I was a progressive mayor. In the country’s youngest city (by age), I embraced the innovation economy. I celebrated Boston’s mix of peoples and cultures. I championed gay rights. According to a gay community newspaper, there were so many gay men in my first administration that “you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one.” The title of this book, Mayor for a New America, is accurate. But my public values look back to an Old America. To schools that prepared young people for jobs. To a secure and growing middle class. To stable communities, close neighborhoods, and strong families.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, raised in Hyde Park on Hudson, was once asked what he wanted for Americans. “What I had growing up,” he said. “Good health, security, the leisure to read and travel and develop my interests. And I want that for everybody.” That’s how I felt about my Hyde Park legacy—the good life people can have living in Boston’s neighborhoods. And I wanted that for everybody.

  Hyde Park, annexed in 1912, was the last addition to Boston. After Hyde Park the city was complete.

  Hyde Park fills Boston’s southernmost corner. But partly because you can drive from downtown to the New Hampshire border quicker than to parts of Hyde Park, to many Bostonians it might as well be Mars.

  Boston pols included. To them Hyde Park was the sticks. They had no idea it was so vote-rich until I made it my base to run for mayor. What one columnist called “the eight-hundred pound gorilla of Hyde Park politics” was loose, and it was too late to stop him.

  Until the 1970s, Hyde Park was a center of heavy industry. There was a Westinghouse plant, an Allis-Chalmers factory, and, to service these giants, small foundries and metalworking shops spread all over.

  My father, a member of the Machinists Union, worked at Westinghouse. Lots of men in our “lunch pail neighborhood” worked there. I could mess up in school, I thought, and still land a job at the plant.

  I did work there the summer of my senior year in high school. By then my dad was a foreman. I noticed how he heard the men out. It was his way of showing respect. That was my first lesson in politics.

  I’m a bad talker (“Mumbles Menino”) but a good listener. I won ten elections. Maybe a politician who stops talking long enough to listen is a breath of fresh air to voters.

  I am your mayor. You came here seeking a better life just like my grandparents.

  —addressing Boston’s newest immigrants in my 1994 inaugural

  As a child I learned about the problems facing newcomers to America—the same problems with visas, language, housing, the bureaucracy, and the schools facing Boston’s immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa today. In my first inaugural, to these new Americans of thirty-four nationalities I said: “I am your mayor. . . . If you have arrived in Boston, like my grandmother, speaking no English, I will make sure you get the help you need to learn the language. Here and now, I tell you, I will institute a full range of English-as-a-second-language programs.”

  To help these folks navigate city government, I established the Office of New Bostonians in City Hall. It connects newcomers to city services with few questions asked. Immigrants are welcome in Boston regardless of their “status.”

  So when immigrants’ rights groups revealed that, under an innocent-sounding program begun after 9/11, my police were forwarding information to federal officia
ls that got moms and dads deported, I hit the roof. The police had better things to do with their time. I did not become mayor to throw hardworking people out of the country.

  My mother, Susan, was a Mother Teresa to new immigrants in Hyde Park, starting at home. We occupied the first floor of a two-family house on Hyde Park Avenue. My aunt lived on the second floor along with my grandparents. My grandfather Thomas Menino was from Grottaminarda, a village in Avellino in the Campania region of southern Italy, the area known as the Mezzogiorno, which means “midday” and refers to the strength of the noon sun. Its inhabitants called it La Miseria for the privations that filled the ships to America. My cousin painted a mural of my grandfather showing him sitting in Grottaminarda with his suitcase, waiting for a ship to cross the ocean that occupies most of the painting. His destination is an American city marked by its skyline. In the mural, so big it filled a wall in my outer office at City Hall, he looks sad but determined. Attracted by the opportunity it offered to practice his trade—laborer—he settled in Hyde Park, his American Dream before it was mine.

  Next door to our house my grandfather bought a six-decker for family members still in Italy. Each group stayed a few years, working seven days a week and eating a diet of pasta to scrape together a down payment for a house. Then they moved out and a new group moved in. My mother, who spoke fluent Italian, helped them fill out job applications, pay their bills, and enroll their children in the schools. She guided them at every stage of their journey to American citizenship. Eventually she extended her hand from family to strangers, and from Italians to immigrants from Greece, Ireland, and other countries.