Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  “HEYHOWAYA?”

  The critiques of Menino—that he gets too much credit just for showing up, that his administration is too secretive and insular, that his record of improving life in the neighborhoods is exaggerated—have begun to resonate, thanks to constant repetition, and a steady drip of bad news emanating from the mayor’s suite.

  —from a Boston Globe editorial during the 2009 campaign

  I’ve tried to keep the brag down in this book, citing facts or others’ opinions. But for once take my word for it: I was not a crook. I ran a clean government. The city’s lawyers cautioned me to proceed carefully against employees under a cloud: They might sue. I spurned that advice. At the first hint of corruption, appointees were out the door. Employees with civil service protection were harder to fire, but I made life miserable for them.

  A reporter preparing a story on my temper once asked if it was true that I ran City Hall like “a drill sergeant.” I didn’t deny it. “I expect the best out of my people,” I said. “I demand it sometimes. The public demands it of me all the time.”

  People believed I’d do the right thing for the city. Abuse their trust, and I’d spend my time trying to regain what I’d lost. I’d get nothing done. Keeping the public trust applied in spades to my own conduct. The only check on Boston’s emperor/mayor was the emperor/mayor. It was up to me to keep me in line.

  Mostly I succeeded. In 2000 I pledged not to take political contributions from developers with business before the city: “What you’re talking about is my integrity, and there is absolutely no price on that.” Partly because aides were competing to see who could raise the most money, that promise was broken, and I wound up accepting donations from a few such developers, some of which we returned. The amount came to a paltry $10,000 out of more than $5 million raised from other sources. When an investigative reporter told me that six “pet” developers with no pending business before the city had contributed $61,000 over four years, I commented: “That’s all? Cheap bums.”

  The issue of public ethics involved is this: Did I practice “pay for play” by favoring developers who made donations over those who didn’t? Donations did not determine my decisions. They were one among many factors. My “pet” developers had track records of outstanding performance. Norman Leventhal, a Dorchester paperboy who became a great Boston benefactor, once came into my office and began to describe a new project. “Don’t tell me where it is, Norman,” I interrupted. “Just build it.” That’s how much I trusted him.

  Contributions aside, what about personal connections? Suppose you had to choose between a proposal from a friend and one from a stranger. Other things being equal, you’d do what I did. You’d favor the friend. Voters are human too. They cut you more slack over friends than over money. (I make no apologies for a 2001 decision that combined them: stopping a chain drugstore from opening near a pharmacy owned by a friend and contributor.)

  Corruption is one of two reasons voters fire incumbents. I was safe on that front. The other reason is they want change. There I was vulnerable. In 2009 I had been mayor for sixteen years. Maybe I was kidding myself, but I wanted another term to improve people’s lives.

  This is the story of my closest election.

  I knew it would be a tough year in January, when, in my State of the City speech, I addressed the hard times brought on by the Wall Street crash: “We are confronting a great economic crisis. Boston did not create it. But Boston must deal with it. . . . Whether it’s at your kitchen table, or my desk, the numbers are not pretty.” To make up a $140 million budget shortfall, I said, unions representing city employees had to choose: a wage freeze or layoffs. “The mayor is popular now, but will he be popular after he lays off hundreds of teachers, cops, and firefighters?” asked the Globe. New initiatives? Forget about it. Holding the line on existing services would be a miracle.

  One observer called the speech “the most dour assessment of the state of the city since British troops roamed Roxbury.”

  In my two earlier contested races, 2001 and 2005, I did not run TV ads until the last week in October, and they were jokey productions. In 2009 I started running ads in April, and they were serious.

  A second hurdle to my reelection was “Menino fatigue.” People had to be tired of seeing me on TV. The financial crisis ruled out running on a bold vision for my precedent-shattering fifth term. I always want to look ahead, to talk about tomorrow. But reality would force me to look back, reminding voters of what I’d done in the past. In the run-up to the preliminary election in September, that would play into the strategy of my two challengers: to style me as yesterday’s mayor.

  “He works hard but this race will not be about the past 16 years but about the next four years,” declared one challenger. His campaign slogan was “A New Season for Boston.” I was an “old school Sony Walkman” mayor. He’d be an “iPod” mayor. He was forty.

  The other challenger hit the same note: “It’s time to bring in a new generation of leadership.” His slogan was “A New Way of Politics.” Appearing “so boyish he looks like he needed to get a parent’s permission slip for a field trip,” he was thirty-nine.

  I ran on the slogan “Moving Boston Forward.” But my vow to reach out to the “generation that gave us Facebook” looked silly when the press reported that I resisted voice mail.* I was sixty-six.

  I couldn’t hide how sour I was over the Gramps treatment:

  REPORTER: Which candidate poses the greater threat to you?

  ME: I’m not going to pick one over the other.

  REPORTER: Which would you rather grab a beer with?

  ME: I don’t drink.

  Challenger One was City Councilor at-Large Michael Flaherty of South Boston. The top vote-getter in three straight council elections and council president for five years. I’d backed him for the job. I’d hoped for loyalty but counted on patience, figuring Mike was young enough to wait out one more Menino term.

  “I’d been advised to wait,” Mike said in one speech. “I said, ‘The city can’t wait.’ For . . . mothers I’ve met over the course of this campaign who have lost their sons to senseless violence, I say, we can’t wait. For children across the city who dropped out of the Boston public schools or who currently are in underperforming schools, I say we can’t wait.”

  After he got 50,000 votes running for reelection in 2005, 14,000 short of my total that year, it was clear that he wasn’t likely to wait. So I backed another councilor for president.

  Challenger Two was At-Large City Councilor Sam Yoon, a Korean American community organizer funded by a national network of Asian American contributors. To win his seat in 2005, he’d defeated four Irish American candidates, among them the son of a former mayor, the daughter of another, and the son of a former secretary of state of the Commonwealth. Yoon was a classically trained pianist who attended “logic camp” as a kid. A Princeton grad. The holder of an advanced degree from Harvard. A newcomer to Boston. The face of the majority-minority city.

  With his résumé, it was no surprise that Yoon demanded debates. “For us not to begin immediately to debate shortchanges the voters of Boston,” he said. “There is too much at stake right now, with this economy and this budget crisis, for us not to be talking to the public about our platform and vision.” Flaherty, a former prosecutor, also clamored for debates. At a City Hall press conference, when reporters badgered me on the subject, I grew testy. “We’ll debate the issues,” I said. “Did you hear what I say? We’ll debate the issues. Next one? Do I have to repeat that line again? We’ll debate the issues that face the city.” And this was only April!

  “He welcomes debates as much as a colonoscopy,” wrote one columnist.

  At a political roast my eloquence came in for ribbing. “As you know, I’m running for mayor of Boston, and I have an opponent,” Flaherty began. “My opponent works very hard, is highly educated, and is known to speak a foreign tongue. . . . Councilor Yoon, welcome to the mayor’s race.” Congressman Stephen Lynch said he
had heard from President Obama the day after I joined other mayors at a White House meeting: “The president wanted to make a point of how impressed he was with the mayor. He said, ‘Congressman, I had no idea that your mayor speaks English as a second language.’” I even got into the act. “Writing books is a new thing for local pols,” I said. “[State Representative] Brian Wallace wrote one, the governor is working on his. I’m starting mine. It’s called the Menino-to-English dictionary.”

  The media was billing it as “the most competitive mayoral race in a generation” even before, a week after the September preliminary, the campaign took a dramatic turn.

  Yoon was eliminated in the preliminary, placing third with 21 percent of the vote. With Flaherty getting 24 percent to my 50 percent, it looked like I’d cruise to victory in the November final. Flaherty’s Old Boston background had little appeal to Yoon’s New Boston voters.

  Then Flaherty made what one columnist called a “big league move . . . to recast the campaign dynamic.” He announced a political partnership with Sam Yoon. Flaherty promised to appoint Yoon as his chief adviser under the title of deputy mayor. Standing with his new partner on City Hall Plaza, an energized Flaherty declared: “There’s a real race for mayor, folks, in Boston. It starts today.” Flaherty embraced Yoon’s call for term limits to “put an end to the ‘mayor for life’ culture that has held Boston back.”

  The op-ed writers were ecstatic. The pairing was “a bold—and potentially winning—gambit.” “The race is shaping up as a real choice between old and new.” “Flaherty’s grounded understanding of Boston politics and Yoon’s desire to modernize city management could complement each other well—combining their insider and outsider critiques of Menino.”

  “Floon is real,” Flaherty said, using the media’s shorthand for his combo with Yoon. “We have gay marriage here in Boston. We also have a great political marriage.”

  The two campaigned together. They appeared in ads together. They even coordinated their wardrobes. “Today, I just feel like wearing a sweater,” Flaherty texted Yoon. “How about you?”

  “What do you mean ‘ticket’?” I shouted over the phone at a reporter. “Just one name is going to be on the ballot, and that’s Mike Flaherty.” There was no such title as “deputy mayor” in the city charter. It was a blatant attempt to confuse the voters.

  Just when I needed some good press, the media discovered “E-gate,” a non-scandal involving one of my closest aides. State law requires public officials not to erase their emails. But, thinking they were being saved by the system, he had erased over five thousand of his. Flaherty seized on the missing emails to denounce “sixteen years of autocratic rule.”

  Stories appeared about my powerful machine. “Dozens, even hundreds,” of city workers by day were said to be taking names at Floon rallies by night. A Charlestown barber claimed one of my operatives pressured him to quit Flaherty’s Facebook group. When, at a candidates’ forum in Roxbury, a woman ignored a no-applause rule to clap every time I spoke, Flaherty asked me, “How many city workers did you bring tonight?” Yoon volunteers complained that city inspectors had cited the campaign for having too many signs in the window of Yoon’s Field’s Corner office. A Yoon aide told a reporter that you couldn’t trust polls of Boston voters “because Boston city workers—and there are 20,000 of them—will lie to pollsters out of fear that if they let slip anything less than full-throated support of the mayor, it’ll get back to the boss . . . the sort of omnipotence usually reserved for Kim Jong Il.”

  I struck back at the story line that made me an autocrat (Kim Jong Il!) and Flaherty the good government candidate, charging at one debate, “I think it’s jobs for votes—telling Sam Yoon, ‘You have a job in my administration if I win,’ hoping to get Sam Yoon’s votes for Mike Flaherty.” Commentators hit on this theme, one writing: “So let me see if I have this straight. Sam Yoon gets promised a job in exchange for an endorsement. And this is the reform movement?”

  Boston Firefighters Local 718, my old nemesis, endorsed Flaherty, and attacked me in ugly ads that Flaherty refused to watch, let alone denounce. One showed an elderly lady sprawled on the floor beside her walker. The voice-over said firefighters would usually answer 911 calls within four minutes—“But only if your emergency call is on the mayor’s list.” The visual changed to a shot of me, the cur refusing to raise firefighters’ pay 20 percent in exchange for drug testing. I’d been pushing testing for two years, ever since two firefighters were killed in a West Roxbury fire and cocaine was found in one man’s body and alcohol in the other’s. Another ad charged that my administration “had contributed to the death of Kevin Kelly,” a firefighter killed when the brakes on his fire truck failed. Former mayor Ray Flynn piled on, recording an ad blaming me for faulty maintenance, lousy equipment, and terrible morale among firefighters.

  When he wasn’t promising the moon to Local 718—by agreeing to create an unnecessary hazmat unit to bleed overtime pay, for example—Mike Flaherty was repeating “sixteen years.”

  “The mayor has had sixteen years to fix the schools. I’d say that’s enough.”

  “This is a different city and a different economy, and we’re not going to be able to solve today’s problems with 16-year-old ideas.”

  “More than 1,000 people have been murdered in Boston over the past sixteen years.”

  “The mayor will say anything to stand in the way of progress, of innovation, of good ideas. That’s what [Boston] has had to bear with this last 16 years.”

  But my longevity was a double-edged sword. One man’s Menino fatigue was another man’s Menino familiarity. A poll taken during the campaign found that 54 percent of the city’s population claimed to have met me. Put another way, over those sixteen years I’d said “Heyhowaya?” to around 256,000 Bostonians. Most I’d encountered once. But others . . .

  When a reporter asked a woman sitting with friends at an East Boston Dunkin’ Donuts “to list all the places she has run into Menino, she quickly listed five and stopped with a look that said, how long should I go on?”

  Asked if she knew me, another random woman, Thelma Henderson, eighty-three, of Roxbury, said: “That’s my man. He looks after me. He stopped by my house to make sure I was comfortable during the hot days.”

  At a Christmas tree lighting ceremony during my last month in office, a man introduced himself and said we’d never met before. “Where have you been?” I asked him.

  My model of governing called for me to be out of City Hall listening to citizens at Christmas tree lightings, pancake breakfasts, groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings . . . Critics said I’d attend the opening of an envelope.

  Tell me Monday about a pothole on your street, and it would be filled by Friday or I’d know why not. A politician can expect no higher praise than “He kept his promises.” In the grand scheme of things, perhaps filling a pothole doesn’t matter. But to the citizen who nearly lost a tire in that pothole, it says, “You matter.”

  The human factor. It’s everything in politics. In 2012 Governing magazine said I set the model for twenty-first-century mayors. My portable formula: Do the small stuff—fix potholes, clean up parks, plow the streets quickly after snowstorms—to win the public’s trust that you’ll deliver on the big stuff.

  The last question in the campaign’s last debate was, Should city workers retire at sixty-five? I broke out in a grin. “I don’t believe in mandatory retirement,” I said. Neither did the voters. I won by 15 points.

  I was disappointed. I was hoping for 16.

  Chapter 5

  “To Think I Did All That . . .”

  He leaves office . . . having presided over and facilitated one of the most successful urban renaissance stories in modern American history.

  —New York Times, January 5, 2014

  NO SOONER HAD I given my victory speech after winning a fifth term than commentators began speculating about the odds of a sixth. “It is almost inconceivable that Menino will run again in 2013,” a Globe ed
itorial predicted. “Like a much-loved 1950s Chevy, his reelection machine can now be packed away.”

  No way would I follow that advice. Keeping my reelection machine tuned up was in the city’s interest. If I packed the old Chevy away, I’d get less money for affordable housing from builders of upscale condominiums, and I’d have less weight with employers deciding between staying in Boston or going out of town.

  I wanted the boys in the boardrooms whispering: This guy might be mayor for life. We can’t afford to tick him off. The mayor of Boston is an elected emperor. He can do whatever the hell he wants. Menino? He’s a thin-skinned emperor. Make him angry and he’ll make us pay. Paul Grogan, the president of the Boston Foundation, nailed it: “People spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how to please him and how not to piss him off.” Restaurant owners who get on Hizzoner’s bad side—it’s easy to do—receive “constant underwear checks” by city inspectors. Politicians who oppose him become nonpersons. Take Sam Yoon. After running against Menino in ’09, he was “radioactive.” Employers were afraid to give him a job. He lived off credit cards for months, and to find work, he had to pull up stakes and head to Washington. Menino freezes out journalists who criticize him. Take Larry Harmon. The mayor dipped into a fund intended to beautify the city in order to buy charm bracelets for departing staffers, and Larry wrote a piece slamming him for it. Afterward, Larry says Dot Joyce told him, “The mayor will never speak to Larry Harmon again.” The third person. Like a sentence of doom from Mordor. Remember Kobie, the gorilla who pelted Menino with his shit? Well, as Harmon tells it, “a few months later, Kobie died of complications from anesthesia during his annual physical exam. That was the official explanation, at least.”