Michael’s pain, his need, was for family. John had erred. Therefore, John had betrayed. From that moment, John was not family.
And Sasso did not defend himself. He should not have to explain: what he did, he did for Mike. Anyone else, any member of the staff, John would have gone to bat for him—gone to the wall! ... But he would not say a word for himself, though he knew, if he did not sway Michael ... he was gone. His dream for himself was gone.
He shouldn’t have to argue with Michael.
For God’s sake, where was Mike’s loyalty?
Gone: in a contest between human loyalty and Michael’s idea of his own correctness ... there was no choice. It did not matter how Michael needed John, or what John needed. Compared to Michael’s idea of himself, astride the moral axis, human need—even his own—was nothing.
That’s what stung Sasso into prideful silence, what he heard in Michael’s voice: nothing.
73
Dr. Dukakis
WHEN GOVERNOR-ELECT DUKAKIS took the T to the State House, after the ’74 election, the first news to land in his lap—Boom!—the deficit was not one hundred million, nor even the whispered one hundred fifty. ... Try three hundred and twenty-one million dollars.
Michael didn’t bat an eye. He knew he’d have a problem to manage. Now he’d have a bigger problem. That was the only difference he saw. Did he doubt he could manage this problem away? ... Not for an instant. Was he unhappy? ... Not exactly. The pols and reporters who talked to the young Governor-elect strove to describe his air: they used words like “optimism” ... “eagerness.”
In fact, this was joy.
He was born to solve problems. Dr. Dukakis had trained himself for forty years to cure the ills. The problems were his reason for being. So the problems were bigger—huge—aha! Just as he’d suspected, as he’d said ...
He was correct!
He set out to make a government unlike anything the citizens of the Commonwealth had ever seen. “The best government,” he promised, “this state has ever had.”
This would be a government of principle, not patronage. That was the first order of business: a radical patronage-ectomy, a professional personnel operation. No one would have a job because he was friend to Dukakis. In fact, no one of any political persuasion or prominence could get a job of any description for a friend.
Of course, he wasn’t asking others to swallow anything he wouldn’t. When anybody from his own campaign asked about a job in the State House, Michael would give them that dirt-on-the-carpet look, and scold: “You know that’s not possible.” ... Why? Because they were friends!
And Michael didn’t stop with jobs—all favors had to cease! The Governor had at his privy command the power to dispense low-number license plates. This was a harmless, much-coveted sign of standing, something like the Order of the British Empire, or a Lenin Medal for Valiant Factory Production. Best of all, it cost the Commonwealth ... nothing.
“Nope. No special plates. That’s not the way we’re gonna do business.”
“But Michael, somehow you gotta thank your friends.”
So Michael told Kitty to schedule a dinner—not too big, maybe twenty-five people.
“Good. I’ll hire a caterer.”
“The way they charge?”
“Michael, I can’t do it!”
So ... the Governor-elect made turkey tetrazzini for twenty-five.
Then he cleaned up.
Then, thanking was over.
The first thing he thought of was to cut the Governor’s payroll in half—who needed staff? (No, actually, the first thing he thought of was to give back ten thousand of his salary—who needed more than thirty thousand a year? ... But Kitty talked him out of that.) Next, he got rid of the limo, and the state cop who drove it—what’s wrong with the T? ... The cops, of course, still had to protect him. Now they all had to ride on the T.
Next, he had to find a cabinet. That was serious. That was principle! No, that was a matter of multiple principles. ... In fact, so complicated was the web of Dukakisian imperatives that Michael put Fran Meaney in charge of the talent search. Only Fran, his longstanding partner in reform, could find the correct people.
First, they had to be clean.
And bright—that went without saying.
And not from Michael’s campaign—no one would say he gave jobs to his friends.
And generalists—they should not have friends among the issue groups they’d regulate. (In practice, that meant most would know nothing about their subjects. Not everyone found it as easy as Michael to keep from having friends.)
Then, at his first press conference, someone asked the Governor-elect how many of his ten cabinet secretaries would be women.
On stage, next to him, Kitty said: “Four!”
Michael said that sounded correct.
So, four women became a principle.
And minorities—that was a principle, too.
“That’s great,” said Fred Salvucci, the transportation sage. “Now all’s we need is an Italian woman whose mother was Hispanic and whose father was Chinese and spoke Swahili.”
“Cute,” said Michael. “Very cute, Frederick.”
Somehow, Salvucci slipped through the web and got appointed Transportation Secretary ... though he knew the field, had helped Michael’s campaign, and could even be described as a friend. (Then again, he was correct, and clean, and had been virtuously ignored for years while he and Michael inveighed against the roads.)
In Michael’s pure vision, the cabinet would actually run the state—the Secretaries and the Governor would make the hard choices—without interference of politics ... not even the politics of the Governor’s office.
That’s why Dukakis could cut his own staff... why he could hire another rookie, David Liederman, as his Chief Secretary: because the cabinet would act as his counselors. They were all going to be on the same team, weren’t they? They’d meet together, pull together ... cure the ills, make Massachusetts work—wouldn’t they?
Of course they would! They’d work in concert, they’d reason and discuss ... at least until some reporter started writing something into a notebook ... after that, the Secretaries mostly ceased to reason—what they did was make speeches.
See, that was a principle, too: not only would the cabinet run the state, give the Governor its candid counsel ... it would do so in meetings open to the press and public. Michael thought it important for citizens to see clean government. They ought to come and watch!
So they did, until one cabinet meeting wherein the Secretaries of the Commonwealth were interrupted in their reasoning by demonstrators who stood up to shout: “No welfare cutbacks! No welfare cutbacks!” And Michael wasn’t going to stand for that crap! He called an emergency recess, and told Liederman:
“Deal with them.”
Of course, by that time, his mood was different. He and his bright generalist counselors had been reasoning together, reforming, cleaning, cutting—administering the physic of honest government for more than three months ... to an anguished crescendo of protest from welfare-rights groups, mental health groups, the elderly, the disabled, the medically afflicted, veterans, and a half-dozen other interests—not to mention a threatened strike by fifty thousand state employees, a rumble of disaffection from the leaders and their myrmidons in Senate and House, and a rataplan of angst from the state’s newspapers ...
And the deficit was climbing toward $500 million.
They begged him! From the minute he got into office, the sachems of the State House—the Senate President, the Speaker, the chairmen—all urged the Governor to bite the bullet: send down a tax plan! Now ... while the next election was still more than three years away, while the deficit could still be labeled as Sargent’s red ink ... while they could still make the case that there’d been no way to know the size of the mess until Michael got in to set matters aright.
It was mostly true ... and it was the only way to shield the new administration (and the legislators) from blame: delay would
help no one—least of all, Dukakis.
But he didn’t want to hear it. What kinda talk was that? He wasn’t going back on a commitment! That’s not the kinda guy he was! No, he was going to manage the problem. Ekonomia!
So he didn’t stop with his own car—he took away the state cars from cabinet secretaries and commissioners. Of course, people weren’t happy. But it must have saved ... well, thousands. And he wouldn’t buy stationery. No! He had his staff use existing stationery, crossing out Frank Sargent’s name. There was no telling how much he could save.
He set out to abolish all jobs in the Fraudulent Claims Bureau of the Insurance Department. His own no-fault law had made those people superfluous. Problem was, those people were friends of the Speaker and Majority Leader, so Dukakis’s bill got abolished in the House. Same with his bill to kill the Governor’s Council: he got hammered on the vote.
That didn’t mean he’d listen to the sachems. Why should he? ... A reporter asked Dukakis if he might have to take his scalpel to the state’s human services programs. Dukakis replied: “It might be a meat cleaver.” That’s when the public protests found their symbol.
One problem was, Michael didn’t know diddly about the budget. Another problem was, he didn’t want to know.
His own top man, Chief Secretary David Liederman, was dedicated to clean government. He was smart, independent, a thoroughgoing public servant—even by Michael’s standards. Liederman had served with Michael in the House, but in contrast to Michael’s fascination with pure government, David’s interest lay in specific state services—housing, community development, children’s programs. In other words, he had to know where the money came from, and where it went. Now he told Dukakis: “Michael, you’re not gonna squeeze it out. You can squeeze ten million, twenty ... maybe fifty. You can play with fifty million. But not two hundred. Not three hundred.”
“Steady as she goes!”
Michael announced he would not release the (contractually required) cost-of-living raises for state workers. (That’s when the unions passed their strike vote). He ruled out the (legally required) cost-of-living raise for welfare. Michael froze the accounts by which services were purchased for the mentally retarded, the disabled, all the state’s poorest and most helpless. He held up thousands of welfare checks to ram temporary month-to-month “budgets” through the legislature. He announced that human services would have to take twenty million in immediate cuts ... and next year (’76 looked even worse than ’75), he would cut welfare alone by $300 million.
He insisted he wasn’t cutting people’s only income ... no! “In human services, for example,” he said, “we may cut back on some consulting contracts. We may stop publishing brochures and bulletins at the rate they’ve been rolling off the presses.”
Three hundred million in brochures?
“All of us,” said Michael, “are going to have to make sacrifices.”
But even his longtime supporters (all those liberals who thought he was one of them) pointed out with obvious justice that Michael’s choice—his instinctive choice—was to balance the budget by cutting benefits and services to the poorest people, to save the middle- and upper-income brackets from the burden of further taxes.
That was another part of the problem: Michael didn’t know anyone who couldn’t find a job. No one on welfare. Like Panos before him, he couldn’t understand why these people shouldn’t work! Thirty-five-year-old people! Men! Taking money from the state? What got into them? ... Where was their discipline?
That’s what he wanted in his Commonwealth: discipline ... for the public weal. He’d hector his cabinet in their (now private) meetings:
“You guys don’t wanna do it! We can do it! It’s not a lotta money—we can get it!”
See, it wasn’t just his public commitment—no new taxes. It was his private compact: no one could tell Dukakis he wasn’t smart enough.
“You guys just don’t wanna do it! ... I don’t wanna hear that!”
So, after a while, he did not.
No one wanted to get in his face. Not even when they were poking around in the Welfare Department—cleaning, literally—and came across shoe boxes full of unpaid bills ... they went back years! Tens of millions of dollars in back bills!
Don’t tell Michael!
Nor even when his finance guys, Jack Buckley and his deputy, Tex McClain, got the latest revenue estimates, and thereby arrived at a new figure for the deficit—the amount of money coming in, compared to the totals going out.
They called Liederman.
“David, you better get down here.”
There they were, Jack and Tex, with their faces hanging halfway to the floor.
Liederman said: “What’s the number?”
“Six hundred and twenty million.”
In the end, he had to raise taxes. But by the time he did, he could never raise enough to close the gap for the current year. So he had to borrow almost five hundred million, and then raise taxes—more than a hundred million a year—to pay back the bonds at nine percent.
That still didn’t take care of the next year. So Michael would have to raise taxes again.
The legislators begged him (well, actually they begged Liederman) to roll all the taxes into one revenue bill. Don’t make them vote for two hikes in one year!
Michael would hear of no such thing. They were separate issues!
So, one week after he signed his first tax hike, he asked the legislators—rather, he told them—to raise $687 million in new annual taxes. That was the steepest tax bill in the history of the state.
He would still cut thousands of people from the welfare rolls, diminish benefits and services for everybody else, stiff sixty thousand state employees on cost-of-living raises, and lay off at least a thousand workers more.
That’s when it came clear the legislature might not be in a mood to hand him two-thirds of a billion dollars. Six months into his term, he had become the enemy of the poor and the middle class. He had become the target for every cartoonist in the state. (Michael-with-his-meat-ax was too good to pass up.) And he had managed to alienate a solid majority (of Democrats!) in the legislature. Maybe they’d give him his budget—maybe not.
Of course, Michael was furious.
Was he, or was he not, Governor?
What it was, of course, he felt betrayed.
74
Wilting from the Heat
SASSO GAVE MICHAEL HIS resignation, the next morning, at the State House. Michael didn’t look well. He hadn’t slept much. But he was brisk, managing the problem.
Nope ... no resignation.
Michael had his press conference already scheduled. He would announce: John would take a forced two-week leave, an exile. Michael, of course, would take full responsibility.
The politics were tricky, they both knew that. This would draw exhaustive and negative attention while people were forming their first opinions of Michael. Iowans were famous for the gentle orderliness of their politics. And now Michael’s campaign would admit to hitting Joe Biden, just as he was to lead the Democratic jihad against Bork.
But Michael wasn’t talking politics. “I don’t have to tell you,” he said, in his chief-executive tone, “that’s not the kinda campaign I wanna run.”
No, he didn’t have to tell John.
Any other time, Sasso might have told him: “Mike ... is this room bugged? Is anybody listening? ... Mike! This is just us!”
(Any other time, John surely would have told him: what he did, he did for Mike—this was no betrayal—John did nothing for himself. John had no way to know his tweak on Biden would start an avalanche. The tapes were the truth. He’d added nothing, taken away nothing. And he never lied about them afterward. (Tully denied the story in the press. Just yesterday, Paul had denied it again—at a contributors’ luncheon. Tully would have to go.) Of course, John didn’t step up and volunteer that he was the source of those tapes. And he waited way too long to tell Michael. But he never lied.
It was im
portant to Sasso that Mike realize that. But there was no way to tell Michael that morning, with Michael in his hunch. Monos mou ... he didn’t want to talk.
Michael called Paul Brountas to tell him the decision: John would be spared ... after an exile. Brountas wasn’t happy, Michael knew. But Michael didn’t want to talk.
See, to fire John, to cut him off ... that would be the old Dukakis. Michael meant to show he had learned ... as he’d said in ’82, he could listen now, he could bend ... he was flexible, more humane. In other words, this was about Michael’s own idea of himself.
“John offered to resign,” Dukakis said at his press conference. “I considered it seriously, but rejected it. I did so, even though what he did was a very, very serious error in judgment, a very serious mistake.”
Dukakis apologized to Biden.
He took full responsibility.
He took questions, and dismissed them, one by one.
Then he walked off stage ... and the heat began.
Kitty soon joined Michael at the State House. She’d already gotten calls at home—Michael should know. Brountas was reporting calls stacked up at his law firm. People thought John had to go. Was Michael condoning this attack on Biden?
Michael took the calls from Senators, Joe’s colleagues ... Teddy Kennedy, John Kerry, Michael’s old law school pal and fellow Greek, Paul Sarbanes. Congressmen were Calling, Democratic Committeemen ... Biden had friends!
And they all said, John had to go, now. This couldn’t wait for another news cycle. Mike had to realize. The networks would kill him!
“I don’t understand why John did it,” Michael kept saying. “I think you know, this is not the kinda campaign I run ...”
They told him it didn’t matter what they knew, or what kinda guy he was—it was what people saw. And Michael had to act—now.
Of course, it was terrible for Michael. That’s why Kitty said, more than once, how outrageous it was, what John had done ... how he’d put Michael into this ... position!
And at some point, near noon, Michael stopped answering into the telephone, “I think you know ...”
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