Common Ground (127 page)

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).

Twenty-four hours before the party was to take place—as municipal employees were threatening a demonstration outside the museum—Joe White’s son prudently canceled the party and promised to return the money.

A reporter asked why.

“The museum,” explained Patricia Hagan’s son. “There was going to be a situation where beautiful pictures would be ruined.”

T
he South End had its own Judge Garrity, sometimes known as “the other Garrity,” “the good Garrity,” or “the real Garrity,” to distinguish him from W. Arthur Garrity of Wellesley and the Federal District Court. Their black robes notwithstanding, nobody was likely to confuse the two jurists. Arthur was circumspect, exacting, and meticulous; Paul was hot-tempered, impatient, informal in the extreme: he had been known to look down from the bench and say, “Hey, guys, I’ve been up here all morning and I’m getting tired. Why don’t we take a break so I can have a cup of coffee.” Paul Garrity was as street-wise as the defendants who appeared before him. Born to an Irish trolley worker and his French-Canadian wife, he went to Boston College and BC Law School and worked as a poverty lawyer before becoming the first judge of Boston’s new Housing Court. When Boston judges were required to live in the city, Garrity and his wife moved from suburban Dedham to the South End, buying a bow-front town house at 22 Rutland Square, just a block from the Divers.

One evening in the spring of 1975, Paul heard a scream from outside his house. Rushing onto the sidewalk, he found a young woman bleeding from a stab wound in the side. The judge took her into his kitchen and called an ambulance, but when the victim was rushed to the hospital she left behind a yellow plastic umbrella smeared with blood. Paul stuck it in the hall closet, but every time he went to get his tennis racket he saw the little parasol with its telltale streak of red. After a month or so, the damn thing bothered him so much he took it downstairs and burned it in his furnace.

That summer, burglars broke into Garrity’s house and stole a coin collection which had belonged to his great-grandfather. A few weeks later his friend Dick Bluestein, associate director of the Boston Legal Assistance Project, was mugged on West Newton Street on his way to a meeting at Garrity’s house.
Then that fall a rash of violent crimes broke over Rutland Square—eight muggings in November alone. Convinced that the neighborhood was becoming “a damned Dodge City” and unencumbered by the liberal philosophy which inhibited some of his neighbors, he was determined to do something about it.

One of Paul’s closest friends was Municipal Court Judge Gordon Doerfer, who lived just a couple of doors away. As the holdups continued that winter, other homeowners on Rutland Square approached the two judges for help. Garrity and Doerfer would normally have been reluctant to use their special influence with the police, but feeling that their own families’—and their neighbors’—security was at stake, they asked Captain Al Flattery of District 4 for greater police vigilance.

Embracing the South End and the Back Bay, District 4 reported more serious crime than any other subdivision in the city. As many as twenty holdups could occur on its streets during a single summer night; gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing were rampant. A beleaguered commander, Al Flattery struggled to please a dozen vociferous constituencies, but when Garrity and Doerfer approached him that fall, he responded as most police officials would: he assigned four officers to keep nightly watch on the judges’ houses. For several weeks, the uniformed patrolmen took turns sitting in parked cars in the alley by the South End library sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups and watching the Garrity and Doerfer residences.

So obvious were the cars and their passengers that no mugger or break-in artist dared approach while they were there. But since the patrolmen never got out of their cars, the criminals were free to pursue their activities nearby. And this, of course, stirred resentment among the judges’ neighbors, who suspected that Garrity and Doerfer had sought special protection while letting the square’s other residents fend for themselves. Embarrassed and exasperated, the judges went over Flattery’s head to Deputy Superintendent Walter Rachalski. To strengthen their case and repair relations with their neighbors, they brought along three people who they knew were equally concerned with the crime situation: Dick Bluestein, community activist Holly Young, and Joan Diver.