Common Ground (43 page)

“Well, Kevin, of course I’m flattered. But I just haven’t thought about it.”

“That’s okay. Just remember, I want you with me.”

Then, with the Mayor carrying the popcorn and Colin the tray of drinks, they climbed to the second floor, where the others were already gathered in the rear parlor: Barney Frank; Deputy Mayor Ed Sullivan; the new redevelopment director, John Warner; and several others. It was a muggy night and the officials had their coats off and their shirt sleeves rolled up as they began laying out options for rescuing the housing program, then stymied by neighborhood opposition. It was a gritty, technical discussion, filled with costs per unit, HUD subsidies, and FHA financing. After ten minutes, the Mayor had lost interest. Soon he was on the telephone with State Treasurer Bob Crane, his close friend and political adviser, and Jimmy Hosker, his campaign manager. As the conference
droned on across the room, the Mayor sprawled in his favorite armchair talking politics and gobbling popcorn.

My God, thought Colin, we’ve lost him. He hasn’t the faintest interest in infill housing. He isn’t interested in governing Boston anymore. All he can think about is that damn governor’s race!

In two years at City Hall, Colin had learned a lot about politics and even more about Kevin White. By now he realized that White had sought the mayoralty principally as a stepping-stone to the State House. Yet his own interest was in the Mayor as mayor, not the Mayor as candidate, or even the Mayor as governor. He was still fascinated by the task of governing the city, and when the demands of the state campaign made it increasingly difficult for any of them to do that, he grew impatient.

As the race progressed, not only were the Mayor’s energies diverted from the city, but so were those of his staff. By September, when White won the Democratic nomination, his senior aides were spending 80 percent of their time on the campaign. Then, in mid-October, the Mayor was hospitalized with a perforated ulcer. He emerged on October 24 clearly lagging behind Acting Governor Sargent, who had proved a formidable opponent. The Mayor’s advisers, desperately searching for issues with which to capture public attention, came up with off-track betting as a way to alleviate the fiscal crisis confronting many Massachusetts towns and cities. Overnight, Colin and three other mayoral assistants cobbled up a position paper.

Last-minute gimmicks notwithstanding, White lost to Frank Sargent that November. To a man whose entire political career had been targeted at the State Housed, it was a grievous blow. Even more devastating was the loss of his own city by a whopping 17,000 votes. Worse yet, the incumbent Irish Catholic mayor of a heavily Irish Catholic working-class city had lost on his own ground to an Episcopalian Yankee acting governor from the horsey suburb of Dover. Indeed, the Mayor had done worst in the heavily Irish neighborhoods of South Boston, Roslindale, and West Roxbury. His own people had publicly humiliated him. He wouldn’t forget that.

Indeed, for the next few months Kevin White could think of little else. The day after the election, he told aides, “I’m through. I’m not going to run again.” Then he left for a Puerto Rican vacation. Even when he returned, he didn’t—in his own words—“give a shit about governing Boston.” He was preoccupied with his own survival. In January, he hired Tully Plesser, a New York pollster, to test the political waters for him. The next month, Plesser came up with encouraging news. The Mayor wasn’t dead politically, but he would have to remake his image. His constituents regarded him as too liberal, too pro-black, too faddist and flighty. Most important, in a city that prided itself on its toughness, he was regarded as weak and indecisive. Plesser urged the Mayor to “toughen up.”

Armed with this judgment, the Mayor sought reelection. But he took Plesser’s advice to heart. For the rest of the year, “toughness” was Kevin White’s watchword. His advertising relied on slogans emphasizing his fighting
spirit: “When the landlords raised rents, the Mayor raised hell,” and “Logan Airport had plans to tear up East Boston, the Mayor tore up the plans.” Some of the shift was pure flackery, deft manipulation of the Mayor’s image. But some of it was real. For White himself sensed that it was time to edge to the right. In part, this reflected a change in his audience. For three years, as a mayor running hard for governor, he had devised his political messages with one eye cocked toward the liberal suburban vote. Now, compelled to seek reelection in the city, he beamed his messages at ethnic, working-class Boston. This realignment was underscored by the departure of some of the aides who had given White’s first term such a liberal tone—Special Counsel Bill Cowin, who left in May 1969 to head the State Public Utilities Commission; BRA Director Hale Champion, who in July 1969 became vice-president of the University of Minnesota; and most important, majordomo Barney Frank, who resigned after the November election, ostensibly to return to Harvard. The effect of these and other liberal defections was reinforced by a new aggressiveness among the traditionalists on the Mayor’s staff—old-liners like Ed Sullivan, Larry Quealy, and Barbara Cameron, who had bristled at the “trendy” tone of the first three years. Soon after White’s loss to Sargent, this “conservative caucus” began compiling a briefing book that emphasized many of Tully Plesser’s points.

So a new Kevin White began to emerge during 1971. He downplayed his Office of Human Rights, Model Cities, and other programs designed to aid the black community, while talking tough on crime and drugs, beefing up the police, and promising to hold the line on taxes. Symbolic of his new stance was White’s campaign for the removal of Doris Bunte from the Boston Housing Authority. Three years earlier his appointment of Mrs. Bunte—a black tenant in the Orchard Park housing project—had been seen as a commitment to give public housing tenants a powerful voice on the Authority, and with two others of similar views, she formed a tenant-oriented majority on the board. But soon that trio and the Mayor found themselves at odds over patronage. Determined to regain control, White charged the outspoken Mrs. Bunte with five acts of misconduct. After a thirteen-day “trial” before the Mayor and City Council, she was found “guilty” of three charges and removed from the board, only to be reinstated by a court. The Mayor said Mrs. Bunte had been dismissed because “she did not bring about reform,” but others saw the episode as a clear signal that henceforth the Mayor would adopt a more skeptical attitude toward the black and the poor. To Colin Diver, the Bunte affair was “a colossal mistake—embarrassing, humiliating, and stupid.” Partly a personal vendetta, partly a power play, partly a political message, it was the Mayor at his worst.

By the summer of 1971, Colin was growing uneasy in the Mayor’s employ. It wasn’t for lack of responsibility. With the departure of Frank, Cowin, and Merrick, Colin’s role had expanded rapidly; he took over some of the substantive policy making from Frank, most of the speech writing from Cowin, some of the federal liaison from Merrick. Advancing into the inner circle of advisers,
he spent nearly as much time in the Mayor’s spacious office as he did in his own cubicle down the hall. Indeed, so shorthanded were they in City Hall that year that he became a jack-of-all-trades, with a hand in almost everything that passed through the Mayor’s office. Bob Weinberg, the Mayor’s new majordomo, would shout down the corridors, “My God, let’s do something. Get Colin!”

But the closer he got to the center of power, the less it appealed to him. Three years before, he had enlisted in Kevin White’s crusade against racial injustice, poverty, and urban decay, and they had accomplished some fine things during those years. But now the Mayor was so preoccupied with his political ambitions that he had little energy left for the substantive issues. Increasingly, White seemed to regard blacks and other disadvantaged groups as political liabilities. Colin found the Mayor’s new priorities dismaying and frustrating.

There were other frustrations as well, which could hardly be blamed on Kevin White. For three years now, Colin had spent most of his time contending with demands from the resurgent neighborhoods. In one sense, he knew, that was as it should be; government ought to respond to the legitimate complaints of an aroused electorate. The trouble was that Boston’s white neighborhoods seemed primarily concerned with
stopping
things. Colin, who had joined the White administration to act on behalf of the disadvantaged, was becoming, instead, an expert in blocking action. And even when he or the Mayor took positive action, Colin was no longer confident that it would produce the intended results. He knew now that even the best-intentioned programs sometimes produced dubious social consequences.

A prime example that summer of 1971 was the “B-BURG” program, an effort by a consortium of twenty-two Boston savings banks (the Boston Banks’ Urban Renewal Group) to provide mortgages for the city’s low-income black families. B-BURG had been founded in 1963 to answer Ed Logue’s appeal for rehabilitation loans, and during the next six years the program had puttered along, committing only $2 million. Then, after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Boston’s business community was galvanized by fear of retaliatory violence and by anxiety over the alliance struck by the militants of the Black United Front and FUND’S suburban liberals. When Kevin White appealed to banks and insurance companies to come up with a counter-program, the savings banks hastily agreed to revitalize B-BURG, pledging $20 million in new mortgage money, most of it for low-income blacks. Indeed, when the commercial banks and insurance companies largely defaulted on commitments they had given at the same time, B-BURG became the only segment of White’s program to bear fruit, its member banks providing $29 million in mortgages to more than 2,000 families over the next three years. Here, it seemed, was an example of effective government–private sector activism on behalf of the black and the poor—precisely the sort of program for which Colin had been pressing all along.

But by early 1971, the unintended consequences of B-BURG began to crop
up—and they didn’t look positive at all. Unbeknownst to most Bostonians, the consortium had granted mortgages to blacks only within a narrow zone stretching from the South End through Roxbury into Dorchester and Mattapan, for nearly a century the route of black—and, earlier, Jewish—migration, a path that generally skirted the Irish Catholic neighborhoods on either flank. The Irish neighborhoods had resisted Jewish encroachment and were likely to repel blacks even more adamantly. By taking the line of least resistance, B-BURG had done nothing to help blacks break out of the ghetto. It had merely enlarged and reinforced the ghetto.

That was only one of the unintended consequences. The combination of heavy black demand for the newly available mortgages and the sharply constricted B-BURG district created a classic breeding ground for blockbusting. As the first blacks bought houses there, unscrupulous real estate people warned Jewish families that they had better sell quickly before their property lost its value. Speculators snapped up the homes at panic prices, then resold them at huge profits to incoming blacks. Real estate agents made big commissions on the rapid turnover. Once begun, the process fed on itself. In a few years, the Jewish population of Mattapan plummeted from about 90,000 to barely 1,500—an abrupt shift that was accompanied by fierce social conflict. Through much of 1970 and 1971, Boston’s newspapers were filled with stories of murders, rapes, and muggings, many of them committed by young blacks on elderly Mattapan Jews. The Jewish Defense League patrolled the area, armed with rifles and baseball bats. One Defense League pamphlet warned: “We will not run from Mattapan. We are determined to fight to the finish these elements and enemies of our people. If need be, we will fight in hand-to-hand combat that our Jewish blood shall be avenged.”

In May 1971, a Senate subcommittee announced that it was coming to Boston in September to hold hearings on the B-BURG program. Assigned to develop the city’s position, Colin discovered that the B-BURG zone had been no secret to city, state, and federal officials. Fortunately, several city officials had protested to the banks, drawing a curt reply that the banks weren’t interested in the city’s suggestions but were simply advising it “what we are and are not willing to do.” This starchy attitude allowed Colin to disassociate the city from the worst aspects of the B-BURG fiasco; the statement he drafted, and which the Mayor submitted to the subcommittee, insisted that the city had always preferred a program which would allow blacks to purchase housing anywhere in the metropolitan area.

Although the White administration managed to escape B-BURG’s worst fallout, the episode had a profound effect on Colin. He may have taken its lesson particularly to heart because it echoed the theme of a book he was reading that summer—
Urban Dynamics
, an unlikely volume to find favor in Kevin White’s City Hall. Its author, Jay Forrester, was a professor of management at MIT, where he had formed an alliance with White’s old adversary, former Mayor John Collins, and Forrester’s thesis reflected Collins’ suspicion of liberals who thought they could solve the urban crisis through social activism
and welfare programs. Using computer language, Forrester argued that most of man’s intuitive responses developed from “first-order, negative feedback loops” For example, when a man warmed his hands by a stove, the only important variable was his distance from the burner. If his hands were too far from the burner, they wouldn’t get warm enough; if they were too close, they’d get burned. Cause and effect were closely related. Such intuitive responses—which governed the way we perform most daily tasks—were accurate and reliable.

But, Forrester warned, the modern city didn’t function like a simple, first-order loop. Instead, it had a multiplicity of intersecting feedback loops, each with many complex variables. Thus, such systems were “counter-intuitive.” If one looked for a cause near in time and space to the symptom, one usually found something plausible, yet it was generally not the true cause, but merely another symptom. Conditioned by our training in simple systems, we applied intuition to complex systems and were led astray. “Very often,” Forrester concluded, “one finds that the policies that have been adopted for correcting a difficulty are actually intensifying it rather than producing a solution.”