Common Ground (44 page)

When applied to urban systems, Forrester’s analysis suggested that “humanitarian impulses coupled with short-term political pressures lead to programs whose benefits, if any, evaporate quickly, leaving behind a system that is unimproved or in worse condition. Job-training programs, low-cost housing programs, and even financial aid, when used alone without improvements in the economic climate of a city, can fall into this category.” Forrester’s prime example was subsidized housing. Intuitively, projects such as Methunion Manor might seem a mandatory response to the needs of the poor and the near-poor for standard housing at rents they could afford. In fact, Forrester argued, such housing generally made things worse for everyone, including those it sheltered. First, the availability of subsidized housing—along with other welfare services—attracted the needy to the city, building a constituency for even more such housing and further straining city services. Then, the housing took valuable land, reducing the land available for non-subsidized housing and business enterprises which produced both jobs and tax revenue. The result: the growth of a dependent welfare class, the exodus of productive businesses and tax-paying employees, and a fiscal crisis for the city.

By 1971,
Urban Dynamics
had become the bible of the “conservative caucus,” which was urging the Mayor to retrench his social programs and concentrate on improving delivery of more traditional services, such as police and fire protection, sanitation, street paving, lighting, and recreation. Colin wasn’t ideologically predisposed to the Forrester thesis, but his experience with B-BURG and other misfired programs prepared him for the notion of unintended consequences. All that summer, he brooded over the book, wondering whether government was making things better or worse in Boston. And yet he clung to the values which had brought him to City Hall in the first place. What had changed were not his beliefs but his expectations. After three years in the Mayor’s office, he no longer believed that government could establish racial
justice or eradicate poverty; those problems, it now seemed to him, were too complex, the resources too limited, the instruments too imprecise, the competing interests too intractable. Money could probably be spent more effectively on improving conventional services. But that didn’t mean government should retreat to mere housekeeping; even with diminished expectations, one should do what one could to reduce social injustice. To that degree, Colin was still an activist—and inevitably that brought him into conflict with the increasingly cautious Mayor.

Rockland Towers was an eleven-story public housing project for the elderly which the Boston Housing Authority planned to build in West Roxbury. When announced in 1970, the proposal stirred vigorous protests from neighborhood groups, for it was the first low-income project ever designated for that last bastion of the city’s Irish middle class. With its single- and two-family homes set well apart on tree-lined streets, West Roxbury looked more like suburbia than like an urban neighborhood. With the exception of Beacon Hill, it was Boston’s wealthiest community, and it was certainly one of the whitest; only a handful of blacks had managed to find homes there. Not incidentally, it was Kevin White’s birthplace.

But West Roxbury hadn’t showed much loyalty to its native son. In his 1970 race for governor, it gave him his lowest percentage anywhere in the city—a meager 31.6 percent. To win reelection as mayor he had to do better than that; so, although he had initially endorsed the West Roxbury project, as soon as opposition developed he began to back away.

Some of the opposition was directed against high-rise apartments of any kind—residents had blocked two other apartment projects which they feared would destroy the suburban feel of their community. “These people wouldn’t approve a ten-story palace for the Pope,” argued one City Hall lobbyist. But Rockland Towers was no ordinary apartment project. It was “public housing”—a code phrase for the black and poor. Much of the opposition was grounded in West Roxbury’s determination to remain as affluent, and as white, as possible.

Early in the summer of 1971, Larry Quealy, the mayoral aide who kept in close touch with Irish neighborhood groups, brought a West Roxbury delegation in to see Kevin White. Colin, who had been arguing forcefully in support of Rockland Towers, was asked to sit in, as were Bob Weinberg and the Mayor’s housing adviser, Andy Olins. After the delegation had made their pitch and been ushered out, the Mayor asked his four aides to stay behind for a discussion of the issues. Larry Quealy, who himself lived in West Roxbury, led off by scornfully dismissing the project. “It’s bad for these people, it’s bad for the neighborhood, it’s bad for you,” he told the Mayor. “That’s three strikes against it. In baseball and politics, that means it’s out.” As Quealy spoke, the Mayor leaned back in his leather desk chair, eyes half closed, nodding his head in apparent agreement.

Colin could see the Mayor’s mind closing down. If he gave in on this one, it would be just another in a series of capitulations to aroused neighborhoods
which opposed his programs. How often was he going to let them exercise their veto? Shouldn’t the Mayor stand up for citywide interests, not to mention those for whom nobody else would speak? As Quealy finished, Colin broke in: “I can see which way this thing is going. I’m sure this serves no useful purpose other than to vent my spleen, but I’m going to say it anyway.” He could feel his face burning, the way it did on those rare occasions when he lost control. In three years with the Mayor, he had never exploded like this. Indeed, he struck his colleagues as the quintessential man of reason, so much so that some of them, behind his back, called him “the iceman.” Sometimes Colin himself worried that all the passion had gone out of his commitment to the city, that he had bogged down in a mechanical cost-benefit analysis. Well, he might be making a fool of himself now, but he didn’t care. He plunged on.

“I don’t think the reasons those West Roxbury people gave are the least bit convincing,” he said. “Does anyone really think they’re concerned about height and density? Do you believe that, Larry? I can only conclude that their real reason for opposing the project is a cynical combination of fear and bigotry. And let me say this, Kevin, the city will be displaying the same kind of fear and bigotry if it caves in to them.” Then he got up and stalked from the room. As he closed the door, he could see the Mayor gaping after him.

Soon afterwards, Colin resigned. He hadn’t lost faith in government, merely in the relentlessly political administration of Kevin White. And he had an intriguing job offer. Bill Cowin—who had left the Mayor’s office two years before to take a post with the state—liked Colin and admired his “astonishing intelligence.” When Bill was given a new job—Secretary of Consumer Affairs—he asked Colin to be his assistant secretary.

Colin’s resignation prompted no recriminations. The Mayor threw him a going-away party and presented him with a Raleigh bicycle. That fall Colin ran two South End precincts for the Mayor, helping him win reelection over Louise Day Hicks.

Early in October 1971, Colin rode his bicycle to the State Office Building to begin his new job. As Secretary of Consumer Affairs, Bill Cowin concentrated on improving the work of the state’s regulatory agencies. As his principal assistant, Colin helped implement the state’s new no-fault insurance law and set up a cable television commission. It was interesting work, but just as Colin got the feel of it, he changed jobs again. Bill Cowin was the rising star of the Sargent administration. In September 1972, Sargent asked him to leave Consumer Affairs and take over as Secretary of Administration and Finance—the principal fiscal, budgetary, and administrative officer in state government. So important was the A & F Secretary that he was sometimes called Deputy Governor, and as Under Secretary, Colin became, in effect, the Deputy Governor’s deputy.

Colin had less contact with the Governor than he had had with the Mayor. His job was to manage the huge A & F department while Bill concentrated on liaison with other state agencies and on advising the Governor, as a member of Sargent’s “kitchen cabinet.” Yet as Bill’s trusted deputy, Colin was sometimes
included in those sessions, which gave him an opportunity to observe the Governor at close hand.

In some respects, Frank Sargent and Kevin White struck Colin as remarkably similar men. To be sure, Sargent was a classic New England Yankee. A great-grandson of the legendary Brahmin banker Henry Lee, he had used a Cape Cod sporting goods store called the Goose Hummock as a stepping-stone to a fifteen-year career as a professional “fish and game man” (director of the state’s Marine Fisheries and Natural Resources departments). But if many Yankees were parched and parsimonious, Frank Sargent was an ebullient, natural politician. His personal magnetism reached across party, ethnic, and class lines. To many of Boston’s Irish, he was an honorary Irishman.

Though he was a lifelong Republican, Sargent’s stance on most issues wasn’t very different from Kevin White’s. After Martin Luther King’s assassination, as lieutenant governor, he pledged to “make the changes that King dreamed of—the change of heart, the change of mind.” In 1970, as acting governor, he ordered the State House flag flown at half-staff in memory of the students killed at Kent State. He was frequently criticized by other Republicans for straying from the party line and for appointing too many Democrats. If anything, Sargent was more liberal than White: no Republican could be elected statewide in Massachusetts without appealing to Democrats and independents.

Colin discerned one major difference between them: White carefully calculated most of his moves, but Sargent governed from the gut. Compared to White, he wasn’t a particularly strong leader: his staff pulled and hauled him in different directions. Yet when he had to make a decision, he invariably came down on the humane side. Indeed, the essence of Sargent’s liberalism was a human response to human needs. He and his progressive appointees improved conditions for the retarded in state schools, expanded the Public Welfare Department’s human services, closed many of the worst youth detention facilities, and carried out a sweeping reform of the archaic prison system.

Colin generally supported these initiatives, but increasingly he was less concerned with the substance of Sargent’s programs than with how to execute them. That was his job at A & F—making sure that state policies were carried out effectively with the least possible waste, duplication, or corruption. Somewhat to his surprise, Colin found that he took enormous pleasure in such tasks as revising the state’s personnel procedures, centralizing computer functions, even setting up a state motor pool. In part this inclination might be temperamental: a man who loved restoring his house, remaking ornamental plaster, and laying bathroom tile was likely to enjoy the nuts and bolts of government. But there was more to it than that. Traditional liberals, he decided, had exaggerated the importance of ideas. Four years earlier, Colin himself had thought that all City Hall needed was bright, innovative, creative ideas. Now he felt that the most important job in government was
implementing
ideas. Of course, if issues abstracted from management made no sense, then neither did management
abstracted from issues. But there were plenty of people around just bursting with ideas, and not that many who could make them work.

There was at least one idea, though, on which Colin’s commitment had never wavered—the notion of racial equality. It had been Martin Luther King’s death more than anything else that brought him into government, and it was King’s dream more than anything else that kept him there. At times the new aggressiveness of black spokesmen irritated him. Once Elma Lewis, a black cultural leader, met with Colin and Bob Weinberg to demand city money for one of her projects. When they hesitated, Mrs. Lewis launched into what Colin called her “three-hundred-years-of-slavery speech,” a polemic in which she blamed whichever white she happened to be with for every indignity that had oppressed her people since the African slave trade. But such incidents hardly interrupted the strong flow of Colin’s feelings about racial injustice, feelings which intensified in 1974 as the long battle over Boston’s school segregation finally came to a head.

For nearly eight years, the State Board of Education and the Boston School Committee had engaged in a fruitless tug-of-war over implementation of the state’s Racial Imbalance Act. Year after year, the board pressed for action to reduce the number of Boston’s “unbalanced” schools (those more than 50 percent black) while the School Committee flatly refused, delayed, evaded, and, when pressed to the wall, adopted token measures. Meanwhile, the number of unbalanced schools rose steadily from forty-six in 1965 to sixty-seven in 1971.

Colin had little direct experience with the schools issue—in three years at City Hall, school questions had rarely crossed his desk, since the Mayor had virtually no control over the school system. Only once in the Mayor’s office did Colin get a close look at the schools. When White appointed a Home Rule Commission to study the city’s governmental structure, Colin served as one of its staffers and drew the schools as part of his assignment. For weeks he prowled the tangled warren of School Department headquarters, interviewing the Superintendent, his staff, and committee members. The experience filled him with despair. He found the department a hive of entrenched timeservers more concerned with buttressing their official positions than with educating children. The School Committee itself, utterly preoccupied with politics and patronage, had dug itself in for a long war of attrition on racial imbalance. Colin concluded that the best solution was to abolish the committee altogether and make the Superintendent directly responsible to the Mayor. As a fallback, he proposed an enlarged committee, elected by district so it would better reflect the city’s ethnic and racial composition. The Home Rule Commission adopted his recommendations, but—as with so many of his assignments for Kevin White—nothing came of it. So long as the schools remained outside his ambit, White wanted nothing to do with them. Moreover, he had ill-disguised contempt for the School Committee. Whenever Colin urged him to do something about the schools, the Mayor responded, “If I’m publicly identified with those idiots, I’m going to be held responsible for what they do.”