Common Ground (95 page)

For a quarter century, Tip stalked his district on Saturday afternoons, picking up his own laundry, pumping constituents’ hands. Each tour produced a dozen appeals—to get a kid into college, push through a federal loan, or get an elderly woman into a housing project. Often pictured as a liberal dogmatist, O’Neill had little in common with the issue-oriented ideologues of the sixties. His was the politics of personal response, of care for individual constituents.

By late 1975, Tip was the second-ranking Democrat in the House, about to replace the ineffectual Carl Albert as Speaker. As he grew in stature, he became a familiar figure not just in Massachusetts but across the nation, a shambling bear of a man in rumpled suits, a shock of yellowing hair folded across his forehead, and a bulbous nose which lit up his jowly face like a neon tavern sign. He was an engaging raconteur, never better than when he launched in his gravelly voice into the story of Jake Bloom.

Jake ran a grocery store on Boston’s Blossom Street. After his wife of forty years died, he got a hair transplant, lost fifty pounds, and took his new girlfriend to Miami Beach. But one afternoon, a lightning bolt rent the heavens and Jake was dead.

“Oh, God!” he cried. “I’m Jake Bloom from Blossom Street. Why did you do it?”

“Jake!” God replied. “I didn’t recognize you.”

This oft-repeated tale suggested that while others might change, Tip remained the same—an old-school politician, a man you could rely on.

Tip’s district was an urban hodgepodge, embracing the state’s third-largest city, Cambridge; comfortable suburbs like Arlington and Waltham; grimy working-class districts like Charlestown, Somerville, and East Boston; elegant enclaves like the Back Bay and Beacon Hill. But Charlestown held a special place in his affections, perhaps because the Townies had rallied strongly behind their fellow Irishman in his most difficult moment, the ferocious 1952
contest against East Boston’s Mike LoPresti. In return he served up ample quantities of patronage, worked hard to provide federal subsidies for Charlestown’s hard-pressed port facilities, and battled in vain to exempt the Navy Yard from Richard Nixon’s vengeance against Massachusetts.

Long after Alice McGoff had lost faith in Ted Kennedy her confidence in Tip remained undiminished. He was a kitchen politician who got things done without all the Kennedys’ posturing. She felt sure he could get the TPF off Charlestown’s streets, eventually even lift the burden of busing from their shoulders.

In March 1975, O’Neill lent credence to these expectations when he told an anti-busing delegation he would ensure that a proposed constitutional amendment restricting court-ordered busing came to the House floor for a vote. Two days later, he went still further, pledging to vote for the amendment, although he had opposed similar measures in the previous session. His apparent reversal stirred consternation among blacks and liberals. By the end of the week, O’Neill was backpedaling, indicating that although he would vote for the amendment if it reached the floor, he would take no steps to get it there (a puzzling position since, without strong pressure from O’Neill, the amendment had little chance of emerging from the Judiciary Committee). By then, everyone was thoroughly confused. Some thought that was precisely what the canny Majority Leader intended. Others believed that the series of apparently contradictory statements indicated that O’Neill, trapped between liberal supporters in Cambridge and working-class whites in Charlestown, was genuinely ambivalent, susceptible to persuasion.

O’Neill’s latest change of position came only two days before many of his constituents were to descend on the capital for a ROAR-sponsored March on Washington. Modeled on Martin Luther King’s 1968 extravaganza, the march was attracting thousands of anti-busing activists from all over the country for an intensive round of workshops and lobbying, culminating in a massive rally on the Capitol steps at which ROAR planned to announce formation of a nationwide coalition to campaign for the constitutional amendment. Alice McGoff welcomed the event with undiluted enthusiasm: here was precisely the kind of dignified but forceful demonstration that would win them recognition. ROAR was developing into a white NAACP, a national alliance of white neighborhoods. She was so excited about the march that she took time off from the telephone company and sent a note up to Charlestown High so Lisa could accompany her. The trip cost them $57.50 apiece, but to Alice it would be well worth it if they could force Tip O’Neill off the fence.

In the dim pre-dawn hours of March 18, Powder Keg’s delegation boarded three silver buses in City Square. The trip took twelve hours, but inside bus No. 62 the Townies were in a festival mood. Early in the evening, creeping through Washington’s crowded streets, they let out a wild whoop as the Capitol’s illuminated dome came into view. Pulling into the Quality Inn near the Pentagon, they were exhilarated to find the parking lot crammed with other buses, the lobby bursting with demonstrators. Some estimated that there were
10,000 marchers in town, others said 50,000. As Alice and Lisa collapsed on their beds, they felt caught up in a remarkable moment in American history, a gathering of oppressed people petitioning for restoration of their inalienable rights.

They awakened the next morning to a fierce thunderstorm lashing their windows. At breakfast in the motel dining room, a ROAR official announced that, because of the weather, those who wished to skip the march would be bused directly to the Capitol. “No busing for us!” shouted Powder Keg’s Bobby Gillis. The Charlestown contingent cheered wildly.

Reaching the Washington Monument, they were dismayed to find barely 1,500 demonstrators—90 percent from Massachusetts—huddled on a grassy oval now reduced to a quagmire. Some marchers sheltered under umbrellas while others had improvised rainwear from green trash bags. But those who showed up that morning were determined to make their point despite the weather. Shortly after 10:00 a.m. they set off up the avenue, each neighborhood arrayed behind its own flag or emblem. The seventy Powder Keg representatives marched four abreast behind a huge banner reading: “Charlestown Against Forced Busing.” Some wore tall Uncle Sam hats, others the revolutionary tricorns popularized by the Charlestown Militia. Many brandished small American flags.

Lisa didn’t give a hoot about the weather. Snug in her hooded yellow slicker, she was grateful for a couple of days off from school, avid for her first look at Washington. Sloshing along beside her friend Beth Burton, she brandished a cardboard placard reading: “Here We Go, Boston!”

Alice was wearing her blue Powder Keg windbreaker and a green-and-white tam-o’-shanter, which soon felt like a sodden sponge around her ears. Within minutes the rain had destroyed her makeup. She was afraid she looked even worse than the hippie demonstrators who’d filled this same avenue through the sixties with their long hair and Vietcong flags. She’d dismissed them as a bunch of nuts. Who would have thought she’d be out here herself a few years later with mascara streaking her face like Apache war paint?

But, of course, there was nobody to see her—the rain had kept potential spectators away. The only others in the street that morning were the District of Columbia police, many of them black, who conscientiously patrolled their flanks. But it was too wet for violence. The only hint of it occurred outside the FBI Building when a South Boston parade marshal pointed at a car stopped at a traffic light. “That nigger gave us the finger!” he shouted. A few of the marchers turned menacingly and one of them yelled, “Hey, nigger, get out of the car and do that!” Just then the light turned green and the car sped off.

Reaching the Capitol at 11:00 a.m., they assembled on the glistening steps. Louise Day Hicks struck a lyrical note. “The tears of those affected by forced busing,” she said, “have flowed just as hard as the rains that came today.” But there was little consolation for the marchers that morning. Only one member of Congress showed up: Marjorie Holt of Maryland, author of the anti-busing amendment.

Where the hell were the guys from Massachusetts? Alice wondered. Where, in particular, was Tip O’Neill? Mrs. Hicks explained that a special meeting had been scheduled that afternoon between ROAR’s executive committee and the Massachusetts congressmen; Tip would be there, she assured them. But when the meeting convened several hours later in a drafty hearing room, only four of the state’s twelve representatives showed up, and when a dozen ROAR members sent an urgent note to Tip imploring him to join them, the Majority Leader declined to leave the House floor.

In the months that followed, Alice brooded over Tip’s seeming indifference. Had all the power gone to his head? Had he finally lost touch with his working-class voters? Or had that little traitor Ted Kennedy gotten to him? Powder Keg’s leaders renewed their request for a meeting with their congressman.

In October 1975, word came from O’Neill’s office: he would be pleased to meet with a small Charlestown delegation. The group was carefully assembled to reflect all the Town’s factions—Alice and Pat Russell from Powder Keg; Gloria Conway, editor of the
Patriot;
Jack “Sugar” Whalen, chairman of the Ward Two Democratic Committee; and Dennis Kearney, state representative from Charlestown. On the afternoon of October 10, the five were ushered into the Congressman’s office in Boston’s John F. Kennedy Federal Building and Tip courteously showed them to armchairs ranged in a semicircle around his desk.

Dennis Kearney led off, emphasizing that the delegation represented O’Neill’s loyal supporters, stalwart Irish-Americans who had returned him to office year after year but who were now in trouble and needed his help. Pat Russell raised several grievances stemming from Arthur Garrity’s order: the “terror tactics” of the TPF, the tight security at Charlestown High, the rule barring demonstrations within a hundred yards of any city school. O’Neill shook his head sympathetically, promising to do what he could.

Before long, they moved on to the central question: how did the Congressman stand on busing itself?

Ah, Tip said, he could understand exactly how Charlestown felt about busing. When his own kids were young, there was a parochial school just across the street in Cambridge, but it was all filled up and he and his wife, Millie, were terribly upset when they had to put their kids on a bus for another parochial school some miles away. Absolutely heartsick, Millie was. He had no difficulty understanding Charlestown’s feelings.

Uh-oh, Alice said to herself, I think we’re in trouble.

But what about the constitutional amendment? Jack Whalen wanted to know. Would the Majority Leader bring the amendment to the House floor?

Well now, Tip said, a constitutional amendment was a long-drawn-out process. Even after Congress approved it, it would have to be ratified by thirty-eight of the fifty states and that would take years, so it wouldn’t really offer any relief for Charlestown.

But would the Congressman at least use his vast power to get the process started, so the people in the states could vote on it?

Ah well, he thought they were exaggerating his power a little; he didn’t really have the kind of authority they were attributing to him.

“Oh, come on, Mr. Congressman,” Alice interjected. “Everyone knows that, after the President, the Majority Leader is the most powerful man in Washington. If you really want to help the people of Charlestown, you can do it. The question is, do you want to help or don’t you?”

A note of irritation crept into the Congressman’s reply. He thought he’d done quite a good deal for the people of Charlestown over the years. He’d worked to get a ship into the Navy Yard so their men would have some badly needed jobs. He’d made sure that high schools like Charlestown’s got a good hot-lunch program.

What was he talking about? Alice wondered. The Navy Yard was closed now, and Charlestown High didn’t even have a cafeteria, much less a hot-lunch program. Long before their half hour was up, Alice was furious. All Tip had done was throw them a couple of well-gnawed bones. He was just like all the others.

Six weeks later, Powder Keg was back in Washington—this time to attend the House Democratic caucus, the forum in which Democratic members occasionally met to frame their party’s position on pending issues. For the first time in history, the caucus was throwing its deliberations open to the public, and high on its agenda was a resolution instructing Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to report the anti-busing amendment to the floor within thirty days. It was a critical test for the measure, and ROAR had called out the troops for a last-minute bout of lobbying. This time they didn’t bother with motel reservations, but rode through the night to reach the Capitol by 8:00 a.m., just in time for a couple of calls on the Massachusetts delegation before the caucus convened at ten. Tip was unavailable that morning, but a rumor raced through the corridors that the Majority Leader had at last decided to support the resolution. As Alice took her seat in the gallery, she was exhausted and rumpled but confident that this time their cause would prevail.

Her hopes were buoyed still further when the resolution quickly drew support from several Northern liberals, among them John Moakley, a Boston congressman known to be close to Tip. Moakley, whose district straddled South Boston and Roxbury, brought cheers from the gallery when he declared: “The parents of Boston deserve more than anguish, frustration, and uncertainty over their children’s physical and educational well-being. The children of Boston deserve more than a life filled with metal detectors, riot squads, and racial tension. In Vietnam we saw the foolhardiness of destroying cities in order to save them. How much longer will we destroy school systems such as Boston’s in the name of saving them?”

Then came the counterattack. First, Peter Rodino, the Judiciary Committee chairman, made it clear that he would not report the measure without a
struggle. Then the Speaker of the House, Carl Albert, advanced to the podium. A frail figure, Albert spoke in a slow Oklahoma drawl, but Alice sensed that his words carried authority: “This [amendment] would be an attempt by the Congress, the legislative branch of government, to usurp that part of the Constitution which was allocated by the Founding Fathers to the Supreme Court.”