Mayor for a New America (4 page)

 

I had twelve years of nuns who used to use their sticks on me.

 

—from my “Nuns' Story”

 

I'm reluctant to say much about school. Because my teeth and lips would not cooperate, I talked out of the side of my mouth, mumbling decades before I was called “Mumbles.” I had trouble enunciating (a nun ordered me to mime the words because my singing was wrecking the school choir), and dreaded being called on in class. Mostly I sat in silence and fidgeted. The nuns encouraged kids who didn't need encouragement, not those who did. Me, I got the stick. One time I spilled a bottle of ink over some brand-new textbooks. A nun charged down the aisle of desks with a stick about a yard long, backpedaled for maximum hitting power, and whaled me. “Sister, it's washable ink!” I protested, but she kept whaling.

I can think of one way my unhappy experience of school shaped my school policies as a public official. Besides giving awards for top grades, I handed out special awards first to kids in my council district then to the graduating classes of every school in Boston. It became a twenty-nine-year tradition. In six award ceremonies, two a night, I put the spotlight on kids who'd never won anything before. Kids who tutored classmates during lunchtime. Older kids who stuck up for younger ones being bullied. Kids who smiled through tough times. Special-needs kids, kids who struggled with English (I could sympathize), kids who worked hard because school came hard. School Spirit Awards, we called them. The students got a kick out of it, dressing up for the occasion—girls in fancy dresses, boys in suits (sometimes with the tags still on!). Their parents often thanked us with tears in their eyes. My last years in office we were giving awards to kids whose parents had won before them. And some of those parents had become teachers.

It's time the schools recognized moral qualities like compassion and persistence and not just natural gifts like intelligence. If I could wave a magic wand, teachers would honor not just being first but being kind, not just grades but effort, not just brains but character.

 

This is the choice, then, in 1960. Shall we go forward? Shall we move with the times? . . . I believe we must go forward. You have to decide what to think. Are you satisfied with things as they are? . . . The campaign is now over. The responsibility has ceased to be ours who are candidates, and it is now yours, the citizens of this great Republic. . . . You must make your judgment between sitting and moving.

 

—Senator John F. Kennedy, from the last speech of the 1960 presidential campaign, at Faneuil Hall on the night of November 7, election eve

 

My parents didn't pay much attention to politics, and I followed their lead. But in 1960 you couldn't live in Massachusetts and be Catholic and ignore politics. Not with Senator John F. Kennedy running for the Democratic nomination in the spring and the White House in the fall. My career in politics began on election eve, when I cut a night school class to catch JFK's wind-up speech at Faneuil Hall.

I took literally Kennedy's stirring call to get America moving. I was in the crowd outside when he came down the Hall's thirteen granite steps. He had one last stop to make: a rally at nearby Boston Garden. As his limousine pulled away, I began to run after it. And as it sped up, I ran faster, chasing JFK through the cobblestone streets of old Boston toward the Garden, bright as day in the floodlit night. I'd always avoided drawing attention to myself, yet here I was shouting “JFK! JFK!” and waving my arms like a madman while running for all I was worth. In the miniseries based on this book, Tom Cruise should have no trouble covering the distance in one take.

My start in politics came six months later.

Hollywood would quickly pass over my work history. I spent one summer as a laborer at Bird & Sons in a suburban mill town. I had to force my beefy body through a two-by-two opening into steam-generating furnaces and scrub them until they were clean and I was filthy. When I got home at night, my mother wouldn't let me into the house until I changed my clothes.

I also worked at a Mattapan eatery, Simco's on the Bridge, taking orders for the famous foot-long hot dogs. After my shift, which ran from three in the afternoon to two in the morning, I'd drive down Blue Hill Avenue for a sandwich at the G&G Delicatessen, a landmark of a long-gone Jewish neighborhood. In the intervening decades, as restaurants shuttered and stores went out of business, the once-lively avenue became a boulevard of broken dreams. My first commitment as mayor was to restore its commercial hub, Grove Hall, to something like its old vitality. I didn't drink coffee, but I was a regular at the local Dunkin' Donuts, my first stop on the way to City Hall. Greeting customers, I'd feel for the pulse of neighborhood recovery. By my last term, Dunkin' Donuts was one store in a bustling shopping mall development, and from planters on the median strip, flowers bloomed on Blue Hill Avenue.

 

What possessed Metropolitan Life to hire me as a salesman? Affirmative action? Arrogance—a belief that there was
no one
they couldn't train to sell? Or was it that I was a big young guy with dark wavy hair who looked presentable in a suit and tie? Whatever it was, I'm grateful. Because I had met Angela, and I couldn't ask her to marry a guy with no prospects.

She was playing on the Hyde Park tennis court next to mine. Somehow her ball kept veering off course and into my end of the court. She'd trot over, apologize for interrupting my game, and trot back.

She didn't need to apologize.

We clicked. We went to the West Roxbury drive-in, shared sodas at the drugstore in Roslindale Square, took walks in the Turtle Pond Reservation in Hyde Park. “And when it came to dancing back when we were dating,” Angela told the
Boston Herald
columnist Joe Fitzgerald, “if I could drag him onto the floor just once, that would be it for the night.” She was pretty, bright, funny, and compassionate. A Roslindale girl, but you can't have everything. I've often been asked if becoming acting mayor of Boston wasn't the luckiest break of my life. No, I reply.

 

He was exactly what I was looking for.

 

—Joe Timilty, in a 2009 interview

 

Summer 1961. Kelly Field in Hyde Park. Boston Park League baseball under the lights. I'm there to watch friends play for the Bottomly Braves. One of the Braves, Mike Donato, a Boston College High star, introduces me to a young candidate for the Boston City Council, Joe Timilty, an ex-marine whose uncle was a Boston police commissioner in the 1930s.

Close-up on me. This is a big moment in my life.

My dad hated politics. But one day he asked me to hand out flyers for his friend Charlie Patrone, a state rep. That was my entire background in politics. Joe didn't care. He needed volunteers for his first campaign. Forty-eight years later he told
Boston
Magazine
, “He worked at it.” That sounds like me.

Joe won his seat on the council. And I joined his organization. Every campaign season we'd come together to reelect Joe. Me, I soldiered on at Met Life.

I was the world's worst salesman. I couldn't talk people into deals that sounded good but tripled their premiums. I didn't believe my own pitch. How could I expect them to?

Met Life would carry a bum salesman. But not one who helped organize a union. I thought I was a big shot sitting across the table from management, but I was a target. They found a pretext to fire me.

I was twenty-six, with a new baby, no degree, and no job.

I turned to Joe for help. He got me “on” the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA).

My job was to move small businesses out of the way of a federal highway slicing through Boston. Protest politics stopped the highway, but not before bulldozers had scraped all signs of life off once-thriving commercial arteries from Roxbury to Charlestown. The “Inner Belt” was the dying gasp of Boston's “urban removal” era. My vision of government was born then. It was the opposite of everything happening around me. Government should be about helping people, not destroying their way of life, which is how merchants in its path saw the federal bulldozer.

I think of an old-timer who ran a hardware store in Charlestown. Waving a slick brochure that made “relocation” sound like a day at Revere Beach, I approached him as he stood behind his counter. He pointed a gun at me and told me to get out of his store.

 

Two wrestlers writhing in a muddy pit.

 

—the Boston Globe, commenting on the 1975 mayoral campaign between Kevin White and Joe Timilty

 

Long before I ran for mayor, politics was my profession. Besides working next to Joe Timilty in his campaigns, I helped run Jimmy Carter's field organization in Pennsylvania in 1976 and 1980. I took to politics. Especially the inside game—planning the events, deploying the forces, and getting the forces and the candidate to the events on time . . . a list as long as your arm.

I took to the details. In office, I earned the nickname “Mayor Pothole” for photographing potholes, broken streetlights, and abandoned cars in my travels around the city and sending the pictures to the relevant departments and then following up. Campaigns are full of potholes. A fellow who keeps track of them is good to have around.

I was Joe's “body man.” I saw him the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Messages to Joe went through me. Tell me something with the bark off, that's how he heard it. I had no agenda of my own. I gave your message level.

I was paid peanuts for my work. I would have paid to do it. My peers trusted me. I saw my merit in their eyes.

I stored that good feeling against the bad moments.

There are lots of those in campaigns. The candidate unloads on you and you've got to take it. Or pretends you didn't tell him something when you did. And the person who asked you to tell him that something? From then on, he's your enemy. Or the candidate is indiscreet about another member of the team, and you can't look at him again without being reminded of what you shouldn't know. I make the candidate sound petty. I've been the candidate. I'm partly talking about myself. You say things you regret. It's the tension. The strain of performing. The self-criticism. The self-pity. Imagine working for LBJ. Now imagine being LBJ.

 

Joe's fights against Kevin White were epic battles. Three times we took the field, and three times we lost.

He was an incumbent. They win every time in Boston. (I should know.) Why did we think we had a chance?

Because the voters resented Kevin's using them as a springboard to higher office. Kevin White was first elected in November 1967. He ran for governor in 1970, losing in a landslide. George McGovern asked him to be his running mate in 1972. Ted Kennedy vetoed that—he wouldn't share the national stage with another Irish Catholic from Massachusetts. But the feeler stimulated Kevin's ambition. He was preparing to run for president in 1976 when Boston's busing crisis derailed his plans.

I was the opposite of Kevin White. I wanted to be mayor of Boston. Period. That was my pact with the people. They were staying put in the city; so was I. In my first race, I pledged to serve only two terms. Later, I made that two terms a century.

Knowing I wasn't going anywhere kept city employees and contractors on their toes. And having no designs on their jobs smoothed my relations with a string of Republican governors from Bill Weld to Mitt Romney. Weld and company knew that helping Boston would not hurt them. By contrast, Mayor Ray Flynn's noises about challenging Weld invited the governor to ignore the city.

We also thought White was beatable because of the “climate of corruption” in his administration, an issue we stoked in our slogan “Joe Timilty, Honestly.” Kevin's fundraising techniques included forced contributions from contractors and city employees, who paid in cash at a suite at the Parker House. We threw this and more at him in 1975. His camp replied in kind. Days before the election, Kevin's police commissioner charged that the Mob was behind Joe. The
Herald
called the campaign “a nasty, negative free-for-all.” Kevin barely hung on, winning by 4.8 percent.

I was the big loser in the election. My work for Joe went for nothing. And Kevin White fired me from the BRA. I didn't blame him. I would have done the same thing.

It was a deliverance. I would have stayed in that rut until retirement. That's how I see the firing now. I was ashamed then.

For the second time in our marriage, I was jobless. Angela didn't reproach me for sinking my life into Joe's career.
I
reproached me. I was getting nothing out of politics. I was going nowhere in
my
career.

For the second time, Joe bailed me out. A state senator by then, he got me a staff job on one of his committees.

During my time at the State House, I stayed in touch with the city through someone I met on Joe's campaign. Often identified as “a longtime counselor to the Kennedys,” Gerry Doherty was an old pro from Charlestown. He became my friend and mentor, inviting me to join the Park Street Corporation, a discussion group on urban issues led by a Paulist priest, Robert Quinn. I showed up for every meeting, and learned a lot from the academics, high-tech entrepreneurs, and developers who spoke.

I was the guy who supplied the bagels. But Gerry saw something in me. “Most of the people you meet, they flash their teeth and shake your hand, while at the same time they're looking over your shoulder,” he told the journalist Joe Keohane. “He didn't do that. When he walked into a room, he wouldn't galvanize it, but by the end of the night he could tell you exactly who was there, what they did, what they didn't do.”