Common Ground (123 page)

High on Beacon Hill was an elegant brick-and-granite mansion once owned by George Francis Parkman. At Parkman’s death in 1908 he bequeathed the mansion to the city, and for the next sixty years it had served as
the headquarters of Boston’s Parks Department, but Kevin White had never set foot in the building until he attended a cocktail party there after the 1968 Harvard-Yale game. Struck by the classic proportions of its Empire-style drawing room, its marbled hallways and soaring staircase, he immediately moved the Parks Department into City Hall and refurbished the sixteen-room mansion with $366,000 in city funds and $250,000 in private contributions. First it served as an Urban Affairs Center, later as Boston’s official guest house. By 1973, as the Mayor’s advisers mapped his national campaign, it seemed the perfect setting in which to display the candidate himself.

That October, gold-embossed invitations went out to a formidable roster of politicians, academicians, and journalists across the country, summoning them to a series of dinners with the Mayor of Boston. Those who accepted over the next year ranged from Bob Strauss, Walter Mondale, and Jay Rockefeller to Leonard Woodcock, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Tom Brokaw.

The dinners followed a rigid agenda. Some twenty guests would gather for cocktails among the apricot-striped sofas in the downstairs reception room, move to dinner beneath the great chandelier in the second-floor dining room, then adjourn for brandy, cigars, and conversation in the restored carriage house. Whether the subject was “Women in Politics” or “Ethnicity as a Coalition Builder,” its focus was Kevin White—always at his best in small groups—flashing wit, irony, and deft little riffs of political philosophy.

Quickly the strategy paid off with increased national exposure. Marianne Means in her syndicated column called White “ambitious, healthy, intelligent, stylish, articulate.” Tom Wicker wrote that “an articulate man like Kevin White, given some success in office and a little money and luck, might do well for himself in a presidential primary campaign.” Jimmy Breslin, Jack Germond, and David Broder all put White on their lists of legitimate candidates.

By early 1974, the campaign shifted into second gear, with the Mayor himself venturing onto the hustings. In a January blitzkrieg through nine Western and Midwestern cities, he addressed political gatherings, met newspaper editors, huddled with party chiefs. In February he toured North Carolina. In May he spoke to New York’s Lexington Democratic Club, lunched with an editor in Atlanta, and watched the Kentucky Derby with Louisville’s mayor. In June he made another major Western swing.

That spring America was caught up in the final throes of Watergate, and everywhere White went he called for “a new integrity and decency in government,” a “rededication of party politics to public service.” Then he warned: “We must greatly expand our presidential candidates for 1976; never again must we allow those candidates to come exclusively from the U.S. Senate. We must ensure that new faces have ample opportunity for wide exposure, pressure under fire, extensive debate and the test of public scrutiny.” Few listeners missed his message. Growing still bolder, he twitted Ted Kennedy for doing a “disservice to the party” by delaying a decision on whether to seek the presidency in 1976. When Kennedy bowed out, White noted that the Senator’s
decision had “made it possible for other Democratic candidates to seek support.”

His aides began briefing him on macro-economics, defense, and foreign policy. Ira Jackson scheduled a series of foreign trips: to Israel, to Ireland, to Rome for an audience with the Pope. In August 1974, eighteen advisers met at the Huntingtons’ Martha’s Vineyard home for a weekend of strategizing. Ira brought elaborate organizational charts; Tully Plesser brought stacks of polling data. There was talk of campaign finance and mass mailings, state chairmen and delegate counts. Late one afternoon as the Mayor sprawled on the veranda poring over a map of primary states, a young aide crept up behind him and played “Hail to the Chief” on the harmonica.

But that summer’s euphoria was built on shifting sands, for even as White and his aides charted a bold course toward the White House, they knew that events were underway that could foreclose any chance for the presidency and even jeopardize his reelection as mayor.

Arthur Garrity’s desegregation order in June had posed an excruciating dilemma for Kevin White. Through his early years in office he had lent a sympathetic ear to minority needs, earning himself the resentment of white neighborhoods. But even in his days as “Mayor Black,” White had recognized the danger of aligning himself with a remedy as unpopular as busing. When Louise Day Hicks campaigned to repeal the state’s Racial Imbalance Act, White defended it while stubbornly insisting that it didn’t require busing. In 1971, when the NAACP first filed suit in federal court, White said that school desegregation was a “noble objective, but I must disagree strongly with the method they suggest of achieving it. I have long been, and still am, opposed to forced busing.” When asked if he would put his own children on a bus, he said, “Probably not” (an academic question since, for most of this period, he kept his five children in private schools, only belatedly sending his youngest into the public system). At one juncture, he even stooped to an unequivocal pledge he surely knew he couldn’t redeem: “There will be no busing in this city as long as I am mayor.”

Through the early seventies, the Mayor had skirted the issue by having as little as possible to do with the schools. Acting on the sound political principle that if you can’t control a situation, you shouldn’t take responsibility for it, he had referred all educational questions to the largely autonomous School Committee. Only under heavy pressure from his staff had he ultimately hired specialist Robert Schwartz to develop a schools policy for him. In April 1973 he revealed the fruit of Schwartz’s labors—a position paper that sought to shift the focus from busing to the larger question of how to achieve “equal educational opportunity” for every schoolchild in the Boston metropolitan area. Schwartz argued persuasively that racial integration improved student achievement only if accompanied by class integration. He urged a mixture of “magnet” schools and “voluntary transportation” to and from the suburbs to give
poor people, both white and black, the same access to quality education as was enjoyed by the rich.

But it was too late for such ambitious reforms. As state and federal courts drew ever closer to their inevitable edicts, racial tensions in the city had begun to escalate. Robert Coles may once have admired Kevin White’s ability to “win the confidence of both blacks and whites … without stirring either of them to more envy and more bitterness,” but the Mayor knew he could no longer work such legerdemain. When René Wagler’s immolation set off racial skirmishing throughout the city in October 1973, the Mayor had exclaimed, “I’m a demolitions expert trying to defuse a bomb. If I make an error, I will become a paraplegic, both politically and otherwise.” White’s sense of imminent apocalypse was echoed by many of his aides, who argued that the busing turmoil would surely abort his presidential effort. But Ira Jackson, now that campaign’s principal architect, disagreed. “The eyes of the nation will be on you,” he told the Mayor. “If you can hold the city together, you’ll look even better than ever.”

Even before Arthur Garrity ruled in June, the Mayor had resolved to confront Boston’s anti-busing forces head on. From mid-April through the blistering summer, he conducted a series of 11:00 a.m. “coffee klatches” and 5:00 p.m. “sunset hours,” trekking three or four times a week into the far reaches of Hyde Park or West Roxbury to sit in somebody’s pine-paneled basement and talk busing with a score of parents. By letting them blow off steam directly to him, he hoped to ease some of their rage, and though he made no speeches, his remarks were laced with one consistent theme: he opposed busing and supported efforts to test Garrity’s order in the Supreme Court, but as long as it was the law of the land, it had to be obeyed. However one felt about the substantive issue, the safety of Boston’s schoolchildren came first.

But the Mayor didn’t entrust his political future solely to solemn exhortations; he took out insurance by making clandestine overtures to his old adversary, Louise Day Hicks. Although White and Hicks had twice opposed each other for mayor and were widely believed to occupy opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, there had never been personal acrimony between them. Indeed, when Mrs. Hicks had returned to the City Council in January 1974, chairing the Ways and Means Committee, they recognized certain common interests. She needed to nurture her organization, which fed on jobs. For his part, the Mayor needed a majority in the nine-member Council, no easy matter when faced with such obstructionists as “Dapper” O’Neil and Chris Iannella. Moreover, the Mayor’s probable opponent a year hence was former State Senator Joe Timilty, whom Mrs. Hicks detested. All the elements of a deal were at hand and, beginning that winter, the rivals edged toward an accommodation—through the good offices of a mutual friend, the Mayor’s veteran lobbyist, Larry Quealy.

But with Boston on the brink of serious racial strife, the timetable for the rapprochement was accelerated. Six days after Garrity’s order in June, the Mayor stayed late in his office, waiting for his assistants and secretaries to
leave. At 6:45 p.m., a car drew up to the rear of City Hall and Quealy ushered Mrs. Hicks into the Mayor’s private elevator, which whisked her to his fifth-floor office. When White and his guest emerged ninety minutes later, the broad outlines of a deal were in place. Louise would support the Mayor in the Council whenever possible; she would help “cool” the city during the busing crisis; and she would keep ROAR neutral in the 1975 mayoral race. In return, the Mayor would open the patronage spigot for her supporters.

The Mayor kept his promise, finding places on his payroll for a dozen Hicks loyalists or their relatives. One became a deputy sealer in the Department of Weights and Measures; another a motor equipment operator in the Public Works Department; still others were squirreled away in the Employment and Economic Policy Administration and the Economic Development and Industrial Commission. So generous was the Mayor’s allocation that Louise told a colleague half jokingly, “I don’t have enough names for the jobs he gives me.”

Mrs. Hicks delivered too, so far as she was able. The day before the buses rolled in September, she called a news conference to declare: “There must be peace in the city tomorrow. I pray that no harm will come to any child. I abhor violence.” Privately, she urged her lieutenants to curb troublemakers. But it was too late. The movement Mrs. Hicks had presided over now had a perverse momentum of its own. She asked a friend if federal investigators might hold her responsible if someone were killed in the riots. To assuage her conscience—and perhaps to hedge against a federal indictment—she began feeding the Mayor’s office intelligence on when and where trouble might be expected, and on occasion these warnings helped avert more serious violence.

For months the White-Hicks détente remained a closely guarded secret, surfacing only after Pixie Palladino’s faction charged Louise with “selling out” to the Mayor. Many rank-and-filers were outraged to discover that while posing as a hard-liner, Louise had helped White muffle their protests. Eventually, Pixie’s faction broke away to form a rival and more militant ROAR.

One of the Mayor’s assistants recalls: “Kevin was like a child that summer before busing began, like a kid so terrified of the future he won’t step on the cracks in the sidewalk. He persuaded himself that if he was very good, if he stepped right in the middle of all the squares, he’d somehow avoid the awful thing that was lying in wait for him.”

It didn’t work, and Boston reaped its whirlwind. Just what lay ahead for the city became clear that first day when rocks and bottles shattered against the buses carrying black students home from South Boston High. When the Mayor arrived at a Roxbury community center that evening, he found three hundred black parents enraged at the day’s events, especially at the city’s failure to maintain order. As the parents demanded immediate arrests in South Boston and a call-up of the National Guard, White nervously temporized. A hefty woman in the front row rose to her feet, leveled an accusing arm in his direction, and shouted, “I trusted you! I believed in you and you let me down!” As others echoed her charge, the hall erupted in fury, several of the parents
advancing menacingly toward the stage. Shaken and sweating, the Mayor pleaded for more time. “It’s not the Lord’s guarantee,” he said, “but I’m asking you for another chance and then, if I can’t produce, I’ll fight alongside you.” Escaping through a side door, he ducked into his car, looking as frightened as any of his aides had ever seen him. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “I could have been slaughtered in there!”

Within hours, the Mayor had grown even more concerned about militant whites. On Saturday, September 14, reports reached the “busing operations center” in the City Hall basement (known colloquially as “the Bunker”) that South Boston’s notorious Mullens might soon enter the struggle. The Mullens took their name from John Joseph Mullen Square at E and O streets, where they had long hung out. Many Mullens were hardworking longshoremen, truck drivers and firemen, but others were involved in less admirable activities: loan-sharking, bookmaking, hijacking, and enforcing. The police called them the “Irish Mafia.” Now reliable informants said the Mullens would join a scheduled anti-busing march on Monday, and if police attempted to halt the march, the “wise guys” were ready for a shoot-out.

According to fresh reports on Sunday, the Mullens were supplying Southie youths with guns. Convinced that the next day’s march might be the critical moment in the entire busing saga, the Mayor and his advisers assembled at the Parkman House on Sunday afternoon. “We can’t screw around,” the Mayor said. “We gotta call in the feds.” Bob Kiley telephoned FBI Director Clarence Kelley, once Kevin White’s choice for Boston Police Commissioner and always ready to help the Mayor out. At once Kelley ordered his Boston agents to knock on the wise guys’ doors, just to let them know the Bureau was watching. Meanwhile, the Mayor reached Tip O’Neill on the Cape, asking him to alert President Gerald Ford that federal troops might soon be required.