Common Ground (126 page)

White’s relationship with Winship was complex and ambivalent. In many respects the two men were alike: creative, imaginative, and perceptive, yet impulsive and inconsistent; given to bursts of productive energy, but also to wild alarums and excursions. Both owed their advancement in part to their
fathers and were sensitive to suggestions of nepotism. Both had risen as far as they could in Boston’s parochial arena and yearned to succeed in the big time. Each fed the other’s national ambitions because it reflected well on himself. Winship would tell Dave Broder or Mary McGrory, “You ought to take a look at our mayor. He’s a comer,” while White would tell Henry Jackson, “You ought to cultivate the
Globe
. It’s got clout.” Whatever tensions might prevail in public, there was often an accommodation behind the scenes. When the Spotlight Team did a tough series on the Assessing Department—a principal focus of corruption charges at City Hall—it reached the Mayor in advance to make sure that it evoked a statesmanlike response. One of the Mayor’s former press aides recalls, “It was as though they’d said, ‘Kevin, we’re going to fire four bullets. We’ll kill three, wound one. Then we’re going to send the ambulance. Have the goddamn good sense to get on board!’ ”

But at times it seemed as if White and Winship had been put on earth to drive each other crazy. The day the Mayor hired Bob Kiley, he gave him a lecture on the
Globe
, his text drawn from Edwin O’Connor’s
The Last Hurrah
. With wry hyperbole, he claimed to be Frank Skeffington, the pol patterned after James Michael Curley, while Winship was Amos Force, the Yankee publisher (“a miserable, vindictive, bastardly figure,” wrote O’Connor). His lesson: on Boston’s ethnic battlefield there could be no permanent alliance between two such disparate characters. Whatever relationship one might imagine one had with Winship, one shouldn’t count on it, because “he’ll throw you off the bridge at the critical moment.”

Yet no mayor of Boston could ignore Tom Winship and his newspaper, and vice versa. Somehow they lived with each other—flattering, cajoling, prodding. White loved to gibe at Winship for his suburban perspective. When the rifle shots went through the
Globe
’s windows in the fall of 1974, a City Hall aide recalls, White suggested that Winship “call the constabulary out in Lincoln.” And after White showed signs of cracking during the 1975 election, Winship asked him, “Kevin, have you ever thought of seeing a psychiatrist?”

But by the spring of 1976, White didn’t need a shrink to tell him what to do. He was mayor for four more years, and this time he was going to consolidate his position so that never again would he be humiliated; never again would he have to worry about Tom Winship’s moral posturing, the
Herald American
’s vindictiveness, the blacks, the liberals, or any of his other critics. He’d spent his first eight years in office trying to do what was right—and what had that got him? Nothing but carping and irresponsible attacks. Well, maybe he’d never be President, but if he had to be mayor for the rest of his life he was damn well going to do it on his own terms.

Some who watched the Mayor’s evolution over the next few years would say he had gone from John Lindsay North to Richard Daley East. But the equation with Lindsay had always been superficial. The similarity in style—tousled hair, necktie askew, coat over shoulder—disguised profound temperamental
differences. Lindsay was a poised WASP, White a mercurial black Irishman. Like his idol, lawyer-statesman Henry Stimson, Lindsay was content to drift in and out of politics, trying his hand at the law, writing, television; perceiving no such options for himself, White was a politician for life, consumed by the process. Lindsay was a Protestant moralist, dedicated to making politics “more wholesome”; White was an Irish pragmatist who could chuckle knowingly when an aide said Lindsay was “giving good intentions a bad name.”

White came to echo Daley’s classic verdict on Lindsay’s New York: “I get the feelin’ nobody’s in charge here.” And he could sympathize with Seth Cropsey’s judgment on Daley’s Chicago: “It is not a grand vision, but American cities do not need a grand vision. What they need is to work.” As early as the late sixties, White had encountered Daley at national mayors’ conferences. In 1972, he read Mike Royko’s
Boss
, an acid portrait by Daley’s most rigorous critic, but drew the opposite conclusion from the one Royko intended: for all his crudeness, Daley was in charge. Their close relationship dated from July 1975, when, playing host to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, White lavished special attention on his senior colleague. Escorting him around the city, White talked with pride about his Little City Halls, the keystone of his early years. If there was a pothole on your street, White explained, you went to your Little City Hall to get it filled. Daley was incredulous. Could anybody do that—whether they’d been
for
White or
against
him in the last election?
Why
, for God’s sake? Soon White sent an aide to Chicago to see how things were done out there, and before long he brought a University of Illinois authority on Daley to lecture Boston city employees on the master’s technique.

But White was as different from Daley as he was from Lindsay: volatile where the Chicagoan was stolid, impatient where Daley was meticulous, melodramatic where Daley was self-effacing. White was too eclectic, too confident of his own uniqueness, to pattern himself on
any
paragon. He borrowed many people’s ideas, taking community schools from Lindsay, “Summerthing” from Milwaukee’s Henry Maier, redevelopment schemes from Montreal’s Jean Drapeau. For a time he borrowed avidly from a fifty-year-old book—
The Great Game of Politics
by Frank Kent—which explained how the bosses of the past had dominated their cities. Always juggling the formula, he groped toward a synthesis of his own. For years he’d talked about combining the best of Lindsay with the best of Daley (his staff gibed, “You’ve got Lindsay’s political savvy and Daley’s compassion”). In early 1976—still reeling from the one-two punch of busing and the ferocious campaign—he altered the mix again, stirring in a big dose of Daley’s
Realpolitik
.

Beginning that March, the Mayor held a series of secret Parkman House breakfasts to brief campaign workers and city employees on his new political organization. At the peak of the pyramid was a “Committee of Five,” composed of five trusted political lieutenants (all full-time city employees). Under them would come 22 “ward coordinators” supervising 252 precinct captains, who, in turn, would direct the activities of 2,000 block workers. Each block
worker would be responsible for 25 citizens, soliciting their votes and acting as their intermediaries with Kevin White’s regime.

White told the breakfasters that the new organization would gradually replace his Little City Halls, which had “failed to deliver” politically. Henceforth, strict political criteria would prevail for the delivery of most city services. If you were a “KHW Positive” (a term from the previous fall’s polling operation, meaning a Kevin Hagan White supporter), you’d get your pothole fixed; if you were a “KHW Negative,” you’d bust an axle.

In the months that followed, city employees were drafted wholesale into the new organization, compelled to attend weekly planning sessions, required to canvass voters, distribute literature, or work the telephones—often on city time. Even the highest-ranking officials weren’t exempt: the City Auditor was spotted one afternoon holding a sign for a White-endorsed candidate on Columbus Avenue. A few balked. When an assistant press secretary declined such “demeaning” tasks, her precinct captain warned: “You better look out! You’re among ten or twelve people who are being watched.” Such pressures intensified when the Mayor used a referendum on property tax assessments as a training exercise for his troops. Those who “put out” during the purely political effort were rewarded with promotions and raises; those who merely performed their municipal duties received no such favors. Pressed to justify this fusion of political and governmental service, the Mayor seemed to echo his brother’s judgment of years before. His bright young advisers, he said, “had no roots. They were not out in the neighborhoods. So I said, let them have twenty-five people each. They should know what it’s like to try to get a favor done for each of the twenty-five…. I did it more to develop them than to save me.”

Although Richard Daley had provided the model for this operation, several City Hall officials detected more than a trace of Richard Nixon in the Mayor’s new style. One evening in April 1976, White attended the Boston premiere of
All the President’s Men
. The next morning, at a meeting of his senior staff, someone asked how he’d liked the film, triggering a fifteen-minute tirade on the lessons of Watergate. The President, White said, had been brought down by “a pair of young punks” who didn’t know their ass from their elbow about government (one listener was certain that the Mayor was thinking as much of Curt Wilkie and Mary Thornton as of Woodward and Bernstein). Nixon hadn’t deserved to be hounded out of office; he hadn’t done much more than they’d done right there in Boston—except get caught. At that, several aides felt like crawling under the table.

White had always been fascinated by the exercise of power. For years he played a game with his staff. He’d ask whom they regarded as the most powerful man in Boston, by which he meant “the guy who can do whatever he wants to you, but you can’t do anything back to him.” They would tease him by tossing out names—Cardinal Cushing, Tom Winship, mob leader Gerry Angiulo, longshoremen’s boss “Red” Moran—but sooner or later they’d say, “Oh, you, Kevin,” and he’d beam. He always said there were only three political
jobs worth having—mayor, governor, and President—because they were the only ones in which you could get anything done. When Tully Plesser tried to interest him in a cabinet post, White said, “You mean sit at a table and when you speak you hold up your hand and they say, ‘No, we’ll tell you when you can speak’? You got to be kidding!”

In late 1976, White made an audacious bid to consolidate his power by tacking a proposal for partisan elections onto a charter reform package. Since 1909, Bostonians had chosen their mayor through a non-partisan contest, with the two highest vote getters in the preliminary facing each other in a runoff. Reintroducing partisan elections, the Mayor claimed, would increase voter participation and “revitalize the two-party system.” But critics contended that the principal beneficiary would be Kevin White himself. With the prerogatives of incumbency and his new political organization, White would almost certainly win a partisan primary; then, since the city was overwhelmingly Democratic, he would be the odds-on favorite to swamp any Republican opponent. If the proposal succeeded, Kevin White might be Boston’s mayor-for-life. In public, White vehemently denied such considerations. In private he was blunt: “Don’t you see,” he told skeptical aides. “This is the Congress of Vienna! Afterwards it’ll be a breeze.” At the last moment, the plan was killed in the state legislature.

Only momentarily fazed by this setback, the Mayor worked out a full theory of executive power. “There is a growing timidity of chief executives in the exercise of authority, influence, and command,” he told any audience which would listen. “Born of an overreaction to Vietnam and Watergate, political reformists are tying the hands of elected officials as the Lilliputians tied Gulliver, in an effort to prescribe good government by imposing restraints. If the presidency is in trouble as an institution it is not so much because it has become too powerful as because it has become increasingly dysfunctional. Power is to be exercised, not husbanded.”

Increasingly he insisted on the trappings of power as well. No longer did the Mayor appear in public with coat over shoulder and sleeves rolled up (“It became a mannerism,” he told one interviewer. “I consciously keep my coat on these days”). Years before, he had refused to use the massive limousine inherited from John Collins, buying a Ford station wagon instead, and often riding up front with the driver. But by the mid-seventies he was back in a limo (which, by tradition, bore the numbers 576, the number of letters in the names James Michael Curley). Although he earned only $40,000 a year—the legacy of a bitter standoff with the City Council—he traveled in style at city expense. On one trip to Washington seeking financial assistance from the Carter administration, he and his party were met at National Airport by a caravan of chauffeured limousines (the Admiral Limousine Service charged Boston $1,567.50 for two days). On a trip to New York, the Mayor stayed in a $250-a-night suite at the Hotel Pierre. The press dubbed him “Kevin de Luxe.”

He justified such expenditures by calling Boston “a world-class city” which required “a certain level of dignity” from its chief executive. “When
I’m in Washington I’m not treated like some kind of donkey. I do it by knowing my place, without trying to strut. I know the President is the President, Tip is Tip, Teddy is Teddy. They can kick the shit out of me in private. But publicly, no. I think that adds to the city.” When told that New York’s Mayor Ed Koch had taken a city bus to his own inauguration, White hissed with contempt, “One of these days some guy is going to do something like crawl. I will never crawl. I will stand and kick, but I will not crawl.”

He worked in handsome surroundings, a sumptuous suite looking out through tinted windows at Quincy Market (“You don’t need to run for President,” Ed Muskie told him. “You already have the nicest office of any public official in America”). But he wasn’t satisfied. Soon he outraged the City Council by announcing plans for a $90,000 dining room and kitchen. Meanwhile, with every passing year, he spent more time at the Parkman House. For an Irish boy, born in lower-middle-class Jamaica Plain, reared in lace-curtain West Roxbury, and settled at the shabbily genteel base of Beacon Hill, the great mansion on the hilltop was the consummation of his fantasies, a house from which he could actually look
down
on the Brahmins. In the spacious dining room lined with eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper of pink-red birds and butterflies, he served his guests—at city expense—such specialties as Strawberry Gantoise and Chicken Vallée d’Auge. Sometimes as he strolled the cornflower-blue rug, warmed his feet by the American Empire fireplace, or dashed off a note at the mahogany secretary, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Completing an interview with a Philadelphia newsman, he paused at the door, gazed up at the graceful, curving stairway, and said, “It’s got to be the loveliest staircase in America!” One spring evening another reporter was driving along Beacon Street when he spied the Mayor on the wrought-iron balcony surveying his city. When the reporter saluted, the Mayor responded with a papal blessing.