Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
Once the race narrowed, its character altered radically. Mrs. Hicks’s reputation as the “Bull Connor of the North” attracted a torrent of media attention. When
Newsweek
caricatured her on its cover and the
Globe
abandoned a century
of neutrality to endorse White, they transformed the contest into a political morality play: Good arrayed against Evil in a succession of stark tableaus. If Louise was never quite the racist her enemies conjured up, Kevin was never quite the righteous crusader (betraying no recognizable ideology through his early years, he’d often been called “light as a feather”). But once the drama was cast, the candidates played out their appointed roles. By early autumn liberals from near and far had rallied to Kevin, among them Barney Frank, fresh from Harvard. Signing on as a researcher, the irrepressible Barney was soon playing a major role behind the scenes, stamping the campaign with his own convictions on social and racial issues.
All this left Terry White deeply disconcerted. Very much his father’s son, a pragmatic nuts-and-bolts campaigner, Terry warned Kevin that he had lost touch with his roots. As Terry saw it, the new ideological war could only repel the working-class ethnics on whom his brother would ultimately depend. Indeed, the more fashionable Kevin’s cause became in Cambridge, the less appeal it had in Andrews Square and Field’s Corner. Late in the campaign, polls showed a perilous erosion of White’s once substantial lead; in November his victory margin was barely 12,000.
Through the following weeks Barney’s influence continued to grow. One after another, senior posts in the new administration went to
his
nominees, most of whom—like Hale Champion, Sam Merrick, Bill Cowin, Dave Davis, and Colin Diver—had no roots in the city. Though Terry regarded himself as a New Deal—Fair Deal progressive, he had little patience with Barney’s self-conscious liberalism. In turn, the Mayor’s liberal advisers saw something vaguely sinister in Terry, whom they dubbed “Raoul” after Fidel Castro’s
éminence grise
brother. But Terry found himself in an increasingly difficult position, unable to deliver jobs for the ward-based faithful or to control the course of his brother’s administration. Exhausted and embittered, he sent word on the eve of the inaugural that he would not attend the ceremony. Kevin locked his bedroom door and wept.
Yet the next day he demonstrated again his determination to break with the past. For the first time in living memory, the inauguration was held in Bullfinch’s classic Faneuil Hall. After a string quartet played Haydn, White delivered a brief but eloquent discourse, the work of Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin. Instead of the time-honored luncheon at the musty Parker House, the Mayor and his guests adjourned for baked capon and vintage Riesling at the elegant Ritz-Carlton Hotel. And that afternoon, White pointedly omitted the traditional hand-pumping tour of City Hall, initiated in the regime of James Michael Curley.
So as Terry went back to painting lines on streets, his brother blazed his own audacious trail that was to lead him four years later to the brink of the second-highest office in the land.
The morning after George McGovern and Tom Eagleton took their bows in Miami Beach, a reporter found the Mayor still morose but struggling to regain
his equanimity. “All I want is to get up a family tennis tournament,” he said, “enjoy the rest of the weekend, and get back to work.”
Returning to Boston on Sunday evening, he was confronted by a crisis. As the city sweltered through a heat wave, a scuffle broke out at the Puerto Rican Day festival in the South End. When police waded into the crowd, ten policemen and thirteen civilians were injured. There was further street fighting the next night, with several stores firebombed and looted. As dusk fell on Tuesday evening, the Mayor decided to visit the troubled neighborhood. Slinging his jacket over his shoulder, he set off on a walk through the riot area. Hundreds of youths followed him down rubble-strewn streets to the Cathedral housing project, where he “deputized” fifty of them to keep the peace. His arms draped around two grinning boys, the Mayor then led a curbside colloquium on the South End’s future. When it was over the kids cheered.
Yet almost immediately White faced another problem. The Rolling Stones, completing an American tour, were scheduled to perform that evening at Boston Garden. Diverted by bad weather, their plane had landed at Warwick, Rhode Island, where Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were arrested after an altercation with a policeman. Fifteen thousand young people were at the Garden impatiently awaiting the Stones while their idols were behind bars fifty miles away. If the South End had temporarily settled down, the kids in the Garden were edging toward a riot of their own. Wheeling into action on this second front, the Mayor telephoned the Governor of Rhode Island and the Mayor of Warwick. Within an hour, Jagger and Richard were released on Kevin White’s personal recognizance. Two limousines pulled up to the jail-house door and, with Rhode Island police leading the way, sped the parolees toward Boston.
While they were on their way, fresh troubles broke out in the South End: more stores on fire, two squad cars overturned. Pressed for reinforcements, the Mayor diverted most of the police detail from the concert, leaving the Garden acutely vulnerable. He then decided to appeal directly to the crowd milling angrily about the arena, still unaware of what had happened to the Stones. But when he advanced to the microphone, most of the audience seemed in no mood to listen to some damned politician. “Get lost, stiff,” they shouted. “No speeches tonight!”
Suddenly announcer Chip Monck grabbed the mike and bellowed, “Shut the fuck up!” They shut up.
“You want to know why I’m here?” the Mayor asked. “The Rolling Stones were busted in Rhode Island about two hours ago. But I’ve called the Governor and gotten them out and they’re on the way here now.”
“Right on, Kevin!” someone shouted.
“But now I need you to do something for me. As I stand here talking, half my city is in flames. I’m taking some of the police away from here and I want you to do me a favor. Just cool it, will you? Cool it for me. Cool it for the city. And after the concert ends, just go home. We’re keeping the subways open until after the show. But don’t go down to the South End. Just go home.
I appreciate it. Thank you.” With a great roar, the crowd rose to their feet and 15,000 kids, many of them stoned, gave the Mayor of Boston a standing ovation. While the Tactical Patrol Force brought the South End under control, there wasn’t a single arrest at the Garden that night.
That evening had shown Kevin White at his best: spontaneous, courageous, resourceful, and articulate, at ease with his diverse constituencies, ready to put himself on the line for the city he governed. When the Mayor’s personal appeal switched on, it was palpable—like a radioactive isotope, it quickly registered on any political Geiger counter. My God, his aides would exclaim, it’s working! They could feel it—and so could he. That evening, as he waited to go onstage at the Boston Garden, he thought back to the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination four years before, when he had made a similar appeal from that very stage to James Brown’s black audience. It had worked then and it worked now. The Mayor knew he was good. If only others would recognize just
how
good, and give him a larger stage on which to exercise those powers!
That night in mid-July left Kevin White on a sustained high which the next few weeks did nothing to dispel. For as Tom Eagleton was compelled to reveal his medical history and to withdraw from the ticket, White’s name surfaced once again. Mayor Wes Uhlman of Seattle forwarded his candidacy in an open telegram to McGovern: “Urban problems will be America’s greatest challenge for the next four years. Kevin H. White is the man with unparalleled background in dealing with our urban crisis: he would make a strong addition to your ticket and would be a truly great Vice-President.” For days in early August, White believed that McGovern might, indeed, turn back to him. And by the time Sargent Shriver received the nod on August 8, the Mayor was ready to read even that as a favorable omen.
Concluding that the Democratic ticket was doomed, he believed its defeat would end McGovern’s and Shriver’s hopes of ever occupying the White House. As for the party’s other presidential aspirants—Humphrey, Muskie, Jackson, Lindsay, et al.—they had all trooped through Kevin’s office that year looking for support and the Mayor had taken their measure. He knew he was their equal, if not their superior. White believed that anyone who succeeded in Massachusetts politics could make it in Washington. After all, Massachusetts was the only state where politics was a full-time occupation for adults—he called it the “Stillman’s Gym of American Politics.” So who had a better claim on the Democratic Party’s shattered leadership than the latest star on the Massachusetts horizon, the consensus choice of McGovern’s advisers?
Such considerations were still on his mind when, in early September, White left for his first trip to Europe. When he joined his friends Sam and Nancy Huntington in Woodstock, England, the three of them began talking of a White-for-President campaign in 1976. The more they discussed it, the more entranced they were by the idea.
That autumn a small group of the Mayor’s closest advisers—the Huntingtons, Bob Kiley, Frank Tivnan, and pollster Tully Plesser—began meeting to
lay the groundwork. Early the next year the circle was widened to include Ira Jackson, a young Harvard graduate who joined White’s staff in 1972; Ann Lewis, Barney Frank’s sister, who in her brother’s absence had quickly become one of the Mayor’s principal operatives; Jackie Walsh, a street-wise political organizer; Shelly Cohen, former Massachusetts director of Americans for Democratic Action; and Curtis Gans, a veteran of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. The meetings were super-secret, shielded not only from the press but from most city officials as well. Sometimes the group met at the Huntingtons’ town house on Brimmer Street, sometimes at the Colonnade Hotel, a Back Bay establishment conveniently out of the political mainstream.
All agreed that White began with formidable liabilities. First, there was Ted Kennedy,
de facto
chief of the Massachusetts party, no great friend of Kevin’s and not about to be eclipsed by another Boston Irish Catholic. Then there was the mayoralty itself, hardly a launching pad for the presidency (no one had ever jumped directly from a City Hall to the White House). Finally, there was White’s need to run for reelection in 1975, a year in which his national campaign should be shifting into high gear.
Yet these debits might be converted into assets. Although White couldn’t risk an overt assault on the Kennedy establishment, he might quietly build a counter-establishment, capitalizing on latent anti-Kennedy sentiment within the party, much of it generated by the Chappaquiddick affair. He could use his mayoralty to demonstrate leadership in a city which mirrored the ethnic diversity and multifarious problems of the nation at large. Finally, reelection by an impressive margin in 1975 could help set the stage for a national bid the following year.
Through the winter of 1972–73, his brain trust elaborated its strategy. The Mayor would be portrayed as the answer to the Democrats’ post-McGovern dilemma: how to bring the party “home” to its traditional constituency without alienating new recruits among the young, women, and minorities. Kevin White, his aides argued, was the only prominent Democrat able to bridge that gap. Relatively young (he was forty-two at the time), well educated, attractive, he had strong credentials with blacks, Jews, academia, and the liberal media. Yet he was also enough of a traditional Irish politician to enjoy excellent relations with old-liners like Dick Daley of Chicago and Pat Cunningham of the Bronx. In an era when many Democrats had emancipated themselves from big labor, he remained on good terms with George Meany of the AFLCIO and even with the hard hats of the Building Trades Council. At a time when many candidates were posturing legislators, White was a big-city administrator accustomed to dealing with the bread-and-butter issues of urban life. In sum—as the Mayor often claimed on his own behalf—he was the best of both worlds, a street-savvy pol at home in the seminar rooms of Harvard, a splendid hybrid who could achieve John Lindsay’s ends with Richard Daley’s means.
There remained the problem of how to give the Mayor the national exposure
he needed while permitting him to spend most of his time at home running the city and preparing for reelection. The three-pronged solution was ingenious.
First, White should claim a leading role in remaking the Democratic Party. The party’s new chairman, Robert Strauss, secretly detested Ted Kennedy and was glad to do what he could for White. What the Mayor wanted was a place on the Democratic National Committee’s prestigious Executive Committee; what he got was the co-chairmanship of the 1974 Democratic National Campaign Committee, a job he shared with an ambitious former governor of Georgia named Jimmy Carter. White and his people were bitterly disappointed, but when Ira Jackson called Strauss to complain, the chairman drawled, “Boy, the difference between the Executive Committee and the Campaign Committee is the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad. I’m doing all I can for you, boy.” Indeed, the campaign post offered an ambitious politician rich opportunities to befriend candidates around the country and thus to store up IOUs which could be cashed in two years later. The problem was that both Jimmy Carter and Kevin White had the same idea. From the beginning, each sensed the other’s secret agenda. In months to come, as both men sought to milk political advantage from the committee, they regarded each other with ill-disguised hostility.
Carter held one obvious advantage: no longer an incumbent, he was free to roam the country, using his campaign position to make direct contact with candidates. Largely confined to City Hall, White couldn’t do that, so his game plan called for others to travel for him. These were the “ambassadors”—six or eight people in and out of city government who could appeal on White’s behalf to interest groups around the country. They were led by Gerry Pleshaw, a special assistant to the Mayor for women’s affairs and chairwoman of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, who had good ties with elected officials in many states. There were Bob Holland with labor, Jackie Walsh with other mayors, Paul Parks and Jim Loving with blacks, Teri Weidner and Ann Munster with women and community organizations. All through 1974, the ambassadors crisscrossed the country—to South Carolina and Arizona, Wisconsin and California—sometimes on “vacation time,” sometimes on city time, generally funded by private sources, wherever possible piggybacking on city assignments. Only rarely did they explicitly sell Kevin White. Instead, they plugged into political networks, tried to make themselves indispensable, and developed obligations which they could cash in on when the overt campaign got underway. But in the long run there was no substitute for direct contact between the candidate and those he sought to woo, especially when the candidate was as magnetically charming as Kevin White. It was here that the Mayor and his advisers came up with their most innovative ideas, designed to exploit not only White’s own appeal but the grace and grandeur of his city.