Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (6 page)

My work with the police confirmed one belief and taught me another. I saw once again that the ideologically and emotionally driven choice of direct action over less dramatic political activity is often counterproductive. When demonstrations became disruptive, the mayor had to use his scarcest resource, his political capital, to resist the popular demand for a harsher police response. This made it harder for us to adopt progressive policies in other areas where there was political opposition to overcome.

Even more damaging was the cumulative impact of the angry tactics adopted by some on the left. Police officers and other city workers who had been unable to afford college educations were infuriated by young people whom they considered privileged causing trouble as they tried to go about their work. The prevalent anti-American rhetoric added literal insult to injury. The Nixon-Agnew ticket benefited from the rift within the Democratic coalition between working people and the children of middle-and upper-income professionals.

Democratic leaders didn’t help matters any when they responded ambivalently to radical protest. This ambivalence had two causes. Many liberals who were themselves committed to electoral politics shared the demonstrators’ strong opposition to the Vietnam War and to lingering racism, and were to some degree morally intimidated by their passion. At the same time, some Democratic office holders and candidates feared that criticizing the radicals’ tactics would cost them votes from their base that they needed to win. The requirement to choose between the most radical, angry people who are on your side and the general population that fears and dislikes them wounded the Democrats for the next decade and after. Our historic consolation is that Republicans now confront the same dilemma in the form of the Tea Party.

Watching my allies struggle with this problem led me to an insight I found crucial. We politicians frequently praise ourselves for bravely defying our enemies. But in most cases this is not so hard. Indeed, excoriating—and even more usefully, being excoriated by—one’s opponents is the optimal way to harvest campaign contributions. Every time AIDS activists tried to embarrass Jesse Helms, they enriched his war chest; his supporters immediately sent money. Criticizing allies is something else altogether. True political courage involves standing up to one’s friends.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, quite fortunately, the disaffection of white working class voters from liberal Democrats mainly involved personalities and not policy. The notion of government as a positive force in our lives retained much of its strength. This proved useful to me as I delved into the issue that would absorb more of my time than any other in my public life: housing for low-income people, particularly rental housing for those who could not afford to own homes.

Boston had an unusually high concentration of public housing—rental units built entirely with public funds and administered by a public agency that gave tenant eligibility to people with very low incomes. One day, John Connolly, a young white public housing tenant from South Boston—the bastion of Louise Day Hicks’s political strength—came to see me. He proposed that tenants like him be allowed to fill the sixty temporary groundskeeping jobs at the projects that were doled out every summer.

Inquiring into the situation, I learned that these jobs, which paid well for such work, were traditionally given to the sons and daughters of the political elite and their friends. Thirty of the jobs were dispensed by the mayor, and the five Boston Housing Authority commissioners handed out the rest. Here was a great opportunity to demonstrate the new values of city government. A workforce of public housing residents would be more racially integrated and economically deserving than the old elite workforce.

Mayor White enthusiastically approved the idea and told me to tell Jacob Brier, chairman of the BHA, to implement it. Brier, a holdover from the previous administration, responded with outrage. “Is the mayor crazy?” he angrily asked me. “These are the best patronage jobs around. He can do what he wants with his half, but I’m not giving up mine and neither are the other members.” Trying to persuade him—I was still in the early stages of my education—I responded that residents of the various developments would do a better job of keeping up the grounds, because it was where they and their families lived. Diligence in lawn mowing and litter removal were not the hallmarks of summer patronage workers. This suggestion drove Brier into even higher dudgeon. “Barney, Barney,” he expostulated, “if these fucking people were any good they wouldn’t live in public housing.”

White did turn his patronage jobs over to the housing tenants’ council to fill, and his first appointee to the board did the same. He was careful to appoint subsequent board members who did not think that living in public housing was a sign of great moral deficiency.

My next effort to improve housing conditions for low-income people was far less successful. I was a strong advocate of “infill housing”: using various federal subsidies to build affordable units in existing vacant lots throughout the city—literally filling in the unoccupied spaces. The rationale was to avoid placing massive concentrations of the poor in a few high-rises. Far better to build scattered units that would not have a heavy impact on any one area.

At the time, I was not familiar with what would come to be known as NIMBY—Not in My Back Yard. This is the unfortunate universal reaction to efforts to build low-income housing, or halfway houses for the mentally ill, or any other socially purposeful edifice, anywhere near anybody. Although Boston had many poor whites who would have been eligible for such housing, the program was inevitably seen as a sneak attack by “Mayor Black”—as White had come to be called—on the racial integrity (in other words, purity) of white neighborhoods. While my work on summer jobs was a success, the infill program was a debacle. It created a few housing units—and a lot of anger.

I had a stronger impact on the city’s streets than on its buildings—though I learned an all-important and chastening lesson in the process. The interstate highway system had long seemed to me one of the country’s greatest achievements—a shining example of what a strong federal government could accomplish if it was willing to mobilize national resources for the public good. Interstate 95, which traveled in a fairly straight line from southern Florida to northern Maine, was a crucial component of the system, but its Boston leg had not yet been built. I soon learned that highway planners intended to route that leg through predominantly low-and lower-middle-income neighborhoods, including one of the city’s few racially and economically integrated areas, the South End. When I met with local activists opposed to the route, I was instinctively skeptical of their arguments. Severing the link that carried commerce up and down the entire East Coast for the sake of a few Boston neighborhoods seemed both excessively provincial and unthinkably radical.

In response, my interlocutors insisted that the proposed route was not dictated by geography. Rather, it typified a disturbing pattern: Improvements to public infrastructure always tore up the poorest residential neighborhoods.

My first—fortunately unspoken—reaction was that this was absurd. It sounded like the same paranoia I had encountered in Mississippi and afterward in my disputes with the angry left. Shortly thereafter, I sought out William McGrath, the chief transportation planner for the city, whose work I regarded highly. I recounted the complaint that highway projects and other improvements were deliberately sited to affect the poorest people in the target area, expecting him to reassure me that this was not true. Instead, to my dismay, he affirmed it.

It’s simple economics, he explained. Your job is to build the road as cheaply as possible, consistent with the necessary quality standards. One major expense is acquisition of the land on which the road will be built. When no existing vacant land is available—almost always the case in a city—housing occupied by lower-income people costs less than any alternative. All else being equal, low-income neighborhoods are the path of least resistance for the highway engineers.

This meant that I did not have the option of advocating a less socially destructive route through the city. Even if Boston wanted to spend the extra money to preserve affordable housing, the funds were controlled by unsympathetic federal and state officials who would not have agreed.

The question then became how we could justify a major breach in the interstate highway system to save the homes of several thousand vulnerable Bostonians. Fortunately, all of this was happening in 1970, when concern for the environment was becoming a powerful force. Cars and trucks were high on the environmental movement’s list of villains.

Working with two gifted city officials, Fred Salvucci and John Lynch, I urged White to do what he wanted to do instinctively. He came out in opposition to the I-95 project and to another proposed highway, and in favor of more public transportation. Frank Sargent, the liberal Republican governor, originally sided with the conventional wisdom of the time and criticized White. But we won the ensuing public debate, helped by the rising popularity of environmentalism and the enthusiasm of the affected neighborhoods, and Sargent reversed himself and joined the opposition, killing the two roads. This early victory of the antihighway forces was to be followed by others, and transportation policy, especially in urban areas, was never the same. (The integrity of the interstate system was not entirely forsaken. At Salvucci’s urging, all parties agreed to rename a large part of Route 128, the state highway that circles Boston, Interstate 95. Drivers confused by an exit numbering sequence perverse even by Massachusetts standards will, on reading this, at least know why the system exists, even if they cannot figure out the system itself.)

*

In the fall of 1970, White ran for governor and lost decisively to Sargent, the incumbent. By that time, I was emotionally and physically exhausted after three years of full-time work in politics and governing. It showed.

I do not drink much—my taste buds have not changed since I first became a teenager. Instead, I deal with tension through food—using the Yiddish for overeating, I needed only two words to answer a reporter who asked why as my campaigns got tougher, I got bigger: “stress fress.” (Cokie Roberts later observed that as one of my hardest campaigns went on, I got fatter and my opponent got crazier.)

In December 1970, I told White that I could no longer do the job. His response was very flattering—he offered me other positions, including running the Housing Authority, given my interest in good rental housing for the poor. Relishing how much that would have agitated Jacob Brier, I considered it. But then I got another one of those phone calls that would alter my fate.

My former boss at the Institute of Politics, Richard Neustadt, told me that a fellowship was available beginning in January 1971. This would provide two things: a badly needed respite from responsibility, and the chance to get serious about my degree, since the fellowship meant a year back at Harvard with few duties.

I had yet to do any work on my thesis besides pick a topic. In theory, my three years working with Kevin White amounted to a massive research effort that I could draw on to produce a case study of how city government worked. But I was much more interested in changing reality than in describing it, and my dissertation remained mostly notional. I did write one lengthy piece during my stay at the institute—an article for
The Boston Globe Magazine
on how I lost one hundred pounds. (Not having to do any serious work for six months played a major role.)

As I contrasted my success as a political and administrative troubleshooter with my failure as a scholar, I realized that a key aspect of my makeup helped explain both results: I have a very short attention span. In my city job, I had to deal with three or four big issues and a handful of smaller ones every day. I can shift gears and juggle multiple concerns better than most people. Given the need to respond quickly to a new problem, I do very well. But when something requires long periods of concentration, not so much. With any task, my competitive advantage over other people diminishes in direct proportion to the time we have to spend on it. Understanding this, I was ready to say yes when I received the next phone call that shaped my career.

It came from Michael Harrington, a state legislator I had worked with when I was executive secretary of the Democratic Study Group. He had won a special election to Congress in 1969, taking a seat that had been held by Republicans since the nineteenth century. Most significantly, he was one of the earliest candidates to run on an anti–Vietnam War platform and win a tough race. This had particular appeal, because I felt somewhat guilty that I had not done very much against the war. So I agreed to go to Washington as his chief of staff—I would be his administrative assistant, in congressional terminology.

In Washington, I hoped to utilize the hard-earned political knowledge I had acquired working for White. One of the most important lessons I’d learned was cautionary in nature. The most committed activists on the left and the right are convinced that the majority of voters agree with them but that institutional flaws in our democracy prevent popular sentiment from prevailing. They are usually wrong. Today conservatives are more profoundly damaged by this state of mind than liberals, but in the late 1960s and early ’70s it was primarily a problem for liberal Democratic officeholders. Their allies were certain that the great mass of voters were ready for a sharp shift to the left, and they excoriated those in power for failing—or maybe refusing—to take advantage of this opportunity.

In recent years, this tension between committed activists and political reality has worsened significantly, exacerbated by changes in how people—especially the most ideologically driven—get their information. Thirty years ago, people watched, read, and listened to the same relatively few outlets, albeit with varying degrees of skepticism. Over the past decade, America’s political community has come to live in two parallel media universes. Each wing ingests information and opinion that reinforces its own policy preferences
and
its own conviction that those preferences reflect majority opinion.