While the Music Lasts
Bulger, William M.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "While the Music Lasts" The Massachusetts Boston While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics William M. Bulger Houghton Mifflin /328 pages / $22.95 REVIEWED BY Christopher Caldwell Richard Jemmons,...
...In the words of then-Boston mayor Kevin White: "There were three extraordinary periods in the city's history: the Revolutionary War, the abolitionist time before the Civil War—and busing...
...It seemed to me our Neighborhood had become Judge Garrity's white whale," Bulger writes, "and that only its destruction would bring him peace...
...In the 1980's, for instance, he once turned up at a conference of the neoconservative Committee for the Free World at the Plaza Hotel in New York...
...But what was done to Boston in the 1970's was no joke, and Bulger was one of the first to recognize it...
...One assumes that by a "Boston" Jemmons/Carville means an old-style big-city politician, probably Irish...
...I'm glad to run into you," the hack replied...
...We swept our sidewalks...
...I don't think we can afford to feed him...
...When Bulger backed Edward McCormack over Ted in the 1962 senatorial primary, Kennedy crony Frank Morrissey invited him to lunch with the candidate at Locke-Ober and tried to get Bulger to switch...
...What's more, the federal judge who ordered busing in Boston, W. Arthur Garrity (a Wellesley resident who wouldn't be affected by busing, either), was a Kennedy protégé, and Kennedy backed him faithfully...
...And he scoffs at the newspapers that accused him of playing politics when he got a job for his brother jack: The allegation was certainly true, but the attempt to give it a pejorative cast struck me as absurd...
...You may dismiss the wars as inconsequential, internecine squabbling among intellectuals, mostly Jewish or black...
...For it is what he calls the "depraved doctrine" of forced busing that defined Bulger as apolitician...
...William Weld appointed him president of the state university system...
...At the high point of busing, South Boston was under martial law, with curfews and restrictions on public assembly, policed by 1,600 local officers, with reserves of ioo federal marshals, 5o FBI agents, and 600 national guard troops...
...Most importantly, Ted Kennedy is one of those whom Bulger names (others include Marion Barry, Tom Wicker, the Boston Globe's Robert Turner, and CCNY's Kenneth Clark) as having vocally supported busing as a means of desegregating public school systems —while sending their own children to private school...
...Jack owes me two dollars and eighty-five cents from the last time he was in my cab...
...Although former Harvard dean Derek Bok reportedly threatened to resign from the UMass board if Bulger were named, Bulger is no less qualified for the post than such pols-tumed-State-U-presidents as Lamar Alexander and David Boren...
...When anyone in public office makes an appointment, it too is, by definition, a political action...
...Bulger may not have been a typical Massachusetts politician, but he was typical of that now-tiny subset of Massachusetts politicians without national aspirations...
...Ever since he first appeared in print—in the New Republic in the 193o's — he has treated literature as literature, and not ideology...
...mostly it is attitude that counts...
...and McCool the postman, who claimed that "God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world," and set out to do the Lord's work by stopping at every licensed establishment on his daily rounds in order to, as he put it, "take on fuel...
...In 1994, Whitey suspiciously turned up with a one-sixth share of the winning ticket in the Massachusetts state lottery, leading police to speculate how likely it was that anyone would buy a 16 2/30 stake in a lottery ticket that costs a 68 July 1996 The American Spectator dollar...
...In 1973, as a young state legislator, Barney Frank formed a Democratic Study Group to create a black state senate seat by mapping Bulger out of his district...
...He is outspokenly anti-abortion...
...Everyone ordered either soup (3o0) or tuna ($1.85) but not both...
...One is tempted to say that, undertanding the activist strain of Democratic power politics as well as anybody, he was in The American Spectator • July 1996 69 The Last of Kazin Alfred Kazin is the quintessential New York literary intellectual —always provocative, but often intemperate, and even malicious, mixing a high intelligence with bouts of foolishness as critic, memoirist, and kvetch...
...If so, then 62-year-old William M. Bulger—the new president of the University of Massachusetts, after seventeen years as president of the state senate — is the great "Boston" of our era...
...In January 1995 Whitey was tipped off that he and two fellow members of the notorious Winter Hill Gang were about to be arrested on racketeering charges...
...I don't know whether we should try to persuade him," he said...
...That is Bulger's politics in a nutshell: ruthless, atavistic, occasionally open to featherbedding and corruption, and considerably less destructive than the national politics that has supplanted it.have consequences, leading to domestic legislation and foreign-policy initiatives...
...He favors school choice and charter schools...
...He has been on the lam ever since...
...Frank survived, but barely...
...When Kazin gave the Massey Lectures at Harvard last year, he noted that the Modern Language Association had entitled a session at one of its conventions z-"The Muse of Masturbation...
...The New York that formed him no longer exists, and in the places where scholarly critics now dwell, the love of literature has given way to a grim, sometimes wacky, pedantry...
...Patrick's Day breakfast that has been attended by the last three presidents, and peppers his speech with Boston Irishisms, such as "grand" and "dearly love," and boasts that begin, "I was fortunate enough to...
...If JFK was a symbol of the promise of politics, Bulger opines, it was "in some magical way that had nothing to do with his politics or his personal acts...
...The politics he practiced is not clean, and it's not meant to be...
...Having had a son lose his place at prestigious Boston Latin High School when the school adopted a quota system, he considers affirmative action state-sanctioned prejudice...
...That's right, and not only was Bulger opposed to busing: he was the most radical spokesman for the most militant neighborhood in the most inflamed city in the most violent desegregation episode since the end of the civil rights movement...
...We went to school and we went to church...
...He, his neighborhood, and the style of politics both represented lost big and lost permanently...
...Without ever saying so, Bulger makes plain that he has a higher opinion of his constituents than he does of the big muckety-mucks on the national political stage, not excluding the Kennedys...
...Norman Podhoretz, say, or Irving Kristol did not tear down the Berlin Wall, and neither did Noam Chomsky or Norman Mailer build it...
...When anyone in public office makes a recommendation, it is per se a political action...
...And then there are the absolute legions of weirdos and misfits —whom Bulger's style brings out of the woodwork as surely as did James Michael Curley's — who come to importune him for jobs and favors...
...Of his childhood hero James Michael Curley, the four-term mayor CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL, a former TAS senior editor, is senior writer at the Weekly Standard...
...Second, Bulger, the father of nine children, is as culturally conservative as any Southern Republican...
...He reached the Senate in 1970, and became its president in 1978 — consolidating power through control over appropriations, appointments, districting, budgets, and votes...
...Bulger has little to say of JFK the man, beyond recounting three or four new tales of his mind-bogglingmiserliness, the best of which has Rose bragging to a Boston taxi driver that her son is a U.S...
...Bulger admits to helping his brother Whitey get a job as a custodian...
...He loathes teachers' unions...
...and two-term convict who became synonymous with Massachusetts machine politics, Bulger says, "I found the sheer Irishness of his personality beguiling...
...There is Julius Ansel, the state rep so anxious to get into news photos that he once knocked a constituent to the tarmac at Logan Airport as she was being carried off a plane in a stretcher...
...Families were stable: a divorce was a whispered honor...
...The only time such acts are reprehensible is when they involve shoddy politics...
...In consistently asserting the prerogatives of an older, local politics against mandates from Washington, Bulger has, on balance, served his community well...
...And yet he cannot be accused of sour grapes...
...On vacation in Ireland, Bulger remarks, "All about me was the peace of a rugged countryside where no one aspiring to a career in garbage removal lay in wait...
...Skunky Dolan, a neighbor (resident of an abandoned car) who always reeked of alcohol ("It was an act of reckless courage to strike a match in his presence...
...senator...
...Ted was very unhappy...
...The plan failed...
...He thinks Gerry Adams wants to bring peace to Northern Ireland...
...Bulger's failings are human ones...
...Rather than slice Republican Margaret Heckler out of her district as House Speaker Tip O'Neill urged, Bulger redrew the map by chopping Frank's district to pieces...
...We had our share of bars and bookies and sin, but the area then, as now, had the city's lowest rate of serious crime...
...70 July 1996 • The American Spectator...
...So Billy Bulger the legislator is clearly at ease among the more colorful characters of Boston politics and neighborhood life, characters being, as the playwright Hugh Leonard put it, "the word we Irish have for any bigot or ignoramus over the age of so...
...In January, Republican Gov...
...He is as comfortable discussing Kant, Isak Dinesen, Heraclitus, Kafka, and medieval French chansons de geste (all quoted in this memoir) as he is telling stories about his neighbors Tommy "Jabber" Joyce, Sen...
...At 8o, Kazin is the dean of American critics...
...Even when polls showed Massachusetts voters favoring his ouster by a margin of 5 to 1, even in the teeth of outright loathing on the part of the liberal Boston Globe, Bulger hung on...
...In a different era, he could have been a Daley or a LaGuardia, but the smarter money was on the national Democratic party...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW The Massachusetts Boston While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics William M. Bulger Houghton Mifflin /328 pages / $22.95 REVIEWED BY Christopher Caldwell Richard Jemmons, the character in Primary Colors based on James Carville, "believed there were three basic categories of Democratic Party pols: Bostons, Southems and Jews...
...He vacations in Ireland, is an extraordinary tenor (he has sung Irish ballads for the Boston Pops), holds an annual St...
...The McCormacks are my neighbors...
...Each in his way, however, told us how we should feel about it...
...We have remained friendly through the years," says Bulger of Frank, but when the 1981 congressional redistricting came around, Frank was in Congress, Massachusetts was due to lose a seat, and Bulger was in charge...
...It was implausible but not impossible, as Whitey Bulger was not only one of Boston's most feared gangsters but also its most eccentric: owner of a senior citizen's bus pass, he would travel to his various assignations by public transportation...
...charismatic, hilarious, and canny...
...Bulger was elected a state rep in 196o, with big help from two neighbors: Joe Moakley, now a longtime congressman for the Massachusetts 9th district...
...he would be proud to hear them described as national ones...
...Not all literary intellectuals are political, although those who are usually live on the left...
...Such, such are the joys of English / lit now, but Kazin hearkens to an earlier time, and he is better than that...
...Conservatives often think it is the other way around...
...Finally, he happens to be the younger brother of the most celebrated organized crime figure in Massachusetts: James "Whitey" Bulger, who served nine years in Atlanta, Lewisburg, and Alcatraz for armed robbery in the 1950's...
...He is also a participant in the literary-political wars...
...Kazin has an attitude, and he takes it with him wherever he goes...
...The conservative Boston Herald's Howie Carr, meanwhile, refers to Bulger—who is closer to five feet than to six—as "the corrupt midget" or, more economically, "the CM...
...given to shady associates and prone to patronage...
...Throughout his career he has shown the characteristic Irish inability to distinguish between his noblest acts and his most vain, a Celtic tendency to make jokes of serious things and serious things of jokes...
...He calls television "voyeuristic trash...
...It may be he is the last of his kind...
...the obsessive Polish-American activist Joe Alecks ("He was the sort who would demand that we name a fire hydrant after Chopin...
...Ideas no position to complain when it predictably turned on its supporters with arrogance and ruthlessness...
...A feminist examined the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and found that the style was "clitoral...
...If Bulger has seldom had to compromise on core political principles, if he has hung on to legislative power with Talleyrandian tenacity, it is due to his sheer prowess as a power politician...
...He preaches a hard-line version of what he calls the "enduring values of Judeo-Christian culture," calls Woodstock a "squalid obscenity," has described homosexuals as "deviant," and expresses what the Boston Globe calls a "deep disdain" for his philandering colleagues in the Senate...
...Except Bulger, who—it being his first time in a fancy restaurant—ordered lobster Savannah ($io): When it came to me, I said—between bites of succulent lobster—"I can't be with you, Ted...
...As an example, he cited a television correspondent who interviewed a 13-year-old girl about her life as a "sexual activist...
...It's one of many brass-knuckles incidents Bulger doesn't mention in the book...
...John "Rosary" Beades, and Bob Dineen, the Crazy Marine...
...The wars have shaped our culture, and our culture has shaped our politics...
...Three things have always made Bulger a Boston with a difference: the first is a hard-won and lightly worn classical education that Bulger gained by begging his way into Boston College High School as a scholarship student, and working his way through BC and BC Law...
...He positively brags about bending the rules to get veteran's benefits for a dirt-poor family whose father/breadwinner is in the slammer...
...History has proved Bulger correct...
...Residency does not require any expertise...
...He flaunted it during the Cold War...
...The prizes went to those Democrats—like Tip O'Neill and the Kennedys — who joined it, even if that meant being part of the juggernaut that rolled over Bulger and his neighbors as if they were so many bugs, and destroyed the neighborhood culture that had been the modus vivendi of Boston's poor since the nineteenth-century migrations...
...but if you do, you will be wrong...
...the Bulgers didn't own a set until all their children had left home...
...Bulger hates this: Of the panel of distinguished experts Garrity nominated to study the busing controversy, Bulger snarls, "They were distinguished, as far as I could see, only in the sense that not one of them was the parent of a child who would be affected by forced busing...
...For Bulger, busing amounted to little more than "a mandate that our children be taken from good schools in the city's safest community and be sent to inferior schools in Boston's highest-crime area...
...As for Bobby, Bulger dismisses him as "pugnacious by nature and more than a little nasty...
...Billy Bulger grew up in the housing projects of South Boston, and is fiercely proud of the unassimilated Irishness of the neighborhood: We washed our windows...
...A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin Alfred Kazin HarperCo/lins /34r pages / $26 REVIEWED BY John Corry JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...Kristol, a panelist, spoke during one session about "mindless" journalists...
...Then Gerry Doherty said, "Could you at least stop eating for a minute so we can talk with you...
...and sports-writer-turned-television-football-commen-tator Will McDonough, who was his campaign manager...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
