Bostonians & Kennedys: romance, recrimination, & leadership
Hale, Dennis
and did not see how I could fit into it. The only alternative was to turn from the mainstream, to devote myself completely to the church. What mattered, however, was not so much what one did,...
...Recently, a Boston Globe columnist argued that racial strife proved how deeply "politicized" the city's life had become...
...The Kennedy entourage tried to renew its connection to Boston on the occasion of the LibraYy's opening, perhaps making the best of a~ arrangement that must not have pleased them very much...
...Behind the romance of ward heelers and folk heroes, behind the slogan s touting Boston as America's most "livable" city, lies the grim reality of racial murders, absymal schools, decrepit public housing, unemployment, and life on the dole...
...The Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority, not under the city's control, is nearing fiscal disaster: its future apparently holds the fatal combination of service cuts and fare increases that has already done in the New York transit system...
...The trick is to find an interest group (the Police Patroimen's Benevolent Association, the fireflghters union, the teacher's union, or the owners of liquor licenses) with members throughout the city...
...The country cannot be rebuilt from the top down, but only from the bottom up...
...I won't mess with them...
...The result is a Council that represents interests rather than constituents...
...officially underway, and the race war has once again settled into a state of siege...
...That was the case throughout the city, with staying home the favored response by far...
...To make a long storyshort (and this involves some exaggeration) cities are special because,they are ungoverned...
...If Bostonians have a "feel" for politics--and there are many reasons for thinking that they do--then what they lack is an arena in which to exercise their talents...
...Nevertheless, the Kennedy family is precisely the kind of political elite that would once have provided the city with a talented group of leaders...
...W , HATEVER the outcome of the next presidential election, there seems to be little hope of any significant change in the conditions of life in Boston...
...Jews were the only white People we ever had...
...There is a double-edged lesson here, one that reaffLrms the failure of public investment in the city, while at the same time confirming the judgment that the Kennedys are in some way "special" and subject to laws much different from those which constrain other politicians...
...Not enthusiastically, to be sure: but united, nonetheless...
...The city is still responsible for public safety and fighting fires, for cleaning up litter and regulating parking lots...
...Since a candidate does not represent a specific place, he is free to roam the city, making promises at will...
...Joseph Califano, in suburban Medford, blamed opposition to desegregation on the worsening economic situation...
...Last spring, Rep...
...It is responsible for public health...
...of ethnicity Commonweal: 720(Irish, Italian, and Yankee...
...It was a bridge between local political elites and the citizens they sought to lead...
...John Kenneth Galbraith told Wellesley High students of his love for John F. Kennedy...
...With an awful predictability, the violence escalated and spread...
...Barney Frank, a liberal Democrat who represents the Back Bay in the state legislature, told an audience at Boston College that the "politics of race" was done for in the city...
...This would not be problematic if ~e political dimension of local life could be swept away with it, ," but unfortunately it cannot...
...As fate would have it, the best and the brightest from the Kennedy administration arrived in the city at the height of its renewed racial turmoil...
...Most of them are Democrats...
...The Mayor, on the advice of the police chief, closed City Hall to public meetings...
...A black couple was chased by a mob of whites across Boston Common, almost to the steps of the State House on Beacon Hill...
...It provided access and entry from below...
...George McGovern opined that during the Kennedy administration (which he served as director of the Food for Peace Program) "there was never a time when you felt lille apologizing for this country or its leadership...
...This "spirituality" called for a surrender of the self to God to be used by Him as He wishes...
...This sort of weak, custodial city government was one of the great goals of the Progressive movement, but its roots are even older...
...The Kennedy clan has been called a "national" elite, but they are national almost by default...
...This is done to take certain functions "out of politics," but the result is simply to remove them from the domain of popular government and give them to bureaucrats...
...Nearly half the city's population (including its minority neighborhoods) has been unrepresented on both Council and School Committee since the charter change in 1951...
...Young toughs in Charlestown talk about getting the "liberals," meaning those responsible for "gentrification" of a white, working-class neighborhood...
...The most widely discussed novels and plays had sanctity for their theme, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Georges Bernanos'sD/ary of a Country Priest, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral...
...A black student looks " the wrong way" at a white student, and within minutes an entire school is shut down...
...Moreover, only the most heavily populated parts of the city ever elect members to the Council...
...But does all of this add up to a government...
...But it is impossible to imagine Pat Kennedy's son following in his father's footsteps...
...Pat Brown, former Governor of California, told Lynn high school students that "we all come from one Maker...
...beaten by black students in Roxbury...
...Columbia Point is the "new poverty...
...Is the name recognizably ethnic...
...The conflict between Yankee and immigrant has provided its own stock of legends, and its, own romance O'he Lost Hurrah...
...National government finds it increasingly difficult to communicate with citizens over the vast distance between Washington and the local community, and also difficult to persuade citizens to communicate with one another...
...There was poignancy, too, in the attempt by the Library's directors to turn the dedication into an educational experience for the students in Boston and suburban public schools...
...With the exception of schools, these, are mostly custodial responsibilities...
...Ted Kennedy may very well have a better "urban policy" than President Carter, but we have had a lbt of "urban policies" in the past twenty-five years, and--while many of those policies were good and useful--the basic conditions of urban life seem relatively untouched...
...Although I was oblivious to the implications then (consciousness-raising was still well in the future) it is striking how often the Revival writers chose as instruments of redemption, the young woman, a suffering and sacrificial victim...
...The Library was built on Columbia Point after being driven from the tonier precincts of Harvard Square, and many have noted the incongruity of its presence there...
...The goal in Boston is to get into the top nine in a field that usually has eighteen or more candidates...
...That was, of course, to be a saint...
...What they lack, in short, is a government...
...The more intriguing lesson has to do with the subject of political elites, how they have changed in recent decades, what they can and cannot accomplish under the conditions of modern politics, and what their role is in troubled communities such as Boston...
...It would be nice if there were a Way of taking advantage of this fact, at least as a way of beginning the reconstruction of the city's political order...
...America was to be governed by a partnership reaching from the smallest city hall, up through the state governments and into the national administration...
...Most speakers, however, avoided the public service theme and Boston's troubles, and took the opportunity to reminisce...
...T HE CONTRAST between the Library and its neighbors was only the more obvious of the lessons taught this fall...
...H. P. Lovecraft dreamed of the dark, nasty things tha~ might live under the ancient streets of the North End and George V. Higgins has evoked an entire criminal class from soattered conversations in courtrooms and interrogation cells...
...But even these associations do not easily accommodate Columbia Point...
...Race conflict, also, is only marginally a city problem...
...Little by little, I am rereading all those books which I read so eagerly long ago and cherished, trying to understand what it was that persuaded me of their truth and what, if anything, can be salvaged...
...The real carpetbagger was Jack, who was elected to Congress in 1946 from a district in which he had lived only as a student at Harvard...
...It mobilized low-status and low-income vOters (a majority in many cities...
...Pierre Salinger recalled the painful moment when he learned of the president's death...
...Boston's past is richer by far than that of most American cities, but its present is poorer by an almost equal measure...
...But through God's grace they abandoned their selfish ways and gave themselves to God in perfect love...
...In this year's election, to the council, all but one of the incumbents were re-elected...
...of economic class (Boston runs the entire spectrum, from indigence to inherited wealth...
...have a little extra firewood or another cup of tea: They are still in an island refugee camp in the South China Sea...
...There are important structural reasons for the weakness of local government in Boston...
...The political party performed a number of functions of great importance...
...Under those circumstances, it is difficult to hold him to any of his promises...
...So for nearly the entire span of our existence as a constitutional republic, local government has been the constant recipient of abuse, legal harassment, and contempt...
...It created a renewable bond between voters and office-holders, giving the former a way of holding the latter responsible...
...Boston's essential problem is becoming clearer, if we can only look through the fog of romance and recrimination that obscures it...
...He could have stayed with his earlier job as a "cleaning room boy" at the Arlington, Virginia, Hyatt House but the twenty-seven-year-old refugee needs the additional money...
...In its history and its traditions was a resource of loyalty that leaders could call upon in moments of crisis...
...It was enormously appealing, especially to women, reinforcing in them what they had been told was "natural" to them anyway, to give themselves totally in love and surrender...
...The framers of the Constitution expected that a vigorous national government, one that busied itself with great national projects, would completely overshadow the petty, parochial concerns of local political elites...
...Here was a vibrant political elite, crystallizing, as it were, out of thin air...
...Columbia Point, unlike Harvard, has no certain place in the Kennedy romance...
...T HE THEME of the educational program was to have been public service," reflected in the career of JFK...
...Boston has twenty-two wards, the historic units of the city's political life, from which councilors and committee members were elected until a charter change in 1951...
...Many were forced to depart from their prepared text and reach into their stock of homilies...
...The romance of Boston is that it is a fiercely political city...
...Meanwhile the romance continues, and has received a considerable boost from the prospect of another Kennedy-forpresident...
...He has a moment to shake my hand but then he is off, saddled with the additional assignment of delivering room service in the hotel...
...The restoration of local government, then--and that means bringing politics back to local government--will help restore national government as well...
...But the church's claim to be "the One and the All" I found myself increasingly questioning...
...What we need, Lord, what we finally need is a woman who would also be a s a i n t . . , and who would succeed...
...But I will say they're dangerous with their jujitsu and their knives...
...Charles Evers, Mayor of Fayette, Miss., tried to deflect what he detected as resentment against Jews among the blacks in his audience...
...Think of Bloy's Clothilde who dies "happy" and in utter destitution, Claudel's Violaine who becomes a leper, is abanI donedand murdered, Bemanos's Chantal who is also brutally murdered, Eliot's Celia Coplestone, who is martyred on some remote island, P~guy's Jeanne d'Arc who declares she will cast herself into hell if that is necessary to save souls...
...The fictional treatment of this theme was Supported by much of the spiritual writing of the time, notably by Gertrude von leFort's books, especially her Eternal Woman and Caryll Houselander'sThe Reed of God...
...A white teacher was...
...Those that have not yet collapsed seem ready to do so at any moment...
...Ironically, what made a commitment to the church so necessary then eventually became a reason to distance myself from the church...
...Others quite frankly looked forward to another chance at public service under Ted Kennedy...
...It is significant that so many of the speeches at the dedication emphasized Jack Kennedy's love of the sea...
...There were stabbings, beatings, and fist fights...
...In a low turnout, that will usually insure a spot somewhere in ~e top nine...
...Th~rdse of Lisieux was rescued from the sickening bourgeois piety she seemed to exemplify...
...The City Council and School Committee, also nonpartisan, are elected at-large, rather than by district...
...It was an institution for co-opting the ambitious and teaching them the ways of politics and a sensitivity to local culture...
...A typical remark comes from a middle-aged white gardener in Kansas City: "Those people just sit and they don't work and the government gives 'era money...
...Which brings us, at last, full circle...
...In the less constrained atmosphere of Manhattan, the senior Kennedy found an outlet for his ambitions denied him by the elite that governed Boston business...
...They would not have been pleased to see a purely nat!onal elite (such as the Kennedy entourage) parachute into Boston to offer advice on purely local problems, only to be airlifted out the following morning...
...The first black elected to the School Committee since the early 1960s was named John O'Bryant...
...Under the glare of television lights, crowds of white students milled back and forth through the downtown streets, looking for a target...
...Walter Huddleston of Kentucky who, according to an aide, "does not 21 December 1979:721...
...Boston's rich political past--the source of its romance--is a thing its citizens cherish with an almost paternal affection...
...In Brookiine, Arthur Schlesinger accused President Carter of lacking a"sense of history," and went on to give a campaign speech ("The time has come for us to throw offthe fatigue and myopia of the s e v e n t i e s . . . " and so on...
...I've read that they eat dogs and cats...
...This latest time of trouble is not without its consolations, however, for those who would study its lessons...
...Contrasted to the shabby U-Mass Campus and the squalor of the projects (described by HUD as "the worst in the country"), the opulence of the Library" is obscene...
...The politics of race began to dominate the city when the tradition of white and black working-class voters supporting the same local candidates came to an end...
...The political dimension of local govemment,~ has been swept away...
...It seemed an alien presence, an aristocracy on the wing, its eyes already turned toward the sea, to the chance of yet another rendezvous with destiny, yet another sojourn in Camelot...
...Not ungovernable, as some suppose...
...Cho looks like a human pinball...
...Holmes saw the State House dome as the "hub of the universe," and Hawthorne wove a magnificent romance from a few shreds of cloth found in an attic...
...FROM LOCAL GOVERNMENT TO NATIONAL PARTNERSHIP Bostonians & Kennedys: romance, roots, & leadership I I I DENNIS HALE I I I T HE PAST few months have been busy and difficult times in Boston...
...East Boston was a neighborhood of immigrants, ward heelers, and men on the make...
...What the city has been left with are the governmental functions nobody else coveted...
...What is usually forgotten, however, is what Bostonians have in common...
...No crime is too random to have political overtones...
...It becomes isolated and defensive, vulnerable to carefully orchestrated pressures and the advice of experts on image-projection...
...It runs a school system, in the space left to it by the state education authorities and the federal court...
...Andrew Young, at Jamaica Plain High, told edgy students that "if we are going to solve our problems people will have to learn to understand each other . . . when you don't like someone, work hard at understanding them...
...Bostonians are not indifferent to politics, certainly--and here is the source of a paradox...
...President Kennedy wanted his library built in Harvard Square, and he often talked about teaching at Harvard when he retired from the White House...
...Former Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin told his audience, with delicate subtlety, that "the one who can get us moving again is the leader we need...
...21 December 1979:717Between the two neighborhoods, the old and the new, stands a century of decline...
...The North End was the "old poverty...
...The Major is elected on a nonpartisan ballot...
...What Boston needs is more politics, not less...
...But the deeper incongruity lay .in the simple fact that here was a group of Commonweal: 718people who were venturing, some for the first time in years, to the wrong side of the tracks to dispense advice to students who knew them, if at all, only as figures in a history book...
...It sends out tax bills, assesses the value of property, and tries to keep the traffic moving on city streets...
...The city is now in a relative state of calm--but it has been calm before, encouraging rash predictions and false hopes...
...The destruction of the political party removed from the local scene the only institution we have ever devised for making democratic politics work effectively over a long span of time...
...Despite their irrelevance for all purposes except tabulating the vote, Boston's wards are still important to many citizens, many of whom know their ward number the way they know the name of their neighborhood...
...you build a wall around the Peloponnese," asked Aristotle, "would that make it a city...
...The city loses its political instit~ltions, but not the problems that political institutions alone can resolve...
...So what, if an~ahing, is special about cities...
...Boston has always nurtured romantic conceits...
...simply ungoverned...
...That way his wife and child can P'cH~_.R KOVLER, a former aide W Senator Hubert Humphrey and Congressman Sydney Yates of Illinois, reports regularly from W~shington for Commonweal...
...Not just the ~:urrent administration, but the government itself...
...When those problems reach a critical mass, the weakhess of the city's political authorities is exposed for all to see...
...The events in Boston reaffh-m that wisdom, and teach a final lesson...
...In the vacuum left by the party label, other means of identification become more important...
...I think often about that evening on the job with Cho because I increasingly hear that the boat people are lazy freeloaders...
...Eveh St...
...T I HE RESTORATION of Boston's politics might begin by tapping the romance itself...
...In a more subtle and sophisticated way, legislators and various interest groups in Washington try to stop the Indochinese...
...Was the candidate's name in the newspaper yesterday...
...A new hagiography flourished, breaking the plaster mold in which all the saints seemed to have been cast...
...Joseph Kennedy, Sr., might have had a long career in Boston politics, had he been so inclined...
...The public institutions that constitute the city's non,inal government are extremely weak...
...Seeing Boston's troubles as stemming from a failure of local government shifts our attention from what is tangential to what is essential...
...Schlesinger is looking for...
...Farther back, of course, there are memories of an earlier Boston connection, to the immigrant city of John Fitzgerald and Patrick Kennedy, of the North End and East Boston...
...The latest optimistic predictions stem from two sources: Kevin White's re-election to a fourth consecutive term as Mayor, a victory in which, for the first time, he won majorities in both black Roxbury and white South Boston...
...Columbia Point is a prison of welfare dependency and second-class citizenship...
...There is only one unhappiness, not to be one of the saints," we were fond of quoting from L~on Bloy's The Woman Who Was Poor...
...Could this be the "historical sense" Prof...
...For many years now the hatreds have been both racial and social: friction between white and black, uppers and lowers, "gentry" and blue-collar, town and gown...
...Now, to be sure, Boston has a thing which is conventionally described as a government...
...The miracle would happen if only we were holy enough...
...He is still in the hospital, paralyzed from the neck down...
...Students who were toddlers when President Kenned was assassinated can tell stories about James Michael Curley and other legendary figures from the past...
...I wonder, but will never know, what the outcome would have been had I been an adult at the time, with an adult role and responsibilities in society...
...Having lost the habits and manners of local government, citizens next lose their ability to participate in (or even comprehend) national politics...
...The rhetoric of city elections, the romance of the once and future Kennedys, and the bitter invective of race war have combined to produce a curious and heady brew...
...Local politics could sorely use such miracles...
...The rest of the voters either voted for his opponent, Joseph Timilty, or stayed home...
...Those who did vote for the Mayor were heavily influenced by the network of personal and neighborhood favors-potholes filled and nephews put on the city payroll--that for a long time has been the alpha and omega of city politics...
...Tocqueville's prophecy has come true...
...Last month Frank confessed that he, and Commonweal: 716many like him, had been taken by surprise when race violence erupted all over again...
...I watch as he bustles furiously from kitchen to table to bar to cashier and then around again...
...These people've got new Fords and Chevys...
...Joe Kennedy sought a much faster track...
...Since the interests represented are a small fraction of the total citizenry, that explains much of the voter's estrangement from the city's legislative body...
...It is free to wander at will through the precincts of American politics, seeking fans wherever it can find them, but never coming home...
...Personal sanctity Was the secret of the apostolate, the power which would convert the world...
...Still, he works this pace daily from 3:00 P.M...
...Later in our history, local elites (political machines, for example) were identified as a source of corruption...
...In practical terms, what we have done is erode those local institutions through which local elites grow, come to power, learn how to use power responsibly, and exercise their influence...
...The city jail was ordered closed by a federal court...
...With (unconscious...
...No wonder that the governments left behind by two centuries of "reform" have been too weak to capture the loyalty or commitment of their citizens...
...Henry Adams described Boston politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds, as harsh as the New England climate...
...It exists everywhere in America, and not just in big cities...
...they would take second place now to a national elite, membership in which would be the dream of the most talented and thoughtful citizens of every state and community...
...The poor are everywhere...
...THE HUMAN REALITY BEHIND THE STATISTICS The boat people on our shores PETER KOVLER C HO IS A WAITER in a Washington hotel-restaurant...
...Not like the colored with their Cadillacs, mind you...
...The Mayor's victory was built, as successful Boston campaigns frequently are, on an alarmingly constricted electoral base...
...The week before, a black high school athlete had been shot on a football field in Charlestown...
...Boston also has elections, to which a few people pay attention if they have nothing more pressing to do...
...The church/world polarity became untenable as I found myself seeking "an original relation with the universe," not a mediated one...
...The city's legislative bodies--the City Council and School Committee -- arg held in contempt not only by scholars and journalists, but by ordinary citizens and even some of the legislators themselves...
...We did not lack role models...
...These local elites were identified by Hamilton and Madison as sources of chronic instability in American life...
...insight, architect I. M. Pei faced the library toward the ocean, its back toward the Boston of Kennedy's grandfathers...
...It has proved elusive since, at least in local contests...
...the best way to get to know people is to go to school with them...
...It might be better to call them a "homeless" elite, with no certain roots in any particular place...
...By removing party labels, these reforms also make it harder for voters to identify candidates...
...It manages the upkeep of public property...
...So empty of leadership has Boston been--and Boston is not alone--that the glitter of the Kennedy administration seemed almost too bright in these surroundings, much like the Library itself...
...Francis of Assisi remained the most popular saint, but lesser known saints began to be celebrated especially as the Daily Missal, with its saint for each day ,became more widely used...
...It is no wonder, then, that local politics has seemed for so many ambitious citizens a second-beSt career, or a dead-end...
...The reason for all of this is quite plain...
...What we have is not an urban problem at all, but a local government problem...
...Now the mayoral campaign is over, the Kennedy campaign is i DENNIS HAlE is a member of the political science department at Boston College...
...All the trappings of government, all maintained at Kreat expense, all involving some degree of pomp and ceremony...
...Violence, physical decay, drug addiction, juvenile crime, unemployment: these and many other problems associated with cities are widespread in the United States, and can be found in abundance in the nation's suburbs and small towns...
...It would be captious to blame the Kennedys for that decline...
...A proven vote-getter in nonpartisan elections...
...They are many: differences of culture (middle-class liberal vs...
...Election studies, however, have shown repeatedly, over a thirty-year period, that these "reforms" have serious unintended consequences...
...That program--and not another Camelot--is what will really get this country moving again...
...In the twentieth century, the world of local politics has offered little to such men...
...And so it goes: every boundary seems permeable, every temper at the edge of its endurance...
...That the church transcendent proved to be all too human one could certainly live with...
...Aside from the liberals (of whom there are very few in the city) the main reason for voting in a Boston city election seems to be the hope of either hanging onto or acquiring a city job2For everyone else--especially those who need government the most--elections are meaningless because the government is meaningless...
...Poverty, for example, is not a uniquely urban problem...
...in Sout~ Boston he was supported by less than half the eligible voters...
...What many of the speakers discovered, however, was an audience eager to talk about the problems at hand: busing, race conflict, violence, inadequate education...
...The Boston Housing Authority has also been put under federal receivership, and is awaiting its new directors...
...The Kennedy romance was in full blogm in Oc,tober, with the dedication of the JFK Library at (~olumbia Point, a grim oceauside neighborhood which also houses the University of Massachusetts and the Columbia Point Housing Project...
...to 12:30 A.M...
...The Housing Authority, the Port Authority, the Transit Authority--these and other functions of local government are no longer functions of local government, but of local (non-elected) administrative agencies...
...Today, some thirty or more years later, my feeling toward that period is ambivalent...
...The anguished cry of P~gny's Jeanne d'Arc had particular meaning for those of us in the Grail...
...These differences are obvi6us...
...From that time on, the Kennedy's were more at home in New york City, Palm Beach, and Hyannisport than in Boston itself, and there was a great irony in the charge of carpetbagging made against Robert Kennedy when he ran for the Senate from New York...
...It was revived, briefly, in Kevin White's first campaign for Mayor...
...The Kennedy family's relationship to Boston has been ambivalent ever since Joe Kennedy, Sr...
...Perhaps most importantly, the party was a way of bringing together leaders from the several parts of the city and nurturing in them a sense of what the city had in common...
...I do know that the Catholic Revival which was so remarkably rich, so provocative, and so effective an agent for change, merits a revival of its own...
...The main institution in question here is the political party...
...of race (white, black, Hispanic...
...They had a deep appreciation of the value local political leaders had to offer: stability, continuity, sensitivity to local needs, and so forth...
...At-large elections add to the confusion...
...But these are doubtful hopes...
...The school system has aixeady been under virtual federal receivership (literally in the case of South Boston High), and now it is experiencing a state of martial law...
...Earlier, a bus carrying black students into South Boston had been stoned by whites...
...A young white woman is burned to death by unknown assailants in a black neighborhood...
...The phenomenon is not unknown to Boston...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...The weakening of the national party structure was preceded by the destruction of local political parties...
...I N ADDITION tO these electoral mechanisms, there is the practice of detaching important parts of the city's responsibilities and giving them to independent authorities...
...pulled up stakes and moved to New York in 1926...
...What mattered, however, was not so much what one did, as what one was...
...The estrangement ot / Americans from their national government will not end until Americans once again feel loyal to the governments that are closest to them...
...As a result, many thoughtful people have become discouraged, 'concludingthat you "can't solve problems by throwing money at them...
...Much like the homeless baseball team in Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, the Kennedy clan is "liberated" at great cost to itself: set free from obligations to a particular place, tradition, or constituency, it is also denied the strength that dependence and rootedness confer on politicians...
...Averell Harriman in a Somerville High School jacket...
...No matter that he made a speech calling for the liberation of Albania...
...The nineteenth century saw four Quincys in City Hall, and the two candidates for Mayor this year--Kevin White and Joseph Timilty--are descended from men active in Boston politics before the turn of the century...
...This may be a good moment to reflect on what has happened to the city, and to speculate on its future...
...Incongruity was everywhere...
...I don't know how they do it but they've all got new cars...
...Is the candidate's name first on the ballot...
...Perhaps no reputation other than the Kennedys' could survive such a pointed reminder of private indulgence and public neglect...
...They depress voter turnout by reducing the stake of party organizations in the outcome of an election: the party, after all, is the only organization that, year in and year out, has an interest in getting voters to the polls...
...blue-collar traditionalist...
...Black and white students staged walkouts and boycotts during the school day...
...In national contests, it is still a viable tradition, and in 1972 (to use just one } example) it passed a genuine miracle: working-class ethnic Boston, middle-class liberals, and blacks all united behind the candidacy of George McGovern...
...Nor is recrimination a newcomer to the city...
...But racial violence is a rejection of politics, by a population that for many years has been estranged from the city's political institutions...
...The voters respond to all of these things by shrugging their shoulders and turning their backs on government entirely...
...Consider, for example, the differences that divide the citizens of Boston...
...I wanted to know the world for and of itself...
...Pierre Salinger, lately of Paris, being nostalgic in Natick...
...Even when coming home, it seems, the Kennedys feel the tug of distant horizons, the ceaseless urge to move on...
...For slyness, an award could go to Sen...
...and Ted Kennedy's long-awaited presidential campaign...
...I am aware that I was very young, an adolescent, when exposed to tile ideas of the Revival and had lived all my life in a totally Catholic environment, a product of the Catholic ghetto...
...The word "Camelot" came up quite a number of times...
...they are more visible in cities because they are concentrated in visible neighborhoods, and not dispersed throughout rural counties or tucked away in mountain hollows...
...A white Harvard student gets into an argument with a black pimp in the Combat Zone, and dies of stab wounds: the crime is picked apart for its complex symbolism...
...In Roxbury, he won the votes of less than one-third of the eligible electorate...
...There is nothing very hopeful to be said here...
...He refused to say who he thought that "one"might be...
...That tradition owed much to the character and policies of James Michael Curley, who dominated Boston politics for half a century...
...Bundy and McNamara talking to students again, without being hooted and jeered at...
...And finally, I realized that it was no longer possible to deny the self for the sake of sainthood...
...The feuds among citizens cannot be stilled until we can still the feuds among neighbors...
...21 December 1979:719Nonpartisan, at-large elections were two of the major goals of the municipal reform movement that loomed so large in American politics during the Progressive Era...
...White's victory has been picked apart for signs of racial healing, and the prospect of another Kennedy administration seems to offer the hope of a better "urban policy" than the one offered by President Caner...
...So when the Schlesingers and Salingers and their kindred arrived in the schools to talk about Jack Kennedy's accomplishments, ,they were faced with a city on the edge of civil war...
...There is a City Hall--an impressive one, at that...
...Alexis de Tocqueville, noting the importance of local institutions to the growth and survival of American democracy, predicted "strange vicissitudes" for a democratic republic that lost the habit and manners of local government...
...It is not likely that out of such motivations there could emerge a commitment to racial harmony or even to racial tolerance: favors, after all, are a scarce resource, one more reward to be fought over by neighbors...
...We were given, instead, holy men and women who had started out in life not much different from the rest of us, sometimes even wicked, or worse, mediocre...
...Roughly three of five eligible voters take no regular part in city elections...
...All in all, the appearance of so many figures from the New Frontier was an extraordinary manifestation...
...The framers of the Constitution, hostile as they were to purely local political elites, did not contemplate abolishing them entirely, but only casting them in the shadow of a more awesome national government...
...That charter returned the city to the system that had been tried first in 1909, and modified in the late 1920s...
...There are agencies, commissions, departments, and authorities...
...A warning to the reader, however...
...There was, therefore, a poignancy to the Kennedys' latest attempt to come home to Boston...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 23
