Massachusetts' Other Rising Star
Lydon, Christopher
MASSACHUSETTS OTHER RISING STAR Mayor Kevin White of Boston by Christopher Lydon Christopher Lydon studied Kevin White while covering politics for The Boston Globe. He is now with The New...
...Now they are having to meet different objectives, but they are gradually finding that they can...
...He wants the governorship, and he wants to build a modern Democratic party in Massachusetts...
...In a cold-blooded way he knew that he had to go for broke to save his career, but he was also convinced that city and state power had to work tog ether...
...As John Collins’s lame-duck Commissioner of Housing Inspection, Finn first won White’s attention by proposing and then quietly organizing a communications and supply network to deal with the city’s unpredictable winter emergencies...
...It was she who insisted that young Kevin White, a floundering student in the local public schools, be packed off to Tabor Academy on Cape Cod, where he did badly but managed somehow to get admitted to Williams College...
...He fought for a more generous response to militant black demands...
...Our plan of attack on this problem will be a steady moving and harassing of the hippies wherever they gather,” said a memorandum from White’s Cabinet...
...When I send the Boston police force in to quell a riot, I will want you to quell it with the weapons you have...
...In the meantime, Kevin White watches his city and his administration with rapidly alternating moods of accomplishment and disenchantment, uncertainty and exhilaration...
...There is less opportunity for that at City Hall, but White has hardly changed...
...There's been much too little calculation of what are known in the jargon as trade-offs...
...The use of a phantom “straw” to file the challenge, the mysterious involvement of City Hall and Redevelopment Authority lawyers, and Logue’s decision to abort the challenge proceedings at their climax combined to dramatize old legends of Logue’s manipulative ruthlessness and drop him to fourth place in the first round...
...Warner has a flair for the unusual...
...Any indication of latitude will only attract more...
...Kevin White has always lacked the qualities that made other Boston politicians real...
...One evening early in September David Nelson, a Negro whom White had made chairman of the City Hospital trustees, brought back to City Hall from a minor clash several young, black victims of police nightsticks...
...The whole budget business is f terribly fragmented here," Davis says...
...Champion frets that he seems to have spent most of his time in the Boston job evolving his general strategy and reorganizing the Authority...
...in the best sense, the exposure to talent spoiled him...
...Earlier, Logue and Collins together, with the unflagging support of the city's newspapers and broadcasting stations, had turned Boston's attention to concern about its future...
...The physical plants available to predominantly white student bodies are, in too many cases, old and dilapidated...
...But this grudging view of the “accidental mayor” is not entirely fair...
...Certainly it is no accident that the era of Logue and Collins also became the heyday of a particularly virulent demagoguery in Boston-ultimately in the person of Louise Day Hicks...
...White was helped by the very size of the preliminary field, and particularly by the entry of Republican John Winthrop Sears, an energetic young Brahmin and ex-Rhodes Scholar who drew support away from Ed Logue...
...Right or wrong, Kevin White has never deceived himself about his goal: his forum is state government...
...His real dream, one guesses, is to put up so many basketball courts all over the city and to organize such a comprehensive coaching program that Boston’s schools become famous for their basketball teams...
...On his visit to the school this winter White was noticeably more relaxed and in fact more communicative than he normally is with reporters...
...He pushed successfully for the appointment of Julius Bernstein to the Boston Housing Authority over Council fulminations that Bernstein was still the head of the Socialist Party in Boston...
...payments in lieu of taxes from the sprawling tax-exempt institutions...
...I know now, in myself, that I have it...
...I may never go any further than Mayor of Boston, but I’m good at my business...
...Black students, a small minority at Hyde Park High School, clustered together in tight groups in the auditorium...
...And all the while, in three consecutive biennial campaigns, his majorities grew dramatically as Republicans gradually took over the major offices...
...I want to see black teachers in every one of our schools, I want to see a lot more black history taught, and I’ll be happy to see black student unions wherever you want them...
...As he explains it: “We are trying to establish, at the lowest possible level, a continuing relationship between the people of the community and a qualified man from this office, on the scene every day, talking about local problems and solving as many as he can...
...White would not have sought or won any of these resources if the final race had been between himself and Logue...
...His experience with the hippies on Boston Common last summer is a trivial instance of this, his work on the Boston schools is a significant one...
...I'd like to wrap up the costs in a single picture...
...At the end of the campaign White was surrounded by a level of talent that he had never really known before...
...While Model Cities is viewed hopefully by some Negroes as the first tentative step toward giving Roxbury a greater voice in its destiny, militants regard it scornfully as a device to undercut the prospects of a black community development corporation...
...A handful of sketches suggests both the variety of White’s staff and the range of the city’s woes...
...To begin with, there is a very real and very significant question of the extent of neighborhood influence, be the neighborhood black or white, over the operation of neighborhood schools...
...He calculated that if he accepted Kennedy’s offer and the ticket won, he would still rank second to McCormack in state party affairs...
...White defends himself coolly...
...Maybe it broke down because it lost that principle .” It can still be argued that the election came to White and made him...
...Each of these several strains contributed its bit to the public impression of Kevin White...
...Boston’s survival, he argues, still depends on remedies of a metropolitan scale that will come only through state legislation...
...The more general problems of the Boston schools are: the departure of middle-class families for the suburbs, skimming by the large parochial system, quickly mounting racial imbalance, aging teachers, antique buildings...
...The story is completely false...
...MASSACHUSETTS OTHER RISING STAR Mayor Kevin White of Boston by Christopher Lydon Christopher Lydon studied Kevin White while covering politics for The Boston Globe...
...At the end of the year, Finn had three mini-city-halls (housed in 50-foot trailers) in active operation, three more opening, and another three or four in planning...
...I ranked 83rd in a high school class of 85...
...Of himself, he has less and less doubt: “Every ambitious man approaches a critical point around age 40, when he discovers whether or not he really has what it takes to go all the way...
...I’d like to channel it to the public good...
...Hicks’s racial offensive grew more strident and, by itself, would likely have defeated her...
...By state law, the five-member Boston School Committee has complete control over educational policy...
...How do we budge the “swing” City Council member to rebuild a working Council majority...
...The Fenway plan Logue approved didn’t have a single unit reserved for low-income tenants, though 50 per cent of the people being relocated for the new development could qualify, on their incomes, for public housing...
...In a feverish effort to dramatize that campaign long after the fact, Time magazine reported in 1967 that Brooke’s first opponent had plastered the state with double-edged billboards: Vote WHITE...
...Although Mrs...
...should ties be required on everybody else...
...Since then,” he has said, “I don’t remember a campaign that I didn’t work in...
...But he has resiliency, a contagious enthusiasm, in most of the situations that others dread...
...The primary elements in Logue's vision were rehabilitated downtown centers of commerce and neighborhood renewal in three particularly dilapidated sections of the city...
...In the ten years since he came to Cambridge as a Harvard freshman, he has had at least a little experience at every imaginable level of politics -in Greater Boston Congressional campaigns, in Eddie McCormack’s Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy in 1962, with the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi through the summer of 1964, and as staff researcher for a coalition of rebellious Democratic liberals in the Massachusetts Legislature...
...White, pleased to have the campaign move off racial issues, hammered away at “fiscal fantasy” and credibility gaps...
...Boston is still stuck with loft garment industries...
...We have become accustomed to thinking of all large American cities as standing on the brink of disaster, but Boston in 1967 faced a peculiar emotional crisis...
...Oh, Kevin...
...In the Fenway project, which the Christian Science Church is developing, the problem is different-not large families but the elderly...
...it is not nagh’s Detroit or as black as Carl Stokes’s Cleveland...
...For all the broken windows and bad facilities, a good principal can make a school work and a bad one can ruin anything, in much the same way that, for all his limited powers, a mayor sets the tone of a city for better or worse...
...As a “sniffer,” White is rivaled only by Dr...
...Avatar was “pleased,” said Giuliano, “to have as its most recent contributor Kevin White...
...Hicks came to becoming mayor...
...Where the BRA was the symbol of things under Collins,” Warner says, “we’d like to think Parks and Recreation can make a mark for this administration...
...I am prepared to take action with regard to the fundamental questions which have been raised...
...Undergrounds and Schoolgrounds Important as these appointments have been to the tone and direction of his administration, White’s own performance still leads the way in showing how a personal style can ventilate a lot of problems, even when a mayor cannot solve them...
...From the distant Revolutionary past to the more recent Kennedy era, the city has been spoiled and distracted by seeing its native sons move boldly onto the national stage...
...Bellotti defeated Peabody but then lost the election narrowly to John A. Volpe, White now says of the 1964 political scene: “I was sure enough of my antennae to know that Peabody was not b doing the job, that he was vulnerable...
...Hey, fellas," he shouted, starting to laugh, "when you all take over this city-and' you will someday- take it easy on the Puerto Ricans, will you...
...Hicks and Ed Logue lost it...
...For all its generalities, this was the first statement by any incumbent mayor that discussed schools without belaboring the restrictions of authority and responsibility...
...In the South End, I’ve met with all the developers that had agreements with the BRA and simply told them that I want four- and five-bedroom apartments...
...Through the years when his official duties in government demanded less than full attention, he established himself among Boston political reporters as a journalist manque: As the most amusing and perceptive background commentator on daily shenanigans at the State House, he became the source of reams of interpretive copy...
...Joseph C. White, who died just months before his son was elected mayor, had held local political office ” almost uninterruptedly from 1927 (two years before Kevin’s birth) to 1960, when he suffered a stroke and retired as president of the Boston City Council...
...Immediately after the election, Frank became a valuable talent scout, particularly at the Kennedy Institute...
...Perhaps, again, savage political division is a necessary price to pay for the radical surgery Boston needed in the early 1960's...
...On school issues through most of his first year, White’s role was ambiguous or nonexistent...
...he also had a clear vision of the general character of his administration...
...4 it’s literally falling down, a shambles...
...The myth of Boston and Massachusetts politics is sustained, especially among the local population, on the basis of largely accidental and exaggerated associations with both notoriety and greatness...
...We made it clear that we weren’t going to proceed until they found room in their own project for the old Fenway residents they were displacing...
...but in his home city of Boston, Collins lost 21 out of 22 wards and polled less than 36 per cent of the total city turnout...
...Another issue which I consider to be a real issue is the undeniable fact of an emerging racial consciousness on the part of Boston’s Negro students...
...Boston is just small enough "a city to make this possible, but no Boston mayor before him really did it...
...Running against Mrs...
...Daniel J. Finn, 44, is the steadiest, least-noticed member of White’s cabinet...
...Hicks and Joseph Lee, are those who keep saying, in the face of unnecessarily massive evidence to the contrary, that Boston has “the finest school system in the nation...
...At the same time, this confrontation threatens to obscure the fact that Boston’s white students, as well as its black, have been cheated...
...Finally she looked up at his face and froze...
...He has begun to discover the means of giving dramatic, persuasive attention to the particular needs of older, predominantly white neighborhoods...
...The main thing that has to be remembered,” he had said in a campaign interview, “is that the city is a service agency...
...Hicks, it was Logue’s surreptitious challenge against White’s nominating papers that decided it...
...Hicks compounded her difficulties three weeks before the election by promising Boston’s policemen that she would raise their pay by a third, to a $10,000 minimum, with no increase in taxes...
...Kevin White’s grandfather on his mother’s side was Henry E. Hagan, who had come to Boston by way of the Canadian Maritimes, established himself as a shoe dealer, then entered city politics in 1915 on a reform wave, with the backing of the Good Government Association that James Michael Curley derided as the “GOO-Goo’s...
...the volume would be an ornament to the choicest coffee table...
...Senate campaign in 1962...
...His "General Plan for Boston: 1965-1975" portrayed as handsome a city of the future as could ever be imagined...
...White’s stock answer to questions on the subject is the puckish line Senator John F. Kennedy used about his own future: “I have a healthy sense of ambition...
...At some risk of appearing gutless, White ran for reelection as Secretary again in 1966...
...What sort of qualities should I be looking for in a fire commissioner...
...Collins’s defeat for the Senate was the first concrete sign of an angry alienation that almost no one in Boston had seen building...
...Doolittle’s dog, Jip, who found a shipwrecked sailor by going to the front of Doolittle’s ship and smelling the wind...
...His basic assignment is to rationalize, if not reduce, Boston's well-nigh incredible tax rate of $129.20 per $1,000 of assessed valuation...
...we could at least show how little of the budget is actually under the Mayor's control...
...I believe in late bloomers,” he told the students at Hyde Park High School...
...White had been in office less than a week when Boston entered a deep eight-day freeze...
...And in some curious sense, Bostonians don’t really acknowledge their political leaders until they have made a national imprint or (still a surer way to local hearts) suffered defeat...
...Originally a reporter with the Milwaukee Journal and San Francisco Chronicle, Champion had been Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown’s press secretary, campaign manager, and, eventually, Director of Finance for the state of California...
...Hicks responded by saying: “I guess I’m not familiar with these so-called non-lethal weapons...
...Logue, a masterful salesman, mesmerized Boston with his own sense of the city's glossy urban destiny...
...Hicks placed first, substantially ahead of White, though with only 28 per cent of the total September turnout...
...In his race against the Negro-baiting Mrs...
...It often seems that as soon as he steps out of his house in the morning, White can sense a dozen plots, counter-plots and developing power struggles...
...I keep coming back to one conclusion,” he says...
...Among his staff and close friends, White speaks of an unalterable commitment to entering the Governor’s race...
...Driving past the bury Court House one afternoon in mid-February, White spotted a large circular crowd in an empty parking lot...
...While critics may argue that he is excessively political, it will never be said of Kevin White, as it is so often said of John Lindsay, that he felt surprised or victimized by petty politics...
...he suffered his only defeat when he ran for sheriff in 1956...
...Who, he would challenge his father, was the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in 1926...
...He has none of John Collins’s growling toughness, little of the Kennedys’ sheer voltage with crowds...
...But by 1967, the social foundations of the New Boston were shaking visibly...
...Two school- girls were wrestling on the ground, one astride the other, pummeling her in the face, “This is the Mayor,” White shouted to no avail...
...They have lived in the same picturesque area ever since...
...Third, White has staffed city departments across the board with well-paid professionalsan administrative revolution for Boston...
...You’ve got to keep flying the plane as you try to fix it,” he observes...
...Men, Roles, and Woes Barney Frank, 28, is now the Mayor’s chief secretary, presides over the “cabinet” in White’s absence, and appears to be the closest thing in the administration to a White alter ego...
...It was not just spite...
...Paul Parks, 45, administrator of Boston’s Model Cities program, occupies that unimaginably difficult position: a black man appointed by a white politician to work with a black community...
...He never excited the sort of faith that former Governor Endicott Peabody did (briefly) among liberals and intellectuals...
...He hopes to develop new revenue ideas (a city payroll tax...
...Boston does not have the excitement that drew immediate attention to Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco...
...White considered the evolution and direction of this program the most demanding job in his administration, with the possible exception of Champion’s post at the BRA...
...The business community is committed and the office-building boom is still growing...
...Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the government department at Harvard, assembled policy papers...
...I’m glad that you mentioned black teachers,” said White...
...to avoid any such racial interpretation, White printed on all his literature: Vote KEVIN WHITE, the unambiguous phrase he has stuck with ever since...
...Didn't do a thing to deserve that, did you, fellas...
...How do we make land available...
...In all the renewal areas, we’re trying to force the construction of four-bedroom units and to get up to 30 per cent of the units for public-housing leases...
...There was no economics in Logue’s General Plan of 1965,” he says...
...But if we leave the door open,' the caretaker told me, 'all the kids will come in...
...It needs calm deliberation and patient experimentnot pre-conception, anger, and violence...
...One of White’s triumphs is that he has made his own chaotic victory in 1967 seem, in retrospect, a logical, happy transition...
...White met them as he was leaving his office...
...The Negro population of Boston is too small, too isolated, and too accommodating to be the major issue in the city's politics...
...When the headmistress said she would forward their questions, the girls paused and then laughed out loud...
...A lawyer and sometime management specialist in the Army and in several state government jobs, Finn covers the widest range in the administration...
...McNamara had been appointed to a new five-year term in the last months of John Collins’s term...
...the abandonment of Boston’s politics to contentedly provincial leaders would ultimately tear the state’s capital and largest city apart...
...It was a revelation and a turning point for White...
...It doesn't mention schools, or non-operational costs like debt service, or the regional sewer and transit assessments...
...Determining the proper degree of neighborhood influence is a complex and time-consuming problem...
...For his delicate campaign against a lady demagogue, he was called “bland,” though he was the first candidate in the race when it appeared that Mayor Collins was running for reelection, and as Secretary of State for seven years before that, he had been a persistently disruptive member of the Democratic Party...
...After a brief stint with Standard Oil in Los Angeles, he rushed back to Boston in 1956 to marry the radiant Kathryn Galvin and to sign on as an assistant district attorney of Suffolk County-an established first step into Massachusetts political life...
...Hicksism- there and elsewhere-is the twisted cry of sad and neglected people: in Boston, it had less to do with Negroes (no darlings themselves of the previous city administration) than with the tough, cold politics of renewal under John Co llins...
...Fourth and most important, White has infected Boston with his own open, familiar, often antic, infinitely likeable personality...
...Boston business leaders, worried about the chances of getting an acceptable successor, are pressing White to stay put...
...As for the question of a new sports stadium, on which the newspapers forced all the candidates to take a stand, White was the only one who spoke hard sense: “I don’t think the stadium is the deepest problem that confronts Boston and it has been played out of all proportion...
...Where his predecessor, John F. Collins, sought and won a wide reputation for an eight- I year program of austerity, massive renewal, and long-range planning, White I has concentrated on the unspectacular process of civilizing city life...
...When he hired me, he said, ‘Look, do me a favor...
...But when I finally met him he impressed me right away...
...Hicks came on the scene, is that the most consistently re-elected committeemen, like Mrs...
...Enforcement of the law was always imperfect...
...Hicks...
...The neighborhood corporation will be free to hire as it pleases for the staff...
...White’s contribution to the language of politics is his unvarying closer, “I’ll talk to ya”- which, translated, means, “I can’t waste time with you now, but you know I wouldn’t make a move without consulting you...
...the Mayor observed, showing the way to his own lavatory...
...As Secretary of State, White used his office and its record-keeping functions for a number of new purposes...
...Between the hippies and the city government there was never much prospect of lasting harmony: early in the spring the word was out from New York to San Francisco that Boston and its venerable cow pasture would be the next hip resort, and by the end of May there were hundreds of young people camping on the Common in front of the bow-front houses of Beacon Street...
...there's really no capacity yet for program evaluation, for measuring the relative effectiveness of programs and departments...
...He is the most persistent pressure on White to shake up, and eventually civilize, the Boston Police Department...
...Mrs...
...Who topped the school committee ticket in 1937...
...The Mayor of Boston is in no position now to deliver even these modest blessings, and no one who hears Kevin White knows where he goes from here...
...But as soon as the headmistress came back into the auditorium, she and I both knew that she was the whole problem in the school...
...Had White’s opponent been anyone other than Mrs...
...He pressed for-and won-passage of one of the best financial-disclosure laws in the country, under which all statewide candidates must channel all their political money through publicly reported bank accounts...
...Next time someone interviews me and asks what’s an underground paper, I’ll have to say, ’Ask somebody else, brother, we’ve copped out...
...White, convinced that he could persuade McNamara to resign, offered the job to Jack Ingersoll, who was chief of police in Charlotte, N. C., and had been a proteg6 of 0. W. Wilson in the Chicago police department...
...The money, she said, would come from Washington...
...The specific crises in the Boston schools are a miniature of New Yorks...
...But White turned it down...
...and a series of mini-disturbances in Roxbury, Brighton, and East Boston...
...The basic budget tells you the men-andmaterials story about departmental operations, but nothing about where you're going...
...He chose Boston because of the BRA’S peculiarly large powers, and also because he sensed greater potential in White than in San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto...
...Yet until recently he was a curiously unknown and unappreciated quantity...
...Only a few years earlier, the national press had celebrated the signs of a New Boston: the shrewd business sense of Mayor John F. Collins (first elected in a dramatic upset in 1959) and the breathtakingly ambitious new planning of Renewal Administrator Edward J. Logue (stolen by Collins from Mayor Richard Lee of New Haven: now Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s director of the Urban Development Corporation in New York...
...He frets over political questions, the more ephemeral the better, all day long, then dissects them through the wee hours over the phone with his mother or with any one of a small knot of old friends...
...More specifically, his assignment is the social renewal of a large, seemingly anomalous Model Cities district that encompasses the ghetto but also includes a number of lower-income white neighborhoods...
...People notice now, to their own surprise, that he is, at the age of 39, the longest-floating Democrat in local politics since World War 11...
...Finn has also been assigned the main responsibility for mopping up after White’s most spectacular failure in office: the confused and ultimately vain effort in the first few days of January, 1968, to unseat his pedestrian, hand-me-down Police Commissioner, Edmund 4 McNamara...
...At the same moment that Kevin White was approaching him, Champion received an offer to take a similar renewal post in San Francisco...
...If I had had as much confidence consecutive biennial campaigns, his in myself then as I do now, I could have been Governor of Massachusetts four years ago...
...He ended up with the largest plurality ever given a candidate for state office in Massachusetts...
...a gross receipts tax on businesses...
...White was still luckier in the final election...
...straws” are almost impossible to eliminate from the lists of contributors...
...But White’s stance changed fundamentally at the end of September, while white and black students were boycotting classes in a dispute over what constituted acceptable clothing in school...
...But he has a gung-ho devotion to orthodox sports...
...Within the operational departments, the most important first step is to get people to define priorities in their budget requests...
...This is only one of the reasons I’m interested in a new community-literally developing new land in Boston Harbor...
...Inside the Mayor’s office, he does a little of everything: he writes, lobbies with the City Council, handles much of the Mayor’s press relations, keeps a general eye on administrative departments and, in policy debates, argues the liberal side of every question...
...Hicks is widely " described in terms of the racial issues that she herself had seized upon as chairman of the Boston School Committee, there was probably less calculated racism among her followers than in her own political program...
...this area is loaded with them, but all the riches have been going to the suburbs around Route 128...
...Richard N. Goodwin pitched in on speeches...
...His mother-widelyread, aspiring, never at ease with Joe White’s cronies, always a GooGoo at heart-endowed Kevin White with his liberalism and cosmopolitan ambitions...
...What is happening to Ted Kennedy’s control of the state Democratic organization...
...Halfway down the City Hall stairs, he turned around...
...I had asked the girls to send me more questions at City Hall and they clapped...
...His mother-to this day a strikingly beautiful, somewhat stern woman with whom the Mayor is in daily touch by phone or in person-was a different kind of influence...
...But I didn’t have then whatever it took to make myself the candidate instead of Bellotti...
...Louise Day Hicks in 1967, visiting reporters usually consigned him to footnotes in stories about the lumbering school committeewoman whose tiny school-girl voice told all-white audiences, “You know where I stand...
...South Boston High School is a segregated school...
...At the State House, White’s office gave him a window on the deterioration of the Democratic Party-its executive blundering, its rigidity in the legislature...
...the easiest course, as for past mayors, is to point to a clear lack of statutory responsibility...
...His campaign, what there was of it, concentrated on Boston in a warm-up for the mayor’s race of 1967...
...A careful, non-controversial representative of Boston’s lace-curtain semi-suburbs, Joe White had also served in both branches of the state legislature and on the Boston School Committee...
...When the Boston Globe published the first story of the offer to Ingersoll, the rival Herald dug up the other side of the story-McNamara’s outrage at having his job advertised before he himself had been asked to leave...
...John D. Warner, 37, the Commissioner of Parks and Recreation, resembles White in youthful good looks, political resourcefulness, and unfailing animation...
...I’ve made no secret of the fact that I considered Logue’s plane in pretty bad shape...
...Ted Kennedy quietly raised funds...
...He was not a member of the Kennedy circle, nor, on the other hand, a Kennedy hater...
...Avatar is flattered and surprised that the Mayor’s office and members of the police department have graciously extended the arm of negotiation to us...
...In 1963, Collins had won reelection with only 55 per cent of the vote against an unpromising challenger...
...To say nothing of drugs, health problems were an immediate danger...
...Hale Champion, 46, the heir to Edward J. Logue at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, came from the Kennedy Institute, where he had just finished a year of happy exile from California politics...
...teachers and principals and, in most cases, the press have been barred...
...he knew that signing me on didn’t give me a real function...
...In fact, White had decided weeks before the convention that his only route to a position of independent power in the party at large ran through the office of Mayor of Boston, which would be up for challenge a year later...
...This spirit also marks White’s administrative cabinet...
...His one major effort to change the situation was an embarrassing failure: in 1964 he conspired with Lieutenant Governor Francis X. Bellotti to challenge then-Governor Endicott Peabody for renomination in the party primary...
...Hyde Park High School, in the semi-suburban southwest corner of the city is not an extreme of either kind...
...It is now apparent that he was better prepared than many acknowledged at the time on such specialties as assessing, housing policy, transportation, and fiscal planning...
...Asked how she would get it, Mrs...
...In the cold snap, Finn’s emergency phone lines answered over 10,000 calls, rendered help in the form of food, fuel, or home repairs to 3,500, and temporarily rehoused 700 people in hotels, lodging houses, public housing, and welfare offices...
...At a girls’ high school that I won’t name, I got superb questions, superb dialogue...
...Among his counterparts elsewhere and in Boston itself, Kevin White has often been an easy figure not to notice...
...I believe that this should be fostered...
...In fact, the mayoral campaign started out with a comically bloated field of 11 candidates in the preliminary round before proceeding to the main event, which turned into a sickeningly real struggle with the city’s own death wish...
...The November election would long have been forgotten if his Republican opponent had not been Edward W. Brooke, then an attorney from Roxbury, later the Massachusetts attorney general, and now U.S...
...White was stuck, and still is, with the understandably disgruntled but determined to stay put...
...The administration’s answer was that Protestant teachers could do the job just as well...
...At the early-summer convention, Kennedy had offered White a chance to run with his blessing for the attorney general’s office...
...Warner’s response was to organize a neighborhood corporation that will sign a contract with the city to manage the pool facility...
...They would allow no judgment of themselves and their efforts short of 1975...
...This sort of thing upsets the developers...
...When liberals prod him about making the School Committee appointive (a number of proposals would put the balance of appointing power in the mayor’s office), White likes to remind them how close Mrs...
...This early cross-fertilization is unmistakable in Kevin White’s conversation today...
...There hasn’t been a unit of public housing built in this city since 1954-excepting projects for the elderly...
...Hicks helped gather White’s key aides...
...The main event of a White school visit is a question and answer session of an hour or more with the entire student body in a main auditorium...
...The rigidity of civil service hiring rules and the civil service mentality within his own department are Warner's special affliction, but he fights it with zest...
...In 1966, in a Democratic primary race for the U.S...
...Under John Collins,” he says, “Boston spent fewer dollars per capita on parks and recreation than any major city in the country...
...this clearly represents the most pressing human need in Boston...
...the decentralization issue has been less clearly defined, and to date only individual schools have been closed down, and for relatively short duration, by the crossfire...
...In addition to that, we’re trying to bring to the neighborhood level-in each of these offices-representatives of all the major operating departments of the city, on a full- or part-time basis, so that response is quicker and expertise is more quickly available, both to the community and to the Mayor’s office...
...The system is designed to thwart old-time "loading" of the field that, in one-shot elections, often gave victory to popular demagogues who did not command majority support...
...In similar fashion, Mrs...
...But even with his local audience Kevin White has had a difficult time winning recognition of his power, innovation, and real talent that have made Boston a demonstrably happier place to live and work...
...This clearly opens him to a charge of opportunism, of having taken the Mayor’s job half-heartedly, of trying to leave it prematurely...
...Hicks blurted out that she and her followers would “beseige Washington” and “storm the President of the United States and the Congress...
...Hicks ran surprisingly strong in the election...
...Mrs...
...Hindsight tends to make any past election look as if it had been an orderly, if not inevitable, selection process...
...Bending the Twig Just as the Kennedys were born into national and international affairs through drilling over the dinner table, so Kevin White grew up testing his political wits in family conversation and in his father’s ward campaigns...
...But even with its faults, the law gave Massachusetts fresh insight into a sensitive under-layer of politics...
...And even if White succeeds in Boston and survives to higher office (a major feat for any modern mayor), he will hardly have proven on a broad scale that our cities are governable...
...he asked...
...He is a rare combination of things, with his Bayonne, N.J., accent, nickel cigars, ,Harvard undergraduate and graduate education, and encyclopedic knowledge of Boston’s political history and folkways...
...I’m telling you to stop...
...Basically progress toward resolving these conflicts will be impossible if we treat this week’s events as anything less than a significant challenge to the entire role of the Negro people in Boston society...
...I believe that we can arrive at rational answers...
...Among the several tribal leaders in the state party, he had a consistent but not especially fervent following...
...Beacon Hill merchants were outraged...
...What are the real issues...
...And all the while, the city-wide institutions with whom Parks had to work out his Model Cities plan (the City Council, the School Committee, the construction unions, the teachers' and policemen's unions) have been busily chipping away at Parks's innovations...
...Champion feels that Collins and Logue “really had the downtown problem pretty well licked...
...But he represented still another distinct layer of Boston Irish politics...
...The Boston school system is a far more intransigent problem and one over which the Mayor has even less control...
...White, helped considerably by having John Kennedy in the top position on the Democratic ticket in 1960, beat Brooke handily and took possession, in 1961, of one of the world’s most insignificant political offices...
...Under a new city charter promoted by anti-Curley business interests and adopted shortly after World War 11, Boston's non-partisan mayoral election is a two-stage affair...
...White never felt he had much room for accommodation...
...If you find you’re not doing anything useful at the end of a week, give me a call.’ I took that as a sign that he knew political administration...
...He used to chat in the White family kitchen with the personalities who inspired the minor characters in The Last Hurrah...
...Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age, a scathing chronicle of callousness and brutality in Boston’s ghetto schools that appeared in 1967, is probably quite as applicable today...
...he said, pouncing out and pushing his way into the center of the crowd...
...Two of the most important virtues to emerge from his administration-a continuing rapport with the large majority of Boston’s Negroes and the extraordinary quality of White’s staff-flow directly ” out of circumstances in the campaign that were beyond White’s control...
...By energy, intelligence, an extraordinary diversity of political experience, and a working harmony that is dissolving bureaucratic barriers, this cabinet - chiefly through weekly meetings with White-gives the Mayor a jump on most policy questions...
...Stop the car...
...The hazards surrounding the Model Cities idea would have discouraged almost anyone but the stalwartly sanguine Parks...
...An independently wealthy, Yale-educated businessman from western Massachusetts, Warner was serving in his fifth year as a state Commissioner of Public Works when White persuaded him to join the city administration...
...The removal of park benches from the Common, curfews, and the use of sprinklers almost around the clock kept the hippies moving and suppressed the problem without solving it...
...The principals make the schools...
...Barney Frank quit his job at Harvard to direct White’s campaign scheduling...
...But at the very least, White’s calm had undercut a variety of legislators and city councillors who wanted total confrontation...
...Like Joe White and Henry Hagan, Kevin White’s father-inlaw, William J. (Mother) Galvin, served his term as president of the Boston City Council...
...Onward and Upward Contrary to the George Apley legend, Beacon Hill is largely populated by young professional people, and it was with them that White organized his first modest coup: capturing control of the Ward 5 Democratic committee in 1960...
...in myself then as I do now, I could have been Governor of Massachusetts four years ago...
...I I find this no more inconsistent with the American way of life than is the retention of ethnic or natural traditions by Irish-Americans, Italian- Americans, Jewish-Americans, or any other distinct and originally immigrant group...
...Like the Kennedy of 1946, the White of 1960 was billed as a prodigy in political craft and leadership...
...Less than 75 years ago the most divisive educational issue in Boston-over which there were boycotts by 25 per cent of the studentswas the Irish demand for more Catholic teachers in the public schools...
...if the top of the Democratic ticket went down to defeat together (as indeed it did), he would be out of a job...
...The Aggasiz School in Jamaica Plain was over 100 years old when I went there 25 years ago,” White used to say in the campaign...
...He talks about them all with contagious excitement, in his own engaging version of the Boston patois...
...Senate, Collins lost to Endicott Peabody (who then lost to Ed Brooke...
...If so, no one fell more deeply under its effects than Logue and Collins themselves...
...In the preliminary phases of the campaign White used to argue with gusto against a variety of counselors who said that the Boston Mayor’s office-like mayors’ offices everywhere-was a dead end, better to be avoided...
...Still, there are a lot of relatively simple analytical methods that can be useful...
...The civil servants of the Park Department had kept the magnificently-fitted pool whole and spotless-by their loving care, and also by keeping community use at a minimum...
...Shortly afterward White named Finn head of his “neighborhood city hall” program, which was part of a campaign promise to decentralize city government...
...By men whose stars had risen and collapsed in less time than White held statewide office, he was dismissed as a young innocent...
...We can’t negotiate with these people...
...The principal there gave me a quick introduction and I knew in two seconds that he was a leader with his students...
...He is not as dazzlingly good-looking as John V. Lindsay, and Boston is a village compared with New York...
...There aren’t 10 ‘politicians in America who are as good at their jobs as I am...
...The Cabot Street Pool, a palatial turn-of-the-century structure in Lower Roxbury, was for years used primarily by off-duty policemen...
...At one of our recreation buildings that was getting very little use," he is fond of saying, "I finally told the caretaker that I wanted the front door of the building kept open...
...No one has studied the pettiness of city politics more carefully or more joyfully than White, and in the long pull, those are important lessons learned...
...The major candidates in Boston's modern mayoral campaigns have always been Democrats, but the second phase of the election typically gives the mass media and the small minority of Republican voters a large hand in picking an "acceptable Democrat" from the finalists...
...He has staged karate exhibitions for lunch-hour crowds in Post Office Square and a thoroughly zany electronic son-etlumiere show at the Public Garden...
...That same summer, when he was 30-a year older than John F. Kennedy was when he first went to Congress in 1946- White was endorsed for secretary of state at the Democratic state convention...
...But they were forcefully represented among the questioners, and a little black girl who appealed for young teachers and a few black teachers got an emotional cheer...
...Hicks carried 10 of the 22 wards and came within six percentage points, or 12,429 votes, of winning...
...In all of Boston’s planning there’s been a tacit acceptance of the city’s remarkably low wage levels...
...What gets him down in his low periods (or at least what he expresses) is not fear of the city’s social or racial difficulties, but institutional problems: the decrepitude of the city’s physical plant (“The sewer system is so old it’s a joke-it could go any day now”), the rigidity of the civil service system and the unavailability of administrative talent, or the antiquity of the city itself (“sometimes.1 look around at our housing and wish I could burn the town down myself...
...The opening of schools last fall precipitated a debate on clothing (are dashikis acceptable on Negro boys...
...White and his bride established themselves in an apartment on Beacon Hill, a short walk from the Courthouse...
...He regards the shutoff (just a few weeks after White’s election) of $56 million in promised federal financing for renewal of the main shopping district as only a temporary setback...
...Parks, a successful architect and one of Boston's universally respected "old militants," admits no major discouragement...
...David Davis, 36, an economist whom Hale Champion had pulled from the civil service for his personal staff in California, came to Boston 11 months ago to fill the new $23,000 post of Budget Director...
...Kevin Hagan White, halfway through his second year as the 43rd Mayor of Boston, suffers from this mythology, although he is a more typical Bostonian than any of his better known neighbors who have moved to Washington: Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Edward W. Brooke, House Speaker John W. McCormack, Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe, and Under Secretary of State Elliot L. Richardson...
...But whether he moves toward decentralization or abolition of the elected School Committee, White is the first Boston Mayor to have accepted some responsibility for education...
...The fading clippings show that even early in the campaign White expressed the most sensitive understanding of the city’s future and of the need, above all, for a political healing...
...As soon as the race narrowed to Hicks and White, he was deluged with offers of help...
...In his use of his office, White personifies an awakening from the nightmare of "urban crises," a happy instinct for confronting anxious problems at their human scale...
...It would break down the ghetto walls sooner than the suburbs are going to change their zoning laws, and it could be used to free land all over the city for new light industry...
...Even when he seized the bigger girl’s arm, she kept flailing with the other as he kept saying, ..This is the Mayor...
...White was for years unidentifiable: an anomaly and a loner...
...At a public meeting with policemen and their wives, ! where White had mentioned “non-lethal weapons” as part of a modernized equipment package, Mrs...
...The wealth-makers today are the universities and research institutions...
...Mrs...
...White’s first Parks Department budget was bigger by half than Collins’s last...
...When most boys his age were memorizing batting averages, he was feeding himself on election statistics...
...keep an eye out for federal grants, and, I in the meantime, make the modern techniques of budget analysis available to the mayor's office as an instrument of policy...
...This is a formula that Warner hopes to repeat around the city...
...He feels that the "manpower" section of his Model Cities plan -almost the only section that survived the City Council re-drafting intact before the plan was submitted to Washington last Decemberwas by far the most important: it will establish a 1,000-man training program in construction skills, to be directed by the Model Cities Board independently of the building trades unions...
...By comparative standards within this reportedly racist nation, Boston is not a bigoted town...
...And Logue's description of that millennium was so extravagant as to be suspect among ordinary voters, especially when the city appeared to neglect immediate, simple services and a reasonable dialogue with city neighborhoods about their concerns...
...Nationally, he has received little attention...
...Many who have been strongest advocates of the neighborhood [i.e., Mrs...
...For White it provides immeasurable insights...
...Volpe’s move to Washington and the accession of Lieutenant Governor Francis W. Sargent to the Governor’s office do not change the election schedule or greatly affect White’s prospects...
...He is now with The New York Times in Washington...
...Hicks] have failed to realize how highly centralized was this city’s system of public education, and how little it really mattered in an educational sense in which neighborhood a child attended school...
...He was one of the rare candidates who could speak openly about the significance of personality in politics...
...For all her cunning at the School Committee, Louise Day Hicks was the most implausible of candidates for a major executive office...
...Avatar, the BostonCambridge underground paper, printed White’s relatively generous public policy statement within the paper’s own psychedelic border, and Avatar’s associate editor, Charles Giuliano, offered backhanded thanks...
...Along the acrimonious sidewalks of Beacon and School Streets, between City Hall and the State House, the older pols and hangers-on still commonly describe White with that most damaging of adjectives: “light...
...Away from the rostrum, however, his precocious fixation on the mechanics and intrigue of politics itself, though broadened by wide reading in British and American history, is still what fires his imagination and fills his informal conversation...
...The thing most voters don’t consider, but which is vitally important, is emotional stability,” he said...
...So far, I’ve been better at getting things in shape than in getting things done...
...Adlai Stevenson became his political hero in 1952...
...How do we get the new industries in, and which ones fit our possibilities...
...In a clear choice between Edward W. Brooke and a young Boston Irish Democrat named Jimmy Hennigan in 1964, the city of Boston voted for the Negro Brooke for attorney general-one of the precious few times Boston has voted Republican for anyone...
...White graduated from Williams College in 1952 and from Boston College Law School three years later...
...Hicks, the situation could have been entirely different...
...Third, in our planning staff, we’re analyzing all the complaints and questions that come in, trying to anticipate things and do some preventive planning...
...He was 17 at the time...
...if college admissions were based on achievement, I wouldn’t have a degree...
...But if, as many thought, the fight was between White and Logue for a shot against Mrs...
...Nor was Logue's promise entirely lost on residents of the city's older neighborhoods...
...White swings unpredictably from mood to mood...
...In his own family and his wife’s, he is the direct heir of at least three clear strands of Boston Irish politics...
...You’ve got to remember that’s power you’re giving a man...
...the forbidding political fact, especially since Mrs...
...It is always fascinating...
...Largely because of Finn, a potential crisis became a warm, early triumph for the White administration...
...she said, “It really is you...
...If you dropped Kevin off the Prudential Tower,” goes a standard line, “he’d float upwards...
...Yet Champion has made low-income housing the highest priority of the BRA, and that in itself is a radical shift...
...For his political presence, his impeccable suits, his striped silk ties, his notably arch pronounciation of “Bawston,” he is accepted (or put down) as the stock Chamber of Commerce Irishman...
...equally, the key role of the massive Negro turnout in electing White gave Roxbury a powerful claim on the Mayor’s attention...
...we must just keep pushing...
...In his year and a half as Mayor, Kevin White has made at least four essential contributions to the revival of Boston’s morale, which had sagged badly in the years before his accession...
...it must be a fight...
...But really nothing has been done about producing housing for large low-income families...
...We'll never have the staff, and maybe not the need, for program budgeting...
...White has since formed a committee, with himself as chairman, that has now visited all the city’s high schools...
...And of course it is always possible that he will run and lose...
...Frank volunteered his services to White at the start of the final campaign against Mrs...
...Senator...
...The final count was 102,551 for White, 90,122 for his opponent...
...Let us not delude ourselves into believing that we are confronted solely by a racial issue when in fact we face the betrayal of all children by a system not equipped to provide them, as it must, with the very best of educational experiences...
...The splendor of Logue's land-use maps and architectural drawings may have been anesthesia for the surgery Boston required...
...His own offices at the top of the City Hall Annex-aswirl with bold primary colors, aerial photographs, color-coded maps, renewal charts - gave local writers and especially the out-of-town press an exhilarating refuge from the filthy drab of City Hall and the agency offices just below Logue...
...He treats each question as momentous and urgent, and the disproportion is sometimes ludicrous...
...Joe White called in a lifetime of political IOU’s, and the convention’s presiding officer, an old colleague of the elder White, helped out by gaveling opponents into oblivion...
...suburban toughs, more than the police, made the Common a nightly battleground...
...Rent subsidies allow you to put a limited number of low-income families into new middle-income developments...
...For the students who greet him like a matinee idol and bury him with questions, it is more than an afternoon’s entertainment...
...At the same time he has opened lines of communication to the black ghetto of Roxbury in a city where until recently it was automatic and politically fashionable to scorn such complaints...
...but his nomination, like Kennedy’s, was a father-son act...
...Champion sees a new role for the BRA in planning industrial development...
...It’s still in use today-a great tribute to the bricklayers but it doesn’t say much for our school system...
...There are still many who feel that White did not “win” the election...
...So the mayor wants to listen to the HIP community...
...The continuity of his own career and the development of his own “opportunities for service,” he says, are a more important guide than the mayoralty’s arbitrary term...
...Hell, our budget isn't quite as big as the Pentagon's and the city isn't changing its weapons system every year...
...Kevin forgot our first appointment completely,” says Frank...
...Hicks, White had both the need and the opportunity to gather up Negro votes as no white politician in Boston ever had before...
...The real hallmarks of the White administration are the little glimpses of humor and resolution where one would least have expected them...
...Finn, in his unenviable role of liaison officer between the Mayor’s office and police headquarters, maintains a tactful pressure for modernized management and more effective use of manpower...
...These neighborhoods were to be brightened by selective demolition and new construction and, more important, stabilized if not repopulated by middleclass families and young new urbanites...
...His practical exposure came early, as an active campaigner in Maurice Tobin’s successful race for Governor in 1946...
...In much the same surprised way, they are saying that he is an extraordinarily good mayor, perhaps even a new standard of effective public performance...
...Her greatest handicap was her womanhood-not incompatible with a School Committee charged with looking after the city children, but unacceptable in terms of a mayor’s office that handles the budget and manages city departments...
...Through old mutual friends in the national police establishment, McNamara pressed Ingersoll to turn down White’s offer, and Ingersoll obliged...
...He is a deft writer and made compelling use of graphics...
...His slot in the D.A.’s office was assigned, three years after his departure, to Edward Moore Kennedy, who needed a modicum of working experience to qualify him for the U.S...
...Mother Galvin, nicknamed in tribute to his effectiveness as a provider during Prohibition, established himself in the Depression as the ward boss of Charlestown, a waterfront section huddled around the Bunker Hill Monument, and even after World War I1 Galvin remained a potentate to be reckoned with...
...John Sears, to everyone’s surprise, ran third...
...Some people like it, others do not, but the view is widely shared in Boston that Kevin White will be a candidate for Governor in 1970, a year before his mayoral term has expired...
...They were used to the Logue theory of renewal construction: strengthen the tax base, and get some ” more middle-income residents into the city...
...Even as he talked with the hippies, his staff was firm...
...That in itself is a promising change...
Vol. 1 • May 1969 • No. 4
