A Congressman's Day: At the District Office
Wolf, Jamie Rosenthal
A Congressman’s Day: At the District Office by Jamie Rosenthal Wolf IThis article marks the third installment in our series depicting the day-to-day realities of life in Congress. “What...
...Whereas O’Neill-“I think he’s such a moron,” says Mrs...
...O’Neill’s permanent staff could probably set a record for collective length of service...
...Smiling in relief at the unsuspected simplicity of it all, the group departed...
...At 61 , he is not exactly vestigial, for remnants of the era he personifies still endure, but he is one of the few remaining links of any political importance to a world which at one time-after the decline of Yankee dominance and before the currently gaining tide of liberal professionalismcons ti tute d the whole of Boston area politics, and, to a lesser but still large extent, that of statewide politics as well: a world of nicknamesHoney Fitz, of course...
...in the same way, his closeness to his constituents, in terms both of accessibility and sheer representativeness, and the solidity of the political base that his attention to individual problems and services has produced-the widespread certainty, in other words, that he is one of their own and that he has their interests firmly at heart-has afforded him a degree of freedom and flexibility lacked by many of his counterparts whose support is not so secure...
...was in a convent deceased brother Jimmy...
...I said to Edward [McCormack, the Speaker’s nephew], I said, ‘Move them along.’ He says, ‘You think he’d do it...
...Francine, the newestcomer, has been on board for nine years, ever since, just out of high school, she met the Congressman at a campaign rally-an event she regards as “one of the greatest things in my life...
...Doris, who had also been listening quietly, entered a strenuous plea for a network of centers that would combine treatment and rehabilitative services in one location, and Haley proceeded to explicate some of the more arcane aspects of the doctors’ presentations...
...And out there,” he said, pointing to it, “is the harbor, with an island for every day of the year...
...If she’s accepted, fine...
...Yeah, I’ll be home Tuesday night, I hope...
...Time’s one thing I don’t have too much of these days...
...Here you go,’’ O’Neill said another day, after a phone conversation which on his part had consisted of a series of polite demurrals and attempted redirections (“Well, Dan, I don’t know what I can do...
...it consists, as he delicately puts it, of “bringing a problem to the attention of’ someone he is friendly with-in this case Daniel J. Flood, chairman of the Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations-and asking him whether he is doing anything about it...
...All three of the young men had a certain air of what could charitably be described as extreme self-assurance about them-“Actually , we’ve heard that some members are not pleased with their speed or relevance or level of analysis,” one of them drawled when O’Neill, in listing the groups that were already performing such an advisory function, mentioned the research staff of the Library of Congress...
...O’Neill is often gruff when a discussion meanders, and usually he does not hesitate to put it sharply back on the track of what in particular it is that the participants would like him to do...
...The name is Zolli, Z-0-L-L-I, Basil V. . . . ” “Francine, you know anything about stamps...
...Whassa matter, you don’t seem very happy today...
...We’ll have lunch,” he said, “with Dan Flood, maybe somebody from one of the hospitals down there to give it a local tinge...
...k. a. Francis) Kelley...
...it contains a nondescript grouping of sofa, coffee table and easy chairs, at one end, and, at the other, a massive, glass-topped wooden desk...
...So he’s Jimmy Gannon’s brother-in-law...
...Kelly remembers her employer’s doing when he first went down to Washington, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s far more important to be nice,” or attributing their constituents’ esteem to the fact that “you’re walkin’ the streets, your head is high-because you don’t duck ’em, you’re always available, they can call you up at any time,” it is also difficult to imagine their responding, as O’Neill did recently to a question about discouragement: “Oh, I suppose you have your temporary rebuffs, there are nights when you go home and you feel you didn’t accomplish anything...
...There’s St...
...But sometimes it’s only some little mattah you were able to do in the course of the day with regards to-not with regard to legislation...
...By the name of Margot Dineen, who the other four days of the week will be working in my office...
...These people, who are mostly businessmen, with a sprinkling of current and former local officials, have rarely made appointments, and when they are around, they are apt to spend a certain amount of time standing about the front room while O’Neill himself is occupied...
...People would come up to him and say, ‘How are you, I worked for you in such-and-such a precinct,’ and by God, he’d take one look and he’d remember, he’d say, ‘It’s so-and-so, how are you?’ Thirty-five years, and he’d remember...
...Dorothy, what day does Margot want to work?-on Wednesdays...
...The conversation could have been lifted intact from O’Connor’s novel-except that it was not Skeffmgton’s funeral that one of the men was Answers to March Political Puzzle: describing to the other but Harriet McCormack’s wake (the wife of the former Speaker having died a short time before): The crowds (“They were down through three more rooms out on the sidewalk and into the street...
...Now the OMB’s an impossible group to speak to-you want to talk to the chairman of the committee and get him to agree to back your request...
...He is a small, neat-faced man in his middle thirties, and this morning, deeply tanned and wearing a khaki suit, a blue button-down shirt and red tie, he looked the very picture of the compleat m o der n congressman...
...There’s B. U.,” he said, “and there’s Jimmy’s and there’s the old customs house...
...Waal, uh...
...I told her she should just go ahead with the interview-she seems to have ability, why have a cloud of political pressure on her...
...All right...
...I’m on the board of the Cardinal Cushing School...
...on these occasions the atmosphere accorded its ultimate fictional distillation in The Last Hurrah is so heavy as to be nearly palpable in the air...
...ONeill says to me, ‘How would you like to come work for me?’-just like that, out of the blue...
...The board was forced, Carver started out by saying, to hire consultants over whom they had no real power, but then shifted into a deploration of the general lack of discipline in the schools these days, a subject which seemed to be of slightly deeper concern to him...
...Well, I’m quite pleased with their competence,” he remarked...
...As he picked up the phone I got up to leave, and he beckoned me to stay...
...This time we deal with an important, but often forgotten settingthe congressman’s district office...
...It’s gonna cost $19,000 to replace them, and he wants to know what to do...
...Speaker of the Massachusetts House, and his requests to that body tend to carry more than routine weight...
...now it has movable panels painted in rather bilious shades: salmon, yellow, and pale green...
...they were not there with a problem they hastened to inform O’Neill, but merely to see whether he had any advice for them about a proposal-“a scheme, I guess you might call it,” one of them said-they had in mind, which had to do with their forming themselves into a corporation and offering themselves as an advisory service for congressmen...
...Have you got your orders, are you home on emergency leave?’’ 7 was in before about three years, I’ve been in this time about a month...
...I have to live with them...
...I’m assuming one way or another you’re looking for money, am I correct...
...Well, I just say the day wasn’t too bad after all, I did accomplish something worthwhile...
...y ’ kn 0 w? ” We Know Your Time Is Precious...
...My head started acting up, blackouts and all that...
...Tell her to get a letter from the psychiatrist stressing that the boy has got to get out of that environment and send it to the housing board, we’ll see what we can do...
...left the convpt...
...This is his 21st year as a member of the House-before he was elected to the Majority Leader’s post after the disappearance, in a plane crash, of Majority Leader Hale Boggs, he was Majority Whip, the number three man in the Democratic hierarchy...
...Late one winter afternoon last year I heard a conversation, between two friends of the Congressman’s who were waiting to see if he would join them for dinner...
...An Academic Interlude Some MIT graduate studentsthree of them, in mustaches and tweed jackets-were next...
...people have turned them into apartments and they’re just lovely when you get inside...
...Yeah, what is it now...
...it is also, and perhaps more pertinently, the one which was represented by Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, John F. Fitz-, gerald, before he became mayor of Boston, as well as by that loved and legendary rogue, James Michael Curley, in the interludes between his multiple protracted stints in the same office...
...He’s an old buddy of mine...
...The office staff, perhaps in compensation, tries to avoid too much reliance on the soothing effectsalthough if anyone in the office gives up easily, it is not discernible to the casual observer...
...You have got a letter saying you can support your wife, you won’t be a public charge...
...This was a characteristic remark: O’Neill’s ideas about what help consists of in circumstances like these are utterly traditional and nonabstract...
...No, he’s applied for a disability...
...Moreover, in addition to his propensity for seeing problems in terms rather far removed from those of wholesale systemic recasting, O’Neill’s customary approach for getting the money for projects like these is just about the most traditional-or retrogressive, if one prefers-there is...
...Aahh...
...We’ll all sit down together-you give me a call, about two weeks before the NIH budget is set is the right time-and then you’ll have a voice on the committee...
...O’Neill turned his head and pointed in a different direction...
...When O’Neill returned, Jon Carver, a former Cambridge city councilman who is currently head of the Watertown School Committee, was waiting for him...
...We’re glad to help out, but with the state our hands are tied...
...0. K., who’ll I have her see...
...Actually, although the bulk of the requests and favors do get handled in the front room, O’Neill handles a good number of them himself, according to an intricate set of precepts that over the years have evolved into something approaching a science and which occasionally dictate temporarily taking no action at all...
...Now these new kids, they don’t want to do this sort of thing...
...There’s not a Jew or an Irishman livin’ there...
...Jeez, could he dance...
...I’ll tell you what amazed me...
...They’ll cut something else out maybe, but not that...
...As long as they’re not used for taxes, it might be a good idea...
...Dorothy Kelly, who is a former social worker, has been with him more than 20 years, and Nick Drago and Jim Rowan for almost as long...
...A lot of congressmen treat their constituents well, but they do it very impersonally...
...You have to have a letter from your doctor, explaining your illness...
...You know the kind of thing they do, don’t you, they alert favorable congressmen to bills on labor...
...William Haley, the association’s chairman, who had become involved in its work, he explained, after an accident occurring a few days before his son’s wedding had left the young man a quadriplegic and his family with $50,000 in medical bills...
...By now there were 10 people or so in the room, and it was pretty crowded...
...bringing about societal change being the euphemism they tend to favor...
...Now I happen to know the interviewer, so I’ll call him afterwards...
...There is a lot of genealogical exploration (“Jimmy, he’s a Gannon, but on his mother’s side he’s a Charbiner...
...He’s up to there talking to everybody in the line!’ And he was, too: ‘Thank you for coming, doesn’t she look beautiful?’ And then he’d take ’em to see the dress she wore for deValerayou know the story about that, how Johnson said he was doubly honored, the first president of Ireland they’d had and the first person who’d been able to get Harriet to the White House...
...Kelly, fondly, “he’ll see practically anybody...
...A man dressed in clerical garb came in and plumped down on the sofa...
...O’Neill, having already removed his jacket, was attired in one of his short-sleeved white shirt and genuine forties flowered tie ensembles...
...O’Neill was relieved too, and pleased, and prompted by Monsignor Carroll, who had stayed to chat, he told one of his more engaging non-aphoristic anecdotes, and then they went out for lunch...
...You should visit during the feast-days, it’s like the old country...
...A woman whose daughter, on honeymoon in Hong Kong, had been out of touch for four days, called the office and demanded that she be located...
...Tom...
...O’Neill poked in his hand to spread apart the slats of the venetian blind and proceeded to conduct a sort of aerial Cook’s tour of the city, a service he is fond of performing...
...Tom I11 came in (he is a friend of Haley’s son), sporting a pair of brown-and-tan saddle shoes...
...who, as O’NeiU had explained beforehand, were trying to see if a greater national emphasis could be put on research into cures for, rather than treatment of, paraplegia, as well as what could be done about improving facilities for paraplegic care...
...when he says “Kev, howahya...
...Clouds in the Old Sunshine ~~ O’Neill’s continued personal involvement with this aspect of his congressional work-an involvement which by now could be considered of limited utility to him, since most of the people it affects can be counted on to vote for him, out of habit if nothing else, stems partly from his understanding of the emotional need for personal contact and from his conception of the obligations of his metier, but there is something else to it as well...
...Peter Charbiner...
...Kelly guesses that around 650 calls get h a n d led weekly - have not ma de appointments either...
...All right, here’s another one,” said O’Neill, reading quickly in a deadpan voice...
...Ed Patten [of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the committee] said to me, ‘Hell, you got two already this year, you oughta be satisfied.’ So I went to Magnuson,” O’Neill says, chuckling reminiscently [Warren Magnuson, chairman of the Senate subcommittee], “and I got him to put it in for me over on that side.’’ “Doctor, let me speak to you about the practicality of how you get funding of this type,” O’Neill coninued, and he wenf on to enlighten the assembled company about the subject...
...There is a lot of identification by way of reminiscence (“You know who he is-he used to own the Blue Moon, down on the Cape...
...Stephen’s Church...
...DOROTHY...
...a lovelv girl...
...If there’s ever a group that needed you-I mean, they waste so much money it’s ridiculous...
...of generally unquestioning party loyalty, genus Democratus...
...you look at the voting lists, it’s one Italian name after another...
...I mean, how do you take somebody at their word, especially a pol...
...So I went to Dan Flood and told him I had a paper by one of my staff, and he took it from there...
...This boy has a tremendous background...
...Some of the people who come in are “dropping by”: they have business elsewhere in the building and have stopped off to say hello, or they are downtown on other appointments and have stopped off to say hello, or they have heard that the Congressman is in town and have made a special trip to say hello, sometimes to talk about something in particular, but more often simply to chat or entice him out for a meal...
...Carver is an old friend of the Congressman’s, and he, too, seemed bent on meandering around the point of his visit, which appeared to have something to do with the constraints placed on the school board by the terms of a federal education grant they had received...
...He does it the right way,” Lawrence DiCara, a young Boston city councilman, has said...
...She’s a. . no, no, she’s a volunteer...
...Sure, some things there’s nothing I can do about, but it makes ’em feel better...
...Well, I’m goin’ down in the mornin’, eight o’clock...
...come from me...
...So then I’ll tell them to go ahead with the papers...
...Michael Harrington, whose district adjoins O’Neill’s, came in-the office had been notified of the meeting...
...0 c c a sionally these problems are exotic...
...You have a job to come home to...
...He may want to be remembered when appropriations go before the legislature, and the boys in the legislature are always very sweet to me when I call up...
...and just as, in another sense, his total, old-fashioned kind of party loyalty has led him to embrace the ideas and concerns of the party’s newer arrivals because-as fellow Democrats-they are entitled to his help...
...Thanks, Tom...
...Or he may say she’s good, but the money might not be there, or the college president might want to use it for something else...
...no, no, no, you use her...
...In slightly different form, the Eighth was John Kennedy’s old district...
...into the phone, the man on the other end is more likely to be Kevin Harrington, the old-style president of the state senate, than Kevin White, the moderately Lindsay-like mayor of Boston...
...The first week I was here I was in taking dictation and he got a long-distance call he’d been waiting for...
...And after he submits ’em, tell him to get in touch with me-we’ll see if we can send a letter to his commanding officer or someone near, for support, y’know...
...Mullen, a high-school classmate, was his assistant in the state legislature 30 years ago-“That’s real chumship for you,” Francine Gannon said the other day...
...The second doctor appropriated the blackboard and, scribbling even more energetically than his colleague, embarked on axonal transplants and reecher mice...
...He is fond of recounting the outcome of his efforts with Flood and company a few years ago on behalf of a group of doctors, some of them affiliated with Boston Children’s Hospital, who were seeking additional funds for their work in pediatric orthopedics...
...Eddie, it’s me again...
...In contrast to the way-station view these previous occupants took of the seat, O’Neill almost from the start has regarded it as a semi-permanent destination...
...One of the doctors had brought along a blackboard, which added considerably to the congestion...
...0. K., fine...
...Kelly began handing around paper cups of coffee...
...The third kind of people who come into O’Neill’s office-some of them previous acquaintances of the Congressman’s and some not-are more purposeful than the fust group and on the whole more sophisticated than the second: they have various specific matters that they want to talk about, specifically with him, and they have made appointments for their discussions...
...and he and Mrs...
...O’Neill thanked him anyway...
...somebody, you were home after a dismal day, and somebody called and they had a personal problem that you were able to pick up the phone and rectify, to straighten out, and uh, a little thing like that...
...Some other people who come into the office-or telephone...
...There is additional seating all around the room, and there is also a great deal of memorabilia...
...and there is political talk, both national and extravagantly parochial...
...You can call me back when it’s convenient with you, I don’t want to ’, 7’ a ,, ,, rush you...
...One of the fruits of this approach of which O’Neill is proudest is a $2,000,000 appropriation for research into sickle cell anemia which the subcommittee authorized in 1971...
...Now you take this letter,” he went on, rifling through a pile sitting on his blotter, “ ‘Dear Tip, I have a very personal favor to ask you...
...He started to expound dourly on the financial crunch faced by Americans for Democratic Action, bv Common Cause...
...when you weigh it in all along the line, you’re-Everything can’t be rosy, y’know, every...
...O’Neill is surprisingly erudite in some areas of medical research (as he is about the treatment of mental illness, a subject on which he can discourse learnedly for hours...
...It’s funny,” he said one day, waving towards the door, “the requests and favors get handled out there, but they all want to see their congressman...
...he had mainly wanted to let off some steam...
...Say someone .working for one of the fellows takes a higher job-instead of filling the position right away, he pays a couple of months’ salary to the DSG...
...I’ve been opposed to substituting large lump sums for these categorical grants, but maybe I’m wrong...
...Now where’ll I have her go...
...The group consisted of two doctors, one from the Veterans Administration and one from a local hospital...
...I’d never heard of the disease,” he says, “or at least not the scope of it, and then a little girl from my office put me onto the matter, and I had Tim do some research on the subject...
...nor, for that matter, is it an entirely euphemistic explanation of what makes him tick...
...Cardinal Cushing bought it because it was the only Bulfinch church in the city...
...I’ve heard that a thousand times...
...I’ve been in the embarrassing position of attending conferences with representatives 01 underdeveloped countries and having to admit that we ’re underdeveloped in this respect,” one of the men said during the course of the meeting...
...The Office Staff O’Neill’s district office, where he tries, not very successfully nowadays, to spend Mondays and Fridays when Congress is in session, is on the 22nd floor of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, a towering Gropius-designed structure on the edge of the vast, treeless but modernistic-fountainincluding expanse of Boston’s Government Center Plaza...
...For just as O’Neill’s affinity with the regulars in the House has allowed him an occasional swing into liberal territory without jeopardizing his standing as a member of the House establishment, and indeed has encouraged him to assume without thinking twice a leadership position in those causes he has championedrecord teller voting, for example, and other major House reforms, as well as the long and painful anti-war fight...
...You said it, I didn’t,” O’Neill said...
...For O’Neill, “helping people” is not a necessary but comparatively tiresome adjunct to the more engrossing aspects of congressional work...
...Kelly said frrmly not long ago...
...also, he had been briefed ahead of time by Tim Meehan, in his Washington office, and he started things off by asking whether anything had come of “the old Smithwicke operation...
...One of our fellas in Brighton at one time had 12 voters livin’ with him, until some of his kids moved away”), and there are jokes which seem to come from some dim end of time (“I said to Tip at lunch, I said we never had any trouble convincing Mary, Frank’s lovely mother from Galway, persuading her to vote for O’Neill-the only trouble was persuading her not to vote twice...
...He’s just as gracious to some poor soul who comes in-he doesn’t forget who put him where he is, y’know...
...Awright, I know you got a problem...
...l t e got a good friend of mine whose son-in-law- here’s his namehe’s stationed in Arlington, Texas, he’s an airman first class, and his wife is there, she’s homesick and she’s pregnant, and he wants to be transferred to Weymouth...
...Once you’re housed, they don’t take kindly to switching...
...They have given him leeway, these things, this way of doing business, to take positions contrary to the very strongly held prevailing district sentiment and-as in the House-remain confident not only that he will not be deposed, but that he may prevail...
...It’s mostly repairing now, old ships...
...People come from all over to see it...
...The flowers from Nixon and Agnew and Eamon deValera...
...Listen, you want to do me a favor and call me back on it...
...This lady wants a plate of stamps...
...No, you can’t involve GE on something like this...
...I talked to some of the black fellas about it, but they weren’t interested at that time, they were more interested in education and civil rights...
...Finally Harrington, who for several minutes had been crouched, looking strangled, in a starter’s position on the edge of his chair, sprang for the door, explaining that he was due at another meeting which had started a half-hour before, and .made shwisi tcehsceadp et.o Oa’ Nceigilal r bayn dth ihse tiwmaes hstaild listening politely, wreathed in smoke...
...Then she calls back-she wants us to know that she’d gotten a collect call from Rangoon, but she didn’t accept it...
...It remained for Harrington to suggest that perhaps it would be possible to start at the end and explain what specific results were hoped for from the meeting-whereupon Haley set off on a wrap-up Of approximately a half-hour’s duration...
...He’s given me as a reference, they’ll contact me...
...Onions Burke-of carefree, conspicuous cronyism...
...You mean one of the kind of cruder lobbying set-ups,” one of the young men said...
...At the beginning of the meeting Haley had made a ritual acknowledgement of the fact that “a congressman’s time is precious...
...Unlike people in some other offices who say, ‘We’ll do evejrthing we can,’ when you know there’s nothing they can do...
...and if it is difficultand not purely for reasons having to do with modes of self-expression-to imagine any of them proposing as a governing maxim, as Mrs...
...One day a week...
...They want to legislate...
...Well, I can get a job...
...No one would ever snatch your purse or make a remark-they have ways of disciplining wise guys...
...They’re very expensive...
...Up where those trees are is a very beautiful cemetery where Paul Revere and various illustrious other citizens are buried...
...Well, you get the papers together and we’ll see...
...I want you to do me a favor, very simple...
...Could you check on the file of Basil V. Zolli...
...like I say, the best thing is to find the job and then let us make the call...
...Thomas Philip O’Neill, Jr., known as Tip, who in January of 1973 became Majority Leader of the U. S. House of Representatives, is the congressman from the Eighth District, Massachusetts...
...That’s the North End-there are people there of Italian ancestry...
...I asked her why not, and she said, ‘How do I know who was calling?’ ”) Most of the time, they are the same sort that are dealt with in political offices in cities all across the country-they tend to be of the same repetitive nature, and they produce the same sense of low-key, unremitting bleakness, with, in the case of citizenship and immigration cases, an occasional leavening patch of joy...
...You can understand my point: here I was, a green kid, and this was during a campaign, with my family active and all-you don’t know what to expect...
...d he was suggesting what he thought B iwt,o wulhdi cbhe wthase itro b mesat ktea cctlieca rf otrh afitn tdhienyg were simply attempting to augment the existing resources-“so nobody’ll worry about competition.’’ “Or come to think of it,“ he said, “your best bet would be to go to the Autoworkers...
...There is a lot of sports talk, in which O’Neill likes to participate (“Say, I want you to know something about my broad versatility of knowledge-Eddie Ford wants to buy a fighter by the name of McDonald, you heard anything about him...
...of reliable, ward-committeemen-delivered votes...
...The woman who was working with him said he was tense all day, pacing the floor, and finally he just vanished in the middle of the afternoon...
...Appreciative chortles...
...Until a few years ago, the office was located in the old Federal Building in a less spiffy and more congested part of downtown (Most-of the staff preferred it there...
...O’Neill brought him up sharply...
...By the end of the meeting O’Neill, who earlier on had said that he didn’t know how they were going to fit in, was telling the young men that if they could get outside financing the demand for their services would be “tremendou~’~an...
...One of the fellas workin’ in them evidently just disappeared...
...it was clear that he was wary of hurting anyone’s feelings, and he sat quietly behind his desk, puffing his meerschaum and interjecting a question from time to time...
...And I think people walk out of here happier because we’ve been frank with them...
...The Speaker’s behavior (“We were trying to get people out of the cold...
...Yet paradoxically-or perhaps, upon reflection, not so paradoxicallyif O’Neill has undergone a considerable liberalization process, a <<g reening,” as it were, over the course of his past several terms in office (the fact that he has so done is now, in the heat of the impeachment furor, being duly and thankfully remarked upon by people, in many cases, who not long ago were content to dismiss him, when they chanced to remark upon the House at all, as another outmoded party boss), it is precisely these oldfashioned, Northern organization Democratic qualities that have enabled him to take some of the stands he has: coming out against the war in the summer of 1967, for instance, in a district which-contrary to popular mis co n ce p t i o n - bears very little resemblance, if any, to Manhattan’s Upper West Side and which in fact, as late as the summer of 1970, in a statewide referendum on the war which was held that year, voted only 30% for immediate withdrawal-the most hawkish in the state...
...What Happens to a Senator’s Day” by James Boyd and “A Day in the Life of a Senator’s AA” by Polly Toynbee were both set on Capitol Hill...
...Nick, where does the VA have their booths to give veterans inforrnation about jobs and so on...
...I said maybe the town engineer could be persuaded to blink his eyes, but it’s better if it doesn’t...
...It is a spectacular view, and it was a spectacular moment to be looking at it: the sun was almost down, there were 0 chiaroscuro clouds in a pink and aqua sky, and everything-the buildings, the drifts of snow, the sky itself-seemed to be lit with gold...
...There’s the Naval Yard, a headache...
...I’m summaa - - rizin’-‘now a lady...
...uh...
...Gradually he got caught up on the pleasure of explaining how things work, and of relating various bits of House lore...
...can’t see why he wants to go with the FBI, but apparently for some reason this job suddenly appeals to him...
...It developed that there was nothing Carver thought the Congressman could actually do about the matter...
...Sometimes we just say we’re sorry, but we can’t help,” Mrs...
...You’ve given me a little insight,” he said...
...came in here with a complaint...
...She called up this morning, she was having an interview at a junior college...
...he turned out to be Monsignor Speed (John) Carroll, the former head of the CY0 of the kchdiocese of Boston, who at present has a parish in Swampscott and who had dropped in following a meeting in the U. S. Health, Education, and Welfare office downstairs...
...Iron Duke Thompson...
...We all do that...
...And it wasn’t a political move either-he had the North End sewed up...
...In situations like this, though, as in any others involving open assaults on the heartstrings, he is a complete pushover...
...and bv the D Dkmocratic Study Group, whose staff, he explained, is paid in “dribs and drabs” out of its members’ individual office allowances...
...Those are Bulfinch homes around there, too...
...There is a lot of Irish-flavored ethnic banter (“Those smart Italians who marry Irish boysthey make the best-looking offspring...
...He’s been missing since Saturday, I think he’s been livin’ with his girlfriend in Somerville, there are drugs involved...
...But when you weigh it all in...
...There is a lot of cigar smoke...
...Sweepstakes (a...
...If he doesn’t have an appointment he’ll see you if you come in right off the street . ” (Even on his tightly scheduled days O’Neill tends to do a good deal of popping out of his office and patting shoulders and asswing people that they’re in good hands with Francine here-or Nick or Jim as the case may be...
...To the left of the front room is a corridor with a sliding closet on one side and on the other side, two small glass-partitioned cubicles, one for Dorothy Kelly and one for Tom Mullen , O’Neill’s second-in-command...
...So I’ll put in a call to the president...
...Now, if I’ve learned one thing in this job it’s that you never call the FBI-if I call the FBI it would be like a nail in his coffin...
...You’ve got Eddie Patten out of Perth Amboy-if we can find a doctor from his area we’re that much ahead of the game...
...and of favors performed for constituents and supporters not through the intercession of an office staff in one or another bureaucratic maze, but in a good deal more direct and primitive a fashion...
...A Congressman’s Day: At the District Office by Jamie Rosenthal Wolf IThis article marks the third installment in our series depicting the day-to-day realities of life in Congress...
...NIH comes in with their budget and the Office of Management and Budget cuts them down...
...We lost him in August, you know-oh, his system was a wreck...
...That is to say, he is hearty, expansive, humble-beginninged, silvertongued, given to more than a bit of blarney, and he possesses an appeal which has nothing to do with glamour but stems instead from his energy, his earthiness, and his very personal and non-abstract concern for the people he represents...
...and he bristled slightly...
...Sometimes he’d have to take a second look, but he’d have it right...
...I t ’ s about this bond I posted...
...He was succeeded by the first doctor, who began drawing anatomical diagrams on the blackboard and talking about experiments with rats and goldfish...
...Have her see you...
...This is not strictly true: the Robert Drinans and the Gerry Studdses-to take two of the “new kids” from nearby districts-place a good deal of well-publicized emphasis on their responsibilities in this area, and they have devised increasingly sophisticated methods, in which the phrase “socialservicedelivery” tends to figure quite a bit, for coping with them...
...my niece...
...There’s really nothing we can do, to be very honest...
...wants to teach...
...Jim was this wide at the end...
...they had that open-air dance floor...
...Their own involvement, however, is inclined to B mbea kseo mane wochcaats icoenraelm voisniita lt;o tah edyi stwriciltl town, and they hold occasional constituent gripe sessions, but they are not accessible on a day-to-day basis...
...She’s graduating from Sacred Heart College and she must work in a legislative office and a congressional office-I’ve had her a couple of summers, she’s a pretty good girl, Jimmy Dineen’s daughter...
...You got too many of them now, that’s your problem...
...the young men, for their part, relinquished some of their hauteur...
...You’re talking about a grant from the National Institutes of Health, am I correct...
...I’m trying to figure out where I come into the picture that I can be of help,” he said...
...I can’t make that kind of call...
...Can you use an intern volunteer one day a week...
...This letter has two purposes, to inform you that I have given your name as a reference to the FBI and to ask if you could call and expedite...
...They are looking for the kind of help which, alas, these days is no longer much available in the form of Christmastime employment at the post office-although there are still ways in which these matters can be approached more or less directly, but is more likely to entail advice on the correct procedures to follow for the problem at hand, and a call, or a series of calls to get things under way, or to expedite them if they are stalled...
...They have a new wing and somehow they got the lights put in without a permit...
...In front of the desk are two items which are very descript indeed-two visitors’ chairs upholstered in shocking pink leatherette, which the General Services Administration, in an apparent flight of decorative fancy, recently provided as replacements for a more conventional worn-out pair in reddish-brown...
...When you’ve been in the business as long as I have,” he explained one afternoon not long ago, “you know where a phone call should be used and where it shouldn’t...
...Well, she can be there any day, I guess...
...all within a pronounced Catholic framework (“It must have been a hot town, all right, Walter’s become a monsignor...
...O’Neill is not an unremitting booster of all facets of congressional life, but he is unhappy when outsiders do the denigrating (“The way they write about the place,” he has said, “it’s a wonder it’s still there...
...Come Down, We’ll Have Lunch’ At length-it was past noonO’Neill did break in...
...There’s the North Church,” he said...
...Tip does it really personally...
...Reliving ‘The Last Hurrah’ People who visit the office fall, on the whole, into three categories...
...it was, they feel, not so intimidating a place for constituents to visit...
...There’s a $3 million concrete pier I helped to get them back a couple of years ago, but what with our expenses for Vietnam you can’t do anything more...
...but then again, he is not without back-up resources...
...The Eighth includes Cambridge , W a tertown, Allston, Brighton, Somerville, Belmont, five sections of Boston-East Boston, Charlestown, Kenmore Square, Back Bay, and Beacon Hill-and Arlington...
...In all fairness to the new kids, if their descriptions of their motivation for entering politics reflect, for the most part, an assiduous avoidance of the old-style euphemism about “the opportunities for helping people...
...My niece has a severe problem, she’s divorced from her husband and she has a IO-year-old boy who’s in trouble all the time, seeing a psychiatristthey’re in a project and she wants to move...
...People have two senators, like they have nine councilmen [the Boston and Cambridge city councils are elected at large], but they only have one congressman, and he understands that.’’ “Lissen,” O’Neill says, “you get an old lady in here-it’s five, maybe ten minutes of your time...
...It would look bad...
...Arlington, a middle-income suburb, replaced Brookline, an upper-income suburb, in the last redistricting, at O’Neill’s request-he is a former Jamie Rosenthal Wolf is a Boston writer and former staff member of The Washington Monthly...
...Beautiful...
...This is a specimen phone call: Tommy, howahya...
...he said, ‘We’re all part of the same office-there’s no secrets here.’ ” The nonsecret-keeper has his office at the end of the corridor, a large room with a deep blue carpet and windows on two sides...
...One day last winter the progression of this kind of visit began at 9:30 a.m., with the arrival of a group representing the Massachusetts Association of Paraplegics...
...they want to have these kinds of problems handled by ombudsmen...
...She’s a volunteer and she’s a good kid...
...G‘bye...
...His car, his clothes, everything is still there-his mother called, she’s working in Washington...
...every once in a while you have your dismal days, a little cloud in the old sunshine...
...And he started laughmg again...
...This guy left RCA, and he has an application in to the FBI...
...He seemed a trifle startled at the sum named by the young men as the remuneration they expected for their first year’s work, which was $150,000...
...He then went into a run-down of how the freshman members, the Southern members, the young farm bloc and the old farm bloc finance their advisory staffs...
...0. K., Room 362, and put her to work, give her some projects...
...So what I suggest,” O’Neill said in conclusion, “is that you come down and visit me in Washington...
...and Doris, a plump , bespectacled dark-haired young woman in a wheelchair, which bore a sticker attesting to her presence at the 1970 Bay State Wheelchair Games...
...The office is well tied in, of course, to both state and local levels of government, although as a consequence of his curriculum vitae and the differences in style between himself and most of the people currently holding major office in Boston and Cambridge, O’Neill’s own orientation is more towards the state...
...It’s not much to you, but it’s everything to her...
...he seemed torn, however, between this awareness and his desire, which he had also mentioned at the beginning of the meeting, to lay bare “the total picture,” and he was doing the latter with extraordinary thoroughness...
...Jon,” he said, in a firm tone, “you...
...O’NeiU is intensely, even belligerently serious about his staff‘s constituentservice function-and his own, which may be one of the reasons for the number of people taking their problems to the front room...
...There is a large front room which houses a waiting area (a cluster of gray steel chairs around a gray steel table with the ubiquitous plaster silhouette of JFK and a computer portrait of O’Neill hanging above it, and copies of the Pilot, the magazine of the Archdiocese of Boston, and a small two-headed china donkey on top of it) and desks for Francine Gannon, Nicholas Drago, Jim Rowan, who are on O’Neill’s permanent staff, and a receptionist-typist, who is usually a student working part-time and whose face changes every six months or so...
...Doing It the Right Way What is slightly unusual about the problems, though, is that so many of them get taken here, rather than elsewhere-the options in this case not including a network of party clubhouses, but encompassing, after all, a number of Boston Little City Halls, set up a few years ago expressly for this purpose, the offices of the various Boston and Cambridge city councilmen, the state legislators’ offices, and state and city agencies themselves...
...Except for a short-lived flirtation with the idea of seeking the Massachusetts gubernatorial nomination, in 1956, he has never in those 21 years seriously considered becoming anything else .) What makes Curley and Fitzgerald more apropos, talismanically speaking, is that O’Neill, like them, is a quite pure embodiment of everything called to mind by the expression “typical Irish pol...
...O’Neill walked over to the window behind his desk, and he pulled that venetian blind all the way up...
...Not that O’Neill is always successful in his attention-directing...
...We’ve lost our world naval power-we’re only about sixth, and they’re losin’ jobs there...
...Well, you know how that works...
...I’m always available to you...
...They’d be better off appealing to his charitable instincts, When O’Neill decides what action is appropriate on these matters, his approach is likely to be direct and rapid-fire, with a bare minimum of beating-around-the-bush type pleasantries...
...Twenty years from now there won’t be any home offices-all of them’ll be doing only what they’re paid for...
...But I came in, and Dot knew who I was, and she was expecting me...
...That’s Logan Airport, another headache...
...When O’Neill’s appointments were over that afternoon, he noticed that a visitor was peering out the window on the far side of his office...
...He’s got such a warmthness to him...
...They’ve got the lowest crime rate in Boston-if you were to ask me as a young girl where you should live, I’d say find yourself a place in the North End...
...See, I come from the North End,” she explained not long ago, “my father was a Navy Yard worker and the whole family was brought up in politics, to take an interest, whatever...
...While I have you on the line, John, I have a gentleman who resides...
Vol. 6 • April 1974 • No. 2
