Once Joe White had enlisted in the campaign, he was in it all the way, but he still couldn’t communicate with Kevin, so Terry was the conduit between them.
Behind the scenes, Joe and Terry sought to clear Kevin’s path. A few days before the convention, they called on State Senate President Johnny Powers, a tough-talking pol from South Boston who would share the convention chair. A spokesman for the city’s “lower wards,” Powers wasn’t the Whites’ kind of guy and Patricia had been aghast the previous year when Joe supported him for mayor. In return, Powers had promised that if elected he would appoint Kevin City Treasurer. But he’d lost the mayoral race and now the Whites were there to claim a different return on their investment.
Cornering Powers outside the Senate chamber, Joe reminded him that Kevin was running for Secretary of State. “Can you give him a little help?” he asked.
“Well, sure,” said Powers, “but I don’t know what I can do. He has to prove himself.”
At that, Terry moved in. “Suppose Kevin could finish second on an early ballot? Could we count on you then?”
“Of course,” said Powers, clearly annoyed at being pressed so hard.
On June 19, the balloting began at the Boston Arena, an ancient hockey and wrestling emporium. The superannuated structure had no air conditioning and temperatures hovered in the nineties. It took nearly twelve hours to nominate the top of the ticket, so the balloting for Secretary of State didn’t begin until 9 p.m.
All evening, Joe White and Mother Galvin prowled the floor, calling in chits from a combined sixty-five years in politics. As the voting began, Joe went to work on John Regan, a power in Joe’s own West Roxbury, but Regan was pledged to the front-runner, Francis X. Ahearn Finally, Joe stationed himself in front of the West Roxbury delegation and stared directly at Regan, who did everything to avoid his eye. When he did look up, he saw Joe still there, silently mouthing, “My boy, John. My boy.”
West Roxbury went for Kevin White, as did a surprising number of other delegates. Although Ahearn headed the first ballot with 432 votes, Kevin was second with 352, narrowly edging out Governor’s Councilor Edward J. Cronin. In an office beneath the stands, the gubernatorial nominee Joe Ward and his powerful ally, House Speaker John “Iron Duke” Thompson, watched the tally, debating where to throw their strength. After the first ballot, Owen Brock, one of Ward’s campaign managers and a cousin of Joe White’s, urged them to support Kevin, arguing that Joe and Mother Galvin would be valuable assets in the campaign. When Thompson and Ward concurred, they summoned their supporters—already celebrating at the hotels—to vote for Kevin White.
Frank Ahearn and Eddie Cronin knew that their only hope of survival was an adjournment until morning. There were legitimate arguments for one—the convention had been in session for thirteen straight hours and the heat was so oppressive that one Lynn delegate had been rushed to the hospital. So many delegates had left the floor that delegation chairmen now stood alone by their microphones, casting hundreds of absentee votes—a practice permitted so long as no delegate demanded a poll of those present.
Toward 11 p.m., rumors swept the floor that Cronin was about to address the convention to throw his votes to Ahearn or demand adjournment. Terry White rushed to the podium, telling Johnny Powers, “Now’s the time. We need you!” When Cronin approached, Powers refused to let him speak.
On the second ballot, Kevin White jumped ahead with 481 votes to Ahearn’s 339 and Cronin’s 293. Ahearn was desperate now. Standing on a chair, he complained loudly that he was being “jobbed.” Pounding his gavel, Powers noted that only a delegate could challenge a count. Ahearn’s supporters howled with rage. Fistfights broke out on the floor. Fearing that a riot might force an adjournment after all, Joe White dashed to the podium, gesturing frantically for his people to calm down. But Ahearn’s forces kept up their clamor until Powers ordered uniformed police to clear the floor of all nondelegates. At 11:25 p.m.—with police standing guard in the aisles—Powers proclaimed Kevin White the winner on the third ballot.
The young candidate was so unknown that fall that Jack Kennedy introduced him to a rally as “Calvin Witt.” But White went on to beat another promising newcorner, Republican Ed Brooke, and didn’t relinquish the Secretary’s office for seven years. The responsibilities were hardly onerous—his bailiwick included the State Archives, State Elections, Vital Statistics, Public Documents, Trademarks, and Notaries Public. His principal accomplishment was sponsorship of the Corrupt Practices Act, requiring that all candidates for statewide office disclose their campaign contributions and expenditures. The second such law in the nation, it drew wide attention, launching Kevin’s reputation as a progressive. Compared to later legislation, the statute was shot with loopholes, but it almost provoked a blowout with the Kennedy clan.
By autumn 1962, White had already declared limited independence from the Kennedys. When Ted announced that spring for his brother’s old Senate seat, Kevin endorsed his opponent, Eddie McCormack. He did that in part out of gratitude to Eddie’s uncle, the former Speaker, who had done Kevin’s ailing father a crucial favor; in part because he harbored some personal animosity toward Ted (once when Ted was busy he asked Kevin to take his wife to a reception, prompting Kevin to ask indignantly, “What does he think I am? A driver?”). White respected Jack Kennedy, but he resented the way the First Family threw its weight around in Massachusetts politics, handpicking “Chub” Peabody as governor, reserving the senatorial plum for Ted. Perhaps because he owed his advancement so heavily to his own father, Kevin was particularly sensitive to the nepotism issue. Barely a year older than Ted, he regarded him as direct competition; he was damned if he’d climb on the Kennedy bandwagon.
Even without White’s endorsement, Ted won handily. A few days after the election, an underling in the Secretary’s office showed his boss clear discrepancies in Ted’s campaign finance report. Since that was the first year candidates had been required to file under the new law, many reports contained such errors, but Kevin jumped at the chance to embarrass the Senator-elect, ordering his staff to prepare a news conference. Only when Terry White warned that challenging the brother of a sitting President was sure political suicide did Kevin reluctantly cancel the announcement.
It isn’t clear how much Ted knew about these events, but White’s relations with the Kennedys were strained from then on (one aide remembers Ted nervously disposing of cigarette ashes in his cuff rather than ask White for an ashtray). The roots of the McGovern imbroglio were sunk deep in their mutual suspicions.
The office of Secretary of State offers its incumbent one striking opportunity. Since all town clerks report to him, the Secretary has ample reason to stay in touch with these influential politicos. Early in his first term, White pledged to visit each of the Commonwealth’s 351 towns and cities. Relentlessly over the next few years, he and general counsel Dick Dray climbed into Dray’s red Mustang and headed off for some remote community. In May 1964, he flew by seaplane into Gosnold, a tiny island village in Buzzards Bay, dramatically completing the tour.
After he was reelected with the largest plurality ever received by a statewide Democratic candidate, his thoughts turned to the governorship, but his advisers were sharply divided on the best route, so in May 1966 White convened his brain trust at the airport motel. Associates like Dick Dray and Jackie Mulhern urged that he run first for mayor of Boston, but Kevin was repelled by the grubby minutiae of city government as well as by his father’s brand of urban politics (no longer much of an influence, Joe White had suffered a stroke and would die the following year). Preferring the loftier realm of state government, Kevin wanted to run for Attorney General. Terry concurred. But to seek a new state position Kevin would have to sacrifice his old one and, if he lost, he would be out of office altogether. Abandoning that notion, he announced for a fourth term as Secretary of State.
Jackie Mulhern, one of Kevin’s oldest friends, continued to brood about the mayoral race. The city was the quintessential arena o
f the sixties, he concluded, the laboratory in which an ambitious politician could make his mark. One day in November 1966, he invited Terry White out to Newton’s Woodland Golf Club and made his argument in detail. After four hours, Terry summoned Kevin. Over dinner in the club’s dining room, his brother and his old friend persuaded Kevin to run for mayor.
Terry signed on as campaign manager and all through that winter he shrewdly orchestrated a public relations effort to frighten Mayor John Collins out of the race. Full-page ads gave the false impression that White was lushly financed; friendly columnists suggested that powerful forces were coalescing behind him. In mid-spring Collins dropped out, throwing his support to Redevelopment Director Ed Logue, a nationally known figure with impeccable liberal credentials and influential friends in the media, among them Tom Winship. Although the Globe was still bound by its self-imposed prohibition on political endorsements, Winship did little that summer to disguise his enthusiasm for Logue.
When White proved stronger than anticipated, the Collins-Logue forces landed what looked at first like a knockout blow. A challenger turned up enough errors in White’s nominating papers to threaten a disqualification. Fighting for his survival, Kevin charged that Logue was behind the challenge; intent on preserving his “non-political” image, Logue disclaimed any role in the matter. Meanwhile, Terry White led an espionage operation designed to prove his brother’s claim. The challenge had been filed by one Richard Iantosca, a name utterly unknown in Boston politics, and the mystery deepened when Iantosca disappeared from home and job. But White’s amateur sleuths ransacked barrooms and staked out hotels, eventually locating the intermediary between Logue and Iantosca. His disclaimers now discredited, Logue withdrew the challenge, and several weeks later finished fourth in the preliminary, setting the stage for a runoff between Kevin White and Louise Day Hicks.
Once the race narrowed, its character altered radically. Mrs. Hicks’s reputation as the “Bull Connor of the North” attracted a torrent of media attention. When Newsweek caricatured her on its cover and the Globe abandoned a century of neutrality to endorse White, they transformed the contest into a political morality play: Good arrayed against Evil in a succession of stark tableaus. If Louise was never quite the racist her enemies conjured up, Kevin was never quite the righteous crusader (betraying no recognizable ideology through his early years, he’d often been called “light as a feather”). But once the drama was cast, the candidates played out their appointed roles. By early autumn liberals from near and far had rallied to Kevin, among them Barney Frank, fresh from Harvard. Signing on as a researcher, the irrepressible Barney was soon playing a major role behind the scenes, stamping the campaign with his own convictions on social and racial issues.
All this left Terry White deeply disconcerted. Very much his father’s son, a pragmatic nuts-and-bolts campaigner, Terry warned Kevin that he had lost touch with his roots. As Terry saw it, the new ideological war could only repel the working-class ethnics on whom his brother would ultimately depend. Indeed, the more fashionable Kevin’s cause became in Cambridge, the less appeal it had in Andrews Square and Field’s Corner. Late in the campaign, polls showed a perilous erosion of White’s once substantial lead; in November his victory margin was barely 12,000.
Through the following weeks Barney’s influence continued to grow. One after another, senior posts in the new administration went to his nominees, most of whom—like Hale Champion, Sam Merrick, Bill Cowin, Dave Davis, and Colin Diver—had no roots in the city. Though Terry regarded himself as a New Deal—Fair Deal progressive, he had little patience with Barney’s self-conscious liberalism. In turn, the Mayor’s liberal advisers saw something vaguely sinister in Terry, whom they dubbed “Raoul” after Fidel Castro’s éminence grise brother. But Terry found himself in an increasingly difficult position, unable to deliver jobs for the ward-based faithful or to control the course of his brother’s administration. Exhausted and embittered, he sent word on the eve of the inaugural that he would not attend the ceremony. Kevin locked his bedroom door and wept.
Yet the next day he demonstrated again his determination to break with the past. For the first time in living memory, the inauguration was held in Bullfinch’s classic Faneuil Hall. After a string quartet played Haydn, White delivered a brief but eloquent discourse, the work of Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin. Instead of the time-honored luncheon at the musty Parker House, the Mayor and his guests adjourned for baked capon and vintage Riesling at the elegant Ritz-Carlton Hotel. And that afternoon, White pointedly omitted the traditional hand-pumping tour of City Hall, initiated in the regime of James Michael Curley.
So as Terry went back to painting lines on streets, his brother blazed his own audacious trail that was to lead him four years later to the brink of the second-highest office in the land.
The morning after George McGovern and Tom Eagleton took their bows in Miami Beach, a reporter found the Mayor still morose but struggling to regain his equanimity. “All I want is to get up a family tennis tournament,” he said, “enjoy the rest of the weekend, and get back to work.”
Returning to Boston on Sunday evening, he was confronted by a crisis. As the city sweltered through a heat wave, a scuffle broke out at the Puerto Rican Day festival in the South End. When police waded into the crowd, ten policemen and thirteen civilians were injured. There was further street fighting the next night, with several stores firebombed and looted. As dusk fell on Tuesday evening, the Mayor decided to visit the troubled neighborhood. Slinging his jacket over his shoulder, he set off on a walk through the riot area. Hundreds of youths followed him down rubble-strewn streets to the Cathedral housing project, where he “deputized” fifty of them to keep the peace. His arms draped around two grinning boys, the Mayor then led a curbside colloquium on the South End’s future. When it was over the kids cheered.
Yet almost immediately White faced another problem. The Rolling Stones, completing an American tour, were scheduled to perform that evening at Boston Garden. Diverted by bad weather, their plane had landed at Warwick, Rhode Island, where Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were arrested after an altercation with a policeman. Fifteen thousand young people were at the Garden impatiently awaiting the Stones while their idols were behind bars fifty miles away. If the South End had temporarily settled down, the kids in the Garden were edging toward a riot of their own. Wheeling into action on this second front, the Mayor telephoned the Governor of Rhode Island and the Mayor of Warwick. Within an hour, Jagger and Richard were released on Kevin White’s personal recognizance. Two limousines pulled up to the jail-house door and, with Rhode Island police leading the way, sped the parolees toward Boston.
While they were on their way, fresh troubles broke out in the South End: more stores on fire, two squad cars overturned. Pressed for reinforcements, the Mayor diverted most of the police detail from the concert, leaving the Garden acutely vulnerable. He then decided to appeal directly to the crowd milling angrily about the arena, still unaware of what had happened to the Stones. But when he advanced to the microphone, most of the audience seemed in no mood to listen to some damned politician. “Get lost, stiff,” they shouted. “No speeches tonight!”
Suddenly announcer Chip Monck grabbed the mike and bellowed, “Shut the fuck up!” They shut up.
“You want to know why I’m here?” the Mayor asked. “The Rolling Stones were busted in Rhode Island about two hours ago. But I’ve called the Governor and gotten them out and they’re on the way here now.”
“Right on, Kevin!” someone shouted.
“But now I need you to do something for me. As I stand here talking, half my city is in flames. I’m taking some of the police away from here and I want you to do me a favor. Just cool it, will you? Cool it for me. Cool it for the city. And after the concert ends, just go home. We’re keeping the subways open until after the show. But don’t go down to the South End. Just go home. I appreciate it. Thank you.” With a great roar, the crowd rose to their feet and 15,000 kids, many of
them stoned, gave the Mayor of Boston a standing ovation. While the Tactical Patrol Force brought the South End under control, there wasn’t a single arrest at the Garden that night.
That evening had shown Kevin White at his best: spontaneous, courageous, resourceful, and articulate, at ease with his diverse constituencies, ready to put himself on the line for the city he governed. When the Mayor’s personal appeal switched on, it was palpable—like a radioactive isotope, it quickly registered on any political Geiger counter. My God, his aides would exclaim, it’s working! They could feel it—and so could he. That evening, as he waited to go onstage at the Boston Garden, he thought back to the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination four years before, when he had made a similar appeal from that very stage to James Brown’s black audience. It had worked then and it worked now. The Mayor knew he was good. If only others would recognize just how good, and give him a larger stage on which to exercise those powers!
That night in mid-July left Kevin White on a sustained high which the next few weeks did nothing to dispel. For as Tom Eagleton was compelled to reveal his medical history and to withdraw from the ticket, White’s name surfaced once again. Mayor Wes Uhlman of Seattle forwarded his candidacy in an open telegram to McGovern: “Urban problems will be America’s greatest challenge for the next four years. Kevin H. White is the man with unparalleled background in dealing with our urban crisis: he would make a strong addition to your ticket and would be a truly great Vice-President.” For days in early August, White believed that McGovern might, indeed, turn back to him. And by the time Sargent Shriver received the nod on August 8, the Mayor was ready to read even that as a favorable omen.
Concluding that the Democratic ticket was doomed, he believed its defeat would end McGovern’s and Shriver’s hopes of ever occupying the White House. As for the party’s other presidential aspirants—Humphrey, Muskie, Jackson, Lindsay, et al.—they had all trooped through Kevin’s office that year looking for support and the Mayor had taken their measure. He knew he was their equal, if not their superior. White believed that anyone who succeeded in Massachusetts politics could make it in Washington. After all, Massachusetts was the only state where politics was a full-time occupation for adults—he called it the “Stillman’s Gym of American Politics.” So who had a better claim on the Democratic Party’s shattered leadership than the latest star on the Massachusetts horizon, the consensus choice of McGovern’s advisers?
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