One of the Mayor’s assistants recalls: “Kevin was like a child that summer before busing began, like a kid so terrified of the future he won’t step on the cracks in the sidewalk. He persuaded himself that if he was very good, if he stepped right in the middle of all the squares, he’d somehow avoid the awful thing that was lying in wait for him.”
It didn’t work, and Boston reaped its whirlwind. Just what lay ahead for the city became clear that first day when rocks and bottles shattered against the buses carrying black students home from South Boston High. When the Mayor arrived at a Roxbury community center that evening, he found three hundred black parents enraged at the day’s events, especially at the city’s failure to maintain order. As the parents demanded immediate arrests in South Boston and a call-up of the National Guard, White nervously temporized. A hefty woman in the front row rose to her feet, leveled an accusing arm in his direction, and shouted, “I trusted you! I believed in you and you let me down!” As others echoed her charge, the hall erupted in fury, several of the parents advancing menacingly toward the stage. Shaken and sweating, the Mayor pleaded for more time. “It’s not the Lord’s guarantee,” he said, “but I’m asking you for another chance and then, if I can’t produce, I’ll fight alongside you.” Escaping through a side door, he ducked into his car, looking as frightened as any of his aides had ever seen him. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “I could have been slaughtered in there!”
Within hours, the Mayor had grown even more concerned about militant whites. On Saturday, September 14, reports reached the “busing operations center” in the City Hall basement (known colloquially as “the Bunker”) that South Boston’s notorious Mullens might soon enter the struggle. The Mullens took their name from John Joseph Mullen Square at E and O streets, where they had long hung out. Many Mullens were hardworking longshoremen, truck drivers and firemen, but others were involved in less admirable activities: loan-sharking, bookmaking, hijacking, and enforcing. The police called them the “Irish Mafia.” Now reliable informants said the Mullens would join a scheduled anti-busing march on Monday, and if police attempted to halt the march, the “wise guys” were ready for a shoot-out.
According to fresh reports on Sunday, the Mullens were supplying Southie youths with guns. Convinced that the next day’s march might be the critical moment in the entire busing saga, the Mayor and his advisers assembled at the Parkman House on Sunday afternoon. “We can’t screw around,” the Mayor said. “We gotta call in the feds.” Bob Kiley telephoned FBI Director Clarence Kelley, once Kevin White’s choice for Boston Police Commissioner and always ready to help the Mayor out. At once Kelley ordered his Boston agents to knock on the wise guys’ doors, just to let them know the Bureau was watching. Meanwhile, the Mayor reached Tip O’Neill on the Cape, asking him to alert President Gerald Ford that federal troops might soon be required.
The next step was to persuade Judge Garrity to prohibit Monday’s march. When Ira Jackson called the judge at home, Mrs. Garrity answered. She seemed nonplussed by the call, and after a long pause—apparently to consult her husband—she came back on the line to say the call was “inappropriate” and perhaps “contemptuous.” The judge wouldn’t speak to the Mayor. When Ira relayed Garrity’s message, Kevin White was stunned. Here they were, dealing with the President of the United States and the Director of the FBI, but they couldn’t reach some damn judge out in Wellesley. “That stupid son of a bitch,” White railed. “That arrogant ass! He issues his damn order, then retires to his suburban estate and refuses to talk with the only guy who can make it work!”
Later that night, after consulting with his top police commanders, White banned the march himself. The next day a massive police presence contained roving bands of men and boys in Southie. Although nine persons were injured and twenty-one arrested, the Mayor’s worst fears never came to pass. But the more Kevin White brooded about the judge’s slight, the angrier he got. In his darkest moments, White harbored a suspicion about Garrity. He knew the judge had been trained by Jack Kennedy, nominated by Ted, supported by the whole clan. Was this arrogance of his just another Kennedy tactic to undermine the Mayor?
On Sunday, September 22, White made a second effort to reach Garrity at home. This time he received a return call from Hayden Gregory of the Community Relations Service, relaying a stern lecture from the judge. The Mayor shouldn’t try to call him again; if he had anything to say, he should say it in court. Six days later—as if to underline his rebuke—Garrity made White a party to the case.
The Mayor was furious. “What the hell does he think?” White thundered to his staff. “He’s bigger than the Mayor of this city? What does he think—we’re a bunch of clerks? I’m gonna give him a goddamn lesson.”
Many of White’s aides shared his contempt for the judge. To blow off steam that week, they chanted an impromptu ditty:
There was a man named Garrity
Who refused to give people parity.
He was a Kennedy man,
A flash in the pan,
Created by an act of charity.
On October 4, with the city apparently slipping into sullen torpor, White took off for a weekend’s rest in Florida. While he was away, the Tactical Patrol Force went on its rampage through South Boston’s Rabbit Inn. The day he got back, a Southie mob trapped and severely beat the Haitian handyman, André Yvon Jean-Louis. Hours later, an exasperated Mayor resolved to throw the whole mess back in Arthur Garrity’s lap. The Rabbit Inn affair indicated that his police were at the end of their tether; the daylight attack on Jean-Louis suggested that Southie mobs no longer heeded Boston’s police. But White suspected that a kid who heaved rocks at an Irish cop might think twice before tangling with a federal marshal who could haul his ass into Garrity’s court to face a stiff prison sentence. White particularly liked the marshals’ symbolism: they would demonstrate for everyone to see that this was the work of a federal judge, dependent for its enforcement on federal power. The Mayor would be off the hook. Moreover, the marshals would have another advantage: they would stave off the National Guard, ill-trained, trigger-happy fellows from the countryside who could only exacerbate the Mayor’s problems. That very afternoon, he asked the judge for 125 marshals.
At 2:30 the next afternoon, Kevin White entered Arthur Garrity’s crowded courtroom and took a seat on a folding chair in the aisle. Peering over his stack of papers, the judge appreciated “the benefits of the Mayor’s presence,” then went on questioning Assistant Corporation Counsel Kevin Maloney about the city’s request for marshals.
A moment later, the Mayor rose. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous, your honor, but …”
“I would like to hear from you,” the judge said somewhat frostily, “but if you’ll just let me finish my question.”
As Garrity continued, White slipped to the table where the city attorney was standing. “Let me take over,” he whispered. Maloney sat down.
“Your honor,” the Mayor began, “this city is under great emotional strain. What we have in this city is hysteria. Hysteria breeds violence. The question before us is whether the federal government is willing to step in after the city has given a maximum effort but before a collapse”—he paused for emphasis—“a holocaust.”
Garrity said his court didn’t have 125 marshals. He had only 23, and they were functionaries who served subpoenas and stopped spectators from smoking in the courtroom. White said he’d accept 23; it was important to establish a “federal presence” in the city and the marshals would be symbols of that presence.
The judge, who believed that White had failed to provide adequate police protection for the buses, now fixed the Mayor with a stern regard. “This isn’t a case that needs symbolism,” he said. “This is a case that needs security.”
“With all due respect,” said White, “I believe your understanding is only eighty percent accurate.”
A mayoral aide who sat nearby recalls: “It was like a Greek drama. Here were two great institutions, the Executive and the Judici
ary, confronting each other head on. Each had profoundly different values: a Mayor, the supreme politician, for whom everything was ultimately negotiable, and a Judge, the supreme moralist, for whom constitutional rights were simply not negotiable. Sitting there, one realized that there was no way these two could accommodate their differences. A collision was inevitable, as predestined as Oedipus sleeping with his mother and murdering his father.”
As the Mayor jousted with the judge, an aide handed him a message. White glanced at it and stuffed it in his pocket, then read it again, glowering. When Garrity called a ten-minute recess, the Mayor shared the message with those around him. President Ford had just held a Rose Garden news conference. Asked for his reaction to White’s request for marshals, the President said that it was up to the court; he had no plans to intervene. “I would like to add this,” he said. “The court decision in that case, in my judgment, was not the best solution to quality education in Boston. I have consistently opposed forced busing to achieve racial balance as a solution to quality education. And, therefore, I respectfully disagree with the judge’s order.”
White was dismayed. As he struggled to maintain order in his city, the President of the United States not only refused assistance but lent public support to opponents of the court order. A moment later, Arthur Garrity returned to further deepen the Mayor’s distress. The law was clear, he said; no marshals could be ordered into Boston’s streets until all local and state resources had been exhausted (that is, police from surrounding communities, the state police, and the National Guard). He had every confidence that “integration in the schools can be achieved by community efforts.”
The Mayor was wild with anger. Everybody had covered their ass, everybody but Kevin White, who was stuck with the blame for anything that might go wrong. Well, no more! From now on he was looking out for Number One. Summoning a news conference the following noon, he struggled for words to express his sense of grievance. “The President and Judge Garrity, by their decisions and statements, in my opinion have abandoned their commitment to the use of federal resources to implement the federal court order.” Therefore, he warned, unless and until he got more federal aid, guarantees of safety for Boston’s schoolchildren, and unspecified changes in the desegregation plan, he would “not publicly support on my own volition the implementation of the second phase of the plan.”
His remarks stirred a tumult in the pressroom. Just what did he mean? reporters wanted to know. Was he refusing to enforce the law?
No, said the Mayor, he’d obey all the judge’s orders. But he would refuse all “voluntary acts,” all employment of “my imagination, my skills, my talent.” Unless you play it my way, he seemed to be saying, I’ll let my city go down the drain. A few minutes later, alone with aides in his office, the Mayor realized he’d mangled his statement. “I should never have gotten into this,” he moaned. “I’m going to be seen as a George Wallace with a striped tie.”
He’d done all he could for the moment; maybe if he stuck the parties together in a room, they could thrash things out for themselves. That Friday, aides assembled five whites and five blacks for a secret negotiating session at City Hall. The Mayor stopped in to wish them well, then left for Dorchester, turning the chair over to Erwin Canham, the distinguished editor emeritus of the Christian Science Monitor.
The meeting began amicably enough, but soon got out of hand when Melnea Cass, a seventy-eight-year-old matriarch from Roxbury, spoke of the Jean-Louis beating in South Boston. “I don’t blame whites for their prejudices,” she said. “You can’t help the way you feel, because you got it from your parents.”
“Nobody calls me a bigot,” replied ROAR’s Rita Graul. “I’m a God-fearing Christian.” And pointing a finger at Mrs. Cass, Pixie Palladino disowned any guilt for the Haitian’s beating: “My first reaction, from the pit of my stomach, was that he deserved exactly what he got. He had no business being over there in the first place.”
Pandemonium erupted. One black slammed her notebook to the floor. Another turned on Mrs. Palladino, shouting, “You think everybody’s a nigger! You don’t see people as human beings!” Another stormed from the room in tears.
Arriving in Dorchester, the Mayor got an urgent call on his car phone, an aide demanding, “You better get back here. This place has gone berserk!” By the time he returned to City Hall his peace talks were in shambles. Surveying the wreckage, the Mayor ruefully conceded that there was no way for him to abdicate management of the crisis.
By mid-October he turned his attention back to the court; somehow he had to get Garrity to listen to reason. One of his problems, he thought, was his representation in the courtroom. Corporation Counsel Herb Gleason and his assistant, Kevin Maloney, were hardly Clarence Darrows. What he needed was a heavyweight, someone of such stature the judge would have to listen. The first name to be suggested was Cyrus Vance, the former Secretary of the Army and a veteran presidential troubleshooter. An aide noted that Vance could be particularly helpful in handling the issue of federal marshals and eventually federal troops. He had been Lyndon Johnson’s special representative during the Detroit riots, deftly negotiating with Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Jerome Cavanaugh, and Michigan’s Republican governor, George Romney, arranging for the 82nd and 101st Airborne to replace the undisciplined Guard. If anybody could sort out Boston’s security mess, it was Vance. In any case, he would look awfully good in court.
When Bob Kiley called him in New York, Vance was willing to consult but dubious about any ongoing role. He was serving that year as president of the Bar Association of the City of New York, a consuming job that left him little time. Vance suggested that they bring in Burke Marshall, Jack Kennedy’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, now a professor of law at Yale.
Late in October, Vance and Marshall spent a day in Kevin White’s office, suggesting ways to alleviate his problems, but neither man was willing to represent the city in court. They tried former Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, then recuperating at Cambridge University in England, but Cox turned them down. The meeting eventually produced another strategy. Rather than seeking a high-priced lawyer, White might persuade Garrity to accept a master in the case, then point him in the direction of someone well tuned to the Mayor’s problems. Vance and Marshall suggested Paul Ylvisaker, a former Ford Foundation executive with ample political credentials, who was then serving as dean of Harvard’s School of Education. A few days later, Kevin White rode across the Charles to talk to Harvard’s president, Derek Bok. Explaining the city’s desperate situation, he asked Bok to make the dean available. Ylvisaker spoke to Garrity, who offered him the job. The Mayor’s elaborate plan seemed to have worked, until Ylvisaker withdrew because of a technical conflict of interest.
Eventually Garrity chose his panel of four masters, led by Eddie McCormack, who got on famously with White, and indeed the Masters’ Plan reflected much of the Mayor’s thinking. When the plaintiffs objected, contending that the plan fell short of “root and branch” desegregation, White invited their lead lawyer, Nick Flannery, to City Hall to discuss the matter. Painting a portrait of a city on the brink of anarchy, he urged Flannery to compromise.
“Mr. Mayor,” Flannery said, “the plaintiffs will do anything we can to alleviate your problems, except curtail desegregation.”
The Mayor moved to his huge office window overlooking the Quincy Market shopping mall. “Sometimes when I look out this window,” he said, “I see Belfast out there.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Flannery. “It looks like Quincy Market to me.”
The Mayor scowled.
When the judge finally rejected much of the Masters’ Plan, White expressed “bitter disappointment.” Garrity, he said, had “virtually guaranteed a continuation of the present level of tension and hostility throughout the city.” With that, the Mayor’s efforts to influence the court’s orders largely ceased. He learned, most reluctantly, to live with them. Privately he continued to denounce Garrity’s “ca
llous disregard for the city’s delicate psyche.” He had equal contempt for those on the other side. (When the newly appointed School Superintendent, Marion Fahey, briefed him on her plans, the Mayor took elaborate notes on a yellow legal pad. An aide who saw the pad later reported that White actually wrote—over and over—“Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!”) He reserved his greatest disdain for those Massachusetts politicians—Ted Kennedy among them—who remained aloof from the battle while occasionally giving him the benefit of their advice. “I feel like a field commander in the middle of a war,” he once remarked. “Every so often some general walks out on the field and says, ‘Tsk, tsk, this is awful. How about flanking the right?’ I say, ‘Okay, I’ll flank to the right with you.’ I look around and he’s back at the old HQ.”
White’s own pronouncements remained deeply equivocal: adamant opposition to “forced busing” matched by eloquent appeals for law and order. His critics accused him of carrying water on both shoulders. Why, they asked, couldn’t he simply declare busing right, legally and morally? That, his defenders argued, would be politically suicidal and strategically self-defeating. “Eighty percent of the people in Boston are against busing,” White told an interviewer. “If Boston were a sovereign state, busing would be cause for revolution.” Only a leader who condemned it outright had a prayer of persuading Bostonians to heed his admonitions for law and order.
Unfortunately for the Mayor, his exhortations were only sporadically observed. Night after night, the TV networks ran lurid footage of disorders in Boston’s streets, scenes which reminded older viewers of confrontations in Little Rock, Nashville, and Birmingham. The Mayor needed no prompting to recognize what all this was doing to his presidential aspirations. If he couldn’t control his own city, people were certain to ask, how could he run the nation? For a while, White did his best to refute the bad press. “It is insulting that Boston is demeaned by grossly oversimplified images,” he wrote on the New York Times op-ed page. “The picture of Boston as a city torn apart, rife with violence and hatred, has never been true. The vast majority of our population is law-abiding and peaceful, and has remained so throughout the busing crisis.” But it was too late for such palliatives. By late 1974, the White-for-President campaign was reeling. The Mayor drew back, fearful of looking ridiculous.
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