On November 12, 1974, White held a Parkman House dinner for his rival, Jimmy Carter (“We’ve got to do something for the little asshole,” Ira Jackson confided to a friend). Chris Lydon, the former Globe staffer who had moved on to report national politics for the New York Times, wangled an invitation, then blew the cover on White’s dinner-table strategy. The next day, Jack Cole of WBZ-TV tried to get into the mansion with a film crew and, when his way was barred, did an icy commentary asking why any reporter, much less any taxpayer, should be refused entry to public property. The Mayor was furious, demanding to know who had leaked to the press. Soon afterwards, he fired three political operatives, in part to plug the leaks, in part to signal that the grand enterprise was winding down. By February 1975 Ira Jackson had found a job at Harvard.
The Mayor still allowed himself to dream. In September 1975, on his way to a White House conference, White and press secretary Barry Brooks were stopped at the gate and asked for identification. The Mayor, who never carried a wallet, shrugged helplessly, but the quick-thinking Brooks produced a Boston newspaper with Kevin’s picture on the front page.
“Okay,” the guard told White, “you’re in”; then, pointing at Brooks, “You’re out.”
“Fuck him,” said Brooks. “When we come back here to live, I’m in, he’s out.”
The Mayor loved it. As late as fall he was still toying with entering the 1976 New Hampshire primary. But in his gut, White knew these were fantasies, for by then he was in the toughest political fight of his life. Twice he had faced “that fat, dumb broad,” who, whatever fervor she might generate among the faithful, never developed a citywide following. Now he confronted the more formidable Joe Timilty, a lean, handsome ex-Marine, a hard-liner on crime, an unequivocal anti-buser, a candidate who could ignite the tinder of accumulated grievances without looking like a kook.
The Mayor’s polls showed him comfortably ahead. Then in April the Globe’s Spotlight Team charged that Fire Commissioner James Kelly had pressured firemen into contributing to White’s campaigns, threatening unfavorable assignments for those who didn’t cooperate. After Kelly resigned, he and his deputy were indicted—though ultimately acquitted—on illegal fund-raising charges.
Hard on the heels of this came a more bizarre revelation. For years Kevin White had lived in dread of a scandal which would stain his administration just as Water Commissioner James Marcus’ 1967 indictment for Mafia-connected kickbacks had grievously damaged New York’s Mayor John Lindsay. White had often warned his aides that they couldn’t afford a “Marcus thing” in Boston. Halfway through the 1975 campaign, the New York-based magazine New Times revealed that, in fact, Boston had already had its “Marcus thing”—five years before—but that White had successfully covered it up.
John D. Warner was, in many respects, a carbon copy of Jim Marcus: a boyish, charming Ivy Leaguer, with an air of forthright rectitude. As White’s first Parks Commissioner, Warner quickly became a confidant and companion of the Mayor’s. So close did the two men become that, as White prepared to run for governor in 1970, he often mentioned Warner—by then director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority—as his probable successor at City Hall. A coolness crept into the relationship after White lost his bid for higher office but Warner wouldn’t surrender his mayoral ambitions. Then, in late 1970, White learned that Warner had apparently pocketed $15,000—either by diverting an illegal contribution intended for White’s gubernatorial campaign or by soliciting a bribe. In White’s version, he asked Boston contractor David Nassif for a contribution and Nassif replied that he’d already given. When the Mayor said that he had no record of such a gift, Nassif insisted that he’d passed $15,000—five times the legal limit—through Warner. But Warner denied receiving the money. White then summoned Nassif to a suite at the Parker House Hotel and, with a tape recorder covered by an Oriental rug, recorded the contractor’s story. When he played the tape for Warner, demanding his resignation, the BRA director refused.
The Mayor had a problem. His evidence wasn’t strong enough to take to the District Attorney, and White didn’t relish the notion of publicizing his administration’s transgressions. Yet if he was forced to fire Warner, or if the commissioner challenged him for mayor, White wanted the press immunized against Warner’s charm (White had never forgotten Tom Winship’s infatuation with an earlier BRA director, Ed Logue, and knew that even then Warner was wooing Winship). On Sunday, December 20, the Mayor visited Globe publisher Davis Taylor at his house in suburban Westwood and told him the story. The Yankee publisher wasn’t comfortable with the machinations of Irish politicians and turned to his emissary on such matters, Bob Healy. White and Healy met that afternoon in an interrogation room at the Quincy police station. After gaining the editor’s assurance that it was off the record, the Mayor played his tape. According to Healy, the recording was “worse than the Nixon tapes,” muffled by the rug and by the Fire Department Band as it passed the Parker House playing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” Healy says he couldn’t make out how much money had passed hands, or who the contractor was, but White’s purpose had been accomplished. Sending word through intermediaries that the Globe knew all, the Mayor forced Warner’s resignation the very next day. Not a word appeared in print until New Times broke the story five years later.
Not surprisingly, this saga of surreptitious taping, apparently illegal campaign contributions, and cover-up soon became known as “Warnergate,” prompting a spate of other revelations about White’s use of his incumbency to raise campaign money. During the last two weeks of October, Boston’s suddenly aroused press produced an astonishing array of charges about the Mayor’s fund-raising techniques: forced contributions from businessmen and city employees, contributions solicited in exchange for city contracts, CETA jobs used as payoffs for contributions, a mayoral suite maintained in the Parker House to receive large donors bearing cash. Seizing on these disclosures, Joe Timilty spoke of “a climate of corruption” at City Hall.
The Mayor responded with a curious amalgam of candor and obfuscation. Of his demand for one hundred dollars from each city employee, he said that was “only twenty-five dollars for each year in my term,” likening it to the Globe’s annual Christmas charity appeal. To one reporter he replied—off the record—with the tale of the Southern politician who, when charged with similar depredations, declared, “Some of you will see me as your next governor, you’ll give a lot, and when I become governor you’ll get a lot. Some of you are going to wait a little, then you’re going to give me a little, and you will get a little from me in due time. The rest of you, you’re not going to contribute to my campaign, and to you I say, you will get good government.”
Later he broadened his rebuttal, arguing that reporters were “applying post-Watergate morality to pre-Watergate events.” Did they expect politicians to be “conceived immaculately”? Indeed, most of the offenses laid at White’s door that fall were time-honored practices in Boston—and elsewhere in urban America. Certainly, the Mayor fully exploited his control of real estate assessments, tax abatements, permits, licenses, inspections, change orders, architectural and engineering contracts to put the arm on those doing business with the city. But what the press had uncovered was more a corrupt system of campaign financing than an example of personal malfeasance. In failing to provide that context, the newspapers sometimes seemed to be suggesting that Kevin White had created the system, when the real problem was that the system compelled many politicians to act that way.
Moreover, White’s complaint that Boston reporters were engaged in “a cross between the McCarthy era, the Reformation and the minor witch hunts” may have been hyperbolic, but it contained a grain of truth. For something happened to the city’s normally compliant press corps that autumn. Fired by the Watergate exploits of Dan Rather, Seymour Hersh, Woodward and Bernstein, Boston’s young reporters had begun to scour the landscape for iniquity. Some stories—notably those by the Globe’s Mary Thornton and Curt Wilkie—were the products of dogged
probing into City Hall’s nether regions. A striking departure from the paper’s usual veneration of White, the Thornton-Wilkie pieces triggered a bitter war at the Globe, pitting White’s old ally, Bob Healy, against the new mandarin of objectivity, Bob Phelps. On more than one occasion, Healy tried to kill or water down a Thornton-Wilkie exposé, while Phelps—who believed the paper had been far too committed to the Mayor—stood by his reporters. The city’s alternative papers, the Phoenix and the Real Paper, also contributed some valuable reporting and analysis. But radio and television, with their lust for the quick fix, were frequently superficial, sometimes irresponsible. And the Herald American plumbed new depths of un-professionalism when, in mid-October, it abruptly abandoned its loyalty to the Mayor and became Timilty’s overwrought champion. In the campaign’s closing week, the Herald launched a series of front-page attacks on the Mayor, some of them only thinly disguised as news stories—a blatant vendetta unlike anything Boston had witnessed since the worst excesses of John Fox’s Post.
White lashed back at his tormentors, trotting out police officials who charged that “organized crime” was using the press to discredit him and Police Commissioner DiGrazia. His press secretary followed with calls to WNACTV, alleging that one particularly aggressive reporter was a “close associate” of mob figures. Later the same reporter had his car impounded for $1,100 in parking fines. Several enterprising newsmen were barred from mayoral news conferences, and White tried repeatedly—but unsuccessfully—to get the Globe’s Mary Thornton removed from City Hall. Finally Jack Cole—the most persistent of the Mayor’s critics—was fired by WBZ-TV. Cole sued, charging that the station had caved in to mayoral pressure; he won a $100,000 judgment, which was later overturned by an appeals court.
The Mayor’s political consultant, John Marttila, called the 1975 campaign “the most brutal election I’ve ever been in.” The Herald American termed it “a nasty, negative free-for-all.” The Globe likened it to “a carnival spectacle, two wrestlers writhing in a muddy pit.” To Kevin White it seemed “a run on the corporation,” a raid on his psychic capital which left him wasted and spent. From mid-October on, White behaved erratically—retreating from the campaign for days on end; flying into rages at his subordinates; sinking into bleak moods from which nobody could rouse him; making phone calls to friends in the middle of the night; prowling the city’s streets in his station wagon. One night, as two reporters grilled him again on the corruption charges, he nearly wept on the air, pleading with the interviewers to understand his position. Fearing that the Mayor was nearing a nervous breakdown, the very aides who had been trying to get him out on the campaign trail now did everything they could to keep him from public view.
As in his father’s race for sheriff two decades before, Kevin could smell defeat—its stench was in his nostrils. On election night, he took his family to dinner to prepare them for the loss he knew was coming; appearing at his headquarters several hours later, he looked “positively stricken.” By then, his aides knew he was going to win, but the Mayor simply couldn’t accept it. Noting that Timilty hadn’t yet conceded, he believed his rival was preparing to “steal” the election. “Get me the Police Commissioner,” he shouted. “I want all the machines impounded.” Bob Kiley calmed him down, persuading him to give his victory speech. By dawn the Mayor had come through with a margin of 4.8 percent.
But even such vindication did nothing to exorcise the demons which rode Kevin White all that winter and spring. Like Winston Churchill, renounced by Britain’s voters after World War II, White felt betrayed by the very constituencies which had once been his most ardent supporters—blacks, liberals, and the Globe. “We’re the first liberation army in history to be stoned by the people we freed,” he told one aide. Most of the city’s black elected leadership, dismayed by White’s performance on busing, had endorsed Timilty, and even though the black electorate rallied to the Mayor, he resented their leaders for abandoning him. Likewise the liberals, who he felt had fled his camp at the first breath of scandal. The Globe had finally endorsed the Mayor for a third straight time, but White couldn’t forgive Tom Winship for letting Mary Thornton and Curt Wilkie flog him daily on page one.
White’s relationship with Winship was complex and ambivalent. In many respects the two men were alike: creative, imaginative, and perceptive, yet impulsive and inconsistent; given to bursts of productive energy, but also to wild alarums and excursions. Both owed their advancement in part to their fathers and were sensitive to suggestions of nepotism. Both had risen as far as they could in Boston’s parochial arena and yearned to succeed in the big time. Each fed the other’s national ambitions because it reflected well on himself. Winship would tell Dave Broder or Mary McGrory, “You ought to take a look at our mayor. He’s a comer,” while White would tell Henry Jackson, “You ought to cultivate the Globe. It’s got clout.” Whatever tensions might prevail in public, there was often an accommodation behind the scenes. When the Spotlight Team did a tough series on the Assessing Department—a principal focus of corruption charges at City Hall—it reached the Mayor in advance to make sure that it evoked a statesmanlike response. One of the Mayor’s former press aides recalls, “It was as though they’d said, ‘Kevin, we’re going to fire four bullets. We’ll kill three, wound one. Then we’re going to send the ambulance. Have the goddamn good sense to get on board!’ ”
But at times it seemed as if White and Winship had been put on earth to drive each other crazy. The day the Mayor hired Bob Kiley, he gave him a lecture on the Globe, his text drawn from Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. With wry hyperbole, he claimed to be Frank Skeffington, the pol patterned after James Michael Curley, while Winship was Amos Force, the Yankee publisher (“a miserable, vindictive, bastardly figure,” wrote O’Connor). His lesson: on Boston’s ethnic battlefield there could be no permanent alliance between two such disparate characters. Whatever relationship one might imagine one had with Winship, one shouldn’t count on it, because “he’ll throw you off the bridge at the critical moment.”
Yet no mayor of Boston could ignore Tom Winship and his newspaper, and vice versa. Somehow they lived with each other—flattering, cajoling, prodding. White loved to gibe at Winship for his suburban perspective. When the rifle shots went through the Globe’s windows in the fall of 1974, a City Hall aide recalls, White suggested that Winship “call the constabulary out in Lincoln.” And after White showed signs of cracking during the 1975 election, Winship asked him, “Kevin, have you ever thought of seeing a psychiatrist?”
But by the spring of 1976, White didn’t need a shrink to tell him what to do. He was mayor for four more years, and this time he was going to consolidate his position so that never again would he be humiliated; never again would he have to worry about Tom Winship’s moral posturing, the Herald American’s vindictiveness, the blacks, the liberals, or any of his other critics. He’d spent his first eight years in office trying to do what was right—and what had that got him? Nothing but carping and irresponsible attacks. Well, maybe he’d never be President, but if he had to be mayor for the rest of his life he was damn well going to do it on his own terms.
Some who watched the Mayor’s evolution over the next few years would say he had gone from John Lindsay North to Richard Daley East. But the equation with Lindsay had always been superficial. The similarity in style—tousled hair, necktie askew, coat over shoulder—disguised profound temperamental differences. Lindsay was a poised WASP, White a mercurial black Irishman. Like his idol, lawyer-statesman Henry Stimson, Lindsay was content to drift in and out of politics, trying his hand at the law, writing, television; perceiving no such options for himself, White was a politician for life, consumed by the process. Lindsay was a Protestant moralist, dedicated to making politics “more wholesome”; White was an Irish pragmatist who could chuckle knowingly when an aide said Lindsay was “giving good intentions a bad name.”
White came to echo Daley’s classic verdict on Lindsay’s New York: “I get the feelin’ no
body’s in charge here.” And he could sympathize with Seth Cropsey’s judgment on Daley’s Chicago: “It is not a grand vision, but American cities do not need a grand vision. What they need is to work.” As early as the late sixties, White had encountered Daley at national mayors’ conferences. In 1972, he read Mike Royko’s Boss, an acid portrait by Daley’s most rigorous critic, but drew the opposite conclusion from the one Royko intended: for all his crudeness, Daley was in charge. Their close relationship dated from July 1975, when, playing host to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, White lavished special attention on his senior colleague. Escorting him around the city, White talked with pride about his Little City Halls, the keystone of his early years. If there was a pothole on your street, White explained, you went to your Little City Hall to get it filled. Daley was incredulous. Could anybody do that—whether they’d been for White or against him in the last election? Why, for God’s sake? Soon White sent an aide to Chicago to see how things were done out there, and before long he brought a University of Illinois authority on Daley to lecture Boston city employees on the master’s technique.
But White was as different from Daley as he was from Lindsay: volatile where the Chicagoan was stolid, impatient where Daley was meticulous, melodramatic where Daley was self-effacing. White was too eclectic, too confident of his own uniqueness, to pattern himself on any paragon. He borrowed many people’s ideas, taking community schools from Lindsay, “Summerthing” from Milwaukee’s Henry Maier, redevelopment schemes from Montreal’s Jean Drapeau. For a time he borrowed avidly from a fifty-year-old book—The Great Game of Politics by Frank Kent—which explained how the bosses of the past had dominated their cities. Always juggling the formula, he groped toward a synthesis of his own. For years he’d talked about combining the best of Lindsay with the best of Daley (his staff gibed, “You’ve got Lindsay’s political savvy and Daley’s compassion”). In early 1976—still reeling from the one-two punch of busing and the ferocious campaign—he altered the mix again, stirring in a big dose of Daley’s Realpolitik.
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