Common Ground (125 page)

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.

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.