Common Ground (54 page)

Mrs. Rita Graul, one of Mrs. Hicks’s principal lieutenants, had just introduced two figures in chicken masks—“the white chicken, Senator Kennedy,” and “the brown chicken, Senator Brooke.” All of a sudden, there was Kennedy himself—that distinctive mop of brown hair, his face tanned from the late-summer weekend on the Cape. There was a brief but heated discussion over whether to let the Senator speak. Ultimately, Kennedy advanced to the microphone, but when the crowd realized who he was they booed and jeered:

“Impeach him. Get rid of the bum!”

“You’re a disgrace to the Irish!”

“Why don’t you put your one-legged son on a bus!”

“Yeah, let your daughter get bused, so she can get raped!”

“Why don’t you let them shoot you, like they shot your brother!”

Kennedy’s face tightened and his fist grasped the microphone more closely, but each time he tried to speak the clamor grew. Some in the crowd chanted, “No, no, we won’t go.” Others sang “God Bless America.” Then, slowly at first, more quickly as the idea caught on, the crowd turned row by row to face the Federal Building named for his brother, the late President. Kennedy
abruptly left the platform and started across the plaza toward his office, a few women pursuing him, shouting further insults. Then out of the crowd sailed a ripe tomato, smashing on the pavement, splattering his pin-striped suit. “Ahhh,” sighed the crowd. Another tomato and several eggs rained down on him. Kennedy quickened his pace, head down. With the object of their resentment in full flight now, the pursuers closed in. Screaming with rage, one woman with a tiny American flag in her hair flailed at the Senator, striking him on the shoulder. He stumbled, then righted himself and hurried on. An elbow caught him in the ribs. A man aimed a kick at his shins.

At last Kennedy reached the Federal Building and darted through the swinging door, secured behind him by uniformed guards. Outside, his pursuers pounded their fists on the tinted glass, howling with frustration. Suddenly, one large pane gave way, the jagged shards shattering on the marble floor as the demonstrators stepped back and cheered, shaking their fists over their heads. Surrounded by a ring of security men, Kennedy told reporters, “People have strong emotions—and strong feelings—and they’ve certainly expressed them. They have—ah—a right to their position. Anyone in public life has to expect this.” But pouring cream into a Styrofoam cup of coffee, his hand trembled.

And well it might. For something had happened that day on the slippery stones between the soaring white tower named for Jack Kennedy and the Aztec pyramid of City Hall which Ted himself had dedicated only seven years before. Something had happened there to puncture a notion deeply cherished by the Kennedys, by the city in which they had come to power, and by the nation which had embraced them with such warmth. Many Americans had allowed themselves to believe that John Kennedy’s accession to the presidency had completed the assimilation of the Irish into mainstream America. His style, grace, and wit, his beautiful wife and handsome children persuaded many that centuries of Gaelic rage and frustration had been dissipated in “one bright, shining moment.” It was widely believed that Kennedy’s breakthrough to the pinnacle of national power had marked a watershed in Irish-American history, a continental divide on whose broad, grassy forward slope the new breed of assimilated Irishman would henceforth accept the standards and mores of the American consensus.

Bobby Kennedy, to be sure, was less assimilated than Jack, more the brooding, mercurial Irishman. Nevertheless, the belief persisted, especially following the Indiana primary, that Bob could rally both blacks and working-class whites—working-class Irish—to his vision of social justice. When that promise was dashed by his own assassination, such hopes were transferred to Ted. In October 1968, Sam Beer, a Harvard professor and friend of Ted’s, wrote him of a conversation he had had that summer with a Croatian construction worker in Chicago who had told him, “We’re fucking tired of feeding niggers.” Beer warned Kennedy: “The racist appeal opens up to economic conservatives a superb method of bamboozling the working class…. One of your strengths is that you could reduce the flow of working men in the racist
direction. Like RFK in Indiana, you could, I believe, hold both Negro voters and blue-collar Slavs…. We cannot simply let the racist Democrats go over to the GOP and trust to some new force, e.g. young people, to counterbalance the loss. We must hold the elements of the old coalition as well as win the new ones (by ‘we,’ of course, I mean ‘you’).”

Ted Kennedy never responded to Sam Beer’s appeal. Perhaps it seemed fruitless during the late sixties and early seventies when millions of working-class Democrats deserted their party to put and keep Richard Nixon in the White House. But through those bleak years, Kennedy remained confident that when the time came he could bring the working-class whites back home where they belonged. Indeed, he felt free to take some of his bravest stands—against the Vietnam War, for government-financed abortions, against IRA violence in Northern Ireland—precisely because he was so confident that Irish Catholic voters in particular, no matter how they might differ with him on a given issue, would rally round him when the chips were down. After all, the Boston Irish were the Kennedy voters par excellence, the people who had sent Jack to Congress thirty years before, who had cherished his family through the best times and the worst. Now, in the heart of Ted’s own city, in the plaza beneath his own office window, in the shade of a building dedicated to his brother, those people had not only deserted him, they had publicly humiliated him.

Nowhere was the resentment against Ted Kennedy more intense than in Charlestown. Some two hundred Townies had led the march to City Hall that September morning, chanting, “Here we go, Townies, here we go,” and had joined in turning their backs on the Senator. (The McGoffs weren’t among them. Barely a week before, Alice had begun a new job—as an operator for the New England Telephone Company—and she couldn’t get away for a weekday demonstration.)

The turnabout in Charlestown’s feelings toward Kennedy had come quickly. As late as June 1970, the Bunker Hill Day parade had been dedicated to Ted “for his continuing tireless and dedicated work in behalf of the residents of Charlestown [and] his self-sacrifice in carrying on in the great Kennedy tradition.” That morning, a huge throng at the base of the Monument had thundered its approval as Kennedy, in the day’s oration, asked, “Did not the men on this hill seek a life for their children free of repression, free of other men’s prejudice, free to advance to the limit of their talents? Then how can we avoid the same search, how can we flee from problems of our society only to seek quiet—when prejudice and repression exist.”

Yet by June 1974, his staff had warned that it would be unsafe for him to appear publicly on Bunker Hill Day. He did show up at Jerry Doherty’s traditional “time” following the parade. Hunched down in a friend’s car, he was driven through the crowded streets, face averted from passersby. Inside Doherty’s house on Washington Street, he threw himself into the spirit of the occasion, slapping old friends on the back, plucking a beer from the pails of ice, a ham and cheese sandwich off the kitchen table. As the party roared late into the evening, friends suggested he join them for a nightcap or two down
the street at Sully’s Cafe. After all, Sully’s was a traditional Kennedy gathering spot—Jack had often stopped there while campaigning in the Town; both Jack and Ted had adjourned to Sully’s after their inductions into the Knights of Columbus Fourth Degree; and Ted’s ceremonial sword still hung on the wall. It was a temptation on that boozy night so reminiscent of celebrations past to join the others down at the tavern, to belly up to the bar with the Townies and try to reestablish the easy camaraderie of years gone by. But Ted resisted. It was okay there at Jerry’s house, but the streets and taverns of Charlestown were enemy territory now. Once when a friend asked him what he thought Sully was saving his sword for, Ted smiled ruefully and said, “Stick it in my gut, I guess.”

Now the incident at City Hall Plaza only intensified Charlestown’s bellicosity. Gloria Conway, the newspaper editor and newly elected secretary of Massachusetts Citizens Against Forced Busing, had been Charlestown’s representative on the podium that day. She had no great love for Ted Kennedy, but she didn’t believe in assaulting U.S. senators. Her misgivings were shared by the other women who had led Charlestown’s anti-busing movement those past few years. Three days after the Kennedy incident—just as busing was getting underway in South Boston and Roxbury—Mrs. Conway called a meeting to assess the situation. Present in the basement of the Bunker Hill Post of the American Legion were many of her own supporters, but they were joined that day by others, Townie parents who had been mobilized by the dramatic events of the past few days and who suddenly realized it was only a matter of time before their children were going to be bused. Many of these newcomers were residents of the Bunker Hill project, the poorest, most vulnerable members of the community, those least able to evade the problem by sending their children to private or parochial schools. The project families were spoiling for a fight, and they got one soon enough.

From the start, Mrs. Conway and her supporters found themselves on the defensive. Some of the newcomers had already joined ROAR. Now, one after another, they rose to challenge the leadership of Massachusetts Citizens Against Forced Busing.

“What the hell have you done?” asked Tom Johnson, a burly ex-longshoreman. “A lot of talking and marching, none of which has made a bit of difference. The time has come for some action.”

“What kind of action are you talking about, Mr. Johnson?” asked Gloria Conway, her voice edged with sarcasm.

“I’m talking about action in the streets.”

“But our children are going to be out in the streets,” Gloria said. “Would you sacrifice one of our children?”

For a moment the room was still, as all faces turned toward Tom Johnson. “Yes,” he said, “if necessary.”

The meeting at Legion Hall left the Charlestown movement irrevocably split. Uncomfortable with the aggressive new street tactics, disquieted by the
intimations of violence, disinclined to associate too closely with the “project people,” most of the Massachusetts Citizens crowd soon retired from the field. Henceforth, Peg Pigott worked the creaking machinery of the Home and School Association, while Gloria Conway published editorials in the
Patriot
, thundering against busing yet pleading for non-violence. But the movement’s leadership had passed into new hands.

Virtually alone among her colleagues in Massachusetts Citizens, Alice McGoff did not back away from these new elements. She had always been something of an anomaly in the old crowd anyway, a widow from the projects surrounded by a clutch of club women from the slopes of Breed’s and Bunker hills. The new recruits were her friends and neighbors, people she saw every day along Bunker Hill Street, at the Red Store and the Green Store, in the courtyards of the project itself. They didn’t frighten or repel her. Like Gloria and Peg, she was temperamentally disinclined to violence; the assault on Ted Kennedy had dismayed her, and when she heard of Tom Johnson’s remarks at Legion Hall they struck her as dangerous bravado. Yet she had come to doubt the efficacy of the Massachusetts Citizens’ approach—the endless lobbying, the interminable parading around the State House and City Hall, pleading for a fair shake. Those were labor union tactics—the patient, plodding, hat-in-hand approach she’d seen Charlestown’s workingmen take for years. What did it ever get them? A couple of extra dollars. Another day off. Scraps for the dogs!

No, Alice thought, if they were going to make Garrity back down, they would have to learn something from the civil rights activists and anti-war demonstrators of the sixties. They would have to take a leaf out of Martin Luther King’s book—civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, sit-ins, boycotts, guerrilla theater. They had to go into the streets and stay there until they won. To Alice, ROAR seemed more likely to prevail in such a struggle than the staid Massachusetts Citizens.

On September 25, Alice attended a community meeting where three hundred angry Townies constituted themselves the Charlestown branch of ROAR, under the name Powder Keg. Pat Russell, an outspoken neighbor of Alice’s from the project, was elected president, narrowly defeating Tom Johnson. Alice was elected to the fifteen-member executive board. On November 11, Powder Keg opened a one-room office next door to a laundromat in the Charles Newtown project. Several hundred people turned out for the ceremony, many of them wearing the blue windbreakers and white tam-o’-shanters topped by blue pompons which had become the uniform of Charlestown’s anti-busing movement. Louise Day Hicks and “Dapper” O’Neil were there to cut a red ribbon stretched across the doorway and slice a big chocolate cake that had green frosting spelling out “Welcome Powder Keg.” When a reporter asked Pat Russell why they had chosen that name, she looked him in the eye and said, “Because we have a very short fuse.”

To those who knew Charlestown’s history of violence, the name was profoundly
unsettling. How long was the fuse, they wondered; how big would the explosion be? Several members of Charlestown’s establishment—among them the pastors of St. Mary’s and St. Francis de Sales’ churches—asked for a meeting with Powder Keg’s leadership, and at a testy confrontation on November 18, the group agreed to clarify these matters in a letter to the
Patriot
.

“We the people of Powder Keg [it read] are not violent people. Our name was selected to go along with this slogan, ‘Stop the fuse; stop forced busing.’ We only wanted something to catch people’s attention. In no way do we condone violence. In fact, we have marshals on every march and motorcade and rally so that if any confrontations occur they can be quickly and efficiently stopped.”

Not everyone was reassured. As Arthur Garrity framed his Phase II plan, he came to believe that the town where his immigrant grandfather had first settled would be “the hardest nut of all to crack,” even tougher than South Boston. His apprehension about Charlestown stemmed in part from his own experience as U.S. Attorney, when he had prosecuted more than a few Townies, but principally from Marty Walsh, regional director of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, which played an unusual role in Boston. The CRS usually functioned as a racial conciliator, “helping people resolve their differences through cooperation rather than as adversaries on the streets.” But when Arthur Garrity realized how little he could rely on Kevin White or his police for disinterested intelligence, he designated the CRS as the official monitor of Boston’s desegregation, his watchdog on the city’s streets.