Mayor for a New America (2 page)

President Obama and Vice President Biden called several times to say if there was anything they could do to help Boston, just ask. I asked. If the IRS denied deductions to One Fund donors, I explained to Joe Biden, that would discourage giving and limit the payout to people who had lost eyes, legs, and children. The IRS, I added, had enough trouble with the Republicans attacking it for investigating conservative groups. It would be a shame if someone leaked the news that IRS bureaucrats were blocking help to the victims of the deadliest terrorist bombing since 9/11 . . .

The problem went away. The One Fund made new tax law.

But that was not clear yet a week after the bombing when I met with big donors and told them they might not be able to write off their contributions. Not one executive blinked. I expected no less from the Boston business community, which in my twenty years in office never let the city down.

 

Cooperation among the different tiers of government—city, state, federal—was unprecedented. The White House responded to all our requests. And Governor Patrick and I agreed in minutes on who should do what, and backed each other up in public statements. The tone we set was communicated down the chain of command, where city cops and state troopers shared information and worked in tandem on the criminal investigation.

“From the very beginning, the senior people on the scene or arriving at the scene felt the need to find one another,” according to a Harvard study of emergency management after the bombing. “They realized that the situation needed them to come together.” On the day of the bombing, that saved lives. (“Every person who left the scene alive is alive today.”) The teamwork was rehearsed. Years before 9/11, I sent my department heads to Virginia for briefings on emergency preparedness. Since 9/11 we had drilled, exercised, played out in real time how to respond to attacks on big public events like the Democratic Convention in 2004 and the annual July Fourth celebration on the Esplanade. “Boston Strong was not a chance result,” the Harvard researchers concluded. “It was, instead, the product of years of investment of time and hard work by people across multiple jurisdictions, levels of government, agencies and organizations.”

About the FBI, the lead agency in the hunt for the bombers, my feelings are mixed. On the one hand, the agents were committed to getting the bad guys. On the other, the bureau's caution seemed motivated by fear of making a mistake.

 

By late Wednesday, Ed Davis and I were losing patience. Security cameras at stores along Boylston Street, including Lord & Taylor across from the second bomb blast, had recorded the bombers' images, but the bureau was resisting pressure to release the pictures. The feds did not want the suspects to know they had been caught on tape. Apparently, some agents thought the two young men (it was not yet known they were brothers) might show up around the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Thursday morning, drawn by President Obama, who'd be speaking at an interfaith service. I hoped that risky plan wasn't the only reason the FBI was reluctant to share the tapes with the earth's population.

Like Ed Davis, I was disturbed to discover that, long before the bombing, the FBI had not shared with state and local police its intel about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's mysterious 2012 trip to Dagestan, a Russian republic. According to a 2014 report by the House Committee on Homeland Security, “even in the days after the attack as the manhunt was ongoing,” the FBI did not inform Davis of its Tsarnaev investigation. The FBI and the CIA had hoarded information that, if shared, might have prevented 9/11. The Homeland Security Committee report identified four “systemic weaknesses” in federal counterterrorism efforts prior to the bombing. The first weakness—“insufficient cooperation and information sharing between Federal agencies and local law enforcement”—suggests that 9/11 had not been enough to shake up the FBI's insular culture.
^*

 

I decided to notch up the pressure to release the videos. In an interview with CNN's John King, a Dorchester boy, I surfaced the Lord & Taylor intelligence. So that cat was out of the bag. Reddit was displaying an image said to be taken from a security camera that fit the bomber's rumored description—white baseball cap, dark backpack. Only it wasn't the bomber but a young man who worked in my office! The FBI warned the media of the “unintended consequences” of running such images.

Lynching was one of them. The cover of Thursday's
New York Post
raised that danger. Under the headline “Bag Men” and flanked by the line “Feds Seek These Two Pictured at Boston Marathon” was a photograph of two innocent Massachusetts men, sixteen-year-old Salaheddin Barhoum and twenty-four-year-old Yassine Zaimi, seen talking near the finish line. The
Post
cover story put their lives at risk. Before the worst happened, the FBI had to release the video of the real bombers. I silently vowed to appeal to the president if the bureau didn't budge.

On Thursday afternoon, it budged.

 

That morning, passing bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling the streets, I arrived at the cathedral before the president. Sitting alone in a basement room, I had time to think. I sensed the public mood falling. Alarmed that the bombers were still at large, people were losing confidence in the investigation. They were also shaken (I know I was) by graphic media accounts of amputations. I wanted to do something—anything—to raise morale, even if only for a news cycle. But what?

I don't obsess about comments in the media. Usually. But a statement to a reporter from a local professor had stuck in my craw. Referring to my retirement at the end of 2013, he said, “It is unfortunate that one of the last impressions people will have of his mayoralty is him in a wheelchair, almost sidelined at a time of crisis.” The phrase “in a wheelchair” got to me. Hadn't FDR led the country through depression and war in a wheelchair?

At the interfaith service a succession of speakers mounted the pulpit to address the audience. A separate microphone, adjusted to the height of my wheelchair, was set up for me. When it was my turn to speak, my son whispered to me, “Dad, I'll wheel you over to the microphone.” Suddenly, I knew what to do. “Tommy,” I said, “I'm the mayor. Wheel me to the pulpit. I'm going to stand up.”

If you watched the service, you saw the struggle I had doing it. I could feel the president and Mrs. Obama and the two thousand people in the cathedral rooting for me. With Tommy tipping the wheelchair forward, I put my hands on the arms and pushed. It was no good. I tucked my elbows further back and pushed harder. Biting my lower lip against a twinge of pain, grabbing the lectern for balance, I stood up. The enclosed pulpit hid the line connecting my catheter to the bag on the wheelchair.

“Good morning,” I said, as the sun lit the stained-glass windows.

“And it is a good morning because we are together. We are one Boston. No adversity, no challenge, nothing can tear down the resilience in the heart of this city and its people. . . . I have never loved it . . . more than I do today.” I described the acts of caring that unfolded within seconds of the bombing, and then I remembered the dead: “We say goodbye to the young boy with the big heart, Martin Richard, . . . we'll miss Krystle Campbell and celebrate her spirit that brought her to the Marathon year after year . . . and we mourn Lu Lingzi, who came to the city in search of education, and found new friends.”

Boston's worst moment, I said, was the beginning of Boston's finest hour: “Even with the smell of smoke in the air, and blood on the streets, and with tears in our eyes, we triumphed over that hateful act on Monday afternoon. . . . Because this is Boston, a city with courage, compassion, and strength that knows no bounds.”

Governor Patrick followed, moving me when he said, “Mayor Menino started Monday morning frustrated he couldn't be at the finish line this time as he always is. And then late that afternoon, checked himself out of the hospital to help this city, our city, face down this tragedy.” His last line—“We will rise, and we will endure”—picked up on my gesture. Reporters are suckers for symbols. A
Los Angeles Times
headline was typical: “Mayor Menino: Symbol of a Resilient Boston.” The story described the reaction to my speech—“He pulled himself from his wheelchair to the loudest applause of the day”—and noted that “in some ways, the mayor has become a potent symbol as a wounded Boston tries to heal.” It quoted one young woman visiting the makeshift Copley Square memorial to the bombing victims, and, boy, did she get my message! “He can't even walk and he's here to comfort all of us,” she said. “It shows how strong our leaders are here—how strong the people are—that if anything were to happen . . . [we'd] drop what [we're] doing and . . . take care of each other.” People still tell me that speech lifted their spirits.

 

On Friday morning I reversed the stand I had staked out on Monday afternoon: Terror must not be allowed to disrupt daily life. Boston had nothing to fear.

Boston had plenty to fear that Friday morning. The release of the store security videos panicked the bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, into running. They didn't get far, about a mile from their Cambridge home, when they stopped to ambush a twenty-six-year-old MIT policeman, Sean A. Collier. In a bungled attempt to steal his gun, they snuck up behind his patrol car and shot him five times. Crossing the Charles River into Boston, they carjacked a Mercedes SUV in Allston. The older brother, Tamerlan, waved a silver pistol at the driver and said, “I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.” And for nearly ninety minutes, the brothers made him, a young Chinese immigrant-entrepreneur named Danny, drive from one ATM to another emptying his bank account. When they stopped for gas back on the Cambridge side of the Charles, Danny bolted and alerted police.

In the SUV, the brothers led cruisers on a chase that ended in the early hours of Friday in Watertown, near the Boston line, in a shoot-out that left one officer, Richard H. Donohue Jr., critically wounded. Tamerlan was killed. Dzhokhar, the younger brother, escaped. After searching for him till dawn, police thought he might have got away. He was a dangerous kid. In the Watertown gunfight, the brothers threw pipe bombs at police.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wasn't all Boston had to fear that morning. There were reports of a man carrying a suspicious package near the federal courthouse in the Seaport District, of another suspicious package in a cab at Charlesgate, of pipe bombs buried in Kenmore Square, of a dangerous character on an Amtrak train . . . Governor Patrick ticked them off in a six
A.M.
call. Monday's question was Friday's: How big could this get?

The security people recommended a lockdown of Boston and municipalities bordering it. Not a state of emergency, Patrick said. A million people would be asked, not ordered, to “shelter-in-place.”

On Monday I vowed, “We will not let terror take us over.” The reports streaming in on Friday morning—earlier in the week we had refused to be panicked by such rumors. I doubted the brothers had confederates. I still believed they acted alone.

Danny, the owner of the carjacked SUV, said they discussed driving to New York to bomb Times Square. Suppose Dzhokhar was still in Watertown. Only one measure could prevent him from seizing another car and carrying out their plan: stopping all travel so any moving civilian vehicle would stand out. That was my reason for going along with shelter-in-place.

“Do it,” I said.

“There is a massive manhunt under way,” the governor announced at a press conference. “To assist that . . . we're asking ­people to shelter-in-place, in other words to stay indoors with the doors locked and do not open the doors to anyone other than a properly identified law enforcement officer, and that applies here in Watertown where we are right now, [but] also in Cambridge . . . and at this point, all of Boston. All of Boston.”

Without detailing them, Police Commissioner Ed Davis, speaking next, emphasized the reports that justified the lockdown: “Within the last half hour we have received information that I have communicated to Mayor Menino. . . . Mayor Menino asked me to come here and to tell you . . . that the shelter-in-place recommendation has been extended throughout the City of Boston.”

Shelter-in-place was an overreaction. That was clear Friday evening, when, minutes after the governor called it off, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found. After being confined to his house all day, David Henneberry, who lived on Franklin Street in Watertown, less than a mile from where Tsarnaev ditched the SUV, went outside to get some fresh air. He noticed two paint rollers on his lawn. He figured they had fallen from the cover on his boat. When he'd wrapped the
Slip Away II
in white plastic in the fall, he'd put paint rollers under the bottom edge of the wrap to protect the surface of the boat. He climbed a stepladder, peeled back the cover, and looked inside.

Minutes later an officer's voice came over the police scanner: “We're getting a report from Watertown of 67 Franklin Street. They have a boat with blood in it. . . . I've got the owner of the house here. He says there's a body in the boat.” Absent shelter-in-place, Henneberry might have discovered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev earlier.

I was in Watertown with my team in the city SUV when Commissioner Davis walked over, leaned his head into the vehicle, and said, “We got him.” Dot Joyce's tweet—“We got him, we got him. Thank God, the search is over”—was the first the world heard of it.

The scanner came alive with chatter. I picked up a microphone. To the hundreds of officers who had worked around the clock for five days to bring the bombers to justice, I said: “People of Boston are proud of you. Especially the mayor of Boston. I'm very proud of what you've done.” Silence. Then the scanner crackled and a voice said something I won't forget: “We did it for you, boss.”