Mayor for a New America (3 page)

That night thousands poured into the streets to cheer convoys of police vehicles. When I returned to the Parkman House, the city-owned townhouse on Beacon Hill where I was staying since leaving the hospital, a crowd of young people were celebrating on the Common. I rolled down the window. They were singing “God Bless America.”

Ed Davis called. “The kids are celebrating in the Fenway,” he said. Should the police begin to shut it down? “Let 'em blow off steam,” I said. “They've been sheltered-in-place for twelve hours. They deserve to whoop it up.”

 

Governor Patrick and I were both retiring at the end of our terms. Our timing was perfect. If we had run for reelection, the lockdown would have been used against us. Attack ads would have depicted Boston as a scene from
Planet of the Apes:
the “eerily empty” downtown streets, the traffic-less highways, the shuttered train yards, the closed businesses, universities, and courthouses, the locked City Hall and State House. The ads would contrast what I said all week with what I said to George Stephanopoulos on ABC's
This Week
two days after Dzhokhar's capture:

 

ME
: These terrorists want[ed] to . . . hold the city hostage and stop the economy. . . . Look at what happened on Friday. The whole city was on lockdown, no businesses open, nobody leaving their homes. . . .

GEORGE
: Well, let me ask you about that lockdown. Because some have suggested that it was an overreaction to lock down the city—that it was actually giving the terrorists exactly what they wanted.

 

George spoke my Monday lines to indict my Friday decision.

Yet if shelter-in-place was a miscalculation by elected officials, it was a triumph for citizens. “We asked,” Governor Patrick said a year after the bombing. “Frankly, it was an amazing thing . . . that people . . . complied.”

Not everyone saw it that way. “The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Ron Paul argued. A military-style occupation? “There has been no law mentioned,” a police official said, “or any idea that if you go outside [you'll] be arrested.” People stayed home voluntarily.

Paul again: “This unprecedented act should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.” Really? Should it “frighten us” that to contain a common threat, citizens did what their government requested? That by depriving terrorists of the option of hiding in the crowd, they took responsibility for public safety? That Bostonians consented to limit their individual freedom in order to preserve their civic liberty? This unprecedented act should make us curious why, for thirteen hours on a fine April day, 650,000 Boston residents put community before self, and how their city came to inspire their loyalty. Trust in government is at an all-time low. Perhaps the Boston story holds lessons on how to regain it.

After five terms as mayor, I left office with an 80 percent approval rating. That is not a tribute to me but to a style of governing that bridges the gap between the citizen and the city. I paid attention to the fundamentals of urban life—clean streets, public safety, good schools, neighborhood commerce. I listened to what people said they wanted from government. Call my City Hall and you never got an answering machine. People trusted government because it heard them. Because they could talk to it. Because it kept its word. And because it was credible about things people could see, they accepted its judgment on important things they couldn't. In an “amazing” show of self-government, all of Boston acted as one on April 19, 2013. This book tries to explain why, as I told George Stephanopoulos, “Boston did a great job that day.”

Chapter 1

I want the city of Boston to be for everybody what Hyde Park was for me.

 

—
from my first inaugural address, 1994

 

I
GREW UP
in a good world. Neighborhoods were safe. Union jobs were plentiful. Parents fought but rarely split. There was a basic security to life. It wasn't like that everywhere in the 1950s, not by a long shot. But it was like that for me coming of age in Hyde Park.

I was a progressive mayor. In the country's youngest city (by age), I embraced the innovation economy. I celebrated Boston's mix of peoples and cultures. I championed gay rights. According to a gay community newspaper, there were so many gay men in my first administration that “you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting one.” The title of this book,
Mayor for a New America
, is accurate. But my public values look back to an Old America. To schools that prepared young people for jobs. To a secure and growing middle class. To stable communities, close neighborhoods, and strong families.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, raised in Hyde Park on Hudson, was once asked what he wanted for Americans. “What I had growing up,” he said. “Good health, security, the leisure to read and travel and develop my interests. And I want that for everybody.” That's how I felt about
my
Hyde Park legacy—the good life people can have living in Boston's neighborhoods. And I wanted that for everybody.

 

Hyde Park, annexed in 1912, was the last addition to Boston. After Hyde Park the city was complete.

Hyde Park fills Boston's southernmost corner. But partly because you can drive from downtown to the New Hampshire border quicker than to parts of Hyde Park, to many Bostonians it might as well be Mars.

Boston pols included. To them Hyde Park was the sticks. They had no idea it was so vote-rich until I made it my base to run for mayor. What one columnist called “the eight-hundred pound gorilla of Hyde Park politics” was loose, and it was too late to stop him.

Until the 1970s, Hyde Park was a center of heavy industry. There was a Westinghouse plant, an Allis-Chalmers factory, and, to service these giants, small foundries and metalworking shops spread all over.

My father, a member of the Machinists Union, worked at Westinghouse. Lots of men in our “lunch pail neighborhood” worked there. I could mess up in school, I thought, and still land a job at the plant.

I did work there the summer of my senior year in high school. By then my dad was a foreman. I noticed how he heard the men out. It was his way of showing respect. That was my first lesson in politics.

I'm a bad talker (“Mumbles Menino”) but a good listener. I won ten elections. Maybe a politician who stops talking long enough to listen is a breath of fresh air to voters.

 

I am your mayor. You came here seeking a better life just like my grandparents.

 

—addressing Boston's newest immigrants in my 1994 inaugural

 

As a child I learned about the problems facing newcomers to America—the same problems with visas, language, housing, the bureaucracy, and the schools facing Boston's immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa today. In my first inaugural, to these new Americans of thirty-four nationalities I said: “I am your mayor. . . . If you have arrived in Boston, like my grandmother, speaking no English, I will make sure you get the help you need to learn the language. Here and now, I tell you, I will institute a full range of English-as-a-second-language programs.”

To help these folks navigate city government, I established the Office of New Bostonians in City Hall. It connects newcomers to city services with few questions asked. Immigrants are welcome in Boston regardless of their “status.”

So when immigrants' rights groups revealed that, under an innocent-sounding program begun after 9/11, my police were forwarding information to federal officials that got moms and dads deported, I hit the roof. The police had better things to do with their time. I did not become mayor to throw hardworking people out of the country.

My mother, Susan, was a Mother Teresa to new immigrants in Hyde Park, starting at home. We occupied the first floor of a two-family house on Hyde Park Avenue. My aunt lived on the second floor along with my grandparents. My grandfather Thomas Menino was from Grottaminarda, a village in Avellino in the Campania region of southern Italy, the area known as the
Mezzogiorno
, which means “midday” and refers to the strength of the noon sun. Its inhabitants called it
La Miseria
for the privations that filled the ships to America. My cousin painted a mural of my grandfather showing him sitting in Grottaminarda with his suitcase, waiting for a ship to cross the ocean that occupies most of the painting. His destination is an American city marked by its skyline. In the mural, so big it filled a wall in my outer office at City Hall, he looks sad but determined. Attracted by the opportunity it offered to practice his trade—laborer—he settled in Hyde Park, his American Dream before it was mine.

Next door to our house my grandfather bought a six-decker for family members still in Italy. Each group stayed a few years, working seven days a week and eating a diet of pasta to scrape together a down payment for a house. Then they moved out and a new group moved in. My mother, who spoke fluent Italian, helped them fill out job applications, pay their bills, and enroll their children in the schools. She guided them at every stage of their journey to American citizenship. Eventually she extended her hand from family to strangers, and from Italians to immigrants from Greece, Ireland, and other countries.

I was twenty-one when she died with my six-year-old brother, David, in her arms. She'd had a hole in her heart. My father wouldn't leave the house for weeks. His grief was total, like his love.

 

Carl Menino was a remarkable guy. On Sundays and on special occasions he wore only the best, down to his silk shorts and cashmere socks. I owe my taste in fine clothes to him. People expect public officials to dress well, and I tried not to disappoint. Three or four times a week, drawn by the discounts on goods that had not sold at the specialty stores in New York and Boston, I'd drop by Filene's Basement on Washington Street. Its closing, in 2009, was a blow to my wallet.

My father was also a semi-pro baseball player. Second baseman on a team that traveled all over New England. After he was spiked turning a double play, he thought,
What am I doing still playing ball? I've got a wife and kids to support
, and hung up his cleats. Carl worked thirty-five years at the same plant. During the Second World War it ran three shifts making propellers and anchors for battleships and carriers. In the 50s it produced giant fans for highway tunnels. On the site today is the Academy of the Pacific Rim, a multicultural charter high school for students from some of the countries that put the Westinghouse Fan Division out of business.

While Carl was mostly good-natured, if the Red Sox lost you couldn't talk to him. (Which in that era meant a lot of silences.) And he was stubborn. In 1956 he went to Eliot Ford in Jackson Square to buy a new car, arriving at eight in the morning and staying till five. He had a figure in mind and wouldn't budge. Outlasting the salesman, he got the car for his price.

Carl took night school classes at Northeastern to improve himself, and he pushed me to continue my education. He sent me to a parochial high school, but I coasted. I'd go to the library with my friends and we'd work for a while; then we'd close the books and hang out at Friendly's Ice Cream in Dedham. “[Tom] used to say, when I got after him to go to college, ‘Truman never went to college,'” Carl said in a 1983 interview. “He must have told me that 1,000 times.”

Harry Truman: my political hero. I hung his portrait behind my desk at City Hall. A plainspoken man of the people. It was only when I read David McCullough's biography that I learned Harry was also a scholar of Greek and Roman history. The public library was his college.

Carl was thrilled by my election to the City Council. He was nervous I wouldn't win and marched up and down the streets of Hyde Park, knocking on every door and asking everybody he knew to vote for me. It was a lesson I carried with me for the rest of my political career—never take any person or vote for granted. A decade later, when I was elected mayor, he wasn't around. He did see me graduate from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1988—at forty-five—a proud day in both our lives.

My parents lived their values. My mother modeled service to others. If I hadn't gone into politics, following her example I probably would have been a social worker. She was the strongest influence on my life. My father, a Westinghouse lifer, modeled loyalty and hard work. By always respecting the dignity of my challenged brother, they showed me the meaning of equality.

Beyond my family, another figure looming over my youth was “the Deacon,” the tall Irish cop who walked the beat in our neighborhood. Kids cursed his timing—he'd show up just when the fun was starting. And I squirmed when he'd stop by the house to say hello to my parents. Still, he made you feel that the government of the city was your friend. As mayor I promised to restore this “symbol of welcome and security,” to bring back the “cop on the beat on foot in your neighborhood . . . to make you and your children feel safe again.” Chapter 3 details how I tried to make that promise a reality.

From preschool to high school I hung out, played ball, and went to the movies with the same group of guys. My oldest friends, they remained my best friends. I was the shyest of the bunch. The idea of me telling a joke
was
a joke. I could hit a baseball. I was tough on the basketball court. That won me some respect. If I spoke of doing anything when I grew up, it was being an engineer. A bridge builder. But a politician? Not in this life. As I put it in a 1993 interview, “I was always involved in the cancer fund, the heart fund, helping raise money. But for me to run for office? That shocked people because I was never an out-front guy. Never.”