Mayor for a New America (30 page)

The 3,700 jobs leaving Boston, Partners' aborted move to Roxbury—both were consequences of my retirement. For, as Larry Harmon observed, “it's safe to assume that Partners would have warmed up to the parcel in Roxbury if Menino had been sticking around for another four years. After all, he understands power and how to wield it to help the city's poor.”

Partners times ten would have been the story of my last term if I had done what the
Globe
suggested and made myself a lame duck from day one.

 

What is . . . vision? Sometimes we get caught up in the grandiose. My vision is jobs, a better school system, community policing, health care. When I leave this job, I want the city to be in better shape than when I took it over.

 

—from a 1994 interview

 

I also owed it to my city to retire. My effectiveness as a leader depended on being “out there,” where people expected to see me. And in my fifth term, out there, in the neighborhoods, my presence was missed. That much-cited 2009 poll found that 57 percent of Boston's 450,000 adult residents had personally met me. In a March 2013 poll, only 49 percent made that claim.

In the 1960s, John F. Collins governed Boston for eight years from a wheelchair. Being on the scene, listening, absorbing information, and responding to complaints, in short, doing the urban mechanic's job—that was not Mayor Collins's bond with the people. It was mine. The spirit was willing, but my flesh was weak.

Five days after my 2009 victory speech, I stumbled walking upstairs at my son's house and severed the tendon in my left knee. Over the years my health had not been great. I'd had a bout with a rare cancer. I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel condition. I had high blood pressure. I was overweight. But after that bum knee, everything seemed to go wrong. I delivered the State of the City address in January 2010 with my leg in a cast. For the next four years I was rarely seen in public without a cast or cane. After falling in the shower, I was hospitalized with an infected elbow and readmitted after experiencing a bad reaction to antibiotics. I needed surgery to repair a torn tendon in my right knee. I suffered a broken toe.

In October 2012, Angela and I left Boston for a two-week cruise in Italy. I'd been feeling under the weather, but couldn't cancel a trip that she'd planned for three years to mark our forty-sixth wedding anniversary. (Imagine the headline: “Mayor Gets Divorced.”) On the cruise ship I got sicker and sicker. I lost all my energy. Turns out I'd developed a blood clot in my leg that traveled to my lungs. Back in Boston, doctors at Brigham and Women's diagnosed me with a severe respiratory infection. As I was about to be released, I suffered a compression fracture in a vertebra of my spine. When an unusual infection developed near it, doctors discovered I had type 2 diabetes. I spent five weeks at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital recovering from my month-long stay at the Brigham.

My health caused strain, stress, and worry for my family and staff. Yet despite everything, I got big things done in my fifth term. I discussed one of them in Chapter 4—standing up the Innovation District. But the critical developments came in politics. By using my field organization to get out the vote for candidates for state and national office, I banked political capital, and in term five I spent it to get important legislation through the State House.

Crushing Boston majorities helped elect the first black governor in the history of the Commonwealth, Deval Patrick, in 2006, and the first woman senator, Elizabeth Warren, in 2012.

For Warren, running against a popular Republican incumbent, Scott Brown, we pulled out all the stops. I asked Michael Kineavy, my political guru since 1993, to organize the Warren campaign in Boston. Scores of employees from the Boston Housing Authority, the Transportation Department, the Office of Neighborhood Services, and other city agencies took vacation time to staff the machine. Our 2,289 volunteers knocked on 117,000 doors. Our sound truck specialists got together with our foreign-language specialists, and soon voters in selected wards were being blasted with pitches for Warren and President Obama in Spanish, Cape Verdean Creole, Vietnamese, and other languages. On Election Day, our network of “foot pullers,” “closers,” sign holders, and van drivers helped mobilize 251,339 voters, Boston's largest turnout since 1964. Three out of four voted for Warren.

In national politics, in the 2008 presidential primary in Massachusetts, my people delivered for Hillary Clinton. A month earlier, when her candidacy hung in the balance, one hundred of our campaign pros camped out in Manchester, New Hampshire, to put Hil­lary over the top in the New Hampshire primary.

Democratic state legislators in Massachusetts drew a lesson from our wins: For those considering a run for higher office (all of them), the road to victory led through Boston. “Team Menino” could make you or break you. (I withheld support from a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the 90s, and he lost Boston and the race by 42 points.)

Political clout helped me win passage of two bills that benefited cities and towns across the Commonwealth. I discussed one in Chapter 2. It allowed cities to create “in-district” charter schools that combined the flexibility of regular charters with control by local school boards. The second bill overhauled public pensions. Among other reforms, it repealed a provision that allowed firefighters claiming career-ending injuries while filling in for a superior to collect a disability pension at a higher pay grade. For Democratic legislators, elected with campaign contributions from the firefighters' union, ending this “king-for-a-day” rip-off was a tough vote.

Even as I got big stuff done, the quality of my face time with residents deteriorated. On the occasions when I did get “out there,” people were too nervous about jarring my cane to crowd around me, which left me frustrated that I couldn't connect in the old way. “You're not enjoying this, Mayor, are you?” Dot asked in the van returning from an event. I wasn't.

It was time to go. Yet, hoping for a return of my old energy, and to preserve my power, I could not let go.

 

“Our future is bright,” I said in my last State of the City address. In the “era of the city, Boston is the city of the era.” The eight-­hundred-strong audience gave me a standing ovation. Andrew Ryan, the
Globe
City Hall reporter, clocked it at two minutes, forty-six seconds. It was a long good-bye.

I outlined an ambitious agenda: using 1 million square feet of city property to build affordable housing, increasing the school budget by $30 million to pay for a longer school day, welcoming sixty-eight new police recruits. I put forward my proposal to make “Boston the premier city for working women.” Handicappers took that as a hint I was running: a bid for the women's vote.

“This week, as Tom Menino gave his State of the City Address, Boston politicos scrutinized him carefully for signs that might foretell an end to his 20-year reign,” wrote a reporter for the
Boston Phoenix
, an “alternative” weekly. “Clues were presumed to lie somewhere in the mayor's rehabilitated legs, infected respiratory system, still-healing back, diabetic blood, Crohn's-diseased intestines, or recently clotted lungs. . . . But the body parts holding the answer to this year's mayoral election might be John Connolly's balls.”

Connolly was an at-large city councilor. When I was first elected mayor, he was a student at Harvard. In appearance he was Sam Yoon II: another thirty-nine-year-old who looked like he didn't shave.

Other potential candidates were holding off to see if I would run. “If the mayor decides not to seek another term, I'm absolutely going to be running,” boldly declared Representative Marty Walsh. Connolly was gearing up to run regardless. “I'm not making this decision based on what the mayor does,” he told reporters, while still mulling. “I'm making this decision because I think I can bring about real change in our schools and bring a new generation of leadership to City Hall.” But were his body parts up to the challenge of taking me on?

The answer came on March 23. In the same room at the Parker House where John F. Kennedy launched his first campaign for Congress, John Connolly announced his candidacy. He hit hard at the schools. Four years earlier, Mike Flaherty's refrain was “sixteen years.” Now Connolly's was “twenty.”

• For “twenty years,” elementary school kids had no access to art, music, science, you name it.
  
• For “twenty years,” Boston had among the country's shortest school days.
  
• For “twenty years,” high school students had not been prepared for college.
  

Twenty years of effort, millions spent. The result? “An abject failure.”

“I think Mayor Menino is a good man whom I immensely respect,” Connolly said. Then he handed me a gold watch: “But I don't think our schools will change without new ideas, new energy, and new leadership.”

What did I think of Connolly? reporters asked. “A nice young man,” I said.

Connolly's attack on the schools riled me (“Look at the improvements we've made . . .”). I sounded eager to climb back into the ring against the whippersnapper: “Let's have a . . . good campaign. Let's discuss the issues, the real issues.”

Did my “use of the present tense” indicate I was running? reporters asked.

“I'm ready,” I said.

Are you announcing now? asked WBZ-TV reporter Bill Shields.

“Shields, go back to the Cape,” I said, laughing.

“On a scale of one to 10, I think it's a 10 he's running again,” said Mike McCormack, that veteran of Boston politics. “And if he runs, I think he'll win.”

The
Globe
commissioned a survey of Boston voters to find out. “If Menino ran again, he would probably win handily, but I think there's a desire among a lot of people to have a new mayor,” the pollster commented. “It's not that they are unhappy with Menino, voters just think it's time for new blood at the top.” The poll's finding that I'd beat Connolly by 29 points made it easier for me to do the necessary.

 

I faced it all and I stood tall . . .

 

—from “My Way”

 

Even as I bantered with the press about running, I prepared for the moment of truth. I had until five
P.M.
on May 13 to apply for nomination papers, the first step toward getting my name on the ballot, but I'd waited long enough.

A week in advance, Dot arranged with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to rent Faneuil Hall for the afternoon of March 28, and the IBEW pulled city permits for a health care rally. The union was our disguise; nobody suspected. The night before, I called friends and colleagues with the news.

“I might change my mind at four o'clock, you never know,” I said the next morning to reporters waiting in front of my house. “I may say something different and pull a Kevin White.” In a payback for years of attacks, Kevin leaked word to the
Boston Herald
that he was running for reelection as mayor in 1983 the day before he announced he wasn't running.

The evening I became acting mayor, July 12, 1993, neighbors celebrated with a cookout, and Angela and I danced to Sinatra's “My Way” playing on a loudspeaker set out on a front porch. It was playing again on March 28, 2013, as Angela and I inched down the center aisle of Faneuil Hall, acknowledging applause, squeezing hands, and greeting old friends, some fighting back tears. I teared up myself when I saw my grandkids, all born while I was mayor, standing on the stage, waiting for their “Papa.” They were clapping but not inside. My decision to retire . . . the hardest part was telling Giulia, Olivia, Will, Samantha, Taylor, and Thomas III.

“I never dreamed I would end up here: Mayor of Boston during its best days,” I began my short speech. “Jobs, graduation ratings, construction, credit ratings are all at record highs. Population, school enrollment, crime rates, and housing all have hit their best mark in years. . . . Most important to me, we are now a more open and accepting city. It was a new day when you picked a Mayor with Italian grandparents. It's a much newer day now.

“Over the past few months, I have been weighing my own place in Boston's bright future. . . . I have been blessed to regain so much of my health.

“I am back to a Mayor schedule, but not a Menino schedule.

“And I miss that. I miss hitting every event, ribbon cutting, new homeowner dinner, school play, and chance meeting. Spending . . . time in the neighborhoods gives me energy.”

Then I voiced Menino's urban mechanic theory of government: “Being with our residents builds our trust. It may not be the only way to lead Boston, but it's the only way for me.

“So I am here with the people I love, to tell the city I love, that I will leave the job that I love. I can run, I can win, and I can lead, but not as ‘in-the-neighborhoods-all-the-time' as I like.”

Nineteen years had gone by since I first spoke from that stage as mayor of Boston, since I said, “I'm not a fancy talker,” since I called the roll of my Hyde Park ghosts, since in my mind's eye I saw my kid self chasing JFK's limo toward the last rally of that long-ago campaign. Nineteen years. I still could not get over my rise, one of the most unlikely stories in American politics. Maybe you feel the same way. How did this guy do it? I haven't a clue. No. That's not right. I have one clue.

America in my years was still a democratic society. A Harry Truman, a Ronald Reagan, a Bill Clinton, a Barack Obama, even a Tom Menino could rise from humble circumstances to the top. I made the most of my tryout as acting mayor. I showed I could do the job. I had a chance. I hope we can remain a country where people like me have a chance.

In the audience I saw members of my team who had made me look good for decades. I'd land on my feet, but I worried about them. How could I begin to thank them? They were as amazed as I was at how far we had come. To think, I said, that “thirty years ago, when I first ran for office, my father Carl worried I would end up unemployed. Instead, my neighbors put their trust in me.” Whether I proved worthy of it is for others to say.