Mayor for a New America (5 page)

In the post-Watergate era, when nobody trusted politicians, Gerry thought my “quietness of style” might come across as sincerity (it was) and help make me a successful candidate. I agreed. But for what office?

The Boston City Council? Its nine members ran “at-large.” I couldn't win a citywide race. All my connections were in Hyde Park. In 1982 the playing field shifted my way. The council was expanded to four at-large and nine district seats. District 5 covered Hyde Park and slivers of other neighborhoods, including Roslindale and West Roxbury. The legislature had to approve the change. Joe Timilty looked out for my interests at the State House. The Hyde Park seat? “It was created for him,” he said.

Just as I started up the political ladder, Joe stepped off it. Following his third defeat by Kevin White, in 1979, he soured on politics and resigned his Senate seat five years later. He moved his growing family out of their small Mattapan ranch to a more spacious house in a suburb of Boston. After 1984, the
Globe
reported, Joe engaged in “an intense pursuit of money, losing many of his old contacts and friends.” His new friends were “big-money developers.” I believe he made some bad decisions. In May 1993, after a trial in U.S. District Court, Joe was convicted of being part of a “conspiracy to commit fraud.” I was mayor when he was sentenced to four months in federal prison. The contrast in our fortunes was painful to me. And tragic for Joe, a guy who poured his heart into helping those who had no voice. One of his greatest legacies was founding Camp Joy, an oasis for kids with special needs.

 

When is the last time a city councilor fried anybody?

 

—speaking at a Cleary Square debate in 1983

 

I was a campaign operative. An organizer. “An extension of Timilty.” A backstage guy whose career nearly ended the second he stepped on stage.

I announced my candidacy for City Council in the backyard of my childhood home at 1449 Hyde Park Avenue. I got through that fine. Not so the first candidates' forum held at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Hyde Park. Before the debate started, the candidates were scheduled to introduce themselves and say why we were running. All I had to do was read a three-sentence statement. All? No one liable to use “condoms” for “condos” would say “all.”

When we drove up, I said I couldn't do it. Those were my friends inside! It would be using them to ask for their votes.

My campaign staff, sacrificing their time and energy to put me over, threatened bodily harm. I relented.

I can still see that lectern. The microphone. The crowd.

Standing in the wings, I took a deep breath, then walked out on the stage.

And froze.

I was supposed to begin “I just want you to know I'm running for . . . ,” but managed only “Ah . . . ,” then nothing. Today that moment would have gone viral on the Web. Mercifully, there were no cameras in the hall.

For what felt like a week, I stood mute at the lectern. Finally, when the crowd was about out of patience, my friend Peggy Gannon tiptoed on stage and tugged the sleeve of my jacket. It broke the trance.

I spoke.

They cheered. Not for what I said but for saying anything. I didn't care. It felt great.

 

On a hot Fourth of July I knew I would win.

Angela and I had spent the day climbing hilly streets and walking up front steps to drop off leaflets. Late in the afternoon, wiping the sweat off my glasses, I saw my leading opponent drive by, windows closed, in his air-conditioned car. “Let's go to dinner,” I said to Angela. “This thing is over.”

The campaign had its moments.

There were six candidates. To break out of the pack, one said he'd give $30,000 of his $32,000 salary to local charities. “How is the gentleman going to live?” I asked in a Cleary Square debate. “It sounds to me like this is not going to be his full-time job. I'll be a full-time councilor!” Not taking that cheap shot would have been political malpractice.

Another candidate, a retired state police lieutenant, ran on the death penalty. Nothing but death. “Menino, Timilty's lackey, is against the death penalty,” he declared at one forum. I'd had it with death. I got to my feet. “This is a campaign for City Council,” I said in a sarcastic voice. “When is the last time a city councilor fried anybody? Talk about the real issues.”

The race drew the attention of the local PBS station, WGBH, which followed me along the campaign trail for weeks. They made a half-hour documentary. I'm not sure if it won any awards but it was definitely a glimpse into neighborhood politics done what some have termed “the Menino way,” one door, one vote at a time.

In 1983 the only issue was the state of Boston's neighborhoods. Kevin White, in charge at City Hall since 1968, was the “downtown mayor.” He boasted that Boston was a “world-class city” of skyscrapers, tourist hotels, and harborside concerts. The neighborhoods felt left behind.

Mayoral candidates identified with White lost in the primary. The two finalists attacked “the downtown interests” and, to my ear, sounded not just pro-neighborhood but anti-development, even anti-business. After sixteen years of Kevin White, “development” versus “the neighborhoods” was good politics, but was it good policy? As city councilor, I promised to bring development
to
the neighborhoods by reviving fading commercial districts, beginning with Roslindale Square, a comeback story told in Chapter 4.

The district had my name on it. I carried every precinct, winning nearly twice as many votes as my five opponents combined.

Soon after my election I attended the opening of the new police academy in Hyde Park. The mayor was there to deliver some remarks. He spotted me in the audience. “You want to come up here and say a few words?” I shook my head. “Well, someday you're going to be up here speaking as mayor,” said Kevin White, then in his last days in office.

 

If you run for City Council two bad things can happen to you; one, you lose, two, you win.

 

—former congressman Barney Frank

 

I'll spare you a chronicle of my ten years on the City Council. Instead, I'll fast-forward and tell how I got to be acting mayor.

It happened in two stages.

Stage one: I become chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

First, I had to take the committee out of mothballs. For that I needed the help of the new mayor, Raymond Flynn.

Ray Flynn was one of the greatest athletes ever to come out of Boston. A multisport legend at South Boston High. An All-American basketball player at Providence College. A runner of road races and marathons well into his fifties.

Like me, Ray was a Hubert Humphrey Democrat. After his longshoreman father fell ill, his family had to go on welfare to survive. Ray never forgot that, and denounced President Reagan's cuts to the safety net as immoral.

Unlike me, Ray was colorful, riding on snowplows, driving to fires in his battered station wagon, hanging out at blue-collar taverns with cops and EMTs, and morning, noon, and night making news. An impossible act to follow as mayor, and I didn't try.

Ray began as a state legislator from South Boston, where he was a leader of that neighborhood's resistance to court-ordered busing to desegregate the Boston public schools. But Ray was never a white-backlash candidate like School Committee Chair Louise Day Hicks and City Councilor Albert “Dapper” O'Neil. As mayor he dedicated himself to healing the wounds left by busing. His “urban populism” stressed the economic common ground shared by working families of all races.

In 1978 he won a seat on the City Council and quickly grew fed up with the power of Ways and Means. “You'd just sit there, nine of you, and whoever was chair of Ways and Means, he would call the shots,” he recalled years later. “If he was buddy-buddy with the mayor, you would have to [appeal to] him even if you wanted to ask questions. It was a joke.” Ray pushed a reform under which, instead of Ways and Means overseeing the whole budget, twelve different committees monitored the budgets of the city departments. Ways and Means was mothballed.

On the council, I quickly grew fed up with Ray's “reform.” Boston's city charter mandates a “strong mayor” form of government. As retiring incumbent John F. Collins allegedly told Kevin White in 1968, the mayor of Boston is a virtual emperor whose power rendered the Boston City Council “a band of eunuchs.” The council cannot increase the city budget, originate bond issues or appropriations, or block the mayor's appointees to head city departments. It can approve or cut the mayor's budget. But under the twelve-committee system, oversight was spotty. Fifty-million-dollar appropriations were passed after ten-minute hearings.

My colleagues were bored with the financial details. Not me. Mastering them as chair of a revived Ways and Means was my road up. But persuading Ray to reverse his stand would not be easy.

After I became mayor, one insider said, “It's almost safe to say that the last ten years was the Flynn-Menino administration.” That's over the top. His second comment is correct: “Menino was the person Flynn went to in order to get things done on the Council.”

I voted with Ray and tenants on condo (not condom) conversions, with him and gay rights activists on needle exchanges, with him and Irish Americans on a plan I worked out to buy the Jamaica­way mansion with the shamrock shutters built in 1915 by James Michael Curley.

And I strongly supported Ray's initiative to replace the elected Boston School Committee with a body appointed by the mayor. “This will be the piece that everybody judges Ray Flynn on,” I said. “He's either going to be a great mayor or they are going to say, ‘He couldn't turn the schools around.'” As mayor, I'd ask the voters to judge me by the same standard.

“Tommy used to come into my office and talk all the time,” Ray once said. “More than all the other councilors put together. He was a team player. . . . You could trust him.” Ray even asked me to join his team as parks commissioner. He did not see me, unknown outside my district, as competition. You have to be a politician to appreciate what that did for our relationship.

By late 1988 I'd carried enough water for Ray that he owed me. He knew how I felt about Ways and Means. “Let's have one committee,” I said. Ray agreed. He weighed in with the council. And by a 9–3 vote, the council scrapped Ray's 1980 reform.

“A lot of us didn't realize how much more powerful it would make him,” said Maura Hennigan, the council's only woman. She wasn't alone in having second thoughts about installing me as chair of Ways and Means. Ray Flynn didn't like it when I summoned his department heads to all-day hearings. Sometimes I'd catch a reporter dozing off and slam my gavel to wake him up. “I don't care how boring it is,” I snapped at one. “If I have to stay awake, you have to stay awake.” The
Globe
saluted my hard-bottom diligence: “If they gave a medal for all-round best councilor, it would be won by Menino, the Hyde Park workhorse who virtually carries the whole council in budget hearings.”

Before, department heads ignored me. Now, they returned my calls.

 

I had given myself ten years on the council. Then up or out. My clock was ticking. When a mouse ran across my shoulders in my council office, it seemed like an omen.

I considered running for one of the four at-large seats on the council. Maybe my good press for holding officials' feet to the fire as chair of Ways and Means had increased my visibility. I commissioned a poll to find out. After Mayor Flynn and Laval Wilson, the superintendent of schools, I had the third-best job rating in the city, ahead of the other members of the City Council, the chair of the School Committee, and a state rep talked about as the next mayor. But what use was a good job rating if 60 percent of those polled had never heard of me?

Basically I was a stranger outside Hyde Park. I couldn't win an at-large seat on the council. Mayor? I didn't even consider it. Anyway, though Ray Flynn was flirting with running for governor in 1990, I was pretty sure he'd go for a third mayoral term in 1991 instead. The way up in city politics was blocked.

I explored a campaign for state treasurer or lieutenant governor. But the record wasn't encouraging. No one had jumped from City Council to state office since 1960. And there was this: “Menino could also have a problem with his public speaking style, which will not make anyone forget [the old-time orator] James Michael Curley,” to quote a political columnist. I took speaking lessons. When you are giving a speech, one acting coach suggested, try wearing sneakers. “I can't take it anymore,” I said, and quit.

Ahead of the '92 elections, a congressional seat unexpectedly opened. Brian Donnelly, longtime congressman from the Eleventh Congressional District, which covered southeastern Massachusetts, announced his retirement. My friends collected ten thousand signatures to get me on the ballot. At a once-shuttered Hyde Park paper mill that I'd help to reopen, I threw my hat into the ring.

A month later I snatched it back. Citing the 1990 census, a federal judge ruled that the Eleventh District had lost too much population to justify having a member of Congress. He ordered my part of the district merged with the newly configured Ninth District, a seat long held by Joe Moakley of South Boston. In challenging the dean of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, a bloody-minded journalist wrote, “Menino would be choosing to shoot and stab himself while garroting himself with piano wire.” I quit
that
race.

 

These years weren't wasted politically.

I spent much of my time at community meetings in Hyde Park. “I just feel I have to be there,” I told a reporter. “They elected me. If I'm able to help people through the bureaucracy, that's the best part of the job. . . . The way their lives go, my life goes.”