Mayor for a New America (6 page)

My careful tending of the district paid off politically. I ran unopposed in 1989. But Hyde Park was a dead end for me. My poll had confirmed that. So, more and more, I ventured beyond the district. I held Ways and Means meetings in the neighborhoods, I visited health centers, I went to homeless shelters—I was out there learning the issues of the city.

To bolster my image as a neighborhood guy in my '83 campaign, I played up not having a college degree. Cautioning me to rethink that tactic, Gerry Doherty picked up my father's banner: “If you don't have a college degree, you'll get stuck.” That was my deepest fear.

So in 1984, at age forty-one, I enrolled in the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts Boston. I never missed a class. I was afraid a fellow student would drop a dime to the media.

That same year my daughter Susan enrolled at UMass Amherst. During our first semester, I saw Gerry one day in City Hall. “Damn you, I had a terrible weekend because of you,” I said. Startled, he asked why. “Well, my daughter is helping me with math. And my problem was, she stayed out late Saturday night and I had to ground her. So I was prepping for my math class on Monday and she refused to help me!”

 

I've voted right on women's issues and I'll continue to vote right. Commitment to issues that are important to the city is what this should be about, not gender.

 

—on the challenge of running against a woman

 

Stage two: I become council president.

It was bad timing, running against a woman in the “Year of the Woman.” But the top job on the City Council was up for grabs, and my ten-year clock was about to strike midnight.

My opponent, Maura Hennigan, was endorsed by the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus. The president of Massachusetts NOW vowed to unseat any councilor voting for me. Maura's candidacy was turned into the Boston edition of the backlash against the male-dominated politics on display during the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings. In the “Year of the Woman” elections of 1992, held while Maura and I were maneuvering for votes, the number of women tripled in the U.S. Senate and doubled in the House. The politicians on the Boston City Council took note.

The presidency was vacant because the councilor holding the office, a gentleman of the old school named Christopher Iannella, died in September 1992, touching off a four-month struggle to succeed him. The job was worth having, especially in 1993. Under the city charter, if the mayor died or resigned, the president of the council became acting mayor. Running as an incumbent, he or she would then be the favorite to win the special election to choose the new mayor.

Ray Flynn had over two years left in his term. But after nearly a decade as mayor, Ray was floating. With the Boston economy in recession, the job was harder than ever. Ray was a good-times mayor. Now that times were bad, he seemed to be looking for a way out of town. Washington beckoned. Word was Ray was in line for an appointment in the new Clinton administration.

Six of the thirteen councilors lined up with Maura. The press identified them as the “progressive” bloc. Six were more loosely aligned with me in the “conservative/moderate” bloc. The swing vote was Anthony Crayton, a new African American councilor from Roxbury.

The “progressive-versus-conservative” labeling confused what was really going on. “What's a progressive? I'm more liberal than most of the progressives,” I said, pointing to my votes on homelessness, AIDS, and other issues. As I saw it, ideology wasn't driving the progressives. Political ambition was. Four of Maura's six wanted to be mayor. They assumed I did, too. (It was a safe assumption.) They knew the next council president might vault to acting mayor. And they did not want me to be the one.

Through the last weeks of 1992, Crayton came under pressure to vote for Maura. Black and Hispanic leaders had pushed the council to approve a new minority district in Jamaica Plain. But the chair of the Redistricting Committee, Jimmy Kelly of South Boston, opposed it. Kelly was one of my six. The Black Political Task Force put Crayton on notice: A vote for me as president was a vote for Kelly as chairman. “The decision Tony Crayton makes will almost certainly be a career decision,” said the president of the task force. “There will be a lot of progressive forces that will support another candidate for that seat.”

But Tony, a hardworking member of Ways and Means, was ambitious. He wanted to replace me as committee chair, believing he could advance minority interests from that post. The council president appoints the chairs. I didn't have to spell it out. If Tony backed me for president, I'd name him chair.

Hennigan thought that neither of us would get seven votes on the first ballot, giving her a chance to lure one of the three conservatives away from me. That strategy might have worked. The conservatives were livid with me for voting to override Ray Flynn's veto of a bill that required most city restaurants to install condom vending machines—this after I supported, opposed, and supported it again! My coalition almost broke down. “I'm really getting beat up,” I told a reporter, who wrote that I “seemed likely to lose” my bid for the presidency. One of the conservatives might have voted “present” to punish me, or held off for a ballot to see what Maura had to offer. But the progressives behind Maura barely talked to the conservatives. I listened to them and would work with them.

Respect—shown by hearing people out and disagreeing without being disagreeable—is a vanishing political virtue. When I was new on the council, and the papers would quote me criticizing the mayor, my father would call me up to complain: “Don't say things like that about the mayor. You have to show him some respect.” Carl Menino may have hated politics, but from him I learned the secret that kept my coalition together. Hours before the vote, the conservatives met behind closed doors and decided to go for me on the first ballot.

“It is heartening that a well-qualified candidate prevailed,” the
Globe
wrote of my 7–6 victory in an editorial titled “A Comer as Council President.” Black and Hispanic leaders who lumped me in with the “conservatives” could take comfort from these words in the editorial: “Since his district encompasses Hyde Park and Roslindale, two racially mixed neighborhoods, [Menino] has an acute sense of the changes that are transforming the city and a knack for reconciling newcomers and longtime residents.”

Maura was gracious in defeat. “It would have been wonderful to win, but it didn't happen,” she said. “You live to fight another day.” That would be a long time coming.

 

The neighbors crowded round for a block party in the Readville section. Neat little bungalows, cheek by jowl, emptied as hot dogs, pizza and soft drinks disappeared. The new mayor gave a Readville-is-now-on-the map speech, and he danced in the street with Angela while somebody's stereo blared Sinatra's “My Way.”

 

—from David Nyhan's column in the Boston Globe, July 20, 1993

 

In early March, Ray Flynn summoned me to the mayor's office. Bill Clinton had asked him to be U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. Should he take the job? “Mayor” (never “Ray”), I said, “some of us from the neighborhoods might get to be congressmen, but name anyone from South Boston or Hyde Park who ever got to be an ambassador. Take it.” Ray said he'd mull Rome over. His call came at 2:30 in the afternoon: “Go out and get some new suits; you're going to be acting mayor.”

“My whole life has changed in a matter of twenty-four hours,” I said to reporters during a flying visit with Ray to Doyle's, a politico haunt in Jamaica Plain. “What's important is not the political future of Tom Menino; it's the future of the city.”

Adrian Walker of the
Globe
wouldn't let me get away with that pious pose: “But even as he declared that government, not politics, comes first, Menino was moving to set up a campaign for November. While Menino worked his way around Doyle's—pressing the flesh in a crowd that seemed far more interested in Flynn—veteran political strategist Edward Jesser, a Menino friend for 25 years, was sequestered in the restaurant's office, recruiting campaign workers and planning fund-raising.”

I sent that clip to Ed Jesser and asked if it “rings a bell.” He wrote back, “I remember it well.” His recollection reads like a scene from
The Last Hurrah
, the classic novel about Boston politics, and politics everywhere:

 

I entered a few seconds before you to watch the crowd carefully. The place was mobbed. . . . Having spent the previous ten years as a regular of Doyle's, a stomping ground for Flynn, his senior staff, and Globies, I knew the crowd well. I was interested in those who barely acknowledged or ignored the current mayor but pressed close to and bestowed congratulations on Your Incipience. Our future campaign workers. I braced them, confirmed their liking of the future acting mayor and moved it from support to pledges with ease. You were standing ten feet away and they had to tell me they were not with you to avoid my little whirlpool. A difficult task if you had to or wished to curry the favorable opinion of the next mayor. . . . Adrian [Walker] caught me not long after in Eddie Burke's office using much of this information to enhance the Menino landslide, explain the train was leaving the station, preclude the anti-Menino idea of needing a meeting to decide on a favorite candidate, and, yes, begin arranging fund raisers. . . . It was a good day, a veritable wonderland for political operative and writer alike. . . . It rings a bell.

 

That was in March 1993. The U.S. Senate was scheduled to act on Ray's nomination in May. Everybody assumed he'd be sworn in quickly as ambassador and resign as mayor. Technically, he had until July 12. Any later than that and city law required that the special election in November be for the remaining two years of Ray's term, not for a full four-year term.

Ray blew hot and cold for weeks. He couldn't be any old ambassador to the Holy See. He had to bring his message of “social and economic justice” to the poor everywhere. Ray Flynn had to be ambassador to the world.

Rule-bound and bureaucratic, the State Department was overmatched with Ray, who as emperor of Boston made the rules. No such posting as roving ambassador exists, they told him. Then create one, Ray said.

While Ray fiddled, Boston politics burned. Six candidates declared for mayor: four members of the City Council, the sheriff of Suffolk County, and a state legislator from Dorchester. A former police commissioner and a former TV news anchor would soon join the mix. A marathon of seventy-six forums and debates stretching to the September preliminary election began. Often, we wound up talking to each other's sign holders. By the end I was so tired that, sitting through another candidate's speech for the fifty-seventh time, I dozed off and fell out of my chair.

The campaign was three months old when Ray called the six candidates to a hurry-up meeting at the Parkman House, the city-owned mansion on Beacon Hill, to deliver the bad news: He might stay on as mayor of Boston. Rome just wasn't working out. None of us could speak.

The next day the mayor made a dramatic announcement: He would go to Rome. Ray had used the Parkman House meeting to jam a decision out of State. To avoid weeks of damaging Ray-inspired leaks, it caved to most of his demands. We candidates were stage props in his play.

It was now June. I had hoped to be acting mayor. I could not talk the job. I had to be mayor to be elected mayor. That was my strategy. Ray was trashing it. Every day he hung on at City Hall was a day less to show my stuff.

Meanwhile, the voters had forgotten me. “Where Is Tom Menino?” a
Globe
headline inquired. Menino signs were “as rare as Red Sox victories.” I was “overshadowed” in a series of debates. I “laid an egg” doing stand-up at a comedy club. I was “a bit frayed in the syntax department.” A must-read columnist offered a backhanded compliment: “Tom Menino is no actor. He's built like a longshoreman, talks like a truck driver, and works like a mule.” Notices like that hurt my fundraising. They demoralized my volunteers. My campaign was going nowhere.

Then events began breaking my way. On the last day of June, Ray was confirmed as ambassador to the Holy See by the Senate. On July 9 Ray was sworn in by Vice President Al Gore. Ray had until five
P.M.
on the twelfth to resign.

 

How did I stay sane that day in City Hall? Ray and his wife, Cathy, were booked on an evening flight to Rome—but Ray was missing. His staff did not know where he was. His police detail was in the dark. A friend reported seeing him slip out of the building in his running clothes.

In my fifth-floor council office, we awaited Ray's return.

We—Angela, my two kids, my brother, some friends, and the journalist Dave Nyhan, the one who said I worked like a mule—spent the time nervously reminiscing while Ray took his last run as mayor through the neighborhoods. Good thing Boston was only forty-four square miles.

I recalled my father's reaction to the big news of a decade before:

 

ME
: I'm gonna run for City Council.

CARL
: You got two children and a wife to support. What if you lose?

ME
: Dad, I won't lose.

CARL
: Give me a break! You're gonna win?

ME
: Dad, I'm gonna win.

 

Angela remembered being miserable during that first race in 1983. She'd been with me through two lost jobs. There was no guarantee my old job at the State House would be waiting for me. I was over forty. Most men were secure in their careers by then. I was
trying
to start over. True, the kids were grown, and she had a good job as a bookkeeper. With her salary we could cover the note on our $35,000 house. But we'd relied on my job for health insurance. And neither of us could expect much of a pension. I knew all that, but she knew the details of every dollar spent and made sure they always stretched far enough. She also knew how much I liked to shop, and eat. Not wanting to dampen my spirits, she kept her thoughts to herself.