Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (5 page)

This was my first experience of full-time campaigning. My short attention span and disinclination to plan ahead turned out to be great assets in this atmosphere. In fact, my impatience in face-to-face dealings, which can be a handicap, suited White perfectly. We could communicate rapidly with little small talk. The campaign succeeded. White beat Hicks, decisively but not overwhelmingly. I prepared at long last to write what I was beginning to fear was a phantom thesis.

Then came another phone call. This time it was the mayor-elect, who asked me to meet him. The Saturday after the election I was attending a National Young Democrats convention at a hotel in Boston. We were discussing a project initiated by Al Lowenstein to “Dump Johnson” and nominate someone else for president in 1968. White picked me up at the hotel and drove me out to suburban Wellesley, where we talked while his son played hockey. He surprised me by insisting that I come to work in the new administration in January.

I remember my precise reaction: “Wow!” That is “wow” as opposed to “hooray” or “damn.” The mayor-elect wanted me to be his chief of staff. The good news was that this was not the kind of political job I had hoped to have—it was a much bigger one. The bad news was that I still had a Ph.D. to complete, and I was scared.

I had never considered what it would be like to hold a job that was the focus of so much day-to-day media attention. There were no instances anywhere in America—or in the world, for that matter—of known homosexuals occupying prominent positions in public life. The closest I could think of was Walter Jenkins, one of President Johnson’s most important aides, who had been caught by the police in a homosexual act in a Washington, D.C., YMCA during the 1964 campaign. He was not only fired but also immediately became a nonperson. President Johnson’s first public response featured his volunteered assurance that he had spent the previous night in bed with Lady Bird.

The risk of exposure was not the only intimidating factor. More important was my worry that the job White sketched out was beyond my capabilities. I had never administered anything more complicated than the Institute of Politics programs, and, as noted, the McNamara debacle had not built up my self-confidence.

So I told White that I would not accept the offer, citing my dissertation as the primary reason. Serendipitously for the mayor-elect, the chair of the Harvard Government Department, Samuel Huntington, was his friend, neighbor, and political ally. “We’ll get Sam to give you a deadline extension of a few years,” he confidently and accurately predicted. He added, “You can then write a great thesis on your experiences at the highest level of city government.”

White had taken advantage of my negotiating mistake—a type of mistake I would learn to avoid committing in the future. Whenever you give someone a reason for a decision that is not your real reason, you leave yourself vulnerable. If your ostensible objection is resolved, you have no recourse to your true but hidden objections.

Thus deprived of my dissertation argument, I had to confess that I was afraid of failure—perhaps I was not the skillful, high-level political operative I seemed. White’s response was irrefutable.

“You want me to be an effective liberal mayor,” he said, “making a lot of changes in a conservative city and a conservative government. The people I’ve had with me in the secretary of state’s office are good guys, but not many of them share your agenda, and without some new blood, I won’t be able to be the kind of mayor you want me to be. If you walk away to be a professor, and because you’re too nervous about how you’ll do, don’t come complaining to me in six months when I haven’t been able to move the way you want me to.”

Case closed. If I was truly committed to racial, economic, and social progress, how could I justify—to myself—ducking this challenge for personal reasons? So I said yes, on the condition that Sam Huntington deliver my extension. He did—an unlimited one. I understand this to mean that I am still entitled to submit a thesis and receive a doctorate. Whether that’s truly the case is a question that is in no danger of ever being answered.

2

CITY HALL

My work for Mayor White began immediately, and to my great relief, I soon came to believe that I would not disgrace myself on the job. White’s closest political friend was the state treasurer, Robert Crane, a shrewd, insightful man whose amiability led people to underestimate him. When I was late to a meeting, Crane had said, “Wait. Where’s the fat Jewish kid?” Not even a wholly complimentary comment could have been more welcome.

At the same time, I was under no illusion that anyone’s solicitude would extend to my sexuality. Bob Crane became a close friend, before and after I came out of the closet, but in those days, there is no chance he would have insisted on the participation of “the fat Jewish gay kid.” Just a few months later, I heard White and Crane mock Truman Capote, whom one of them had seen on a talk show, for being such a screaming fag. My consolation prize was my recognition that they would not have spoken that way in my presence had they any suspicion about me.

By January, White had outlined my responsibilities. As his executive assistant, I would sit just outside his office and serve as his agent in dealing with the problems, complaints, and crises that arose from the basic functioning of city government. This would be emotionally draining work. I was in the grief business. If there was no problem, I was not needed. When problems arose, I had to find solutions—or at least ameliorations. Harry Truman’s description of the presidency actually applied to my work as the mayor’s surrogate: “The president,” Truman said, “is a glorified public relations man who spends his time kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”

As I saw it, I had made an implicit deal with the mayor. I would deflect flak for him and help him provide basic city services, and in return I would have more leverage to promote liberal policies. But I soon came to value the first part of the bargain for its own sake. Winning arguments and achieving great social advances were important parts of the job. At least as important were a range of everyday tasks that were essential for the quality of our lives but that the private sector at its most productive and efficient would not undertake.

From the time I was seventeen, I realized, I had lived in the sheltered atmosphere of the university, where snow removal, police protection, and sanitation work were automatically carried out by a reasonably efficient bureaucracy, with no need for debate. I had taken these services entirely for granted. Now I was partially responsible for seeing that they got done.

To my pleasant surprise, I was good at it. I ran political interference for administrators, refereed disputes among them, listened to public grievances, pushed the bureaucracy to respond and, not least, helped the press secretary explain all of this to the media.

As it turned out, there was a close connection between this work and my interest in making society less unequal. While even the city’s richest residents needed well-paved streets and an efficient fire department, it is also true that the less money people have, the more they depend on publicly provided services. Improving those services improves their quality of life. Moreover, wealth and political influence are inevitably correlated, and when resources for public services are scarce, the lower-income areas usually suffer first—especially those largely populated by minorities. In working to overcome such disparities, I was also working to pull the mayor toward the left. The progressive mission was not just about advancing certain policies on racial integration, income distribution, and other issues. It was also about making sure basic public services were supplied as they should be.

At the time, urban liberalism was at its zenith. Two other mayors had been elected with great national publicity on the same day that White won. Carl Stokes of Cleveland was very close in age to White. He was also the first African American mayor of a large city. Joseph Alioto in San Francisco did not share their youth—he was fifty-one—but he was one of America’s best, and best-known, trial lawyers. Not surprisingly, Alioto and Stokes were both very much on the progressive side. It was less clear that the mayor of the more socially conservative Boston would share their views. But he did. The three were frequently featured as harbingers of a new, pragmatic liberal approach to urban government. White would soon join several other big-city mayors in traveling road shows that pressed the national government for greater support for cities and the low-income people who lived in them. (By that time, New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay had gotten into political trouble, and we spent some time trying to differentiate ourselves from him. I was quoted as saying he had given good intentions a bad name.)

Given White’s victory over an outspokenly bigoted opponent, race would inevitably top his agenda. But the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., three months into the administration elevated the issue even higher, both morally and politically. The mayor received word of King’s death while he was watching
Gone With the Wind
at a local theater. That night, a riot broke out in the predominantly black neighborhood of Roxbury, and the very next night, James Brown was scheduled to perform at the Boston Garden, which raised the prospect of further rioting.

Discussing the concert, White initially expressed puzzlement that a football player—he was thinking of the fullback Jim Brown—would have that kind of appeal. I must acknowledge that I was not one of those in a position to correct him. The mayor also said he wanted to cancel the concert. But Boston’s one black city councillor, Thomas Atkins, later general counsel of the NAACP, and members of the mayor’s staff advised that it should go on. White immediately accepted Atkins’s opinion and then persuaded the local public television station to broadcast the show. As a result, the city did not need to worry about thousands of black and white young people streaming into and out of the Garden. Instead, most of those young people stayed home to watch. To help keep people indoors, the broadcast was repeated immediately after it concluded.

Soon after, White convened Boston’s business establishment to formulate a program that would direct housing, jobs, and other services to the city’s African American population. The business leaders also agreed to provide $100,000 that White could use to address immediate needs. Due to my troubleshooting responsibilities, and the good relations I had with the city’s black leadership, I was put in charge of the checkbook.

The money soon came in handy. When a black family was attacked by whites in the mostly white area of Dorchester, they called the local Black Panthers for protection, and the police responded by confiscating the Panthers’ weapons and filing charges against a member of the group. The city’s lawyers persuaded the police to drop the charges, but on the day of the Panthers’ scheduled court appearance, I received an anguished phone call. It was from Jeep Jones, a youth worker greatly admired by young black men whom White had hired to head up the city’s Youth Activities Commission. He explained that the Panthers would not agree to the settlement unless their rifles were returned to them. Police officials drew the line at this, and White’s testy relations with the police commissioner—whom he had tried unsuccessfully to fire—kept him from overruling them. My solution was to tell Jones that we would provide funds to buy the Panthers replacement guns—although I did ask him to price the weapons himself, lest we be overcharged. Even back then, $100,000 was not a huge amount. I am relieved to add that there was never any sign that the rifles were used to shoot anybody.

White showed his liberal bona fides in other realms as well. The city boycotted grapes in solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers and took early pro-environmental steps (the first Earth Day was held during White’s third year in office). On his own initiative, White pioneered the appointment of women to high office. Among these was my sister Ann Lewis. Following the King assassination, Ann had volunteered to help organize our response to the flood of incoming mail and phone calls. Impressed by her positive effect on my work, White decided to make Ann my deputy. Sensitive to the charge of nepotism, which was considered a bad thing in the circles I’d previously traveled, I started to explain to City Councillor Fred Langone that it had been entirely White’s decision. “Don’t you dare apologize,” he interrupted me. “If you can’t take care of your own in this business, what good are you?” Ann did not remain my assistant long. As White began contemplating a role in national politics, he soon promoted her to be one of his top political aides.

In 1969, the Stonewall upheaval shook New York as gays protested police harassment, marking the unofficial beginning of the “gay rights movement.” But sexual minorities remained largely peripheral to Boston’s politics. So I was somewhat surprised that year when a self-identified gay man—at the time, one of the few I had ever met—came to my office to complain of police brutality at a gay bar. I was eager to follow up, both because I wanted very much to respond to the complaint as a public official and because this struck me as an opportunity to meet other gay men, which up until that point I had not been able to do. I asked him to set up a meeting with the victims so I could get the information I needed. Unfortunately, the man never called me back, and no other complaints from the gay and lesbian community came to my attention.

I was disappointed. My experience was that if I presented a plausible case of police misconduct, especially if I could identify the officers involved, the department would investigate, report back to me that nothing untoward had occurred, but privately reprimand those involved and order them not to repeat the behavior. (I learned this from friendly sources—some police officials wanted good relations with the mayor’s office.)

With our large concentration of colleges and universities, Boston was a center of antiwar activity. One of my main responsibilities was to work with law enforcement to maintain the right to demonstrate peacefully and keep the police from overreacting when protesters were unruly. This was not as difficult as many thought. The police supervisors I worked with, Warren Blair and Charles Barry, were fully willing to show flexibility. Their greatest difficulty, they told me, was imposing restraint on police officers when demonstrators viciously insulted their wives and mothers. We successfully avoided the police violence that had marred the Chicago Democratic convention and the student occupation of Columbia University without ceding control of the city’s public places to disrupters.