Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (7 page)

Given my own policy preferences, I would have been very happy if the liberals had been right about majority opinion. But after three years working with an electorate consisting mostly of working-and middle-class citizens, I knew they weren’t. Yes, people wanted more and better government services. But they did not support the significant reallocation of society’s resources necessary to bring this about. My appreciation of the point was strengthened by the wisdom of two tough-minded Boston politicians.

In a meeting with Fred Langone, the city councillor who had rebuked me for seeking to justify the hiring of my sister, I criticized the residents of the city’s Hyde Park section. They had pressed the mayor to build a public swimming pool in the area, and he had agreed. When work began, we received complaints about the construction noise and the flow of trucks removing excavated material and bringing in concrete. “What do people expect?” I asked Langone in an injured voice. “How do they expect us to build a pool without doing the things they are upset about?”

He was unsympathetic. “Hey, kid,” he lectured me, “ain’t you heard the news? Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

State representative John Melia’s lesson came when I asked him to support a bill that would allow the city to tax some of the tax-exempt property within its borders; there were many such properties and they benefited from city services without being assessed any property taxes. Melia declined. “Pal, you know I’m a great friend of the mayor,” he explained, “and I help him whenever I can. But I have a rule for staying alive in this business. Vote for every program, and vote against every tax increase, and the people will love you.”

In those years, incident after incident revealed to me that broad programs for social and economic transformation had little appeal to most voters, black, white, or Hispanic. Two days after the murder of Dr. King, I was entering city hall for a morning meeting with leaders of the black community when I was confronted by a dozen or so picketers. They were protesting the city’s response to the assassination and insisting that the police presence in black neighborhoods be removed. As I argued with them, Dan Richardson, who had been elected to chair the community board of Boston’s Model Cities program, heard me, leaned out the window—this was the old city hall, which had windows that opened—and told me to get upstairs for our meeting and stop wasting time with those people. The agenda of the community representatives had little in common with their self-appointed advocates downstairs.

At the time, I often heard echoes of the argument I had resisted in Mississippi—that African Americans did not want integration into white middle-class society; they wanted to create and run their own institutions. The issue was now discussed in terms of “community control” of the organs of city government in minority neighborhoods. For a small number of the most militant, the call for community control was in fact a demand for a form of separatism: They wanted a semiautonomous black-run operation to perform city services, with funding provided from general city revenues. But it soon became clear that the majority of the “community” had no great interest in taking over snow removal, street paving, park maintenance, or most other activities. What they did want—understandably—was greater influence over those government activities where they felt victimized by racially driven mistreatment. In the case of public housing, for example, black tenants and their allies believed that drastic action was necessary to break the plantation mentality manifested by the Housing Authority chairman I quoted earlier. When White agreed to give tenants a bigger role in running their housing developments, the offer was voted down by white residents of the city’s largest project, Columbia Point, but eagerly accepted by the black tenant population of the Bromley Heath project.

The best illustration of the distinction between “community control” as a utopian endeavor and as a defense against mistreatment lies in the concept’s application to two major agencies. Overwhelmingly, African Americans wanted much more involvement in running the police department, especially in their neighborhoods. But no one ever demanded similar control over the fire department, because no one saw a discriminatory pattern in its operation. (There was unhappiness over the dearth of black firefighters, but no one asserted that this meant less attention was given to fires in buildings inhabited by minorities.)

What the radicals failed to appreciate was that most voters would support change only if they could be persuaded it was very much in their self-interest—and as
they
perceived their self-interest, not as it appeared in some idealist’s model. Even those at the lower end of the scale were often afraid that they would lose what little they had in a radical shift in societal arrangements. Two hundred years ago, Jeremy Bentham explained why his advocacy of “the greatest good for the greatest number” did not call for socialism—leveling, as it was then known. A person’s pain in losing something, he asserted, is usually greater than the pleasure someone else experiences in benefiting from that loss. This principle helps explain why both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama faced so much popular opposition to their plans to extend health care coverage, and why efforts to redistribute income by raising taxes rarely gain sufficient support from those who would benefit from them.

While I was confirmed in my belief that left-wing theorists had overestimated the appeal of radical change, I had to acknowledge as well that I had overestimated the beneficence of government as it existed. In many realms, official action has disproportionately negative effects on those bereft of income and political influence. The revelation did not come from the vitriolic denunciation of poor people by officials at the Housing Authority. It was William McGrath, the respected, well-meaning transportation planner, who shocked me into recognizing the long reach of “institutional racism,” which should more accurately, if awkwardly, be designated “institutional classism.”

The government decisions in question were not motivated by animus against blacks, Hispanics, or poor people. The victims of such decisions whom I would later represent in Fall River and New Bedford were overwhelmingly white and working-class. Rather, the decisions were the consequence of public officials following the path of least resistance in issuing waste disposal permits, installing infrastructure, zoning for industrial use, siting high-rise commercial buildings, or locating facilities for people in need of treatment or confinement. But the absence of bad motives in no way alleviates the bad effects. Trying to educate well-meaning people—including many of my fellow liberals—about the need to correct this harmful tendency has been a part of my self-appointed mission ever since.

Even though the White years demonstrated that creating a fairer society would be harder than I expected, they did not lead me to despair. White’s successful effort to avert rioting after the King assassination and our subsequent steps toward racial fairness earned him the support and gratitude of African Americans. This support could not be explained solely in terms of solid accomplishments. Given the limited jurisdiction and resources of city government, there was only so much we could do about African Americans’ economic disadvantages. The city bureaucracy also proved difficult to change. Entrenched officials and employees often resisted the mayor’s efforts to provide basic services more fairly and efficiently. But the mayor still deserved praise. His forthright acknowledgment that racial discrimination was common, his appointment of African Americans to important city positions, and his visibility in black neighborhoods—a first for a Boston mayor—counted for a lot.

Although these actions came at little if any cost to the white majority, they nonetheless generated angry criticism. When white voters wielded the “Mayor Black” epithet, they were expressing a perception of neglect. White himself, a superb politician, recognized this early on and sought to show equal concern for the sensibilities of whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, who were receiving recognition from city government for the first time. But too many of Boston’s whites regarded mayoral respect as a zero-sum game pitting themselves against the black population.

*

When I moved to Washington in 1971, I recognized that I was giving up my planned scholarly career. If I’d been forced to admit I was not very good at scholarship before I had served Kevin White, I would have been unhappy. But now I had an alternative line of work that I valued and enjoyed.

As I’ve mentioned, Harrington’s strong opposition to the Vietnam War was especially gratifying. When the war began, I was skeptical of its supporters’ domino theory, the idea that if South Vietnam fell, so would its neighbors. But I fully supported keeping the 1960s version of communism from extending its hold over an additional tens of millions of people. We had done that in Korea, and while the South Korean government was repressive, it was never as bad as its northern neighbor, and it was on the way toward democracy. As time passed and the moral and pragmatic cases for the war in Vietnam became harder to make, I had to keep my anger at antiwar militants’ tactics from affecting my view of their cause. My view of the war was also affected by my continued support for President Johnson’s domestic agenda, and by my close association with Mayor White, whose need for federal assistance argued against vehement denunciation of the administration’s major foreign policy effort. After Nixon was elected in 1968, antiwar sentiment became easier for many Democrats. Partisanship was now boosting antiwar feelings rather than retarding them.

In Washington, I found that while Nixon and Agnew preached social conservatism to great political advantage, their administration was an activist one in economic affairs. At the time, support for a larger public sector remained very strong. It’s frequently noted that Nixon proposed policy changes in health care and welfare that congressional Democrats rejected as too conservative, only to settle for less years later. The administration’s use of wage and price controls to steer the economy was perhaps even more notable. These measures accompanied Nixon’s decision to take the United States off the gold standard. He engineered this major shift in the management of our currency with the help of his secretary of the treasury, John Connally, himself a champion of vigorous governmental action.

In one area of public policy that is central to liberal concerns today, the Nixon administration was the first to play a significant role. Under the auspices of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration did pick up where his cousin Theodore had left off in promoting conservation. But to contemporary environmentalists, some of the proudest New Deal successes—the Tennessee Valley Authority and several large dams—are mistakes to be corrected. It was only under Nixon that the government took on the new missions embodied in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. These were most fervently pushed by congressional Democrats, but with considerable Republican support. Nixon not only acquiesced in these efforts but also appointed enthusiastic advocates to run newly established agencies.

One critical aspect of the Clean Air Act was the restrictions on lead, which I cited earlier as one of the best examples of effective government policy we have seen. Its partner, the Lead-Based Poisoning Prevention Act, was also signed into law by Nixon.

For all of his unexpected actions that we applauded, we were still eager to see Nixon go. Happily for me, I agreed with Harrington’s decision to support Maine senator Ed Muskie for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Muskie was one of the most effective liberals in the Senate. He and Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin were considered Congress’s best environmental advocates, and even before arriving in Washington, I had volunteered to help his campaign. The first of these efforts involved representing Muskie’s interests at an Al Lowenstein–inspired Dump Nixon rally in Providence, Rhode Island. Before the rally, I met separately with its fervent antiwar organizers, some of whom still resented Muskie for running on Hubert Humphrey’s ticket in 1968, and with the leaders of the much more conservative Rhode Island Democratic establishment. That meeting took place in the hotel suite maintained by Providence’s mayor, Joseph Doorley.

“This is a great layout, Joe,” one of the statewide officeholders noted. “What’s the price?”

“Price?” the mayor responded with a wolfish grin (a phrase I had previously encountered in novels and until then thought was an example of excessively melodramatic writing). “To he who assesses?” Rarely has a question been so conclusively answered by another question.

In January 1972, Harrington gave me an unpaid leave to go to Ohio and help Governor John Gilligan pick the delegates for the Muskie slate to the Democratic convention that summer. By the time I returned to Washington, it was clear that a deep disenchantment with the war and those held responsible for it was sweeping Democratic ranks. Muskie’s once-inevitable nomination was rapidly falling victim to George McGovern’s moral crusade.

The passionate McGovernites were suspicious of Muskie supporters such as Mayor White. Indeed, when McGovern decided to anoint White his vice presidential candidate at the upcoming party convention, the Massachusetts McGovern delegation, which had beaten the Muskie slate in our primary, rebelled against its own native son. As a result, McGovern had to make another choice: the ill-fated Senator Thomas Eagleton.

Harrington’s strong antiwar stand immunized him from rising antiestablishment sentiment, and his reelection seemed assured. But his district had been Republican for close to a century. He also had a penchant for controversy—he once voted present on a Happy Birthday resolution for Harry Truman to protest the waste of congressional time. As a result, we couldn’t take anything for granted.

When I accepted Harrington’s job offer, I promised to stay with him through his reelection campaign. But my promise to remain at his side became awkward when I got another career-changing phone call. It was from Steve and Shelley Cohen, two then-married friends with whom I had worked in the White administration. They urged me to return to Massachusetts and run for state representative in the seat about to be vacated by the moderate Republican Maurice Frye.