What It Takes (128 page)

After Board meetings, the other Young Turks would sit down to lunch, plan the next week’s mischief. They’d laugh about the old “Hoosiers” on the Board. (South to a certain line, those people had been in the city for years—they were Hoosierocracy; a bit farther out lived the Hoosieoisie; and way out, with the pickups and three-wheelers, were the Hoosietariat.) Those Friday lunches were a cackling self-congratulation for all they’d put over on the old farts ... hah! Never knew what hit ’em!

But the real action went down the next day—Saturdays, 10:00
A.M.,
coffee and doughnuts in the Treasurer’s offices. No one knew about it. City Hall was closed, and the guards would only let certain people in. No blacks. Few Aldermen. Nongovernment guys had to bring the doughnuts—the guy from Laclede Gas, the guy from Southwestern Bell... Midge Berra was the boss ... Louie Buckowitz from the Tenth Ward, Sam Kennedy from the Eighteenth ... and Dick was the only Young Turk who could come.

In ’73, the Young Turks ganged up against the Mayor, Cervantes. They backed the City Comptroller, John Poelker, a straight arrow, a white knight ... it was a risk, they rolled the dice—and they won. They made John Poelker the Mayor. They’d knocked off the boss ... and Gephardt had run the campaign.

A year after that, they were talking up Gephardt for Mayor. Hell, he had backing all over town, he had ideas, he had energy. And he wanted to get something done—
now
.

Some of Dick’s old friends—his cousin, Joe Kochanski, for instance—used to tell him: Don’t rush in. The Mayor’s job was a dead end, a citywide headache, a mess ... and for what? ... Wait a few years, something better would come along.

Dick would nod, and go right on. If something better came along, that was fine. The one thing he wasn’t going to do was wait. He was going to do something—
now
. What Joe didn’t understand—what none of them seemed to understand—it could all be gone, tomorrow ... like
that
!

The point was, Dick could do something
now
. Things were changing in the city, in the country. After all of Nixon’s troubles—Agnew, Colson, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, CREEPs, Plumbers, and all the rest—the voters wanted something new... fresh faces, untainted, people they could trust. (There was a man named Carter, saying the same in Iowa.)

The point was, after Watergate, Gephardt knew his time had come.

The point was, after Matt, Dick’s time was always ...
now
.

A
FTER WATERGATE, IT WAS
a wonderful time to be a reform-minded Democrat. The clean would inherit the earth! ... And there was no one cleaner than Michael Dukakis—or readier to seize the day.

He had started again on his trips around the state. The earnest evenings in the living rooms, the drives through the darkness ... they were just part of life now. For the first time, Michael had staff—young men pounding the highways, building the card files for reform.

He created Dukakis’s Raiders, modeled after Nader’s Raiders in Washington. Michael’s young issue wonks would investigate state agencies, like the Outdoor Advertising Board, or the Massachusetts Port Authority, to make sure the Commonwealth was being served cleanly, rationally ... and, of course, it didn’t hurt if Michael’s name cropped up, from time to time, in the newspapers.

Or his face on TV. ... He met a man named Greg Harney, a producer for public TV, who had helped to create
The Advocates
, a weekly PBS issues forum about disputes in the news. The show was set up like a courtroom, with an audience, and a panel of experts “testifying” from the liberal and conservative sides. In 1972, Harney was hunting a new moderator to introduce the topic and the experts, to keep the discussion on track ... and he recruited Dukakis.

Well, it was a political godsend—weekly, prime-time identification with the issues that mattered most. There was Michael, earnest, intense (power of brain—like a young Rod Serling) ... keeping company with Senators, Secretaries of the Cabinet, professors, and political thinkers ... and
he never had to lake a position
. He was somehow above positions—the embodiment of fair-minded reason.

Just as he was, when Watergate took over the
Globe
’s front page, a well-known public-interest Raider ... the personification of good government.

Just as he was, heading into 1974, the best-organized Democrat in the state of Massachusetts.

Dukakis was organized before he knew what he was organizing for. When Michael hosted his first meetings on Perry Street, back in 1972, he still had in mind to run again for Attorney General. He was sure the incumbent, Quinn, was going to make the jump to the Governor’s campaign. But Quinn refused to tip his hand. He’d announce his plans when he was good and ready ... very confident was Quinn—he had the boys on Beacon Hill lined up behind him. So Fran Meaney devised a plan to
force
Quinn to make the jump.

Michael would start making noise—about the
Governor’s
race! Quinn would
have
to jump in, lest Michael get a head start. Then Michael could drop down and gracefully accede to run for AG ... very clever.

Except Quinn wouldn’t jump. Michael’s out there, talking Governor ... his toe, and then, his
whole foot
in the water ... and still Quinn wouldn’t jump!

But a funny thing happened—other people jumped. Reformers, do-goods—they wanted to help. (They even sent money.) They loved it!

And nobody laughed. The
Globe
called Dukakis a serious candidate. The neighborhood groups, who loved him for fighting the roads ... the East Boston people, who hated the Port Authority ... the consumer types who recalled Dukakis’s no-fault bill... and, of course, antimachine insurgents all over the state—they all said it was time they had an alternative.

Michael Dukakis should be
Governor
!

And that’s what everybody thought, in those meetings in his living room—especially the guy at the front of the room.

MIKE DUKAKIS SHOULD BE GOVERNOR. ...
That was actually the slogan—a bit peremptory, perhaps ... but Michael thought no one could disagree. Actually, it was meant to be part of a larger ad campaign—tied in with his issues:

The Port Authority should work for the people ... Mike Dukakis Should Be Governor ...

People should have decent housing ... Mike Dukakis Should Be Governor.

Like that ... but it ended up, there was no money for the ads. Michael’s campaign never had that kind of money. (Smart money was all with Quinn, who finally did declare for Governor, after Michael.) Michael couldn’t even vet the checks overnight, to send back the dirty ones. His Campaign Manager, Joe Grandmaison, insisted: if those donations didn’t get to the bank today, Michael’s own checks would bounce all over the state.

Grandmaison was Michael’s first professional Campaign Manager. He’d made his name, in 1972, as McGovern’s (and Gary Hart’s) man in New Hampshire. Of course, Michael wasn’t for McGovern. (He was a Muskie man!) ... But he signed up Grandmaison in ’73, and reluctantly agreed to a salary of twenty thousand a year.

That’s about all Michael spent. Through a bitter two-year primary campaign, Dukakis’s media expenses were only twenty-four thousand—statewide. And through all but a month of that long march, Quinn was ahead in the polls, confident he’d take Michael to the cleaners in the September primary. Quinn had the big pols, a big name, money ... and the logic of one immutable fact: he was an Irishman.

But he was also the perfect foil for a Michael Dukakis morality play: old-guard Irish, slap-on-the-back, job-for-a-friend ... politics as ever it was in Massachusetts. Quinn could feel no new wind.

Michael was stumping the state, promising to rid the State House of the “cancer” of patronage. He released five years of his tax returns, which proclaimed his frugal cleanliness. He promised an administration so rational, so efficient, that state voters could finally escape the cycle of deficits, followed by tax hikes, followed by deficits. ...

No new taxes!

How could Quinn answer that?

Well, for months, he didn’t even try. Even after the race drew even—near Labor Day—Quinn refused to debate Dukakis. Quinn thought if he could hold the Irish ... and Italians (his wife was Italian) ... well, how could he lose?

But Dukakis was winning the Italians from the shore towns, promising to stop the Port Authority from eating away at their neighborhoods.

How could Quinn answer that? His old buddy, Ed King, was the head of the Port Authority.

Then Dukakis went at Quinn’s record as AG, implying there was something shady about the way he administered federal law enforcement grants.

And at last (just as new polls showed Dukakis ahead for the first time), Quinn went nuclear. One week before the primary, he put ads on TV, accusing Dukakis of favoring abortion. And then he dropped leaflets in Boston, accusing Dukakis of backing busing. (Hey, he voted for the Racial Imbalance Law!)

What he did was play into Michael’s hands.

Michael got
free
TV time to denounce Quinn’s last-minute smears ... dirty tricks! (Nixon, though departed, was still on the mind.)

“This,” Michael intoned, “is
the kinda hack politics
that has been hurting the state for forty years.”

No one could do righteous indignation like Dukakis.

Quinn withdrew the ads, but it was too late. He had allowed the campaign to become a referendum on political morality. He had revealed himself as exemplar of the politics that Michael was born to displace.

The Sunday before the vote, President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Voters in Massachusetts were disgusted—an obvious deal!

Monday, the
Globe
withheld comment on most candidates, but singled out Dukakis as worthy of support. (Michael was not like a candidate, by that time. He was nothing less than the new wind itself.)

Tuesday, Dukakis beat Quinn in a landslide, by more than a hundred thousand votes.

After that, he could have just shut up and won. The
Globe
’s first poll of the general election showed Michael ahead by eighteen percent.

And the Democratic Party was uniting as never before. By grace of God, Michael was blessed with a Lieutenant Governor nominee who was Irish—an O’Neill! ... In fact. Tommy O’Neill was the eldest son of Tip O’Neill, Majority Leader of the U.S. House and the best-loved star in the old-guard cosmos. That meant Tip and Tommy would whip up the hoary machine, even as Michael cried reform.

You couldn’t dream it up any better.

Withal, even for the liberal Frank Sargent, this was a lousy year to be an incumbent Republican. It wasn’t just Watergate—or the pardon!—though that was bad enough. ... Before he vacated the White House, Richard Nixon had punished Massachusetts (the only state to vote for McGovern) by closing
five
military bases. The end of the war in Vietnam stripped the state of megamillions in defense contracts. The Arab oil embargo had stuck the voters in gas lines, raised heating bills by fifty percent, caused a horrific recession that drove unemployment toward ten percent.

People were hurting, and they were pissed off.

But, of course, Michael wouldn’t shut up.

He thought he knew—he was
sure
he knew—the cause of the inflation, unemployment, the terrible business climate: it was not Arab oil, not Nixon, not the plunging dollar—no. It was ... inefficiency in the State House!

“It is,” Michael told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, “the utter failure of state government to manage itself effectively and responsibly.”

Of course, he was trying to stick it to Sargent, but really ... what was the point?

The point was, Sargent was not Michael Dukakis.

Michael promised that he—being him—could wring
$100 million
out of state budgets and thereby make good his vow, “No new taxes.”

Sargent said that was preposterous. What was Michael going to cut? (Here was Sargent, the Republican, talking compassion for the hard-pressed poor. And Michael running like a Yankee Republican.) Dukakis insisted, he wouldn’t have to cut anything (he wasn’t going to lose the liberals—they thought he was one of them). No! Better management! Efficiency!
Ekonomia!
A hundred million was less than three percent of the budget. No one could tell Michael he wasn’t smart enough to find three percent.

In the last month, it came clear to all the knowing men of the State House that the next Governor was going to have to find a lot more than a hundred million—just to tread water. With a recession, people out of work, welfare and social service expenses were shooting through the roof. Tax collections were falling. The state was bleeding red ink.

Sargent couldn’t admit that. He’d have to concede that he’d failed to manage. And Michael
would not
admit it: he’d have to go back on his boast that he could manage away the problem. No new taxes!

The
Globe
asked him, point blank:

No taxes? Are you serious?

Serious was Michael’s middle name.

Lead-pipe guarantee?

Absolutely. He’d close the deficit in the first six months!

Michael could smell triumph now. He was galloping toward it—on his high horse. In a letter to the Governor, he offered to meet Sargent personally to work out details for the final debates. “... But not at the State House, and not on the public’s time.”

When Sargent misreported a $40,000 loan from his wife to his campaign, Michael said that reminded him of Watergate. (At the same time, he was denouncing Sargent for running a “scurrilous” campaign.)

Michael was so sure he bestrode the highest, purest moral axis ... well Sargent was
prima facie
sleazy—just for contesting the election! And so sure was Michael that reason and decency were on the march, he actually agreed to take a $10,000 loan—personally—to fund the last week of his campaign.

When Grandmaison got to Michael’s room in the 57 Hotel, on election night, that was the first question Michael asked:

“Did you pay back the loan?”

“Yeah.”