The Life and Times of Kevin White

The Life and Times of Kevin White - Politicus #1,098

Kevin White in a Southie parade in 1960 with an inset of his campaign sign.

By D. A. Mittel, Duxbury Clipper

His like will not soon pass this way again

My recollections of the late Boston Mayor Kevin White begin in 1960 with Edward W. Brooke's dramatic seaplane landing in Duxbury Bay. Brooke was running for Secretary of State as a Republican after encountering racism in the Democratic Party in Boston's Ward 11. White was the convention-endorsed Democratic candidate.

After landing, Brooke's pilot called the Duxbury Yacht Club by ship-to-shore requesting a launch. The dock boys were trained that the launch Garvey was strictly for members or visitors from other clubs with reciprocal arrangements with the DYC. Captain Norman White, who supervised the dock boys, called Ben Lawson, a senior member of the club, to get advice.

Lawson replied that Mr. Brooke was to be granted every courtesy of the club. The Garvey left the Basin and returned twenty minutes later with the candidate.

Ed Brooke stepped onto the float with a wave and shook hands all around. As he strode toward the clubhouse he patted children on the head – there was swimming off the floats in those days. Duxbury Clipper publisher John Cutler, Brooke's later biographer, called him the most charismatic man he ever met.

He won the day but lost the election. Kevin White's house signs that year read, “Vote White.”

Brooke would be elected attorney general in 1962 and to the first of two terms in the U.S. Senate in 1966. In 1967, Secretary White, just elected to a fourth term, ran for mayor of Boston. The leading candidates were Louise Day Hicks, Edward Logue, Republican John Sears and White. If there were anything a secretary of state should know it was nomination papers. But White's were a mess. Logue, head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority and Mayor John Collins' chosen successor, challenged the signatures – a fatal blunder when it failed to get White off the ballot.

White asserted a breach of democratic process, got sympathy, and finished second to Hicks in the preliminary election. Hicks had discovered the political power of race-baiting since her election to the Boston School Committee as a “reformer” in 1961. Boston's leaders, including its newspapers, properly rallied to White, who was elected by just 12,000 votes.

Governor Michael Dukakis with Mayor Kevin White and Kitty Dukakis in 1975.White was an articulate gentleman who had attended Tabor Academy and Williams College. If he bullied people he did not do so publicly, as the current Boston mayor notoriously does. He was also a rarity in that he had friends among fellow politicians. He conversed with a Mike Dukakis – a rival to his own ambitions – as if they were sitting in easy chairs in front of a fire -- two friends shooting the breeze. The later notion that he was a “loner in love with his city” was the fatuous concoction of a publicist. He had many friends.

White brought talented young people into City Hall and was taken as Boston's mayoral answer to New York's elegant John Lindsey. The problem was that from his New Year's Day, 1968, inauguration he was running for governor.

A meeting in Plymouth

In the summer of 1969 I found him with a city car and a Boston cop at a restaurant in Plymouth, apparently courting other vacationing pols from his summer home on the Cape.

White's loss in 1970 to Republican Frank Sargent did much to elect Mike Dukakis, his running mate, governor in 1974. In 1972, White was George McGovern's first choice to be his vice presidential running mate. A telephone call from John Kenneth Galbraith at the behest of Ted Kennedy put the kibosh on that.

From then on, White contrived watery lemonade out of the bitter of his lemons. His ablest aides such as Barney Frank and Fred Salvucci didn't stay long into the second term. In the third term, his administration perfected the art of using public money to polish its imagery. City workers doubled as ward-heelers delivering services expressly to the political faithful. In the fourth term the city was broke – innovations such as Summerthing (cultural events throughout the city) and Little City Halls gone with the wind that had taken their creators.

I think the White years also began the journalistic decline of The Boston Globe. With White and his successors, Ray Flynn and Thomas Menino, The Globe has taken the position that a non-racist mayor's failings are to be overlooked. Over time, there went journalism – not at the reporting level; rather in the editorial ivory tower. In 1980, the Globe's Spotlight Team ignored a study of Boston's abuse of the federally-funded Community Development Block Grant program. The Patriot Ledger ran the story, The Herald picked it up, and the ensuing federal criminal investigation was almost certainly the reason White did not seek a fifth term.

Kevin White was at his graceful best in receiving Queen Elizabeth II in 1976 and Pope John Paul II in 1979. Initiatives such as the revival of Quincy Market had economic multipliers whose benefits are ongoing. But when the ivory towers of government and the press collude, the watch is abandoned. Corruption has license to thrive, and the watch, self-blinded, dies.

David A. Mittell is a Boston-based political columnist and radio host who has been a columnnist and political writer for many newspapers including the Patriot Ledger and the Providence Journal. Toiday he write for the Duxbury Clipper. This column is reprinted with the Clipper's permission.