Politics: Truman, Newton, Massachusetts, 2006 R 2-20

At Columbia, I became friendly with Professor Richard E. Neustadt, a former chief assistant to President Truman during his presidency, and a man who later moved to the Harvard faculty after the 1969 Columbia student revolution. Jon took a course on the presidency with him.

During my junior year, Neustadt arranged for President Truman to give three speeches and take questions from a panel of Columbia undergraduates. I was lucky enough to be chosen for the second of the three days of Truman’s visit in April 1959 along with my good friends Bob Fisher and Paul Nagano, and we had breakfast first at Neustadt’s apartment on Riverside Drive. Neustadt also invited former Governor Averill Harriman of New York to be his guest at breakfast, Harriman was the son of a great railroad tycoon, an ally of Truman, and an extraordinary public servant with extensive international and domestic experience. Harriman had just lost the governorship of New York to Nelson Rockefeller in November 1958.

At breakfast, Neustadt seated me next to Truman. That morning I had read in the New York Times that Senator Kefauver had criticized Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader for not being liberal enough. I was bold enough to ask President Truman if he had a reaction to that criticism. I guess I was not aware of the depth of disdain for Kefauver by serious people such as Truman. Kefauver always campaigned in a coonskin hat, was known as a womanizer and a drinker, and not known as a hard-working Senator, but was well-known for his televised series of nation-wide hearings on the Mafia. A book has been written about Kefauver’s hearings as the first major use of television for political purposes. Truman looked at me and said, quite firmly: "Senator COW FEVER will never do as much for liberal causes in his lifetime as Lyndon Johnson does every day of the week!"

On the way over to Columbia from Neustadt's apartment, along Riverside Drive, there was a small construction project and a hill of dirt approximately ten feet high, with a very gradual slope. At the top were three African American workers shoveling dirt. They recognized Truman and simply looked at him in awe. Truman ran up the hill to say hello and shake their hands. These guys, just like us, didn't know what hit them, but Truman had a depth of personality that came through to everyone and we all admired him greatly. True to form, Harriman, a stiff patrician, barely noticed the workers at the top of the hill.

Truman’s speech and the panel session were quite exciting, held in McMillan Theatre, which holds several hundred people. At one point in his commentary, Truman seemed to suggest that you could not pack the Supreme Court, and suggested that he had tried to do it and it didn't work. I signaled that I had to say something and was called upon. I asked Truman if he was referring to the steel seizure case, when the justices he appointed to the Supreme Court, all close friends of his, voted against him and ruled that he did not have the authority to seize the steel mills during the Korean War under a general theory of presidential authority in wartime. He acknowledged that he was referring to that case and I think I saved him from a little embarrassment due to his earlier comment.

My career took me in a different direction than running for office, busy with a growing legal practice and a family, it became a lower priority for me, and I’ve never been a candidate. However, Honora and I became active in Newton politics and in 1973, Honora was asked to run for the Newton School Committee in order to provide a ‘sure’ fifth liberal vote on the nine-member committee. There were four liberals, representing four of the eight wards of the city, two conservatives, and two moderates, one of whom was giving up her seat, from our Fifth ward. The Mayor was the ninth vote and he was also a moderate. Honora agreed to run against Sumner Silton, who was one of the conservative slate of candidates, who were supported by the very popular Mayor Ted Mann.

Once Honora and I saw the game strategy of the four ‘sure’ liberals, we decided to run a campaign completely independent from them. While the candidates represented each of the eight wards of Newton, and had to reside in that ward, the elections were citywide. Through introductions, we obtained the quiet endorsements of two politicians on the more conservative north side of Newton, Dick McGrath, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and Joe DeNucci, who was going to run the next year for the House of Representatives, and who later became the longtime auditor of the State of Massachusetts, a wonderful, elected, easy position. DeNucci and McGrath, rival politicians with their own bases of support, did not know the other was supporting Honora. We worked out a letter from each of them to their entire support base on the north side of the city, the strong hold of the conservative school candidates. We timed all of the three thousand first class letters to be mailed on the Friday before the Tuesday election, so that they would arrive Saturday or Monday.

Our campaign manager, Jeanne Stolbach, also believed that the entire campaign had to be completely organized by Labor Day, so that from then on all you did was implement your strategy. This consisted of holding coffees at people's homes, standing outside key stores and handing out leaflets and shaking hands (preferably with your kids in tow and on weekends), speaking at candidates nights, and sending out mailings. Even better, we also leafletted the entire city of (then) ninety thousand people, as a less expensive system of communication.

Election Day came and it was a complete wipeout of the liberals – except for Honora. The four who sought her as a fifth sure liberal vote, all lost their seats, and there was a new conservative majority of six, with Honora as the lone liberal, along with the one remaining moderate, plus Mayor Mann, who soon came to regret his support of the conservatives. Honora handily defeated Silton with the surprising strong support on the north side. Through allies, we also met Tony “Fats” Pellegrino, whose support in the Italian enclave on the north side , obtained just by meeting him and becoming friends and paying attention to him and his suggestions. Honora carried his normally conservative precincts. We concluded that McGrath was not pleased that we also allied with his rival DeNucci!

The next two years were open warfare on the Newton School Committee, with extensive local press coverage (when there actually was a major city newspaper!), bitter battles over issues, which led to a complete reversal of fortunes for two years later, when six sure liberals were swept into office, or perhaps seven, and Honora was elected Chairman. Budget problems developed and the school committee had to figure out how to reduce costs while protecting as many programs as possible. The liberals decided that it was necessary and educationally sensible for the students involved to close the two elementary schools with very low enrollment.

This, of course, led to a revolution in the precincts in which those schools were located. One of those schools, Emerson, was located in Newton Upper Falls, a small, geographically isolated, blue collar community, and it was an underperforming school as well. The idea was to merge it and provide more programs in a neighboring more diverse school, Countryside, which in fact ultimately worked out very successfully, and was much better for the students from Emerson who now had a more diverse student body and more programs available.

The people opposed to closing the schools mounted a successful drive to obtain enough signatures to force a special referendum to overrule the decision of the school committee to close the schools. They had all the politicians on their side, and arranged for the special election to be on an unusual day, not a Tuesday, in late June, figuring that only the people passionately against school closings would show up to vote. They also worded the override question to seek a Yes answer, usually easier to obtain – Yes, to override the school committee decision and keep those schools open. We decided to wage a stealth campaign against them. Honora, Wally Bernheimer, who owned Hub Mail, a major direct mail corporation, and we put together a fabulous flyer urging "VOTE NO!"

We posed several questions in the flyer: do you want to heat half empty school buildings instead of providing programs for students? NO! and several other similar urging people to vote no all for good reasons. This mailing went out to the entire city just before the election, and to the dismay of all the politicians, who counted on a small turnout, primarily from the precincts whose schools were being closed, the effort to keep the school buildings open was soundly defeated.

Payback time was to be the next November, when Honora was up for re-election again. It was clearly going to be a very tough race, and we knew that the Newton Upper Falls Precinct vote would be very strongly against Honora. We calculated that if they got six hundred votes against Honora in that precinct, and she would get maybe twenty votes, then Honora would probably lose the election. In those days, you would actually send someone to each precinct (there were thirty-two, four for each of the eight wards), and I went to the Upper Falls Precinct myself to get the tally, knowing they would all be hooting and hollering at me with the expectation that Honora would lose. As soon as I saw the total, that Honora had gotten about twenty votes, and the opponent a little over four hundred, I figured we had won the election and just smiled back.

In fact, out of perhaps twelve thousand votes city-wide, Honora won by only thirty, leading to a cliff-hanging recount, which was run by my partner Harold Hestnes, who had been Chief Counsel to Republican Governor John Volpe some years earlier. Honora picked up a handful of votes in the recount, winning by about thirty-five. We had a fine victory party, but Honora had had it with school politics, served her final term without serving as Chair, and retired from politics.

Based on our organizational success with Newton School Committee elections, I became more active in other political campaigns, and in 1978 was asked by Scott Harshbarger to run his campaign in Newton for district attorney of Middlesex County, where he was challenging the longtime D.A. John Droney, who had held the office for many years, and was never seriously challenged for reelection. Droney's key assistant was John Kerry, the famous anti-Vietnam War veteran, who had lost a race for Congress in 1976. Kerry took control of Droney's campaign and won it in the end with excellent newspaper advertisements trumpeting Droney's crime-fighting successes over his long career.

Harshbarger ran a grassroots campaign, and there were three key liberal towns, Newton, Cambridge and Lowell, Harshbarger's hometown. I obtained from Cissy Weinberger, his close friend and campaign manager, an allocation of $10,000 that I could spend as I wanted. Cissy also helped me get Ethel Sheehan, an active political leader and member of the Newton Board of Alderman, to serve as co-chair of Newton with me. Ethel and I settled on a strategy of leafletting the entire city shortly before the election with one key brochure which we prepared, which headlined: "If you are voting for Kennedy... Dukakis... Bellotti... and Drinan, then your candidate for district attorney is Scott Harshbarger.”

We knew that all of those candidates, Senator Edward Kennedy, Governor Michael Dukakis, Attorney General Frank Bellotti, and Congressman Bob Drinan, were all going to carry Newton by huge margins, and we hoped to send the message that Harshbarger was one of those reliable liberals, rather than the more conservative Droney. The strategy worked, and in a three-person race for district attorney, Harshbarger polled approximately sixty percent of the vote in Newton. Had he done as well in Lowell and Cambridge, he would have unseated Droney.

That race however, put Harshbarger in the position to easily win election as District Attorney when Droney retired four years later. Since I was going through a divorce in 1982, I was not active in that campaign. While I did not work actively on statewide campaigns, I did get to know many of the statewide candidates quite well as a social matter. Mike Dukakis was a young member of the House of Representatives, which was then a part-time job, and he was a partner in Hill & Barlow, in which Joe Steinfield, my closest friend from Harvard, was a partner. Honora and I knew Mike and his wife Kitty, and I remember being on a beach with them in Rhode Island where the Steinfields would go for part of the summer, and discussing with Honora and Mike his contemplated first run for governor of Massachusetts, prior to his first run for statewide office in the early 1970s. He said a major issue was going to be abortion, and our discussion took place before the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion.

Mike had made a name for himself in the legislature pushing for tort reform and especially automobile insurance reform, which led to "no-fault insurance," which meant that the insurance companies would pay for damages arising out of an accident, without regard for who was at fault in an accident. I remember Honora suggesting to Mike: "Why don't you propose no-fault abortion?" The issue became moot when the Supreme Court subsequently permitted abortions under Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Subsequently, our son Jon worked on the Dukakis Campaign for President starting in July of 1987, and he was based in Mason City, Iowa, from July through the Iowa caucuses in February 1988. I served on the Dukakis finance committee, and my partner Paul Brountas started as a key strategist to Mike, with the campaign manager being the very capable John Sasso. Sasso got in trouble when the Dukakis campaign released a video showing that Senator Biden of Delaware, a rival for the nomination, had copied, almost word for word, a very personal and emotional speech made by a politician in Great Britain.

The controversy doomed the Biden candidacy, but the Dukakis people, instead of proudly claiming that they brought this to the public's attention, tried to conceal it, were caught lying, leading to Dukakis' dismissal of Sasso as his campaign manager. Brountas succeeded Sasso, and campaigned with Dukakis throughout 1988. During his absence from Hale and Dorr, I served as chairman of the Corporate Department. I was in charge of fund raising in our law firm, and raised over $100,000 for the Dukakis presidential campaign.

I also visited Jon in Iowa, and spent a couple days campaigning with him. Sometime later in the winter, Jon called and told me that Dukakis had visited in Mason City a couple days before our call, and Jon greeted him waiting outside the little Mason City Airport, in the freezing cold, dressed in a sport jacket, but no overcoat. Jon related to me that Dukakis walked out of the terminal and immediately yelled at Jon "Where's your coat?" This was typical of Dukakis, who cared a great deal about the young people who worked on his campaign, and he justifiably earned their undying loyalty for his caring about them, probably unique among American presidential candidates.

The next week I saw Dukakis at a finance committee breakfast meeting. As usual, he walked around to all the tables, and everyone would stand up and shake hands with him, and exchange a few words. I simply looked at Mike, shook his hand and said, "Thanks for caring about my son Jon." He looked at me for one second and then said "Marty, I didn't want him to catch a cold!" Not only did he care about these young people who worked on his campaign, but it meant enough to him that he would remember it and know what I was talking about. Too bad the real humanity of Mike Dukakis never came out in that unfortunate campaign, driven by the outrageous Republican attacks on Dukakis as supposedly being soft on criminals, soft on defense, and pro-gay rights. The only thing soft about Dukakis was his being soft about defending himself against outrageous attacks.

In 1984, Paul Tsongas, who I did not know well, decided not to run for re-election to the Senate due to his first bout with cancer. John Kerry, then Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, was running for the Democratic nomination against Congressman Jim Shannon, and others. At Vin McCarthy's suggestion, Kerry called me and asked if I would come to his office to talk about the campaign. I agreed and brought Jon, who was then finishing his second year at Harvard, to Kerry’s tiny office in the State House in April or May 1984.

Kerry asked for my support, and Jon and I talked with him and I asked a few questions. I remember asking if he had ever been to Israel and what he knew about Israel. He acknowledged that he had not been there, was going there soon, and said "But I know that you can't turn a jet fighter plane at full speed around without going over the borders." I remember replying "That's a good start, John," but thinking this guy knows what he's talking about, and liking him very much. Jon worked in Kerry's office in Washington after he became Senator during one summer, and then became a foreign policy assistant for the first year after graduating Harvard in 1986, until he left to go to work on the Dukakis campaign in July 1987.

While at Harvard, Jon organized an undergraduate program of meeting with interesting local politicians, one of whom was then city councilman Ray Flynn. Flynn was known as a conservative, an insular South Boston politician, who was opposed to school busing, which the courts had mandated in order to alleviate the racial segregation in the Boston public schools. It was a very controversial solution to a problem, and the court had almost no choice since the Boston school committee continued to build and organize schools in the center of neighborhoods, eliminating the possibility of students going to schools across the lines of neighborhoods, which would have increased the diversity of the student body. Of course, busing failed as a solution anyway.

John was impressed with Flynn, and he said I should get to know him because he was going to be the next Mayor of Boston and was actually a pretty good guy who wanted to unite the city and not divide it. I followed John's advice and got to know Flynn, supported him for Mayor, and indeed, he upset all the other well-known politicians in the city, won and also was reelected a couple times. As Jon suggested, Flynn was a major unifying leader in bringing the city of Boston together and helping to overcome its racially charged history.

Flynn campaigned actively for President Clinton during his first campaign in 1992, and was rewarded with the choice post of Ambassador to the Vatican, but resigned after a couple of years, finding it too formal and boring, not liking Rome, and hoping that he could have made the position into being an Ambassador at Large for Human Rights and other issues, involving himself in problems in Rwanda and elsewhere. Actually, it's too bad he didn't serve that role rather than the position at the Vatican.

Having worked on the Dukakis Campaign for President, and interested in getting involved in Public Service, I spoke with both Paul Brountas, who had returned to the firm after the 1988 presidential campaign, and Don Stem, formerly with Hale and Dorr, and then Chief Counsel to the Governor, requesting consideration for an appointment by Dukakis to some State Board or Commission that I would find of interest. Dukakis was well known for not rewarding campaign donors with positions, but I really felt that I had something to offer in public service, and that my being able to get such an appointment shouldn't be hurt by the fact that I raised money for him for the presidential campaign. Nevertheless, nothing happened.

After Kerry beat Jim Shannon for the senatorial nomination in 1984, I suggested that Hale and Dorr bring Jim Shannon, whom I did not know, in as a partner, as he had an outstanding reputation, and was quite young. We did just that, and Jim did contribute to the firm in a meaningful way. Two years later, when Attorney General Frank Bellotti decided not to run for re-election, Shannon entered that race and was elected Attorney General and did an outstanding job, and I remained close to him. Scott Harshbarger, who had become Middlesex County District Attorney in 1982, was ambitious for statewide office and challenged Attorney General Shannon in the Democratic primary in 1986.

That was a bad year for incumbents, as Dukakis lost to Ed King in the primary and Shannon lost to Harshbarger. As that nasty campaign got started, Harshbarger and Cissy Weinberg asked me to support Scott, and I said I could not, because both Scott and Jim were friends of mine and I was deeply committed to both of them. That being the case, I felt I had no choice but to support the incumbent, Jim, who I believe was being unfairly challenged by Scott. When Scott won, I knew that my reappointment to the Board of the Boston Foundation was not going to happen.

After Shannon was elected Attorney General, I had let him know of my interest in going on the Board of the Boston Foundation, and knew that as Attorney General he had the right to name one person to a five-year term and that that appointment was coming up in 1993. Shannon nominated me and I was elected to the Board of the Boston Foundation. My term would be up in 1998.

And, as I expected, Harshbarger refused the Boston Foundation President Anna Faith Jones’ direct request that he reappoint me, made in a private meeting which she related to me. Jones asked him why he was not reappointing me. He stated that the Boston Foundation needed more racial diversity and he intended to appoint Wayne Budd, who in fact was an outstanding African American attorney, a partner at another firm. Jones said to him "I need Marty on the board, because he is such an important leader and a strong liberal voice, and I can judge our diversity needs better than you, since I am the African American president of the Boston Foundation, we have other African American members, and the chairman of our board is Frieda Garcia, who is Hispanic." Harshbarger still refused. Jones reported this conversation to me.

A few days later, I received a call from Wayne Budd, who apologized for taking my seat on the board. I said that he had every right to take the position, that hopefully he would enjoy it and do a good job, and I told him that the decision was Harshbarger's and not his anyway. He served on the board for about a year or two, was mildly disinterested, resigned to take a high corporate position, and Scott then filled the seat with Ed Masterman, an attorney whom I know and like very much, but quite conservative on the Board.

I never strongly supported Harshbarger from then on, except when he ran for Governor against Paul Cellucci. I helped organize education leaders statewide for an endorsement of Harshbarger and his education plans in comparison with Cellucci’s. This was an easy choice given Weld and Cellucci's alliance with John Silber, and the negative direction they were taking education policy in Massachusetts following the positive period during my leadership of the State Board.

Honora and I were also active in the campaign supporting Father Robert Drinan, the Dean of Boston College Law School, and Honora knew him having graduated from BC Law, when he ran for Congress in 1970 in the Democratic primary on an anti-Viet Nam War platform to unseat Congressman Philbin, a supporter of the war and member of the House Armed Services Committee. Drinan won that race, thus also denying Philbin the opportunity to become the chairman of the Armed Services Committee as he was next in line following the retirement of the then chairman. We held fundraisers for Drinan in Newton and on Martha's Vineyard.

In 1980, Pope John Paul II issued an order for all priests to cease serving in public offices and Drinan did not run for reelection. Several politicians in the district, including state Representative David Mofenson of Newton and Mayor Clark of Waltham entered that primary, as did Representative Barney Frank from Boston, who immediately moved to Newton to enter the primary. Barney, as he was universally known, of course became an important Congressman, and won that first primary only when Mofenson withdrew from the race when it was clear he would come in third and threw his support to Barney.

However, there is a back story in that the Newton School Committee liberal establishment, including the four members who had been wiped out in the conservative rebellion when Honora was first elected, all gravitated toward Barney Frank rather than Mofenson partly because Mofenson and the other local Democratic leaders had supported the Vote No campaign. That was a major motivation for our supporting Barney, whom we did not know and we did know Mofenson.

A year prior to that primary, the Honora and I co-chaired the Combined Jewish Philanthropy Lawyers Breakfast with about 300 in attendance. The keynote speaker was Congressman Steve Solarz of Brooklyn, who noticed Barney sitting in the room and called out that if we could ever find a congressional district for him, he would end up being the first Jewish Speaker of the US House of Representatives.