The Education Of a City Kingpin

It took more than a wheel of brie and a litre of Gallo to get elected in those days, and certainly more than a position paper. Forty or fifty supporters of a city council candidate would get together, attach campaign signs and railroad flares to their cars, and drive slowly through the city. The candidate would gather everyone from the neighborhood at Thompson's Grove for a picnic, a ball game, and a pledge of undying loyalty through election day. And there were thousands of slate cards for kids to hand voters as they entered the polls, palm-sized pieces of cardboard with the proper names on them just in case anyone had forgotten.

It wasn't until he reached sixth grade, really, that Walter Sullivan got involved in politics. The year was 1935, and his father--Michael A. "Mickey the Dude" Sullivan--was making his first bid for the Cambridge city council. Walter, of course, was distributing palm cards, watching the railroad flare-processions, and helping out at the picnics. The lessons were not lost on him:

He watched his father finish seventh--good enough for a seat on the nine-member council--and he watched his father hold the seat until he died 14 years later in 1949. At that point, it was only a question of which son would run to fill the vacancy. "It was a tossup," Walter says, but Edward J. Sullivan had a job that allowed for easier campaigning, and so he made the bid. And, of course, he won. A year later, in January of 1950, the Hood Rubber Co. of Watertown laid off Walter. "And from that day forward I started campaigning for myself," he declares.

Running against his brother was out of the question. Fortunately, there was a state representative race to be had in the old three-member district that stretched from Central Square to Porter Square. Sullivan joined with a Watson and a Good; together they took on the entrenched Republican machine of Winslow, Serrino and Lindstrom. A democrat (and Sullivan is very much a Democrat) had not won the seat in decades. But he had an issue--"we pulled absenteeism on rollcalls on Serrino, cause he had missed quite a few over the years"--and he had energy. "We worked damn hard." Sullivan says, and it paid off when he won a two-year trip to Beacon Hill, a tenure marked by a controversy over the Provincetown steamship franchise and the opportunity, which Sullivan took, to back Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill for speaker of the Massachusetts House.

Eisenhower and the GOP sweep of 1952 cost Sullivan his seat in the legislature, but not his place in government. He went to work first for the city's Water Department, and then took over as commissioner of the city's veterans' services program, which, in the mid-1950s, was a very big job. "We had a half-million dollar budget, big money in those days." Sullivan says. There was one unsuccessful race for the state seat in 1956, and a grandly successful campaign for his brother Edward, who was elected clerk of courts, a post he still holds. Edward kept his council seat till his term ran out, donating his salary to local charities, but he decided not to run for re-election in 1959. Which left the Sullivan seat open. Which left Walter Sullivan knocking on doors.

In his first run for council, Sullivan collected slightly more than 5000 votes. That was far more than anyone else in the race, and almost twice as many votes as anyone, including Sullivan, drew in the 1979 city election. He did even better in 1961, setting his personal all-time record of 5145 votes. He has never failed to top the ticket since, remaining the most popular politician in Cambridge for over two decades.

The phone in Sullivan's courthouse office rings. "Yeah?" [pause] "Yeah, Mrs. O'Leary, yeah Julia, at the corner by the old synagogue, right? Yeah" [pause]. "Yeah, I talked to the people at housing." [pause] "Well, I'll call them again. I'll see what I can do." "Where were we?" he asks me. The phone rings. "Yeah?" [pause]. "No, Sal, there's nothing. Not until this Proposition 21/2 is straightened out." [pause] "No, nothing at all. You know I'd tell you if there was." "Where were we?" he asks me. The phone rings.

Collecting votes in great numbers is a simple, if never-ending, task, Sullivan says. "Every day is election day for me. I'm out working every day of the week, saying hello, doing favors for people." No one hesitates to call, apparently. "They know where to get to me. And if I'm on vacation they can get my brother. We hardly ever leave at the same time." Campaigning means more than fixing sidewalks and finding jobs, though. Sullivan attends about 35 weddings a year ("that's a helluva lot of weddings") and goes to an average of two wakes a day. "I just go in and offer my condolences," Sullivan, who reads the death notices every day and has a network of friends who call him on such occasions, says. "People appreciate you coming in--maybe it's someone who's worked for me over the years, or I know someone in the family."

It's not surprising that Sullivan's biggest year was 1961; in the 20 years since, Cambridge has changed swiftly from a big city full of ethnic enclaves to a smaller city dominated by middle- and upper-class, well-educated professionals. "You don't have the Cambridge citizens born and raised here anymore," he laments. You also don't have the infrastructure-perfect for his brand of politics--they created. St. Paul's, a block from Quincy House, had 1200 students in Sullivan's schooldays, and there were other Catholic schools in every parish of the city. And you don't have nearly as many three-deckers crammed with immigrants. "There were great numbers of Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, and, naturally, Irish," Sullivan says. "There were just loads and loads of Irish," he adds.

What happened, he says, is simple. "The universities, Harvard and MIT, drove them out by bringing in their people and by expanding their properties." Mickey the Dude grew up on Plympton St (indeed, he acquired his nickname when FDR and others would dress him in tuxedos and take him to the final clubs), then lined with three-deckers housing ethnic families. Now it is lined with Quincy House. "You look at Mather House--that whole area down by Banks St. used to be all Irish, a lot of four-deckers and the like."

Bustle turned to turmoil as the city changed--Sullivan still shakes his head when he recalls the late 60s and early 70s. "Those were really bad times. Conditions were really out of control," he says. "We had every one of the Chicago 7 living in Cambridge, and that kind of element antagonizes other people, and pretty soon things are really wild," he says. Sullivan was serving as mayor--largely an honorary position, except in crises--in 1969, when student demonstrators broke into Harvard's University Hall to protest the school's involvement in the Vietnam War. The students had broken in during the morning, and by 2 p.m., Sullivan says, Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey '28 decided he wanted the police to clear the building immediately.

"We had 100 cops, and there were 4000 kids milling around Harvard Yard," Sullivan says. "There was no way we were going in then." So local officials recruited police from all the surrounding towns and the state, and then held a 1 a.m. meeting. "We decided we'd wait until 5 a.m. and then get them out. And we did, cleared them out of there. But they sure had made a mess of that place," Sullivan says. And adds, with a chuckle," we must have taken ten busloads of them out of there and right down to the courthouse. They were in a lot of hot water." It was, he says, a necessary move, both for Harvard and the city. "They needed us bad, and we didn't want those kids out on the streets of Cambridge."

Political activity was not confined to issues of foreign policy. The same young people milling around Harvard Yard were, on other days, cramming City Hall to demand that Cambridge adopt a rent control law. In 1970, despite Sullivan's opposition, they succeeded, and the law has remained in place since, the single most divisive issue in the city. Support for it in recent years has come from the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), now the local liberals but once a "good government" coalition that included Mickey the Dude.

In those days, the coalition stood for reform and an end to corruption. "It was Democrat and Republican, but all good conservative Yankees," Sullivan says. In the last 15 years, though, as it has moved to the left, neighborhood and service-oriented politicians like Sullivan left the CCA and formed their own slate, the Independents.

By virtue of his prodigal vote-getting ability, Sullivan is the unofficial head of the Independents. But in marked contrast to the tightly disciplined CCA, his slate has never been unified, though he admits it would improve their chances. "I've always taken the position that anyone could do what they wanted. I've never told anyone to stay out of a fight or to get into one. No one should be denied their rights." Sullivan says. "They all want to be independently Independent."

But the conservatives do share some basic positions, especially an abiding opposition to government intrusion into the city's housing market. "Rent control (limits on the amount of rent a landlord can charge) ruined the city," Sullivan says. "Properties have not been kept up, there have been absentee landlords and all the rest because people could not afford to maintain what they owned." But, after a decade, he concedes it would be disastrous to scrap the program overnight, favoring instead a gradual program that would decontrol apartments as they became vacant. "It would have to be eased out very slowly," Sullivan says. Since the switch of a single council seat to the Independent camp would allow the abolition of rent control, Sullivan is campaigning as hard this year as ever. "The city is coming back to normal again," he says, crediting both growing national conservatism and the "excesses" of CCA members who have attempted to put even tighter controls on condominiums in recent months. The fifth seat, he says, is a possibility.

At council meetings, Sullivan is the least noticeable of the nine. He drifts over by the radiator in the corner and talks quietly with administrators, with the old ragged guys who come to every meeting, with reporters. Most nights, the longest speech he makes is: "Move the question, Mr. Mayor.

At the city high school they have disco music, not bells, to signal the end of classes. For a few months, while the council chambers were undergoing repairs, the body met in the school's cafeteria, and one night, on the hour, the Spinners interrupted a discussion of industrial zoning. Walter Sullivan, the most conservative councilor, wasted no time in grabbing Saundra Graham--the only Black, the only woman, and the most outspoken radical on the body--and beginning to boogie.

In Boston, things like that don't happen. There, the city councilors bitch and feud and sincerely hate each other, and, consequently very little gets done. "They carry a grudge, I guess," Sullivan says. "I know how to come out of a fight and forget it. The other side has respect for my decisions--they know they're made sincerely and not from politics. And I know they have their people that support them, people they represent."

Only the charge--often repeated by city liberals--that Sullivan and other Independents don't really represent the interests of their largely lower-income and working class constituencies makes him angry. Is opposition to rent control a strange position for someone with enormous support from the fixed-income elderly? "Most elderly people are in federal projects, and there's no rent controls there," Sullivan says. "So who's kidding who?"

There have been victories for Walter Sullivan--his several stints as mayor, for example--and there have been setbacks--including a decade of losses to the liberals. But he is a politician, and takes his defeats in stride. Only once, he says, has he been truly disappointed. That was in the mid-1970s, when city liberals concerned about traffic congestion managed to block the planned construction of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Harvard Square. On his office wall there are several pictures of him and Kennedy touring possible sites for the library. Cambridge "was the only place it belonged. This city was where he had been, what he knew, and he loved it here." The same, of course, could be said about Walter Sullivan.WALTER SULLIVAN