From Community Awareness...

Inside a pale gray, unassuming little frame house on Garden St., a few individuals perform the intricate balancing act which forms the basis of Harvard-Cambridge relations.

One administrator there, Jacqueline A. O'Neill, wins near-unanimous acclaim for almost single-handedly making human communication possible between the monolithic, bureaucratic University and diverse activist groups which dot the Cambridge map.

And that praise says a lot in a city where local residents and University officials agree never to agree.

The first and only female vice-president of Harvard, O'Neill manages to walk the shaky tightrope between the professional, the political and the personal as successfully as she juggles University-community concerns.

With a Speaker of the House as a father-in-law and a former lieutenant governor for a husband, O'Neill has developed a knack for political negotiation by osmosis in her 17 years of marriage. A Dedham native herself, the 40-year-old O'Neill became intimate with every door of Cambridge during the campaigns of various members of her family.

When she came to Harvard in 1976, she encountered a history of hostile relations between the University and the community. Squabbles over land and buildings were a daily occurrence as the community repeatedly charged Harvard with insensitive imperialism. The battling came to a symbolic head when outspoken City Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci proposed that Harvard secede from Massachusetts and form its own city-state.

No one ever said her job would be easy.

O'Neill works hard at the Office of Community Affairs to improve the once-polarized relations between town and gown. "When the University does something, no matter how insignificant it may seem, we have to consider the consequences, actual or perceived, in the community," she says.

O'Neill's philosophy of community relations, she says, is based on recognizing the need to include every voice in the community in a non-bureaucratic way, and to understand Cantabrigians' ambiguous feelings towards Harvard--a mixture of pride and resentment.

By creating a committee made up of representatives from surrounding neighborhoods, O'Neill has pioneered an elaborate system of information-sharing among community leaders and Harvard officials, to prove to them both that "there is very little difference between a `Harvard person' and a `community person'," she says.

Those who have worked with her praise her cooperativeness, her friendly manner and her ability to end a stalemate. "She's made a considerable difference in relations," says Gladys P. Gifford, an activist in the Harvard Square Defense Fund, a citizens' group which monitors all Harvard Square issues from the police to graffiti. "She listens to the community point of view. She understands that there is one. And this brings about resolutions on issues that used to be big battles."

When O'Neill wants something done, she has no qualms about doing it herself, even if it involves a lot of garbage. One day, to prove a point about making the Square cleaner, she rolled up her sleeves and joined a group of inner city kids picking up trash, one Cambridge resident recalls.

"She is the most valuable player when it comes to Harvard relations," says John Shattuck, vice president for government and community affairs. Shattuck and several community activists attributed to O'Neill a deal in which Harvard and a community committee banded together against a private developer and succeeded in dramatically changing the plans for the condominium development across from the post office on Mt. Auburn St.

Using that model, O'Neill established community committees to compromise on the height of the parking garage next to the Kennedy School, and convinced the University to back off a proposed bridge between the Fogg and Sackler Art Museums.

Asset for Harvard or City?

Local politicians grant that O'Neill may be an important asset for Harvard, in that she helps the University understand the needs of the community, but they do not acknowledge her influence helping the community understand Harvard. "The University's quiver isn't filled with arrows of community achievement, but Jackie has been careful to involve people--she has managed to have an impact on Harvard," says City Councilor Francis H. Duehay '55.

"My frustration in dealing with her is that she's not a decision-maker, just essentially a buffer for the real decison-makers, whoever they are," says City Councilor David Sullivan. "But she does do a good job of transmitting community sentiment," he adds.

Another O'Neill in Politics?

A year ago, rumor had it that O'Neill was planning to take a shot at her father-in-law Tip's seat in the House of Representatives. The National Women's Political Caucus, looking for a female candidate for the Eighth Congressional race, asked O'Neill to run. According to her husband, Thomas P. O'Neill III, former lieutenant governor, she did seriously consider taking up the offer. "She's the most electable O'Neill," he says. "She's throughly liberal with a sense of humor, and that stands out in a crowd."

Long-time Cambridge City Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci says if O'Neill had run, she would have won, "and they'd have had the first woman Congressman in this district." O'Neill's Italian heritage--her maiden name is DeMartino--would have appealed to the Eighth, one-third Italian, Vellucci says, but when he tried to convince her to run, "she just flashed a big, pretty smile."

O'Neill denies that she ever seriously considered running, explaining that "it required enormous personal sacrifice, and at this time of life, it's not something I want to do." She says that she is a "strong advocate of women running for political office," but refuses to comment about future ambitions for a political career.

Local politicians say that O'Neill quickly decided not to take part in the Eighth. "I asked her because I was thinking of running myself," says Duehay. "She said it was never a very serious possibility."

Her father-in-law, Thomas "Tip" O'Neill Jr., did his best to dissuade everyone in his family from a career politics because "it's too tough a life," her husband, Thomas P. O'Neill III, says. The former lieutenant governor gave up his own political career to become a successful real estate developer in Boston.

On top of moving and shaking for Harvard in Cambridge, Boston and across Massachusetts, O'Neill has a happy marriage, a seven-year-old daughter, Leigh, and a large extended family. "She has the greatest capacity for juggling that I've ever seen," her husband says. "I solicit her advice professionally, because she's smarter than I am," he says.

O'Neill, who comes from a long line of working women which dates back to her great-grandmother, says "the heroine role model of a working mother is hardly the professional woman with one child and a flexible job. The real heroine is a single parent working in a factory with four kids." O'Neill adds, "I have a supportive husband, a wonderful daughter, an extended family nearby. It's not a lot of angst."

And what's next on the agenda for O'Neill? On the home front, she plans to have another baby. On the career front, she says she plans to figure out a way for the University to help the city create affordable housing. It would seem that even if the tightrope gets longer or narrower, O'Neill doesn't need to worry about losing her balance.