Outside Looking In

Most of the people who rise to the top in Cambridge politics have lived here all their lives. They succeed because they have known from childhood how the city works and how their neighborhood thinks.

Barbara Ackermann is an exception. Not only did she not grow up in Cambridge, she spent most of her childhood living in Europe.

As a result, when she was elected to the School Committee in 1961 and to the City Council in 1967, Ackermann says she had to learn Cambridge from the ground up.

In writing "You the Mayor?": The Education of a City Politician, a reflection on her political career, Ackermann says she tried to retain a stranger's perspective.

`Outsider's Eye'

"I think that an outsider's eye is always more apt to see things that the insider doesn't notice anymore," she says, adding that it was only through politics that she was able to understand the city's problems.

"I might never have understood anything about poverty or unemployment or anything outside my own middle-class world if I hadn't had to travel all over the city for my campaigns."

Ackermann says she also tried to avoid the chches of political memoirs. "I wanted to write the kind of book that I would like to read," she says. "I used a lot of dialogue and worked up to a climax because you have to be kind to your reader."

The book's most prominent theme is city officials' difficulties in getting things done. In a place like Cambridge, simple problems such as establishing bicycle lanes can take years to implement and then fail.

The City Charter is one of the difficulties. It explicitly bars city officials from participating in the administrative affairs of government, placing all executive power in the hands of a city manager. The system, designed to reduce the corruption and patronage that often characterizes strong-mayor cities, means that elected officials are powerless to respond to many of their constituents' complaints.

Another problem is that many city officials are not trained to do the jobs asked of them. Much of "You the Mayor?" focuses on the role of the police, who Ackermann says are often unprepared to handle the situations with which they are confronted.

"Their job is impossible, and they tend to be ill-equipped and undertrained by the people who hire them," Ackermann says.

When then-Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey '28 ordered police to forcibly remove student protesters from University Hall in April, 1969, Ackermann says the city police force had no idea how to respond.

"Our police had never seen anything like that," she says. "There had been panty raids and stuff like that, but they had never been told to be aggressive."

After the University Hall takeover, Cambridge formed a special tactical police squad trained to handle demonstrations. Nonetheless, Ackermann says that the climate of violence that came to Harvard in 1969 filtered down to other parts of the city.

The climax of "Who the Mayor?" is the series of protests that grew up in response to the 1972 death of 16-year-old Larry Largey, who activists claimed was beaten to death by police.

"Our local kids mixing in got bashed by the police too," says Ackermann. "That's when the police really got themselves together and formed the task force."

"We all got into the habit of having these riots and thing all over the streets," she adds. "I think the Larry case was an example of how the whole revolutionary thing had sort of seeped down."