Poisoned Politics

CHARGES and countercharges of corruption and graft have been commonplace in Massachusetts political campaigns over the years. Not within memory, however, has as much incontrovertible evidence of malfeasance in public office been turned up as in the past twelve months.

Recently recapitulated in a series of three articles by Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, the year’s disclosures began with a legislative investigation of Greater Boston’s Metropolitan District Commission. This has since resulted in the conviction for various forms of graft of the M.D.C. chairman, an associate M.D.C. commissioner, a state representative and several members of his family, and assorted lesser figures. The M.D.C. investigation was followed closely by another legislative probe, this time of the Massachusetts Department of Public Works, which since 1949 has handled over a billion dollars in highwaybuilding funds. Although widely regarded as a whitewash, the D.P.W. investigation did turn the spotlight on a number of questionable if not demonstrably illegal practices in the award and execution of highway contracts. Then, in January and February, 1961, came the much-publicized proceedings to revoke the probation of Thomas Worcester, a consulting engineer who had been given a suspended eighteen-month sentence for income-tax evasion and placed on probation on the condition that he give full and candid testimony as to the ultimate recipients of some $275,000 in cash “commissions" paid by his engineering firm in order to get contracts with Massachusetts state agencies. Brought on the basis that Worcester’s subsequent testimony had not been “full and candid,” the proceedings were described in full and fascinating detail by Charles L. Whipple in an article in the March issue of this magazine entitled “Dirty Money in Boston.”

Started at about the same time as the legislative whitewash of the D.P.W. and still under way is a federal grand jury inquiry into conspiracies to defraud the United States in connection with the D.P.W.’s administration of the federal-aid highway program in Massachusetts. Although focused thus far primarily on inflated land-damage awards, the investigation will presumably — and certainly should — be extended to cover other aspects of the program. And, within the last few months, the D.P.W. has again been spotlighted by charges of irregularities in the Waterways Division. On the basis of a preliminary investigation of these charges, the director was suspended for thirty days, and Governor John A. Volpe demanded a new grand jury investigation.

Extensive as these disclosures have been, no citizen of Massachusetts would be likely to assume that all the dirty money has been brought to light. As a former United States attorney who, while in office, initiated the Worcester proceedings and brought the federal-aid highway investigation to the point of indictments, I know full well that it has not been. However, both a fair regard for the responsibilities of my successor and the restrictions against disclosing grand jury proceedings or Internal Revenue Service information combine to prevent me from discussing facts that are not a matter of public record.

But enough has already been revealed to give rise to certain rather clamorous questions. How, in the first place, has all this come about? What can be done about it? Is there any real hope of a cure? If so, what remedies are indicated? Not all Massachusetts politicians are venal, of course; on the contrary, the majority are honorable men and women, genuinely dedicated to serving the public interest. The fact remains, nonetheless, that the political processes of Massachusetts are deeply infected.

THE most striking feature of the Massachusetts political scene, as I view it, is the subordination of programs and principles to personal relationships. Friendships and enmities, loyalties and feuds, courtesies and slights have an importance in determining political alignments that is exceeded only by the pocketbook. Amid the welter of personal conflict, the merits of issues are soon submerged.

As to the whys of this state of affairs, one can only speculate. One factor, certainly, has been the indifference of the most comfortable, best-established groups in the community: turning their backs on the messy business of party politics, they have satisfied their consciences by immersion in suburban town affairs and in the improvement of the Commonwealth’s world-renowned hospitals, educational institutions, and cultural enterprises. Another factor, no doubt, has been the spread of an attitude toward politics deriving from the days when an inhospitable Yankee community forced the newly arrived Irish and Italians to turn to political organization as the only available avenue toward security and advancement. In those days, quite understandably, jobs, contracts, and miscellaneous favors became the lifeblood of Massachusetts politics. They still are, notwithstanding that the circumstances which made them so have long since largely disappeared. But the politician is still expected to go through the old motions, though they no longer serve their old purpose. The result of this decline in function has been a corresponding decline in status. No longer an esteemed benefactor and not yet a respected public servant, the politician, in the eyes of all too many citizens of Massachusetts, is a mere errand boy, remembered only when there is a ticket or a sidewalk to be fixed.

The politician thus regarded can hardly be blamed for taking a similar view of himself. Where political careers are built on favors and rewards, recriminations and reprisals, it is natural that the political careerist should attach only secondary importance to the merits of issues. Instead of expertness in municipal finance or public transportation, he is more apt to acquire expertness in determining whether a given back calls for scratching or the knife. In a state, meanwhile, endowed through its colleges and universities with unparalleled riches in expert judgment, the expert’s opinion is all too frequently sought and used merely as a stick with which to beat the opposition.

Here, in its essence, is the real tragedy of Massachusetts. It has been played and replayed in countless variations during recent years. One instance is the fate of legislation affecting the city of Boston. Reasonable concern for the hardpressed city, one might suppose, would demand support for legislation designed to give control of Police Department expenditures, one of the largest items in the city’s budget, to the mayor and council. It is, at any rate, a matter on which legislators representing the city might be expected to work in harness with Mayor John F. Collins, who has been trying to get such legislation adopted. In actual fact, however, John E. Powers, state senator from South Boston and president of the Massachusetts Senate, has maneuvered — successfully, so far — to block this and other bills designed to correct inequities burdensome to Boston. Why? The reason, in Massachusetts’ petty political world, is not far to seek: in November, 1959, John Collins defeated John Powers for mayor.

Explanations of Massachusetts political phenomena on the basis of personal angles are so often the true explanations that old hands in Massachusetts politics tend to operate on the assumption that disinterested motives do not exist. Take the case of Howard F. Fitzpatrick, popular sheriff of Middlesex County, phenomenal Democratic fund raiser, and chairman of the $100-aplate birthday dinner for President Kennedy held at the Commonwealth Armory in Boston last May. Only four days before the dinner, Middlesex County District Attorney John J. Droney obtained a grand jury indictment of Fitzpatrick for his negligence in permitting two inmates, one an alleged cop-killer, to escape from his jail. What could possibly explain this extraordinary event? Beacon Hill buzzed with conjecture. It was common knowledge that Droney had been handpicked for the job of Middlesex County prosecutor by President (then Senator) Kennedy. It was assumed that Droney would not have taken action against the President’s birthday-dinner chairman without the President’s knowledge and approval. The President must, therefore, have wanted to cut down Fitzpatrick’s influence. This hypothesis, advanced by one seasoned politico, was typical of attempts to find the expected personal angle. It would have been regarded as unprofessional, apparently, to entertain the obvious explanation: that the grand jury and the district attorney were merely doing their duty as they saw it.

FOR William F. Callahan, now chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, and past master of the art of Massachusetts politics, it would seem that this nightmarish world of vendetta and intrigue is the only one that really exists. The Worcester probation proceedings contained testimony linking Callahan to the cash payments made by Worcester to get D.P.W. contracts. (Callahan was Commissioner of Public Works at the time.) The D.P.W., under Callahan, at one time took by eminent domain property belonging to the family of Judge Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., who presided at the Worcester hearing. Speaking for the family, Judge Wyzanski had objected to the D.P.W.’s offer of damages as too low. Judge Wyzanski’s conduct of the Worcester proceedings evidenced a keen interest in getting to the bottom of the alleged connection between the payments by Worcester and the award of contracts to Worcester’s company by Callahan. To Callahan there could be only one explanation: the judge was trying to get even with him. Callahan, apparently, is constitutionally unable to believe what everyone who really knows Judge Wyzanski would not for a moment question — that he is incapable of allowing his judicial conduct to be influenced by purely personal considerations.

Corruption is a weed that grows naturally in such an atmosphere. Where things are done for wrong reasons that are not improper or unlawful, it is easy to do them for wrong reasons that are both improper and unlawful. The lines are blurred between the reward of loyalty, the return of a favor, and the exaction of a quid pro quo. If nobody complains, or even seems surprised, when official action is used to help friends or hurt enemies, nobody is likely to notice when it is turned to the service of personal gain.

Consider, for example, performance bonds — bonds which insure against loss resulting from failure by a contractor to fulfill the terms of his contract. Such bonds have to be taken out by any contractor engaged in construction for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The business can be placed through any licensed insurance broker; the service rendered is the same no matter which broker handles it. Although it is the contractor himself who, in theory, selects the broker, the public official empowered to award the contract has in practice had a lot to say about the contractor’s choice. In some cases, the official’s nominee is merely a personal friend. More often, he is a past contributor of services or funds to the party in power. But a prospective quid pro quo may just as easily be made the basis of selection.

The quid pro quo may take many forms, cash included. Where the broker is also a legislator, sufficient consideration is afforded by the tacit assurance of favorable votes on issues of interest to the contracting agency. Such assurances, presumably, accounted for the splitting, in 1955 and 1956, by William F. Callahan’s old friend Percy G. Cliff of his enormous commissions on the Massachusetts Turnpike performance bonds with seven members of the Massachusetts legislature.

The same range of factors — from personal through political to venal — may be found wherever official action is not regularly measured against clear-cut objective criteria. Among those who, to their cost, have found this to be true have been lawyers, appraisers, architects, and consulting engineers, all members of professions which frown on competition in price. For some, the campaign bite—a specified percentage of gross fees — has been routine. Small wonder that for a few it has seemed only a short additional step to the kickback.

This was the squirrel cage in which Thomas Worcester got trapped in 1948. As Judge Wyzanski implied in the opinion which brought the Worcester case to a close, Worcester could hardly have been the only Massachusetts engineer or contractor so enmeshed. What made Worcester unique was that his payments came to light. This happened as the result of an income-tax investigation into other matters. More recently, it is said, kickbacks have had to be paid out of after-tax money. The cash must be drawn, in other words, from the engineer’s or contractor’s personal net income — what he has left after both individual and corporate income taxes have been paid. The result, of course, is to cover any trace that might put the Treasury bloodhounds on the trail.

Some have asked, “What’s all the fuss about? What does it really matter? Things get done, don’t they?” Fair or not, these questions deserve something more than the answer that honesty is good and dishonesty is bad. Or that corruption wastes the taxpayer’s money.

One answer is that corruption poisons the democratic process. The very possibility of representative democracy demands the acceptance and fulfillment of responsibility. The responsibility required is responsibility to the electorate. It is a responsibility to serve the public interest. The officeholder who betrays this responsibility by serving his own interests instead diminishes the capacity of democracy to work.

Where decisions, votes, and policies are not based on the merits, where the positions taken by the people’s elected representatives do not reflect their honest convictions, the electorate cannot fulfill its own responsibility to the democratic process. The voter may for a time attempt to penetrate the fog of distortion and half-truth, to correct for the angle, and to detect the outright fraud, but the task is endless and discouraging. Too often he yields in helpless resignation to the assumption that “all politicians are crooks.” Such is the “alienated voter,” so perceptively described by Professor Murray Levin in a book analyzing the Boston mayoralty campaign of 1959.

Corruption in its earlier, more innocent phase, such as was depicted by Edwin O’Connor in The Last Hurrah, represented the aberration of greed in an environment of firm moral standards. It now tends also to reflect — and to reinforce — the ego-centered, self-indulgent, conscienceless amorality of a fast-buck, expense-account society. In this respect, political corruption belongs in the same shoddy category as the priming of television quizzes, the rigging of commodity prices, and the fixing of college basketball games. Giving impetus to cynicism, cheating begins to seem normal, if not respectable. Corrosion, meanwhile, gnaws at the fabric of democracy.

In such an atmosphere, even the most urgent public issues — metropolitan planning, mass transportation, the rationalization of the tax structure — are difficult to get considered, much less resolved. Initiative is choked. Imagination is stifled. Reasonable accommodations are frustrated. Mediocrity presses down. Support for any but the most routine functions of government becomes harder and harder to enlist. The result, inevitably, is decline and decay.

The effects of just such deterioration are widely apparent in Massachusetts. Somehow, despite them, there is a stirring of new energy in the old state. Hope, like a solitary geranium in a tenement window, is being nurtured by a variety of civic and business organizations. A dedicated mayor of Boston and a vigorous, capable governor are struggling to unite the forces of progress.

But more than this energy and this hope, more than a mayor’s dedication and a governor’s vigor will be needed to solve Massachusetts’ problems. The effort to get off dead center must also include an all-out attack on corruption. By exposing and punishing the betrayal of responsibility, such an attack can help to ensure that the public interest will be served. By reducing the possibility that decisions, votes, or policies are adopted for wrong reasons, it can increase the likelihood that they will be guided by right ones. It can contribute also to the restoration of voter confidence, and check, at the same time, the slide toward mindless amorality.

TO BE effective, an attack on corruption must be composed of many converging elements. To my mind, these are the most important:

1. Investigation. A complex, time-consuming, and frequently frustrating process, investigation demands ingenuity and, above all, persistence. In Massachusetts, the chief participants are—or should be — the state attorney general, the state auditor, and the United States attorney, who in turn can call on the investigative resources of the Justice and Treasury departments. In apportioning the task and coordinating the results, it should be the attorney general, as the chief law-enforcement officer of the Commonwealth, who takes the lead, for it is state rather than federal law that is primarily involved.

2. Prosecution. This, of course, should follow investigation whenever the evidence turned up is sufficient to support an indictment. Its value lies not so much in the imposition of punishment where convictions result as in attesting to the community’s abhorrence of the conduct involved. Most venal politicians are “good guys.” For those convicted, a jail sentence proclaims the fact that they are also crooks.

3. Publicity. People, not excluding officeholders, are capable of amazing feats of self-deception. So long as the grafter’s proclivity for taking a buck is undetected, he may be able successfully to delude himself with the thought that “everybody’s doing it” or that “nobody’s really hurt.” Even though directed to others, publicity can weaken, if not destroy, such comforting rationalizations. It can also serve to arouse the community and to stimulate corrective action. In these respects, Massachusetts news media have done well of late. They could, however, do a far better job in helping to redirect the focus of public attention from personalities to programs and principles.

4. Voter Reaction. Investigation, prosecution, and publicity are wasted, of course, if the voter merely shrugs and continues to support the offending officeholder. It is devoutly to be hoped, therefore, that it was not a reaction typical of the state as a whole which Boston radio and television station WBZ encountered when it made random phone calls to residents of State Representative Charles Ianello’s district in Boston’s South End after he had been sentenced to a year in jail and fined $300 on a charge of larceny involving a sidewalk-paving contract. Of twenty voters called, eighteen said they would vote for Ianello again. That such a reaction could occur, however, points up the need for unremitting efforts on the part of churches, schools, news media, and civic leaders to arouse the electorate. The eloquent pastoral letter from Richard Cardinal Cushing circulated throughout the Boston Archdiocese last winter set a powerful example. Referring to “those individuals who poison politics with dishonesty and corruption,”the Cardinal said: “These are genuine subversives who turn to wickedness the good order of society.”Another ringing call to arms was the clarion sounded by Judge Wyzanski at the close of the Worcester probation proceedings.

There have been encouraging signs that these and other less well-publicized exhortations are having some effect. In a birthday letter to President Kennedy last May, the Boston Globe reported that “the people of Massachusetts want a better political climate, and will not quit until they get it.”The people of Massachusetts can get a better political climate if they want it. They have only to remember that retaliation at the polls is a weapon in their hands. The voter, after all, need not wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. He is entitled to act — and should act — on the basis of reasonably well-founded suspicion.

5. Party Responsibility. The tradition of independent voting in Massachusetts (nearly half the voters are not registered with either party) may have its good points. One seriously unfortunate by-product, however, has been the weakening of party responsibility. Stronger party organizations could help, through the more effective enforcement of party discipline, to sharpen public issues and give the voter more meaningful alternatives. Responsible party leadership could also do a better job in finding worthy and purging unworthy — candidates.

On both sides, heartening signs are visible. On the Republican side, progress is already well advanced. Philip K. Allen, the newly elected state chairman, is doing an energetic and forwardlooking job of revitalizing the Republican State Committee. On the Democratic side, the tasks neglected by the regular organization have aroused the energies of a youthful dissident group which calls itself COD. (The initials originally stood for “Commonwealth Organization of Democrats.”but the Democratic State Committee refused to allow COD to use the word “Democrat" or “Democratic" in its name.) Headed by Jesse R. Fillman, a former New York lawyer now practicing in Boston, COD is trying to improve the caliber of Democratic candidates for the Massachusetts House and Senate and has announced its intention of attempting an extensive purge of incumbents in 1962. It remains to be seen whether or not COD will have in this undertaking the support of President Kennedy, who on the eve of his inauguration reminded a joint session of the Massachusetts legislature of the “grave trust" and “great responsibilities" of public office in a speech which took as its text Governor John Winthrop’s admonition: “We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us.”

THESE, in broad outline, are the essential ingredients of a successful attack on corruption. They do not add up to reform itself. That can come only from the electorate, and it will not have been accomplished until the voter ceases to ask, “What’s in it for me?", and asks instead, “How will this affect the community and the state?”

The problem is the age-old one of getting people to see the true identity of their own self-interest. The so-called public sector bulks large in our lives today, as taxes bite deep into our incomes. Narrow concentration on our own homes, our own neighborhoods, and our own occupations will not arrest the spread of urban blight, the obliteration of green areas, the pollution of air and water, or the deterioration of the economic climate. These can be arrested only by intelligent long-range planning, by the effective use of experts, and by responsible officeholders who understand the need for both.

The voters of Massachusetts are beginning to see this. I have enough respect for their innate good sense to be confident that sooner or later overwhelming numbers of them will see it. But there’s the rub. Will it be sooner? Or will it be later — perhaps too late?

An aroused electorate can assure itself of good political leadership. Good political leadership can arouse the electorate. Some improvement in the electorate can produce some improvement in its political representation. And once under way, the upward spiral can feed on itself. But how does it get started?

In Massachusetts today, the forces necessary for an all-out offensive against corruption are gathering. There have been forays and skirmishes, some local successes. The immediate need is for strategic coordination and tactical direction. Without these, the attack is likely to fizzle and be forgotten. Will they be supplied? That is the unanswered question.