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. . . a list as long as your arm.
    I took to the details. In office, I earned the nickname “Mayor Pothole” for photographing potholes, broken streetlights, and abandoned cars in my travels around the city and sending the pictures to the relevant departments and then following up. Campaigns are full of potholes. A fellow who keeps track of them is good to have around.
    I was Joe’s “body man.” I saw him the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Messages to Joe went through me. Tell me something with the bark off, that’s how he heard it. I had no agenda of my own. I gave your message level.
    I was paid peanuts for my work. I would have paid to do it. My peers trusted me. I saw my merit in their eyes.
    I stored that good feeling against the bad moments.
    There are lots of those in campaigns. The candidate unloads on you and you’ve got to take it. Or pretends you didn’t tell him something when you did. And the person who asked you to tell him that something? From then on, he’s your enemy. Or the candidate is indiscreet about another member of the team, and you can’t look at him again without being reminded of what you shouldn’t know. I make the candidate sound petty. I’ve been the candidate. I’m partly talking about myself. You say things you regret. It’s the tension. The strain of performing. The self-criticism. The self-pity. Imagine working for LBJ. Now imagine being LBJ.
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    Joe’s fights against Kevin White were epic battles. Three times we took the field, and three times we lost.
    He was an incumbent. They win every time in Boston. (I should know.) Why did we think we had a chance?
    Because the voters resented Kevin’s using them as a springboard to higher office. Kevin White was first elected in November 1967. He ran for governor in 1970, losing in a landslide. George McGovern asked him to be his running mate in 1972. Ted Kennedy vetoed that—he wouldn’t share the national stage with another Irish Catholic from Massachusetts. But the feeler stimulated Kevin’s ambition. He was preparing to run for president in 1976 when Boston’s busing crisis derailed his plans.
    I was the opposite of Kevin White. I wanted to be mayor of Boston. Period. That was my pact with the people. They were staying put in the city; so was I. In my first race, I pledged to serve only two terms. Later, I made that two terms a century.
    Knowing I wasn’t going anywhere kept city employees and contractors on their toes. And having no designs on their jobs smoothed my relations with a string of Republican governors from Bill Weld to Mitt Romney. Weld and company knew that helping Boston would not hurt them. By contrast, Mayor Ray Flynn’s noises about challenging Weld invited the governor to ignore the city.
    We also thought White was beatable because of the “climate of corruption” in his administration, an issue we stoked in our slogan “Joe Timilty, Honestly.” Kevin’s fundraising techniques included forced contributions from contractors and city employees, who paid in cash at a suite at the Parker House. We threw this and more at him in 1975. His camp replied in kind. Days before the election, Kevin’s police commissioner charged that the Mob was behind Joe. The
Herald
called the campaign “a nasty, negative free-for-all.” Kevin barely hung on, winning by 4.8 percent.
    I was the big loser in the election. My work for Joe went for nothing. And Kevin White fired me from the BRA. I didn’t blame him. I would have done the same thing.
    It was a deliverance. I would have stayed in that rut until retirement. That’s how I see the firing now. I was ashamed then.
    For the second time in our marriage, I was jobless. Angela didn’t reproach me for sinking my life into Joe’s career.
I
reproached me. I was getting nothing out of politics. I was going nowhere in
my
career.
    For the