Mayor for a New America by Thomas M. Menino

had pushed the council to approve a new minority district in Jamaica Plain. But the chair of the Redistricting Committee, Jimmy Kelly of South Boston, opposed it. Kelly was one of my six. The Black Political Task Force put Crayton on notice: A vote for me as president was a vote for Kelly as chairman. “The decision Tony Crayton makes will almost certainly be a career decision,” said the president of the task force. “There will be a lot of progressive forces that will support another candidate for that seat.”
    But Tony, a hardworking member of Ways and Means, was ambitious. He wanted to replace me as committee chair, believing he could advance minority interests from that post. The council president appoints the chairs. I didn’t have to spell it out. If Tony backed me for president, I’d name him chair.
    Hennigan thought that neither of us would get seven votes on the first ballot, giving her a chance to lure one of the three conservatives away from me. That strategy might have worked. The conservatives were livid with me for voting to override Ray Flynn’s veto of a bill that required most city restaurants to install condom vending machines—this after I supported, opposed, and supported it again! My coalition almost broke down. “I’m really getting beat up,” I told a reporter, who wrote that I “seemed likely to lose” my bid for the presidency. One of the conservatives might have voted “present” to punish me, or held off for a ballot to see what Maura had to offer. But the progressives behind Maura barely talked to the conservatives. I listened to them and would work with them.
    Respect—shown by hearing people out and disagreeing without being disagreeable—is a vanishing political virtue. When I was new on the council, and the papers would quote me criticizing the mayor, my father would call me up to complain: “Don’t say things like that about the mayor. You have to show him some respect.” Carl Menino may have hated politics, but from him I learned the secret that kept my coalition together. Hours before the vote, the conservatives met behind closed doors and decided to go for me on the first ballot.
    â€œIt is heartening that a well-qualified candidate prevailed,” the
Globe
wrote of my 7–6 victory in an editorial titled “A Comer as Council President.” Black and Hispanic leaders who lumped me in with the “conservatives” could take comfort from these words in the editorial: “Since his district encompasses Hyde Park and Roslindale, two racially mixed neighborhoods, [Menino] has an acute sense of the changes that are transforming the city and a knack for reconciling newcomers and longtime residents.”
    Maura was gracious in defeat. “It would have been wonderful to win, but it didn’t happen,” she said. “You live to fight another day.” That would be a long time coming.
    Â 
The neighbors crowded round for a block party in the Readville section. Neat little bungalows, cheek by jowl, emptied as hot dogs, pizza and soft drinks disappeared. The new mayor gave a Readville-is-now-on-the map speech, and he danced in the street with Angela while somebody’s stereo blared Sinatra’s “My Way.”
    Â 
—from David Nyhan’s column in the Boston Globe, July 20, 1993
    Â 
    In early March, Ray Flynn summoned me to the mayor’s office. Bill Clinton had asked him to be U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. Should he take the job? “Mayor” (never “Ray”), I said, “some of us from the neighborhoods might get to be congressmen, but name anyone from South Boston or Hyde Park who ever got to be an ambassador. Take it.” Ray said he’d mull Rome over. His call came at 2:30 in the afternoon: “Go out and get some new suits; you’re going to be acting mayor.”
    â€œMy whole life has changed in a matter of twenty-four