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Illustration by Christopher Bing |
As an undergraduate, Bill Weld was one of those annoying people who could spend all night at the Hasty Pudding Club and still ace his exams in the morning. Lesser mortals followed his example at their peril.
The Republican former governor of Massachusetts is still up to his old tricks--or chicanes, as he prefers to call them in his clever first book, Mackerel by Moonlight, with its tough-guy protagonist, Terrence Mullally. (The recherché title was lifted from Virginian John Randolph's description of New Yorker Edward Livingston, who became secretary of state under Andrew Jackson: "He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.")
The political novel's story line is straightforward enough. Mullally is a Democratic assistant district attorney from the wrong side of the tracks in Brooklyn. He wins a few high-profile cases in New York, but uses questionable legal tactics. He arrives in Boston one step ahead of the sheriff and lands a cushy job in the Yankee law firm of Warfield & Coles--or "Warfield ampersand Coles," as Mullally likes to refer to it. He is persuaded to run for Suffolk County district attorney, and then for the U.S. Senate. (He wins both elections.) Along the way, he leads a charmed and charming life. He marries a duck-hunting Boston Brahmin and successfully dodges his shady past. All in all, Weld's chronicle is a competent, if slight, procedural.
But for readers from Massachusetts and from the Harvard community who know Weld--or people like him--the fun in paging through Mackerel by Moonlight likely comes from watching real-life New Yorker Bill Weld make wry observations about himself and Boston's unique political culture. In an early chapter, an unidentified suspect is described as "a white Caucasian, six feet 2 inches tall with red hair"--exactly matching the author's dimensions. Why is it that Weld seems to enjoy giving himself nefarious alter egos?
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Mackerel by Moonlight, |
During the district attorney's race, a reporter tells Mullally:
"Reason we get along, D.A., has nothing to do with tilting at windmills. It's you guys understand we're in the same business."
"Oh? What's that?"
"The entertainment business. Welcome to the stage."
Perhaps it came from his College days treading the boards at the Hasty Pudding, but the real Bill Weld also knew how to dominate the public stage. At every press conference, he would throw out a bon mot or tell a self-deprecating joke that kept voters chuckling and sent reporters scrambling for their dictionaries. In Mackerel by Moonlight, Weld provides a fictionalized explanation for the appearance of some of the arcane words and phrases he liked to use; the passage reflects the Boston Globe's account of Weld's regular meetings with the president of the state senate and the speaker of the house to discuss pending legislation, during which the three played a quick hand of cards. The loser then had to work some abstruse word like "oxter" or "moue" into the joint press conference that followed. (One wonders if "walruses in the State House"--Weld's term for bureaucrats--evolved from such a quirky process.)
This sense of whimsy helped the Republican governor maintain power in the most Democratic state in the nation. But Weld also made clever use of the unexpected. Thus, in the first chapter, young prosecutor Mullally explains:
You often get more out of a witness on the way to the interview room than you do inside. There is a great scene in the movie Footsteps in the Fog where Jean Simmons is at the police station giving phony handwriting samples to prove she didn't write the kidnap note. They tell her she's in the clear and she's rushing out and they just have her sign the guest register real quick and guess what? It's a perfect match, she's cooked. Misdirection played all the way, she lets her guard down. Beautiful. I love misdirection.
A member of Governor Weld's staff once put it more elegantly: "Working for Weld was like playing chess against someone playing two games at once." But as Terrence Mullally would say, "Same meaning."
Mullally casts a critical eye on cold roast Boston, particularly the bow-tie-wearing Republican governor Archibald Lovett, who is often a stand-in for Weld himself, and sometimes a stand-in for Weld's former boss and Harvard Law School professor, Archibald Cox '34, LL.B. '37, LL.D. '75. Mullally grudgingly admires Lovett's self-deprecating jokes at the annual Saint Patrick's Day breakfast, a favorite Weld venue and a make-or-break event on the Massachusetts political circuit. Mullally also notes that the governor seems bored silly during the D.A.'s swearing-in ceremony, a demeanor Governor Weld often permitted himself.
The book takes another Weldian twist when the author reveals more of his own political tricks in a frankly autobiographical chapter entitled "My Funny Management Style," during which Mullally overrules his political strategists to make fun of his own well-publicized weight gain. He sums up his philosophy this way: "The press is seldom so innocently employed as when writing about the boss's waistline, as compared to the boss's outrageous power grabs and abuses of authority. Better peccadilloes than peculation, Hugo. Give 'em mock turtle soup, mock foibles, not the real thing!" Other politicians have used the same strategy, but few have described it so eloquently.
Weld has already described how Mullally comes about his views on abortion in the course of a strategizing session with his soon-to-be campaign manager.
"I'm prochoice on abortion. How's that going to go down in Southie and Eastie and Winthrop?"
"No, you're not," the kid broke in. "For these purposes, you are prolife as a matter of conscience....If you ever go statewide, that's a different context, and there will be ample time to review the arguments on both sides of this complex and personal issue."
Weld is refreshingly frank about other parts of the political process. How many times have we heard candidates say that the worst part of their jobs is having to ask for money? Do we really believe it is such heavy lifting to hoist a few cocktails at a private party on the Vineyard? Do we really think it is hard work to smile, say what a swell guy you are, and collect the checks? It is refreshing to hear Weld's alter ego admit that he likes fundraising. But perhaps it is only a former politician, now with a lucrative private law practice, who can admit that fundraising is more fun than shaking hands at your local meat-packing plant's early-morning shift.
If you want a book written by a "socially liberal" Republican governor about a "socially conservative" Democratic senator, if you want a book that delves into the ritualistic love-hate relationship between Boston's Irish and Yankee politicians, then this is the book for you. My only quibble is that Weld writes love scenes like a Republican--but then, as Terrence Mullally might say, "Dunno why, maybe it's just genetic or something." Of course, if all this is fact, rather than fiction...