Moakley did the job as if born to do it

1 June 2001

The year Joe Moakley first won his congressional seat, 1972, marked my political coming of age. His was the first campaign on which I ever worked. It was a race of broad strokes and high drama, a fight in which I truly felt I was on the side of the angels.

It was also a time of easy verities, particularly when seen through the eyes of a teenager. The Vietnam War had split the nation into camps of hawks and doves. The black-hearted Richard Nixon was president, running for a second term against the saintly George McGovern.

And then, of course, there was Louise Day Hicks.

Hicks was an easy person to demonize. Once chair of the Boston School Committee, she seemed to personify the racism that ultimately led to a federal court's finding that Boston had intentionally segregated its schools. In 1970, riding a crude and often vile wave of anti-busing sentiment, Hicks had run for and won a seat in Congress representing the 9th District.

She was, to say the least, an acute embarrassment. We needed a savior; his name turned out to be Joe Moakley.

Although Hicks was widely disliked, the power of incumbency was strong. It seemed impossible to unseat her, especially in the only race that anyone thought mattered: the low-turnoutDemocratic primary.

That was Moakley's take on it as well. So Moakley, a long-time Democrat, did the unexpected: He bypassed the primary and ran as an Independent. It was a bold move and it captured my imagination.

I thus spent the weeks leading up to the election holding signs and handing out leaflets. Our technique was innovative but, by today's lights, amazingly unsafe. Two of my brothers would sit on the hood of my grandmother's red Oldsmobile while I, the only one with a driver's license, drove. Every few houses they would leap off, running to doorsteps to drop off Moakley campaign literature.

To my 16-year-old eyes, Moakley was a Promethean figure, sword in hand, fighting for good. And when he won in November, with votes from Independents, Republicans and suburbanites who had no use for Hicks, it was as if a glorious war had been won.

I suppose the truth is that my efforts amounted to little in the context of the larger campaign. Yet I had been part of a cause and, for the first time in my life, part of something I thought would change the world.

In the nearly three decades since, the world did change, although in ways I did not expect. The simple truths from back then became more complicated. Issues I once saw as black and white now had shades of gray.

The conflict in Vietnam proved to be a complex political and military story where right and wrong were hard to discern. Richard Nixon, a brilliant but flawed man, nevertheless accomplished much. And Louise Day Hicks, repugnant rhetoric aside, spoke for genuinely aggrieved people who saw themselves as scapegoats for something over which they had little control.

During those years my perception of Moakley changed as well. I once saw him in near-mythic terms. But in college I interned for a summer in his Norwood office. My siblings also worked for him: Kevin spending two years as a legislative aide in Washington, D.C.; Brian interning there for four years.

We grew to know Joe Moakley as a man (of course, it's hard to see someone as a demigod when he's chewing you out for not getting Mrs. Sullivan her check from the Social Security Administration). Someone we once thought of as larger than life we now understood was simply human.

Human he may have been, but he was a human of uncommon character. What had first attracted voters to him was his genuine interest in each person's story, his candor and the sense that he was fundamentally a decent man.

And for all that changed in those years, those qualities never varied. With rare exceptions - his role in battling the Salvadoran military being the most notable - Moakley never strode the national stage. He did not push to the front of the room whenever a TV camera showed up. Rather he worked diligently behind the scenes, influencing the flow of legislation as chair of the House Rules Committee.

Being a member of Congress was a job he relished, one he was seemingly born to do. In it for all of the right reasons, he never lost touch with his constituents, and his biggest satisfactions seemed to come from being able to affect their lives in some concrete and positive way. It was that way the day he first entered Congress; it was that way until Monday, the day he died.

And now, having touched thousands of lives in his life's journey, he today is laid to rest. To some, he gave jobs or housing or a helping hand. But to others, me included, he gave inspiration.