Michael Dukakis in 1984
At nearly one in the morning, two sets of three males paced the sidewalk in front of Phillips Drug Store at the corner of Charles and Cambridge Streets in Boston. It was 1982 in the heated Democratic primary race for governor. The youngish men were political enemies awaiting a delivery truck carrying the first edition of The Boston Globe. On the field for incumbent Massachusetts Gov. Edward J. King were Ed Reilly, political guru/re-election campaign manager; Gerry Morrissey, press secretary, and a factotum named Rick Stanton. Representing the challenger, once and future Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, were ace speechwriter Ira Jackson; deputy issues man Tom Herman and me, the Dukakis campaign press secretary. None of us spoke to any of them.
The bundles eventually dumped from the back of the truck were dragged inside and their cords cut. All six men scurried into Phillips to buy copies. Back outside, I had one Globe for us, holding it open while Jackson and Herman peered over my shoulders. Nothing on Page One! Nothing on the Metro cover! I slowly scanned succeeding pages until I found the story about our campaign besmirching Governor King’s wife. A freelance Dukakis supporter had bastardized a Jodie King radio ad to rearrange her statements as if she were answering a fictitious narrator's questions concerning her husband’s sexual preferences. Smiling broadly, I looked up at Morrissey:
“Inside. Page 19, below the fold,” I said with satisfaction.
Angry, Morrissey quickly moved toward me, thrusting an index finger close to my face:
“We’re going to get you!” he growled.
The doctored tape had arrived unsolicited in the campaign mail. I learned of it when John Sasso, Dukakis’s campaign manager, waved me into his office, grinning. We sat down and he began to play the offensively hilarious recording. Trouble was he had his telephone on speaker. Listening was a reporter from The Globe. I can’t recall clearly if it was Charlie Kenney or Ben Bradlee Jr. but I’m guessing it was Bradlee because my memory tells me that Sasso had first played it for Kenney alone and then again for me and Bradlee. I tried vigorously to stop the tape, but Sasso pushed me away. A brilliant man, John was making a mistake of earthquake proportions. He had grown close to several reporters. He treated them as buddies, expecting similar treatment in return. I had tried to convince Sasso that reporters were good people and fun to be around but they will eat you alive. A good story trumps a good “friend” any day.
The tape, we later learned, had been mailed in by an over-enthusiastic, brutally clever supporter from Ware, Mass., who supposedly used WARE’s radio facilities to create the satire. At the time I didn't even know where Ware was. As King’s campaign continued to work reporters to fan the fires of outrage, we Dukakis employees tried just as hard to hose it out of existence. Keeping what soon became known as “The Sex Tape” off the front page that first news cycle was a win for us good guys.
Earlier that day, Dukakis and I had met with the editorial board of The Patriot-Ledger at its old location in Quincy. The usual point of such meetings was to try to win a paper's endorsement, but the Patriot-Ledger’s policy was not to endorse any primary-election candidates. Dukakis still wanted to meet with them and answer their questions. Present were reporters and editors whose names I no longer recall. Near the end of the session someone entered the room and announced that there was a call for me that would be transferred to a telephone outside the door of the meeting room. I walked out and picked up the phone. Close by were wire-service teletype machines. These noisy, chattering tickers typed breaking news stories on a continuous roll of foolscap, sometimes preceded by dings whose urgency alerted staff to tear the stories off the roll to read.
It was Sasso on the phone. News of the Jodie King tape was out. He asked if the Patriot-Ledger knew this. Were they grilling Dukakis? I told him no. At the same time I turned to read the latest story coming in from Associated Press (or it might have been United Press International). It was all about the sex tape. I don't think I read the incoming story to John because that would have taken time I didn’t have. Instead, I told him that the wire service was breaking the story as we spoke. I turned around to face the newsroom. Glancing back at the machine, I noted where the story ended. Still holding the phone, I slid my left hand behind my back, ripping the paper from the teletype as silently as possible and brought it up under my suit jacket, shoving the paper down between my underpants and trousers.
Minutes later, the Duke and I were back in the car with a waiting driver. If anyone heard the crinkling sound as I scooted onto my seat, he was too polite to comment. They dropped me at campaign headquarters, and Michael went on to Springfield as scheduled.
That night, in the words of Ira Jackson quoting The Godfather script: “We hit the mattresses.” The telephones blazed for a couple of hours. After having been told that all copies of the errant tape had been destroyed, I told Frank Phillips: “The tape does not exist.” Phillips, writing for The Boston Herald, was someone I knew well and had once worked with on a journalism project. He didn’t ask if the tape had ever existed. Yes, I know – I am not proud of myself, then or now.
We went on to beat King by about seven points and defeat Republican John Sears by about a 59-38 percent margin in the general election. Although Dukakis eventually offered me his top press job, I stayed only a couple of weeks after the inauguration, which was on Jan. 6, to help with his transition. It’s one thing to work your heart out for low pay six or seven days a week all year to get your candidate elected. It’s another thing to have to go home for Thanksgiving not knowing if you've got an offer for a job to start in January. I never knew why the offer took so long, but I did learn that a paid campaign media adviser was pushing hard to clip me on behalf of his friend, an editor of an alternative weekly newspaper. Sasso is the one who told me, but advised me not to worry. When I told the Duke that I wouldn't stay he took me to lunch to talk me out of leaving. He even asked if he could meet with my wife to tell her why he wanted me. No way, I replied, she might cave. Dukakis asked me to recommend a replacement. In turn, I asked Frank Phillips. He suggested someone. To ice the interloper, I strongly recommended Frank's candidate, Jim Dorsey, who got the job.
Six years later Dukakis was serving his third term when he was nominated for president at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, in Atlanta. Sasso had run this campaign, too, until he hit a severe bump in the road five months before the convention. This time it was a videotape.
Then Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, a primary competitor, had made himself vulnerable by delivering public remarks plagiarized from a British politician. Sasso leaked to the press a video comparison of the Biden speech with that of the Brit’s. It was enough to kill Biden's 1988 candidacy. But the public blow back was sufficient to make Sasso resign his own position at the end of September 1987. Still, I didn’t see a thing wrong with Sasso's action. While on a lunchtime walk up Beacon Street in front of the State House I learned from Mike Macklin, a TV news reporter, that Sasso was out. Macklin wanted me to comment since he knew that I had worked closely with John. I told Macklin on camera that Sasso should not take the fall for pointing out the truth and, further, that “I think he's being crucified.”
Years later, John's wife told me that during the Atlanta convention she and her husband dined with a group of national network newsmen. Speaking of his resignation Sasso told the gathering: “When I left the campaign only two people went on television to defend me – then New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and Jerry FitzGerald,” His listeners chewed their food, nodding their heads, until one, Tom Brokaw, I think, asked: “Who's Jerry FitzGerald?”
A year after the Biden tape debacle, about two months before the national election, Dukakis brought Sasso back to run the campaign as “vice-chairman.” John called me, I want to say, on Friday, Sept. 10. We met early next morning at the old Statler Building (now the Park Plaza) in Park Square, the same headquarters location used in 1982. After a brief chat I offered to help him any way he thought I could. Sadly, he declined.
“No, Fitzie. We're going down. What's worse is that we are going down never having stood for anything.” John's words cut me like a sharp knife. Even now, decades later, I find it extremely difficult to believe that he believed what he said.
Afterward followed one of my most enjoyable afternoons ever. Someone, I think on the side of the family of Sasso’s wife, Francine, was in town from New Hampshire with Red Sox tickets. John, the N.H. relative, and -- a surprise to me -- Ted Sorensen and I took a cab to Fenway Park to watch the Sox lose a close one to, as I recall, Cleveland. The seats were good, but sitting next to Sorensen made mine even better. I hardly let him shut up about his nearly 11 years as JFK's right arm, including writing speeches for the president whose phrases still ring in our hearts. In fact, we continued to chat walking all the way back from the stadium to Park Square. He was only 50 then. He would live another 22 years, but I never saw him again.
As we all parted, I clasped his hand and thanked him profusely for all he had done to help our president who had truly helped our nation. For much of my boyhood I had read books by Sorensen, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Pierre Salinger, Arthur Krock and many others while daydreaming of assisting a worthy candidate to become president of the United States. That never happened for me. Still, sometimes the dreaming and the reaching out are nearly enough.
Gerald FitzGerald’s career has also included being a newspaper editor, a writer, a prosecutor, a defense lawyer and a civic leader.
