Free Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas Page A

called to say, “Brown will get his money.”
    But the Mayor didn’t have the money. Everyone agreed it couldn’t come out of the city treasury. Tom Atkins’ televised appeal for a “Martin Luther King Trust Fund” had elicited barely $5,000, most of it from liberal white suburbanites. A few large private donors were tapped, with little success. So the Mayor turned to the one source which could come up with such money on short notice—the Vault.
    In the late 1950s, shabby and decrepit Boston had drifted toward a financial crisis, a forerunner of the credit squeeze which would plague many municipalities two decades later. When Boston tried to raise desperately needed capital with a bond issue, Moody’s Investor Service rated its bonds lower than those of any other large American city. The Athens of America, once the financial capital of the colonies, the home of generations of parsimonious Yankees, was now ranked below Cincinnati or Denver. To the Brahmin bankers, this was simply unacceptable.
    Convinced that Boston was headed for municipal bankruptcy, the sachems of State Street resolved to control that process. If the city had to go into receivership, then the banks and major corporations were determined to have a mechanism in place to administer the wreckage. This effort was spearheaded by Charles A. Coolidge, senior partner in Ropes & Gray; Lloyd Brace, president of the First National Bank of Boston; Carl Gilbert, president of the Gillette Company; and Ralph Lowell, board chairman of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. Widely known as “Mr. Boston,” for his astonishing range of civic enterprises, Lowell became chairman of the new group, which met in his company’s boardroom. Lloyd Brace brought his bank’s senior vice-president, Ephron Catlin, along as treasurer.
    The consortium convened in utmost secrecy, but a few scraps of information inexplicably reached the press. One newspaper dubbed the new group “the Vault,” and the name stuck.
    By 1959, State Senate President Johnny Powers seemed all but certain to become Boston’s new mayor. Distrusting Powers, whom they saw as the prototype of the big-spending Irish pol, the bankers considered several ways of forcing the city into bankruptcy and giving them control of municipal finances. Nevertheless, regarding Powers’ election as a foregone conclusion, they reluctantly supported him. Only at the last moment did several Vault principals quietly open channels to Powers’ opponent, Register of Probate John Collins. When Collins scored an astonishing upset, he shrewdly forged an alliance withCharlie Coolidge and his colleagues. Every other Thursday at 4:00 p.m., Collins met with the Vault in the boardroom of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. Against all precedent, the Irish mayor and the Yankee bankers collaborated intimately on the “New Boston,” then rising on the twin cornerstones of “fiscal responsibility” and a “revived downtown.” Time and again, the Vault produced substantial sums for the Mayor’s cherished projects, while raising money for him to hire experts at salaries well above budgeted levels.
    When Collins decided not to run for reelection in 1967, he mobilized his financial backers behind a handpicked successor, Redevelopment Director Ed Logue. If Kevin White instinctively distrusted the Yankee establishment, he particularly resented its determined support for his opponent. Once in office, he pointedly kept his distance from the business community, only reluctantly attending a couple of Vault meetings. Yet now, as he sought the money for James Brown, his thoughts naturally turned to the Vault. Why shouldn’t he tap their ample resources? Indeed, with all the money represented around that table, why stop at $60,000? The “long, hot summer” was nearly upon them. Even in the best of years, funds would be needed to put young blacks to work and expand inner-city recreation.
    One day in mid-April, White made his pitch to