This article originally appeared in the November 7, 1972 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
It was much neater the last time around.
The 1970 congressional race in the Third District (now the Fourth) featured a gawky, outspoken Jesuit priest awarded the Democratic nomination by a citizen’s peace caucus — a law school dean new to politics and awkward at it, who, according to a Globe magazine piece written shortly after the election, “spent far more time than most candidates actually talking to voters instead of just pressing the flesh;” a stubbornly issue-oriented man at great pains to discuss the details of his positions; an “untraditional candidate” who, “though his prepared speeches tended to be tedious and his jokes baffling,” was effective and comfortable in small groups: a pre-convention McGovern all the way. Ranged against him, back in that year of cool, easy verities, were a smooth young suburban state legislator, a Jaycee-type Republican, whose advertising well warranted the Drinan people’s protest. (Announcer’s voice: “If the law is unjust, not only may we but we must disobey the law.” McGlennon’s voice: “That’s what Robert Drinan says, and I say that kind of thinking can destroy our country…”); and a 72-year-old paradigm of political hack-dom, the incumbent congressman denied renomination by the Democrats and making a last-ditch stand as an Independent, leveling his own charges of violence, extremism, hatred and radical ideas, and marshalling all the advantages of incumbency — the free mailings, the recognition factor, the record of personal constituent services and pork of various kinds brought into the district. What right-thinking person — certainly what concerned, sophisticated voter — who of us could have felt a tremor of hesitation at the choice?
It would be nice to have it so simple this year. But Drinan’s baffling, knotty, spontaneous jokes have been replaced by sure-fire numbers: “So there I was in this lonely motel in Springfield, and I came across the inevitable Gideon bible, and you know how it is, they have selections for when you’re depressed and when you’re lonely, and I turned to the selection for loneliness, and there at the end of the passage was this note: ‘If you’re still lonely, call 227-8686…’” (This staple has a number of variations — the Father himself in other locales, two rabbis in a Newton motel, etc.) The touching awkwardness and the thoughtful little chats with the voters have given way to a breezy line of patter and a manner which resembles no one’s so much as Monty Hall of Let’s Make a Deal (though in fairness he still takes copious notes on individual problems). The painstaking discussion of the issues has become stream after stream of lofty, rousing rhetoric on the imperatives of citizen involvement, the necessity for a new spiritual vision, the potential role for the U.S. as a moral leader to the world and his own role among the moral leaders to the Congress, the multitudinous evils of the Nixon administration, and that true and inescapable paradox, “We are our brothers’ keeper, because we are our brothers’ brother” — attempts to press him towards a fuller examination of his positions generally met first with a flurry of invective against whatever other alternative is at question, next a stentorian defense of his own rectitude, and sometimes — quite often, in fact — the clincher: “It’s a lie!”
