The (continued) importance of being Ken Reeves

He was once the most popular politician in Cambridge, but after a slip in the polls, people said he was through. Don't count him out just yet, though.

by Jason Gay

You are Ken Reeves. You are a Cambridge city councilor. You used to be mayor. You are talented. You are charming.

You have presence. You have charisma. You walk into a room, you fill it. You give a speech, people listen. Your voice can melt an audience like butter.

You are black. You are gay. But you are other things. You resist definition. You don't like being pigeonholed. You want to be seen as an advocate for children. For artists. For the elderly. You speak for the poor. You try to represent the unrepresented.

But you are controversial. Your style irks your critics, who think you have a big mouth. People say they can see through you. You get called a demagogue. You don't always get along well with the press.

You don't like the criticism. Your critics can be jealous. But you can be thin-skinned.

You have been extremely popular. When you were mayor, people everywhere paid attention to Cambridge. You ran for city council and topped the ballot. Twice: 1993 and 1995. People asked you to run for Congress. You thought about it.

Then, you slipped. You got bad press. You came in eighth out of nine winners in 1997's city-council race. People whispered that you were through. That you were out of touch. That you didn't care.

Ha, you said. You are running for city council again in 1999. Election Day is less than a month away. People say you are re-energized. You say you are the same as you have always been.

You fascinate people. You fluster people. You are different. You are Ken Reeves.

---

Ken Reeves has arrived at the First Baptist Church in Central Square for a city-council candidates' forum. It's an unseasonably cold night in early October. Wool-sweater weather. Campaign weather.

The forum is sponsored by a Cambridge tenants' organization called the Eviction Free Zone. These are bad days for the activists. Rent control is gone in Cambridge, and people are fleeing because they can't afford to pay higher prices. Affordable-housing ideas are scarce. Funding is scarcer. The Eviction Free Zone is under siege.

Reeves walks up an aisle to a table in the front of the church. He wearing a black suit and a gold Tommy Hilfiger tie. He doesn't like fussing about his wardrobe, but he looks pretty spiffy next to the other candidates, most of whom are dressed like junior-high-school guidance counselors. Reeves sits at the table, stares straight forward, and waits for his turn to talk.

Candidates' forums in Cambridge are generally futile affairs. Because there are so many candidates -- 24 for nine seats in 1999 -- and everyone must get equal time, the events are more like policy buffets than policy discussions. Candidates compress entire agendas into 90-second morsels. The basic idea: show up, smile, and don't say anything that pisses anyone off.

Mercifully, only eight candidates have turned out for the Eviction Free Zone forum. It feels cozy. After a little rant from the forum host about post-rent-control hell, the council candidates are asked to answer two questions, which can be neatly distilled into a single interrogative: what the hell are you going to do to fix the crisis?

Most of the candidates merely preach to the choir. Bring back rent control! Down with landlords! Shake down Harvard for money! A couple of candidates jump on Reeves's case for not signing a ballot-question petition to revive rent control, a sore spot for some tenants because the petition failed to reach the ballot after a dispute over signatures. Others poke at Reeves and his fellow councilors for failing to earmark more money for affordable housing. (Years ago, Reeves and Councilor Katherine Triantafillou proposed a $20 million housing plan, but that figure was eventually scaled back to $4.5 million. Reeves's primary housing goal continues to be buying available land in order to facilitate new construction.)

When the mike gets to Reeves, he pauses. He's clearly irked by what he's heard. To him, it's baseless fantasia, pandering at its worst. He begins to speak, his voice at a quiet, conversational level:

You know, in the last election, out of nine people, I came in eighth. There is no God-given right I have to serve as an elected official. Unless you elect me, I cannot be there. I am one of two voices on that council who attempt at all [times] to support tenants' rights for citizens. You got people sitting here who say that they are tenants' friends whose basic campaign theme is, "Life is wonderful in Cambridge, everybody loves Cambridge." You have got to rise up and elect [those] who have voted with you.

At this point, Reeves begins to get revved up, raising his voice:

You also have to win! It seems to me that to run a petition campaign and not get the question on the ballot is a very valiant effort, but I want us to win! If you would work with the people you elect to get on the ballot, and involve the people you elect, we may have more success. I think we need to get rid of all these tenant schisms and internal BS! It doesn't end in success.

Reeves is nearly shouting now:

I've been involved in the tenant movement a long time, and if the time we spent on internal squabbles was shorter than the time we spent winning something . . . We've got tenant leadership that has never been involved with a winning issue ever! You need to win this battle. And I assure you, I am happy to be associated with the $20 million plan. Because I'm not sitting here talking about foolishness, about how we should ask Harvard to give us something. I defy you to show me when Harvard ever gave us anything!

It is a full-frontal attack, and it's the truest moment of the night. Reeves has come into the house of the Eviction Free Zone and blasted the tenant activists like an outspoken grandmother at Thanksgiving dinner. The spectators look temporarily stunned, as if they don't know whether they should clap or hide.

This is the essence of Ken Reeves. Don't give the people what you think they want. Give them what you think they need. Hell or be damned.

---

Kenneth Erroll Reeves was born on February 8, 1951, in Detroit, Michigan. His father was a bus driver; his mother, a nurse. Reeves's parents divorced when he was two. He was raised by his mother and a pair of godparents.

Detroit was hard, but Reeves found solace in the classroom. He excelled at school. He went east to college. After a year at Trinity College in Hartford, Reeves enrolled at Harvard in 1969. It was the Square's zenith: hippies, radicals, Krishnas, Panthers, politics. The sounds of drums, the smells of drama and confrontation. Reeves loved it. "Just the energy of it," he recalls of his first visit. "I had an immediate reaction that this is where I would be."

Harvard, however, was Harvard. Reeves was dazzled by the institution's resources, frustrated by its stubbornness. He was told he couldn't study African-American history; that the field didn't exist. He dabbled in campus politics. He roused rabble. He helped shut down the president's office in 1972 for two weeks, demanding that the university divest itself from companies with investments in South Africa.

In the summer, Reeves went to work at the Columbia Point public-housing projects in Dorchester, a train ride from Cambridge but a million light-years away from Harvard. Reeves worked at Columbia Point for three summers, teaching kids. He lived there, too. And he learned the defining tenet of his political life.

"I learned some inalienable truths about human beings," Reeves says. "I learned in Columbia Point that everybody, no matter how poor or degraded or uneducated or educated, has the same desire for their kids to have success. Everybody has that. Now, some people know more about how to achieve that, but at base, they all want that. Everybody wants to have dignity, everybody would like to have a reasonable roof over their head, and everybody would like to kind of have some joy in life. . . . I learned that in a way that I have never forgotten. And that time informs whatever I do every day."

Reeves graduated from Harvard in 1972. He traveled abroad. He got a fellowship and lived in West Africa, where he studied tribal cultures. He went to Sweden, where he studied the country's socialized form of government. He returned to his home state to go to law school at the University of Michigan. He graduated and got a job with the National Consumer Law Center. He resettled in Cambridge.

Reeves decided to run for city council in 1985. He lost. He opted not to run two years later, but he did in 1989. He was backed by the city's venerable progressive political organization, the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA). He won. His city-council colleagues elected him to be the city's vice-mayor. Two years later, they elected him mayor.

---

Being mayor of Cambridge is a strange thing. You don't get elected by the people; you get elected by the city council. You preside over council meetings and the school committee, important duties both, but other than that, it's largely a ceremonial job. You cut ribbons, you give speeches, you greet dignitaries. No one pays much attention. Quick! Name Cambridge's current mayor. (It's Frank Duehay.)

When Ken Reeves was mayor, however, you knew it. Naturally, there was a hulabaloo because Reeves was the city's first black mayor, and the city's first openly gay mayor (also the first in the state). But it was more than that. Reeves energetically used the job to press for improved education, teen empowerment, neighborhood beautification, and the arts. He called in every one of the city's high-school seniors and asked them what they planned to do after graduation. He presided over city-council meetings with a sharp tongue and an even sharper sense of humor. People showed up at meetings to watch him. He turned routine events like street-corner dedications into parties.

"He loved being mayor," says John Clifford, the owner of Central Square's Green Street Grill and one of Reeves's closest friends. Their bond stretches back more than 25 years, to when both men worked at Columbia Point. "He made the job bigger than it was," he says. "There was more pageantry, more fun."

Indeed, Reeves became a political celebrity in a city unused to having political celebrities. Cambridge is a place where politicians make their names by going to wakes and Little League games and knocking on doors in the rain. Reeves was more like an overnight star. He was known on both sides of the river. He got his name in national newspapers. And when people thought about candidates to replace Joe Kennedy when Kennedy tired of the Eighth District congressional seat, Reeves was on everyone's short list.

Not surprisingly, says Clifford, the attention Reeves got made people jealous. City-council meetings were derided as the "Ken Reeves Show," a showcase for the mayor's ego. There were controversies. Articles in the papers. Questions about Reeves's expense accounts -- how much city money he spent on meals, on travel, on entertainment. There were charges that Reeves was riding high on the city's dime. There were columnists who attacked Reeves because he lived in a rent-controlled apartment while he was making $43,000 a year. There were columnists who attacked him for his friendship with Bill Walsh, a city councilor who was convicted of bank fraud. There were columnists who just attacked. Howie Carr went to Walsh's trial and made fun of Reeves's lisp. Carr referred to Greg Johnson, Reeves's partner of more than 25 years, as Greg "Johnson" Johnson. He called Johnson a "boy toy."

Many pols would have pulled back. Some would have given up and fled. Reeves -- who to this day insists he did nothing inappropriate, and points out that he was never found guilty of doing anything illegal -- hung on. The controversies and columns hurt, but during the height of the storm, he ran for re-election and finished first. He had the backing of the people. Still, in 1996 he lost his seat as the city's mayor to Sheila Russell, the widow of another former mayor. Russell had a low-key style and brought an abrupt end to the unpredictable excitement of the previous four years.

Reeves took a seat on the floor with his fellow councilors. He still spoke and shouted and pushed his agendas, but it wasn't the same. He ran for re-election two years later and nearly lost. It was a mysterious slide. Reeves has explanations for why he finished so poorly -- explanations that have to do with bad campaign strategy and bad decisions -- but those around him say he was distracted. His campaign was not the juggernaut it had once been. People wondered what happened.

But still, he won. That's what counted. And over the past two years, there's been a Ken Reeves revival of sorts. In the post-rent-control era, Cambridge has struggled with its new political definition. But Reeves has been front and center in the city's desperate quest for more affordable housing. He has been pointedly critical of Cambridge's city manager, Robert Healy, and of conditions that have provoked several minority employees to file discrimination suits against the city. He and Katherine Triantafillou have sought to fill the vacuum of progressive leadership left by the decline of the CCA. "I don't think Ken has lost his relevance at all," says Triantafillou. "I don't even like talking about it that way."

---

Ken Reeves is sitting in a booth at the Middle East Restaurant in Central Square. It is a late afternoon in October. He has ordered a hamburger in pita bread but is having trouble finding time to finish it. People in the restaurant constantly stop by to say hello. One of the Middle East's owners comes up and asks Reeves if he needs anything. Later, the Middle East's other owner comes up and asks Reeves if he needs anything.

It is always like this. Walks down the street with Reeves aren't really walks; they're brief series of steps continually interrupted by constituents of every background and age. Horns honk, schoolchildren wave. While he's walking through the neighborhood near Central Square, a woman spins out her SUV in the middle of the street to stop and thank him for speaking at a function. "People still call him `mayor,' " says one of Reeves's campaign aides.

Much is made of Reeves's status as a ground-breaker; the fact that he's black, the fact that he's gay, and the way those two facts together make him an original. These things are true, but Reeves is also a throwback, reminiscent of an era when politicians understood style: the idea that it's not only what you say, but how you say it. "He's an absolutely brilliant speaker," says Triantafillou. "He has a capacity for energizing and motivating people through words that I envy."

"I think he's a remarkable individual," says Chris Gabrieli, the millionaire venture capitalist who hired Reeves to be his Cambridge eyes and ears in his unsuccessful 1998 bid for the Eighth District congressional seat. "He's someone who I think is the very rare person in politics and public life who combines a deep personal interest and appreciation of an individual citizen's life and interests with a keen mind that understands public policy. . . . I consider him something of a mentor."

Reeves would no doubt be embarrassed by such talk. To him, politics is not rocket science. The intellectual demands aren't as strenuous as the time demands. When you have to be at point A and point B at the same time, he says, you do both. There are constituent issues to be heard, city-employee grievances to be aired, business concerns to be addressed. Sometimes you can accomplish everything. Sometimes not.

But Reeves wants his greatest currency to be the truth. Call him the anti-panderer. Whether it's a tenants' rights organization or a long-time constituent looking for a city job, Reeves isn't afraid to provide people with a little reality check. "There are a lot of people who say, `I was born in Cambridge, I grew up in Cambridge, I raised my kids in Cambridge,' as if they're ticking off job qualifications," Reeves says, pushing at his pita burger. "They believe that as native-born Cantabrigians they are entitled to something. And sometimes, it's my job to say, `You know what? If it hasn't happened yet, maybe it isn't going to happen.' "

Call it a political version of tough love. Beneath Reeves's progressive agenda is an unshakeable belief in self-sufficiency -- don't rely on others, don't make excuses, do it yourself. He applies the same approach to Cambridge as a whole. Whereas some believe the city's wealth and academic resources all but guarantee success, Reeves think it's quite the contrary. Such attributes have made Cambridge lazy, he believes.

"You've got Harvard, you've got MIT, you've got all this energy and talent and vibrant neighborhoods," Reeves says. "So why isn't a city that has this embarrassment of riches deeply involved in a discussion about who we want to be -- where we will be 10 years from now, and how we can make a community serve its citizenry? This discussion doesn't go on. This city, at this moment, is in such a visionless period."

Of course, Reeves still gets grief. He's still a target; he still rubs some people the wrong way. There are those who believe that he is to blame for the city's lack of vision -- that he's been a divisive force on the council and impeded real progress. He's been accused of playing the race card in his comments on the city-employee discrimination cases. He's been bashed for bashing the city manager. He also took grief for accepting a $2000-a-week job campaigning for congressional candidate Gabrieli when aides of hometown candidate John O'Connor thought they had lined up Reeves's support.

There was a time when Reeves might have taken all this personally. But now, Reeves says he is more perplexed than stung by the criticism. "Katherine Triantafillou says to me, `You're like Papa Doc. Something happens -- it's because of you," Reeves says, bursting into gigglish laughter. "I don't understand why I have become the king of the hot-button issue. All I know is that I have tried to work as hard as I can for a pittance to serve the people of Cambridge. And that's what I enjoy doing. And I can't think of anything that would have been more fun."

---

This campaign is not a comeback, Reeves will tell you. How can you come back when you never went anywhere? He campaigned pretty hard the last time out, he says, and finished eighth. Go figure. Could happen again. You never know.

Friends say it's different, however. That old Ken Reeves electricity is back, they say. Clifford says his friend from Columbia Point is pumped up again. A couple of weeks ago, Reeves even had his first swishy A-list campaign party: famed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his wife, Sharon Adams, hosted a fundraiser for him. It was a called an "Evening of Politics and Jazz." Lani Guinier was there. Cornel West was there. Developer and Clinton buddy Dick Friedman was there. Mike Capuano was there. "It was a party," Reeves says, shaking his head. "Lord, was it a party."

Reeves knows he faces some stiff competition come November 2. Seven of the nine council incumbents are running for re-election, and first-time candidates such as Jim Braude, Marjorie Decker, and David Maher are making strong bids. And no one knows exactly what to make of the thousands of new residents -- most of them young, white, and affluent -- who have flooded Cambridge since rent control's end. Some think these new residents could swing the election. Some think they will simply drive their Passats past the polls on their way to work.

For the most part, Reeves is sticking to his tried-and-true agenda of affordable housing and education and public safety. He has pushed for green-space purchases and small-business development. But he agrees that Cambridge's new residents are the unknown factor in next month's election. "The apartment that used to rent for $650 is now going for $1350, and we believe the person who can afford $1350 is someone quite different," Reeves says. "We fear it may be someone who's only interested in national elections."

These new voters present some problems for Reeves. One of the best ways to reach new constituents is through the media, but Reeves is wary of the media, especially the hometown paper, the Cambridge Chronicle. (There are people in his campaign whose media strategy can adequately be described as "screw the media.") Also, Clifford gets on Reeves's case for not directly asking people for their vote, or for a check. "He won't ask people for money," Clifford says. "For some reason, he just won't."

Assuming, however, that Reeves wins re-election -- and it's not a stretch -- no one knows where he will go from there. No matter who wins, the next city council is probably going to be pretty fractured. Unlike in the old days, there are unlikely to be any powerful voting blocs. It's anyone's guess who could be mayor. And though some councilors will no doubt stand in the way, Reeves may have a shot. "That's his cup of tea, man," says Clifford. "He used to say he could be mayor for life."

For now, Ken Reeves is content to leave that kind of speculation to the speculators. There are people to meet, votes to win, truth to be spoken. The man who was once called the future of Cambridge politics wants you to know he still has a future. Don't call it a comeback. Ken Reeves is very much alive and well and living in Cambridge. Thanks for asking.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.