The Boston busing crisis

Review of Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas

This book offers an absolutely magnificent tableau of American politics in all its complexity and ambiguity. Lukas investigated the lives of three families in a fundamental controversy on the future of America: forced school busing.

The first family are brahmans (the Divers), from Harvard Law. In a moment of idealism that would forever change his career, Diver went straight into the Mayor's office. He saw himself as a mechanic of political change, who was trying to lead a good, honorable and impactful life. Then there is a working class Irish family (the McGoffs), from the other side of the tracks. The widowed mother becomes a great adversary of the process underway, in no way racist but opposed for very practical and personal reasons to forced busing. Finally, there is a black family (the Twymons), struggling to get by amidst dashed hopes and pathological mental illness; they serve as the supposed beneficiaries of a great social experiment. The portrayals of these lives – all real and thoroughly investigated by an absolutely first-rate investigative journalist – are beyond novelistic realism. The personalities are so vivid and well drawn that it is simply astonishing.

Then there is the wider political/historical milieu, Boston in the early 1970s. Lukas stops at nothing to create a composite picture: there is the mayor Kevin White (whom I was surprised to learn was considered by Jimmy Carter as a running mate in 1976), Ted Kennedy, and scores of others including the archdiocese and various minor politician-demagogues hoping to make a career out of the crisis. The portrait is as beautiful and detailed as the Sistine Chapel, exposing the best, the worst, and the unexpected in American politics of the period. Lukacs' talent to do all of this is simply extraordinary. Late in the writing, I learned, he had to throw out one of the three families and begin the entire process over again in the name of thoroughness. No wonder he won a Pulitzer.

This book also spoke to me personally. I lived in Boston for part of the busing crisis in 1975, in the very neighborhood where the brahman Divers lived as a personal social experiment (it was a gentrifying near-slum). I witnessed many of the events as they unfolded. Lukacs' evocation of it all struck me as entirely accurate, pitch perfect to where people were coming from and what they hoped and feared. As such, this book represents a crucible of the American race conundrum, a turning point of the greatest political import, nearly equal to the Vietnam war protests.

And the writing! It is elegant and clear, the product of an unusually driven mind of talent. The characters are so vivid that I will reflect on them until the day I die. This is destined to become a classic, like Tacitus or Thucydides - the quality is truly that high. I have read HUNDREDS of political-historical books, and this one ranks as near the top as a handful.