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To understand the spirit behind Tom Pendergast's card is to understand the ever-mounting spate of scandals in Washington. Most of the men accused, including Bill Boyle, are sincerely indignant at the charges against them. They have done nothing that they consider wrong, nothing that was not approved or tolerated in the political environment where they learned the game, nothing that was not done in Washington years ago. Public criticism of their actions strikes them as strange and unfair.
The new intensity of the criticism is based partly on two new factors: 1) the welfare state and government-in-business present too many opportunities to be run on the old city-hall basis; 2) Washington is the capital of the free world, which is locked in a fight for its life over moral issues with the Communist world. Boyle's law, the code that he and his kind live by, is not the worst code around. It just isn't good enough for 1951.
What is Bill Boyle's law, and how did he come by way of it to his present eminence and notoriety?
Grass Roots. "Bill has never done anything wrong. He has always been more than glad to do favors in a nice way," said Mother Clara Boyle last week as she reminisced about the family's beginnings. He and his twin brother Russell (now an Army colonel) were born in 1902 in Leavenworth, Kans., where their father was a broomcorn merchant. They were a devoutly lighthearted Irish Catholic family of five. The twins went to Cathedral School in Leavenworth, where a stern rule forbade the playing of mumblety peg on the front lawn. "Bill liked to have fun," said Clara Boyle, "but he always got by." One day Bill and Russell were tossing a knife into the turf when a priest walked up behind them and coughed. Bill looked up beamingly. "Such a beautiful lawn, Father Kelly," he said. "We couldn't bear to see it spoiled by the dandelions."
The family moved to Kansas City in 1915, and Mother Boyle had Bill and Russ pushing doorbells and passing out handbills in the hilly Fourth Ward before they were out of high school. Theirs was a predominantly Republican district, and the few Democrats were badly split between Tom Pendergast's "goats" and Joe Shannon's "rabbits." Mother Boyle stuck loyally to the "goats," and ran her Cosmopolitan Democratic club for Tom Pendergast with a firm hand. At the big, rip-snorting Pendergast picnics at Lonejack, Mo., the Boyles got well acquainted with the Trumans, another loyal Pendergast family. Harry Truman was a Jackson County judge (i.e., county commissioner) and making a name for himself for administration. "The President loved those picnics, never missed one," Bill Boyle recalled much later. The kids always hoped Judge Truman would be moved to make one of his "Lonejack orations," the belligerent, off-the-cuff speeches that still serve him best at election time.
Onie's Diplomatic Doorman. Bill Boyle got through the Kansas City School of Law, and, in 1926, was admitted to the bar. He stuffed his diploma in a desk, went to work selling gas appliances, and married a stenographer named Genevieve Hayde. If Bill had failings, greed was not among them. A friend recalls: "He'd make $100 in the morning and take it easy around home the rest of the day."