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When the depression caught Bill with two babies and no job, Mother Boyle hustled to the rescue. She knew just where to turn, and the Pendergast organization did not fail her. She got Bill on as a $100-a-month booking clerk at the old Fourth District police station, in the heart of Kansas City's Irish district. Two years later he was secretary to the director of police, an old Pendergast hack named Otto P. (Onie) Higgins. The ward bosses, the flatfeet and the job hunters who came to deal with Higgins called Bill Boyle "Onie's Diplomatic Doorman."
One day in 1939 the machine found itself in need of a shining, bright-eyed new face. The reform forces of Governor Lloyd Stark were bearing down on Kansas City and threatening to put the corrupt police department under state control. Pendergast & Co. kicked out Onie Higgins (he later went to prison) and put Onie's diplomatic doorman behind Higgins' desk. Boyle was told to "clean up the town and keep it clean." Police Director Boyle followed his orders enthusiastically. In person, he raided gambling houses, broke up slot machines, closed up the red-light district, shut down saloons, and even tossed some of his old acquaintances into jail.
Two Moves & a Jump. But it was later than Tom Pendergast thought. In three months the State moved in, and Bill Boyle was no longer police director. He moved over to the Pendergast redoubt at City Hall, became commissioner of street cleaning. A reform mayor fired him in 1940, and he moved again: this time to the job of assistant prosecuting attorney in the county courthouse, the last Pendergast citadel. It was dull work; his main assignment was to take confessed criminals before the court to enter guilty pleas. "To my knowledge," said Bill's good friend, Lawyer Shannon Douglas, later, "Bill never tried a single case in Kansas City. What that boy needed was a job."
He found a good one. As Bill Boyle likes to remember it, Senator Harry Truman called him from the Capitol and asked him to be an investigator for Truman's war contracts investigating committee. As others recall it, Boyle was desperate, and Harry Truman put him on as a sort of personal aide, at $350 a month. In 1942, Truman's old Missouri crony and secretary, Harry Vaughan, went off to the Army, and the Senator gave Vaughan's job to Boyle. Bill became a specialist on the boss's political problems, and in 1944 moved over to the Democratic National Committee to try to help Truman get the vice-presidential nomination. He got it. Bill Boyle took and passed the District of Columbia bar examination. By the time Harry Truman inherited the presidency, Bill was all set and ready to do business.
Right Place, Right Time. Fourth Ward arithmetic was hardly adequate to measure the opportunities for influence in postwar Washington. In Kansas City or Boston, a pol could do a friend a favor by fixing a traffic ticket, knocking down a tax assessment or awarding a municipal contract. But all these things were clear-cut acts, and relatively easy to rule legal or illegal. The complications of the federal operation opened up new frontiers for the pol.