The Cambridge City Council may grab the headlines in the city's government, and Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci may seize the spotlight, but the man who fine tunes the city's affairs is much less a public character. One city councilor is working as an administrator at Tufts, another earns a living as a security guard and a third recently left a job as a state tax collector. But it's City Manager James L. Sullivan who runs the city full-time.

Sullivan's specialty is not pulling strings to win votes and influence people. While Vellucci works to keep his name in the public eye and good food in the stomachs of his supporters, Sullivan plays the cautious, unsensational business executive, trying to rein in municipal spending, draw in more federal funds and clamp down on the city's carefully-watched property tax rate.

Sullivan's most important function, in the eyes of those who appoint him, is to provide tight financial management. But instead of high profits, it is low taxes people want from him. And instead of stockholders or voters, it is the city councilors to whom Sullivan must ultimately answer.

Cambridge's city charter follows one of the five plans outlined in Massachusetts state law that provide slightly different relationships between a city's elected officials and its administrators. Each of the charters, like a meal on a Chinese restaurant's menu, has a letter designation. "Plan A" comes with a strong mayor. With "Plan E" you get a strong city manager. Plan A guides the city of Boston--its mayor is also its chief executive, and is elected directly by city residents. Cambridge's mayor is a city councilor--a legislator--picked by the other eight members of the council to serve as titular head of the city.

In Cambridge the mayorship is a part-time post, but the city manager is a professional executive. The city council picks the manager, and the charter forbids it from choosing anyone who has served in any elective office in the county in the past two years.

Sullivan is certainly no vote hunter. He holds an M.A. in administration and finance from Boston College, and before coming to Cambridge as manager he served as top administrator in a succession of towns.

The council can remove the manager, and it has final say over the city's annual budget, which the manager draws up. But Cambridge's Plan E keeps a strong check on political patronage, stating: "Neither the city council nor any of its committees or members shall direct or request the appointment of any person to, or removal from office by the city manager or any of his subordinates." Boston mayoral candidates wave vague promises of city posts before the eyes of possible supporters, but there is much less room for job-bartering in Cambridge politics Cambridge councilors pick one man, and he picks everyone else.

But politicians don't always behave. Two weeks ago, the city council voted to urge the Cambridge Housing Authority to reinstate Francis G. White, its former director of maintenance, in what one source termed a pre-election move to gain votes. The request couldn't stick, however; White still doesn't work at the housing authority.

The Plan E system is not unusual, but in the U.S. it is more common among towns further to the west. Older eastern towns have been reluctant to forego their traditional structures for modern management methods. Cambridge made the switch in the early '40s, after a controversial Irish mayor went to jail for taking kickbacks from an architectural firm. And for two decades afterwards the system indeed featured a strong city manager, as it was meant to. Between 1942 and 1964 the city council changed Cambridge's top executive only once.

But in 1964 the council's choice of city manager became more than a question of sound management; it became an issue in city power struggles. Between 1964 and 1974 the city changed managers more frequently than it changed councilors. The city's legislators are elected every two years, but they went through seven managers in ten years.

"That was all politics, "Mayor Vellucci says now, as though that is a game he does not play. But Vellucci, a veteran of the city council since 1955, was in the fray with the rest. Whenever alliances shifted, there was a new man administering the city's affairs.

Sullivan had one stint as city manager during that time of changes, but he only lasted from 1968 to 1970. The council, with the support of present Councilors Vellucci, Daniel I. Clinton and Thomas W. Danehy, ousted him in June 1970 over many objections. Cambridge residents crowded into the council chambers to protest the move at a hearing required by the city charter, and former Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey '28 joined with the then-president of MIT to send a telegram to the nine councilors stating, "Now, as never before, we need stability and continuity in the administrative branch of the city government." (Spring 1970 was the season of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia--the season that a Crimson headline read, "Rioting devastates Harvard Square; Windows smashed, scores injured.")

Sullivan's removal involved more than power politics. CityCouncilor Francis H. Duehay '55 says the council was not ready for Sullivan's style; he was high-powered, independent and aggressive. When the council moved against Sullivan, he charged that it was because he supported citizens' participation in the city government. And at the hearing on his removal citizens backed him up. Spectators in the back of the room shouted at the councilors voting to push Sullivan out, and the councilors shouted back.

The zoo atmoshphere in the council chambers subsided after that, at least on the city manager issue. Sullivan's former assistant city manager, John H. Corcoran, took his old boss's post. But Corcoran was a relatively weak manager, and by 1974 the city faced many unsolved problems: corruption the housing authority, excessive demands for wages from municipal unions, stagnation of Kendall Square development efforts and confusion in the city's federal aid programs. The council decided that Cambridge needed a strong manager in fact as well as in charter, and in 1974, after elections had brought another shift in the line-up, the council asked Sullivan to return after he had spent four years as city manager in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Sullivan's record has been solid, and the council now backs him firmly, recognizing the importance of stability. For three years running Sullivan has pushed down the city's property tax rate, and Vellucci, one of the five councilors who voted Sullivan out of office in 1970, now stands squarely behind him. Sullivan has gotten developers to invest in the historically bleak area of Kendall Square in East Cambridge, and Vellucci says that under Sullivan's leadership Cambridge is doing as well as any city in Massachusetts at pulling down federal money to boost the city economy.

Robert Healy, Sullivan's present assistant city manager, says that on average, professional managers spend only three to four years in one city. But now that the Cambridge manager's stay in office is not a divisive issue in the city council, and now that Sullivan has built up a fiscal record with which councilors can't argue, the city manager may once again be facing a decade at the helm.