But the conservatives do share some basic positions, especially an abiding opposition to government intrusion into the city's housing market. "Rent control (limits on the amount of rent a landlord can charge) ruined the city," Sullivan says. "Properties have not been kept up, there have been absentee landlords and all the rest because people could not afford to maintain what they owned." But, after a decade, he concedes it would be disastrous to scrap the program overnight, favoring instead a gradual program that would decontrol apartments as they became vacant. "It would have to be eased out very slowly," Sullivan says. Since the switch of a single council seat to the Independent camp would allow the abolition of rent control, Sullivan is campaigning as hard this year as ever. "The city is coming back to normal again," he says, crediting both growing national conservatism and the "excesses" of CCA members who have attempted to put even tighter controls on condominiums in recent months. The fifth seat, he says, is a possibility.
At council meetings, Sullivan is the least noticeable of the nine. He drifts over by the radiator in the corner and talks quietly with administrators, with the old ragged guys who come to every meeting, with reporters. Most nights, the longest speech he makes is: "Move the question, Mr. Mayor.
At the city high school they have disco music, not bells, to signal the end of classes. For a few months, while the council chambers were undergoing repairs, the body met in the school's cafeteria, and one night, on the hour, the Spinners interrupted a discussion of industrial zoning. Walter Sullivan, the most conservative councilor, wasted no time in grabbing Saundra Graham--the only Black, the only woman, and the most outspoken radical on the body--and beginning to boogie.
In Boston, things like that don't happen. There, the city councilors bitch and feud and sincerely hate each other, and, consequently very little gets done. "They carry a grudge, I guess," Sullivan says. "I know how to come out of a fight and forget it. The other side has respect for my decisions--they know they're made sincerely and not from politics. And I know they have their people that support them, people they represent."
Only the charge--often repeated by city liberals--that Sullivan and other Independents don't really represent the interests of their largely lower-income and working class constituencies makes him angry. Is opposition to rent control a strange position for someone with enormous support from the fixed-income elderly? "Most elderly people are in federal projects, and there's no rent controls there," Sullivan says. "So who's kidding who?"
There have been victories for Walter Sullivan--his several stints as mayor, for example--and there have been setbacks--including a decade of losses to the liberals. But he is a politician, and takes his defeats in stride. Only once, he says, has he been truly disappointed. That was in the mid-1970s, when city liberals concerned about traffic congestion managed to block the planned construction of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Harvard Square. On his office wall there are several pictures of him and Kennedy touring possible sites for the library. Cambridge "was the only place it belonged. This city was where he had been, what he knew, and he loved it here." The same, of course, could be said about Walter Sullivan.