While at BankBoston, Jackson moved the company towards greater involvement in the Boston community.

“Ira brought to the bank the point of view that you can do well and do good at the same time,” says Fleet Bank chief executive officer Chad Gifford. “Everyone around him was strongly impacted by his beliefs.”

Gifford says Jackson pioneered Fleet’s First Community Bank, which catered to low-income communities. He also helped BankBoston win the Ron Brown Award—presented at the White House by the vice president—for investment in the inner city.

“He wrote the book on corporate involvement in the community,” says former Mass. Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, for whom Jackson served as a top aide before accepting the position at BankBoston. “He demonstrated to the corporate world that [community service] isn’t just good citizenship, it’s good business,” Dukakis says.

For Jackson, his time at BankBoston validated his vision for business.

“BankBoston proved to me that business can have a heart as well as a head,” he says.

A Different Take

Businesses have felt this heart much more strongly in the past weeks, following the fall of the World Trade Center. And Jackson’s ideas are enjoying increased popularity, although not under the circumstances he would have liked.

“He’s been doing this his entire life,” says Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the Kennedy School William W. Hogan. “But now the rest of the world suddenly realized he had a point.”

Jackson laments, however, that it took terrorism to give his ideas a boost.

“It shouldn’t take a grotesque event such as this for people to realize and appreciate the importance of a strong public sector and a competent governmment,” he says.

He says he would like to see the government continue to support the flourishing of civic involvement that he claims could usher in a “new era” of engaged democracy.

“Just as President Bush has been so willing to apply power and the levers of public spending, I hope the business community doesn’t fall back on its traditional playbook,” Jackson says.

But Jackson says he is hopeful and enthusiastic about the changing national mood—a change he saw firsthand on a trip to New York two weeks ago.

While getting out of a cab, Jackson lost his cell phone, which slipped from his briefcase.

Soon after, he got a call from a reporter for Fox News, who had found the phone and dialed the last number Jackson had called to find the phone’s owner.

Jackson was pleasantly surprised.

“It was a very un-New Yorker thing to do,” Jackson says. “I think there’s something different going on.”

—Staff writer William M. Rasmussen can be reached at wrasmuss@fas.harvard.edu.