Word: pendergast
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Meat & Drink. Shrewd, hard-bitten Bill Boyle believes in machine politics and the everlasting value of the faithful ward-heeler. He was a precinct captain himself before he could vote, rose through the ranks of the Boss Pendergast machine to acting director of police (TIME, Feb. 21). In 1941, Senator Harry Truman appointed him to the counsel staff of his war investigating committee, later made him his personal secretary. Last year Boyle plotted Truman's whistle-stop campaign, insisted on going after what proved to be the decisive farm and labor vote. An Irish-Catholic politician...
...Pendergast and Philadelphia's Republican Publisher Moses Annenberg for income-tax evasion. He was looking around for other victims in a field rich with game, when Franklin Roosevelt elevated him to the place left vacant by the death of the only Catholic on the Supreme Court, crusty old Pierce Butler...
...Jonathan Daniels. Pendergast...
Ward-level thinking came naturally to Bill Boyle. Like Harry Truman, he was a product of Kansas City's old Pendergast machine. At 16, he was ringing doorbells in the old Fourth (Silk Stocking) Ward in Kansas City, later became leader there, entered the law. He was a police-department secretary in 1939 when his boss followed old Tom Pendergast to jail. Boyle took over the police department for a few months, won the praise even of the opposition for his administration...
There was not a new Truman. At 64, he was the same brisk, gregarious, stubborn, artless man, the fanatically loyal friend who flew from Washington to attend the funeral of Boss Tom Pendergast, the same engaging Missourian who tripped over his academic gown and blurted: "Whups! I forgot to pull up my dress." Home in Independence for Christmas last week, Harry Truman tramped through the familiar streets with careless informality, dropped in on his friends, doffed his hat to neighbors. Like any well-trained husband, he carefully knocked the snow off his boots before going into the house...