Kevin H White

Both his father, Joseph C. White, and his maternal grandfather, Henry E. Hagan, served as presidents of the Boston City Council; Joseph White was also a Massachusetts state legislator. Kevin White earned a bachelor’s degree from Williams College in 1952; a law degree from Boston College in 1955; and also studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, now the John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1960, when he was barely 31, Mr. White was elected Massachusetts secretary of state. He was re-elected three times, serving until 1967 (Mr. White was elected to a four-year term in 1966; before that, the term was two years). That year, he ran his first mayoral campaign, defeating Louise Day Hicks, an ardent busing opponent, by fewer than 13,000 votes to become Boston’s 51st mayor. Mr. White was re-elected three times: in 1971, when he defeated Ms. Hicks again (she was by then a United States representative); in 1975; and in 1979. Though considered scholarly and aloof, Mr. White was, in the judgment of many, also exceptionally shrewd. When Dr. King was assassinated, on April 4, 1968, Mr. White feared race riots in his already tense city. By chance, the soul singer James Brown was scheduled to perform in the Boston Garden on April 5. Persuaded that the concert must go ahead as planned, Mr. White quickly arranged for it to be shown live on WGBH, the city’s public television station. The broadcast kept people at home in front of their television sets and became popularly known as “the night James Brown saved Boston.” In 1983, Mr. White announced he would not seek a fifth term. Questions about Mr. White’s finances would bedevil him even after the federal investigation ended: in 1993, without admitting guilt, he agreed to return to the state nearly $25,000 in surplus campaign funds that he had used for flowers, groceries and other personal items. (In 1988, Mr. White had told The Globe that he planned to spend the money on himself out of “perversity and obstinacy.”) From 1984 to 2002, Mr. White was the director of the Institute for Political Communication at Boston University. Mr. White is survived by his wife, the former Kathryn Galvin, whom he married in 1956 and who was herself the daughter of a Boston City Council president; a brother, Terrence, who managed Mr. White’s early campaigns; two sons; three daughters; and seven grandchildren. In 2006, a bronze statue of Mr. White was unveiled to great fanfare in front of Faneuil Hall. At 10 feet tall, it was, as many observers noted, quite a bit larger than life.