Leading the way

Bridging the Divide: My Life
By Edward W. Brooke
Rutgers University, 332 pp., illustrated, $29.95

More than four decades before Deval Patrick made history by getting elected as the nation’s second black governor since Reconstruction, another African-American made his mark in Massachusetts and the nation with unprecedented triumphs in statewide races.

Edward W. Brooke blazed a lot of political trails. He was the first African-American nominated for a constitutional office in Massachusetts (secretary of state, 1960), the first elected attorney general of any state (1962), the first in the nation popularly elected to the US Senate (1966), and still the only one to win reelection as a senator (1972).

Now 87 and a resident of Miami, Brooke has written a readable, tempered autobiography whose political passages should remind anyone who was paying attention of Patrick’s campaign. Though they belong to different generations and political parties, Brooke and Patrick shared more than race as candidates. And they ran remarkably similar campaigns.

Brooke thrived as a moderate Republican, as other senators of his day did before ideological conservatives took over the national party. He supported George Romney, father of outgoing Governor Mitt Romney, in his aborted campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968.

‘‘Bridging the Divide,’’ Brooke’s summation of his life, has the same unifying message as ‘‘Together We Can,’’ Patrick’s campaign slogan. Both initially came to the state to seek opportunity; in Patrick’s case, from Chicago to attend Milton Academy. Brooke left Washington, D.C., to join a segregated unit at Fort Devens during World War II and came back to the state afterward to go into business with Army buddies in Roxbury.

Both are successful lawyers trained locally, Brooke at Boston University and Patrick at Harvard. ‘‘I believed law was a good background for politics,’’ Brooke explains. Both are unabashed advocates for civil rights.

As candidates, both were ambitious, bold, and appealing to voters across racial lines. When Patrick made soundings about a run for governor, most of the state’s Democratic leaders had discouraging words. He ignored them.

In 1962, Republican elders wanted Brooke to run for lieutenant governor. But he aimed to be attorney general instead, and so informed his flabbergasted interlocutor, Elliot Richardson, over lunch at the then Parker House. In Brooke’s account, Richardson recovered and responded in definite terms: ‘‘I am going to be our candidate for attorney general.’’

The lunch meeting ended, Brooke writes, with him telling the wealthy Brahmin, who later became US attorney general under Richard Nixon, ‘‘Look, Elliot, I’m going to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for attorney general. So if you want to be attorney general, you’re going to have to beat me.’’ He didn’t.

Four years later, Brooke almost cleared the Republican field by declaring his candidacy for the Senate the day after Leverett Saltonstall announced he would not run again. Brooke defeated yet another prosperous Brahmin, former governor Endicott ‘‘Chub’’ Peabody, that November. The first black senator of the 20th century strolled to reelection to a second term.

His political career ended with a bitter loss to Paul Tsongas in 1978, which he blames on media coverage — particularly this newspaper’s — of his divorce from his first wife and related financial matters. The Senate Ethics Committee cleared him of all charges, but not until four months after the election. Brooke holds back his feelings about the bitter episode, which he recounts matter-of-factly.

Throughout his campaigns, Brooke embraced his racial identity without making it an issue. So did Patrick. ‘‘I did not raise the subject of my race,’’ Brooke says about his initial run for attorney general.

Voters, he figured, ‘‘cared less about race than reform.’’ Brooke had been a corruption-fighter as attorney general and, before that, chairman of the Boston Finance Commission. Patrick ran as a reformer too.

As he contemplated his first campaign, a losing bid for a legislative seat, Brooke recalls making this assessment of his skills: ‘‘I was able to mix easily and talk comfortably with people of all races. I loved meeting people, listening to them, and bringing them together.’’ That sounds like the governor-elect.

In his breakthrough campaign for attorney general, Brooke says, he made a ‘‘promise to restore public confidence in government.’’ Patrick made the same appeal with different words by vowing to give people turned off by government reason to ‘‘check back in.’’

The two candidates even took the same approach to the mechanics of campaigning. ‘‘We built the best field organization in the state,’’ Brooke boasts of his attorney general race. The architect of the expansive field operation that returned Michael Dukakis to the governor’s office in 1982, Jack Corrigan, has said Patrick’s was even bigger and better.

In detail after detail, candidate Patrick had so much in common with the trailblazing Brooke of the 1960s and early 1970s that a reader has to wonder: What took so long for another black candidate to win statewide office?

Brooke last won an election two years before US District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered the desegregation of Boston schools in 1974. The polarization over busing, which ended in 1999, seems to be the best answer.

Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a freelance journalist based in Boston.