DL: It's the project's great moment. It sets up this extraordinarily dramatic fight in the Senate as to whether or not Reagan's veto will be sustained. And Reagan cites the project explicitly as one of the reasons why he is vetoing the bill. But the veto was about what should be the right level of federal spending, who's going to run domestic policy, Congress or the Reagan Administration, how much pork is acceptable pork in the course of government. And you have this phenomenally dramatic showdown in the Senate where Reagan can't convince enough Republicans to support him because their states are benefiting from other pieces of this large highway bill and he ultimately goes down by one vote. Having actually won one day and then the Democrats convinced the one Democrat who had abandoned them to come back into the fold and they override the veto on reconsideration.

DL: The Senate is getting ready to vote on whether or not to sustain Reagan's veto. There are thirteen Republican senators who have said they will not support Reagan on this veto. Most of them come from states that do very well in this transportation bill. It's a highway and transit bill and several of them have significant amounts of transit money. A couple of them come from states, rural western states, where people have been very upset about the fifty-five mile an hour speed limit and the compromise bill allows states to raise the speed limit from fifty-five to sixty-five on rural highways. So you get two western senators who really want that sixty-five mile an hour provision and advocates of the larger bill made it very clear to those people that if they didn't support the larger bill, when whatever emerged out of the post-veto, would not include the sixty-five mile an hour provision, a sort of, you can have it now but if you don't back me up, I'm taking this back tomorrow. The last wonderful piece of this story, one Democratic senator, Terry Sanford, the new senator from North Carolina, votes to sustain Reagan's veto and he does so because North Carolina doesn't do that well in this transportation bill. That is to say that North Carolina gets back less in highway funds than it pays to the federal government in gasoline taxes. And Sanford says this is terrible. I promised people in North Carolina I wouldn't support this. So the question is, how do you get Sanford to turn around his vote? Tremendous lobbying pressure is brought to bear on Sanford and probably the most critical chain of events is some of the urban Democrats in the House of Representatives go to their colleagues from North Carolina and they say look, for years we have supported tobacco subsidies. This is not particularly popular or important for our constituencies. So if you don't find a way to convince your new senator from North Carolina to reverse his veto, the next time tobacco subsidies come up, we're going to vote against you and, you know, the American Cancer Society's going to cheer us on and it's going to be a great victory for us. And these representatives from North Carolina began to call Sanford and the people around Sanford and say, you've got to change your vote on this. It's too important on the whole for the state. Yes, we lose on the highway side but we do so well on the tobacco subsidy side that it's not worth making. And Sanford is put in this very embarrassing position of having to go change his vote. It doesn't happen very often in a place like the Senate where you see somebody reverse a position so quickly and so publicly and so blatantly in the face of great political pressure. Sanford switches. On reconsideration, Reagan's veto is overridden by one vote, that's Sanford's vote. And Massachusetts wins its fight with the Reagan Administration, gets the money it needs for the Central Artery and the country gets this massive highway and transit bill.

DL: There are two critical elements that go on in the design of the Big Dig. The first is it says we can build a major new piece of urban infrastructure without directly hurting a lot of people. Robert Moses in New York building highways in the '40s and '50s says, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Right. You can't build a highway through a city without having to go through neighborhoods and tear down buildings and make people unhappy but you have to do that for the greater good. The paradigm of the artery is we're going to leave nobody worse off and we're going to leave the region as a whole, better off. It's a very expensive strategy but the artery takes absolutely nobody's house. It's an incredibly important selling point. It does take some commercial properties but that's not as significant a problem.

That sets up a dynamic for what we now call mitigation. The first thing I say is look, I'm not going to hurt you. And so I'm not going to take your property. Now maybe even after all the design things, that something bad is going to happen to you during construction and so I want to mitigate that. I want to make it better. It might be as simple as saying look, it's going to be really noisy outside your apartment so I'm going to sound proof your apartment. It might be as simple as saying there's going to be a lot of dirt and it's summer time and you don't want a lot of dust so every night we're going to have a truck go down the street and we're going to wet down the dirt so it doesn't blow around. But this sets up a dynamic where anybody who can make a credible case that they're going to get hurt, can make a credible case that they're hurt ought to be addressed. So now it becomes not only are we not going to take a building in the North End but when we're done, we're going to leave you this really nice park to the North End for a sort of payment to make you better for all you suffered in these years.

This begins to snowball and a variety of interest groups in Boston that have laudable goals that they've never been able to find money for see this huge project that appears to have an almost unlimited amount of money, and it still needs lots and lots of permits. And so you have a bunch of interest groups saying, if I can make a credible case that I have a problem, and if I can make a credible case that I might be able to stop the permitting through this project--because in permitting, you have to go a hundred for a hundred, it's not enough to get ninety-nine of the hundred permits you need--then they'll have to deal with me if I can make a credible threat. And so this begins to escalate as the project gets towards the end of its permitting project and people begin to say, well, there's this park that we want and gosh, shouldn't we also build some transit because more people are going to drive and so you have to mitigate the air quality problems and on and on and on. So arguably at least a third, perhaps half, perhaps even more of the project is going to mitigate the harms or the alleged harms that come from building a highway in an urban area.

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