The compleat politician.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: Outgoing Massachusetts Senate Pres. William Bulger - Cover Story

When William Michael Bulger, the longest-serving president of the Massachusetts Senate, announced his departure from that body last November to assume the presidency of the University of Massachusetts, the move was painted in the kinds of hues that have colored nearly all of his epic career.

He wasn't just leaving the Massachusetts Great and General Court, his home for more than three decades, he was taking with him an entire era.

"There is no doubt in my mind that he was not only one of a kind, but that his kind flourished in a period of our recent history that is now over," says John Culliname, founder and CEO of Culliname Software in Boston. Culliname, with Bulger's help, has raised millions for the city's massive public library system. He places the long-time Senate president in a pantheon of Massachusetts political legends that also includes John F. Kennedy and Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. "His was the era dominated by just a few men who got things done," Culliname adds.

"I think he is the last of the Mohicans," agrees Bill DeWeese, the House Democratic leader of Pennsylvania, who, like Bulger, takes his literary allusions seriously. "It is a piercingly unhappy prospect to see him go because he was one of the last of the backroom strategists. And from the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago in 1860 to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles in 1960, smoke-filled rooms have produced some of the great political luminaries of our past.

"Bulger's eminent political style would have been successful for 20 years in our national experience, but for the last 10 or 15 years only his furious industry and impeccable skills have allowed him to prevail," says DeWeese.

"The last of this historic era was defined by its last few leaders," contends Steve Lakis, president of the Legislative Leaders Foundation in Boston. "These were people like William Bulger of Massachusetts and Willie Brown of California. We are not likely to see their kind again, nor will their kind of leadership be seen again."

GONE FOR GOOD

Even Bulger himself, a lightning rod for praise and provocation who was first elected to the House in 1960, admits his particular approach to leadership was not only unique but is now perhaps gone for good.

But it wasn't, Bulger insists, a leadership spawned of some personal force or brilliance or even a leadership of a particular era. What made his tenure so long and successful, Bulger says, was hard work and the diligent attention to detail that came with it.

"I...