Who Is Clint Reilly, Really?

The real Clinton Thomas Reilly -- at least, the Reilly who came through in 25 hours of interviews -- seems an intelligent, carefully controlled self-contradiction with a simmering temper. He's a Roman Catholic who supports gay rights and a woman's right to choose, a political candidate who quotes Martin Heidegger and St. Thomas Aquinas, an owner of fine art whose taste has a high gauche quotient, a successful businessman who has supported "progressive," anti-business causes. He is openly calculating in his quest for the Mayor's Office -- his agreement to be interviewed at length was, in fact, a thought-out, acknowledged attempt to change his public image for the better -- but his motives for enduring the intense pain of San Francisco politics seem utterly personal, almost beyond his control. He says he wants to be mayor to accomplish good, to do what is right, but, as his own statements make clear, he is pursuing public office for his own sake, not yours. He fervently wants your support, but he wants you to support him because he is who he is, and not for what he would do, specifically, as mayor. In fact, he seems not to have a clear idea of what he will do if he gains the Mayor's Office -- except to keep away from the enemies who, he knows, abound in the city's political and journalistic jungles.

He is someone who could own a ship-shaped country manor full of Warhols, believe he possesses the common touch, and be angry when you do not agree.

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Blue-eyed, soft-spoken, 75-year-old Bess Reilly, who is Clint's mother, and Joseph Reilly, his 74-year-old father, have agreed to share coffee and cookies with me in the living room of their small house in San Leandro, and to talk about their son. The oldest of 10 children, Clint was born in 1947 into a family his parents describe as, at best, lower working class. "We were poor because we had so many kids," Bess says. Joseph worked as a milkman; Bess sold hot dogs at the Oakland Coliseum.

"We didn't have curtains," Joseph says, laughing. "People would knock at the door and ask if the house was for rent."

When Clint was 6, Bess, a Presbyterian, converted to Roman Catholicism; Joseph, who was born a Catholic, had fallen away from the church. "I was a pious nut," says Bess. "I said the rosary at the table."

The church became the center of family life. Clint and his ever-increasing tribe of siblings attended catechism classes and took the sacraments at St. Leander's church a few blocks away. Clint became an altar boy. In 1959, the Reillys moved into the house Bess and Joseph still inhabit, after one of Clint's sisters, Jill, succumbed to a brain tumor. "There was a lot of joy and heartache in our house," Bess remembers. "We were intense, that's the word. Clint is intense, too."

After Jill died, Clint decided to become a priest, and in 1960 left home to enter the seminary. Bess says that at the seminary, her son was most influenced by Monsignor Eugene Boyle, a priest who was close to Cesar Chavez and the civil rights movement of the turbulent 1960s. In fact, under an autographed picture of Boyle on the wall of the Reilly family home, there leans a "Clinton Reilly for Mayor" placard. "Priests should be involved in politics," says Bess. "They should be concerned about human beings and injustice in the world."

Interested in Monsignor Boyle's view of things, I drive down the Peninsula to St. Patrick's Roman Catholic seminary in Menlo Park, which is surrounded by 20 acres of palm trees and flowery gardens. The turn-of-the-century buildings are filled with fine wood furniture and woven carpet from Austria. The seminary is so richly appointed that it was made a pilgrimage stop in the Vatican's recent celebration of the 2,000th birthday of Christ.

A few blocks from the seminary I find Boyle, 79, in the apartment to which he retired after a half-century as a well-known advocate for social justice. Boyle met Reilly while teaching social action seminars at St. Patrick's in the mid-1960s; he has been Reilly's spiritual mentor and political sounding board for more than 30 years.

"Clint was always a leader," says Boyle. "A leader has to be tough. Controversial."

In 1968, under Boyle's guidance, Reilly and a group of his fellow seminarians wrote the "Little Kerner Report," which detailed race-based poverty in San Francisco. Mayor Joseph Alioto was furious at the attention the report received in the press. He called it "Chicken Littleism."

Then, in the early 1970s, Reilly helped Boyle weather an international media storm. A children's coloring book that contained an "Off the Pig" (that is, kill the police officer) page was "discovered" in the basement of Boyle's Western Addition church. The priest had allowed the controversial Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to run a breakfast program in that basement. Reilly acted as the monsignor's media spokesman in the affair, which ended when a congressional investigation revealed that the coloring book had been planted by the FBI.