“I played him in the movies.” Reagan grinned.
“No, you didn’t,” O’Neill corrected him. “You played Grover Cleveland Alexander, a baseball pitcher.”
“Jeez,” Reagan admitted. “That’s right.”16
Long afterward, the speaker told me that Reagan had not impressed him early on. Perhaps. And perhaps O’Neill believed that he could afford to let Reagan’s economic program pass, confident that it would fail in practice. By Dan Rostenkowski’s account, O’Neill promised Reagan in their first meeting “that he would give him all the rope he needed—to either herd the Congress or to hang himself.”17 To me, the opposite seems more likely, for O’Neill seemed cowed by Reagan’s popularity, sensing that with Democrats split, he had no effective way to block the high-riding president. Retreat was realism.18
In any case, O’Neill did not gear up to fight Reagan in the early months of 1981. The old bulls, the Democratic Committee chairmen, urged him to obstruct the Reagan program; liberals wanted him to counterattack. But O’Neill reckoned that was both wrong and futile. He feared permanent defection by the Boll Weevils if he tackled Reagan hard. “It would have been a schism within my own party,” he told me. “They’d have overrun me.”19
I recall vividly one press breakfast, a vintage O’Neill performance defending the bygone liberal era. O’Neill talked of a program to help dwarfs grow taller. It made him sound hopelessly out of date. “I didn’t become speaker to dismantle the programs I’ve fought for all my life,” O’Neill boomed bravely, only to lapse into damaging admissions. “You know, I’ve been one of the big spenders of all time,” he said. “It’s true: I am a big spender.… Once a doctor came down here to talk to us. He said the average dwarf grows only forty-six inches high, and if we appropriated $45 million for research, maybe that could be increased to fifty-two inches. So I got the $45 million into the budget.”
Around Washington, reporters and politicians told and retold the “dwarf story” at Tip’s expense.
Nothing epitomized more vividly the contrast between Reagan’s ebullient vigor and O’Neill’s weary fatalism than the speaker’s junket to Australia and New Zealand during the 1981 Easter recess with a delegation of Democrats. Reagan used the recess to lobby Democrats around the country by phone. One was Tom Bevill of Alabama, an important Appropriations Subcommittee chairman who was in O’Neill’s traveling group. The president woke up Bevill half a world away, right under O’Neill’s nose.
“This is President Reagan, what time is it, and where are you?” Reagan asked Bevill.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Bevill replied sleepily, “and I’m in New Zealand.”
Reagan apologized for awakening him. “Have a good trip and when you get back to Washington, I want you to come in and see me,” he said. “I want to sit and talk to you about the budget.”20
When O’Neill got home, preliminary Democratic nose counts showed Reagan would win the first budget battle of 1981 by fifty votes. Reagan’s popularity had soared after his gallant response to the attempt on his life. He was inviting Democrats to breakfast by the carload. An enormous tide of support washed over Congress after Reagan appeared before a Joint Session. “The mail was running 300,000 against 6,000—in his favor—on the Gramm-Latta [budget] bill and the reconciliation,” O’Neill recalled. “The papers were saying it was time for a fiscal change in the politics of America.”21
O’Neill compounded his problems by predicting defeat. “I can read Congress,” he told reporters on April 27. “They go with the will of the people, and the will of the people is to go along with the president.… I’ve been in politics a long time and I know when you fight and when you don’t.”
It was an honest, accurate prediction but it riled other Democrats who saw it as a colossal blunder, fueling revolt. Indeed, on May 7, Reagan swept to victory—gaining sixty-three Democratic defectors. House Democrats heaped opprobrium on O’Neill, like an angry, beaten football team out to lynch the coach. Les Aspin, a Democratic moderate from Wisconsin, delivered the most stinging, seditious commentary in a newsletter to constituents:
Tip is reeling on the ropes.… Tip doesn’t understand the explosions that have been going on since November. He’s in a fog. Tip is smart enough to understand that there’s been a seismic event, but he also realizes that he doesn’t understand its nature. He’s not part of what’s happening and he has no idea where to go.… The Democratic Party needs some new leadership and it needs it badly.
Tip O’Neills Turnaround
The lesson was clear: A passive strategy is fatal for the opposition. It not only produces losses but feeds political depression. Politics is like football. The team with forward motion gets the breaks and gains the extra yardage; the team on its heels loses and becomes dispirited. The moral was contained in Roosevelt’s spur to Rayburn in 1938: “Better to go down fighting than to accept defeat without fighting.”
Savaged by his own troops, O’Neill abruptly changed his game. To friends and aides, he admitted how badly he had been hurt by that first knockdown, and he switched from passive speaker to opposition point man against Reagan. “Tip took him on,” Richard Boiling remembered. “Rostenkowski didn’t take him on. The rest of them wouldn’t take him on. Jim Wright was scared to death of Reagan in 1981…. Tip was getting no support from Democratic chairmen, except the black ones.”22
Like an oak, the speaker bore the whiplash of defeat for his party and weathered the storm for months. The more partisan O’Neill became, the more visible were his defeats. Republican House Leader Robert Michel protested that O’Neill was breaking tradition by leaving the impartiality of the speaker’s high-backed chair on the dais to enter the partisan fray down on the House floor. But even if activism meant more defeats, it staked out a Democratic position and built a record.
The first break for the Democrats—giving them an issue to exploit in 1982 and 1984—was a Reagan mistake. A bit too cocky, Reagan sent Stockman’s package of Social Security cuts to Congress, only to have them whipped back by the Republican Senate, 96–0. Unsteadily, Democrats regained their legs, and O’Neill launched his confrontation politics. “I had to be tough,” O’Neill said. “I had to be what they call bitterly partisan.”23 Democratic pollster Peter Hart advised O’Neill to stop defending the poor and start attacking the rich as recipients of Reagan’s largesse—a gambit that nettled Reagan personally.
Until then, O’Neill had almost never appeared on the Sunday television interview shows. But in early June 1981, as Reagan was moving toward the final budget showdown, O’Neill used a rare Sunday TV appearance to jab at the president. Picking up Peter Hart’s cue, the speaker not only denounced Reagan’s proposed tax cuts as a “windfall for the rich” but he taunted Reagan personally—saying Reagan did not understand working people because he was surrounded by rich, selfish advisers and probably did not know anyone earning less than $20,000.
It was unusual for a House speaker to throw such a personalized punch at a president—and O’Neill’s haymaker bruised Reagan. For ten days the president stewed. Still stinging at his June 16 press conference, Reagan rose to the bait when ABC’s Sam Donaldson shouted a reminder of O’Neill’s barb, as Reagan was leaving the podium. The president spun around and came back. He recalled his humble beginnings in Tampico, Illinois, and seemed to cast an aspersion on the speaker, implying that O’Neill lived in a worse neighborhood than his family.
“We didn’t live on the wrong side of the tracks, but we lived so close to them that we could hear the whistle real loud,” he said. “And I know very much about the working group. I grew up in poverty and got what education I got all by myself and so forth, and I think it is sheer demagoguery to pretend that this economic program which we’ve submitted is not aimed at helping the great cross section of people in this country that have been burdened for too long by big government and high taxes.”
Like spectators at a tennis match, reporters watched for the speaker’s reaction. It was a turning po
int. O’Neill was getting divided advice; old-timers such as Leo Diehl, O’Neill’s home-state patronage man and inside staffer for decades, thought it inappropriate to spar personally with the president.
“Leave it alone,” he recommended.
But Chris Matthews, O’Neill’s combative new media adviser, urged O’Neill to hit back. “You got to fight this thing,” he insisted. Matthews operated by the maxim that any public accusation—especially one made on television—is assumed to be true unless it is answered. It was weakness to let the other guy get the last word.
“You got to go, Mr. Speaker,” Matthews urged.
That warmed O’Neill’s Irish blood. Talking that evening with reporters during a dinner for two hundred Democratic party bigwigs, O’Neill struck back. O’Neill invited invidious comparisons with Reagan’s Hollywood riches by observing that he himself had neither left his own humble beginnings, nor forgotten them.
“I still live in the same neighborhood I did as a young boy,” O’Neill snorted. Moreover, he insisted the issue was not Reagan’s family roots, but his policies—“all geared to the wealthy of America.”
As for the charge of demagoguery, O’Neill acted as though such tactics were beneath his high office. “I’m surprised that the president of the United States would make a statement about the speaker like that,” he said, regally enshrining himself in the near-papal dignity of the third person singular. “I trust in the future he’ll have more respect for the title of speakership.”
When a reporter asked about O’Neill’s future with Reagan, O’Neill advised: “Well, I’d have to say the honeymoon is over.”24
It was their first sharp, toe-to-toe exchange.
Rather than hit back, the president phoned the speaker to say that he had not meant to give personal offense. O’Neill replied in kind: “Politics is politics. We may disagree during the day but come six P.M., we become friends.”
The truce of manners was for show. Within twenty-four hours, O’Neill was blasting Reagan’s “dictatorial” treatment of Congress, and Reagan was on the phone again—with a less friendly message.
Reagan had been persuaded by David Stockman that House Democratic Committee chairmen—“the Politburo of the Welfare State,” as Stockman mocked them—had made a sham of cutting the budget. He persuaded Reagan to fire another thunderbolt.
“I want a chance to send some substitute language up there on the budget and have it voted on,” the president told O’Neill on the phone. Oiling the machinery, Reagan added patronizingly, “The House has worked hard and done a good job, but it hasn’t gone far enough and I …”
Irritation and frustration flashed across Reagan’s face as the speaker burst in. O’Neill smelled a Reagan power play, and he wanted to head it off. The House committees had done their work, O’Neill insisted, and there was no need for a new resolution.
O’Neill went on to needle Reagan: “Did you ever hear of the separation of powers?”
Then in his booming baritone, O’Neill lectured Reagan on Civics I: “The Congress of the United States will be responsible for spending. You’re not supposed to be writing legislation.”
“I know the Constitution,” snapped the president.
O’Neill pressed Reagan to “be specific about what you’re going to send up. You always talk to me in vague generalities. I don’t want to see the Republicans trying to shove something through without full consideration.”
“Oh, c’mon, you mean the Democrats,” tweaked the president. “I was a Democrat myself, longer than I’ve been a Republican, and the Democrats have been known to make a few power plays.”
The speaker backed off, rather than pursue partisan pinpricking. “Okay, we’ll have a look,” he said.
Reagan inserted belated congratulations on O’Neill’s fortieth wedding anniversary, and the speaker closed by advising him, “Have your people talk to Jones and Boiling [the Democratic chairmen of the Budget and the Rules committees].”25
Despite this genial sign-off, the battle was on. In the forty-eight hours from Reagan’s press conference to his second prickly phone call, the two leaders had indulged in the mutual needling, the posturing, and the punching that characterized their rivalry. That rapid sequence captures their Irish tempers and their Irish blarney, their little digs and their substantive clashes, their compulsion to combat and their lust for the power game.
O’Neill now wanted to win. The Democratic-controlled Budget Committee crafted a package designed to lure back the Boll Weevils. It cut less from domestic social programs than Reagan’s package; it built up defense, but not as much; it cut taxes for one year, not three. It did not beat Reagan, but it lured home more than half of the Boll Weevil defectors. Reagan’s victory margin dropped from seventy-seven votes in May to just seven votes in the second budget battle in June.
The speaker was making some headway—playing “me too” on substance and slugging Reagan rhetorically. In the final test of 1981, on cutting taxes, Reagan beat O’Neill again by outbidding the Democrats in passing out tax cuts. O’Neill and Rostenkowski, his tax strategist, warned (correctly) that Reagan’s three-year tax cut risked big future deficits and refused to match Reagan. Also by then, the president was harvesting his image of invincibility from earlier victories. On July 29, O’Neill suffered his third major loss of the year, a 238–195 vote for Reagan’s tax package. This time, forty-eight Democrats defected.
“Certainly, it was my worst time,” Tip O’Neill confessed to me. “He had the votes. He had me licked.… I was about as low as anybody could be.”
O’Neill would come home and share his pain with his wife.
“I’d come home, I’d be feeling so low. Millie used to say to me, ‘Well, d’you think you’re right?’
“I’d say, ‘Of course, I’m right. I know I’m right in conscience. I know I’m right in philosophy. I know I’m right in my mind. I know I’m right for America.’
“Well, she used to say, ‘Hey, put on a clean shirt and a new tie and press your suit, and go out and keep your chin up. Don’t let ’em know you’re down. That’s all.”
“And I did. I took that attitude and I kept fighting.”
Teaching the Old Dog New Tricks
After that early pummeling, O’Neill learned the new power game. Everyone knew Tip O’Neill as an old shoe—a friendly, clubby backroom man. He liked card games and shmoozing with cronies at the University Club. His wife, Millie, had no taste for Washington and had remained in North Cambridge. So, O’Neill shared a bachelor pad with Congressman Edward Boland, another Massachusetts liberal. They were an odd couple: Boland, trim, quiet-spoken, and immaculate; O’Neill, gregarious, rumpled, and endlessly dieting to get below 250 pounds. Weekends, he would commute to Boston to play golf near his Cape Cod home, his score hovering near 100. And he loved visiting barbershops and factories or swapping small talk with little old ladies down the street. His favorite aphorism—All politics is local—epitomized the parochialism of the House and marked him as a classic old-breed politician.
But Tip O’Neill was surprisingly adaptable; he became a modern politician who changed the ways of the House. He moved the House into the media age by bringing in cameras for live coverage of floor debate in 1979. He developed his own public relations tactics for jousting with Reagan. Despite touting localism, he thought in national terms. He hired pollsters to help plot a national strategy for congressional Democrats. He saw the rising strength of younger-generation moderates and neoliberals (more pragmatic than old-style liberals) and drew them into the leadership. His own thundering liberal rhetoric made him an anchor of consistency for a party adrift; yet, simultaneously he accommodated on both tactics and substance—all to protect his party’s precious bastion in the House.
Few people outside Washington are aware of how open O’Neill was in his final years to politicians half his age. That fit his record; he had been an agent of change a decade before. In the early 1970s, he had been a prime mover in changing the seniority system, i
n opening up House proceedings, and in setting House ethics standards. He had been among the first big-city Democrats to break with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and, later, to assert that Richard Nixon should be impeached.
As speaker, he readily tapped the talents of the new generation. After the 1980 election debacle, he gambled on Tony Coelho, a hard-driving Californian just starting his second term, to revitalize the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coelho was so phenomenally successful at fund-raising and modernizing the party apparatus that in six years he jumped way up to the number three job, Democratic whip. On economic issues, O’Neill would set up special task forces to leaven old committee chairmen with younger neoliberals (Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Tim Wirth of Colorado, and Leon Panetta of California). Open to new ideas, O’Neill quickly endorsed the tax-reform plan proposed in 1982 by Gephardt and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, which became the model for Reagan’s 1985 tax plan. O’Neill urged Walter Mondale to adopt it in 1984, but Mondale declined.
Institutionally, O’Neill copied the executive branch, building up the speaker’s office. He delegated much authority to a talented young staff: Ari Weiss, a slender, bearded, serious-minded Orthodox Jew, who mastered the substance of legislation and the politics of the House; Kirk O’Donnell, a tall, lanky, straight-talking, Boston Irish protégé of Mayor Kevin White, who was O’Neill’s sage and able national strategist; and Christopher Matthews, a witty, grinning, wisecracking phrasemaker with quick reflexes, canny media instincts, and a partisan lust for combat. O’Neill was in awe of Weiss, who finished college in three years and whom he treated like a son and a one-man brain trust. He leaned on O’Donnell for broad judgments and foreign policy advice, and he used Matthews to teach him the modern counterpunch. Together, all under forty, they moved O’Neill into the new era.
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