Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  Having owned Capitol Hill with only two short breaks since the New Deal, the Democrats, with the advent of Ronald Reagan and those riding his coattails, had, as I’ve said, every reason to be uneasy. At a post-election press conference, Tip opted for a tone of preemptive diplomacy, referring to Reagan as “the admiral of the ship.” The new president, he hoped, would be steering “the proper course” in “smooth” waters. The Speaker depicted his own party as having been hit by a “tidal wave.” Still he rejected obstructionism. “We will cooperate in every way.”

  Reagan’s opening move was to recruit a top-flight team of White House aides, a savvy group that included pragmatists and moderates. Illinois’s Robert Michel, the Republican leader in the House, despite his seat on the other side of the aisle, had long been one of the Speaker’s buddies. What Michel saw now was that the Speaker would regard favorably the efforts the new administration was making to assemble experienced players, however he might feel about their ultimate aims. “Tip is a very practical politician,” was Michel’s assessment as he took stock of the brand-new Washington landscape. He knew only too well the low regard in which Tip had held the previous president’s people, having heard his frustrated private complaints about the tactics and attitudes of Carter’s Georgia homeboys, above all political aide Hamilton Jordan—whom O’Neill had contemptuously rechristened “Hannibal Jerkin.”

  But while Tip’s practicality was important, so was the fact that he counted himself, above all, a professional. He gave no sign of bearing any grudge at the incoming Republicans for the nastily personal TV ad they’d run against him. Chiefly financed by the National Republican Congressional Committee, it featured a Tip look-alike stranded in a black limo that had just run out of gas. Even worse than its poking fun at what O’Neill would himself refer to as his rough looks, the commercial portrayed him as arrogant and clueless. The on-screen “Tip” was a catered-to and spoiled Washington insider unable to recognize his tank was empty. When asked how he felt about this lampooning, the real Tip shrugged. “Water off a . . . ,” he’d reply dismissively. He understood it was politics, where the opposition’s duty was to hit hard enough so you could hear the smack.

  Besides, this was not the time to look back. The election was a done deal. The present—and future—were all that counted. “I don’t intend to allow my party to go down the drain,” he vowed. He also made the prediction that the Democrats would bounce back in the first midterm election, still two years off. “We’re going to gain seats,” he insisted with gallant defiance, knowing full well the national political wind was gusting hard in the other direction.

  At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, there was no need for such bravura. The Reagan production was rapidly getting under way. The president-elect was unusual in knowing his own weaknesses as well as being very aware of his strengths. Back in Hollywood, he’d had the benefit of a team: producer, director, screenwriter, costumer, etc., each of whom well understood his or her assignment. It was a familiar routine to him, having an expert on the set tell him where to stand and which camera to respect. He was accustomed to being told the plotline.

  The first absolutely vital move he made, the significance of which can’t be overestimated, was to hire James Addison Baker III, a Houston attorney and seasoned political advisor, as his chief of staff. Reagan cared more about getting it right than holding grudges. The fact that the much-admired Baker had in the past strategized against him—working for Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries and for George H. W. Bush in 1980—was no lasting offense. He could find his way to accept a pro whom he saw as a fellow conservative. “I always throw my golf club in the direction I’m going,” he’d say. Most important, Nancy Reagan, whose opinion counted for a great deal, agreed with her husband when it came to this crucial hire.

  Though conservative in his beliefs, Jim Baker was comfortable in government and effective in politics. He now set to work with his boss’s full confidence, having been given the authority to assemble a White House team. Choosing the aides who’d be dealing with Congress—half of which, remember, remained in Democratic hands—was an important part of this responsibility. Like David Gergen, appointed Reagan’s communications director, the Princeton-educated Texan was evidence that the more centrist political lieutenants can be the most fearsome in battle; they’re often cagier.

  In Hollywood terms, you could call Baker the producer, the one taking larger-scale responsibility, the overall honcho. Michael Deaver, a close California friend of the Reagans and longtime GOP political operative named now as the White House deputy chief of staff, assumed the role of stage director. He was entrusted with choreographing Reagan’s indelible turns, as he had done with that dazzling Labor Day appearance at the Statue of Liberty. The third key inside guy was Edwin Meese, a lawyer like Baker and, like Deaver, a Californian. He and Mike Deaver had worked closely together in the California State House during Reagan’s two terms there. Arriving in Washington, Meese was given the title Counselor to the President for Policy, which allowed him to make sure the Reagan programs stayed on message.

  This arrangement allowed the new president to concentrate on his essential dual roles: Ronald Reagan, keeper of the conservative faith, and Ronald Reagan, the performer. Relying on his aides to organize his presidential schedule and nail down the details, he would serve as the production’s chief mastermind. He would also be the administration’s leading man. He would be Ronald Reagan. He would play Ronald Reagan.

  How perfectly Jim Baker understood the man and the operation he was running. He saw that an unwritten part of his job entailed keeping his boss focused on why he’d wanted to be president in the first place. Every cabdriver in D.C. would soon know what President Reagan stood for: to reduce taxes and government at home, and to defeat the Soviet Union abroad.

  Reagan had been nursing grievances against the federal income tax ever since he’d been penalized back in the 1940s by what was then the high-end marginal rate of 90 percent. To avoid hitting that bracket, Reagan refused to make more than two movies annually. To Jim Baker he’d later explain, “Why should I have done a third picture—even if it was Gone with the Wind? What good would it have done me?” The star had never forgotten his outrage. As president, he was eager to start swinging the ax.

  An across-the-board cut in marginal income tax rates was now President-elect Reagan’s holy grail. To succeed in winning it would require a mix of ideological allegiance and political seduction. It was time for Ronald Reagan the political leader to cede the stage to Ronald Reagan the leading man. What he needed and wanted to do now was to start wooing Washington on its own terms. Unlike Jimmy Carter, here was a man who liked being liked and knew well how to work a room. Both had big grins—but one was infectious while the other merely provided a too-easy target for editorial cartoonists. Carter, thoughtful and earnest, forever seemed the Sunday school teacher he actually was. Reagan, whom millions of Americans remembered nostalgically from his days hosting the popular General Electric Theater—and later, briefly, Death Valley Days—came off as a familiar, genial personality. He barely had to introduce himself to the country, since his face and voice were already in its mass consciousness.

  He and Nancy first needed to introduce themselves to a much smaller group, social Washington. After all, as Nancy wisely saw, this was where they were going to live. As president and first lady, they soon were in demand and immediately began accepting invitations, seeking open channels into the local power culture. Not differentiating, really, between mandarin Republicans and mandarin Democrats, they early on attended a dinner given by publisher Katharine Graham, whose newspaper, the Washington Post, had overseen the ruthless cashiering of fellow Californian Richard Nixon. In the coming years, Kay Graham, the first lady of Washington society, and Nancy, the country’s first lady, finding they liked each other, would lunch secretly. Used to having a circle of chums back in Los Angeles, the new first lady also formed other Washington friendships.

  This was not Tip O’Neill
’s world, where the Reagans were beginning to circulate. His wife, Millie, whom he would salute for having “never changed,” sought no part in the Washington whirl. She had stayed home in North Cambridge for much of his congressional career. Jim Baker, however, saw O’Neill as the highest-value target of the charm offensive. He was determined that the Reagan White House treat the Democratic Speaker with the respect he’d never received from the Carter gang. Baker believed that it was vital to keep communication lines open between the White House and the opposition as represented by the Speaker’s office. For example, he thought it basic political wisdom to let Tip know what was coming, policywise, and to treat him properly, with the courtesy and respect he deserved—even when they disagreed. Baker knew that an important aspect of his job was to function as the White House’s chief legislative strategist, and that meant he’d have to keep calibrating how to move these two heavyweights—Reagan and O’Neill—together.

  Here’s Baker’s own version of how he saw it: “Like Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan had run as an outsider who criticized the Washington status quo. Unlike Carter, however, we made plans to extend an immediate olive branch to Congress.” He later added, “I knew that President Reagan would have his hands full with a Democratic-controlled House that he had campaigned against vigorously. So it was even more essential to keep the lines of communications open and civil with Capitol Hill.”

  Like the man he served, Baker subscribed to the same goals, but it was his responsibility to do the careful planning. He knew what invitations to the White House were worth, whether the event was a breakfast for the GOP leadership or invitations extended to lucky members of Congress—Democrats included—to watch the Super Bowl with the president on the big screen in the White House family theater.

  Baker, acting on Reagan’s behalf, was right to fix Tip O’Neill squarely in his sights when it came to bestowing careful treatment. For one thing, you couldn’t be trying to play the game of politics and fail to acknowledge the Speaker’s essential Boston-Irish toughness, a part of Washington lore. “I’ve known every speaker since World War II, including Sam Rayburn, one of the great ones,” Nixon had recalled. “I would say that Tip O’Neill is certainly one of the ablest, but without question, he is the most ruthless and the most partisan speaker we have had in my lifetime. The only time he’s bipartisan is when it will serve his partisan interest. He plays hardball. He doesn’t know what softball is. So, under the circumstances, when I heard that he was taking over shaping the Democrats, I knew that we were in trouble.” The veteran Bay State representative had, in fact, been the Democrat backrooming Nixon’s impeachment.

  Baker also knew about “Hannibal Jerkin.” But it’s likely he respected Tip for never criticizing Jimmy Carter himself personally, even as he wisecracked about Jordan. “We were particularly aware,” he remembers, “of the imperative as a Republican administration dealing with a Democratic House, of finding a way to establish a relationship so we could deal. When we came in we had a 100-day plan. And that plan was to reduce the tax rates—the marginal tax rates—and get some spending cuts. We were going to focus with laser-like efficiency and intensity on getting that done. We knew from the time we first got there that none of this could happen if the Democratic House could not somehow be co-opted, be persuaded to vote for it.”

  For his part, Reagan, too, was well briefed on how shortsightedly Carter’s aides had dealt with O’Neill and the Speaker’s office. “He’d been aware of all that,” Max Friedersdorf, Reagan’s chief of congressional relations, told me, shaking his head. “They’d offended the Speaker from day one.”

  Exactly two weeks after Election Day, Ronald Reagan made a trip to the Hill, where he visited the Speaker in his office. According to Tip—in his memoir, Man of the House—they bonded in ways both expected and unexpected. “When President-elect Reagan came to my office in November of 1980, we two Irish-American pols got right down to business by swapping stories about the Notre Dame football team. I told Reagan how much I had enjoyed his Knute Rockne movie, and he graciously pointed out that his friend Pat O’Brien was the real star of that film.”

  In response, Reagan was able to share with his host their common New Deal roots. “He told me how, back in 1948, he and O’Brien had been part of Harry Truman’s campaign train. O’Brien used to warm up the audiences, and Reagan would introduce the president. He took great delight in that story. . . . Before [he] left my office that day, I let him know that although we came from different parties, I looked forward to working with him. I reminded him that I had always been on good terms with the Republican leadership, and that despite our various disagreements in the House, we were always friends after six o’clock and on weekends.

  “The president-elect seemed to like that formulation, and over the next six years he would often begin our telephone discussions by saying, ‘Hello, Tip, is it after six o’clock?’

  “ ‘Absolutely, Mr. President,’ I would respond. Our watches must have been in sync, because even with our many intense political battles, we managed to maintain a pretty good friendship.”

  That first Reagan-O’Neill meeting contained only one discordant note. It came when Reagan reported to Tip how well he’d gotten along with the legislature as California governor. As O’Neill recalled it years later: “Reagan was proud that he, a Republican, had worked harmoniously with the Democratic state assembly. ‘That was the minor leagues,’ I said. ‘You’re in the big leagues now.’

  “He seemed genuinely surprised to hear that. Maybe he thought that Washington was just an extension of Sacramento.” When the two walked out of the room together to confront the press, Tip promised not to turn up the heat for six months, adding that “we will work to turn America around and make the economy work.”

  “I echo what he said,” Reagan was quick to agree. “We know, of course, that we’re not going to accomplish anything without the cooperation of the House and the Senate. In other words, we’re not going to just throw surprises up here at the Hill.”

  Obviously, the absence of actual issues—they talked neither policy nor politics—played a big part in the warmth of this first encounter. Push had not yet come to shove. It was simply about two pols of a shared generation finding themselves well able to like each other as people. This is despite the grand canyon of difference in their life experiences. “My father didn’t get the world of Hollywood,” Tom O’Neill told me decades later. “It was far different from the streets of North Cambridge.”

  Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan had yet to draw their weapons. Both were still looking for a way, if such a way still survived in the brutal arena of national politics, to fight without becoming enemies.

  • • •

  The day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, January 20, 1981, was the warmest oath-taking day on record. Tip O’Neill, along with Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, was invited to join the president-elect and the outgoing Jimmy Carter on the ride up to Capitol Hill. Affable as always, Reagan attempted to break the ice with anecdotes from his Hollywood past. Carter, who had been up all night hoping for the hostages’ return, smiled tightly but couldn’t really follow the point of the stories. Later he’d ask his longtime media advisor Gerald Rafshoon, a man well acquainted with the movie biz, “Who’s Jack Warner?”

  Reagan’s inauguration was the first set on the Capitol’s West Front, overlooking the Mall, and the moment of his swearing-in was the signal, in Tehran, for the release of the hostages after 444 days. Timing is, indeed, everything. Another “long national nightmare” was over.

  At a congressional lunch following the ceremony, in his toast President Reagan spoke of “the adversary relationships” that often are part of the constitutional territory that assures “checks and balances.” But, he said, he hoped there’d be more cooperation than conflict. “I look forward to working with you on behalf of the people and that this partnership will continue.” He and O’Neill both understood the delicate balance of power between them, one that would
grow even more uncertain in the months to come. Though the Democrats controlled the House, dozens of their members were southern conservatives open to Reagan’s embrace. Would their loyalties swing left or right?

  But the headline-grabbing drama that had determined the election—the fate of the hostages in Tehran—was still playing out, right up until this very moment. After hearing for certain that the plane carrying the Americans was finally winging its way home, President Reagan announced to his congressional hosts: “With thanks to Almighty God, I have been given a tag line, the get-off line, that everyone wants for the end of a toast or a speech, or anything else. Some thirty minutes ago, the planes bearing our prisoners left Iranian airspace, and are now free of Iran. So we can all drink to this one: to all of us, together, doing what we all know we can do to make this country what it should be, what it can be, what it always has been.”

  Before leaving the Capitol, Reagan graciously obliged the Speaker’s request that he put his now-presidential signature on a stack of commemorative stamped envelopes. As he did so, Reagan joked that he was counting a Democratic vote for each sheet he signed—which could have been a way of reminding the Speaker that his very ambitious plans for changing Washington and the country would mean poaching directly on Tip’s terrain. The declaration he’d just made on the West Front—“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”—could not have been a starker rebuke. In hearing Reagan’s words, how could O’Neill not have heard a denunciation of himself?

  The new president meets the veteran Speaker: two Irishmen of a different sort trying to figure each other out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NEW KID ON THE BLOCK