On the same day, May 12, 1981, House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill announced that Gary Hymel, who’d been his administrative assistant during his years as majority leader and now Speaker, was leaving. In the statement announcing his departure, Tip said it wouldn’t “be easy to find someone to replace Gary . . . his shoes will be hard to fill.”
I don’t recall exactly the moment when I started to get my hopes up the Speaker would pick me for the job. But it was what I wanted.
Conservative vs. liberal.
The two men would argue philosophy even with no other audience than each other.
CHAPTER TEN
FIGHTING SEASON
“Courage for some sudden act, maybe in the heat of battle, we all respect; but there is that still rarer courage which can sustain repeated disappointment, unexpected failure, and shattering defeat.”
—ANTHONY EDEN ON WINSTON CHURCHILL
Once I’d begun working closely with Tip O’Neill, I found myself struck by the enduring commitment he felt. A complicated man, his political strength lay in the belief system he’d long adhered to, which was a simple one. In Tip’s mind, government was there to make better lives for those governed. And the fact that he stuck to this conviction, willing to be on the “wrong” side when the country was tilting in the other direction, was, I believe, a particularly fine moment in American heroism. There is more than one sort of heroic behavior, and they don’t all look the same.
In his daily life as a working politician who’d risen to a pinnacle of power, Tip O’Neill knew all the moves, could wheel and deal shrewdly, apply pressure as needed, put a word in the right ear. He understood most keenly the ways of those making the laws. In his world, seniority, procedure, and tradition were honored, while rewards and punishment needed to be fairly rendered. Always underpinning his visible actions was his less visible passion, making him a traditionalist ripe for leading a righteous rebellion.
The following Time magazine analysis gives a sense of the criticism that began to be leveled at O’Neill once he’d lost the budget battle. “At that moment, it was clear that the nation’s most powerful Democrat had been badly, perhaps even fatally, wounded,” Robert Ajemian wrote in mid-May. “It was obvious that he still had an emotional hold on the House. But the hold is loosening now, and it looks very much as if the job Tip O’Neill has worked a lifetime for is offering challenges he cannot meet.”
Further adding to the unhappiness that Time piece created around the office was the feeling that Ajemian, a reporter considered a pal by Kirk O’Donnell, had betrayed a trust. Granting access is always risky—the power of the press ultimately belongs to he who holds the pen—and we all knew it, but that didn’t make it any better. Or Tip any less angry. The truth is, he was already coping with enough.
An observer could see that the table had been turned. Suddenly Tip O’Neill, the veteran liberal, found himself in a position like that of Ronald Reagan back in the 1960s when his own party had little interest in hearing what he had to say. Through his early politician years, Ronald Reagan’s name had been associated with his party’s out-of-the-mainstream right, the hard-line admirers of Barry Goldwater—both conservative and libertarian—who marched to their own ideology.
During the Nixon years and after, out of step with Gerald Ford and other centrist Republicans, Reagan remained a Goldwaterite. Never taken quite seriously, he managed to find his national popularity only when conditions—the high inflation and interest rates of the late 1970s, the taking of the hostages in Tehran, the seeming weaknesses of Jimmy Carter—aligned the stars for him. Watching Tip in the late spring of 1981, he may even have been reminded of his own time in the wilderness. Ronald Reagan knew only too well what it felt like to be in ideological disrepute.
Fresh from his stunning victory in the Congress, Reagan was now about to look backward, though not to his days as a GOP outsider. Instead, he was headed to Notre Dame as president of the United States. He arrived on campus to deliver the class of 1981’s commencement address as the Gipper, the embodiment of an ideal he’d portrayed on-screen in a role that had come to define him. It was life imitating art imitating life, and to make this even clearer, Pat O’Brien, Reagan’s old pal and the top-billed star of Knute Rockne—All American, was also to get an honorary degree that day. And so a Hollywood reunion also took place in South Bend on that Indiana afternoon.
Fifteen thousand spectators had turned out, all aware of the historic nature of the event. Reagan was the fifth president to present a speech to Notre Dame graduates, yet the first who’d ever portrayed one of their own. “I’ve always suspected that there might have been many actors in Hollywood who could have played the part better,” Reagan told his enthralled listeners, “but no one could have wanted to play it more than I did.”
Recognizing not just Ronald Reagan’s symbolic worth to Notre Dame, but also the value of that connection to him, the school now awarded the man standing there on the dais two distinct honorary memberships in its Monogram Club for athletic achievement: one for himself as president and another as a stand-in for the late George Gipp. Having once so movingly acted the part of Gipp, Reagan acknowledged that the nickname had been passed on to him. “Now, today I hear very often, ‘Win one for the Gipper,’ spoken in a humorous vein,” he told the crowd. “Lately I’ve been hearing it by congressmen who are supportive of the programs that I’ve introduced.” Then, after waiting for the laughter to die down, he got serious. “For too long government has been fixing things that aren’t broken and inventing miracle cures for unknown diseases,” he explained. It was his well-wrought theme, now perfected after decades of experience. “Indeed,” he went on reassuringly, “a start has already been made. There’s a task force under the leadership of the vice president—George Bush—that is to look at those regulations I’ve spoken of. They have already identified hundreds of them that can be wiped out with no harm to the quality of life. And the cancellation of just those regulations will leave billions and billions of dollars in the hands of the people for productive enterprise and research and development and the creation of jobs.”
Back in Washington, Tip was gearing up to fight these very convictions. Though over the years he’d only infrequently, and with reluctance, agreed to appear on the networks’ weekend interview programs, a new era now called for new tactics. As a guest on ABC’s Issues and Answers on June 7, he denounced the Reagan tax cuts as a “windfall for the rich.” Yet, with that, he was only warming up.
“I’m opposed to the Reagan tax bill,” he further explained, “. . . because it’s geared for the wealthy of the nation instead of being spread out among the working class of America and the poor people. The president truly in my opinion doesn’t understand the working class of middle America, what it’s all about, what they go through, because of the fact that he doesn’t associate himself with those types of people. He has no concern, no regard, no care for the little man of America.”
What Tip was doing, in fact, was proclaiming himself to America, stepping out of the background to declare who he was and why it mattered. He was careful to say he understood, of course, where President Reagan was coming from, and that he knew what made him tick, recognized his habits and his natural habitat. But, owing to “his lifestyle,” Tip said, the president actually never met those people to whom he’d just been referring. “Consequently, he doesn’t understand their problems. He’s only been able to meet the wealthy. I think he’d do much better if he had brought in some people close to him who are from the working force of America, who have suffered along the line, not those who have made it along the line and forgotten from where they’ve come.” Not that he was calling Ronald Reagan himself “callous”—he made that clear—but, he bluntly suggested, there must be “very, very selfish people around him.”
Steven V. Roberts of the New York Times saw the Speaker’s Sunday appearance as a political turnaround. “Mr. O’Neill, a hulking bear of a man with a large nose and a fondness for big cigars, does not
fit the modern image of smooth-faced, blow-dried TV-age politician. Where he comes from, you win votes with handshakes, not makeup; by doing favors, not by being famous.”
The Times reporter said it was significant to see O’Neill so aroused:
As a neighborhood politician who loves the intricacies of legislative maneuvering, the Massachusetts Democrat is not particularly comfortable with television. And as a 68-year-old grandfather who has spent most of his life in politics, he hates to give up weekends with his family to appear on television. . . .
But now Mr. O’Neill feels that the battle over the direction of the nation has been joined with President Reagan and his Republican troops, and the Democratic leader is under considerable pressure from younger colleagues to step out front and lead the counterattack.
Tip’s shot at Reagan struck like flint on steel. All it needed was the right person to blow on the spark. At a White House press conference a few days later, ABC’s chief White House correspondent, Sam Donaldson, fanned the flame. “Tip O’Neill says you don’t understand about the working people!” he shouted just as Reagan was concluding a televised press conference. “That you have just a bunch of wealthy and selfish advisors!”
Returning to the microphone, Reagan took the bait. “Tip O’Neill has said that I don’t know anything about the workingman,” he began. His indignant tone was perfectly pitched. “I’m trying to find out about his boyhood,” he went on, “because we didn’t live on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, but we lived so close to them we could hear the whistle real loud.”
It was a great line, but he wasn’t finished—and he begged to differ. “And I know very much about the working group,” Reagan asserted. “I grew up in poverty and got what education I got all by myself, and I think it is sheer demagoguery to pretend that this economic program . . . is not aimed at helping the great cross-section of people in this country that has been burdened for too long by big government and high taxes.”
Sheer demagoguery. Intended as a mere rebuttal, Reagan had gone too far when he uttered those two words. Caught off guard by Sam Donaldson, he’d defended himself by attacking in return, and, in the process, badly misjudged the term he picked to denounce the Democrat’s disagreement with his policies. To Tip, who’d been calling the truth exactly as he saw it, Reagan’s phrase was nothing less than a shocking insult. The Speaker of the House stands second, after the vice president, in the line of presidential succession, and, to him, Reagan’s slur was an attack not only on him, Tip O’Neill, but on the historic dignity of the office he now held.
The news wires lit up with the story. At Washington’s highest level, it looked like the gloves finally might be coming off! As the TV evening news programs prepared their stories, Reagan’s target stood in his office, trying to make up his mind how to handle the situation. There were staffers who wanted him to allow the president’s inflammatory comment to pass, while others were urging a swift, decisive counterpunch.
“Let it go, Tom.” This was his longtime friend and senior aide Leo Diehl. He was of the old school, just like Tip, and believed politics belonged, for maximum effectiveness, in back rooms like this. There were a half dozen of us sitting in the antechamber to the Speaker’s office where such sessions normally took place. He’d stopped there to get a sense of what his people thought he should do. It proved to be a heated moment. Leo, like Eleanor Kelley, Tip’s executive secretary, was of the view that all TV camera crews must be stopped before they even get a toe inside, just the way you keep pesky door-to-door salesmen at bay.
As I watched, it was clear to me this man was no longer going to be comfortable in retreat—not now, not anymore. Ever since the election back in the fall, he’d been slowly having to accept the notion that, in Ronald Reagan’s Washington, being Speaker of the House meant more than that basic job description up until now implied. Suddenly, here was a veteran politician who’d become, symbolically, the country’s last standing Democrat. Expected to keep aloft the banner for his fellow liberals—who, to greater or lesser degrees, now cowered behind him—Tip O’Neill was in front of the curtain all by himself.
As the reality of all this—and the imperatives for change in the ways he’d always operated—started to sink in, it seemed to him both overwhelming and a galvanizing personal challenge. He’d had his political heroes, FDR the greatest of them, obviously, and channeling his indomitable spirit would be part of going forward. Yet Tip’s own convictions and courage until this moment had, for the whole of his career, asked different things of him. Most crucially, he would now be faced with the seemingly impossible task of defending his party’s principles on that national, televised stage where the highly telegenic Ronald Reagan had long been professionally at home. There were reasons why Tip’s old pals and senior staffers worried about him and any intrusion by camera crews.
But, helping support Tip, not just sharpening his message but also getting him out front, even if it meant standing alone, was the reason I was in that room to begin with. So, sitting there on that historic afternoon, I expressed my opinion—perhaps a bit tremulously, I confess, but I knew what I believed—that retreat was not the answer. “You’ve got to fight this,” I said, weighing in. My position was that we were already at war with the White House, and so the only question, really, was the right moment to abandon the political pacifism he’d been practicing, a stance arising both out of traditional courtesy to a newly inaugurated president and also in response to Reagan’s nearly having lost his life to an assassin’s bullet.
If Tip didn’t punch back now, I felt, he’d be missing out not only on a necessary partisan shot, but on something much bigger—the chance to reshape himself as a leader willing and able to go head to head with his adversary. Were Reagan allowed to get away with accusing Tip of “demagoguery,” it could stand for the foreseeable future as an accepted truth. Plus, it amounted to weakness to let the other guy have the last word, even if—especially if—he’s the president.
For me it was the moment of truth. I said he had to fight, that anything else would signal Reagan’s domination—and not just of the moment.
I wasn’t the only one there in that meeting who hoped to see him offer a hard retort to Reagan, but I was the sole person who’d been hired to blow the bugle. I represented the opposite of business-as-usual, which is the direction he’d been slowly heading in and needed to now reverse.
“I’m going up to the gallery,” Tip now said. At this, some of us looked at one another with deep awareness. He had decided to fight. First, he headed back to the door of his private bathroom. At six foot three and close to three hundred pounds, Tip’s already imposing self was topped with a head of hair that remained defiantly thick for his age and always sent dandruff flaking onto his giant shoulders. When he emerged, I got a whiff of the richly old-fashioned scent I’d soon come to associate with his making himself camera-ready. Was it cologne? Or, possibly, hair spray? I wasn’t sure and never asked. But it was included in his ritual and I respected it, knowing it was a part of his armor.
He then began the—extraordinary for him—ascent to the House’s radio and television press gallery, well aware that all the correspondents, notified of his imminent arrival, had raced there ahead of him. As he took his position in front of the waiting cameras, Tip O’Neill looked straight into them and began speaking.
“I would never accuse a president, whoever he was, of being a demagogue,” he said with dignity. “I have too much respect for the president, for the institution . . . and I assume in the future he would have the same respect for the Speakership.”
He was responding to the assault that had so offended him in his own way—and I believe he did it perfectly, focusing neither on himself nor on his role as leader of the opposition, but rather on the significance of his constitutional post, as Speaker of the House. Reagan’s accusation revealed, as Tip saw it, a basic ignorance of the civic protocol of his new home, an ignorance resulting in a regrettable show of political bad manners. Tra
ditionally, presidents had understood and acknowledged the relationship that linked them, and respect for a Speaker was what was expected.
Tip had more on his mind at that moment than rebuking Reagan for his unseemly incivility. He wasn’t forgetting what he was even angrier about, the elephant in the living room he couldn’t ignore and that he’d come there to the press gallery to denounce—the White House economic program. It was clear to everyone who heard him that afternoon that the Speaker was really on the boil, and once he’d finished—his contempt informing every word—the question instantly asked was inevitable. “Well, I’d have to say the honeymoon is over,” Tip informed the reporter who’d wanted to know.
Word of Tip’s wrath quickly reached the Oval Office, where it definitely wasn’t the message from the Hill its inhabitant was expecting to hear. Ronald Reagan preferred to avoid conflict whenever possible, and Tip’s defiant planting of the banner spoiled the president’s vision of their shared political landscape. Arising the next morning, he was eager to regain their previous footing. Reagan phoned the Speaker to apologize for the attack that had launched Tip on the warpath. Though he listened courteously, his adversary was uninterested in what he believed the president to be offering him, which was a truce.
“Old buddy,” the Speaker replied, certain of his ground now, “that’s politics. After six o’clock we can be friends; but before six, it’s politics.” It was Tip’s town, and if he couldn’t call every one of the shots, he was still his own man.
The day Tip went to the press gallery was when the lines got drawn. Nothing was the same afterward, not for Ronald Reagan, not for Tip O’Neill, not for the country, and not for me. The Speaker had stepped into his role as a late-twentieth-century media politician, accepting that it was both his duty and his fate. No matter what he’d thought of his abilities in the past, in the present he was happy with the decision to fight. So was I, of course; it’s what I was there for. I now understood that he’d wanted Kirk and me to cheer him on, even as Leo and others worried about him urged caution.
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 Page 13