Tip O’Neill naturally saw right through the White House ploy. The issue for him wasn’t that Stockman had talked out of school to a journalist but whether he’d believed what he’d told him. And if he didn’t, then what had been the point of the whole exercise? Since the Reagan economic program had seemed dubious to Tip from the beginning, he was perfectly able to accept what he’d read in the Atlantic as the plain truth straight from the horse’s mouth. Besides which, having known Stockman as a colleague during the two terms he’d served in the House before joining the Reagan administration, the Speaker thought of him not just as hardworking but also as straight-shooting.
“Dave, in his heart and mind, advocated exactly what the Democrats have been saying all along,” he said. “He was carrying the ball for [the White House] and I think is probably the only knowledgeable person in their organization who knows the budget system. He knows it inside and out.” Meaning, if anyone had a right to sound off about it, Stockman did—and trying to distract Tip and the rest of the country by making the budget director out to be a very naughty boy simply wasn’t going to work. “George Bush called it ‘voodoo economics’ and they made him vice president. Dave is saying the same thing, and I don’t know where he is going to go,” the Speaker commented wryly.
Even in the wake of the Stockman incident, Tip still found himself admiring his opponent. It was always complicated, watching the man he called “one hell of a pol” to reporters and deploring at the same time everything he stood for. “I think he’s going to remain popular, to be perfectly truthful with you,” the Speaker told the Washington Post. “People like him as an individual, and he handles the media better than anybody since Franklin Roosevelt, even including Jack Kennedy. There’s just something about the guy that people like. They want him to be a success. . . . He’s cutting the heart out of the American dream to own a home and have a good job . . . and still he’s popular.”
“You know, I said to him one day that ninety-seven percent of the economists that I talk to think your program’s not going to work. And he laughs and says, ‘Well I guess it’s the three percent that I talk to that have been right all along.’ How can you dislike a guy like that?”
As Tip’s administrative assistant, I, too, felt the unsettling effect of Reagan’s dual nature, the way his charm and affability seemed separate somehow from his unswerving ideology, even as those qualities remained in service of it. And I was very aware of the dilemma it caused for the Speaker, a man who’d been drawn his entire life, ever since those Barry’s Corner days with the other boys in North Cambridge, to the warmth of camaraderie. When Reagan would say to him, “Look, Tip, I’m resetting my watch, it’s six o’clock,” he was intuiting a truth about his rival and cannily plugging into it.
On December 9, Tip’s sixty-ninth birthday, President Reagan hosted a party at the White House for him. Beginning over lunch, the mutually enjoyable bipartisan celebration continued well into the afternoon. At one point, the president, by habit never much of a drinker, rang for one of the White House attendants to bring up a bottle of champagne. The tribute he then offered was as over-the-top as it was unforgettable. “Tip, if I had a ticket to heaven and you didn’t have one too, I would give mine away and go to hell with you.”
Mike Deaver would recall the moment: “It was an old Irish toast he had heard somewhere. Well, Tip’s eyes were all filled up, you know, it was just incredible. And they left the dining room with their arms around each other’s waist and Reagan took him down to the elevator and Tip went out on the South Lawn and beat the shit out of Reagan with the press.” I’ve got to hand it to Mike. His overall sizing up of the relationship between his boss and mine strikes me as pretty close to the truth. “Reagan,” Deaver said, “thought Tip was absolutely wrong and pigheaded. And Tip thought Reagan didn’t understand anything about this country except the rich. But there was a lot of respect that both of them had for each other.”
Even when the Speaker went on the attack, the president, hearing Tip rail against him, simply brushed it off. He’d tell staffers not to get upset. He seemed to see Tip clearly and accept what he saw. “Tip was an old-fashioned pol,” Reagan wrote. “He could be sincere and friendly when he wanted to be, but when it came to the things he believed in, he could turn off his charm and friendship like a light switch and become as bloodthirsty as a piranha.”
His son Ron believed the regard in which Reagan always seemed to hold the Speaker was real. “He was fond of him,” he told me. “He’d say so around the house.” Just as I know Tip took his feelings—positive and negative—about his opponent home to Millie and his kids, the president did not leave Tip at the office.
• • •
Now the two were headed for their second round. A year that had been shattered by an assassin’s bullets had given the new American president his greatest policy triumphs. The coming twelve months would test his wisdom on where and how to defend them.
Shape of the Table.
When President Reagan came to Capitol Hill to negotiate a budget deal in April 1982, Speaker O’Neill suspected a setup. Here he sits uneasily at Reagan’s side, but only for the picture-taking. Later, he would take the seat across from Reagan. Others at the table are Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, House Majority Leader Jim Wright, and White House aide Ed Meese.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SUMMIT
“Always be able to talk.”
—KIRK O’DONNELL
The Reagan winning streak had made it a tough year for the Speaker. As the Democrats departed the White House at the start of ’81, the Republicans’ media consultants were still wringing mileage from their caricature of the portly, white-haired, old-school pol left high and dry by the roadside. Imagewise, Tip O’Neill was the exact opposite of the new GOP president, who was handsome, athletic, and always ready with a grin and a quip.
Given his blunt manner, frequent cigar, and seemingly out-of-date convictions, the man from North Cambridge, Massachusetts, seemed the perfect embodiment of his own party’s current unseductiveness. Yet wounded as he was by the continual conflicts of the first Reagan year, with one difficult month following another, Tip had hung in there and survived. Most vitally, he’d made a name for himself—out there in the world beyond Capitol Hill and the commonwealth of Massachusetts—not just in spite of the distinctively unfashionable persona he presented but, perhaps, because of it.
To those paying attention to the struggle in Washington, Tip O’Neill had been out front, taking on Reagan when others of his party and philosophy looked to be heading for the tall grass. His goal was to make Reagan pay for each victory with a heavier burden of responsibility. He wanted the American people to demand every inch of what the new president had promised.
A pragmatic politician above all, Tip was rising above the daily frustrations in order to play the longer game. You had to believe, and he did. Few in the Speaker’s own camp specifically blamed him for losing the legislative fights over spending and taxes—battles that, more than likely, no one on their side could have won.
The good news was that Tip had started to make headway connecting the man in the White House to charges that stuck, among them Reagan’s on-the-record—and never believably enough repudiated—opposition to Social Security, as well as his preference for relaxing among wealthy friends mostly at home in Bel Air or Palm Springs. A man can be judged by the company he keeps, and the idea was to paint a portrait of a president not just out of touch with mainstream Americans but blithely so.
Nonetheless, a campaign of strategic retreat—which is what, essentially, Tip O’Neill had been waging—only succeeds up to a point. As Winston Churchill warned after Dunkirk, “Wars are not won by evacuations.” While, in 1981, losing those House votes had been bearable, failing to win legislative seats in the critical election year of 1982 would not be. According to standard political wisdom, the opposition party is expected to pick up congressional seats in the midterm contests. A failure to do this would be humiliating
and shocking.
For Tip O’Neill, what now lay ahead would be a war of aggression, and the strategy was a simple one: stand, fight, and conquer. But more than this, the opposition troops he led needed the symbolic boost a strong victory that November would provide. In the sports lingo he well understood, Tip was going to have to beat the spread.
For Ronald Reagan, the arrival of 1982 brought different challenges and also an emerging peril: the U.S. economy was sinking into deep recession and the jobless rate edging toward double digits. As this all-important index rose, so, naturally, would the country’s impatience with the administration’s direction and the possibility of dangerous shortfalls. The Gipper—his speeches rich with sincerity—had promised to cut taxes, boost defense spending, and banish the deficit all at the same time. Those doubting whether he could actually manage such an astounding feat now saw their skepticism proved correct.
The balance of power was starting to tilt, in ways affecting both parties. To maintain an appearance of confidence in his program, President Reagan needed the backing of that same congressional coalition that had supported him before. But with the economic figures plunging around them, even the GOP legislators, now most concerned with holding on to their seats, were showing less enthusiasm. On the other side of the aisle, the rebel Democrats looked as if they might be coming home. It would take Reagan’s most persuasive efforts, plus a display of White House muscle, to keep those restless recruits content with what they’d previously bought into.
• • •
When it came to Tip O’Neill, I could see the shift in the political winds had breathed new life into him. No longer the beleaguered warrior I’d encountered when I first signed on the year before, he now seemed ready to defend mightily all that he cared about, and to do it with gusto. Along with his increasing zest for combat came a change in my role.
When first we’d met, I’d been the media-savvy young guy fueled by partisan belligerence and brimming over with attention-getting ideas, most of which Tip had regarded warily. It was as if I’d arrived from Mars to tell him what life was like out there, only in this case the alien environment was requiring you to be camera-ready at all times and the only language you had to speak was sound bites.
Over the months of our working together, Tip and I had learned much about each other’s strengths and weaknesses. The respect I had for him from the start now was mirrored in the growing acceptance he began to offer me. Ronald Reagan had been dubbed the “Great Communicator,” but my colleagues and I knew two could play at that game and even on the same turf: television. My particular job was to stand behind Tip every step of the way, making sure he had the right weapons, as he advanced onto this new battleground.
There were others cheering on this effort, and though I’ve mentioned the two most important allies I had before, still I want here to make a large nod to both again. Kirk O’Donnell had been with the Speaker since 1978. Those four years had left him confident enough to call him “Tip” while in the room with him and tough enough to act on such presumption. Kirk believed that the moment to fight had arrived, and, having helped put me beside Tip to begin with, he now backed my operation all the way. Tony Coelho, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, an early booster, too, remained staunch. Chosen by his fellow Democrats to reverse the party’s fortunes, Tony never lost sight of his assigned mission. He played a critical early role in urging the Speaker to step out from the procedural shadows—the behind-the-scenes world where he was most at home—and become the fighting firebrand their fellow House Democrats cried out for.
When it came to the part that television, by necessity, now was going to play in Tip’s life, it was necessary to acknowledge a pair of his deep-seated certainties. One, the Speaker was convinced his looks worked against him; on this, he was virtually unshakable. Plenty of handsomer guys were out there on the floor among his troops—ask him, and he’d name them with no trouble—but not only that, he also recognized how many Democratic legislators were far more articulate than he. In the same way that Richard Nixon had been only too conscious of John F. Kennedy’s personal glamour, Tip O’Neill knew, when he looked in the mirror, that he didn’t see Ronald Reagan’s face staring back at him. But while Nixon’s opponent had been simply a dashing and privileged rich man, Tip’s had once been an actual movie star.
Yet, since Tip wanted nothing more than to continue as Speaker, a job he’d fought for and treasured, he couldn’t argue with the task assigned him. Men of his generation understood the life predicament of having no choice; what was dished out, you took, and then you gave your utmost. Yet even with the fate of the party he loved resting in his hands, a Tip O’Neill wouldn’t turn on a dime. While he accepted the necessity of TV cameras, he did it in his own way. Though still banning them at his daily press conferences, he instead took part in what became a popular daily ritual.
Arriving for work at the Capitol early each morning, he’d find network cameramen waiting for him. As he’d get out of his car on the East Front Plaza, the eager television crews stood watch. Accompanied by their field producers, the congressional correspondents then would vie to get his comments on breaking stories. For both sides, it was a fruitful solution. By the time he arrived in the office—to meet with Kirk, Ari, and me in preparation for the morning briefing—he’d not just run a small gamut of TV cameras and lived to tell the tale, but satisfied the networks, which now had fresh tape of House Speaker Tip O’Neill to broadcast on the evening news. It wasn’t the most polished of settings, but it got him in the daily story and got him there early.
This simple compromise that Tip accepted—showing himself to the press, however briefly—turned out to have a significant effect beyond its immediate message-delivering benefit. Because of this greater regular visibility, the Speakership, as embodied by Tip O’Neill, became institutionalized as a position of authority that involved speaking out at a national level and not just a parochial one within the Congress. Suddenly “Speaker of the House” meant more than the title of a figure belonging to the back corridors of Capitol Hill who symbolized legislative deals the general public couldn’t really follow and so yawned over. In this way, as he took on the freshly defined role shaping itself around him, Tip’s job allowed for a counter-pulpit to the bully pulpit of the presidency. It was an idea new to the Washington stage. It delighted me that I was able to pitch the man I worked for as the natural, inevitable anti-Reagan.
Here’s a quick example: If the wire reporters covering him failed to run any important point the Speaker had made at his daily press briefing, I didn’t gnash my teeth. I’d merely wait a half hour, then pick up the phone to put in calls to selected White House reporters. “Did you hear what the Speaker said about Reagan today?” I’d ask. Invariably, whoever was listening would say, “Wait a minute . . . ,” and then I’d hear them roll a sheet of paper into their typewriter or flip open a notebook.
That’s how it was in those days, when the news cycle was more leisurely—before the incessant real-time jamboree of cable—Hardball included—Limbaugh, and social media. During this crucial period in 1982, the absolute top goal for those of us committed to pushing back the Republican gains—both legislatively and electorally—was to keep the heat on in any way we could, with Tip leading the charge. Yet it was easy to see that the Speaker from Massachusetts was, at that political moment, too liberal for the country at large, and so our goal was to turn this fact from a negative into a rousing advantage. The key was his continuing to focus on specific issues like Social Security, where the American public—above all the Reagan Democrats who’d switched teams to follow the Gipper—had no quarrels with Tip’s longtime, fiercely held views. They meshed perfectly with the familiar truth that, in an economic downturn, the middle tends to identify with those worse off than they, fearing their own turn might come next. (In good times, the middle identifies with those better off, in hopes of joining them.)
Such was the look of the battlefield as the oppo
sing forces examined and solidified their positions in 1982’s early months. Ronald Reagan needed to ensure the country remained patient, thus allowing his program its chance to stimulate economic recovery. Tip O’Neill had the task of roundly bringing home the other side of the argument, which equally meant the argument over him. Lampooned in 1980, derided in 1981, he could now be seen as rightfully openhanded when it came to those in need. Here was no lobbyists’ fat cat but rather an experienced paternal figure long committed to a regular flow of monthly Social Security checks into America’s mailboxes, and also to keeping them hefty enough to pay for inflation. Listening to the advice of veteran pollsters like Pat Caddell and Peter Hart, O’Neill learned to adjust his political grip. The sharpest shot he now took at Reagan had no trouble hitting the bull’s-eye: not that Reagan was tough on the poor, but that his real constituents were the rich.
• • •
It was the night of Ronald Reagan’s first State of the Union address and he’d come to the Capitol early. For reasons of security he needed to be in place even before the Secret Service walked their bomb-sniffing dogs through the House chamber, and so while he waited, he needed to be held in a suitable room in the building. The one selected was the Speaker’s ceremonial office, right next to mine. It was where the Speaker’s daily press conferences took place, the ones currently showcasing his regular criticisms of the president and his policies. After a bit of hesitation, I walked through the door and introduced myself. He was standing in the middle of the room surrounded by a few staffers I didn’t recognize. “Welcome, Mr. President, to the room where we plot against you.” Technically, we hatched our plans in the Speaker’s back office, but it was as good an icebreaker as I could manage.
In any case, Reagan was having none of it.
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 17