Because of his aunt’s community and because of the testimonies he heard—often privately, as a result of his openness to her world—Tip O’Neill was attuned to a Nicaraguan reality distinctly at odds with the one Ronald Reagan insisted upon. “Over and above the briefings I get,” Tip had explained to his regular press contingent in 1984, “I have nuns and humanitarians who tell us that the people in the villages of Nicaragua do not know what communism is. But they know they are living a better life—with food and health care—for the first time.” He could not forget what he’d heard.
Having lost the March vote on military aid to the Contras, Reagan was far from giving up. “You have my solemn determination,” he had sworn after his defeat at the hands of the Tip-led Congress, I will “come back, again and again, until this battle is won.” His second opportunity arrived in June, and, with an eye to swaying votes with the president’s rhetorical fervor, the White House team decided to ask Speaker O’Neill if Reagan could address the House on the Tuesday before the vote.
Chief of Staff Don Regan was the one who made the request, reaching O’Neill at a charity golf match. Tip, enjoying himself after his big Boston College send-off and seeing no reason to hop to, took his time getting back to him. When he finally did, an hour and a half later, the Speaker refused to agree. To have Reagan simply come to the House on the eve of a vote, he said, would be unprecedented and “constitutionally wrong.” However, he offered alternative suggestions. If President Reagan wished to meet with the House, he told the importunate Regan, then he’d have “to participate in open dialogue with members of the body.” And if he wished to make a formal address, then protocol called for any such presidential speech to be made before a joint session, with the Senate in attendance as well.
O’Neill believed Regan was trying to embarrass him, making and then advertising a proposal he knew in advance the Speaker would have to reject. “There’s no question about it,” he told reporters. “It’s a cheap political trick and I don’t think the president of the United States would do it.”
White House officials were “stunned” at the rebuff, a staffer who refused to be named told the Los Angeles Times. Reagan became as enraged by O’Neill’s straight-arm as Tip himself had been by the dark suspicion Regan and others at the White House had been trying to set him up. “Tip refused to let me speak to the House. I’m going to rub his nose in this one,” he announced to his diary. In the end, he settled for going on TV and making his case in a noontime broadcast. He realized that O’Neill’s denying him the personal appearance before the House had degraded his address dramatically.
But when the House voted in June on the $100 million in Contra aid, Ronald Reagan wound up prevailing. For him, the victory was made doubly sweet by the fact that he’d won it after coming from behind.
• • •
Ronald Reagan knew only too well that he’d originally gained the presidency with a strong assist from Jimmy Carter’s failure to win release of the American hostages in Tehran. Starting in 1984, with no surer remedy than his predecessor had, President Reagan found himself with an interminable hostage situation of his own. Over a period of months, seven American citizens would be taken as hostages by Hezbollah, a terrorist group based in Lebanon. As time passed, Reagan increasingly took personally the United States’ inability to free these captives. He was particularly upset by the knowledge that one of the men, the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, had undergone severe torture at the hands of his captors.
National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane now went to work selling Reagan on a plan he believed offered the possibility of a deal by which the hostages might be released. Claiming the existence of “moderate” elements in Iran who might be willing to try to influence the hostage-takers in Lebanon was the first part of his pitch. McFarlane’s idea was for the United States to sell our superior weapons to those so-called moderates for use in their ongoing war with Iraq. In return for this support, there was the strong possibility, he’d said, they’d be willing to approach Hezbollah.
McFarlane then offered an added inducement for the old Cold Warrior. Those “moderates” could well assume power upon the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. They might make all the difference when it came to thwarting Soviet intentions in Iran.
“Some strange soundings are coming from the Iranians,” Reagan wrote in his diary on July 17, 1985. “Bud M. will be here tomorrow to talk about it. It could be a breakthrough on getting our 7 kidnap victims back. Evidently the Iranian economy is disintegrating fast under the strain of war.” The next day, he met with McFarlane. There are, indeed, Iranians “with reasonably good connections,” McFarlane told Reagan, who could help get the hostages freed. “Yes, go ahead,” Reagan told him. “Open it up.”
Yet Reagan recognized the need for the deepest secrecy, as the conspiracy began to wind its way into history. Here’s what he confided in his diary, five months later, on December 5, 1985:
NSC Briefing—probably Bud’s last. Subject was our undercover effort to free our 5 hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. It is a complex undertaking with only a few of us in on it. I won’t even write in the diary what we’re up to.
The plot very definitely was thickening. Having been initially described as an arrangement involving the United States and Iranian “moderates” in the Iranian ruling circle but outside the official Iranian government—by January 1986 it had morphed into a deal between the United States and elements in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Reagan’s backing of a deal nevertheless remained constant. What this meant was the United States was now shipping arms to the Iranian leadership itself.
What had begun as a deal to establish a back channel with Iranians possibly able to open discussions with the hostage-takers no longer looked like that. Now what we were entering into had become precisely the sort of quid pro quo Ronald Reagan had said he’d never ever stoop to, in this case, an arms-for-hostages arrangement with Iranian generals, who’d repay our support with a command to release the Americans being held in Lebanon.
The American press ran with the story on November 5, with its original news source for the details the Lebanese weekly Al Shiraa. The instant the revelations broke, they hit the White House as an all-out scandal.
Having dumped one president—Jimmy Carter—perceived as weak in confronting Iranian hostage-takers, the American public was in no mood to buy this updated version. An ABC poll showed four out of five Americans surveyed opposed delivering arms to Iran to win freedom for the hostages. Nearly as many citizens questioned indicated opposition to providing Iran with weapons as a way to improve relations with Iranian moderates. A majority of those polled believed Reagan had broken not just with American policies but with his own principles, that he’d been caught “negotiating with terrorists.” Suddenly Reagan found himself a man mired in Middle Eastern intrigue, far from his Cold War comfort zone.
On November 25, Attorney General Edwin Meese announced that his investigation of the Iranian arms deal had shown that “monies” from the transaction had then been diverted to the Contras in a ploy overseen by Oliver North. (In fact, I’d known North around this time, though only slightly, encountering him at meetings. Initially, I viewed North as a figure involved with Central America. Later, I’d noticed his name connected to the Middle East. Even back then, in real time, he’d struck me as spreading himself around far too thin for his own good.)
The Iranians had paid $30 million for the missiles, Meese learned, more than double what they cost. Most of the profits, according to an April memorandum from North to Admiral John Poindexter, who’d replaced McFarlane the year before as national security advisor, went to the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance Forces, that is, the Contras, for “critically needed supplies.” It was to “bridge the period between now and when Congressionally-approved lethal assistance can be delivered.” After the House had, in March, defeated the $100 million in military aid, the enterprising North simply had decided to make up for the loss.
&n
bsp; Though he vigorously denied all knowledge of North and Poindexter’s action, Reagan nonetheless made clear in his diary where his sympathies in the matter lay. The diversion of the money, he wrote, was “their way of helping the Contras at a time when Congress was refusing aid to the Contras.”
Poindexter, who resigned the day Meese delivered the news, had headed the NSC less than a year. Still, it was long enough for him to reflect on what had gone down on his watch. Here’s the epitaph he left to Oliver North’s disastrous scheme to divert the profits from the arms-for-hostages deal to the rebels in Nicaragua. “I had a feeling,” he later admitted to Don Regan, “that something bad was going on, but I didn’t investigate it and I didn’t do a thing about it. I really didn’t want to know. I felt sorry for the Contras. I was so damned mad at Tip O’Neill for the way he was dragging the Contras around that I didn’t want to know what, if anything, was going on. I should have, but I didn’t.”
Tip and the Gipper.
They showed how two conviction politicians, a liberal and a conservative, can make politics—and democratic government—work for the American people.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LEGACY
“Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
—MARK TWAIN
Ronald Reagan survived the Iran-Contra scandal, though the fallout caused his job approval rating to take a deep dive—dropping more than twenty points in late 1986. The summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev—Geneva in 1985, Reykjavik in 1986, Washington in 1987, and Moscow in 1988—were thrilling. Peace between two long-standing enemies, they said, might at last be at hand. Without a shot being fired, the dread with which every American had lived ever since news the Soviets had gotten the “A-bomb” was gone.
For my part, I felt the wonder of its absence, and, clearly, so did my fellow citizens. I remember the morning late in 1987 that I found myself standing alongside throngs of other admirers at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street, all of us cheering the Soviet president who’d helped to change history. I recall, too, that Gorbachev, startled by such a reception, but pleased, had stepped out of his limousine to shake hands with admirers.
Within a year of Reagan’s leaving office, the Iron Curtain came crashing down across Eastern Europe—most movingly, when the ugly wall that had divided Berlin for almost three decades was leveled in celebration. The actual end of the Cold War was surprising, however, and played out far differently from what anyone had expected. The T. S. Eliot phrase “Not with a bang but a whimper” is apt. The sad, pinched bureaucrats of East Germany and the other Soviet Bloc capitals simply converted. As a sly government economist in Budapest cynically told me that spring, “The road to Damascus is very crowded these days.” An activist university professor I met was more sublime. “Freedom is contagious,” he said.
By 1989, George H. W. Bush was the occupant of the Oval Office, and I’d been working for two years as the San Francisco Examiner’s Washington bureau chief. Just as I’d loved being in the thick of the action in the Speaker’s office, I treasured the chance now to be a journalist during such a time of great events. That autumn, as the world watched the revolutions in Eastern Europe that signaled the downfall of communism, I devoted one of my twice-a-week columns to saying I wished Ronald Reagan were still president in November 1989.
I would have loved to hear the speech he’d have made. I remembered how, at the Berlin Wall, in 1987, he’d looked ahead to the stirrings that were already in the air. “We welcome change and openness,” he declared, “for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”
What had occurred, what was still then occurring, meant that all Europe would soon be free, just as Roosevelt and Churchill had once hoped. In those exciting years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I shared in the glorious sense that the many wrongs of the twentieth century were truly being righted.
But what about my boss, the distinguished Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., and the end to his own Washington service? When he stepped down in late 1986, his job approval rating stood at a heartening 67 percent. “I was almost as well-liked as the president,” he noted in his memoir, Man of the House, and I know how much that notion meant to him. His book, published the year after he retired, gratifyingly, was an instant bestseller.
Ronald Reagan had held office in Washington for eight years, Tip for thirty-four. They’d begun their political careers on opposite sides of the American continent, and would, I’m sure, never have known each other had not each man felt a compelling pull to affect—in great, not small, ways—the world in which he lived. Both knew, too, when to make a fist and when to shake hands.
At the same time, I’d say that, throughout the era during which I closely observed them, neither of these two highly individualistic, greatly determined men ever penetrated the mystery of the other. Nor did they really try. Their way of life comprised an ever-ongoing series of alliances and antagonisms, but did not include personal analysis of themselves or others. They were men born when the more formal nineteenth century remained the cultural backdrop. Tip would jolt his far younger staffers with casual references to “back in the days of high-button shoes” or when he would casually mention “Taft,” referring not to the prominent Ohio senator of midcentury but to the man’s father, still in the White House at Tip’s birth. This may well have explained the restraint that marked both his character and Reagan’s. In his own way, each was a true gentleman in a way we don’t ask our leaders to be anymore.
When I worked for the Speaker I came to love the rituals and rhythms of the House, especially Thursday nights when the whole body would come together for the closing arguments and final vote. I recall one particular night that warms my heart even now. I’d begun observing a hot debate with two men in the very heat of it. When it was over, the big vote cast, the Republican member crossed the aisle to the other side and stopped before the Democrat with whom he shared the red-faced debate. “What are you doing this weekend?” he inquired warmly. And then, after a moment of chat, “Say hello to your wife.”
I seriously contend if Jefferson or Madison or any of the others had been present for those moments—the debate across the aisle and the getting together afterward—they would say, “We did well. This is what we wanted, what we most hoped would endure.”
I’ve now, in writing this book—but also in the decades before, as I considered writing it—thought a great deal about their relationship, where they meshed and where they emphatically parted ways. One thing I know: when I marry Reagan’s inability to connect personally to the roughness of the budget cuts to Tip’s inability to grasp his rival’s hold on the country, what’s remarkable is the way what needed to get done did—even with those stumbling blocks along the way.
Yet, given their pre–World War I births, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill both lived to see nearly every great advance of the twentieth century. They knew, too, their own century’s harrowing wars and its generations of ever grimmer weapons. The span of decades to which they bore personal witness was monumental.
Each man, as I judge his behavior, thought it always preferable to propel the republic forward—even when the will of the people differed from his own. Why is that? Here I’d like to offer what I regard as the best explanations for their behavior, at its best.
1. Both had been brought up to show respect for positions of authority. “Reagan took Congress very seriously,” as O’Neill once observed. For his part, the Speaker rarely referred to his political rival by his name but, most often, by his full title: “The President of the United States.” The lessons taught him at St. John’s High School were long-lasting.
2. Both preferred to play by the rules. Tip understood that Reagan had won in 1980 and, as a result, did not delay action of his economic agenda. He gave the new president a “schedule” for votes on his fiscal program and stuck to it. Fo
r his part the Gipper recognized that he’d lost in 1982 and so allowed for the repair of Social Security based on the Democrats’ chosen approach.
3. Neither acted like the spoiled kid who when he’s losing yells, “It’s my ball and I’m taking it home!” Both believed in keeping the process going—through the myriad frustrations—and so filibusters, roadblocks, government shutdowns, all were avoided.
4. Each understood the important rule continually preached by my colleague Kirk O’Donnell: “Always be able to talk.” The two of them, Reagan and O’Neill, matched each other in this, and both had truly able staffs that supported them in keeping communication lines open.
5. Each had the confidence to recruit, and take counsel from, strong advisors. This showed a deep sense of personal security on the part of both men.
6. They had one very big thing in common. Not just their Irishness, but their age. Both were growing not just older, but old, and they knew it. Tip was facing the fact that Reagan would be his last president, while Reagan understood that this was the only presidency he was going to get. If each were to leave his mark, then he would have to do it, somehow, with the other. In other words—together. The truth of this political reality became clear when, starting with the 1982 election, Ronald Reagan realized he could no longer shove Tip O’Neill aside.
In fact, as it turned out, their matchup over the course of six years was no zero-sum contest. Not at all. Rather, in combat, as gladiators do, each made the other look stronger, bigger. I can see now how Tip brought out the reformer in Reagan, forcing him to make the case for change as president as he had as a candidate. At the same time, I can’t deny that Reagan woke Tip up from years of complacency in a Congress the Democrats had dominated for years.
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 33