Fighting on many grand issues, they cast each other in brighter colors as they did so, creating for themselves larger parts in history, I believe, by their sharing of the stage. Reagan without Tip would have lacked the frequent pushback that kept him from the abyss of excess. Tip without Reagan would have been a man who’d reached his pinnacle but without a reason to be there. As it was, he could retire, proud of an undeniable accomplishment: he’d helped make Ronald Reagan a conservative president but not a radical one.
• • •
However, I worked for Tip, not the other guy. And just as my grandmother had intuited how much my Peace Corps stint in Africa had changed me, so would anyone be right if they remarked changes in me as a result of those intense, shining years spent in the Speaker’s office. Most important, I learned that convictions are not a burden but a strength; they are what separate the fighter from the quitter.
And then there were the lighter moments, rare and therefore treasured. Like the time he called me into his back Capitol office just to have me see him strutting across the room in his green top hat with his Blackthorn walking stick—all just for me.
After he retired, our relationship changed only a little. He took an office at his son Kip’s law firm near Dupont Circle. We would have long lunches across the street at the Palm, where I’d listen to him ask the old question, the one that had brought me to attention each morning during all those years. “Whaddaya hear, Chris?”
I was very happy he liked the first book I wrote, Hardball. It had been, of course, my time with him—and all those thousands of hours next to Kirk O’Donnell, working for him—that inspired it and provided many of its stories. He seemed to enjoy my syndicated twice-a-week column, too. What he didn’t like, occasionally, was stuff he heard me say on television; he’d call when an opinion didn’t sit well with him and let me know. On that score, nothing had changed. He still looked upon me as “his” guy. I’d earned my political spurs working for him, after all.
Certainly, his pals saw me as Tip’s satellite for years after I was off doing my own thing. I remember once in the fall of 1988 when I picked up the phone at 8 a.m.—a Saturday!—and there he was. He must have been up all night at a card game and had had to endure ribbing from his buddies for the way I’d called the Bentsen-Quayle vice presidential debate that week. (Yes, incredibly, I’d awarded it to Quayle! I’d done it on points, ignoring the game-changing moment when he’d recklessly compared himself to Jack Kennedy.) What was affecting for me to hear, and accept—even though he didn’t come out and say it in so many words—was that, at some level, he felt that when I spoke I still spoke for him.
Of course, if you worked for Tip O’Neill, there were all those stories he recounted. He never stopped telling them, and even if we’d heard them before, we never stopped listening. We knew he wasn’t just one of a kind, but also one of a dying breed. And if Tip wasn’t, when you came right down to it, the most articulate of men, he was, as I’ve repeatedly emphasized, an Irishman through and through. His son Tommy once told me those stories I listened to for so many hours back then were his father’s gift to me. His dad, he said, had known one day I’d write about them.
I was, after all, his writer.
I remember one of my last conversations with my old boss. He described a recent trip he’d taken and the young flight attendant who’d mentioned to him how she’d heard an important person was going to be aboard. She apparently had no idea who Tip O’Neill was. “Chris, it goes away,” he said. And I heard him.
He died in January 1994. Later that year, Ronald Reagan began his fade from public life. In a handwritten letter to the country, he announced he was a victim of Alzheimer’s disease.
I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. When the time comes, I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage. In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.
With dignity and courage, his wife, Nancy, would keep alight the Reagan torch through all the years ahead.
The worse things get in Washington—the more threats of shutdown weaken the country’s confidence in government; the more eleventh-hour stopgap deals come along to demoralize us; the more personal attacks are performed on cue for the cameras; the more nasty tweets—the more people who care about our republic look back to an idea of when the world worked the way it’s supposed to.
At the start of this book, I mentioned George Washington and Pierre L’Enfant riding on horseback up to Jenkins Hill, then looking down on the prospect before them. It must have taken great imagination for those two men—the general who’d won the war against the great British Empire and the immigrant architect—to see this swamp along the Potomac as the seat of a great new Republic. But how much more hope it must have taken to summon up an idea that had never taken root before, of a fresh and rugged country governed by its own citizens with all their passions and differences.
We need a restoration of that confidence and of the standards for public service it demands. An alertness to common ground, an allegiance to united interest. We need leaders able to balance large purpose with equally large awareness of the electorate, what message the voters have sent.
In a worthy contest this goes for those who’ve won but especially for those who haven’t. Both sides in any debate must respect each other. The rules of fair play can’t be simply cast aside. You ask if such behavior is possible. I wrote this book to show that it is.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the powerful contribution of President Ronald Reagan. I want to thank Nancy Reagan and historian Douglas Brinkley for bringing his diary to publication. It’s a wondrous source of daily insight into Reagan’s political personality. Without it, I could not have captured the ping and pong of his relations with Speaker O’Neill.
As a companion document, one recording O’Neill’s daily thinking, this book benefits from the daily press conferences the Speaker conducted fifteen minutes before each House session. I must thank Eric Schwartz, now a Washington attorney, for recording these events for the Rules Committee. Reading these transcripts today takes me on a trip back to those years when I stood at the side of the Speaker’s desk as he spoke with his accustomed candor about the man in the White House.
The great chroniclers of the Reagan-O’Neill contests were the correspondents of the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, and United Press International. I began this project with piles of their clippings that towered several feet around my desk. It’s with their help I was able to isolate and narrate the episodes recounted in this book. What impressed me most was the accuracy and fairness of the reporting for these quality institutions.
I want to thank Hedrick Smith, the celebrated New York Times reporter, for sharing the transcripts of the meaty interviews he conducted for his landmark work, The Power Game. Because he spoke with Tip O’Neill, Kirk O’Donnell, and myself back in the 1980s, the interviews carry fresh and still-exciting memories of the events discussed.
There is one person who deserves credit above all for this book. People ask me how I can carry out a project like this while hosting Hardball on MSNBC each night of the week. The answer is the great Kathleen Matthews, executive vice president for Marriott International. The queen of my life has allowed me the ambition to sit in my home office and work at all hours of the day. I don’t know how to weigh the benefits of the work against the loss of relaxed time together but I can only hope it comes out in favor of the effort.
As for the production itself I hereby acknowledge the brilliance of Tina Urbanski. In addition to her
always on-the-mark advisory role, she has been chief operating officer of this project, keeping the worksheets filled, the tasks clarified, the deadlines met. Where there could have been chaos, I came face-to-face each day with an associate committed to the work, dead-set on its completion on the date assigned. Tina is my organization. More than that, she is a wartime consigliere, forever ready for the day’s challenges, calm in the face of danger.
For the literary challenge of this project, I owe all to my longtime editor Michele Slung. She’s fabulous. In the case of each of the twenty-three chapters, including the two she made out of one, Michele has taken my draft and Midas-like transformed it, in flow, cadence, and storytelling, to novel-like narrative.
This being a work of history, I have needed a researcher with the academic background and youthful zeal to put in the hard, essential work at critical stages of this project. Michael Banning, a recent Yale graduate, did the crucial job of identifying and cataloging my research, organizing the material into the giant binders that were the genesis of each chapter. It was also his role to challenge and, where necessary, correct me on the facts. It’s my great fortune to have had an associate like Michael ready to take the pains to get it right.
I want to thank as well the authors who preceded me in narrating this period of American history. One is my old boss himself. If you want to know what it was like to sit in Tip O’Neill’s back office in the Capitol and hear the stories, get a copy of Man of the House. It’s his book from cover to cover, filled with the color of an incredible life and career.
Next comes John Aloysius Farrell’s masterwork, Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. It captures all the Irish in the guy, from his days in North Cambridge to his fight to end the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. It is a great work of biography. Another part of the scaffolding for this book comes from the great biographies of Ronald Reagan. They include Lou Cannon’s President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Richard Reeves’s President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination, Edmund Morris’s Dutch, and Ron Reagan’s My Father at 100. Cannon is the best and most compressive when it comes to understanding Reagan’s political rise to power. Reeves puts the sharp focus on the presidency itself. Morris goes for the elusive man himself. Ron Reagan gets far deeper, writing with love about a father who kept so much secret.
I want to thank the people in the Reagan White House who were helpful in telling my stories in Tip and the Gipper. They include former U.S. secretary of state James A. Baker III, former Reagan chief of congressional relations Max Friedersdorf, and Kenneth Duberstein, who was President Reagan’s last White House chief of staff. For my account of the Social Security rescue effort I owe Alan Greenspan, who headed the president’s bipartisan commission. This great public servant was generous, thoughtful, and penetrating in his recollection of those tricky days when the country’s chief retirement program faced an uncertain future. Bob Michel, the Republican leader in the House during the Reagan years, was another positive help. As was my friend Rockwell Schnabel.
I want to thank the surviving children of Tip and Millie O’Neill for helping with this project, especially with the stories of home life during the political turbulence of the 1980s.
For assistance in producing an accurate account of history, I want to thank Steven Weisman, who reported on Reagan and O’Neill for the New York Times. His insightful study of my draft and the revisions he suggested added greatly to the finished product. The same is true of my close friend Mark Johnson, who once again contributed his historic sense and close reading to help me get it right.
At the Reagan Library I wish to express my gratitude to Joanne Drake, and also to Nancy Reagan’s assistant, Wren Powell. I thank Nancy Reagan herself for her lively, generous friendship of all these years.
Also, William H. Davis of the National Archives; Bruce Kirby of the Library of Congress; Justine Sundaram and Kathleen Williams of the Boston College Library; as well as Rino Landa, Ed Kaplan, and Annelise Anderson.
I would also like to thank our interns at Hardball for the key research assistance they have given me in addition to their daily duties: Sara Bovat, Kara Brennan, Josh Cole, Alex Kaplan, Katie Lesser, Stephanie Melson, Hannah Jane Nunez, Joseph Rabinowitz, and Rachel Witkin.
I want to thank MSNBC president Phil Griffin for his support all these years we have worked together, and Hardball executive producer John Reiss for being a great partner day in and day out. He is a newsperson of the first order. So, in fact, is the excellent Hardball team, both in Washington and New York.
Now to the two people who deserve the world. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh of William Morris Endeavor is quite simply the greatest representative an author could have. Jonathan Karp, publisher of Simon & Schuster, stuns me with his judgment in every conversation. I quickly came to trust his every editorial decision; now I do it instinctively. What a great mind and sensibility to have at the helm! While I’m at it, I certainly want to thank his associates Nicholas Greene, Jonathan Evans, and Larry Hughes, who promises to be the book tour’s Natty Bumppo.
ALSO BY CHRIS MATTHEWS
Jack Kennedy
Kennedy & Nixon
Hardball
Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think
American
Life’s a Campaign
NOTES
The primary sources for this book include President Reagan’s diaries (RR), transcripts of Speaker O’Neill’s daily press conferences (TPO), which he held—and I attended—before each session of the House of Representatives, and the handwritten journal I kept in an old-style ledger book during my tenure as his administrative assistant (CJM). Most vital, I have to suppose, are my own deep, personal memories of those six years working at my Capitol desk outside the Speaker’s ceremonial office.
To strengthen this foundation of day-to-day statements by Reagan and O’Neill—and my own memory—I have used the excellent deadline work of correspondents for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal; also the weekly journalism of Time, Newsweek, and the National Journal.
Since the events in this book centered on three decades ago, I have relied on two other sources for contemporary accounts. One is Speaker O’Neill’s autobiography, Man of the House (MOH) (New York: Random House, 1987), which contains all the old stories I heard him tell. Reading its pages reminds me of sitting in his back office of the Capitol when there was time on our hands and he had the generosity to tell me his tales of lore. The other source, which I found invaluable, were the interviews the much-respected Hedrick Smith conducted for his groundbreaking The Power Game (HS). Rick sat with Speaker O’Neill, Kirk O’Donnell, and me for lengthy sessions focusing on the political strategies of our long fight with Reagan. To read those transcripts is to replant oneself back into the history of which we were such a feisty part.
I have added to these with fresh interviews with Reagan’s senior aides: chief of staff and later secretary of the treasury James A. Baker III; chief of congressional relations Max Friedersdorf, congressional liaison and Reagan’s last chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein, and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver’s widow, Carolyn. Added to these are the conversations I have had with the four surviving children of Speaker O’Neill: Rosemary, Thomas, Susan, and Christopher.
Both Reagan and O’Neill have been the subjects of impressive biographies. Lou Cannon has devoted a huge effort covering Reagan back through the time of his California governorship. President Reagan: Role of a Lifetime is, indeed, his masterwork. Richard Reeves has produced the impressive President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), and Edmund Morris, for all the controversy attached, has given us Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999), a work that the president’s son Ron has said gets closest to uncovering what he describes as his father’s strangeness. John A. Farrell has written the excellent Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001).
PREFACE
since General
Washington and Pierre L’Enfant: The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008), June 28, 1791.
“What both men deplored”: Thomas P. O’Neill III, New York Times, October 5, 2012.
CHAPTER ONE: DEATH OF A PRESIDENCY
In the final weeks of the Carter presidency I wrote an account of the campaign’s final days. I wanted to show the drama of that short bit of time between the debate, which Reagan clearly won, and the president’s desperate scramble to avoid defeat in the election. This provided me with a useful contemporary record of the events described here.
“You will call him an actor”: Author conversation with Gerald Rafshoon.
“I am paying for this microphone”: Cannon, President Reagan, p. 47.
Choosing a new campaign manager: Ibid., pp. 47–48.
It had been in 1940: Ibid., p. 54.
“The president lately has been saying”: Reagan speech, Neshoba, Miss., August 3, 1980.
“Can anyone look at the record”: Reagan speech, Republican National Convention, July 17, 1980.
“I’m here because”: Reagan speech, Liberty State Park, September 1, 1980.
“There you go again”: Reagan-Carter presidential debate, October 28, 1980.
“any attack on an embassy”: U.S. Department of State.
ramped up his attack on Reagan: Carter speech, Akron, Ohio, November 3, 1980.
“How many of you”: Carter speech, Seattle, November 3, 1980.
CHAPTER TWO: STARTING OUT
This is my personal backstory, the prelude to my involvement with the Reagan-O’Neill rivalry. Because they formed such an important part of my life, they are memories with deep footprints. They are hard examples of how each step a person takes becomes the course set for the next as well as the prerequisite for getting to take 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 34